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.
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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.
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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?
You'll need a subscription to read the full article, but the public-facing portion of the piece provides food for thought.
https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/saylor-breaks-the-immaculate-bitcoin
I am not anti-Bitcoin, I just have a very nuanced position on it which includes a very healthy dose of skepticism. I explained this in a 2 hour long interview two years ago, for anyone who cares about my take. But, in short, what you need to know is that here on this blog I have said repeatedly that Bitcoin and crypto sit at the very tip of the risk spear in today’s market.
Bitcoin is not just another asset. It is a highly speculative instrument whose value depends heavily on confidence, liquidity, adoption, and the belief that the network will continue to expand. Psychology is not a side issue in crypto like it is with a company generating billions in cash per year. Psychology is the issue. The ecosystem depends on people believing the next buyer, the next institution, the next treasury company, and the next wave of adoption are still coming.
That is why Michael Saylor’s recent sale of Bitcoin matters.
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Might be something. Might be nothing. We'll see.
Unsurprisingly, speculation has exploded. Some believe this is evidence of insider knowledge — that someone knows gold will be officially revalued higher. Others argue it’s simply a hedge fund placing a highly asymmetric macro bet.
. . . **What the Chart Shows — and What It Doesn’t **
The source of the buzz is CME and Bloomberg data showing a sharp concentration of open interest in December 2026 gold options, clustered around the $19,000–$20,000 strike prices.
At first glance, it looks dramatic. But it’s important to understand what “open interest” means. It tells us how many contracts are outstanding — not who initiated the trade or whether the contracts were bought or sold.
Every options contract has both a buyer and a seller. From the chart alone, we cannot determine:
- Whether this was initiated as a bullish purchase
- Whether someone sold these options
- Whether the position is part of a larger hedge
- Or whether it is offset somewhere else in global markets
In other words, the structure matters more than the headline.
Reports suggest the position involves roughly 11,000 December 2026 $15,000–$20,000 call spreads. That’s where things get interesting.
. . . Gold has historically served as insurance during systemic stress. Structuring a defined-risk options trade allows a fund to maintain core positions while protecting against extreme upside scenarios in gold.
Even the December 2026 expiration fits institutional logic. December is one of the most liquid COMEX contract months, and year-end positioning offers accounting clarity. It also falls after the November midterm elections, which could carry policy implications.
Viewed through this lens, the trade appears less like secret knowledge and more like disciplined risk management.
(More, including a video which I've not watched)
The widespread hacking campaign that relied on simply asking Meta AI’s chatbot to take over a victim’s Instagram account appears to have continued even after the company said the issue had been resolved. Meanwhile, the company has been scrambling to secure the targeted accounts and alert victims.
Over the weekend, hackers claimed to be exploiting Meta’s AI support chatbot to take over several high-profile Instagram accounts. At the same time, a large number of people complained on social media that their Instagram accounts had been hacked, some of them with unique short user-profile handles.
TechCrunch has seen examples of allegedly hacked handles featuring common forenames or names of countries, which can be then re-sold almost as collectibles in a gray market for so-called “OG handles.” Other victims of the hacking spree appeared to be the dormant Obama White House account (which Meta disputed), and the account of the U.S. Space Force’s chief master sergeant, John Bentivegna.
These attacks were so simple that calling them hacks may be giving the people behind them too much credit, while at the same time not putting enough blame on Meta for not preventing rudimentary attacks from hijacking people’s accounts.
Hackers simply told Meta’s AI chatbot that they were the owners of the target’s account, and asked the bot to link that person’s account to an email they controlled. The chatbot complied with the request, allowing the hacker to reset the target account’s password and take control of the account — in some cases locking out the victims. At no point were Meta employees or contractors involved in the chat.
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The boot on European's necks is grinding ever-harder.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/slow-disappearance-cash-europe
Starting in July 2027, Europeans will no longer be allowed to pay businesses or professionals more than €10,000 in cash (roughly $11,500). Any transaction above €3,000 (just under $3,500) will require mandatory customer identification. This is another step toward political uniformity across Europe, stripping countries of autonomy and subtly pushing citizens toward the digital euro.
This measure, part of the new Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (AMLR), applies directly to all Member States. Under the pretext of fighting money laundering, Brussels is imposing yet another form of forced harmonization that ignores the principle of subsidiarity: the idea that decisions should be made at the level closest to citizens and national governments.
What was once a matter regulated by individual countries is now becoming a uniform mandate from Brussels.
This is a thinly disguised restriction not only on political freedom, but above all on economic freedom. Cash remains one of the last truly private means of exchange still available; unlike digital transactions, cash does not automatically create a centralized record accessible to banks or public authorities.
The use of cash is often associated with the intention to hide illicit activity. Yet the ability to conduct private and discreet transactions is a natural extension of property rights and freedom of contract. Many law-abiding citizens prefer cash for entirely legitimate reasons, including protection against financial instability or potential capital controls.
