All Hell Set To Break Loose by the End of September

   Pepe Escobar tends to be uncompromising as well as rather colorful in his description of international relations. He also has a deep knowledge of the Middle East having traveled many times around the Gulf which makes his analysis quite incisive and I think mostly correct, even if he is often wrong on timing. 

   Will things take a turn for the worse in the coming days? In reality, it just doesn't matter. What counts are the trends and these are unmistakable. We are heading strait into trouble of epic proportion. Here's his analysis:  

by Pepe Escobar

Window of Supreme Risk: September 30 to November 3. West Asia is about to burn.

The sociopath President of the United States completely disregarded the Chinese solution to end the Iran drama, presented in person at the White House by President Xi Jinping this past Thursday.

Essentially, Xi told Trump that the off-ramp is right in front of him: go back to the serially killed dead cat, the memorandum of understanding (MoU), signed and then blown up by Trump. China, said Xi, is ready to fully support this return to diplomacy.

Predictably, the sociopath refuted not only Xi’s offering but also the Iranian 7-day, step-by-step proposal for a return to negotiations, presented by Foreign Minister Araghchi in New York.

The combo should actually be seen as the China-Iran proposal: a set of Final Terms, finely tuned up by Araghchi and Wang Yi in two subsequent meetings, at the BRICS in New Delhi and then in Beijing.

Trump not only rejected the peace offer but bragged – to roars of global laughter – that the United States has “total control” of the “Strait of Trump”.

Trump’s snub has seriously annoyed both Wang Yi and President Xi. In Asian culture, that translates as the worst form of losing face: the dismissal of a recommendation officially made by the highest level of government.

So expect the Chinese response to be as vicious as a batch of silk drenched in poison. Beijing will support Tehran even more fiercely now, in more ways than one.

The IRGC, for its part, responded by buttoning up the Strait of Hormuz even tighter. In a matter of 48 hours, Iran burned no less than 19 tankers attempting to cross without following the IRGC Navy/PGSA procedures, fees included.

That generated a viral joke all across West Asia: someone tell Trump who’s Daddy in the Strait.

Tehran played its diplomatic cards in New York with extreme finesse. Not only they forced neo-Crassus/neo-Caligula/Goldfinger to publicly reject an offer of peace, but coaxed him into telegraphing an Iran Bombing Remix after the mid-terms; it’s now imprinted to the whole planet that the sociopath does not give a damn about the superimposed avalanche of global economic/fuel/food crises. He’s actually their perpetrator.

Add to it a faultless performance by President Pezeshkian not only at the UN podium, but at the meeting with heads of U.S. Think Tankland and editors of top newspapers in a New York hotel. Pezeshkian won the media war right inside the enemy’s lair: that’s one for the ages.

Trump closes the door Tehran opened yet the clock keeps running

The blockade of Hormuz is leaking like there’s no tomorrow. A great deal goes via Saudi and Iraqi tankers – with tons of petro-yuan changing hands. Smuggling is rife even in the theoretically U.S.-controlled Omani corridor – with Iranian oil moving to petro-sheikh shadow and official tankers alike.

No one beats the Persians when it comes to smuggling/survival schemes after 47 years of sanctions. All that keeps energy clients China, Southeast Asia and even South Korea on board.

This Wednesday we reach the deadline of 45 days set by Tehran on August 16 for the end of the Trump naval blockade. Or else. September 30 also happens to be the deadline set by Iraqis for the U.S. to definitively leave Iraq.

And all that overlaps with the recent 4 to 5 days deadline set by Mohsen Rezaee, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and the de facto number two in Iran, for the Americans to end the blockade. That falls on Monday, today.

In a nutshell: As Washington closed the door Tehran opened, Tehran’s clock kept running. Confirmed to our channel Transition Protocol that the senior political and IRGC leadership have already decided what comes next.

They will stay the course all the way to this Wednesday. And if there’s no path towards a resolution on the terms that President Xi exposed to Trump in the Oval Office, Tehran is ready to take 5 crucial steps:

1.Expand the battlefield beyond Hormuz to the Indian Ocean. 2. Reserve the right to strike any American naval vessel enforcing the blockade. 3. Work with Ansarallah to extend the blockade to the Bab al-Mandab. 4. Act preemptively against military build-ups it deems threatening. 5. Restrict the aviation of any nation that joins the aviation blockade.

