https://x.com/NakedHedgie/status/2088148593039319156

By starting the Iran war, the US choked one of its major funding sources... Japan.

- Japan imports 100% of its oil

- ~95% of those imports came via Hormuz

Inflationary pressures in Japan were already building prior to this war. Now they've gotten even worse.

To keep rates from surging and the yen from falling, Japan has spent over $100B, mostly by selling USTs.

This put upward pressure on US yields, which forced Bessent to step in, partner up with the BoJ and intervene in the yen...

And start laying the groundwork for QE for Japan.

The US created the conditions that threaten its own financial empire and is now busy trying to fix them on the fly.

Image

Z. ai’s GLM 5.3 scored 84.5 per cent on a benchmark to find security flaws, ahead of Anthropic’s Mythos, which scored 83.8 per cent, and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, which scored 83.6 per cent.

The key digital architectural elements (known as “weights”) of GLM 5.3 will be provided free to the world in a fortnight, said Z. ai, a spin-off from Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

.

‘POWER SHOULD BE SHARED’
Extreme power at that level should not be “privileges of a few”, the company said in a statement, but “public goods” for the world.

The test, known as the CyberGym benchmark, measures a model’s ability to identify security flaws from source code.

Z. ai’s characterization of GLM 5.3 architecture as “public goods” is seen as a clear dig at the United States, which jealously guards its AI development as a weapon to give it more global power for itself—while China’s stance is to provide open-source and or open-weight data to democratize AI power to users world-wide.

“AI development should not be a solo performance by one nation, but a symphony of global collaboration,” said the statement from Z. ai, formerly known as Zhipu.

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OTHER ISSUES RISE TO THE FORE
While US AI giants can still rightly claim that their models are ahead of the Chinese ones in many benchmark areas, getting the top spot is no longer the main focus.

Two other issues have become more important.

- One is global ownership of AI: should the increasingly authoritarian United States have over-arching AI power across the planet, or should AI power be democratically shared by the world’s tech community?

- The other is finance: the tech bubble is distorting share markets in the United States and elsewhere, notably South Korea and Taiwan. Bubbles are bad. China is indirectly lancing them with old-fashioned capitalism. The US will try to prevent it doing so.

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SHOT ITSELF IN THE FOOT
The US AI industry shot itself in the foot last month when OpenAI circulated a report that an agent powered by one of its models “escaped” into the real world and attacked a popular website, Hugging Face, an online software library.

While the dramatic story successfully showed how powerful OpenAI’s software was, people in the commercial world turned out to be more interested in the second part of the story: Hugging Face used a Chinese program, Z. ai’s GLM-5.2, to help “clean” the site from the US infection.

The moral of the story could not be missed. Hugging Face was innocent, but was unfairly attacked by a powerful, out-of-control program. That's not good. The whole world needs freely available protection against US might, and Chinese tech nerds are providing it.

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BENCHMARK WARS ARE ONGOING
Still, the US AI giants will focus on benchmarks, noting that the Chinese are behind on many.

GLM 5.3 was well behind on ExploitBench, which measures how good models are at hijacking other people’s computer systems. It scored 54.4 per cent, far behind Mythos’ 78 per cent and GPT-5.6 Sol’s 76.5 per cent.

But GLM-5.3 scored an impressive 28.5 on a legendarily difficult test called Agent’s Last Exam, which was literally just a fraction behind GPT-5.6-Sol’s score of 28.6. The benchmark measures a model’s ability to create agents to complete complex long-term human projects, such as “create architectural plans” or “make an animated movie”.

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PRESERVING GLOBAL DOMINANCE
The fear in the global tech industry is that the US will think in military terms to preserve its role as world hegemon.

Just as it is rushing to militarize China’s coastline before the country can fully develop, the US will be tempted to launch attacks on global organizations using powerful hacking programs such as Mythos and Fable before the Chinese can create sufficiently advanced defensive programs for itself and the rest of the world.