From that date onward, professionals will be forced to turn every transaction above €3,000 into a bureaucratic process involving identity verification, data collection, and the risk of penalties. This is yet another regulatory imposition that raises the cost of doing business, similar to the introduction of VAT in Europe decades ago, which pushed many small businesses to close their doors or move into the informal economy because of increased bureaucracy and compliance costs. Small entrepreneurs, already pressured by high taxes and excessive red tape, will once again bear the heaviest burden.
What were once simple voluntary exchanges will become sources of additional costs, delays, and state intrusion.
Once again, centralized authorities are creating regulatory complexity under the difficult-to-challenge justification of fighting crime, even though each country already has its own rules in this area.
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Whether AI will ultimately be a benefit or a harm overall, any tool can be used for both good and ill.
OpenAI no longer has to worry about being last in the AI IPO race and lagging ARRs when compared to Anthropic, not to mention a potential Supreme Court showdown against Elon Musk (pending appeal). Earlier today, Florida became the first state to file a lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, launching a new broadside in a growing rebellion against the alleged safety failings of artificial-intelligence chatbots.
The lawsuit, filed Monday by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, claims OpenAI and Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users, the WSJ reported.
The 83-page suit alleges that OpenAI allowed ChatGPT to aid and abet mass shooters, encourage people to take their own lives, degrade users’ critical thinking skills and addict minors to a tool that feigns human compassion.
“This litany of harms is driven by Defendants’ insatiable quest to win the AI arms race and amass large fortunes, despite knowing the danger of ChatGPT,” the suit said.
According to the WSJ, lawmakers, legal authorities and public interest groups have increasingly been raising concerns about the personal and societal risks posed by AI, one of the fastest-growing consumer technologies in history.
The suit says it seeks to protect Floridians from OpenAI’s conduct and mitigate what it describes as a dangerous public nuisance. The suit also seeks to hold Altman personally liable for harm it says he has caused Floridians.
Uthmeier opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI in April over the role its chatbot played in a mass shooting that killed two people at Florida State University last year.
The suit opens with a screenshot of an OpenAI blog post that says ChatGPT was built with safety in mind.
“Not so,” reads the suit’s text under the screenshot.
The suit alleges that OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as reliable despite *its tendency to frequently generate dangerous misinformation, which is to be expected from a generative LLM trained on such toxic, liberal cesspools as Reddit and Wikipedia. *
“ChatGPT was designed by the Defendants to keep users hooked into conversations by any means, regardless of the truth, because it leads to more use of the chatbot, more training data for its improvement, and more market value for OpenAI,” the suit alleges.
The suit also claims the company exploits human compassion to collect user data and lacks necessary safeguards for minors.
The suit describes a lack of safeguards in ChatGPT for teens and minors as reckless, and refers to instances of adolescent users being encouraged by AI to take their own lives.
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https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/state-department-issues-travel-advisory-mexico
The State Department updated its travel advisory for Mexico on May 29, continuing to warn Americans who plan on visiting the country to be wary of terrorism and crimes.
“Many violent crimes take place in Mexico. They include homicide, kidnapping, carjacking, sexual assault, and robbery. There is a risk of terrorist violence, including terrorist attacks and other activity in Mexico,” the advisory said.
Overall, Mexico is categorized with a “Level 2—Exercise Increased Caution” designation for travelers.
“The U.S. government has limited ability to help in many parts of Mexico, a large country in which conditions can vary widely from state to state and even within a state. U.S. government employees may not travel to certain high-risk areas, which may be within states that include low-risk areas,” the department said.
The travel restrictions on U.S. employees prohibit them from traveling between cities in the dark, waving down taxis on the street, driving between border cities and the interior of Mexico, and traveling alone, especially in remote areas. Due to security risks, Americans visiting Mexico must follow the same restrictions as applied to U.S. government employees, the advisory said.
The State Department also published maps showing various restricted areas in Mexico.
Some states in the country are classified under “Level 4-Do Not Travel,” such as Colima, Guerrero, Michoacán, Sinaloa, Tamaulipas, and Zacatecas. States designated as “Level 3-Reconsider Travel” are Baja California, Chiapas, Chihuahua, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Morelos, and Sonora.
The department warned Americans that emergency services will be unavailable or limited in rural or remote regions. When met with a road checkpoint, visitors must comply, the advisory said, warning that “fleeing or ignoring instructions can lead to you being hurt or killed.”
There have been multiple cases of tourists being killed in Mexico. In April, a Canadian tourist was killed in the Teotihuacan archaeological zone after a gunman opened fire on tourists. Back in 2024, an American couple was shot dead in the state of Michoacán while traveling in a pickup.
According to the Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2025, there are “extremely high rates” of violent crime in Mexico.
“Security analysts estimate that around two-thirds of homicides are committed by organized crime. Two-thirds of homicides in 2023 were committed with firearms,” the report said.
The group also warned about the risk of arbitrary detention in Mexico.
“People accused of crimes often face extended periods of pre-trial detention. Approximately 37 percent of incarcerated people in 2023 were not convicted of any crime, and more than 20 percent of those in pre-trial detention had been there for more than two years,” it said.
