The UN has announced it will need to cut $500m from their 2026 budget and will lay off 20% of its staff as it struggles to cope with a massive reduction in funding by the Trump administration.  Trump has eliminated at least $1 billion in total funding from the UN.  

The plan is likely to involve an initial minimum 3,000 job cuts out of a 35,000-strong main workforce, with eventual job losses at around 7,000. The overall UN core or regular budget would be cut from $3.7bn to about $3.2bn next year. It means reductions of 15.1% in resources and 18.8% in posts in the regular budget compared with the 2025 budget.

Despite the funding losses, UN Secretary General António Guterres continues to press ahead with his new “pact for the future” focusing on artificial intelligence and policies for sustainable development.  The UN is now looking for alternative funding for their operations, though, it is unlikely they will be able to fill the void left by US cuts.  Most countries have no interest in paying more; the reliance has been entirely on Americans for generations.

Critics of the Trump Administration argue that distancing the US from the UN will lead to disaster.  They claim that in the aftermath of World War I, the failure of the United States to join the League of Nations (supported by elitist President Woodrow Wilson) was a contributing factor to the outbreak of World War II. 

In reality, the League of Nations and the UN are precursors to global centralization.  Widespread war has always been the excuse used to push individual nations into greater compliance with globalist ideologies.  The end goal is ultimately to erase nation states and citizen governance altogether.  Just as the European Union is run by a gaggle of faceless and unaccountable bureaucrats, a “global union” would be operated in the same fashion. 

War is an acceptable risk, because separate nations and cultures help to prevent homogenized global tyranny.

Global organizations have only brought the US public misery in recent years through universal pandemic mandates and multiculturalist agendas that lead to mass immigration from the third world.  The UN has been the spearhead for “climate change” regulations around the world, from carbon emissions taxation to population control.  Man-made climate change claims have been largely debunked in recent years and the public is waking up to the reality that carbon emissions have little or nothing to do with changing temperatures. 

Faith in the UN’s purpose is dying, and their humanitarian efforts look more and more like a cover for a group that wants power and control more than it want’s what’s best for the public.  It’s difficult to defend the idea of taxpayer dollars continuing to pay for their operations.

As Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, argues: “The postwar global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us.”

The US government has made no secret of its intention to considerably reduce America’s engagement with international institutions. The White House has already announced withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).  It has also declared it will no longer fund the UN Relief and Works Agency or the UN Human Rights Council.

A 180-day review of participation in international organizations, originally due in early August, is to suggest more organizations to leave.  The funding cuts expose a startling level of dependency within global organizations and foreign government.  How much of the world feeds on American taxpayers?  Too much.  

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About… Everything

I haven’t really been active on Facebook since the COVID era when it became pretty obvious to me that most of the people I grew up with or went to college turned into authority addicts and were thoroughly brainwashed by mainstream agitprop.

They’re still like that today…

…and they seem to buy it hook-line-and-sinker.

Libertarian podcaster Tom Woods, used to put out mini e-books titled “Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About….”, and he’d fill it in with whatever the lemmings are up in arms about at the time: vaccines, mask mandates, gun control, whatever.

I’d been marvelling at just how dead the Facebook/Meta platform has become since the COVID years. Like tumbleweeds, really.

But over the past few months I had been posting a bit more there, but was trying to keep the politics out of it (like many, I’m a long-time sufferer of outrage-fatigue).

All that changed when Charlie Kirk was assassinated and the reaction from “the left” was just so appalling and indefensible that I got more vocal about it in my feed.

It was a mistake, and I ended up creating a couple of long-running comment threads and getting piled-on by people I knew in high school, or college or my early tech days in Toronto.

They started wearing me down with increasingly deranged and nonsensical talking points that seemingly came straight out of an Antifa 101 pamphlet.

A former bandmate sent me a private message featuring some “anti-hate expert” (a dude dressed up as a woman) lecturing me on why Charlie Kirk had it coming…

Another guy from my high school started comment bombing every post with 40 or 50 anti-Trump memes and multi-paragraph rants in ALL CAPS that ended with YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.

Fucking. Unhinged.

A couple nights ago I finally realized what I was doing to myself and deleted those threads (and blocked the comment bomber). I feel a little sheepish that it took me nearly a week to realize that I too, had been caught up in The Loser’s Game: arguing politics with my hometown friends on social media.

When you spend your time and mental energy on Facebook, getting sucked into emotionally charged political debates, trying to convince people you don’t really know anymore, can’t influence, and wouldn’t deal with in real life, you’re not just wasting time—you’re handing your life force over to people who are in all practical measures, losers.

(How can I say that these people are losers? Because they are wasting their lives arguing on Facebook. And as long as I participate in those arguments, then I’m being a loser, too).

The above is a screen grab from one of my favourite books of all time: Stop Being A Loser. I laughed out loud when I read it as I spliced it into this post, but it was also bittersweet, because I realized it was talking about me.

But I can’t help but notice that Social platforms like Facebook, Reddit and Bluesky have become breeding grounds for collectivist berserkers, and sundry boot-lickers.

They spend their days revelling in miserabilism, and they are quick to swarm anyone violating the boundaries of their groupthink.

I’ve also noticed that they take special exception toward anybody with independent thought or exercising personal agency.

Thank-you, Time Magazine

The single greatest heresy you can commit in our current collectivist zeitgeist, is to believe, or worse, demonstrate, that you can improve your own life without the mediation or intervention of The State.

Pyrrhic Victory & Opportunity Cost

Imagine you spend 45 minutes, or a couple of hours – arguing with some jerk you knew in Grade 10, who you never hung out with then, and you have never even thought about since. He insists Charlie Kirk’s assassin was a MAGA extremist and the real martyr of the day is Jimmie Kimmel.

