Warren Phear

Son, Husband, Dad, Granpa, Retired, Vet, Liberal

[Pradeep Pandey @Div_pradeep]

97% of iPhone users never touch Camera settings.

Which means 97% are shooting with settings that make photos look worse than they should.

I changed 5 of them last week.

My photos instantly looked more professional.

Here is what I changed:

[Joe G @EastEndJoe]

Here’s what really happened.

[Aria Westcott @AriaWestcott]

My iPhone was hot, slow, and lagging on everything. I was already pricing out a new one.

A repair shop owner took it, swiped through four screens, and handed it back.

"Your phone is fine. Four settings are choking it. I see them every day."

Here is what he changed:

[Murray Rothbard @MurraySuggests]

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began.

The not-war began because Iran had uranium that was totally, completely, beautifully obliterated, so they can’t build the nuclear bomb they weren’t building, which is why the United States had to start the not-war it definitely didn’t start.

Now the United States, which has nuclear weapons, is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for countries with nuclear weapons to allow other countries to have.

If the United States saw the United States doing what the United States does in other countries, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

[Iqra @AiWithIqra]

I hadn't slept a full night in 3 months.

Melatonin. Magnesium. Meditation apps. Nothing worked.

A friend pushed me to see a sleep doctor. I expected blood tests, a sleep study, maybe a CPAP referral.

He didn't even look at me.

He looked at my iPhone and said:

"There are 3 settings turned ON right now keeping your brain awake at 3 AM. 9 out of 10 patients I see have the same 3 toggles."

Me: "So my own iPhone is the thing keeping me awake?"

He didn't answer.

Here's everything he showed me (save this, your sleep depends on it):

[George Noble @gnoble79]

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.

[Canada Hates Trump @AntiTrumpCanada]

This remains one of the few times a journalist stood up to the orange fascist with a simple question: “Do you regret all the lying you've done to the American people?"
~ S.V. Dáte, HuffPost correspondent

[Acyn @Acyn]

Trump: Nobody's allowed to fix their car. They gave a man 7 years in jail actually because he fixed his own car, so I thought we'd do something about that. Can you believe it ?

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is so insanely corrupt, I can’t even believe it.

More than half the donors to Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom just won over $50 billion in new federal contracts in six months.

And here’s the part that should make your blood boil.

Sixteen of these 27 donors were facing federal enforcement actions, antitrust reviews, labor cases, securities charges. Many of those cases have been quietly dropped or scaled back since Trump took office. You write a check, your legal problems disappear. That’s not a coincidence.

The White House won’t even release the full donor list. They’re hiding it on purpose, because daylight is the one thing pay-to-play can’t survive. A federal judge already ruled ballroom construction has to stop until Congress authorizes it.

Government is supposed to serve the people, not auction itself off to the highest bidder. When access goes to whoever pays the most, working families always end up paying the price.

We either end the corruption, or the corruption will end us.

https://t.co/4MGFzSseFl

[Warren Phear @warrenphear]

@stuwhitney Doeden at least hitched his wagon to the fading maga cult hero. Dusty tried playing both ends against the middle. In three weeks trymps cult will be DOA because of $5.0O a gallon gas. Rhoden will kick Doedens butt because of it.

[Mark @Mark4XX]

ART BERMAN'S BASE CASE: OIL SPIKES TO $160 THEN STABILIZES PERMANENTLY AT $110

Petroleum geologist Art Berman built a probability model for the current oil crisis that rejects political theater and quick deals. He treats every forecast as a distribution of outcomes because the situation has no historical precedent. His base case carries the highest weight and it points to a permanent break from the energy world of 2025.

ART BERMAN'S PROBABILITY MODEL

➡️ He maps best case, base case, and worst case scenarios instead of offering single predictions because no one can know the exact path through unprecedented disruption.
➡️ The best case assumes a perfect deal by early June yet still delivers only 50 percent of normal flows by the end of 2026 due to demining, insurance delays, and weeks of tanker queuing.
➡️ Even that optimistic path leaves three quarters of 2026 operating under severely reduced energy supplies with catastrophic economic consequences.

THE BASE CASE THAT DRIVES EVERYTHING

➡️ Iran has no incentive to ever fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz and will likely maintain control indefinitely.
➡️ Restarting shut-in production faces massive lags from damaged reservoirs, lost investment confidence, and infrastructure that may never fully recover.
➡️ The global system faces irreversible change with no realistic path back to 2025 economic conditions.

THE OIL PRICE PROJECTION

➡️ In the realistic base case oil prices will almost certainly spike into the 150 to 160 dollar per barrel range by summer.
➡️ Extreme prices trigger demand destruction that pulls Brent back down to around 100 to 105 dollars.
➡️ Prices then slowly rise and stabilize in the 105 to 115 dollar per barrel range through 2027 and likely beyond.

WHY THIS SHOCK IS 60 TO 99 TIMES FASTER

➡️ The rate of supply loss is 60 to 99 times faster than the greatest previous oil shocks in recorded history.
➡️ No rapid solutions like vaccines or policy reversals exist this time to cushion the blow.
➡️ Inventories have masked the crisis so far but those savings are running out fast and the full impact is coming.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Art Berman's model shows the world just suffered its greatest energy blunder in modern history by jeopardizing the entire global economy with one move.

Oil will spike hard then settle into a permanently higher range because the old supply system is broken beyond repair.

#OilPrices #ArtBerman #EnergyCrisis #OilShock #HormuzBlockade #DemandDestruction #NewOilNormal
HT: YouTube @PalisadesRadio @aeberman12

[Merajul Hasan @jusslaugh1]

@KobeissiLetter Trump has won this war 7 times.

He’s negotiated a peace settlement 12 times.

And he’s opened the Strait of Hormuz at least 4 times.

What more do you want from him?

[Boston Smalls @smalls2672]

This needs to be played everywhere 24/7

[Kathleen Winchell ❤️🤍💙🇺🇸🇺🇸 @KathleenWinche3]

For some Friday funny! 🐱🐶😂

[Matthew LaBosco @matthew_labosco]

High cortisol is the real reason you wake up at 3-4 AM.

It also shaves 5 years off your life — tanks testosterone, locks belly fat, literally shrinks your brain.

If I wanted to fix it without medication, here are 8 things I'd do every day:

1. No food 3 hours before bed.

[Warren Phear @warrenphear]

@Rossputin @Costco I get my exec membership fee and then some back with our 5% back on gas which is already 5% lower than anywhere else.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

If this deal with Iran is real, I will welcome it because every day this insane war goes on, America gets weaker. The priority is to end the war - now.

But make no mistake: these are Iran’s terms. Our nation emerges humiliated.

1/ A 🧵 on what we know about the deal right now.

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇺🇸 The most expensive House primary in U.S. history just ended, and Thomas Massie lost.

Fuentes: It wasn't a battle between Ed Gallrein and Thomas Massie. It was a battle between the Israel lobby and America First.

[Ed Krassenstein @EdKrassen]

JD Vance really just said this:

"What I would propose is something very simple, that if you are willing to turn the page on Joe Biden's law fair, why don't we prosecute people? Very simple principle. Why don't we prosecute people who violate the law? Let's not prosecute people because they said the wrong thing, or because they had the wrong political candidate, or because they had the wrong viewpoint. And I think part of that, part of turning the page on that, is to actually ensure the real victims of that law fair receive some compensation."

I think James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton, Mark Kelly, Jason Crow, Adam Schiff, Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, and John Brennan would like to have a word.