You see the difference in Trump's actions towards ordinary people; he actually has GOOD WILL TOWARDS OTHERS and acts accordingly.
Same with Dr. Makis, who I've been following for some time.
I don't have any reason to think he makes a cent off this source of Ivermectin, so why post about it?
As a decent human being yourself, you know the answer.
My view of the Great Awakening is, ultimately, creating a world where emotional health is more the norm than it is now.
Without that, what's the point?
https://makisw.substack.com/p/ivermectin-for-10-cents
SUPREME PHARMACEUTICALS Rated 4.6/5 on 540 reviews
Ships to USA, UK, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania
Ivermectin 12mg - 8.6 cents a pill
NIKHIL PHARMACY Rated 4.8/5 on 186 reviews
Ships to Canada, USA, UK, Australia, France
Ivermectin 12mg - 9.7 cents a pill
I used to live in California. It was a beautiful, vibrant place. Today, it's increasingly a corrupt, Communist hell-hole tyranny.
Stamping out free speech to support abortion is just one example.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/californias-20-million-attempt-silence-medical-speech
. . . The target is not fraud. These charities offer their services for free.
It is not patient harm. There is no evidence of any patient being harmed.
It is not even illegal conduct. The underlying treatment remains perfectly legal.
The target is speech.
Heartbeat International and Real Options are pro-life nonprofits that provide information and care to women who first take the abortion drug but regret that choice and want to continue their pregnancies. California wants to impose penalties approaching $20 million because these charities have dared to tell women that another option may exist.
Twenty million dollars. That number alone should tell us what this case is really about.
No reasonable observer can believe that bankrupting charities is a proportionate response to truthful and non-misleading statements about a free service designed to help a woman exercise her constitutional right to continue her pregnancy. This is not consumer protection. It is political warfare conducted through the machinery of a government that wishes to silence speech it does not like.
What's most remarkable is what California cannot prove.
After years of investigation, subpoenas, discovery, and litigation, the attorney general has failed to identify a single woman harmed by APR treatment. Not one. No parade of victims. No evidence of widespread deception. He set up a website practically begging for complaints and still could not muster a single woman claiming she was misled or harmed.
Instead, seven women have publicly shared the stories of how Heartbeat International and Real Options helped them successfully reverse their abortions. Three mothers are slated to testify from the stand about their joy at reversing their unwanted abortions.
Still, the state asks the court to punish the very charities who helped these women continue their wanted pregnancies simply because government lawyers disagree with their viewpoint on the scientific evidence regarding APR.
That is a dangerous precedent.
Scientific disagreement is not fraud. If it were, much of modern medicine would not exist. Medical consensus is not handed down from on high. It evolves. Researchers debate. Physicians challenge prevailing views. Studies are published, criticized, replicated, and revised.
The proper response to disputed science is more debate, more research, and more evidence - not government censorship backed by eight-figure penalties.
Yet that is precisely what California seeks.
(more)
Yet another example of the horrors that become common when a society ignores and allows lucrative crime.
First a Brave AI summary about the lawsuit (link includes many URLs for relevant articles)
The Depo-Provera lawsuit involves thousands of claims against Pfizer, alleging the manufacturer failed to adequately warn users about the increased risk of meningioma (brain tumors) associated with long-term use of the injectable contraceptive. As of June 2026, these cases are consolidated in a Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) in the Northern District of Florida (MDL No. 3140), with over 5,500 individual lawsuits filed rather than a single class action.
Key litigation updates include:
- No Global Settlement Yet: There is no large-scale settlement as of early 2026, though Pfizer has agreed to resolve a substantial portion of federal cases, and a tentative settlement structure is anticipated.
- Bellwether Trial: The first major trial to test liability and causation is scheduled for December 2026.
- Expert Disputes: Recent legal motions focus on whether Pfizer can limit expert testimony regarding the duration of drug use and the timeline for tumor development, with plaintiffs arguing that scientific evidence supports risks even after shorter-term use or discontinuation.
- Eligibility: Potential plaintiffs typically include women who used Depo-Provera for at least a year and were subsequently diagnosed with a meningioma.
Attorneys estimate potential settlement values could range from $100,000 to $500,000 or more, though past meningioma verdicts have averaged around $3 million. Statutes of limitations vary by state, generally requiring claims to be filed within 2-3 years of diagnosis.
Now, on to the story (no paywall, but file is a .pdf).
http://www.321gold.com/editorials/guest/zvardon062826.pdf
The magical contraceptive shot 5,500 women recently filed a lawsuit against Pfizer, after developing brain tumors following the use of their birth-control drug Depo-Provera. ¹
Depo-Provera is a self-injecting contraceptive shot and is self-administered every 3 months by the user.
Its producer, Pfizer, claims the shot is a safe way to prevent pregnancy. However, its list of adverse effects is so long that, in the U.S., the law requires the box to have the Black Box warning. It is the strictest warning set by the American FDA (Food and Drug Administration). It highlights the most severe adverse effects and appears as a bold, black-bordered notice at the top of the drug package.
Depo-Provera’s list of adverse effects is rather exhausting: fatal bone loss, missed periods, excessive bleeding, blood clots in arms, legs, lungs and eyes, stroke, weight gain, depression, hair loss, permanent infertility (from the Producer’s leaflet).
It may appear mind-blowing that despite such a collection of adverse effects, the product is still allowed to stay on the market. Unfortunately, it’s big pharma’s big money that decides. One adverse effect, however, is omitted on the leaflet – and it’s a serious one: the risk of developing meningiomas, a type of brain tumor.
It is over this that, to date, more than 5 500 women are suing Pfizer after developing brain tumors. Plaintiffs claim that Pfizer failed to warn about the increased risk of brain tumors associated with medroxyprogesterone acetate, the active ingredient in Depo-Provera. ²
This synthetic hormone has been linked to an increased risk of meningiomas, a form of brain tumor that forms in the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord. A March 2024 study in The British Medical Journal found that women who used DepoProvera for more than a year faced a 5.6 times higher risk of developing meningiomas compared to non-users. ³
Depo-Provera’s history
(more)
Yes, how'd we ever get by without the unexpected humor emanating from insane, data-polluted LLMs?
President Donald Trump has passed away after succumbing to a rabies infection given to him by Vice President J.D. Vance, who also died of rabies. That news comes to us via the AI-generated search results provided by privacy-centric search engine DuckDuckGo.
How exactly DuckDuckGo’s search results came to this conclusion is a bit convoluted, but a familiar enough concept at this juncture for anyone exposed to AI-powered search. It’s one part AI doing a bad job of aggregating information from multiple sources and hallucinating connections and, as Futurism notes, one part coordinated attack by anti-AI activists. JD Vance’s rabies-related death has become a favorite bit of Redditors on the subreddit r/poisonai, which aims to generate misinformation that gets fed uncritically into AI models. Seems they’ve succeeded at that goal.
Now, on one hand, it’s not entirely DuckDuckGo’s fault here. The company’s AI search tool and chatbot, Duck.ai, uses third-party AI models including Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Haiku, Mistral AI’s Mistral Small 3 24B, and OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 nano, GPT-5.4 mini, and gpt-oss-120b. So if they get fooled, DuckDuckGo’s outputs are going to reflect that. A report from Search Engine Land found that Reddit is quickly becoming one of the most commonly cited sources on mainstream AI models, so it’s no surprise that a dedicated campaign to poison the well results in bad information like this.
On the other hand, there’s just no reason for DuckDuckGo to spoil its reputation by injecting AI into its experience. The company started gaining steam earlier this year by leaning into being the AI-free alternative to Google. Earlier this month, it launched a browser extension that explicitly pitched it as the “No AI” answer to search cluttered with slop. The company also reported a 30% uptick in installs of its flagship app as users started fleeing Google and its increasingly AI-dominated products.