You go back and forth with him over the course of a few days, weeks even, …and then, you actually bring him around to your point. You’ve won! Right?

Well… actually…

You’ve wasted the better part of an entire working day (or more) converting one, single, low importance, inconsequential NPC around an issue that even you are going to stop thinking about as much in a few days, weeks or months from now.

In that same time you could have:

• written a pitch deck that will bring in a 7-digit investment to one of your business ventures

• knocked out a blog post that racks up over 100K views and adds 500 new subscribers to your email list

• created a new email sequence that brings in a steady trickle new customers to one of your websites, every day, every week, forever

• optimized one of your conversion funnels and doubled your ROI

• fixed that software bug that was costing you $50K a year

• interviewed enough people to find that next great hire

• read through about a half-dozen 10-Qs of companies, one of which could 100X over the next decade

But you didn’t do any of those things.

You spent all that time and wasted all that energy arguing with someone you don’t really care about, whose intellect is too crude to digest anything that demands critical analysis anyway. They have Type 1 TDS and they’re well beyond Stage 4 (terminal brain worms).

If you really wanted to spend all that time on a single person, you would have been better off taking your spouse or kids on a special day trip – something you’ll actually remember, with people you genuinely care about.

Instead, you forfeited all that, it’s called opportunity cost – and these are all just examples of the kinds of opportunities playing The Loser’s Game has cost you: endlessly arguing with knuckle-dragging retards on a social platform infested with people who envy and loathe high agency people on principle.

As WOPR, the 1970’s-era super-computer finally figured out in the classic flick of our youth, War Games: the best strategy is not to play.

Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I have been playing The Loser’s Game. Arguing with people on social media about issues they’ve already made up their minds about anyway.

Connecting The Dots

General semantics is the discipline that studies how language and symbols influence human thought and behavior, and how our abstract representations of reality can distort our perceptions of it.

In his seminal work on the topic, The Book of Radical General Semantics, Gad Horowitz give us the metaphor of the dots:

Christopher Mayer on William O’Hanlon’s “The Reality of Reality”

(I read it as cited in Chris Mayers’ “How Do You Know?“)

In the 4×6 grid on the left each of those dots represents a “fact”.

As you can see, you can gather together a collection of “facts”, a group of happenings nobody disputes and are objectively real in terms of “they happened”.

But there are innumerable ways to “connect the dots”, which is surmising or assessing how all these separate, objective facts relate to each other.

And this makes a HUGE difference.

There’s a reason I bring this up here.

The Great Bifurcation, revisited.

There are two types of people:

Most people have a tendency to connect the observed dots using one path, and in their minds, that path is the only valid pattern to connect the dots.

That path becomes their Truth. Any other pathway that can also connect those very same dots is heresy, conspiracy, hate speech, denialism or some other manner of thought crime.

Some people (fewer in number) understand that there are numerous possible explanations of how the observed facts could relate to each other.

Even more important, is that the most probable path (the obvious one) is not necessarily the most accurate, nor is the most agreed-upon path (consensus-driven). Those paths could be inaccurate, and by “inaccurate”, what I really mean is wrong.

The difference between these two types of people is cognitive. The latter have access to an additional layer of mental abstraction that the former don’t even comprehend exists.

And those are the people I’ve been arguing with on social media.

I’ve written in the past about The Great Bifurcation – which was originally about wealth inequality, and I thought that would be a bad enough problem in our collective future.

Lately I’ve come to understand it primarily as a cognitive gap.

The human race is splitting into two completely different species – a la Morlocks and Elohim, and the barrier between them isn’t money. It’s the level of mental abstraction the individuals are capable of functioning at.

W R Clement’s book, Quantum Jump, a favourite of mine that I often to refer to, ascribes the entire Enlightenment and ensuing Scientific Revolution to the discovery of perspective (a.k.a “God’s Space”) in Medieval art.

Something similar is happening today – with the advent of cyberspace and the phenomenon of non-linearity.

This has all kinds of knock-on effects, not the least of which is the accelerating acceleration in the rate of change (tachyosis or hyper-acceleration).

Most people, are ngmi. And their inability to cognitively function at the faster-paced, non-linear levels of mental abstraction induces a kind of psychosis (“Future Shock“).

Connecting The Dots

Back to the dots that comprise reality:

Just by way of example, here’s three different pathways through the dots around the objective event of Charlie Kirk’s assassination:

1. The generally confirmed consensus view that Kirk was murdered by a kid from a Republican family who had been radicalized into far-left ideology, mostly acting alone, but amongst far-left groups who may have had foreknowledge of the plan.

2. This one was emailed to me by a reader: Charlie Kirk was a crisis actor, the death was faked, here’s proof (followed by a link to a 45 minute frame-by-frame video analysis of the ripple in his shirt as the bullet struck)

I’ll throw out another one that actually keeps intruding into my thoughts:

3. The Kirk assassination was a Reichstag Fire moment—carried out by entrenched MAGA operatives who may have also staged the July 13, 2024 attempt on Trump in order to manufacture a crisis, catalyze public reaction, and install an authoritarian “solution.” Standard Hegelian dialectic.

This was the moment that put Trump back into the White House.
Could it have been orchestrated?

All three lines connect the same observed dots. Which is correct?

I have no idea, and neither do you.

Beyond a few first principles—like “don’t murder people,” “everyone gets free speech,” and that a talk show host losing his job isn’t more tragic than a young man getting his head blown off in public —the rest is just hamster wheels in our heads.