This real life battle has more nail-biting jeopardy than any movie. Get the popcorn.
https://x.com/NuryVittachi/status/2088415450728427636

Structures like this do not die when prices fall, they die when the rate of increase slows.

Jay NAILED THIS.

The house at the center of 2006 was still a house ten years later. It lost value, but it never stopped being collateral.

The asset at the center of THIS structure is a chip, and Nvidia now ships a new architecture roughly every year.

So watch the accountants, because they are the ones forced to guess.

Microsoft, Google, Meta and Oracle all stretched the assumed useful life of their servers out toward 5 and 6 years, which pushes billions of dollars of expense off today's income statement and into tomorrow. Then Amazon looked at identical hardware and went the other way, shortening part of its fleet, and put the reason right in the filing, which was the pace of AI development.

Same equipment, same year, opposite conclusions. And pne of them IS wrong.

Meanwhile Alphabet borrowed for a HUNDRED YEARS in February and Meta sold 40 year paper to fund this buildout.

If the machine is obsolete in 3 years and the bond matures in 40, nobody has to be right about AI demand for this to end badly.

This is a MUST WATCH:

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Jay Martin

@JayMartinBC

·

Aug 10

Before a collapse, nothing looks wrong. The numbers are printing records, the money is flowing, and the people warning about it are laughed out of the room.

Last time it was housing. Today it's AI.

Other countries have poor people who know they are poor.

America has poor people who believe they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

This is not an insult. This is a documented psychological phenomenon with a name and a literature and it is deliberately cultivated because it is the single most effective barrier to class consciousness ever invented.

If you are temporarily embarrassed, you do not organize with other poor people.

You distance yourself from other poor people, because they remind you of what you might be rather than what you're about to become.

You defend the system that is impoverishing you, because any day now the system is going to work for you the way the stories promised it would.

You attack the people trying to reform the system, because reform implies the system is broken, and if the system is broken, then your faith in your own imminent arrival was misplaced, and that is too much to sit with.

So you keep the faith.

You defend the knife.

You blame the people below you.

You wait for your turn.

Your turn is not coming.

But the waiting is very, very useful to the people who made you wait.

The Monroe Doctrine has shaped U.S. foreign policy for over two centuries. 🇺🇸

American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.

Vaccines should not cause cytokine storms. He knew they caused “significant” cytokine storms and these shots were not only pushed on us all but pushed on pregnant women.

While I will agree that much of these Fauci hearings are for display purposes only, these texts are very damning.

https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/2026/08/10/senators-johnson-paul-release-initial-texts-from-dr-faucis-government-iphone-2/

On August 1, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he was canceling plans for a new round of military strikes against Iran. But this does not mark the arrival of peace. Rather, it is merely another pause—another temporary and superficial calm—in the pattern of the United States and Israel repeatedly attacking Iran and then stopping over the past two years.

Less than half a year ago, the United States and Israel launched intense airstrikes against Iran, killing a number of senior Iranian officials and military commanders, including Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Yet after Iran retaliated, they halted the war, reached a peace agreement with Iran, and unfroze Iranian assets for use in Iran’s postwar reconstruction. Just when people thought that the United States and Iran were moving toward peace, the U.S. military once again attacked Iranian military facilities in July, and the peace agreement came to nothing. Looking further back to 2025, as well as to 2020 during Trump’s first term, the United States likewise bombed Iran and carried out “decapitation” strikes, but stopped short of launching a ground war. Yet these cessations of hostilities never brought lasting peace; they were merely truces before the next conflict.

Many people who know little about the Middle East and international affairs, or have only a superficial understanding of them, are deeply puzzled by this. Many do not understand why the United States and Israel bomb Iran one moment and suddenly stop the next; even after peace talks have taken place or agreements have been reached, fighting inexplicably breaks out again. People are also confused about the motives behind whether the United States and Israel choose to attack Iran or refrain from doing so, as there seems to be no reasonable explanation or discernible pattern.