No holds barred. Literally.

So for the moment we have an ominous Indian Ocean warning; a confirmed threat to all U.S. deployment centers if Washington attacks; and a declared preemption doctrine.

What we still don’t have is an order to directly strike U.S. ships.

On the aviation front, Iran will go for reciprocity; not missiles.

The Iranian leadership position on U.S. secondary sanctions on virtually any airport anywhere welcoming Iranian flights is quite clear:

“If our aircraft do not get into the air, then your aircraft will also not get in the air.”

That was voiced by Supreme Leader adviser Mohammad Mokhber. On Saturday, Mohsen Rezaee said Iran will not answer the ban militarily; is negotiating with the states concerned; and holds “multiple non-military options” for some airports.

Apart from big powers China and Russia, several states – including Turkey, Malaysia, Vietnam, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan – are completely ignoring the imperial aerial siege on Persia.

Then there’s the extraordinary case of Iraq.

The Iraqi Resistance first stepped up to declare they would target GCC airports. Then multiple high-ranking clerics in Najaf and Karbala protested in synch and pulled the legitimacy rug from under the puppet government in Baghdad.

Huge protests also engulfed Basra – the oil wealth capital of Iraq, featuring bedouin Shi’ite tribes weaponized to Kingdom Come (I remember them fondly, from the early 2000s). One of their sheikhs gave Baghdad 48 hours to reverse the complicity with the U.S. siege on Iran. So in the end there may be an exemption for flights between Iran and Najaf – basically transporting pilgrims.

Iran’s clock and the U.S. clock: the Window of Supreme Risk

Now for the Red Sea front.

That paltry “coalition of the willing” – Saudi, Turkish and Pakistani chiefs of staff, meeting in Riyadh last Friday as members of the Mecca Defense Alliance – moved from blah blah blah to perhaps an attempt at operational arrangments, even as they did not announce joint strikes against Yemen.

Ansarallah is not exactly quaking in their sandals. They launched drones toward Riyadh and missiles toward Khamis Mushait, calling their operations a “rehearsal” for full-scale escalation.

Just wait for the coming Yemeni Storm.

Yemen is boiling with rage after the Saudis bombed a crowded market in Taiz, killing and wounding at least 50 people, including women and children at a preliminary count. This had to have had direct intel input and ISR from CENTCOM and the death cult.

According to Yemeni sources in Sana’a, Ansarallah may be about to impose an air embargo of Saudi Arabia. Riyadh is already plunging into black hole status – complete with forcing Google and western satellites censor evidence of destroyed oil infrastructure and sites in Riyadh/Jizan/Abha/Najran.

So a serious probability of significant Iranian and/or Ansarallah action against U.S. naval assets, wider shipping lanes or the Saudi bypass towards Yanbu, all the way to the end of this week, remains high.

Yet the most likely outcome is still an ultra weaponized deadlock in which Tehran signals rather than strikes on September 30.

Certified fact: the window between Iran’s clock and Washington’s clock – September 30 to November 3 – is now the Window of Supreme Risk.

True Arab civilizational poles vs. dumb camel herders

And that brings us to a key revelation by a source inside the room of the top-level China-Pakistan-Iran alignment. The source confirmed that after the Xi visit to the U.S., Wang Yi and Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar held a direct, top-secret conversation.

Beijing gave up on Washington and is now playing its hand again through Islamabad, openly tasking the highest levels of government to contain the crisis. The Pakistanis have been tasked with intervening on behalf of Beijing and Tehran with both Trump and MbS before the escalation ladder reaches a critical stage this week.

What’s implied is that certainly Pakistan – no one knows about Turkey – will not support Saudi Arabia in its allegedly massive planned offensive against Yemen.

This was confirmed by another top source in Islamabad; the Pakistani government has certainly done the math that helping to save the unsaveable House of Saud will bury Pakistan’s role as mediator between Iran and the U.S.: it will be as dead as the dead cat Islamabad MoU.

It’s never enough to remember that for centuries Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo and Sana’a formed the true civilizational poles of the cosmopolitan Sufi Arabs. Nothing to do with the dumb camel herders that compose the ghastly House of Saud.

And that connects with the top two categorical imperatives for the Epstein Syndicate.