Which is why the best use of your time and energy is focusing on what you can control, like how you respond to life events and focus on what’s actually within reach: honing your craft, developing your innate talents, expanding your skills, and deepening your relationships. That’s where the leverage flips and you gain more than you lose.

That is playing the winner’s game.

Of all the truly successful people that you know – how often do you observe them screeching or engaging in high-tension political histrionics on social media?

The most successful people I know don’t even have Facebook accounts. Their socials, if they have any, are run by interns.

The eminent computer pioneer Jaron Lanier once put out an entire book on “10 Reasons why we should all delete our social media accounts“. Reason number one is “it turns you into an asshole”.

I have been guilty of playing The Loser’s Game.

(As comedian Cathy Ladman once put it, “Some of these I do, just for me”)

It’s time to get back to work.

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As Germany marks 35 years of reunification on October 3, some depopulated eastern towns are offering “trial-living” schemes: several weeks of super-cheap housing to attract new residents, according to Yahoo/AFP.

Participants pay just €100 a week, and in towns like Guben, flats can be rented for only €5–7 per square meter.

One of the newcomers is kindergarten teacher Weslawa Goeller, 50, from Mainz, who is testing life in Guben with her toddler. At first, she said, “Since I arrived, I feel like I never see anyone.” But she’s warming to its pace: “It’s green and quiet,” and with free childcare, “I could easily work here as an educator.” Still, she admits, “Old trees like me are hard to uproot. But I might decide to move here.”

Yahoo/AFP writes that Guben’s population has dropped from 31,000 in 1990 to 16,000 today, despite its slogan, “A town where people stay.” Like much of the east, it never recovered fully from the collapse of state industries after 1989. Researcher Tim Leibert warns the demographic decline could become “a bomb for the German economy,” with the east projected to lose up to 16% of its population in 20 years.

Some, however, embrace the quiet. Anika Franze, 38, left the “Berlin party scene” for Guben and now works on the trial-living initiative. She calls the scheme “a very modern concept, a bit like a 30-day right of return.”

Project head Kerstin Geilich, 61, recalls the economic trauma of the 1990s but says conditions have improved with jobs in factories and healthcare. Still, “It’s hard to make (people) understand that you can find a good job here today.”

Other towns are following suit. Eisenhuettenstadt, built in 1950 as East Germany’s steel hub, has lost half its population since reunification. Mayor Frank Balzer calls it “the tragedy of the 1990s.”

IT consultant Melanie Henninger, visiting from Bremen, is considering a move: “I would like to contribute to society here, for example by training older people in digital technology.” She adds, “I try not to have any preconceptions… I have to give this place a chance.”

Authored by Guy Birchall via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Most Europeans would be unwilling to take a pay cut to work from home, according to a European Central Bank (ECB) survey published on Sept. 25.

The portion of eurozone workers aged 20 to 64, who are not self-employed and at least partially working from home, has doubled from 11.7 percent in 2019 to 22.4 percent in 2024, according to data from Eurostat.

The survey found that 33.6 percent of employees reported working from home at least two days per week since May 2024.

According to figures from the ECB, the majority of workers in the Eurozone, 55.7 percent, still do not work from home.

Hybrid working, or operating between home and workplace, was the most common form of arrangement for the 44.4 percent of people who do at least some remote work.

Of those hybrid workers, 11.9 percent signed in from home one day a week, and 21.9 percent for between two and four days a week.

Some 10.6 percent of respondents worked entirely remotely.

“Overall, a hybrid working pattern appears to be the preferred remote working option, with most hybrid workers (84 percent) expressing satisfaction with their current arrangement,” the ECB said.

“Interestingly, 43 percent of employees who work fully remotely would prefer to spend fewer days working away from the office. This suggests that remote working may be driven more by necessity or employer requirements than by preference.”

The ECB survey also found that 70 percent of employees would not be willing to accept any pay cut to either continue or begin working from home.

Of those who would accept a reduction in remuneration, it found that 13 percent would take a pay cut of between 1 percent and 5 percent, and 8 percent would accept a reduction of between 6 percent and 10 percent.

“The average pay cut that employees would accept to work two or three days per week from home is 2.6 percent,” the ECB said.

“This is significantly lower than other estimates in the empirical literature.”

Other analyses it cited included a survey of German workers in 2024, which found they would be willing to accept a reduction of 7.7 percent of their pay to work fully remotely.

Another survey of workers in the United States tech sector said some would accept a cut of 25 percent in their pay packets for a remote position instead of an in-person role.

The ECB found that employees who work from home more frequently would be willing to accept a higher pay cut to preserve their current arrangement, but that cut was only of 4.6 percent.

The survey also found that younger workers were more likely to value the ability to work from home, as were employees with children or those who had long commutes.

Alongside this, the ECB found that other factors such as income, education level, and gender seemed to have little impact on the value workers placed on flexible working.

European Union leaders are mulling a joint “drone wall” to boost Europe’s defenses, according to European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier from Brussels.

He previewed that EU Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius will participate in meeting representatives of seven frontline EU member states, listed as Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania – as cited in Bloomberg. The Ukrainian government is also expected to send representatives to the meeting.

It comes after earlier this month there were several alleged breaches of NATO members’ airspace by Russian drones or jets. Also, NATO’s ‘eastern flank’ countries have grown more and more alarmed.

The September 9th Polish instance was the most serious, given Warsaw accused Russia of intentionally sending a ‘wave’ of drones – up to 19 – which resulted in its military urgently scrambling jets to track them.

Following this, there was a Russian drone which was tracked by Romanian fighter jets, before it went back into Ukrainian airspace.