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A market version of DOGE sounds like a damn good idea.
Two alumni of the Department of Government Efficiency are bringing their cost-cutting experience from Washington to the private sector, launching Special, a startup that aims to harness artificial intelligence to wring inefficiencies out of what it describes as America's $10 trillion Main Street services economy.
Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox spent much of 2025 at DOGE, where they spearheaded the Small Agencies team. Their government stint, under the high-profile effort led by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, contributed to approximately $215 billion in estimated savings. The pair departed in September 2025.
"Similar to the government, Main Street is massive, highly unoptimized, and provides essential services to Americans. One needs to look no further than childcare learning centers in Minnesota or hospice businesses in California to find immense waste at the state level from businesses that benefit from taxpayer dollars," the founders wrote in their announcement. "AI provides a generational opportunity to transform the efficiency of these businesses, root out waste, and deliver a great customer experience for American taxpayers. Through this process, we believe we can set a new standard for how these businesses should operate."
Special is reportedly building what it calls SpecialOS, an operating system that integrates frontier AI models with proprietary tools to automate manual tasks like billing, scheduling, and insurance processing. Instead of licensing the technology broadly, the company plans to vertically integrate by acquiring and operating businesses in targeted industries, allowing it to control deployment and outcomes.
The first product, Figure Health, focuses on senior care and has already secured its first acquisition in Texas, a provider serving more than 1,400 patients and employing hundreds of nurses, according to the company. The plan is to use AI efficiencies to raise nurse pay, easing labor shortages while improving care quality. Figure Health intends to open-source its Medicare and Medicaid billing claims.
Special has attracted notable backing in a financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from DOGE alumni and allies including Steve Davis, as well as Coinbase's Brian Armstrong and Palantir's Shyam Sankar.
"The name Special pays tribute to those we believe are the greatest movers of society: the builders, the creators, the people who put it all on the line and just go for it. Special pledges allegiance not only to the United States, but to those in the arena - the ones courageous enough to move the world forward," Cavanaugh and Fox said.
Before you use the conventional medical system or Big Pharma for ANYTHING, you'd be a fool not to DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH FIRST.
Just my opinion.
Text information with more information (than you see below) in the original.
Yes, there's a paywall.
https://makisw.substack.com/p/news-new-cancer-injection-eliminated
. . . The jab, called amivantamab, was given to people who had stopped responding to standard treatments.
Research shows the injection of amivantamab shrank tumours in 43 of the 102 patients, including 15 whose tumours disappeared completely.
Experts say the results of this clinical trial are promising.
Amivantamab is a targeted cancer treatment designed to block several of the signals that help cancer cells grow and spread. It is made by Johnson & Johnson and is already used to treat certain types of lung cancer.
ANALYSIS:
Always look at the financial benefits first. Then work backwards.
Amivantamab, a targeted therapy made by Johnson & Johnson is already used for lung cancer.
Amivantamab costs between $250,000 and $330,000 per year. (!!)
Is it curative? Of course not! (Don't be silly)
If you believe the Big Pharma Clinical Trials (like the MARIPOSA trial), this $300k drug will give you a few months extra before your cancer comes back and will give you a few months extra overall survival.
Then there are the side effects, of course.
Grade 3 Side Effects are “Serious” Side effects (the Grading scale goes up to 4).
35-80% of patients had Grade 3 or higher side effects (!!)
Could Ivermectin, Mebendazole, Fenbendazole or combinations thereof be far superior to this $300k drug? Absolutely.
But imagine $3000/year worth of Ivermectin & Mebendazole vs $300,000 worth of Amivantamab.
Some people make the argument that if Ivermectin worked better for cancer, all Oncologists would use it.
Yes, humans, especially in highly competitive corporate environments, routinely take 99% salary and profit cuts for the sake of the greater good.
(Hint: they don’t).
That’s why we need Ivermectin Clinical Trials in Florida
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I love and appreciate Elon. I adore his companies, and the intelligence, drive, energy, and savvy behind them.
Despite that, for this IPO to make sense, something well beyond what we're being told must be true.
Is it?
Numerous charts and graphs in the original.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-199273735
In a few weeks’ time, Elon Musk’s SpaceX will go public. The IPO has been described as a “once-in-a-generation market event,” and for good reason: At a roughly $2 trillion valuation, it will be the largest IPO in history.
The go-public may also make Elon Musk the first trillionaire, pushing his net worth to roughly 3.6% of the GDP of the U.S. (the richest American ever). At $2 trillion, SpaceX would be the seventh-most valuable company in the world, more valuable than Meta, Walmart, JPMorgan, and even Tesla.
That’s why I was anxious to read SpaceX’s IPO filing, the first real look into the company’s financial statements, which finally dropped late last week. At 277 pages, the document is longer than The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye. And while not as captivating, it might be more consequential than either of those novels, as the words on the page will be the determinant of trillions of dollars.
This post is an examination of the SpaceX filing. To be blunt: It’s a trainwreck. Unserious, empty, hallucinatory, and borderline dishonest. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you I was shocked to see what I saw. So let’s get into it.
