@joemccann@PerseusDefense Russia's jet powered drones are now destroying Ukraine because they can't shoot them down. USA better be developing counter measures, because this is the future. Period.
The market has this week’s Fed meeting at about 90% for a hike. Headline CPI at 3.4% and a 0.4% monthly print make that look obvious. I don’t buy it.
Core CPI excluding food and energy is running around 2.4% year over year, close to the lowest since 2021. The 2022 inflation problem is not the one in front of the Fed. Gasoline jumped 3.9% in August and is up 27.4% year over year. Energy alone explained more than a third of the monthly CPI increase. That is a supply shock, not an overheating economy.
You cannot hike your way to more oil, a reopened shipping lane, or cheaper gas. Using demand destruction against an oil shock is the wrong tool and the FED knows that. The only thing that FED really needs is for the war to end. Rate hikes cannot do that.
PPI tells the same story. Headline looks ugly; diesel and goods prices were the impact. Services barely moved.
Financial conditions have already tightened for them. The 10-year is near 5%. Mortgages are above 7%. Long rates are doing a lot of the job a 25 bp hike would do.
Then there is the part nobody at the Fed will say. The Treasury is rolling a mountain of cheap debt into a 4–5% world. Net interest is already over $1 trillion a year, outpacing military spending.
Hiking is essentially declaring war on the US Treasury.
They can wait. There is another meeting, another CPI, another jobs report, more oil data. Hiking is easy to do and hard to undo. Holding this week would not be a dovish blunder. It would be refusing to fight a supply chain issue with an economic sledgehammer.
The trade is not “inflation is dead.” It is that inflation is not accelerating enough, the economy is not overheating enough, and the interest bill is already too large to treat a 90% market price as destiny.
Flossmoor Golf Club this afternoon just after the storm played through, from behind the pro shop, looking down 16-17-18, then a distant view of the clubhouse and a brief close-up of the pro shop roof.
This is the 800 lb gorilla in the room.
Is it a coincidence that since Trump cut off funding to Ukraine, USAID, and NGOs, the Democrat Party is suddenly broke?
Weren't they swimming in cash in 2022?
Didn't Kamala Harris supposedly raise $2 billion in 2024?
Where did all the donors go?
Hint: They never existed.
All of that big Democrat money in the past was just laundered foreign funds. Or even worse, U.S. taxpayer funds laundered back to them.
We can draw one of two conclusions here:
Either the Democrat base is so broke they can't afford to donate money to their party, or all that support you see in the polls for Democrats doesn't really exist.
Debunker Neil DeGrasse Tyson has completely changed his tune on UFOs on national news 🤣🤣
“The real question is not ‘are we alone?’ it’s ‘are we ready?’ Are we?”
“Yeah, I think we are, because given the testimonies that we've heard and that we heard delivered in front of Congress in 2023, 2024, 2025 from whistleblowers and insiders and military officials, ex-military, intelligence officers.
It's no longer just the farmer in the back commenting on what hovered over their crops or the revelers coming out of the bar at 2 a.m., these are people of high rank, and all sincere.
Not only have they sort of said that they've got alien body parts and reverse engineered technologies, that's sort of consistent with the files that were released.”
He says the last thing that needs to happen is for the government to roll out an alien body.
🚨 The banking cartel is in full panic mode. 🚨
While Americans were celebrating Mother’s Day with their families, the CEO of the American Bankers Association sent a frantic alert to every bank CEO in the country, demanding “immediate engagement” to lobby Senators and kill stablecoins that would finally let everyday Americans earn real yields on their own money.
This line in the letter sticks out: “we believe committee members may not be fully aware of the risks to the economy by the stablecoin loophole.” That’s both intellectually dishonest and simultaneously demeaning. First, there is no “loophole.” This entire issue was litigated during the GENIUS Act debate. @BillHagertyTN worked tirelessly on this issue and this statement is an insult to his and others work.
For decades, these banks have treated your deposits like their personal piggy bank, paying you next to nothing while lending YOUR money out for massive profits and executive bonuses.
During the Biden era, these same banks worked hand-in-glove with @SenWarren and her allies to debank Americans, including President Trump’s own family. They shut down accounts of conservatives, patriots, and anyone who dared challenge the regime, all while regulators applied pressure under schemes like Operation Choke Point 2.0. It wasn’t about risk. It was about political control.
Now that innovative stablecoins threaten to break their monopoly and give you actual financial freedom? They’re running to Congress again, screaming about “threats to economic growth and financial stability.”
Translation: Protect the racket at all costs.
The Senate Banking Committee votes on landmark crypto legislation this Thursday.
As a member of that committee, my message is clear:
Hands off the people’s money. Let Americans choose real competition and better returns. No more shielding Wall Street from the future. The banking elite’s days of rigging the system and debanking their political enemies are over. Innovation, freedom, and the American people will win.
I’m voting to break the cartel.
Food for thought.
Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride
For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface.
The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities.
Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed.
In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines.
In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive.
A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent.
By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right.
In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.
opus 4.5 is actually batshit insane
this thing can do anything I ask it with some high-level system design guidance and a clear path for verifying itself and I've been coding for over a decade
you'll soon see $1B+ one person companies
2026 is going to be for the books
When I created Claude Code as a side project back in September 2024, I had no idea it would grow to be what it is today. It is humbling to see how Claude Code has become a core dev tool for so many engineers, how enthusiastic the community is, and how people are using it for all sorts of things from coding, to devops, to research, to non-technical use cases. This technology is alien and magical, and it makes it so much easier for people to build and create. Increasingly, code is no longer the bottleneck.
A year ago, Claude struggled to generate bash commands without escaping issues. It worked for seconds or minutes at a time. We saw early signs that it may become broadly useful for coding one day.
Fast forward to today. In the last thirty days, I landed 259 PRs -- 497 commits, 40k lines added, 38k lines removed. Every single line was written by Claude Code + Opus 4.5. Claude consistently runs for minutes, hours, and days at a time (using Stop hooks). Software engineering is changing, and we are entering a new period in coding history. And we're still just getting started..
Andrej Karpathy literally built the neural networks running inside coding assistants.
He taught the world deep learning at Stanford. He ran AI at Tesla.
If he feels “dramatically behind” as a programmer… that tells you everything about where we are.
The confession here is that raw intelligence and deep technical knowledge no longer guarantee mastery. The new stack isn’t about understanding transformers or writing elegant algorithms. It’s about orchestrating a zoo of stochastic systems that nobody fully controls.
Karpathy’s list is revealing: agents, subagents, prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations. That’s 15+ new primitives that didn’t exist 18 months ago. Each one evolving weekly.
The mental model problem is real. Traditional engineering gives you deterministic systems. You write code, it does exactly what you wrote. Now you’re managing entities that are “fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing.”
His “alien tool with no manual” framing is exactly right. We’re all reverse-engineering capabilities in real-time. The documentation is always out of date. The best practices from 3 months ago are already wrong.
The magnitude 9 earthquake isn’t coming. It already hit. The aftershocks are the new normal.
I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.
The Arizona Tell
All media & university pollsters showed Biden winning as we showed Trump +4 and Trafalgar had Trump +3. Caution here was thus required.
Rupert Murdoch refused Jared Kushner's request to reverse this crazy early call. Now look at the 'win margin' below.
This was the beginning of all Murdoch properties denying there could be any significant election fraud. This posture continues to this day. It can and will not last much longer.
And Murdoch fired Chris Stirewalt soon after 'the call' ...
https://t.co/G0veiW5eHS