But the Estonian instance has been the most interesting and controversial, given the wildly contrasting narratives being presented.

The Estonian foreign ministry had described that three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets “entered Estonian airspace without permission and remained there for a total of 12 minutes.”

With the publication of a map by the Estonian Ministry of Defense which purports to show the breach and Russian flight path, some pundits have argued the jets were only in the country’s exclusive economic zone for fishing. But others have said that the jets violated airspace within 12 miles from the coastline, making it an incursion into Estonia’s sovereign territory.

Here is a map regarding Estonian airspace violation by 🇷🇺.
🔹 The violation took place over the Gulf of Finland.
🔹 The 3x MiG-31 flew parallel to the 🇪🇪 state border from east to west and entered 🇪🇪 airspace to a depth of less than 10 km.
🔹 NATO🇮🇹 fighters escorted them out. pic.twitter.com/Df7pdPltbt

— MoD Estonia (@MoD_Estonia) September 20, 2025

Regardless, European officials are denouncing the “brazen” violation, and are pushing for greater EU/NATO anti-air defense initiatives to protect against Russia.

Moscow has rejected the charges, instead saying via the defense ministry and state media:

In a brief statement on Saturday, the Defense Ministry said three MiG-31s were conducting a routine flight from Karelia Region, east of Finland, to an airfield in Kaliningrad Region, a Russian exclave bordering Poland and Lithuania.

The jets flew over the neutral waters of the Baltic Sea, more than 3 kilometers from Estonia’s Vaindloo island, “without violating Estonian airspace,” the MOD said.

“The flight was carried out in strict accordance with international airspace regulations and without crossing the borders of other countries,” the ministry added.

This has not convinced Estonia or its allies, with Prime Minister Kristen Michal saying “NATO’s response to any provocation must be united and strong. We consider it essential to consult with our allies to ensure shared situational awareness and to agree on our next joint steps” – in reference to consultations over Article 4.

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

Banning the AfD, more “statistically conspicuous” deaths of its candidates, and even a repeat of the Romanian scenario can’t be ruled out as the nationalist opposition continues growing in popularity…

A poll from publicly financed German media revealed that the AfD once again ties the ruling CDU in popularity at 26% each, which Euractiv evaluated as proving its staying power. They also assessed that their tripling of support in North Rhine-Westphalia’s latest elections, Germany’s most populous state, to 14.5% “emphasized the party’s increasingly national base.” This is in spite of media smears, namely that it’s backed by the Kremlin and extremist, and the “statistically conspicuous” death of seven candidates.

The AfD’s surging support across Germany can be attributed to the unofficial recession that Germany entered in 2022 after complying with US pressure to sanction Russia in solidarity with Ukraine and from which it’s still struggling to recover. Simply put, cutting off reliable access to low-cost energy raised prices across the board, which reduced the competitiveness of German companies and led to economic malaise. This unfolded in parallel with the government taking on more of a “liberal-totalitarian” form.

A growing number of Germans therefore naturally gravitated towards the only real alternative political force that had emerged in the country by then, which was made all the more attractive by its pragmatic approach to the Ukrainian Conflict. At this point, the West can no longer win (hitherto officially considered the restoration of Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders but recently described by Zelensky as Ukraine simply continuing to exist), all that it can do is reach a deal with Russia or risk its client state’s full defeat.

The AfD favors a compromise that paves the way for resuming Germany’s import of Russian gas while the ruling elite want to perpetuate the proxy war as proven by their latest pledge of €9 billion to Ukraine through 2026. The first’s policy would restore the strength of the German economy and consequently its pre-conflict social spending levels whereas the second would perpetuate economic malaise while enriching those who invest in the military-industrial complex and worsening corruption in Ukraine.

Circling back to Euractiv’s article, they concluded on the note that “Merz doesn’t face national elections until 2029, but the AfD are eyeing a number of regional elections next year, including votes in two eastern states where the far right have been holding clear leads in the polls.” While early elections are possible, just like the ones in February that brought Chancellor Friedrich Merz to power and in which the AfD shocked the establishment by coming second, the elite probably won’t risk them (at least not yet).

They won’t want to take the chance that the AfD wins and there’s still more work to be done in engineering the elections whenever they’re eventually held, whether in 2029 or earlier. This could take the form of banning the AfD on extremist pretexts or more of its candidates might fall victim to more “statistically conspicuous” deaths by then. A repeat of the Romanian scenario whereby politically inconvenient electoral results are annulled on unsubstantiated foreign meddling pretexts is also possible.

One way or another, the ruling elite are expected to continue resisting the winds of change that were unleashed by their own policies and are now sweeping across the country, especially those towards Russia that sabotaged the structural strength of the economy. Whether they succeed in keeping AfD leader Alice Weidel out of the chancellorship remains to be seen, but there’s no doubt that her party’s appeal will continue growing since it’s the only one that truly has Germany’s national interests in mind.

Authored by Sylvia Xu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Fertility rates have plummeted worldwide over the past six decades, leading experts to warn of dire consequences as the downward trend continues.

Continued low fertility rates will cause “a gradual implosion of the world’s economy as the population ages and dies,” Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, told The Epoch Times in an email. Mosher is an expert on population control, demography, and China.

“This will not occur overnight, of course, but once it is well underway it will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse course,” he said.

Fertility rates (the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime) are different from birthrates (the number of live births per 1,000 people in a population over a given period), although the terms are related and often used interchangeably.

Countries with low fertility rates are also likely to have low birthrates.

Macroeconomist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde called low fertility rates “the true economic challenge of our time,” in a February report for the American Enterprise Institute.