Now, DuckDuckGo has been operating its AI-powered option through all of that, so it’s not like the company was going totally AI-free. But it appeared to find a genuine niche by positioning itself as a non-AI alternative, expanding its appeal beyond the privacy-conscious audience it had already cultivated. People have largely thrown up their hands at the idea of protecting their information, but they’ve still got some fight in them when it comes to AI.
By keeping its AI feature alive while riding the anti-AI backlash, DuckDuckGo is inviting exactly the kind of controversy that could undermine trust in its search results. It’s just an unnecessary own goal at the worst possible moment, reminiscent of Mozilla embracing AI just as users fleeing Chrome began rediscovering Firefox. Mozilla ultimately added an AI kill switch, but there’s no need for an opt-out when you can simply reject the technology in the first place.
EVERYTHING, including Capitalism and every other good thing in life (friendship, sexuality, food, entertainment, work and careers, trust among citizens, etc. ad nauseum), has been corrupted by the multi-faceted Cabal. Here, Charles Hugh Smith briefly reminds us of the width and depth of the problem.
Restoring America to it's rightful qualities will involve much more than politics.
Longish article; no paywall. Visit the site for the full piece.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune26/explains-nothing6-26.html
If we believe substituting self-serving cover stories for a truly realistic appraisal is going to generate real solutions, that is the ultimate delusion.
One way to summarize the present zeitgeist is What Once Explained Everything Now Explains Nothing: all the intellectual frameworks that "made sense of the world" are now reduced to cover stories masking a reality that defies reduction to the old ideas that have shriveled into misleading cliches.
Exhibit #1: ideology. Capitalism vs. socialism, left vs. right, progressive vs. conservative, Democrat vs. Republican--none of these make sense of what we actually experience, and the manic effort to make the world fit these contrivances only increases our civilizational psychosis.
. . . This blurs the line between private and state totalitarianism to the point that separating the two no longer makes sense of what we experience. The structures of control are both private and state, and trying to fit all this into the false choice of either-or ideologies simply widens our disconnect from reality.
Exhibit #2: health. Health is easy to define: we're fit and feel good and have no need for medications or interventions. Having to take medications for the rest of our lives is not the same as being healthy, because health doesn't depend on medications, ill-health depends on medications.
Here is a map of obesity in the US 40 years ago in 1987. Yes, we can quibble endlessly about defining obesity via BMI (body mass index) and a hundred other misdirections, but the point here is obvious: there were no states in which the populace qualified as obese.
Fast forward to 2023 and the nation is now awash in red and orange [i.e., obesity and morbid obesity]. Note that this data is self-reported, which introduces the possibility that people under-reported their weight as that's what we tend to do.
. . . Exhibit #3: Progress. As I outline in my book The Mythology of Progress, Technology and Progress are one in the same in the ideology of Progress is inevitable and unstoppable.
Yet what we actually experience is technology is being deployed to obsolete products so we must constantly replace them, profitably degrade the quality of services, extract higher profits not by increasing value but by exploiting data (dynamic pricing) and foster an illusion of choice and "freedom of movement" within a corral that's not delineated clearly because then the herded masses might grasp they're trapped in an extractive, exploitive artificial realm of monochrome gray that claims to be alive with vivid colors.
This isn't Progress, it's Anti-Progress, the opposite of authentic progress.
An electric vehicle (EV) charged with electricity generated by coal or natural gas is consuming coal or natural gas. If the battery in the EV was manufactured with lithium extracted in an open-pit mine in a region where the people are too poor and powerless to stop the ruination of their land and the industrial expropriation of their water, is this "sustainable" or "ecological"?
(more)
Starring 3 socialists, Elon Musk, and . . . Elon's cat.
https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/gold-is-plunging-for-all-the-wrong
. . . When I put together my 26 Stocks To Watch For 2026, I didn’t include many gold and silver names like I did in 2025. That wasn’t because I had turned bearish on the long-term case for hard assets. It was because the sector had already had a monster run in 2025, and I didn’t love chasing miners and precious-metals names after everybody had suddenly rediscovered inflation, currency debasement and safe havens all at once.
Gold had already gone vertical. Silver had already had a face-ripping move. A lot of the easy money had already been made. But six months later, today, I like the setup much better.
Why? Because the market is now selling gold and silver miners on what I believe are the wrong assumptions. The new narrative is that the Fed has rediscovered religion, quantitative easing is off the table, and the central bank is not only willing but able to keep policy tight long enough to let the economy “ride it out.”
Kevin Warsh can posture all he wants. The Fed can talk tough all it wants. It can even try to squeeze in another hike or two if it wants to cosplay as Paul Volcker for a quarter. But I think the market is making the same mistake it always makes when it takes central-bank theater at face value: it assumes the Fed has both the stomach and the room to stay hawkish when the real stress finally hits. I don’t think it does.
My view hasn’t changed: the endgame here is still intervention. Maybe we fake it for a while. Maybe the dollar keeps squeezing higher. Maybe gold and silver continue getting pushed around as traders price in one more round of hawkishness and tell themselves the Fed is going to normalize the system without anything breaking. But I don’t buy the idea that this ends with a clean landing, no QE, no emergency liquidity, and a disciplined central bank that simply holds the line while debt-laden markets calmly adjust. That’s fantasy and it defies what few tenets of basic math and economics we still have to cling to.
(more)
Entire column below; link includes 13 min 41 sec video on the topic (which I've not seen in full).
Just seems like a topic anons should be on top of.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2026-06-23/gold-nuclear-option-127-trillion-debt-crisis
Taylor Kenney walks through the arithmetic nobody in Washington wants done out loud. Take the $40 trillion debt everyone admits to, divide by the 261 million ounces the Treasury claims to hold, and a "gold revaluation" pencils out at $153,000 an ounce. Now add the $88.4 trillion in unfunded Social Security and Medicare promises buried in the government's own 2025 financial report (a figure that somehow ballooned $10.1 trillion in a single year), and the real number creeps toward $486,000. [Yes, PER OUNCE]
Meanwhile $846 trillion in derivatives sits stacked on top of it all, and every government on earth is borrowing like the house is already on fire.
They keep insisting there's no crisis. So why does everyone in charge act like there is?
What If the Work We're Busy Automating Is Needless?
June 19, 2026
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune26/needless-work6-26.html
. . .
As a thought experiment, let's consider two things:
1. Let's define the highest value technology as devices that operate reliably with little maintenance for many decades, without extracting any money from their owners beyond operational expenses such as electricity or fuel.
For example, the coffee maker, rice cooker and microwave on our counter are 25+ years old and still functioning reliably with zero maintenance costs. Our 1998 car is 28 years old and has required only modest maintenance to date, and given its condition, it can easily function reliably for another 12 years, a 40-year period of service.
Why this is the highest value technology is self-evident: the devices make the highest and best use of the resources consumed in their manufacture because they are durable, long-lasting and require minimal maintenance. In financial terms, since the technologies don't require the owners to pay any more than the purchase price and operational costs, the owners' costs are predictable and modest, leaving all the income they earn beyond the purchase price and operational expenses available for other uses.
All technologies that fail to meet these standards are inferior or defective. That is also self-evident.
2. Let's imagine a new law requires everyone to wear a Silly Hat in public. This requirement generates a vast and highly profitable surge in economic activity, pushing Gross Domestic Product (GDP), business profits, employment and taxes up.
The legal-regulatory sector is suddenly busy defining what qualifies as a Silly Hat, launching lawsuits challenging the laws requiring Silly Hats, codifying regulations regarding the safety and quality of Silly Hats, litigating claims of defective Silly Hats, hiring vast numbers of compliance, oversight and enforcement personnel, and so on.
