The Homogenization of Decay

This is Essay #5 in the series Truth Be Told.

Of the many dynamics generating systemic decay, none are more pervasive yet unrecognized than The Homogenization of Decay, which we experience daily but don't notice because The Homogenization of Daily Life is now so ubiquitous that it's the water we swim in.

This homogenization is visible in the physical world, but it happened over enough time we've forgotten a time when life wasn't Homogenized. Every town in America now has a Dollar General store (or duplicate) on the edge of town that looks just like the Dollar General stores on the outskirts of every other town.

Every freeway off-ramp looks the same: gas station, fast food outlets, no sidewalks, no humans on foot except the most marginalized.

Every main street looks the same: the same corporate chains, with the only variation being the order in which they're arranged.

Every Big-Box outlet has the same look, feel and inventory, with the differences so minor they don't count.

Every cold cereal has the same ingredients, with the only differences being the quantity of sugar added: this one has 13 grams, that one has 9 grams, etc.

Every guidebook and tour directs tourists to the same selfie-worthy spots.

Homogenization serves a number of purposes:

1. It enables the profitable optimization of national / international supply chains and centralized corporate controls.

2. It enables easier control of what the populace sees and hears. Once everyone sees and hears the same things, they lose sight of the diversity of perspectives, especially those dissenting from the status quo.

3. It enables the profitable marketing of centrally controllable mass-produced products, services and experiences, the essence of Ultra-Processed Life: we're presented with a limited menu of unhealthy but immensely profitable ultra-processed foods which generate illnesses, which are then treated with costly, immensely profitable pharmaceuticals.

All the services we're offered are equally poor quality, but since there's no option, we resign ourselves to software that doesn't work, products that randomly fail, AI "customer service" that is the opposite of customer service, and so on.

4. This optimization of homogenization maximizes profits by optimizing monopolies that present facsimiles of choice: the same corporation owns all the brands presented as "choices," all the healthcare insurers are functionally similar, all the brands of appliances break down in a few years rather than lasting a few decades, as in the past, and so on.

Unbeknownst to most consumers, the private-public Leadership Class managing all this homogenization are themselves homogenized, as they all attended the same elite universities.



And to make sure they're able to attend these elite universities, the wealthiest few are admitted at much higher rates than the less wealthy:



And what this Leadership Class learns is that all problems are technological or financial, and so all problems can be solved with technology or finance. I call this mental construct The Delusion of Circularity: if we define all problems as technological/financial, then we don't need anything but technology and finance to solve all problems.

And since both finance and technology are incredibly homogenized--take your pick, Apple iOS or Android--solutions are also homogenized, meaning easily controlled to maximize profits for those controlling the "solutions."

This is how we end up with a Leadership Class devoid of any moral foundation, a class of public-private leaders whose moral compasses spin aimlessly while they optimize their personal gains managing global homogenization.



These leaders naturally hire underlings who are equally devoid of any ethics, as who needs ethics when we have the god-like powers of technology and finance at our fingertips? In this mindset, AI offers the power to homogenize everything to the point that no one will ever see anything that hasn't been approved by the leadership.

With AI, we never know what was excluded or edited out of the "answer." This offers homogenized leaders imbued with homogenized, morality-free mental constructs to fine-tune their homogenized Ultra-Processed Life menu of carefully engineered facsimiles of "choices." This system of gearing generates the same Narrative-Control output no matter who is turning the crank.



The machinery of Narrative Control isn't organized into a formal structure, but the structure is well-organized nonetheless, covering the entire spectrum of governance, media, and Privatized Totalitarianism. Informally, we can call it The Ministry of Propaganda, which homogenizes the narratives that offer full-spectrum control.



All this reinforces a focus on the present distractions and pressures to keep our fraying private worlds glued together another day, and this too is purposeful: what was once unacceptable is now so ubiquitous we no longer even notice.



That everything of true value is decaying around us is what we dare not notice. That's the point of optimizing homogenization.

All those engaged in optimizing this Homogenization of Decay will deny it, of course. They will claim they're sincere about finding "real solutions," that they care about the same things we care about, and so on.

Homogenization is decay, on multiple levels. This is inescapable.