In 1960, the average woman bore four or five children in her lifetime. By 2023, that number had halved to 2.2, approaching 2.1, the replacement level—or the level at which a population replaces itself from one generation to the next.

In July, the U.S. Census Bureau projected that the world’s population will reach 8.1 billion this year. Experts say although the figure has grown from 3 billion in 1960, the number to watch is the pace of population growth.

The bureau stated that “the rate of growth peaked decades ago in the 1960s and has been declining since and is projected to continue declining.”

Fernández-Villaverde warned that while the sagging rate of growth may not have immediate consequences, in less than half a century, declining fertility will impact the world economy. Countries with low or negative birthrates will contend with a shrinking workforce and the ballooning costs associated with an aging population.

Global Fertility Rates

Only about 4 percent of the world’s population reside in a country with a high fertility rate—more than five children per woman—and all of those nations are in Africa, the Census Bureau noted. Even in those countries, fertility rates are generally lower than they once were.

The bureau reported that nearly three-quarters of the world’s population live in countries where fertility rates are at or below the replacement level.

The fertility rate in India, the world’s most populous country, has steadily declined over the past six decades. In June, the UN Population Fund reported that India’s fertility rate stood at 1.9 children per woman, down from five or six children in 1960.

In 1990, China’s fertility rate was 2.51, despite its one child policy. By 2023, it had dropped to less than one birth per woman, according to the United Nation’s population division.

In the United States, fertility has undergone a persistent decline. It fell below the replacement level in 1972 and reached 1.62 in 2023, a historic low.

Asian and European countries have the lowest fertility rates in the world, and South Korea (0.72), Singapore (0.97), Ukraine (0.977), and China (0.999) all have rates below one.

Across much of Europe, North America, and Eastern Asia, fertility rates have fallen below replacement level.

Looking Back to the ‘60s

In the Western world, the decline in fertility rates that began in the 1960s coincided with the advent of oral contraception, the legalization of abortion, and the widespread adoption of no-fault divorce.

In the United States, the first oral contraceptive was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960. Within five years, the birth rate in the United States had already declined “substantially,” a report from the National Fertility Study indicated. By 1976, the U.S. fertility rate had fallen to a record low of 1.7.

In 1973, abortion became legal in the United States following the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. At the time, a handful of other countries had also legalized abortion, including the UK, Norway, and Singapore.

The United States’ decision was followed by several countries including Denmark, South Korea, France, West Germany, New Zealand, Italy, and the Netherlands. Today, only 22 countries completely ban abortion.

Read the rest here…

Oh, and…

Submitted by Brent Johnson, courtesy of MacroAlchemist.com

Investor Euphoria & The Anatomy of a Market Crash

Executive Summary

Markets move in cycles of innovation and speculation, and the present surge in artificial intelligence is no exception.

Today’s AI boom displays nearly all the features that have defined past bubbles—soaring valuations, concentrated flows of capital, euphoric investor sentiment, and media narratives that reinforce expectations of unstoppable growth. By most measures, the parallels extend beyond resemblance: the speculative fervor around AI rivals and in many ways exceeds the South Sea Bubble, the 1840s railway mania, the 1920s boom, the dot-com era, and the subprime mortgage frenzy.

At the center of the storm lies a combustible mix of genuine technological promise, abundant liquidity, and human psychology. Investors see the potential for world-changing transformation, credit remains accessible enough to fuel risk-taking, and fear of missing out drives behavior to extremes.

The result is an environment where both startups and established firms are valued as though flawless execution, relentless hypergrowth, and immediate mass adoption were inevitable.

Such assumptions are unsustainable.

Every historical bubble has revealed the danger of expectations drifting too far from reality. In the late 1990s, the mantra was that profits no longer mattered; today, many AI firms are projecting revenues and margins based on unproven scenarios.

When the gap between projections and actual results grows wide, the risks compound. Financial losses are the most visible outcome, but history shows that misconduct often follows. From the railway booms of the 19th century to Enron, WorldCom, and the more recent mortgage excesses, periods of extreme optimism have created fertile ground for creative accounting, misrepresentation, and fraud.

The warning signs are well known.

Extreme valuations relative to tangible earnings, heavy concentration of capital in a handful of celebrated winners, and the easy availability of venture funding or leverage all raise systemic risk. The proliferation of complex financial products magnifies fragility, turning small disruptions into cascading stress events.

And as always, the insistence that “this time is different” echoes loudly in the background, emboldening herd behavior while discouraging sober analysis.

When both retail and institutional investors chase momentum trades rather than fundamentals, the system edges closer to its breaking point.

History also offers a guide to navigating these environments.

Investors who wish to participate in innovation without being consumed by its excesses must apply a disciplined, historically informed framework. This means challenging assumptions behind valuations, scrutinizing profit projections, monitoring leverage and liquidity conditions, and examining whether business models are robust enough to withstand shocks.

It also means cultivating behavioral awareness—recognizing that FOMO, herd instincts, and narrative intoxication can overwhelm even the most seasoned decision-makers.

Perhaps most critically, vigilance against aggressive accounting or unrealistic guidance is essential, since the incentives for embellishment grow strongest in speculative peaks.

This study is not written from a position of permanent pessimism. It is a general exploration of the anatomy of market crashes, designed to provide a framework for understanding why speculative cycles form and how they unwind.

At the same time, it is timely. The conditions we observe today suggest that a sharp correction is not a distant possibility but a near-term risk.

And our goal is not to preach fear.