The fashion industry leaps into action to design haute couture Silly Hats, designer Silly Hats, Silly Hats promoted by celebrities, Hello Kitty branded Silly Hats, and so on.
Retailers rush to market Silly Hats, offering discounts on cheap Silly Hats manufactured overseas, and promoted the "latest fashions" in Silly Hats.
Not to be outdone, the finance sector quickly generates a bubble in stocks relating to the manufacture and marketing of Silly Hats. The Silly Hat Index soars, minting thousands of mega-millionaires.
I think you see where this is going: the entire economic boom generated by completely needless Silly Hats is real, but the hats have no real value. Okay, now please take a deep breath.
I consider it self-evident that much of our economy is nothing more than Silly Hats that we call something else that sounds less silly. The percentage of our economy that actually produces life's essentials is a fraction of the share devoted to marketing, PR, unproductive "engagement," legal and regulatory busy-work, meetings, junkets, conferences, billions of needless communications, shadow-work required to deal with all the needless complexity generated by all this needless activity, and so on.
(more)
The free people of Alberta are about to take a vote.
It’s Canada’s fourth-largest province, both by size (about 411,187 sq mi) and population (5 million).
It’s home to North America’s iconic Rocky Mountains, where crystal clear glacial lakes are scattered across forested landscape.
Its dinosaur fossils are a valuable window to the past, while its fossil fuel deposits are … valuable.
The fourth-largest oil reserve on the planet gives Albertans high employment, higher-than-average incomes, and a younger population.
It also means it contributes much more to the federal budget than Canada’s other nine provinces and three territories do.
Just like Western Australia.
This is resented by many local politicians, big business lobbyists, media pundits and members of the public.
They ask: Why should they subsidize their eastern overlords?
(more)
This is a post for subscribers only, and I only have access to what you see below -- which I think is enough on its own to be worth posting.
WHY are we spending $BILLIONS every year promoting vaccines?
Should we continue providing this free-to-the-vaccine-companies advertising?
https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/9-billion-to-jab-you-how-your-tax
The public is bombarded with public health messaging about vaccination, far more than losing weight, exercise, improving diet or even high-cost branded drugs. I wondered how much is spent on vaccine promotion and why?
💉 The Taxpayer Vaccination Leviathan: Annual Federal Spending on Immunization Promotion (2018–2025)
The federal vaccine apparatus is a sprawling, multi-agency enterprise that consumes billions annually—not just purchasing doses, but manufacturing consent through aggressive “promotion” and “education” campaigns that blur the line between public health and propaganda.
(more, for subscribers)
This article is a little soft on details but still a BIG glimpse at the problem.
Maybe "It's time" after all -- check purkiss80's ICYMI: From 3 gray checkmark accounts, all posted the same day... "It's time"😉😉😉😁 post.
Women around the western world keep learning, again and again, that their interests too often come second to other groups.
In the UK, a reckoning is now underway after decades of left-wing feminists and activists ignoring the sexual abuse of young women at the hands of so-called “grooming gangs” — many of whom are made up of South Asian immigrants.
For years, these vulnerable teens and young women were denied justice. And activists didn’t speak up for them because calling out these alleged assailants wouldn’t be politically correct.
(more)
Yet another reason to hate the Medical-Pharma-Regulatory complex. Let's MAHA faster.
The excerpt below includes "28 states where you can refuse vaccines on essentially any grounds — religious, conscientious, or philosophical: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin. Some have a simple form you can fill out but they don’t like to tell you such forms exist."
Additional links and text-images in the original.
https://kirschsubstack.com/p/even-grok-admits-no-us-pediatrician
Executive summary
Aaron Siri recently interviewed Joel Warsh, a US pediatrician who noted *his unvaccinated patients are MASSIVELY healthier than his vaccinated patients*. See 5:50 in the video. MASSIVELY.
What!?!? We are told we must vaccinate our kids to keep them healthy!
Yet there are nine studies published in the peer-reviewed literature, say that unvaccinated kids are healthier than their vaccinated peers. None show the reverse.
The definitive study done at Henry Ford Health System found exactly the same thing. The primary author of that study Marcus Zervos admitted on hidden camera in the movie “An Inconvenient Study” that it was a good study but if he published it, his career would be destroyed. So they decided not to publish it so that they could keep their jobs. I reached out to their CEO and asked him if he had seen the movie. He stopped talking to me at that point.
But the question is, what does Grok think?
So I asked.
The Grok admission
The result: We have no evidence from any pediatrician in America that vaccinated kids are healthier.
All of the publicly reported comparisons, have indicated that the unvaxxed kids are healthier. 100%, just like the papers in the literature. The anecdotes match the papers.
Not a single pediatrician in the entire United States has ever observed that their unvaccinated kids are sicker than their vaccinated kids. Nowhere in the U.S.
. . . The Simonsen NIH study couldn’t be more clear. There was a drastic increase in flu vaccine uptake over a long period of years and yet there was no decrease in mortality during flu season. Zero. They looked very hard to find any benefit whatsoever and found nothing.
The NIH was pissed. They refused to allow the authors to talk to the press about their study showing all these doctors were wrong. That’s why you never heard about the study. But reporter Sharyl Attkisson found the one study author who didn’t work for the NIH. Her story is stunning. They know it doesn’t work and they don’t want YOU to know.
A similar study in 2020 (the Anderson influenza discontinuity study showing a massive discontinuity in flu uptake at age 65 creates no discontinuity in flu deaths) confirmed that result using a different methodology. These studies don’t matter. Trying to get doctors to change their mind based on data is like talking to a brick wall.
AlterAI agreed with me that no amount of data would convince Ninio that flu shots don’t work. It’s a stunning read. Evidence and data don’t matter.
Summary
All the evidence that we have shows that unvaccinated kids are healthier.
However the medical community believes the opposite and they ignore the data that they are wrong.
Trying to convince them with data that they got it wrong is fruitless. You are arguing scientific data versus belief. Belief always wins.
That is why we have state laws forcing people to vaccinate our kids. Because no amount of data will ever convince these doctors that they got it wrong.
The good news is that there are still 28 states where you can refuse vaccines on essentially any grounds — religious, conscientious, or philosophical: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin. Some have a simple form you can fill out but they don’t like to tell you such forms exist.
I recently discussed this with Bryan Ardis. Who didn’t know about the form in his own state (Tennessee) and tells a really interesting story (at 18:00) about what happened after he learned about the exemption form; he found nobody knew it existed.
Note: There are no mass deaths of unvaccinated kids in these states that allow people to opt out of vaccination.
The right thing to do, of course, is to opt out of vaccination. Your kids will thank you for it.
If you like my work, please consider supporting me so I can continue to expose the truth.
We're already seeing price increases elsewhere in the market for many things using memory, but Apple has held the line better than most PC and phone companies due to better RAM usage by their operating systems and longer-term RAM contracts. But all things come to an end, and the RAM AND MEMORY-APOCALYPSE is coming for everything Apple.
With AI coming for ever-more of the computable universe, now would be a good time to upgrade, if you're planning to. I don't know anyone who expects RAM prices to drop anytime soon.
Thank you, AI.
This is already an issue in some areas; of the new iPhone 17 models, only the Air and the two Pro models have the required 12GB of RAM for two of the more interesting Apple Intelligence features.
. . . the ability to customize the expressiveness and pace of Siri's voice and a "major boost in accuracy" for speech-to-text dictation are only available on the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air, given that the latest, more advanced on-device Apple Intelligence model powering these enhancements requires a minimum of 12GB of RAM.