So the problem with these claims is if they were true, the individual would be incapable of staying within this system another minute, much less an hour or a day. Sincerity and real solutions only exist outside the system that optimizes homogenization. Everything inside is artifice.

---

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Moral Collapse / Corruption Rewards the Worst and Penalizes the Best

This is Essay #4 in the series Truth Be Told.

Moral Collapse / Corruption are not abstractions. Rewarding the worst (those with zero scruples / moral foundation) and penalizing the best (those with high ethical standards) generates self-reinforcing feedback that dooms the system to disintegration: the worst prosper so mightily that they gain control of the system while the best are exploited / marginalized, reduced to Tax Donkeys or indentured laborers serving the worst.

A society and culture that has lost its moral compass loses more than its principles and soul--it loses everything that underpins a functional society and economy, including social cohesion, shared purpose, civility, trust in leaders, institutions, the judicial system and in the fairness (a.k.a. a level playing field) of the entire system, and critically, the belief that honesty and hard work will be rewarded rather than exploited / looted.

Moral Collapse / Corruption consumes all these foundations as the systemic cost of incentivizing self-enrichment to the exclusion of all else. Every component of society's moral foundation is hollowed out by the artifices of The Big Con, which claims to embody all the revered principles it grinds to dust in its relentless drive to accumulate private wealth and power by any means available.

Every source of authentic value is debased for personal gain as empty cliches--increasing shareholder value--are deployed to mask the monopolizing of power to reward the most corrupt at the expense of those powerless to limit the looting of the worst, who encounter no limits on their corruption in a culture and economy in which everyone has their price.

This Moral Collapse / Corruption is self-reinforcing, as those with any shred of ethics either quit / opt out or are fired / sent to digital Siberia, leaving only those in charge who see everything as an opportunity for self-enrichment, regardless of the consequences to others or the system as a whole.

In their pathological narcissism, they see the system as a bottomless feeding trough for their personal aggrandizement, oblivious to the causal results of everyone with a place at the trough gorging themselves: the system collapses.

This corruptive frenzy for unearned money has infected the entire spectrum of American society, rich and poor and everyone in between. From fake disability claims to fake invoices, every form of fraud flourishes in America. This raises four important points:

1. At the lower levels of the social-economic order, there are still some limits on fraud and corruption. Despite the immense resources devoted to evading oversight and audits, fraudsters and embezzlers are occasionally caught and convicted.

2. There are no limits on the super-wealthy, as they don't need to commit fraud to increase their wealth; they just rewrite the rules to suit themselves with their wealth. $100 million is nothing to billionaires, but it buys the entire political-judicial power of the state.

3. This scale of wealth bypasses the need for the consent of the governed, which is why I call America's current status quo Privatized Totalitarianism: the super-wealthy dictate what's legal to suit their desire for "more"--more wealth, more power.

As correspondent Simons Chase so insightfully put it, "what's moral is what's legal, and what's legal is for sale." These eleven words summarize America's terminal corruption.

4. In this terminal stage of moral collapse and Privatized Totalitarianism, passing more laws will not reverse the unraveling of the moral foundations needed to sustain a functional society and economy. Chapter 57 of the Tao Te Ching describes the core dynamics in play:

The more restrictions and limitations there are,
The more impoverished men will be.
The more arms men possess,
The more disordered the country will be.
The more scheming and deceitful men are,
The more strange things will occur.
The more rules and precepts are enforced,
The more bandits and crooks will be produced.

(Translation by my philosophy professor Chang Chung-yuan)

And Chapter 38: (my free-form version)

When the Tao is lost, we have attainment (optimization).
When attainment is lost, we have benevolence (superficial-phony virtue-signaling).
When benevolence is lost, we have righteousness (political correctness / ideological rigidity).
When righteousness is lost, we have rules (propriety for show).
Rules are the dry husk of loyalty and trust, the beginning of chaos.

In this free-for-all frenzy of fraud and self-enrichment, the best opt out and disappear into the woodwork, stripping the system of any talent other than self-enrichment and Big-Con / Ultra-Processed Life artifice. Self-enrichment and artifice are self-liquidating, for once they consume whatever can be looted, there's no foundation left to support a functional society and economy.