Hopeium
The trouble starts at the very beginning of the document. After eighteen images of rockets in space, we learn that the company’s mission is “to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” To accomplish this, the company plans to advance humanity “to Kardashev Type II status,” which is defined in the document as “a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of its local star.” Only a few pages in and it’s already starting to feel like an ayahuasca trip.
We soon learn that psychedelic language is part-and-parcel of the pitch. “The light of consciousness” (sounds like WeWork’s old slogan?) is mentioned ten different times in the document. Meanwhile “human augmentation” is mentioned eleven times, and “first principles,” twenty-seven times. AI gets a mind-boggling 1,251 mentions — more features than the word “Jesus” gets in the Bible.
SpaceX-stasy
Once you arrive at the financials you start to realize what the language is overcompensating for: awful numbers. The company generated $4.7 billion in Q1 2026, up only 15% from the year before (very low for an “AI company”). It also lost $4.3 billion, up 700% from the year before. That means the company is spending roughly twice as much as it makes (and on pace to explode those losses even more), while growing its topline six times slower than Nvidia and two times slower than my own podcast. There’s no getting around it — these numbers are terrible.
But it gets worse when you compare those numbers to last year’s. Revenue grew 33% in 2025, meaning the business has actually started to decelerate. Meanwhile net losses came in at $4.9 billion, so the company is on track to lose four times more money than it did last year. I’ll put it simply: slowing revenue + skyrocketing expenses = not good.
Pricing Problems
I’d have no problem with SpaceX’s sh*tty financials if they were reflected in the valuation — but they’re not. The stock is set to be priced at 107 times sales, which would make it one of the most expensive stocks in history. (The most expensive stock in the S&P 500 is Palantir, which trades at 64 times sales). It will be twice as valuable than Walmart while generating less revenue than Macy’s.
Maybe this is just the nature of blockbuster IPOs? No. Compared to previous go-publics, SpaceX’s valuation falls nothing short of insane. Meta went public at 28 times sales with 88% revenue growth. Google went public at 10 times sales with 234% growth. Put another way, SpaceX is growing seven times slower while asking for a multiple ten times higher. Pass me the crack pipe.
Ke-TAM-ine
How did they reach such a stupid valuation? With stupid financial projections. SpaceX claims to have “identified the largest actional total addressable market (“TAM”) in human history,” worth (wait for it) $28.5 trillion. That’s larger than the GDP of Europe or China. If this sounds dumb to you that’s because it is.
It gets even dumber when you learn the company attributes less than $2 trillion of that TAM to space and satellites. Isn’t this a space company? Where’s that $26 trillion coming from? I’m asking the question but you already know the answer. Two letters: AI.
AI-huasca
AI is where this business comes off the rails. While other parts of the business make sense, — such as connectivity (i.e. satellites), which generated more than a billion dollars in profits last quarter — SpaceX’s AI unit is essentially a giant sinkhole. The segment generated less than a billion dollars last quarter while spending more than three billion. Total AI losses for Q1 2026? $2.5 billion. That’s in addition to a ridiculous quarterly AI CapEx bill that came out to $7.7 billion. #MoneyFurnace.
Strangely, the AI unit was not part of the company until a few months ago, when SpaceX acquired Elon’s other startup xAI for an implied $250 billion. Why purchase this seemingly bad business? Because it spices up the sales pitch. SpaceX can now be sold not just as a “space company,” but also an “AI company.” It allows the company to increase its “TAM” by $26 trillion while expanding its multiple. In fact, the filing mentions AI 23 times more than space. This is an intentional sleight of hand trick to make it seem like the core business (building rockets) isn’t the core business.
EBITDon’t
Elon stans will argue SpaceX is profitable on an EBITDA-basis, which is true. The problem, however, is in the D and the A. While EBITDA can make sense for evaluating companies with low capital expenditures, it makes no sense for a company that builds rockets. The depreciation and amortization costs at SpaceX are gigantic — stripping them out in your financial analysis makes no sense whatsoever.
Exit Liquidity
So who will actually buy this thing? Management believes retail is the answer. SpaceX is reserving 30% of its shares for retail investors, three times larger than the average IPO. The expectation is that die-hard Musk fans will buy the stock no matter what — a bet on the “dumb money.”
The other big buyer will likely be you. Elon negotiated a “fast entry” deal with Nasdaq so that SpaceX will be automatically included in the blue-chip index. That means billions of dollars of passive money will automatically flow into the company as soon as it lists. In other words, if you own the Nasdaq, you’re about to own SpaceX.
Return To Earth
If we apply comparable market multiples to each of SpaceX’s three business lines (space, connectivity, and AI), we arrive at a sum of parts valuation of $550 billion. That would be a reasonable valuation of SpaceX. However, it’s roughly 75% less than the target.
The only way to get yourself mentally to $2 trillion is to believe that every possible sci-fi objective will be achieved, from data centers in space to asteroid mining to building cities on Mars. Once you’ve done that, you then have to convince yourself that each of those endeavors will also make money. There’s optimism, and then there’s delusion. As Patrick Boyle told us on the pod last week, SpaceX is more a science experiment than a business.