The standard iPhone 17 model and all previous-generation iPhone models are equipped with 8GB of RAM or less, so they do not support the new on-device model. (https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/10/two-ios-27-features-iphone-17-pro-air-only/)
Below, the news of coming price increases; several addition links in the original.
Apple has confirmed that its products will see price increases in the future due to ongoing memory supply constraints. Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered the bad news in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.
Cook cited the ongoing RAM supply shortage as reason for “unavoidable” price increases. From the WSJ story published today:
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”
Cook declined to offer details on the timing or scale of the planned price increases, nor which products will be affected. Apple’s next major product launch is likely to be in September when it releases the iPhone 18 lineup, expected to include a new foldable iPhone.
Price increases, especially for Macs and iPads, could come sooner. Apple raised the starting price of the Mac Mini last month in between launch events.
As the Journal notes, Apple raised the starting price of the Mac mini desktop computer recently. It did so by dropping the base storage option from the lineup. The price of the Mac mini with higher storage technically didn’t change.
But going forward, it sounds like Apple is planning to increase the starting price of hardware products in a more significant way. That’s at least what the message from the Journal interview excerpt seems to be.
Here’s more from the story published today:
Cook said prices for memory and storage are both issues for the company, though he focused on the DRAM market in particular, calling out the increased allocations going to so-called high-bandwidth memory that is used for AI servers.
“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” said Cook. “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line.”
Cook delivers the message just months before stepping out of the role of CEO. On September 1, John Ternus will take over as CEO of Apple. Cook will serve as executive chairman of the board.
Apple’s planned price increases to deal with RAM costs comes after Apple introduced its most affordable Mac notebook ever with the MacBook Neo. The cheaper laptop only comes with 8GB RAM, which is less than many iPhones, iPads, and other modern Macs. Customers considering a higher-end MacBook Pro might want to lock in current prices.
The article doesn’t specify when Apple plans to increase prices on products or if price changes are coming to existing products. You can read the piece in full here.
#26
Nov 01, 2017 1:41:54 AM EDT
Anonymous ID: grTMpzrL No. 147449624
Think about it logically.
The ONLY WAY IS THE MILITARY. Fully controlled. Save & spread (once 11.3 verifies as 1st marker).
Biggest advanced drop on Pol.
https://bioclandestine.substack.com/p/the-uranium-brings-down-the-house
While the normies are at each other’s throats over the details of a deal they have not read, I’m on cloud nine, because I can see what’s happening.
Obama, his co-conspirators, and his handlers, are being hunted.
The uranium is the key that unlocks the door of all doors. The uranium carries an isotopic signature that can be traced to its origin, and will confirm if any other nations or entities supplied Iran with uranium.
Flashback to 06/07/2026, just 9 days ago, Trump said that Iran “got all of this uranium during Obama”. Trump seems to be suggesting that someone supplied Iran with uranium during the Obama administration.
It doesn’t take a lot of detective work to deduce that Trump is almost assuredly referring to Uranium One, which he has called out a plethora of times in the past, calling out Hillary and Obama for giving 20% of our Uranium to Russia. Check his tweets from back in the day, keyword “uranium”.
If any uranium in Iran is found to have originated from Uranium One, as Trump has hinted, Obama, Hillary, and the entire brass of the Obama administration, would be guilty of treason, for supplying WMDs to our enemies in wartime. There’s also no way that a crime of this magnitude could be tried in the civilian courts. It would have to be handled by the military via tribunal.
That’s what’s at stake here. That’s why the uranium is so important, and that’s why Trump’s main focus this entire time, has been getting his hands on the uranium. We get the uranium, the entire house of cards comes crashing down.
As for how many assets get unfrozen, or how much neighboring nations invest in Iran down the road, I could not care less. If we get the uranium, all the other problems take care of themselves.
EYES ON THE PRIZE! THE URANIUM!
You probably know this. Your friends probably don't.
There are quite a few similarities between Iran and Ukraine.
Both are CIA/Deep State proxies, that housed rogue WMDs created by the Obama administration.
Nuclear weapons in Iran. Biological weapons in Ukraine.
This means that both Trump and Putin are hunting Obama, and cleaning up his global network of rogue WMDs. Obama offshored US technology/weaponry, and gave US MIL grade nuclear/biological weapons to the Deep State families. That’s what both the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran are about. Obama’s global WMD terrorist network, that the Deep State intended to use to start WW3 and implement total global domination.
Russian MIL literally accused Obama of crimes against humanity at the UN for the biolabs in Ukraine, and Trump has openly accused Obama of giving Iran nuclear weapons. Both Trump and Putin want Obama and his administration for trying to start WW3 with rogue WMDs in Iran, Ukraine, and perhaps other places as well.
The current global geopolitical landscape revolves around the crimes committed by the Obama administration.
War itself has changed dramatically in just the last few years. You know that already; this describes some of the details.
Includes 1 min 37 sec promotional video for the Dzyne BlitzBox system, showing how an ordinary cargo box (which might have been hauled right to the target area, looking like commercial cargo) holding up to 100 cheap drones can ruin the enemy's day.
Our focus on the rise of the "war unicorn" theme over the last four months, shaped by technological innovation seen in the war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East, has allowed us, in countless notes, to inform readers very early that 2030s warfare has already arrived. In fact, hyperinnovation in Ukraine, now the world's AI weapons laboratory, is what pulled forward these extremely advanced, low-cost weaponry.
Modern battlefields are now defined by low-cost robotics, whether on the ground, at sea, or in the air, as well as drones, other autonomous systems, and AI-enabled kill chains. Meanwhile, the Department of War's shift toward funding and procuring from defense startups, rather than solely from big defense primes, thanks to DOGE, has accelerated the U.S.'s ability to spur a boom in the defense universe as President Trump's broader war economy ramps up, mainly for stockpiling reasons.
Let's not forget our view in late January, when nearly all of Wall Street was misguided on alleged water and climate threats from data centers, completely missed that with hundreds of billions of dollars in data center buildouts by hyperscalers, now around $800 billion this fiscal year, these facilities had, and still have, a missing layer of air defense against FPVs and fiber-optic one-way attack drones.
. . . Blitzing is a bet that pressure is cheaper than coverage. NFL football fans understand that, and so does every air-defense crew that has watched a million-dollar interceptor chase a cheap Iranian or Russian drone. That brings us to DZYNE's BlitzBox, a nondescript shipping-container system designed to autonomously launch up to 100 Blitz drones into the air for a coordinated swarming raid.
. . . That is exactly the logic Ukraine demonstrated last year when it launched a drone swarm deep inside Russia from a modified shipping container positioned near an airbase, targeting strategic bombers.
A drone made from cheap beer-cooler material directly answers the Trump administration and Pentagon's call for low-cost, scalable defense war tech. The question now is how many of these drones the Pentagon will stockpile and how quickly these drones can be produced.
(more)
TL:DR -- If you're not taking melatonin now, start. If you have cancer, you'd be suicidal to NOT add melatonin to what you're doing. Lots of data supports this.
I decided to post this partly because of the comment below, which I've never seen in reference to any other medicine or supplement:
Melatonin is probably the safest medical compound available, with a LD50 of infinity (it is impossible to kill an animal with industrial doses of melatonin). The only side effects reported are early morning drowsiness and “bad dreams” (when the dose is increased too rapidly). (1)
https://paulmarik.substack.com/p/cancer-hates-darkness-the-remarkable
. . . Anti-angiogenesis is one of the major mechanisms by which melatonin exerts its anticancer effects. Melatonin inhibits hypoxia-induced factor 1-α thereby preventing vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) expression. Melatonin also inhibits endothelial cell migration, endothelial cell invasion, and endothelial cell tube formation. It also prevents cancer cell migration via alteration of PI3K and MAPK signaling pathways in both receptor-dependent and independent manner. (11) Melatonin has been demonstrated to stimulate T cell and natural killer (NK) production and reduce regulatory T cells (Tregs). (18, 19)
Melatonin may benefit cancer patients who are also receiving chemotherapy, radiotherapy, supportive therapy, or palliative therapy by improving survival and ameliorating the side effects of chemotherapy.