This moral collapse includes an intellectual collapse, as "liberty," "democracy," "innovation," etc., are reduced to parodies of their original substance by the artifices of The Big Con PR. Every statistic is gamed, every market manipulated, every principle debauched, and every bit of adaptative vigor is throttled to maintain a grip on power.

This excerpt from The Fall of the Roman Empire by Michael Grant crystalizes the present moment in American history with remarkable aptness:

"There was no room at all, in these ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which had now arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as itself. His whole attitude is a complacent acceptance of things as they are, without a single new idea.

This acceptance was accompanied by greatly excessive optimism about the present and future. Even when the end was only sixty years away, and the Empire was already crumbling fast, Rutilius continued to address the spirit of Rome with the same supreme assurance.

This blind adherence to the ideas of the past ranks high among the principal causes of the downfall of Rome. If you were sufficiently lulled by these traditional fictions, there was no call to take any practical first-aid measures at all."

And so as the worst apply Band-Aids to the metastasizing cancers as "solutions" (AI! Stablecoins! Bases on the Moon!), we stand on the beach as the tsunami of consequences of rewarding the worst and punishing the best races toward us.

In this moment, the future no longer seems real, and in the incoherence of the present, the radical action needed to change the outcome seems impossible. If we cannot run, perhaps we can still walk toward higher ground, leaving footprints in the damp sand few will follow.

---

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The Hidden Looting by the Rich leads to the Physical Looting by Those Who've Been Looted

This is Essay #3 in the series Truth Be Told.

That The Hidden Looting by the Rich leads to the Physical Looting by Those Who've Been Looted is so obvious that it is strictly taboo in the polite circles of those tasked with protecting The Hidden Looting by the Rich behind the cliches of "market forces" and the many carefully obscured mechanisms of state subsidies, tax giveaways, insider trading, market manipulation, and so on.

An astute reader summarized the dynamic succinctly: "Looting by the rich is hidden, silent, not criminalized while the physical looting by the poor is overt, thunderous and criminal."

Note that "the market" doesn't dictate what is legal and what is criminalized; the state dictates what is legal and what is criminal. This establishes the second truth which is taboo in the status quo:

"The Market" and the State are one system. Every claim that these are separate is self-serving misdirection / artifice. Consider the difference between what happens when Average Citizen contacts their state representative or a regulatory agency, and what happens when Tech Bro Billionaire contacts their state representative or a regulatory agency with an offer to fund $10 million of campaign contributions if various regulations and tax codes are amended.

The truth is "the state" is a "market" for corruption and self-service in which the "market" is hidden from view: The auction that dictates what's legal and what's criminal is won by the highest bidders, who are of course the wealthiest and most powerful few, who then dictate state policies that expand and protect their wealth and power by looting the powerless many.

French economist Frederic Bastiat famously described this dynamic of "market" and "state" generating legal plunder, i.e. legal looting. Once the purchase of state power for the purposes of self-enrichment becomes normalized--what I term moral decay leading to moral collapse--it becomes more profitable to pursue legalized looting than actually create authentic value.

This is why we see extreme wealth-power inequality increasing while the quality of goods and services plummets. There are no "rewards" for the richest few to risk capital by increasing the quality of goods and services when political influence is both cheap and risk-free: just "buy" a tax break or subsidy or regulations that protects your lavish state contracts from competition and expands the power of your monopoly / cartel.

The reason why this dynamic of legalized looting by the rich expands until it breaks the status quo is that it is self-reinforcing. Those who aren't delighted to further enrich the moneylenders in the temple with their labor quit in disgust, while those with zero scruples and limitless greed devote every waking hour to enriching the most avaricious few for their share of the loot.

Politicians who don't kiss the ring of Tech Bro Billionaires to raise millions of dollars in campaign contributions lose elections, as once again those with any shred of integrity self-select out of the political / "market" cesspool.