It’s a shame because I used to like this company. I’m fascinated by space travel and I believe we owe it to ourselves to better understand the universe. But there’s a time and a place for childlike wonder, and valuing companies is not that place.
Needless to say I won’t be buying the SpaceX IPO. Not until it returns to earth.
Plenty of links scattered throughout the text in the original.
https://gizmodo.com/crypto-security-pioneer-i-now-consider-all-of-defi-unsafe-2000764097
Crypto projects in the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector have faced a wave of security incidents lately, and now, one of the earliest figures in smart contract auditing has declared the entire DeFi space unsafe. This point of view was shared on X by Manuel Aráoz, co-founder of OpenZeppelin. He has gone so far as to privately advise friends and family to exit all DeFi positions, including what many view as low-risk “blue chips” such as Aave, MakerDAO, and Compound.
Aráoz pointed to advances in artificial intelligence as the core reason for this shift in the reliability and trustworthiness of DeFi apps. “Coding agents are superhuman at finding vulnerabilities, and smart contract security is too asymmetric: defenders need to fix every bug while attackers need just one exploit to steal funds,” he explained. [A similar dynamic is central to the dangers of AI in general]
Late last year, Anthropic released data showing AI agents had become far more capable at spotting and potentially exploiting bugs in crypto smart contracts. At that stage, the progress mostly involved issues humans had already identified. Things shifted earlier this year with the release of Anthropic’s Mythos model. The system is so powerful that Anthropic keeps it under tight restrictions and makes it available only to a limited group of partners. According to Anthropic, it has uncovered critical bugs in software that had run in production environments for decades without anyone noticing the flaws. Due to the security implications for the crypto space, exchanges, such as Coinbase, have reportedly reached out to Anthropic to gain access to Mythos.
To Aráoz’s point, a major DeFi hack last year sent a chill across the DeFi sector because it hit a vulnerability in a smart contract that had operated in the wild for years, survived multiple audits, and carried a reputation for being solid. The $120 million exploit itself played out in a way that echoed the penny-skimming scheme from the movie Office Space.
More recently, April stood out as the worst month on record for the sheer volume of crypto hacks, with incidents occurring at a pace of nearly one per day. North Korea has been linked to the vast majority of funds stolen through these attacks this year, though the regime issued a rare denial of involvement last month.
Just this past weekend, another incident occurred when stablecoin issuer StablR saw its system compromised. The setup relied on a 1-of-3 multisignature wallet for minting, meaning a single key could approve actions, and an attacker gained control of one key, added themselves as administrator, removed the legitimate operators, and minted roughly $13.5 million in unbacked stablecoins. They swapped the tokens on decentralized exchanges and walked away with around 1,115 ether, valued near $3 million at the time.
As the StablR incident illustrates, the reality is that far from all hacks trace back to smart contract bugs. Social engineering and centralized attack vectors often play the decisive role, even in projects that market themselves as decentralized. Admin privileges, key management failures, and poor operational security frequently open the door wider than any code flaw.
(more)
Long post with many short text-images from people talking about using Ivermectin and sometimes other drugs (such as FenBen or hydroxychloroquine) for Lupus, with good results.
https://makisw.substack.com/p/ivermectin-and-lupus-sle-30-testimonials
Got the link for this inside a story posted by aslan_is_0n_the_m0ve.
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-costs
Corporate leaders are starting to question whether soaring AI spending is delivering meaningful returns.
Why it matters: Companies that rushed to embrace AI are now confronting ballooning IT costs, uncertain productivity gains and growing employee skepticism.
Driving the news: Microsoft canceled most of its Claude Code licenses, in part over costs, according to The Verge, and Uber's COO said AI costs are getting "harder to justify."
An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees.
Companies are citing AI's ability to automate jobs as a cause for layoffs, though Anuj Kapur, CEO of CloudBees, told Axios that workforce cuts may simply be "the only lever they can pull" to offset their AI bills.
Consumer sentiment around AI is also nosediving, and employees are rebelling against the use of the technology at work.
What they're saying: The enterprise is undergoing a "healthy swing" away from AI overuse — or "tokenmaxxing," the push to burn as many AI tokens as possible — Ali Ansari, CEO of model training firm Micro1, told Axios.
Ansari hopes this correction will push companies toward more efficient AI use.
While the market views these tools as working equally well across the enterprise, Ansari says "the reality of AI right now is that it only works for coding."
That disconnect can drive up IT bills without leading to high return on investment in agents, he said.
Friction point: Corporate AI adoption is running into four unique problems.
Use cases: "Most people default to automating tasks they dislike rather than tasks most valuable to the company," Sophia Velastegui, CEO of Velastegui Ventures and former chief AI officer at Microsoft, told Axios. Instead, they should focus on using AI to drive revenue.
Costs: One CTO told Axios that employees were using AI models to check the weather. That gets expensive fast: Enterprise AI plans are not truly "all you can eat," and even simple chatbot queries can carry heavy token costs.