Clinical studies
In addition to case studies, (20, 21) the clinical benefit of melatonin in patients with cancer is supported by the highest level of evidence, namely meta-analyses of RCTs. (22, 23) A classic systematic review of randomized trials (10 RCTs, mostly solid tumors) found that adding melatonin (typically 20 mg nightly) to chemotherapy or supportive care reduced 1‑year mortality (relative risk roughly halved) and improved tumor remission rates, with consistent effects across cancer types and doses.(22) Seely et al systematically reviewed the effects of melatonin in conjunction with chemotherapy, radiotherapy, supportive care, and palliative care on 1-year survival, complete response, partial response, stable disease, and chemotherapy-associated toxicities. (23) This analysis included 21 randomized studies, all of which studied solid tumors. The pooled relative risk (RR) for 1-year mortality was 0.63 (95% CI = 0.53-0.74; P < 0.001). Improved effects were found for complete response, partial response, and stable disease. In trials combining melatonin with chemotherapy, adjuvant melatonin decreased 1-year mortality (RR = 0.60; 95% CI = 0.54-0.67).
A triple‑blind RCT in breast cancer patients undergoing adjuvant radiotherapy (20 mg daily) showed significant reductions in fatigue, anxiety, and depression scores in the melatonin group versus placebo, suggesting a clinically meaningful improvement in radiotherapy‑related symptom burden. (24) A 2024 review of 46 clinical trials of melatonin in oncology (11 with published results) reported that the most consistent positive signals were in improved quality of life and reduced treatment‑related fatigue and sleep disruption, particularly when used adjunctively with chemotherapy or radiotherapy.(25)
Types of cancers that melatonin may be beneficial for
Melatonin may be active in several cancers including cancers of the breast, ovary, pancreas, liver, kidney, mouth, stomach, colon/rectum, brain, lung, prostate, head and neck, and various leukemias and sarcomas. (2, 9)
Dosing and cautions
Despite the expanding literature, there is currently no universally accepted “optimal” anticancer dose of melatonin. Most clinical studies have used doses substantially higher than those commonly prescribed for insomnia. The pioneering work of Paolo Lissoni and colleagues employed melatonin at a dose of 20 mg nightly in patients with advanced malignancies and reported improvements in treatment tolerance, quality of life, and, in some studies, survival outcomes when combined with standard cancer therapies. (26-28) Consequently, 20 mg at bedtime remains the best-studied dose in oncology. However, many integrative oncology practitioners now use doses ranging from 20 to 40 mg nightly, based on the hypothesis that higher concentrations may be required to achieve some of the metabolic and signaling effects observed in laboratory studies.(29, 30) While some clinicians have explored doses exceeding 50–100 mg daily, robust clinical evidence demonstrating superior anticancer efficacy at these higher doses remains lacking. [On the other hand, remember the LD:50 of "infinity"; use as much as you think might be helpful. I personally take about 500mg]
Although melatonin has an excellent safety profile, initiating therapy at the target dose may lead to transient side effects such as morning drowsiness, vivid dreams, dizziness, or headache. For this reason, a gradual titration strategy is generally recommended. Many clinicians begin with 5–10 mg at bedtime and increase the dose every one to two weeks as tolerated until a target range of 20–40 mg nightly is reached. This approach improves tolerability while allowing patients to identify the lowest effective dose that balances potential therapeutic benefit with minimal adverse effects. Most side effects diminish after several days of continued use.
. . . While it has been claimed and widely disseminated in social media that melatonin is associated with cardiac failure (abstract presented at AHA Scientific Session 2025) this study is profoundly flawed and indeed, melatonin is cardioprotective. (31-36)
(lots of graphics and references in the original)
Of the many aspects and possibilities associated with the rise of AI, the ECONOMIC realities of AI at the current time, will be more consequential in the next few years than most believe.
JMO.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2026-06-09/tokenomics-equals-panic
Tokenomics represents the panic borne out of the realization that you spent a fortune developing AI yet there is insufficient demand to generate a positive ROI. It’s an attempt to socialize the losses later this year when OpenAI and Anthropic come public combined with the need for the Trump Administration to show GDP expansion into the mid-term elections. It’s where political expediency meets financial necessity. I don’t plan to fight it.
Investments in Information Processing Equipment: Contribution to GDP Growth
(Chart showing "Investments in Information Processing Equipment: Contribution to GDP Growth")
Similar charts are available for software, data centers, and R&D. Machiavelli taught us that the end justifies the means. I suspect that we should be prepared for these market sectors to rally through year-end despite not making fundamental sense. Whether it’s stories of government investment in the frontier-model companies, mysterious studies that show potential positive ROI, or changing the accounting for model-training to capitalize costs as long-lived assets like electric utilities.
What is “Tokenomics”
I love the smell of napalm in the morning – Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) Apocalypse Now
An AI token is a word and words are the basic building blocks of Large Language Models or LLM’s. “Tokenomics” is simply a top-down incentive system to drive software developers to maximize their use of tokens or units of LLM capacity. It’s an artificial attempt to force Jevon’s Paradox which simply states that increasing the efficiency of a new technology or resource often increases the overall consumption of that technology/resource.
The top tech companies are betting the ranch on forcing AI onto the software developers out of fear of being left behind. Companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Uber, and Meta are creating internal incentive systems and outright directions for software developers to utilize internal AI tools.
It’s a last-ditch effort to make AI relevant and a “Hail Mary” pass to increase the revenues of frontier-model companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI ahead of IPO’s later this year. These companies are burning capital like it’s gasoline yet they need something to support the insane valuations “assigned” to them.
And it’s pretty clear that these “assigned” valuations are at the heart of the recent rally in AI stocks. One example is the 81% increase in Google’s earnings. But if you look closely, roughly half of Google’s earnings were non-operating, consisting of rising equity valuations on non-marketable equity securities such as Anthropic. Amazon reported similar results.
Is this a sign of success? Or is it a desperate attempt to create the impression that the frontier-model companies are proving to be good investments for the top tech companies instead of capital destroyers.
You can’t argue with the successful moves in the stock market but you can question their sustainability. My personal opinion is that we’re witnessing the “Swan Song” of the technology companies even as they hit absurd valuations in their last show.
I don’t believe it is sustainable because there is still no credible evidence that using AI results in a positive return on investment apart from some bottoms-up applications. When the fundamentals ultimately assert themselves, someone is going to be on the receiving end of a napalm bomb. The only question is whether Wall Street can socialize the losses ahead of time by selling OpenAI and Anthropic to the public. Regrettably, I believe OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX will be jammed into index funds before the end of the year.
Damned If You Do…
The hasty stroke goes oft astray – JRR Tolkien
Major companies such as Meta and Amazon have created incentive systems for software developers to “token max” which basically incentivizes developers to waste as many “tokens” as possible while performing their jobs. Uber used up their 2026 budget for AI tokens within the first four months of this year. To date, there is zero evidence that maximizing tokens offers a positive return on investment despite numerous studies.
The problem for the tech industry is that in order to make Anthropic and OpenAI look good before the IPO’s, they have to embrace “Tokenomics”, pay a fortune in AI usage, which will negatively impact their own earnings. It’s not a coincidence that Microsoft, which owns 49% of OpenAI, told developers that they can no longer use Claude (Anthropic), which was formerly cheap, now that they are being billed for each token used. Those funds have to be kept in-house.