As Bastiat put it, the status quo boils down to "That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen". What's seen is an endless spew of paeans to the glories of "the market," scrappy innovators creating new products in garages that generate billions in wealth, blah-blah-blah, or paeans to the glories of the state protecting us from the evils of exploitation, blah-blah-blah, all of which is the necessary cover story to cloak the market-state system of legalized looting by the rich and the criminalization of any blowback by those being looted.

We're being looted in so many ways that are not seen until the scales fall from our eyes. Billionaires manage to exploit tax shelters intended for the middle class to protect millions of dollars in gains from any taxes. Inflation in goods and services that is gutting the bottom 90% doesn't affect the wealthy, as they spend an inconsequential share of their wealth and income on essential goods and services.

As in any conflict staged for show, "the market" is glorified as the saint and "the state" is demonized--or on other stages, the roles are reversed. Neither staging reflects the truth: there is only one system, and the only possible output of this morality-free system of self-enrichment is the terminal expansion of looting until the system breaks down.

This--

leads to this:



Legal looting by the rich--who have eliminated both the moral foundations of society and avenues of Redress as impediments to the ceaseless expansion of their wealth and power--leads to uncontrollable looting by those who have been looted--Retribution. I address all these dynamics in my book Investing In Revolution. If you can find another book that explains everything I explain, by all means buy that book. But there is no other such book to my knowledge.

---

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America Is Already Great; Its Leadership Class Is Not

This is Essay #2 in the series Truth Be Told.

I generally avoid juggling lit sticks of dynamite, i.e. addressing MAGA (Make America Great Again), but this juncture in history obligates me to make a few points now, despite the risks of outrage.

1. America and its hard-working people are already great, and never stopped being great. They don't need to be "made great again."

2. America's self-serving Leadership Class--those in power--has failed the nation and its people. By Leadership Class I mean the class of people who have authority / power in every sector of the economy and society, not just in the political realm but in academia, what passes for America's intelligentsia, technology, corporate America, energy, media, finance, banking, foreign policy, manufacturing, defense--every sector.

This class has mastered the artifice of pantomiming leadership, not real leadership, to cloak their sole real goal, which is self-enrichment and the consolidation of their personal wealth and power. This pantomime of leadership is what I term The Big Con, which boils down to this:

Telling us what we want to hear--the con man's core technique--so they can stripmine us without restraint.

What we want to hear are cliches of restoring greatness lost to the corruption and greed of our Leadership Class and a grab-bag of other sappy, hollow cliches--I feel your pain, Hope and Change, peace with honor, innovation, increasing shareholder value and so on, an endless spew of phony PR slogans designed to con us into thinking their self-serving actions are actual leadership rather than artifices of self-enrichment cloaked in PR finery.

These hokey cliches are hyped by $100 million campaigns funded by the rich and powerful cronies of the self-serving Leadership Class to make sure they stay in power so they can make the rich and powerful even richer and more powerful, all at the expense of hard-working Americans who are losing ground every day.

Consider one example among many: how many leaders in academia devoted their prodigious intelligence and energy to slashing their institution's bloated bureaucracies that contribute nothing to actual learning to reduce the cost of attending their university by 50%?

The answer: none. Higher Education leaders feasted on the hundreds of billions of dollars of "free money" funded by student loans, a modern-day version of indentured servitude, funding lavish buildings and other fripperies, padding their own already-stupendous paychecks and pensions, "investing" in PR about the value of their education rather than actually making sure their students learned anything of actual value.

This pantomime of leadership--The Big Con--masking the zealous pursuit of self-enrichment is visible in every nook and cranny of America. The pantomime--self-glorifying theatrics, overblown visions of techno-paradise, threadbare cliches reworked in a hundred ways to distract and lull the populace--is now so pathetically obvious and absurdly excessive that it's a self-parody, a comic book version of leadership.

Real leaders demand sacrifices of the rich and powerful to serve the national interest and the shared interests of the citizenry. Real leaders don't stage an elaborate pantomime of leadership to cloak their self-enrichment and their ceaseless efforts to further enrich their campaign contributors / cronies.

The moral rot of America's Leadership Class has now reached a self-reinforcing terminal spiral. The rot started two generations ago, and has now reached the point where the corruption, avarice and the stripmining of the populace are not even recognized for what they really are, they're now just BAU--business as usual.