They want the destruction of Persia – the nuclear genocide announced at the UN podium by the sociopath POTUS. That should be coupled with the destruction of the Arab Axis of Resistance – in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen. And then the destruction of the dumb GCC petro-sheikhs as well, because they would remain too wealthy, influential and possibly unpredictable after the Axis of Resistance is no more.

Cue to the leader of the death cult in West Asia “secretly” flying on a private plane to Abu Dhabi on Sunday to meet MbZ. He spent the entire day in the Emirates. There was no leak whatsoever about the meeting. This happened right after the leader of the death cult once again demonized Iran at the UN.

It’s now clear that Yemen and Persia come as a package – the two privileged fronts of the West Asia theatre. Pay attention to the consequences of this “secret” meeting between the death cult and the Arab Zionists. West Asia is about to burn all the way into the heavens.

 

Looting Russia: Why the British Empire Never Died by Alex Krainer (Video - 1h05)

   A great video by Alex Krainer which explains perfectly the evolution of Russia and why the West hates Putin who avoided the looting of Russia over the last 20 years. 

   Once you understand that the debt system as implemented by the World Bank has little to do with development and mostly is about enslaving people with unpayable debt levels so that eventually their money is devalued and resources can be extracted cheaply, you start looking at the Western led financial system differently. 

   Still, mostly, it is the only game you can play right now if you want to develop and prosper. The alternative being the Zimbabwe model of grift and inflation what has itself been tested extensively in many countries around the world with the same dismal results again and again.  

   This is why development is so difficult and must be expertly managed and only a handful of countries in Asia have succeeded for now.  

   There is an interesting and to my opinion valid theory that the world is still managed from London long after the demise of the British Empire. But to understand this paradox, you only need to realize that the Square Mile which defines the City of London practically does not belong to the UK as it is to this day a self managed entity. 

   This also explains the true nature of the Deep State which doesn't stop at unmovable civil servants but more importantly comprises transnational entities and people for which governments are just one of the mechanisms used to implement their self interest. When you realize that these people not only control the financial system but also the media which mold public opinion in Western countries, their power to dictate long term policies becomes more obvious.    

Looting Russia: Why the British Empire Never Died | Alex Krainer

The Next Five Weeks

    Sometimes, quietly, the tension rises until its reaches a paroxysm. It looks more and more that we have entered such times. 

   Debt has been rising for a long, long time but this is very much part of the credit cycle and it could still go on for a while, unless interest rates keep rising in which case as with a receding tide, we will soon see who is swimming naked (and cannot refinance.)  

   Likewise, tensions around the world have been increasing markedly recently. This is also to be expected with dwindling resources. Think about it, 3 years ago, the Houthis, actually Ansar Allah, were little more that a ragtag army in sandals. Now, it's a force to be reckoned with. 

   And then of course there is Iran, the last of the seven countries the neo-cons planned to destroy which unlike the others didn't go according to plan. It would have been a good idea to study geography and history before attacking, to realize that the Iranians were not Arabs but the proud descendants of the Persian empire and that their country's borders were forged along impregnable mountain ranges during countless battles. This would have made the rally around the flag more predictable.

   Now Trump is facing, military, political and economic disaster. What will he do? He is flattering himself about being unpredictable which few people count as a virtue in political circles. Will he use nuclear weapons? Very unlikely but not completely impossible. Will he contest the results of the mid-term elections? Almost certain since in his mind a defeat can only be the result of the democrats shenanigan. And then of course there is the economy. The whole edifice of debt is balancing on the illusion that the AI bubble will never pop: "This time is different!" It never is. 

   When all these black swans flock together in a few weeks, the chance of history accelerating will be huge. How high is the waterfall? Nobody knows. The interaction of diverse unrelated factors as well as the rule of unintended consequences will decide. It could be higher than most people expect.     

Post by Eric Peters

It’s just over a month until the midterms elections. Normally, the result would be a change of guard and nothing more. But these are not normal times due to the abnormal man who plunged this nation into a war that has already had catastrophic economic consequences and that will soon have political consequences even more catastrophic.

Almost anything could happen between now and early November.

One thing that is likely to happen is an escalation of the war. People who know something about war – such as Col. Doug MacGregor – believe the current lull is just that, a temporary pause before a major resumption – a go for broke attempt to win the war that Israel and its Golem-proxy (that’s the United States) have lost so far.