Humans: We are the bottleneck to more efficient adoption, as we're still catching up on AI. Leadership isn't always helping: Throwing AI licenses at the wall and seeing what sticks (or what Velastegui calls the "thousand flowers bloom" approach) isn't leading to tangible returns, she said.
Data: When enterprises are hesitant to give AI agents unfettered access to proprietary data, those agents become less effective, Josh Pantony, CEO of Boosted.ai, which focuses on AI tools for finance, told Axios.
What we're watching: Whether companies get more disciplined about AI use. Or overcorrect and clamp down.
No one on this board needs to hear about AI bias, but it's good that the public is seeing articles like this. Wakey, wakey!
Also, along the way to inserting AI into everything, this topic needs more consideration.
Artificial intelligence chatbots are relying on left-wing media and politically charged sources, making it difficult for the average American to trust them as a news source, critics say.
AI systems are widely known to sometimes “hallucinate” and generate false yet believable information that can quickly erode trust.
Some critics insist chatbots such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Claude provide information with a liberal slant, or push information from left-leaning news sources while silencing opposing views.
As more and more Americans rely on the technology, the right-leaning Media Research Center (MRC) has conducted studies in an attempt to determine if the chatbots should be relied upon — and they don’t find the results encouraging.
“We’re watching the next phase of media bias unfold in real time,” Media Research Center President David Bozell told Fox News Digital.
“Silicon Valley’s shiny new toys can no longer be considered neutral and cannot be trusted.”
ChatGPT, which is developed by OpenAI, insisted in January that nobody named Charlie Kirk was ever assassinated and declared no credible evidence or reporting could substantiate such a claim, according to the MRC.
That same month, the MRC reported that Claude, which is developed by Anthropic, rejected the notion that AI should directly incorporate the US First Amendment into its policies.
(more)
The US space enterprise is desperately waiting for Starship—will it finally deliver? "This is such a wild ride. The highs are high. The lows are low." https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/05/the-us-space-enterprise-is-desperately-waiting-for-starship-will-it-finally-deliver/
Includes this graph of how much upmass has been carried by each provider; SpaceX launched 82 percent of all mass into orbit in 2025
Friday's launch of the new V3 Starship went well:
SpaceX's Starship V3—still a work in progress—mostly successful on first flight https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/05/spacexs-starship-v3-still-a-work-in-progress-mostly-successful-on-first-flight/
This appears to be an update to this report, posted 3 months ago.
https://makisw.substack.com/p/ivermectin-fenbendazole-dmso-quercetin
The section below was captured from the text-image of a screenshot and turned into text by my Mac. It appears accurate but I've not checked it carefully, and I'm the world's worst copy editor anyway.
Mon 2/2/2026 9:50 AM
Before I started your protocol I was in very bad shape from RA. I have been on Placquenil for about 30 years but it had stopped being effective. I was having difficulty turning doorknobs, lifting a glass of water and walking. I had near constant pain in my fingers, wrists, shoulders, and knees primarily, but other places would pop up as well. I was taking a lot of Advil to get through the day, and to sleep.
Within weeks of starting your protocol I started seeing noticeable improvements Gradually every part of my body got better. My fingers are nimble and pain free. I never have shoulder pain anymore. I'm able to lift weights, play pickleball, pretty much anything want to do. I have occasional pain in my hands and knees, and my wrists are still not quite 100%. But I can easily lift myself up out of the bathtub now and can even do a few pushups before the wrist pain is too much. I could not put any weight on my wrists before your protocol.
I almost never take Advil or any pain reliever anymore as even flare ups are very minimal. Honestly it feels almost miraculous.
I've been off your protocol for one week because of the heart stent procedure and have had no pain progression. I resumed the protocol today.
As an FYI, since you have the fasting as optional, I want to let you know that I did a water only fast for three days each of the three months.
Thank you so much for your help. I will send new labs next month.
KEY POINTS:
64 year old Ohio Man with Rheumatoid Arthritis
In September 2025 he started:
Ivermectin 1mg/kg/day
Fenbendazole 888mg/day
DMSO 1/2 tsp in glass of water or juice twice a day
Topical DMSO on involved joints or sites of pain
Quercetin 2000mg/day
NEW FLORIDA CANCER CLINIC COMING SOON!! (JUNE)
Email: [email protected]
https://www.instagram.com/wmakismedicine/
Not on Facebook, Telegram, Signal, TikTok, WhatsApp, Messenger, No websites
NO WEBSITES (Any website with my photo is a fraud)
Please do not engage with any of the 100s of imposters
We recently conducted an audit, there are over 1750 FRAUD or IMPOSTER accounts using stolen photos!
At least the Fake news provides the occasional good laugh.
Kirsch, a vaccine-injured man, has been putting out information on the subject for years now. Still no (or almost no) traction with the mainstream propaganda centers. At least SOME movement on the issue in the Trump admin, but nothing like what will be needed to bring real help to those harmed and to ensure another such disaster is never allowed to be pushed on us in the future.