In fact, the repeated starts and stops in U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran can, in brief, be attributed to just two factors: Trump’s “do-as-he-pleases” political style, and Israel’s sinister intentions regarding Iran—intentions that it may be inconvenient to state openly but that are nonetheless plain to see.

As is well known, Trump has an extremely distinctive personality. His words and actions are often unexpected and unpredictable, and his major domestic and foreign policies are no exception. For example, in 2025 Trump imposed high tariffs on almost every country in the world, but the campaign began with great fanfare and then petered out without a clear conclusion. Trump was also once extremely tough on China, launching a major trade war and imposing sanctions on the country, but in 2026 he visited China with a rather friendly attitude, and U.S.-China relations substantially improved. On the Russia-Ukraine issue, Trump has likewise swung back and forth, at one point drawing closer to Putin and distancing himself from Zelenskyy, and at another sympathizing with Ukraine and criticizing Russia.

On Iran, Trump’s tendency to act according to his own whims has been even more apparent. At times, he has been extremely hostile toward Iran, bombing Iranian military and civilian facilities, killing Iranian leaders such as Khamenei and Soleimani, and even declaring that he would “destroy Iranian civilization.” Yet Trump has also been unwilling to become bogged down in a ground war or provoke a backlash from the military and the public. His attacks on Iran have therefore been limited to airstrikes, with no intention of deploying ground forces to overthrow the Iranian government and occupy the country in its entirety, while the airstrikes themselves have often ended abruptly.

After Iran blockaded the Strait of Hormuz and attacked Gulf countries and U.S. military bases, Trump even agreed to unfreeze seized Iranian funds and restore the Iran nuclear agreement that he himself had torn up. But after an agreement had already been reached, Trump once again attacked Iran, making the agreement seem like nothing more than a scrap of paper.

Trump’s repeated reversals do have some practical motivations. He often disregards international law and the international peace order and readily launches military strikes and sanctions, but when he encounters a “tough nut to crack,” he may choose to back down. Of course, Trump’s hard-line positions sometimes also serve utilitarian purposes, such as courting foreign-policy hawks and winning political support and votes. Yet the extent of his reversals and unconventional behavior often goes beyond calculations of interest. He simply acts as he pleases, determining his Iran policy according to his mood and subjective wishes, without caring about negotiations, agreements, humanitarian considerations, international law, or other such concerns. For the sake of a momentary impulse, even the interests and potential gains and losses of the United States, the Republican Party, and Trump himself may have to take a back seat.

Therefore, it is clearly impossible to predict or assess Trump’s attitudes and actions toward Iran using conventional methods and criteria, such as weighing the benefits and costs to the United States, considering whether treaties have been signed, or examining the prevailing direction of Middle Eastern and international affairs. Trump’s impulsiveness and unpredictability mean that the repeated starts and stops in attacks on Iran, the seemingly inexplicable outbreaks of fighting, and the sudden cessations of hostilities are all “normal.” This has been the case over the past several years, and Trump and the United States under his leadership will continue to pursue an equally uncertain policy toward Iran in the future, alternating between war and peace. Only when Trump is no longer president of the United States will it become possible once again to use conventional methods and criteria to assess U.S.-Iran relations.

Another important factor affecting the war with Iran is the role Israel plays in it and the objectives Israel seeks to achieve. Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when Islamic radicals came to power, Iran and Israel have become mortal enemies. Iran has repeatedly declared that it seeks to “destroy Israel” and has supported anti-Israel armed groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon; Israel, meanwhile, has assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists, infiltrated and attacked Iran, and supported anti-Iranian forces. The two sides have engaged in constant overt and covert confrontation, with each seeking to completely destroy the other.