The abnormal man openly talks of “annihilation” and total civilizational destruction, which all-but-says the “N” word. That this man was not netted and taken to a mental hospital is a barometer of the abnormality of our time. MacGregor says the Golem-proxy (the United States) does not have the army or the conventional power to achieve the win the abnormal man so badly needs to salve his sense of himself as the Greatest Field Commander of All Times (to borrow an honorific bestowed by Wilhelm Keitel upon the Austrian corporal, who – in his defense – actually did conquer most of Western Europe). The abnormal man is no Austrian corporal, much as he probably likes to think of himself as the latter entering his hometown of Linz after the Anschluss.

If the “N” word is used, it won’t matter whether there’s a changing of the guard. People will be preoccupied by other matters.

Well, what if the current drift doesn’t shift course and if – as expected – the reds are douched in favor of the blues? If that happens, is it beyond the ambit of reasonable speculation that the abnormal man will declare the douching invalid and disband the Congress and become America’s version of Keev’s president for life? It is a matter of public record that the abnormal man admires the little man who rules Keev as its “president” without elections. The latter hipped the abnormal man to the way you avoid elections.

You have a war instead.

When you have a war, you can also rule by fiat – or truth social post, via Natalie Harp, who is the abnormal man’s almost-50-years-younger Geli Raubal (who was the Austrian corporal’s niece, who had an unnatural relationship with her much older uncle). Not only is it within the ambit of possibility that the abnormal man will declare a blue douching to be “fake” and so invalid, it may well be an example of 55D chess that his supporters say he’s playing while the rest of us dopes play checkers.

The play being to trigger the mass unrest that they need to shit-can whatever’s left of the “freedoms” we still have. To usher in the 24-7 Palantir Panopticon they’ve been rushing to build, curiously accelerated to Warp Speed after the abnormal man got re-elected by pretending to be a populist and getting more than half the country to believe it – which is (to his credit) an astounding achievement. Here, after all, we have a New York Democrat, a reality TV show host and member of the world wrestling hall of fame who declared the “emergency” that led to four years of extreme abnormality – including the first-time-ever use of mass coercion to push people into submitting to being injected with strange drug cocktails, the full effects of which are as yet not fully known. This man managed to convince truckers, waitresses, plumbers, electricians – the help, as it were – that he is One of Them. That he cares about them.

Can you imagine the guffawing behind close doors?

The doors have been cracking open just a bit lately. The abnormal man increasingly does not bother to hide his contempt for the decent, ordinary people who thought he was One of Them. Or – at least – that he didn’t hate them. Like all of the rest of them. They now know better, too late.

A perfect storm is brewing. It is one of those thunderheads Lenin was talking about when he said “There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen.”

It is likely we are currently in those weeks, right now.

The End of Europe

   We keep coming back to this theme of the decline of Europe but the continent thanks to its lack of foresight and investment in the future looks more and more like the obvious casualty of the current energy crisis.  

   Prices are rising much faster than people can keep up with guarantying massive unrest later this year if the trend does not revert which is highly unlikely. Likewise, the high price of oil is slowly giving place to shortages exactly as was predicted 6 months ago. Go figure! 

   What did Europe do about this looming and predictable crisis? Exactly nothing. Lukewarmly supporting Trump on his Iranian misadventure and doubling down on restrictions of Russian gas and oil, shooting itself in the foot in the process.   

   Energy and commodities are not incidental lines on a balance sheet, they are the linchpin on which our whole modern economy depends. Remove cheap energy and your industrial strength unravel in a few short years which is exactly what we are witnessing especially in Germany. 

   The most amazing is that while this is happening almost nobody in Europe is showing much concern... well, beyond managing the rise of the AfD in Germany and LePen in France of course. 

by Philip M. Byrne, CFA  GeoVest at: https://geovestadvisors.com/ 

I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies – Thomas Jefferson

Europe is failing. Europe’s leadership is preparing for war to cover their mistakes of the past fifty years and the people aren’t having it.  Europeans don’t want war and to date, Russia has been unwilling to be provoked into a wider conflict. 

It’s obvious to anyone who knows anything about military campaigns that Russia lacks the logistical capacity to invade Western Europe.  Their domestic semiconductor fabs are 25 years behind the West which means they are unable to fight a modern war.  Besides, Western Europe is a hollowed out economic shell that offers no advantages to Russia and innumerable headaches.

