UPDATE
California has 3,055,949 ballots left to process statewide.
That total is down by 550,179 ballots from yesterday afternoon.
Of the 3,055,949 ballots left to process statewide, 543,180 are in L.A. County.
The L.A. County total is down by 170,000 ballots from yesterday afternoon.
If Raman takes second and Pratt does not qualify for the general election, after days upon days of thinking he would, it will be the political equivalent of watching the Palisades burn again. If you can’t hold leaders accountable for their failures, then democracy does not exist.
Pratt can’t be allowed to advance to November by the California Dem machine. Here’s why:
His marketing style, given five more months to compete in a two-person race, will capture the attention of too many. He’s not likely to win a two-person general election, but something over 40% would be highly damaging to the influence the demons need to hold over the electorate.
The ballot harvesting would cost Pratt the race in November, but the more success he has then requires the system to work even harder, with more exposure with each passing day. When someone has an awakening in the modern era, they don’t go back to sleep.
Waking up 40% of LA sets up for a future the Dems can’t control.
That’s why Pratt will be in third by Sunday. Can’t risk it.
For years, Washington D.C. felt like a city that had been allowed to slowly rot in plain sight. The reflecting pool sat stagnant. The grass looked tired and dead. Parks had become places regular people avoided. Restaurants closed because nobody wanted to be there after dark. The fountains didn’t run. And the people who live and work in this city every single day noticed all of it.
They noticed because they had to walk through it. They noticed because their kids asked why certain areas felt unsafe or depressing. They noticed because the capital of their country started looking and feeling like a place that had given up on itself.
Now the water is back in the reflecting pool. Real water. Clean water. The kind that actually reflects the monuments instead of hiding them behind algae. The grass has been replaced. The parks are being reclaimed.
Restaurants that had gone dark are reopening because the city no longer feels abandoned. Fountains are running again. The difference isn’t theoretical ... it’s visible the moment you walk outside.
Elites spent years telling everyone that caring about clean public spaces, working fountains, and grass that isn’t dead was shallow or unimportant. That noticing the decay made you superficial. Meanwhile, normal people who actually live here had been watching it happen in real time. They didn’t have the luxury of pretending it didn’t matter.
One side spent over a decade either ignoring the decline or actively excusing it. The other side came in and started fixing the things normal people see every day. And the people who live here can feel the difference without needing anyone to explain it to them.
Normal people always notice. They just finally have something worth noticing again.
(article below)
A cyclist who stopped on a pedestrian bridge to enjoy a pretty sunset in British Columbia was not expecting this close encounter with a bear. https://t.co/lvNMvCEhrR
DeepSeek is becoming more popular among US enterprises as companies look for cheaper alternatives to Anthropic and OpenAI
“DeepSeek takes top spot on 'trending' list as companies look for alternatives to OpenAI and Anthropic, spending tracker's report says Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek took the top spot on a major US business spending index in June, surging as more companies swap out expensive American options like OpenAI and Anthropic in favour of more affordable alternatives.”
Nothing to see here
NVIDIA IS BUYING ITS OWN CHIPS AND CALLING IT REVENUE
And your retirement account is secretly holding the bag.
This scheme is literally straight out of the Enron playbook...
In January 2026, a special purpose vehicle called Valor Compute Infrastructure was created with one purpose:
Buy Nvidia's chips so Nvidia could book the sale as revenue.
Valor raised $5.4 billion and purchased over 100,000 of Nvidia's GB200 GPUs.
But $1.9 billion of that money came FROM Nvidia itself.
Nvidia invested $1.9 billion into the shell company, then sold that same shell company $5.4 billion worth of its own chips and booked every dollar as revenue.
It's the Girl Scout whose dad bought all the cookies and then she wins the sales contest because Dad was the customer. Except this Girl Scout is a trillion-dollar company and the cookie sale is $5.4 billion.
But it gets MUCH worse:
The remaining $3.5 billion in financing came from Apollo Global Management. Apollo structured the debt, packaged it into securities, and then sold those securities to Athene.
And guess who Athene is? Apollo's OWN insurance subsidiary. The one that sells fixed annuities to American retirees as safe, conservative retirement products.
Follow the chain:
Nvidia funds a shell company with $1.9 billion. The shell company buys $5.4 billion in Nvidia chips. Apollo finances the remaining $3.5 billion. Apollo sells the debt to its own insurance arm. That insurance arm packages it into annuity products and sells them to retirees who think they're buying something safe.
The retirees have no idea that their retirement savings are now backed by 100,000 computer chips sitting in some data center that will be worth pennies on the dollar in three years.
Now look at what's happening inside Athene:
$74.2 billion in US reserves but $217 billion in assets have been shifted to a Bermuda-based captive insurer, outside normal US regulatory oversight.
$103 billion of that portfolio (roughly 35%) is classified as Level 3 assets. That means there is no observable market price.
These assets are valued by internal models, not by actual markets.
And sitting on top of all those unpriced assets? 16.6x leverage.
If you're getting flashbacks to 2008, you should be.
Back then it was mortgages bundled into securities that nobody understood, sold to investors who had no idea what they were holding, rated as safe by agencies that never looked under the hood.
Today it's GPU-backed securities. Computer chips bundled into structured credit instruments, routed through an offshore insurance subsidiary, and sold to you as a retirement product.
The collateral is 100,000 GPUs leased to a single customer through an xAI subsidiary. If xAI stops making lease payments for any reason - financial distress, a pivot in strategy, anything - the entire structure unravels.
And Nvidia releases new architectures every year, so each generation delivers dramatically more compute per watt. A 5 year lease on technology that's obsolete in 2 years creates a mismatch that should terrify every annuity holder in America.
Every single step in this chain is technically legal. The SPV is legal, the lease is legal, Nvidia's equity stake is legal, the securitization is legal, and the Bermuda transfer is legal.
But legality and legitimacy are not the same thing.
I've seen every trick Wall Street has ever pulled in my 45 years of doing this.
And what I'm looking at right now is a pipeline that takes AI infrastructure risk, launders it through 8 layers of financial engineering, and deposits it in the retirement accounts of Americans who never agreed to fund Elon Musk's data centers.
In 2008 it was mortgage-backed securities.
In 2026 it's GPU-backed securities.
Different asset. Same greed. With the same ending.
There are a lot of dog owners in cities who are essentially mentally torturing their dog by keeping them in apartments. No, your 30 minutes of walking a day and once-a-week dog park visit do not make up for the rest of the time.
I used to use aluminum foil any time I lined a pan in the oven. But food would stick, the foil would tear, and half the time it leaked. In the past 6-12 months I've become a parchment supremacist.
Bacon? Parchment paper
French fries? Parchment
Chicken tenders? Parchment
Shrimp? You guessed it, parchment
Literally anything I'd cook in the oven where I would line the pan for easier cleanup, I'll now toss a sheet of parchment paper down. It's cheaper than aluminum foil and is heat safe to around 400-425F. The food slides right off of it, and you can toss it in the trash when you're done.
You can get a multi-pack of large boxes at your local club store for around $10-15, but I've found the stuff that Sam's club sells to be the best on price and quality.
Are you still using aluminum foil or have you converted to parchment?