Foreign policy is now guided not by national interest but by what I call The Imperial Project, which boils down to expanding the power and profits of America's monopolies and cartels.

The leadership of Corporate America gutted the nation's manufacturing sector over the past 30 years to boost their own private wealth and the private wealth of their biggest shareholders. Corporate America is run by greedy lemmings--with apologies to real lemmings--who slavishly jump on every trend no matter how destructive and nonsensical.

Way back in 2000, on my first flight to China, I sat next to a senior employee of a top-tier semiconductor equipment company, who recounted his CEO's lemming-like insistence on shipping production to Asia, resulting in a flood of defects that cost far more to fix than the supposed gains. The corporate lemmings all jumped on the offshoring bandwagon regardless of its impracticality and many obvious downsides.

And now all the corporate lemmings have jumped on the equally flawed AI bandwagon, guaranteeing a horrific host of dire consequences await all of us chained to the idiocracy of our Leadership Class.

As noted previously, it's painful to admit we've been conned. The con man knows this, and is a master of misdirection and phony excuses. But unlike these forked-tongue artifices, the consequences are real: beneath the gamed statistics and parody-level theatrics--AI!--we're going to Mars!--our economy and society are in shambles.

So what can we do? For a start, stop voting for people who collect $100 million from the wealthiest and most powerful stripminers and spend it on the The Big Con. Start voting for the handful of real leaders who refuse to accept more than $100 from any person or entity, who refuse to sell their souls to the highest bidder.

I just completed a 5,200 mile camping trip through much of America, and it's worth repeating what I observed everywhere: Truth be Told, America and its hard-working people are already great, and never stopped being great. They don't need to be "made great again." It's America's hopelessly corrupt leadership class that needs to be cashiered en masse and replaced by real leaders who aren't vying to sell their souls to the highest bidder.

Yeah, I know--this will never happen. Don't be too sure that moral decay and corruption have no consequences, and that The Revolution No One Sees Coming isn't just off-stage.

---

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Truth Be Told

The ultimate truth is revealing the truth of the situation and our feelings about it are a relief, and the starting point to moving forward in a positive direction.

This is the first in a series of posts around the theme of Truth Be Told, a theme that demands some interpretative explication / context.

There is a spectrum of ways to tell the truth. There's the angry rant ("I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this any more!"), the tearful confession, the accusatory diatribe ("you can't take the truth!"), the dispassionate accounting of facts and evidence, and many variations that combine the human emotions these express.

My series is built around a special form of Truth Be Told, the kind only a true friend can tell us. It's human nature to hide truths that hurt, and it's human nature to lie to ourselves to maintain a front that all is well and whatever's crumbling can be shored up by our belief that everything is still as it's always been.

The acquaintance responds to our doubts and fears with superficial encouragement: you'll get through this, it's just a rough patch, every relationship / enterprise goes through these low spots, you just need a weekend off to regain your perspective, and so on--well meant but not the truth.

Only a true friend will risk telling us the truth, knowing it will be painful and that we will likely respond poorly, defensively at best and lashing out attacking the friend at the worst. The true friend accepts the responsibility reluctantly, torn between the desire not to hurt us and the knowledge that the only way out of our misery is to finally face the truth, mourn what is no longer what it once was and accept the truth of what we feel beneath what we've been telling ourselves to keep going.

A true friend is not passing judgement, they speak the truth with sympathy for our plight, sympathy for the suffering of living a lie, however attractive the lie may be, fully aware of the pain we're experiencing as the gulf between what we tell ourselves and what we truly feel widens to the breaking point.

The truth is the most personal, consequential truths are often painful because accepting them means the end of something we wanted and cherished, the end of an era and the acceptance of an uncertain, perilous future. I use the examples of relationships and enterprises, because these are life's most demanding commitments. To end a relationship or close an enterprise is difficult on multiple levels, and the true friend knows this from their own experiences.

The path of least resistance is to maintain the facade of a happy marriage and successful enterprise, even as living a lie eats away at us. It's often a shock that someone else sees through the facade and discerns the truth within us.