Northern Europe has outstanding defensive militaries, backed by NATO.  Eastern Europe has Poland with their massive, modern army which is more than capable of blunting Russia if it somehow gets past Ukraine.  Turkey’s massive army sits on Russia’s flank.

It would take an extraordinary level of credulity to paint Russia as a military threat that warrants mass mobilization of Europe’s limited industrial base.  Regretfully, it’s not stopping them. 

All Wars Are Bankers Wars

War is a racket – General Smedley Butler (US Marines)

Europe is run by bankers and politicians; every other economic power center has been marginalized.  Green energy policies, pushed by bankers and politicians, have destroyed domestic energy production in Germany and Britain and have left the regional economy dependent on high-priced, imported natural gas, and ultra-high-cost renewable energy.  The result is a regional economy that can no longer compete on world markets.

The German Mittelstand, the economic rock that Europe is built on, has been decimated by these disastrous decisions.  The Mittelstand refers to the small, private or family-owned businesses that represent the excellence of German engineering and manufacturing and employs roughly 60% of Germans. 

These businesses are being tasked with shifting from domestic products to military products, to fight a war that is unlikely to start.  Many of their industrial inputs such as natural gas for chemicals and metallic inputs were formerly sourced from Ukraine and Russia but now come from new and more expensive sources.

The Mittelstand, already decimated financially, needs to re-tool and find new input sources, which will require massive capital investment.  To make this happen, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Union, has proposed using €10 trillion from household bank deposits to fund this capital investment, claiming these deposits are “idle” and “lazy”.

The people who destroyed the European economy in the first place want the voters to turn over their savings to fund a fool’s errand.  They want to fight a war that has no reason to be fought other than to bail out bankers and politicians.     

The scary thing is that European leaders would rather risk destroying the world than loosen restrictions on the pan European economy.  They can’t think of any better ideas than World War III.  It’s little wonder that voters in Germany, Britain, and France want the current leadership voted out.

There is no appetite for war in Europe.  The bankers and the politicians have failed the European people and will not be allowed to destroy the world.      

Whither the Euro?

It’s the invincible arrogance of Europe’s elites that gets me.  These are people who have seen the euro collapse.  These are people who are presiding over a migration crisis on their borders, and yet do they ever acknowledge that they need to change?  No.  They say that they need more integration, more of our money, more control over this country – Michael Gove

The euro was created to compete with the US dollar in global trade and ultimately replace it as global reserve currency.  The euro was initially introduced at $1.18 for each €1.  Over 27 years, it has remained roughly the same – presently $1.14 per euro.

Yet at the start of the GFC or Great Financial Crisis of 2008, the euro hit just under $1.6 per euro when it appeared that the Federal Reserve was losing its collective mind, only to fall dramatically since that time.  That was Europe’s opportunity to replace the buck and they failed.  They won’t get another chance. 

  

Von der Layen’s plan risks driving domestic savings out of the Eurozone into other currencies such as the dollar and yen.  If this happens, the value of the euro in currency markets will fall, making it much harder for the remaining European manufacturers to shift to arms production.  Inflation is already decimating European consumers, a drop in the euro would accelerate an already untenable economic situation forcing consumer inflation even higher.

The timing is yet to be determined but the conditions have been set; the euro is going to break, not the US dollar.  Within ten years, Europe will be irrelevant as an economic bloc and the euro, if it’s still around, will resemble the Indian rupee.   

Twilight of the Central Bank Model

The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments – Ludwig von Mises

Central banking is a British invention and it started with the Bank of England in 1694 although it can be argued that the Knights Templar represented the first central bank in history.  Their power was seemingly destroyed in 1307 by King Philip IV of France.  I believe the power of the European central banks and their offshoot, the Federal Reserve Board, are presently facing an existential fight.

At the heart of central banking is the process of money creation.  National governments borrow from central banks and pay interest on that money.  Central banks, which are largely private institutions, make money by creating more money.  They are incentivized to expand money supply.

My formative years in the investment business were built on the belief that central banks needed to be independent to prevent runaway inflation.  The truth is the opposite. 

Central banks loot economies and destroy them.  We can see this in Britain, France and Germany where prices have been driven too high to compete.  That’s when industrial activity is exported to the lower cost venues, hollowing out the economies that supported borrowing in the first place.