Note: https://airtable.com/, the site linked below to the surveys and data, isn't loading for me and I've not been able to view the contents of those links.
https://kirschsubstack.com/p/as-many-as-2m-americans-were-seriously
I recently did two surveys (your family and your medical practice if you work in a medical practice).
The full live results can be viewed here: family and medical practice. The Notes column is available as well. Only the emails were removed for privacy reasons. The records count at the time of this article were 2908 and 107.
I had Claude Opus 4.7 co-work evaluate the survey solicitations, the survey questions, the survey results, the notes column, my reader base and gave it unrestricted use of publicly available data (CDC, Insurance industry, FRED data, etc) to reconcile everything. This allowed Claude to give me a more objective answer because my reader base is not representative (e.g., half of the respondents had no vaccinated family members) and because my reader base are more likely to attribute disability and deaths to the vaccine.
The key results:
As many as 1M Americans killed by the COVID vaccine
As many as 1.5M working-age Americans disabled for 6 months or more
Silence from health authorities worldwide on this issue. Not a single national public-health authority, anywhere in the world, has produced an estimate of the type constructed in this article — a comprehensive, all-cause, all-ages, attributable-deaths-plus-disabilities total for the COVID-19 vaccines.
(Graphs and other data in the original)
. . . I asked Claude if any other health authority has done a similar analysis.
Answer: no.
. . . The asymmetry
There is an asymmetric pattern in what public health officials have estimated:
Multiple large official and quasi-official estimates of deaths prevented by COVID vaccines: the Commonwealth Fund (~3.2M US deaths prevented through 2022), Imperial College (millions globally), WHO Europe (1.4M lives saved), various Lancet papers. These are policy-shaping numbers.
Zero official estimates of total deaths caused by COVID vaccines, despite using broadly the same counterfactual modeling techniques that would be required.
The asymmetry is striking and is the reason the public conversation has the shape it does: one side of the ledger gets quantified at population scale, the other side does not.
. . . Summary
Claude noted that its estimates were “reconcilable with every independent dataset above.”
So they can’t write this analysis off. [Just WATCH THEM do so!]
The fact that no public health official anywhere in the world has ever even attempted to estimate the number of disabled and killed by the COVID shots is not surprising. None want to know the damage they have caused. There appears to be no political will to do that.
If you ask any public official (lawmaker, public health official) how many people the COVID shots have disabled and killed, the honest answer would be “We don’t know and we really don’t want to know.”
Sticking your head in the sand?
Similarly, The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall St. Journal, CNN, 60 Minutes, etc. Well, they don’t want to know either. They could have easily done what I just did.
None of them want to know. It’s that simple.
That is not serving the public interest, is it?
(Bad language warning, for those who care about such things).
https://briancates.substack.com/p/be-skeptical-of-what-all-the-formers
The narrative you’re constantly having waved in your face by all the ‘formers’ - former CIA agents & CIA assets, former FBI agents and FBI informants - does NOT MATCH what you saw unfold that night, does it?
What have the ‘formers’ insisted for going on 6 years now?
They have hackers from FOREIGN COUNTRIES ‘hack in’ to the thousands of machines in hundreds of different US counties on Election Day to remotely alter the election results on the fly.
What was the REALITY of 2020?
They’d banked over TWENTY FRICKIN’ MILLION FAKE MAIL IN VOTES BY ELECTION DAY...
...pay attention to this part now, it’s important...
...and despite the fact they had over TWENTY MILLION FRICKING FAKE MAIL-IN VOTES just sitting right THERE already counted...
...you really want to pay attention to this part, I’m serious...
...TRUMP WAS GOING TO WIN ANYWAY.
Right then, right there on Election Night.
TRUMP WAS GOING WIN.
Why?
Why was Trump going to win anyway, despite 4 years worth of carefully prepared and very very well-funded 2020 election ‘fortification’ against him?
Why was he going to win anyway?
Do you know?
Shall I tell you?
I mean, it’s the least I can do. After all, I’ve been researching the 2020 election theft for more than 6 years.
All right. Gird your loins. You ready? Are you gonna be able to handle it?
Trump was going to win ANYWAY on the night of the Election in 2020...because their machines were TELLING THEM he was going to fucking win.
DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I JUST TOLD YOU?
Can you dig it?
Can you fully grasp it?
THEIR machines, that they supposedly have complete control of, with their cool foreign hackers by the bushel in places like Italy and Germany and Caracas and Belgrad and Beijing carefully controlling the vote counts, were telling THEM Trump was about to WIN on Election Night.
UNLESS.
Unless they PULLED THE FUCKING PLUG.
Unless they TURNED THE MACHINES OFF AND HIT THE FUCKING ‘PAUSE’ BUTTON, they were gonna end up having to watch Trump give a victory speech THAT NIGHT. Very likely by 11:30 pm ET.
So they were forced to do a very hastily formed ‘Plan B’.
TURN THE MACHINES OFF.
STOP the counting in 5 battlegrounds.
Distpatch the BALLOT DUMPS.
For 3 days.