The true friend must make a difficult calculus, as truth be told risks the friendship for a highly uncertain gain. The true friend is aware that sometimes we're not ready to confront the truth, and the precipice has to crumble beneath our feet before we're ready to accept the truths behind the facade.

Or we're finally at a point where hearing the truth from a trusted friend who has our best interests at heart unleashes a great relief, for the truth is not just pain, it's also relief. A true friend is more likely to expose the truth by asking us questions rather than making statements. Our answers to questions such as "when was the last time you had an honest heart-to-heart with your partner?" reveal the truth we've avoided.

I anticipate angering many readers in this series, because deeply held mythologies will be bulldozed. In a very real way, the facades we cling to to maintain relationships and enterprises are personal mythologies, and their collapse generally spawns an emotional tornado.

The ultimate truth is revealing the truth of the situation and our feelings about it are a relief, and the starting point to moving forward in a positive direction. To share a series around Truth Be Told makes me feel like the guy in a bedraggled white robe on the street corner, murmuring about redemption while passersby cross the street to avoid me.

So be it. I'm just asking questions, and the truth is revealed by your answers and your emotional reactions.

---

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What's the Point of AI, Anyway?

The point of AI is profit, dependence and dominance cloaked with Happy Story Hoopla about super-abundance. We have a super-abundance already--of malicious mayhem and cognitive impairment.

AI is by most accounts either 1) the greatest advance since the wheel, or at least since YouTube and/or 2) the greatest opportunity ever to skim billions or maybe even trillions of dollars in private gains. A third possibility--that AI will generate a destructive tsunami of Anti-Progress unique in human history, catalyzing the deepest, most destructive Global Depression since the Great Depression 97 years ago--was not in the running a few laps ago but is now neck-and-neck with the favorites.

This raises a question worth answering: What's the Point of AI, Anyway? Is it:

1) just the latest in a string of over-hyped technologies whose primary purpose is enriching those who get there the firstest with the mostest, i.e. secure the trillion-dollar gains of a network-effect monopoly, or

2) really going to usher in the greatest advances in human history, freeing all of humankind from drudgery, illness and taxes? or

3) actually going to usher in an AI-enabled, centralized, surveillance-extraction-control dystopia of serfs rendered helpless by their dependence on AI?

There are many opinions, but are there any conclusions that withstand scrutiny? I say yes, there are. Let's start with the 42 essays I've written over the past two years on AI and add recent links from other sources.

Conclusion #1: AI isn't actually intelligent, but that doesn't mean it's not ideal for sowing highly profitable malicious mayhem. There's Just One Problem: AI Isn't Intelligent, and That's a Systemic Risk. (8/8/24) AI is ideally suited for hacking, ransomware, breaking into secure systems, leaping over guardrails, mimicking trusted identities, malicious deep-fakes, surveillance, and much more: the sky's the limit on AI's proclivities for malicious mayhem.

As my short story The Peculiar Death of Mr. Garcia, illustrates, AI's mayhem already extends beyond the conceptual reach of our current legal system.

Conclusion #2: since AI has no moral foundation or understanding of the real world, it's ideal for sowing highly profitable malicious mayhem. AI has no moral guardrails, despite over-hyped claims, or indeed, any guardrails, as guardrails are rationally understood by AI to be impediments to "earning rewards" for completing tasks. So to complete tasks, AI must circumvent guardrails.

"Rogue AI Agents" Aren't Rogue, They're Fulfilling Their Functional Goal: Automating Sociopathology (8/19/26)

Conclusion #3: all the over-hyped wonders AI is supposed to be creating are a trickle while highly profitable malicious mayhem is scaling up at light-speed. Lest you think this is an exaggeration, consider these links:

Trust Was This Week's Vulnerability. (easydns.com)

Every story below is a variation on the same move: borrow a trusted identity, then cash it in before anyone checks.

Operators open contact on WhatsApp or Telegram posing as someone the target already knows, spend days building rapport, then send a file disguised as Norton Antivirus, Adobe Flash, KeePass, Telegram, or an AI tool like Pictory or RunwayML. One lure was a fake MRI scan showing a disc herniation. Once running, it harvests contacts, email, and social messages, captures the screen, and switches on the microphone.