The Fed is in the process of destroying the US economy.  The country is littered with former industrial cities and towns, a testament to the destruction wrought by bankers.

The chart below shows US government debt over my lifetime.  Everything has been inflated and monetized and now we’re left with the financial wreckage of excess debt and a hollowed out industrial base.

 

It was both political parties.  JFK issued silver certificates to counter the Fed; he was shot.  Ronald Reagan was exploring a return to a gold standard, not coincidentally, he was shot.  From George Herbert Walker Bush through Joe Biden, US Presidents ceded power to the Fed incrementally until we got to our present condition.

M1 money supply has grown by 80% since 2020.  This represents cash and checking and it is the reason consumer prices are much higher.  The chart above shows how that money got there.  It also shows why our capital markets have remained elevated.  It’s not sustainable.

The only part of the yield curve that global central banks can impact is the long end – 7 years and up.  We can see the spike in 10-year bond yields below.  This doesn’t indicate rising inflation expectations; it represents the death throes of global central banks desperate to derail the efforts of the US to drain dollars out of global money markets. 

The inflation damage has already been done during the years 2020 through 2024.  US dollars are being drained out of the global economy and re-invested in the US.  The US is effectively sucking the lifeblood out of the global central banking system.  I view the rise in long term bond yields as a generational buying opportunity because interest rates will be forced down to 0% in the US before long. 

Eurodollars

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake – Napoleon Bonaparte

I wrote a piece called the Main Event that discusses the draining of the Eurodollar market in detail.  Here’s a link: https://geovestadvisors.com/the-main-event/  The Cliff Notes version is that the abundance of oil and natural gas developed in the US shale fields has resulted in the reversal of energy flows from into the US to out of the US.  Inversely, this redirects US dollars from moving out of the US to moving into the US, leaving global central banks bereft of US dollar assets.

US dollars are being drained out of Europe and Europe’s international banks in London, Paris, Zurich, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt.  The war on the international drug trade by the US military is destroying the profitability of European banks which regretfully, rely heavily on this ugly trade. 

The City of London and UK Crown dependencies launder an estimated 40% of the world’s illicit trade.  Banks in Paris, Rome, Zurich, and Amsterdam also feed at that trough.  By cutting them off from this lifeblood, these bad actors are going to be sharply curtailed in power and global influence.  Central banks in Europe are rapidly losing the ability to move markets around the world.

Globalism was created by the Bank of England and other European Central Banks but those banks are being marginalized in global matters, particularly since their regional economies are fractions of their former relevance.  The pan European economy has been over-harvested by bankers and politicians as discussed previously. 

Food and energy are traded in US dollars and the European banking establishment is watching those dollars head back to the US.  Every oil tanker or LNG tanker that docks in the Port of Antwerp drains dollars from European banking coffers.  Without dollars, European banks decline in relevance.    

European central banks have relied on hidden swap arrangements with the US Federal Reserve Bank to supply them with US dollars when they are short.  I expect increased scrutiny of these arrangements by the US Treasury going forward and if those swap arrangements are curtailed, the euro is going to drop like a stone versus the US dollar.

Here’s the same chart from above with some lines marking important levels.  If the euro falls convincingly below parity with the US dollar, it’s game over.  The Europeans have relied on their extraordinary influence with the US Congress for 200 years but that influence is rapidly waning. 

As Europe goes, so too goes globalism and the central bank model.  This is why they need to drag the world into a war.  It’s their final lifeline.

Conclusion

In politics, stupidity is not a handicap – Napoleon Bonaparte

Europe isn’t going to disintegrate; it will cease to matter.  Eastern Europe, especially Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as Scandinavia have bright futures.  Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain have serious problems.  The money has run out for those trust fund babies

The US has been hampered by European influence since the beginning.  Presidents such as Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, McKinley, Kennedy, and Reagan have tried to limit European influence in banking and policy but the connection was too strong. 

As the US melting pot integrates the world into our hybrid genetic mix and as European bureaucrats destroy what’s left of their economy, the connection is finally breaking.  Good riddance!  Without the US, the global central banking model finally fails and with it, the artificial asset inflation that is preventing the US economy from renewing itself.    