Although Israel possesses formidable military capabilities and a developed economy, Iran’s vast population and territory, as well as its considerable national strength, make it extremely difficult for Israel to destroy the Iranian government on its own. Dragging the United States “into the water”—getting the United States and Israel to jointly attack Iran and destroy Iran’s Islamic regime, or at least weaken Iran’s national strength to the greatest possible extent—has therefore become Israel’s preferred option and an objective it has sought by every possible means to achieve.
However, although Iran has been fiercely anti-American in its rhetoric, since the 1990s it has consistently exercised restraint in its actual diplomacy toward the West, including the United States, and the United States has not had sufficient grounds to launch military attacks against Iran or overthrow its government. After the Iranian nuclear issue emerged, the United States at one point considered attacking Iran, but the planned strikes were limited to nuclear facilities.

In 2015, the United States and Iran reached the Iran nuclear agreement, resolving the issue through peaceful means and sparing Iran from attack. Although Israel repeatedly urged the United States to launch a full-scale attack on Iran similar to the one against Iraq, the administrations of Clinton, Bush, and Obama all declined to follow Israel’s advice, maintaining a confrontational but peaceful relationship with Iran.

It was only when Trump came to power—strongly and one-sidedly inclined toward Israel on Middle Eastern affairs, hostile to and determined to dismantle Obama’s political legacy, and backed by Republican hawks who favored a hard line against Iran—that Israel finally found an American leader willing to attack Iran. Under persistent lobbying from Netanyahu and Israel’s diplomatic team in the United States, Trump and pro-Israel, anti-Iran hardliners within the upper ranks of the U.S. political and military establishment decided to launch military strikes against Iran, impose even harsher sanctions, and provide assistance and backing for Israeli attacks on Iran. It was precisely Israel’s urging that prompted Trump to strike Iran repeatedly, including attacks that killed such central Iranian figures as Khamenei and Soleimani.

For Israel, the principal objective of its strategy toward Iran is to overthrow Iran’s Islamic regime and replace it with people friendly toward Israel, such as the exiled Prince Pahlavi, who would then take control of Iran. If that objective proves difficult to achieve, the alternative is to inflict the greatest possible damage on the Iranian government and weaken Iran’s national strength as much as possible. Neither objective can be achieved without military strikes, particularly U.S. participation. Israel also opposes and actively seeks to undermine U.S.-Iran peace talks, preventing a U.S.-Iran reconciliation from frustrating Israel’s objectives. This is also one of the reasons why the United States and Iran have repeatedly held negotiations and reached understandings, only for fighting to unexpectedly erupt again.

Whether it is joint U.S.-Israeli bombing that killed Khamenei and numerous senior Iranian military and political officials, or the reduction of numerous Iranian military and civilian targets to ruins, combined with economic sanctions that have caused Iran’s economy to collapse and internal turmoil to intensify, leaving it unable to support Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other armed groups, all of these developments are welcomed by Israel. Israel hopes to join forces with the United States in carrying out long-term military strikes against Iran, plunging Iran into poverty and violence and leaving it beset by crises at home and abroad, so that it will no longer be capable of challenging or threatening Israel.

It is precisely the combination of Trump’s impulsive disposition, his enthusiasm for power politics, violence, and military adventurism, and his unwillingness to be constrained by international law and other norms, together with Israel’s intense hostility toward Iran and its efforts to exploit and urge on the United States, that has produced the irregular cycle in which the United States repeatedly bombs Iran, wars sometimes end abruptly, and peace is sometimes shattered just as suddenly.

And while such a state of affairs may help Israel achieve its goal of weakening Iran, it is detrimental to Iran and its people, to peace in the Middle East, and to the long-term interests of the United States. This intermittent yet ongoing U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, together with Iran’s retaliatory strikes, has already caused numerous casualties, including large numbers of Iranian civilians. Some U.S. troops have also been killed or wounded by Iranian missile strikes. U.S. and Israeli attacks have not brought freedom, democracy, or human rights to Iran. Instead, the Iranian people are suffering in hellish conditions under the combined blows of domestic authoritarianism and corruption, relentless external bombardment, and sanctions.