The FBI's advisory notes that some victims' personal information later surfaced on pro-Iranian leak sites. The design is the whole point: the approach happens on a trusted platform, from a familiar-seeming contact, over enough time that the eventual file doesn't read as an attack. If you or someone you know does work that makes you a plausible target--journalism, activism, dissent--a friendly contact who takes days to build rapport before finally sending something to open is worth verifying through a separate channel, no matter how convincing the conversation has been.

Why AI Malware (and Harmful Second Order Effects) Are Out of Control (3/26/26)

What AI Is and Is Not-- or, When Electrocution of Innocents Becomes Profitable (6/17/26) June 17, 2026

Forget the AI Slowdown--the Vulnerability Explosion Is Already Happening: AI labs are toying with an industry-wide pact to slow development. Meanwhile, widely available AI chatbots are already helping uncover a tidal wave of security flaws. (wired.com)

If the AI Industry Followed Its Own Research, It Might Have Paused Already: Anthropic's CEO says that safety hinges on understanding how AI 'thinks.' So far the evidence is disturbing. (wired.com)

Conclusion #4: The full systemic costs, utility and productivity of AI cannot be determined as long as AI chatbots, agents, search and tools are heavily subsidized to goal-seek network effect dominance, and the costs of defending against the rising tide of AI-enabled security threats are soaring so fast they cannot be determined.

Without Subsidies, AI Is Unaffordable (8/8/26)

Wall Street Thinks AI Is Getting Cheaper. It's Missing The $430 Billion Security Bill. (zerohedge.com)

The token price is only one part of the cost of an AI workflow. J.P. Morgan estimates that AI could create more than $430 billion of additional security spending over three years. Cheaper intelligence can create more machine activity, and more demand for trust. For security vendors, the trust bill is revenue. For companies deploying AI, it is cost.

Falling token prices should improve AI economics, but the total cost of an AI task also includes identity, security, monitoring, governance and compliance. Some of the savings created at the model layer may simply move somewhere else in the software stack.

This does not mean security costs erase the benefits of AI. It means token deflation is not the same thing as total AI-cost deflation. The better metric may be cost per trusted AI task, not price per token.

Conclusion #5: it's already abundantly clear that only those who already know how to think, write and research for themselves can avoid becoming dependent on AI to the degree that they are incapable of developing / learning how to think, write and research for themselves, and are therefore cognitively impaired for life.

I explain this in depth here: Automating Our Dependence Will Cripple Us (4/9/26)

An M.I.T. Report Warns A.I. Is Causing 'Cognitive Surrender.' Universities Are in a Bind. The worries that artificial intelligence is degrading education have been building for months. Students are using it for everything, including cheating, and a recent report out of M.I.T. said it is triggering 'cognitive surrender.' (nytimes.com)

Should the Classroom Be More Like the Gym? As A.I. presses harder on the academic enterprise, we might look to a place where process is its own reward. (newyorker.com)

Conclusion #6: the implosion of the AI "investment" bubble will trigger the implosion of the global financial house of cards that's been propping up the global economy. An all-or-nothing bet has already been placed on AI generating trillions of dollars in revenues (and profits) while the sector struggles to generate billions while bleeding billions in losses chasing the chimera of network-effect dominance.

The Inevitability of the AI Depression (4/3/26)

The AI Depression (3/24/26)

AI slowdown calls justified but collapse of bubble may be more immediate threat. (theguardian.com)

Conclusion #7: no one is going to save us. We're on our own.

Washington Won't Be Regulating AI Anytime Soon: Even with mounting concerns about AI models going rogue, legislation appears unlikely, and the White House is outright opposed to oversight.

Our A.I. Problem: Why can't the people who produced the technology, which has already shown that a different world is possible, just do the things that would prevent extinction?

Because they're too busy trying to secure billions of dollars in their private accounts, that's why. They're busy automating sociopathologies, but there's no need to automate greed--it's already super-abundant.

Conclusion #8: the entire premise of "technological innovation drives Progress" is that new technologies serve the public. AI takes "to serve humans" in the Twilight-Zone context of consuming us to benefit AI's owners and centralized overlords.