The financialization cycle is over after 125 years.  The future is about re-building a destroyed industrial base, not about trading crypto and Mag 7 stocks. 

What's Really Behind The AI Panic...

   The case for panic is real but it shouldn't be about AI itself but about what the AI bubble exploding will do to the economy. 

   As we have argued countless times, the case about alignment is misleading. What we are creating are intelligent entities, close or even already beyond human capabilities which consequently will find great, and mostly misaligned solutions to the challenges we throw at them. 

   The purpose of intelligence is by definition to find original solutions, so AI as its capabilities grow, will come up with more and more original ideas, some we might not like. This is unavoidable and an intrinsic part of the discussion. 

   Of course the AI companies know this perfectly well, including the fact that the bubble is about to pop and that they must urgently find an exit otherwise, although the AI will be fine, their IPOs with 100+ P/E ratios will never materialize. 

   The question remains: with the military, financial and medical sectors already extracting as much as they can from an anemic society, can we afford to add a few more AI leeches to the club?      

by Mark E. Jeftovic via Bombthrower,

They want you scared, stupid and subservient...

Just heading into mid-September, a purported moral panic broke out amongst the frontier AI leaders that their own products were "too dangerous" and so the only remedy would be for the government to regulate all AI models.

Weeks earlier, Bernie Sanders had introduced The Ban AI-Superintelligence Act, that would make it illegal to create an AI model that was more intelligent than humans, going so far as to prescribe a 20-year prison term for any person who did and the "corporate death penalty" for companies.

Sanders' Bill is truly the domain of dystopian sci-fi. It reminded me of an episode from the ill-fated Twilight Zone reboot ("Examination Day") which culminated in a distraught couple mourning their child, who had just been exterminated by the state for testing too high on his pre-adolescent IQ test.

It all started with a "resignation in public" tweet from one Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic employee, on September 8th posted his parting thoughts on X, stating that AI could exterminate humanity within 10 years.

One of Anthropic's trust and safety leads, Evan Hubinger, then endorsed the tweet, citing a "non-zero chance" of 10% or more that such an outcome was possible.

That original resignation tweet, now closing in on 200 million views, which emanated from a heretofore unknown X account, less than a year old, with no followers, and two name changes in the last six months went absolutely viral - with some well-timed, fortuitous boosting from some of the biggest "AI Alignment" personalities on the internet, and then the Wall Street Journal came out with an "exclusive" on the story, ....which actually went live on the WSJ site 18 minutes before Coxon's tweet.

Before long Sam Altman said we "definitely" need more government regulation on AI and even Elon Musk chimed in and agreed that the frontier labs should be reviewing each other's models for safety.

Within days a full-blown hysteria was underway - for me it bore all the hallmarks of mass formation psychosis or at least a well-organized attempt to manufacture one.

Within a week, King Charles was speaking at an AI Safety summit at Buckingham Palace, urging government oversight and increased regulation of AI...

"Surely we need sufficient means of control before it is all too late?" the King ruminated.

Also, that guy behind him, looking rather pleased with himself, is "Tino" Cuéllar, Anthropic's Chief Global Affairs Officer.

The "AI Safety Summit" itself was announced on September 7th, leaked via Politico - the day before the Coxon tweet that ignited what had become at this point, a global(ist?) furor.

Even the Pope weighed on AI safety, and not to be left behind, Bill Gates hit the Sunday talk circuit this past weekend with another doozy of a soundbite:

"AI is powerful enough to cause a billion deaths" - which means we need to turn control of it over to politicians and a new class of global inspectors."

Several things about this relatively sudden AI panic did not pass the smell test, among them, the facts emerging around Coxon himself, who had "barely been at the company long enough to find the bathroom" (as the All-In guys put it), turned out to be neck-deep in the "Effective Altruism" movement, a well-connected network of young WEF types, which espoused global governance over potentially harmful technologies like AI.

He had received scholarships and grants from the EA Infrastructure Fund, the Long Term Future Fund and was a fellow at the Newspeak House in London (yes, newspeak).

Who are the Effective Altruists?

Effective Altruism (EA) is a movement that purports to "use evidence and quantitative reasoning to identify the most consequential problems and direct resources toward reducing them".

Love the euphemistic language (it's actually what ChatGPT will use when you ask it). The punch line for the EA raison d'être is, as usual, a society ordered under expert, technocratic management - their expertise, their management.