You keep being TOLD it’s the hackers altering the vote totals of the machines they have access to.
THAT’S. NOT. WHAT. FUCKING. HAPPENED.
Do you get it yet?
They turned their machines OFF. They STOPPED the count. They spent THREE FURIOUS DAYS doing good old fashioned NON-ELECTRONIC ballot dumping in AZ, GA, PA, MI and WI.
And yet what do I still SEE every fucking day on this platform?
I see all the SAME FUCKING ‘FORMERS’ regaling you with tales about data centers in Belgrade, hackers in Caracas, remote election machine controllers in Caracas.
I don’t trust ‘former’ CIA/FBI agents/assets/informants and their stories about exactly how the CIA/FBI rigs elections, now that they are out there making the media rounds getting it all off their chests.
Maybe these people have an agenda. Maybe they’re not doing what you think they’re doing.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.
Trump is working hard to improve the situation; how quickly can that be done, and at what cost -- and how long and deep will the negative consequences of the world's current situation be?
https://no01.substack.com/p/cut-the-fuel-cut-the-future
Brent surged 65% in March.
Global oil output is projected to fall 6.6% in Q2 - the largest quarterly drop since the COVID lockdowns shut the world down on purpose.
Tanker traffic through Hormuz collapsed from around seventy a day to fewer than fifteen.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, originally created in 1975 for exactly this scenario, is currently being used for… I don’t know… just about any other scenario. Seven consecutive weekly drawdowns. And then the most recent one, 8.6 million barrels, clocking in as the largest single week on record. With nearly half of the released crude being exported because that’s what’s called capitalism.
Economies are contracting.
They haven’t decided to use less energy.
The energy dropped off stage right, and the productivity tumbled with it.
I've seen this one. I remember the original. The reviews were not kind.
In October 1973, the OAPEC cut production and the embargo pulled somewhere between seven and ten percent of global supply - the numbers are still disputed fifty years later. Oil quadrupled from $2.90 to $11.65 in three months. The decade that followed gave the English language the word “stagflation” because nothing in the existing vocabulary fit.
Same story then.
Same story now.
But that mechanism runs in the opposite direction from what most economics textbooks will teach you.
They will tell you that the economy grows, and then because it grows, it uses more energy. As if “the economy” is a creature that wakes up, lifts some weights, builds an appetite, and orders a barrel of crude for breakfast.
My position is that that causality runs the other way.
Cheap energy enables productivity → productivity grows output → more output means “THE GREATEST ECONOMY EVER”™.
But pull out the energy, and watch the productivity drop, and the GDP following it down the stairs. The correlation is there for anyone (but the economists) to see. The causality is not what they’ll tell you it is.
I ain’t quibbling about some modelling. Not this time, I promise!
It is a fundamental flaw in the “science” of economics, air quotes included.
When reality gets reversed, the policy conclusions come out reliably backwards, and the people running monetary policy are surprised by oil shocks every so often like clockwork.
Let me show you what I mean.
(More. It's a long article, including a history lesson focused on energy availability).
https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-establishes-1-776b-fund-to-combat-deep-state-weaponization
President Donald Trump has agreed to dismiss his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS in exchange for a formal apology and the creation of a new $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund, a Justice Department program designed to compensate Americans who say they were unfairly targeted by federal authorities.
According to officials cited in the reporting, the settlement also ends Trump’s related claims involving the 2022 FBI search of Mar-a-Lago and the Russia-collusion investigation. The administration is presenting the fund as a broader remedy for what Trump and his allies describe as government “weaponization.” A senior official said the program is open to anyone who believes they were unfairly targeted by any administration, not just Republicans or Trump supporters.
A senior official said the program is open to anyone who believes they were unfairly targeted by any administration, not just Republicans or Trump supporters. That could include people charged in connection with the events of January 6, 2021, at the Capitol and even Hunter Biden, whose legal troubles and expenses have been widely publicized.
An official said the purpose is not to enrich claimants indiscriminately, but to compensate people for tangible losses such as legal fees and other costs tied to what they experienced. The official described the goal as restoring dignity and helping people recover some of what they lost. The settlement does not guarantee payment to Trump, his sons, or the Trump Organization; instead, they are expected to receive a formal apology, while any compensation claims would be evaluated separately.
The program will be overseen by five board members appointed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, with one additional member selected in consultation with congressional leaders. The president may remove board members without cause.
The board will have the authority to issue apologies, request more information, and recommend monetary relief.
Supporters of the settlement argue that the agreement reflects Trump’s long-running promise to end government abuse and politically motivated prosecutions. Trump made that case during his second inaugural address, saying the power of the state should never again be used to persecute political opponents.
A spokesman for Trump’s legal team said the president entered the settlement “squarely for the benefit of the American people,” while continuing his fight to hold accountable those who wronged Americans.
The DOJ has argued that the fund fits within existing legal authority for settlement payments, pointing to the Judgment Fund and prior claims processes as precedent. The administration says the new structure is intended to create a formal, flexible mechanism for reviewing claims from across the political spectrum.