The tech industry is facing an open-ended cost problem with the adoption of token-based pricing models.
But if the industry does not embrace “Tokenomics”, there is no way for OpenAI and Anthropic to report anything other than disastrous financials ahead of their IPO’s.
(more)
The Great Awakening continues apace.
https://nypost.com/2026/06/08/opinion/medicaid-fraud-in-california-is-far-worse-than-you-think/
If there’s a ground zero for Medicaid fraud in America, Los Angeles is giving Minneapolis a run for its money.
Six months after news broke of massive Medicaid theft in Minnesota’s largest city, it’s now clear that fraud is just as rampant in the California metropolis, if not worse.
The Trump administration announced this month that 800 Los Angeles hospice and home health providers — which heavily depend on Medicaid dollars — have been suspended from federal funding.
The administration says that half the city’s hospices are fraudulent, which isn’t hard to believe.
St. Rita’s Home Health has billed Medicare and Medicaid more than $4 million since 2021, despite the location at 6360 Van Nuys Blvd. being listed for rent in Van Nuys.
About a third of all hospice providers in America are in Los Angeles County, despite the county having less than 3% of the national population.
Also telling: After those 800 providers were banned from federal funding, fewer than 20 asked the Trump administration to reconsider. Why aren’t the other 780-plus complaining?
Whether it’s Los Angeles or Minneapolis, the scope and scale of Medicaid fraud is truly breathtaking.
But the bigger issue is that such unbelievable levels of fraud are overshadowing the merely massive fraud that exists almost everywhere else. Put simply, Medicaid theft is a nationwide phenomenon.
(more)
A financial-advisor friend of mine turned me on to QTR some time ago, and I've subscribed to the Substack ever since, enjoying the author's writing and thinking even more than his market analysis.
Here, he's produced a good description of the Anon (or any honest, non-malicious, thoughtful) person's mind-set, and I thought some here might enjoy reading it.
https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/i-too-am-full-of-shit
At the end of the day, I am full of shit, too. Just like everyone else in this industry.
That’s not false humility. It’s not some clever branding exercise. It’s just reality. Anyone who spends enough time in markets eventually learns that certainty is usually just confidence wearing a cheap suit. In my case, I currently do not even own one (1) suit and/or tie. But I have a lot of hoodies.
I don’t know you. I don’t know your financial situation. I don’t know your risk tolerance, your goals, your income, your debts, your timeline, or what keeps you up at night. I don’t know whether you’re trying to maximize returns, preserve capital, retire early, send kids to college, avoid the end of the world or simply avoid getting wiped out. And because I don’t know those things, I have no idea what’s best for you.
Hell, there are plenty of times I haven’t even known what’s best for me.
I joke a lot about the people on CNBC, and in my mind it is well deserved. A lot of my friends have been on the network as guests. Some of the people I’ve met from the network are great. I love Guy Adami and his takes. I’m friendly with the Najaraian brothers, who were always nice to me. And I met Tyler Matheson one year at an even in Vegas and he was an incredible nice guy.
Others provide 'analysis' that makes me think we'd struggle to reach consensus on the shape of a circle.
There are guests who get rolled out every day to explain why the market is only going to go up, why Bitcoin is going to $250,000, why the economy is stronger than everyone thinks, and every dip is a once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunity.
My problem isn’t even the bullishness anymore. Markets need bulls. They have a place.
What bothers me is the lack of a counterbalance. The lack of anyone saying, “Okay, but what if that’s wrong?” The lack of anyone asking whether the assumptions underneath the narrative actually make sense. They bring the legendary Rick Santelli on once a week for 12 seconds to have a stroke on some abandoned trading floor in Chicago, and then we return to 58 straight hours of this sorry-ass look:
(text-image)
The financial industry has become one giant used car sales operation. Nearly everyone involved benefits from keeping money moving, keeping people invested, and keeping optimism elevated. The incentives are obvious once you start looking for them.
The clerk at your local bank wants you buying something and won’t let you take out more than $100 in cash. The wealth manager at the branch wants to “introduce” themselves to you anytime you’re within a 30 foot concentric circle of the bank. The sell-side analyst putting out price targets every morning wants you buying stock. The investment bank wants you in their private credit products. Financial media wants you watching, clicking, and staying engaged. The crypto influencer wants followers. The guy with laser eyes on social media wants you buying the exact thing he already owns and to trust him that’s it totally not about him eventually selling. And finally, me, the newsletter writer, wants subscriptions.
Everyone has inventory. Everyone has a narrative. Everyone has a reason why the future is brighter than you think and why the thing they happen to be selling is the answer. So here’s my bullshit explanation: I try to, at least, provide some friction to whatever this is:
Not because I’m smarter than those people. That’s Brian Kelly. He has an M.B.A. from Babson Graduate School of Business with a concentration in finance and econometrics. In college, I majored in Advanced Theories, Practices and Principles For Hand-Crushing Natural Light Beer Cans On One’s Forehead.
Not because I have access to some secret data terminal hidden in my basement. These guys all have $25,000/year Bloomberg terminals and I use Yahoo Finance while annoying my actual professional friends with DMs all day that say: “Hey man, sorry this is the last time, but can you pull this chart for me?”
And certainly not because my own performance has earned me the right to lecture anyone about investing. As I wrote last week, I should be wearing a safety helmet at all times while attempting to trade…which is why I stopped trading actively altogether.
I’ve found plenty of ways to light money on fire without assistance from Wall Street. The only real difference between me and some of the professional forecasters is that when I screw up, fewer cameras are pointed at me and there are a lot fewer zeroes attached to the damage. And I’ve disclosed in advance to my readers that I’m not a mind-reader and can’t predict the future. I can only offer up my best guess based on my analysis, which is based on my nearly 15 years in the industry.
I’ve been wrong before. I’ll be wrong again. In fact, if you’re in markets long enough, being wrong isn’t the exception, it’s part of the job description. The people who pretend otherwise are usually the ones you should trust the least. The ones who have a chance to hold people accountable on their bad calls…and then don’t…well, they should be trusted even less.
What I do try to do is challenge my own views. I try to understand the bull case even when I don’t agree with it. I try to ask what if the consensus is right. I try to consider the possibility that things really are different this time, even though history suggests those four words have probably destroyed more capital than almost any phrase ever spoken in finance.
Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I end up changing my mind, and sometimes I end up more convinced than when I started. But at least the exercise forces me to think instead of simply picking a side and defending it like a sports fan. It’s funny being always called a “permabear” when I’m literally making a list of potential long ideas every year. This is what happens when you show just one iota of skepticism toward the prevailing sentiment about monetary policy.
My goal isn’t to become another talking head shouting predictions into the void. The world doesn’t need another person confidently forecasting where the S&P will close twelve months from now or pretending to know exactly where Bitcoin will trade next quarter.
My goal is simply to add one voice pulling in the opposite direction of an overwhelmingly one-sided conversation. When almost everyone is leaning one way, there’s value in at least asking whether they’re missing something.
Because markets don’t need more cheerleaders. They don’t need more people treating every asset like it’s destined for the moon. They don’t need another parade of experts explaining why this time the risks don’t matter. They don’t need crypto convictions for coins and networks no one has ever heard of being turned into tattoos and then talked about on-air or in print as though they are some kind of discounted cash flow model.
What markets need is skepticism. They need doubt. They need people willing to ask uncomfortable questions and point out inconvenient facts. And they need people to do it with attitude, because bulls and monetary policy defenders simply act like arrogant hyenas and outright total cowards (see this and this) sometimes.
Not because the skeptics are always right, but because the presence of skepticism forces everyone else to sharpen their arguments.