Rather, it is to help prepare readers for the rogue waves that history tells us appear just when the waters seem calmest. We believe extraordinary opportunities will emerge once excesses are flushed from the system, but to capture them, investors must first survive the volatility that lies ahead.

The sections that follow build upon this foundation, beginning with the AI boom itself. As the most vivid present-day example of innovation colliding with speculation, it provides a live case study of how opportunity and risk entwine, setting the stage for both painful collapse and enduring renewal.

Background

Financial markets have always swung between fear & greed, moments of stability & episodes of mania.

Crashes are rarely a product of truly unforeseen shocks; more often, they are the inevitable outcome of long stretches of investor euphoria. These euphoric phases are characterized by an intoxicating mix of extreme optimism, soaring valuations, the easy availability of credit, and the conviction that some new technological or economic paradigm justifies abandoning the lessons of history.

In hindsight, signals of excess usually appear glaring. But in the moment, investors, institutions, and even regulators are lulled by persuasive narratives and the apparent reliability of ever-rising prices.

This paper examines the anatomy of such euphoric cycles. It explores the conditions that allow optimism to grow unchecked, the signals that can be seen in real time, the distortions that only reveal themselves after collapse, and the enduring lessons investors can carry forward.

Historical examples ranging from tulip mania to the dot-com boom to the SPAC frenzy of 2021, paired with data on valuations, leverage, IPOs, and liquidity, provide the lens through which we analyze how manias build, why they unravel, and how disciplined investors can prepare for their aftermath.

Conditions That Breed Euphoria

Euphoria tends to be powered by three main elements:

1. Inflated valuations.
2. Abundant credit.
3. And a compelling narrative of progress.

Valuation is the most immediate signal. Robert Shiller’s CAPE ratio offers a century-long view of how earnings multiples expand during speculative eras.

In 1929, CAPE rose above 32 before collapsing to 5 in the depths of the Depression. In 2000, at the height of the dot-com bubble, it touched 44—a record that stood until today’s era, when CAPE once again surged into the high-30s.
Each peak was followed by years, even decades, of muted returns.

Elevated valuations may not trigger an instant collapse, but they reliably compress long-run forward returns, leaving markets vulnerable to sudden shifts in sentiment.

Credit availability provides the second engine.

Liquidity supplied by banks, shadow lenders, or central banks amplifies speculation. Margin debt offers a stark illustration: it reached $278 billion in March 2000, $381 billion in July 2007, and $935 billion in October 2021, before topping $1 trillion in the current cycle. Each surge coincided with a wave of risk-taking; each retracement magnified losses as forced selling cascaded through the system.

The third element is narrative.

Bubbles are rarely built on nothing; they are anchored in genuine shifts. Railroads in the nineteenth century, electrification and automobiles in the early twentieth, the internet in the 1990s, and AI and cryptocurrencies in the 2020s all provided credible visions of boundless growth. Yet markets consistently priced these innovations with unrealistic speed and scale.

The phrase “this time is different” echoes across every euphoric episode, deployed to rationalize valuations and leverage levels that in calmer times would be dismissed as reckless.

Signals Visible in Real Time

Even at the height of mania, warning signs are visible to those willing to look.

Retail investor surges are a common marker. The 1920s saw households speculating in bucket shops with leveraged stock bets. The 1990s featured day traders armed with online brokerages and chat-room tips. In the 2020s, commission-free apps fueled meme-stock frenzies as millions piled into GameStop, AMC, and other speculative trades.

When investing turns into cultural entertainment, markets are already deep in the euphoric phase.

Issuance is another signal.

Nearly 500 IPOs flooded markets in 1999, many from unprofitable firms. In 2021, more than 1,000 listings, dominated by SPACs, eclipsed even that surge. Such waves demonstrate not only investor appetite but also opportunism by issuers exploiting inflated valuations.

Price patterns often provide confirmation. Parabolic moves—where prices accelerate beyond sustainability—are the classic tell. The NASDAQ between 1998 and 2000, Bitcoin in 2017 and 2021, and certain AI stocks in 2023–2025 all displayed this behavior. Media coverage follows suit, shifting to unrelenting positivity, with stories of overnight millionaires and celebrity endorsements reinforcing the frenzy.

Speculative mania reaches full bloom once it enters the mainstream cultural consciousness.

Liquidity measures add further evidence.

In 2020, U.S. M2 money supply expanded nearly 25% year-on-year—the fastest pace since World War II—fueled by stimulus checks, ultra-low rates, and massive asset purchases. That surge powered booms in equities, crypto, and collectibles. When M2 contracted in 2022, risk assets fell sharply, revealing how dependent euphoria is on the tide of liquidity.

Signals Clearer Only in Hindsight

Other distortions only emerge after collapse.

Cheap capital enables malinvestment: dot-com firms burning through cash on marketing in the late 1990s, SPAC startups of 2020–2021 collapsing once easy funding evaporated. Hidden leverage is another revelation. In 2008, mortgage-backed securities and CDOs concealed systemic exposures; in 2022, crypto lenders failed for similar reasons.
Narratives, too, undergo a dramatic pivot.

During booms, the focus is boundless growth. After crashes, scrutiny shifts to governance, unit economics, and sustainability. The shift from “how big can this get?” to “can this survive?” is the hallmark of reversal.

Accounting misrepresentation is another thread.

Enron remains the archetype: vendor financing, premature revenue recognition, and other tricks prolonged the illusion, until collapse became unavoidable. When Enron fell, it dragged down Arthur Andersen, one of the world’s most prestigious accounting firms, underscoring how far the damage can spread.

Behavioral Dynamics

Beneath these financial patterns lie recurring psychological forces.