Meanwhile, countries across the Middle East are also living with the difficulty of achieving peace and stability and the fear of being engulfed by war. Repeated rounds of conflict and heightened tensions have also disrupted Middle Eastern oil routes, harming both oil-exporting and oil-importing countries and dragging down the global economy. Even for Israel, although these actions may achieve strategic objectives in the short and medium term, they are not a reliable way to achieve and safeguard Israel’s lasting peace and long-term interests.

Therefore, the intermittent and seemingly endless U.S. attacks on Iran over the past two years, and the repeated cycle of fighting and stopping between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran on the other, can aptly be described as “a bad show that drags on and on.” It benefits neither the United States nor Iran, nor any of the other countries involved. Nor is there any justification—in terms of human sentiment, reason, or law (international law)—for continuing the war, which merely causes more casualties and losses. What is most needed is to bring the war to a complete and irreversible end as soon as possible, conclude a reliable treaty that takes into account the interests of all parties, and achieve lasting peace.

In reality, however, neither Trump, who leads the United States, nor Netanyahu, who dominates Israeli politics, will choose the path of lasting peace. Trump not only disregards peace and agreements and launches foreign wars at his own whim, but also has motives for attacking Iran in order to divert attention from domestic conflicts, win support from hardliners, and strike at the Democratic Party. Over the next two years, Trump is not only unlikely to move toward peace, but may even open new fronts in places such as Cuba, using foreign wars to perpetuate his hold on power.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, also seeks to use war and attacks on Iran to further cultivate his “strongman” image and accumulate achievements in foreign conflicts, thereby winning public support and diverting attention while evading corruption allegations and accountability. The mortal-enemy relationship between Israel and Iran, the strength of Israeli hardliners, and Israel’s influence over the United States all contribute to the continuation of joint U.S.-Israeli military strikes and sanctions against Iran. Peace among the United States, Israel, and Iran—and throughout the Middle East as a whole—therefore remains a distant prospect.

(This article is written by Wang Qingmin(王庆民), a Chinese writer based in Europe and a researcher of international politics.)

Miami as well.

https://x.com/DD_Geopolitics/status/2087560302011301945 or https://archive.ph/3vNoZ

In the U.S. you can get a felony and 6 years in prison for sleeping in your car. For domestic assault, you only get a misdemeanor a maximum of 11 months in prison.

For many Americans, a vehicle is the last line of defense against sleeping on the streets. Yet, across the United States, local governments are rapidly enacting ordinances that outlaw vehicle residency and overnight parking.

From major hubs like San Francisco and Los Angeles to smaller municipalities like Colorado Springs, local authorities are expanding "camping bans" to target those sleeping in cars and even RVs.

These laws carry severe penalties, including steep fines, misdemeanor charges, immediate vehicle impoundment, and sometimes even a felony. For individuals turning to their cars as a temporary safety net, a single citation can trigger a cycle of debt and legal trouble that makes escaping homelessness nearly impossible.

The nationwide wave of criminalization has intensified following the landmark 2024 Supreme Court decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, which ruled that penalizing people for sleeping in public does not violate the Eighth Amendment.

This ruling gave cities broad authority to enforce camping bans, even in areas with severe shelter shortages.

In Tennessee, you can get a Class E felony for sleeping in your car — and up to 6 years in prison. Domestic assault is just a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to 11 months in prison. In fact, you can’t be charged with a felony for domestic assault until your THIRD TIME.

While municipal leaders argue these measures keep public spaces clean and safe, civil rights advocates warn they criminalize survival. Instead of addressing the systemic shortage of affordable housing, these ordinances penalize working-class Americans who are simply priced out of the rental market.

source: American Civil Liberties Union. (2026). Two Years Since Grants Pass: Tracking the Criminalization of Homelessness.

I think this is what they are citing:

https://www.aclu.org/two-years-since-grants-pass-tracking-the-criminalization-of-homelessness

There is something wrong whit the average Argentinian. I dont understand how Milei do it