Someone has to stand in front of the tidal wave of bullish bullshit and ask whether the emperor might be missing a few articles of clothing. It can be done. Here’s Guy Adami calling out Wharton Professor Emeritus (or whatever bullshit Latin title he has) Jeremy “He Who Should Not Be Named” Siegel:
(Video)
And here’s former CNBC guy and all-around solid market anlayst Jeff Macke showing what actual balls look like at the start of Covid:
(text image)
The point is that none of this makes me an expert, either. If anything, it just makes me another participant trying to navigate the same mess as everyone else.
I’m trying to separate facts from narratives, probabilities from certainties, and information from marketing. Some days I do a decent job of it. Other days I convince myself I’ve discovered something profound only to realize later I was just inventing a more sophisticated way to be wrong. Sometimes you chase your tail for years before you realize you’re not doing anything productive and you can just…stop.
My job isn’t to tell you what to think. My job isn’t to tell you what to buy, what to sell, or how to allocate your money. What I can do is try to put as many cards on the table as possible. The good cards. The bad cards. The facts that support the bullish case and the facts that undermine it. The information people love talking about and the information they conveniently leave out.
After that, it’s on you. You take the cards. You weigh the evidence. You challenge your own assumptions. You try to get as close to reality as possible, knowing you’ll never get all the way there. Then you make the decision that’s right for you, your circumstances, and your goals.
Not for Tom Lee. Not for CNBC. Not for Wall Street. Not for your neighbor. And certainly not for me. Because if there’s one thing markets have taught me, it’s that everyone is full of shit. The bulls are full of shit. The bears are full of shit. The economists are full of shit. The strategists are full of shit. The influencers are full of shit. The people predicting crashes are full of shit, and the people predicting endless prosperity are full of shit.
The only difference is the flavor.
My hope isn’t that you trust me. Either I’ll earn that from you or I won’t. My broader hope is that you trust nobody completely, including me. My hope is that this corner of the internet just serves as a counterweight to the overwhelming pressure to buy, believe, chase, and conform.
Just remember: I’m full of shit too. I’m just trying to be full of shit in the opposite direction as everyone else.
This is a long one, so for all the details (including charts, graphs, and links) click thru for the original article. No paywall.
Many of us have had the intuition that the economic damage from 2020 – including industrial stoppages, monetary printing, supply-chain disruptions, extended school closures, and general population demoralization – was in fact far greater than official statistics indicate.
What follows will shore up this intuition, using new techniques and numbers from an innovative project called RealityIndex.co.
It’s true that official data is bad enough, showing a 26% loss in purchasing power, slow growth in output, and only marginal improvements in real income. The labor participation rate and worker/population ratio never fully recovered and continue to fall.
Output has been lackluster. It’s supposedly running 2.3% which is about half the postwar norm for US economic performance. It feels like a general downshift. Official data shows a brief recession in 2020 followed by gradual economic recovery overall.
But is this even true? In 2024, Brownstone Institute commissioned a study (by E.J. Antoni and Peter St. Onge) that concluded that we have never really entered recovery after 2022. We’ve been in a technical recession since that time. They got this with some limited adjustments of price data bumped up against output data. That study was met with brutal attacks, with every critic falling back on official data and doubting the supposed extremism of the conclusion.
That’s where matters have stood even as reports pour in concerning broken labor markets, no raises for 1 in 4 professional-class workers, and sketchy Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data that seems barely above zero thanks mainly to medical-sector subsidies, government spending, and social services. Then there are the learning losses showing dramatic declines in test scores among affected students.
We are left with real questions. How can consumer sentiment be at historic lows given that the overall data seems to raise no loud alarms?
In the meantime, Artificial Intelligence has come along to make these complicated calculations possible, ones that seek to discern and delineate the huge gaps between official data and reality. The goal is to come up with real data concerning real prices, sans the many different methods that the Department of Labor uses to adjust price changes.
For example, housing prices are not measured directly but rather converted to owners’ equivalent rent (OER). Medical service prices are adjusted for consumption, not premiums or final bills. When consumers substitute one good for another, that is also factored in. When the quality of a good or service improves, the statisticians apply what they called hedonic adjustments, which are invariably designed to minimize price increases and never run the other direction.
Where does this leave those of us who are looking for a plain index of prices? A veil has been put over that basic question and answer, such that we don’t know for sure. This matters tremendously for issues like raises, examining cost of living increases, taxes, and pension payments. Everything is adjusted for inflation to convert it to real valuations but if we don’t have a clear number, what are we to do?
This is why we should be thrilled about a new study/service called the Reality Index. You are free to browse the site yourself and examine every aspect of the method. Essentially, the site owner, an independent intellectual in Madrid, Tom Elliott, has deployed tools of AI to wholly reconstruct price indices in a way that is consistent with actual prices. His results are absolutely eye-popping. I’ve examined the method here in detail and found no fault.
The Wall Street Journal has also taken notice. This is good news and raises the possibility that we can finally get to the truth.
The core of the problem is a constantly changing methodology in official data. The formula was changed eight times over 35 years. All the changes seem technical and vaguely justifiable, once explained. Adding them all up, you get wild distortions in the data that the index is supposed to reveal. All these changes came home to roost in the great inflation of 2021-2024, which might be entering a second wave right now.
(long snip) . . . The big picture is that the lockdowns, not only nationally but globally, were far more catastrophic for us economically than has been generally admitted or recognized. It is not unusual in the history of economics for the really bad news to emerge years and even decades after an exogenous shock such as war.
We would rather not wait that long. The crisis is too real and the public knows, even if the official data does not admit the truth.
Lockdowns were a kind of war on the population. The economic carnage might have sliced off half of the purchasing power of the dollar and cut output by as much as 12% over six years (in real terms, leaving aside missed counterfactual growth on the previous trajectory), even as labor participation never recovered and continues to fall.
Did Covid kick off a kind of permanent recession? How many decades must pass before we admit what happened? More precisely, how much longer will it take before the public mind recognizes what they did to us?
Here's hoping CA's vote fraud gets its knees cut out from under it before November.
Plenty of links in the original.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/californias-wealth-tax-coming-everyone
If you own property in California, you're not safe. A new ballot measure will empower the state to confiscate a percentage of the assets of any resident, even though its initial provisions don't communicate that intent. California's "One-Time Wealth Tax for State-Funded Healthcare, Education, and Food Assistance Programs Initiative," which has already qualified for the November ballot, is even worse than it appears.
It's not as if appearances aren't bad enough. The explicit intent of the initiative already chased at least six billionaires out of the state in 2025. Moved to Florida are Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, along with PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Nevada is now home to billionaire Don Hankey, and Texas has welcomed former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Famed director Steven Spielberg has moved to New York, apparently concluding even that deep blue state is a safer bet than California. Just the departure of these six men has lowered the potential take from the wealth tax by an estimated $27 billion.
A Hoover Institution study claims that another 20 California billionaires have already made departure plans and will leave immediately if the initiative is approved by voters. One of the initiative's many diabolical provisions is that it will apply retroactively to anyone living in the state after January 1, 2026, but unlike the six who got out in 2025, this next tranche of would-be exiles have been advised by their attorneys that the initiative's retroactivity will not survive a constitutional challenge.
Other details of this initiative are likely to survive court challenges, and they reveal a stunning level of aggression toward wealth. If you live in California, and this bill is approved by voters, you will have to pay a "one-time" tax of 5 percent of your "covered assets" valued over $1 billion. "Covered assets" include unrealized gains in the value of stock owned by employees of private companies. It is unlikely the framers of this initiative didn't understand the implications of this provision. Valuations of private companies are subjective, volatile, and illiquid. An employee with stock options valued at a few billion in the last private equity round could be assessed tens of millions of dollars in wealth tax on money they don't actually have access to, based on a value that could plummet at any moment.