Herding compels investors to follow the crowd, reinforcing momentum. Overconfidence convinces traders they will exit before the downturn, even as exposure builds. Narrative bias gives stories of transformation primacy over sober analysis. Risk perception erodes as practices once considered reckless become normalized.

This cycle of behavior repeats with uncanny consistency.

Case Studies in Euphoria

Speculative manias arise when optimism, innovation, and sudden wealth converge to fire the collective imagination — and when easy credit provides the means for everyone to participate.

Each instance has its own cultural markers: tulips in 17th-century Holland, the South Sea schemes in Enlightenment England, radio and automobiles in 1920s America, internet startups at the turn of the millennium, securitized mortgages in the 2000s, and meme stocks during the pandemic era.

Beneath these surface differences lies a common emotional cycle: excitement, enthusiasm, greed, and, eventually, panic.

Tulip Mania (1637)

The Tulip Mania of 1637 is often remembered as the first great financial bubble.

It was never simply about a flower. In the Dutch Golden Age, Amsterdam had become the center of world trade, and merchants, craftsmen, and artisans were enriched by global commerce. Tulips, newly imported from the Ottoman Empire, were prized as luxury goods, their vivid colors and striking patterns caused by mosaic viruses.

To own rare bulbs was to signal both taste and social standing.

Demand soon transformed tulips from status symbols into speculative assets. What made the episode remarkable was how deeply it penetrated Dutch society. Farmers, artisans, and small merchants speculated, often through futures contracts that allowed wagers on bulbs never actually exchanged.

At the peak, a single bulb could trade for more than ten times the annual wage of a skilled worker, with anecdotes of prices rivaling canal-side mansions.

When an ordinary auction failed to draw expected bids, confidence evaporated almost instantly. Prices collapsed, contracts went worthless, and while the Dutch economy absorbed the shock, the episode left an enduring lesson: when prestige and speculation merge, markets can detach from reality.

South Sea Bubble (1720)

The South Sea Bubble of 1720 followed a similar trajectory but with greater institutional weight.

Early-eighteenth-century England was encumbered with war debts, and the South Sea Company proposed an elegant solution: it would assume the national debt in exchange for shares and monopoly rights to trade with Spanish South America. Promoted by politicians and endorsed as virtually risk-free, the scheme sent shares soaring.

Investors ranged from the aristocracy to common citizens, with even the royal family participating. The age of Enlightenment optimism encouraged faith in boundless opportunities, and opportunists launched dozens of copycat ventures — some laughably vague, such as “a company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”

When it became clear that South Sea’s trading prospects were illusory and its debt-conversion model untenable, the bubble collapsed.

Families lost fortunes, public fury mounted, and Parliament was forced to investigate.

The lesson was broader than speculation: it underscored the dangerous interplay between state endorsement, finance, and public trust, a formative moment in British financial history.

1929 Crash

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 captured the euphoric mix of technological innovation, cultural exuberance, and financial leverage.

The 1920s were transformative: automobiles expanded mobility, radios connected homes, and electric appliances revolutionized daily life. Jazz, cinema, and the cultural energy of the decade reinforced the sense that a new era of prosperity was permanent. Corporate profits rose, stock ownership broadened, and margin loans enabled investors to buy shares with borrowed funds.

Newspapers and radio personalities celebrated the market as a one-way ticket to riches.

By 1929, valuations were stretched to extremes, but the cultural conviction in progress drowned out skepticism. When the downturn came, margin calls cascaded into panic selling. The crash marked the abrupt end of the Roaring Twenties, shattering faith in markets and ushering in the hardship of the Great Depression.

Dot-com Bubble (1999–2000)

The dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s provides one of the clearest modern parallels.

The internet represented a genuine technological revolution, but as in earlier eras, it was mythologized as the foundation of a “new economy” where old valuation rules no longer applied. Startups became cultural icons, showered with venture capital and ushered to market through a flood of IPOs.

Retail investors, empowered by online brokerages, joined the rush. Cultural artifacts of the time included Super Bowl ads from unprofitable firms and magazine covers proclaiming the death of brick-and-mortar business. Analysts argued that “eyeballs” and “clicks” mattered more than profits.

The Shiller CAPE ratio surged to 44, a historic extreme. When the bubble burst, the NASDAQ lost nearly 80% of its value over two years, erasing fortunes and careers. Yet, as in 1929, the underlying innovations endured: Amazon, Google, and eBay eventually thrived, just as autos and radios had before them.

The lesson was not that innovation lacked value but that speculation accelerates expectations far beyond what reality can deliver.

Global Financial Crisis (2008)

The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 extended the pattern of euphoria into credit markets.

Unlike the dot-com boom, this was not a mania of households buying internet stocks but of institutions building towers of leverage on the foundation of housing. The cultural backdrop was belief in homeownership as the cornerstone of the American dream, coupled with faith that housing prices never declined nationwide.

Banks extended credit to increasingly unqualified borrowers.

Wall Street packaged mortgages into securities and collateralized debt obligations, which rating agencies blessed with investment-grade status. Yield-hungry institutional investors bought them eagerly.

When home prices began to slip in 2006 and 2007, the illusion collapsed.

Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and other giants fell, credit markets froze, and the crisis cascaded into the worst global recession since the 1930s. The central narrative of stability and safety gave way to systemic fragility and mistrust.

SPAC and Meme-Stock Boom (2020–2021)

The SPAC and meme-stock boom of 2020–2021 showed how quickly euphoria adapts to new environments.

The COVID-19 pandemic initially sparked panic, but unprecedented monetary and fiscal stimulus soon reversed the collapse. With near-zero rates, trillions in government transfers, and record household savings, retail investors found themselves with capital to deploy.