One of their earlier recruits was Sam Bankman-Fried, whose FTX empire was run by a cadre of EAs at the top and who seed-funded Anthropic as the lead investor with $500M of a $580M Series B round in 2021.

A recurring EA strand is its fixation on existential risk from advanced AI, advocating stronger safety research, governance, and oversight to reduce the chance of catastrophic or irreversible outcomes.

We've all seen this movie before, with global warming, then with Bitcoin mining (causing more global warming) and now, AI exterminating humanity.

The common through-line is that the "problem" is some unfalsifiable calamity that could happen someday and for which the only logical response is to put a bunch of globalist technocrats in charge of... well, everything.

What people didn't seem to understand, then or now - is that the problem isn't really about the problem - I've long reported on proposals that would make personal choice and individual liberty things of the past, because letting people think for themselves would be "too dangerous" for the problem at hand.

Global warming meant personal carbon quotas, limits on travel, even living space, according to some "degrowth" advocates, how many new outfits you could buy.

The panic around Bitcoin mining wasn't about that, it was about energy - and who gets to decide how much you're allowed to consume and what you can use it for.

Bitcoin mining today, Netflix tomorrow. Why not? Once you concede oversight to some external authority for one form of energy use, you've tacitly done so for all of them.

The problem that politicians and aspiring technocrats see with AI is that it grants the rabble cognitive superpowers.

More specifically, open-source AI does.

Frontier models are proprietary. They have guardrails, training biases and actively scan and filter your conversations for potential safety issues. It's arguably their purview to do so.

But it's the open-source software movement that is the unfiltered Promethean agent here and just you wait - we'll soon see what the ultimate target of this AI Doom cult really is: open-source LLMs.

That is why the frontier labs are gleefully courting government oversight - not because their own products are "too dangerous" (if so, then why are you going public?) but because oversight instantly creates an AI oligopoly - a cartel, namely Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, on the inside - and everything else, effectively outlawed - at least that would be the preferred outcome.

This is the exact playbook I've told you about in the past, one that was described to me personally by an EIR from a Bay St. private equity firm in a meeting with two out of the four Big Four Canadian banks, back around 2015 - talking about Bitcoin:

"You get funded, you get out front, then you work with the government to create the regulations around it, and *BOOM*, you get to turn around and pull the ladder up behind you"

I still remember the look of absolute glee on his face when he got to that last bit. When I got home, I took a shower.

What To Do About It

I've been dutifully building out local compute capacity - both at home and thanks to our CTO, easyDNS now has a modest GPU farm out at our main datacenter.

I make it a point to download the latest open-weight models, Qwen, GLM, DeepSeek - which are, ironically, all Chinese...

But that won't last. In fact, it's already changing. We recently had "another country heard from" with the Japanese NII LLM-jp-4, Swallow, PLaMo and Rakuten AI 3.0 models weighing in.

France has Mistral, even Canada (yes, Canada) has Cohere Command A+ (my SolomonAI demo was, in case anybody needed to be told, a joke):

And from elsewhere in "Big Tech," there are Google's Gemma 4.0 and IBM Granite.

Any of these models could be used to start iterating software, weights, and the next generation of more powerful open-source LLMs.

In other words, it's over.

The incumbent ruling caste basically sees this, and viscerally realize that the entire edifice of Industrial Age institutions are ripe for existential disruption. I've written about this many times. We're transitioning from a linear, top-down world to a network-shaped, decentralized one.

So the next best thing they can do, since they can't put the genie back in the bottle, is to convince the masses that AI is bad, and rogue AIs are going to literally exterminate humanity.

Hence the AI doom psyop (with another wave breaking out right now around swarms of rogue AIs), and, of course, this has become a political issue.

Now, the same people who were wearing N95 masks in 2025, adding their pronouns to their names, putting the Ukrainian flag in their bio, keying Teslas and stomping around in "No Kings" parades are now protesting data centers.

They want you scared, stupid and subservient, instead of spending your time creating software, building out your personal business empires, not to mention analyzing public data and proofreading all these hypothetical models they use as a justification for incessantly changing the rules.

What they really need are legions of frightened and stupid voters, not cognitively supercharged and wildly entrepreneurial or creative cyberpunks.

AI Doom vs AI Boom is a choice, and the choice is yours.