It gets worse. The language of the wealth act provides for what amounts to unrestricted escalation of its reach, something that will surely become necessary when high earners are driven away, taking their taxable assets with them. Built into the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is the right of the state legislature to amend its provisions with a two-thirds vote. That would include lowering the $1 billion threshold, replacing "one-time" with an annual assessment, and eliminating the exemptions currently present for real estate and retirement accounts. The wording of this initiative is purposely designed to give the state legislature the authority to override the property tax protections afforded by Proposition 13, passed by voters in 1978 and one of the only obstacles left that prevents the state from stripping the state's middle class of assets they've earned and stewarded over generations.
It is ridiculous to think California's state legislature cannot muster a two-thirds vote, anytime they wish, in order to extend the reach of the "Billionaire Tax Act" down to "millionaires," which, in California, is almost anyone who has owned their own home for more than a decade. In both houses of California's state legislature, 75 percent of the seats are held by Democrats.
(more)
Honestly, this one is almost unbelievable.
The Empire State is rapidly becoming a scene out of “The Handmaid’s Tale” — not because of conservatives, but because of Democrats in Albany.
The state Legislature has now passed Senate Bill 9316, and if Hochul signs it, New York law will replace the terms “mother” and “father” with so-called gender-neutral alternatives.
Under the bill, mothers become “gestating parents.”
Fathers become “non-gestating parents.”
In the name of inclusion, New York lawmakers have managed to do something remarkably regressive: stripping women of perhaps the most meaningful identity they can ever hold.
What do we call Mother’s Day?
Just a few weeks ago, Americans celebrated Mother’s Day.
Politicians flooded social media with tributes praising mothers for their sacrifices, their love and their irreplaceable role in the lives of their children.
Schools sent home handmade cards; restaurants filled with families honoring the women who brought them into the world and raised them.
Now many of those same political leaders are supporting legislation that effectively tells women that “mother” is no longer an appropriate word.
The issue isn’t merely semantic: The bill has real-world implications in family court and legal settings, where mothers and fathers have historically been recognized as serving distinct roles in the lives of children.
By reducing motherhood to a gender-neutral biological function, lawmakers are not simply changing terminology; they are redefining one of the most fundamental human relationships in existence.
What makes this especially offensive is how profoundly dehumanizing the new language is.
Progressives are quick to deploy passionate rhetoric about empowering women, especially in their reproductive rights, but now they themselves have created the term “gestating parent,” reducing a woman to her reproductive organs.
Doing so strips away the humanity, history, affection, sacrifice and meaning associated with motherhood and replaces it with the kind of sterile language one might expect to find in a medical textbook or livestock inventory.
As a mother of six, I find that reduction both insulting and bizarre.
Motherhood is not a biological event that concludes in a delivery room.
When my children wake up from a nightmare, they don’t call for their gestating parent.
When they scribble notes on construction paper or write cards for birthdays and holidays, they don’t write, “To my favorite gestating parent.”
They write “Mom.”
Motherhood is not a medical condition.
For decades, feminists argued — correctly — that women should never be reduced to their reproductive capacity.
Yet somehow we’ve arrived at a moment where progressive lawmakers have taken the most meaningful female experience many women will ever have and reduced it to a bodily process.
It’s difficult to imagine a more dehumanizing way to describe a woman.
(more)
https://briancates.substack.com/p/trump-continues-to-consolidate-power
Consolidation is an important strategy. There’s a reason President Trump gives people in his administration multiple jobs at once, like he’s done with Marco Rubio at the State Department and now Bill Pulte, who will remain on the board and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while he also begins functioning as the Acting Director of National Intelligence given Tulsi Gabbard’s coming departure.
There’s a reason the current theater at DHS with Mullin and Bovino is going on, while Kristi Noem literally dropped off the radar while ‘Shield of the Americas’ a 17 nation military alliance - is literally shredding the cartels in Ecuador, Columbia, Honduras, Mexico, and elsewhere, 80% of never shown to you.
Trump’s about to evict certain criminal elements completely out of the entire American hemisphere. That ‘Donroe Doctrine’ is not a joke. People should be able to see at this point he is 100% serious about it.
Now while all this absolutely WILD stuff is dropped out of the DNI’s office for the next 4 weeks, Tulsi will be indisposed, taking care of her very sick husband. They can’t yell at her and trying to sue her in court to stop this won’t accomplish anything.
Suddenly, the people fighting behind the scenes to keep all this shit hidden have to switch targets in mid-stream. Tulsi to Pulte.
And Pulte is a literal cypher.
Changing your network target in mid-stream as you try to limit the fallout of what’s coming is not as easy to do as some people are claiming to you.
How successful has the network been at stopping/taking down Todd Blanche and Kash Patel thus far?
Since Bongino left once his job was done, and Bondi departed to fight her thyroid cancer, and then magically shows up with a new job that is AI related?
Remember how I told you for 2 months now when you saw what Bondi’s ‘new’ job is, new vistas of understanding would open up for some of you?
You know who’s been taking down the massive coordinated hidden NGO fraud/theft/crime networks of a literal HYDRA transnational crime syndicate embedded throughout the entire civilized world?
And they’ve been using sophisticated AI to map out/trace/shut down/destroy/seize assets from the Syndicate for a year now, mostly on the downlow while all that money that used to be sent to these ghouls is being stopped/seized/redirected into doing stuff like, oh, I don’t know, I’m just sp[[[i]]]balling here, fixing all the decayed/destroyed parks and national monuments around Washington DC?
Elon Musk, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and Todd Blanche.
AI is all up in their shit and they can’t hide these massive networks any longer. The sheer SIZE and AMOUNT of the theft/moneylaundering and the WORLDWIDE SCOPE OF IT used to actually protect the criminals.
Now it doesn’t.
Running your stolen billions through 200 false front LLC’s, both here and overseas…sure, a HUMAN investigator couldn’t follow that. But AI is tireless and relentless and it never sleeps. A maze that would take a human investigator months to solve for one transaction, an advanced AI will trace it and the next 20 transactions in the chain in less than an hour.
The technology outstripped their fraud system. Their fraud system is now obsolete. It cannot hide in the Dark any longer.
2/3rds of the International Shadow Government they constructed over the past 100+ years is run by ‘NGOs’. That’s ‘non-governmental organization’ for those of you in Rio Linda.
They HID two thirds of their massive Shadow Government out of sight here and overseas inside of NGOs they PINKY SWORE TO YOU were private entities, and certainly not organized crime fronts. Many of them CIA/USAid.
In fact, calling these ‘NGO’s was always a clever rhetorical trick. They were OUTSOURCING to secret off-[t]he books entities all the illegal shit they didn’t dare do openly themselves.
They’ve been GIVING your money to ‘private’ organizations to secretly do criminal shit for them all over da world and here in the United States.
Like planning and executing mass migrations, starting wars, exacerbating conflicts, rigging elections, launching multiple plandemics, overthrowing governments, running human/drug/uranium trafficking networks using NGOs like, oh I don’t know, I’m just spitballing again here for no reason, The Red Cross.
How do you CLEARLY SIGNAL a massive FUCK YOU to the people who formerly had control of the Executive Branch of our federal government, and are in the process of losing more and more of their precious control every damn day?
You clean up DC to show them they don’t own it any longer.
We do.
And then you do a massive FUCK YOU, CITY OF LONDON HYDRA CRIME SYNDICATE NATIONAL CELEBRATION of your new American sovereignty at the NEW AMERICAN WHITE HOUSE YOU JUST TOOK AWAY FROM THEM.
Ain’t life grand?