Platforms such as Robinhood made trading free and gamified, while online communities on Reddit and Twitter forged a culture of collective speculation. Meme stocks like GameStop and AMC became cultural symbols, celebrated less for fundamentals than as vehicles of rebellion against Wall Street. At the same time, SPACs multiplied, providing fast-track listings for untested firms.

In 2021 alone, more than 600 SPACs raised capital, reflecting both investor enthusiasm and a cultural belief in disruption. By 2022, tightening monetary policy and inflation punctured the boom.

Meme stocks, SPACs, and even cryptocurrencies collapsed, leaving behind another lesson: liquidity, psychology, and culture can generate illusions of permanence that dissolve almost overnight.

Taken together, these various episodes show how societies repeatedly convince themselves they stand on the edge of transformation — whether through flowers, global trade, industry, technology, or digital platforms.

Credit expansion, cultural narrative, and mass participation provide the fuel.

Collapse brings destruction, reform, and reflection, but also resilience.

In nearly every case, the innovation at the core of the bubble — tulips aside — survived the washout.

What is left behind is both a cautionary tale and a foundation for the future.

* * * 

Continue reading at the Macro Alchemist or the pdf below.

Authored by Debra Heine via American Greatness,

The White House press secretary on Monday shot down media reports accusing President Donald Trump’s border czar of accepting a $50,000 bribe from undercover FBI agents last year, telling reporters “the president stands by Tom Homan 100 percent.”

MSNBC reported on Saturday that Homan was caught on tape accepting a bag filled with the cash from federal agents as part of an undercover operation in Texas during the heat of the 2024 election.

According to the report, written by RussiaGate hoaxers Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian, Homan took the bribe in exchange for helping the agents win government contracts in a second Trump administration.

During the White House press briefing Monday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked if President Trump had asked the Justice Department to close the case, and whether Homan would be returning the alleged bribe.

“Mr. Homan never took the $50,000 you’re referring to so you should get your facts straight, number one,” Leavitt replied.

“Number two, this was another example of the weaponization by the Biden Department of Justice against one of President Trump’s strongest and most vocal supporters in the midst of a presidential campaign,” she continued. “You had FBI agents going undercover to try and entrap one of the president’s top allies and supporters, someone they knew very well would be taking a government position months later. Mr. Homan did absolutely nothing wrong.”

Leavitt said the Trump Department of Justice had FBI agents and prosecutors investigate the allegations and “they found zero evidence of illegal activity or criminal wrongdoing.”

“The White House and the president stand by Tom Homan 100 percent because he did absolutely nothing wrong and he is a brave public servant who has done a phenomenal job on helping the president shut down the border,” she declared.

FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement to the Hill Saturday that “this matter originated under the previous administration and was subjected to a full review by FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors. They found no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.”

Homan himself called the allegations “bullsh-t.”

Imagine hauling in enough platinum, gold, and rare earth metals to bankroll every American’s wildest dreams–or potentially tank the global economy overnight. That’s the high-stakes gamble NASA and a cadre of innovative U.S. startups are wagering on the untapped riches of asteroids.

As NASA’s Psyche spacecraft hurtles toward its 2029 mission toward the metal-rich asteroid that shares the same name as the mission, a cadre of U.S. startups is accelerating efforts to turn celestial rocks into a viable business, potentially reshaping global supply chains for critical minerals. Yet the venture carries risks of market disruption, echoing historical commodity booms and busts. Launched in October 2023 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, the Psyche mission is on course to orbit Asteroid 16 Psyche by late July 2029, where it will spend two years mapping the body’s composition.

Led by Arizona State University’s Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche targets what scientists believe is the exposed core of an ancient protoplanet, rich in iron, nickel and other metals potentially valued in the “quadrillions of dollars”—”15 zeros,” as Ms. Elkins-Tanton put it in a recent interview with Space. The economic allure is clear: The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter harbors vast deposits of platinum for catalysts, cobalt for batteries, iron for steel and gold for electronics. NASA’s estimates suggest mining just 10 such bodies could generate $100 million per Earth resident, totaling $1.5 trillion.

However, the mission, unsurprisingly, is no cake walk, as commercialization hinges on controlled extraction to avoid flooding markets. An oversupply of rare earths, which is vital for iPhones, electric vehicles and defense tech, could trigger price collapses akin to oil gluts, stranding terrestrial miners and suppliers.

The daunting potential consequences don’t scare companies like California-based TransAstra, which is refining optical mining, using concentrated solar energy to process water-laden asteroids. The technique encases targets in polyamide enclosures and vaporizes volatiles to yield pure metals, a process the company’s CEO, Joel Sercel, likens to wielding the sun as a blowtorch, according to Space.

TransAstra narrowly missed a test run last fall with mini-moon 2024 PT5, a fleeting orbital visitor that lingered for nearly two months; such opportunities arise sporadically, perhaps yearly or every decade, per former Tethers Unlimited co-founder Rob Hoyt. Hoyt’s Tethers Unlimited, inspired by NASA consultant and sci-fi author R.L. Forward, once pitched net-and-tether systems to capture and tow asteroids into Earth orbit for robotic disassembly, notes Space.

This crop of startups is the first to attempt to mine the cosmos.

Early attempts like Planetary Resources, founded in 2012 with backing from Hollywood director James Cameron, Google bigwigs Eric Schmidt and Larry Page and Virgin CEO Richard Branson, invested millions in probes for water and metals prospecting. The firm restructured amid financing woes but seeded the sector’s ambitions.