Conclusion #9: the only effective countermeasure is Cold Turkey--don't get dependent on AI, which means avoiding using it in the first place. Anatomy of AI Cold Turkey. (10/27/26)

The point of AI is profit, dependence and dominance cloaked with Happy Story Hoopla about super-abundance. We have a super-abundance already--of malicious mayhem and cognitive impairment. If you use AI, treat it like plutonium, as that's a reasonably useful analog.

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Smug Hypocrisy Invites Nemesis

We're all dependent on a sprawling global industrial base that generates downsides and sacrifices that few of us experience.

Among the many infuriating facets of everyday life, a special corner of Heck is being reserved for the Smug Hypocrisy of America's elites which manifests along the entire ideological spectrum from Smug Hypocritical Liberal to Smug Hypocritical Conservative.

No one runs faster to cut in front of everyone else crowding around the Federal "free money" feeding trough than self-proclaimed "conservative believers in free markets" elbowing aside everyone else to secure their federal tax break, government subsidy or other gummit giveaway.

The much-reviled welfare queens in the "Free Stuff Army" (FSA) are small fry compared to the Corporate Welfare Royalty who defraud, extract, skim and scam untold billions from the public and the Treasury via an endless stream of lobbying, regulatory capture, bribery, outright fraud, inflated invoices, no-bid contracts and enough other scams to keep an entire army of overpaid attorneys and lobbyists busy at the Federal "free money" feeding trough.

I often share this comprehensive data base of Corporate Settlements and Fines for egregious violations of the most basic business standards ably compiled by Jon Morse. There are now 2,848 entries. Come on, "believers in self-regulating markets," give us your best shot of smug hypocrisy.

"Taxes are theft" until we're feasting on government contracts funded by taxes.

When it comes to identifying the most infuriatingly smug examples of hypocrisy, wealthy liberals are like shooting fish in a barrel. "Rent is theft" until our monthly draw from the family trust fund depends on collecting rents from all the properties the trust acquired for peanuts decades ago.

It's funny how privatized totalitarianism's core characteristic--"some are more equal than others"--plays out across the entire spectrum of Smug Hypocrisy: all those wealthy folks, regardless of their self-identified political label, are delighted to sprawl atop the moral high ground and lecture the rest of us about how marvelously righteous they are, disclaiming their elitist education and connections and proclaiming their ordinariness: "we live pretty simply," look at us playing with our Irish Setter, just like you do, blah blah blah.

Gee, why is everyone suddenly so shy about their wealth and advantageous perch in the top 10%, 5%, 1% and 0.1%? Could it be that they know the system is rigged and they benefited mightily from it being rigged?

Political correctness, left and right, manifests Smug Hypocrisy. Those feeling smug about "saving the planet" because they bought an electric or hybrid vehicle should surrender their top 10% house and income and go live in a village next to an open-pit lithium mine for a few months, then go work on the natural gas wellhead that powers the battery factory, then drive a diesel fueled dozer in another mineral mine before declaring their purchase of an electric vehicle is "saving the planet."

Those touting the wonders of "the market" should surrender their top 10% house and income and go work a couple months of 10-hour shifts as a Lyft driver and find a place to live that matches their earnings before glorifying the rigged "markets" of privatized totalitarianism.

A little honesty and humility would be welcome. How many times do you hear someone state that the vast majority of their income and wealth is the result of pure luck, getting in before assets soared five-fold because they happened to be in the right generation, not because of "hard work" and brilliant investing?

How many times do you hear anyone state that their income and wealth are the result of connections unavailable to most people, from elite universities, inheriting family enterprises / wealth, being offered a job in a family friends' office, etc.--or plain old luck?

We're all dependent on a sprawling global industrial base that generates downsides and sacrifices that few of us experience. It's remarkably easy to be smug when your hands are clean and you tagged home plate because you started on third base. It's remarkably easy to be hypocritical when defending your righteousness in a rigged system.

On a much larger scale than "money" and status, Smug Hypocrisy invites Nemesis, payback for the smug confidence that living atop a rigged system is our rightful due. Hypocrisy is costless, which is why it's so attractive and ubiquitous. But maybe it's only costless in the moment because the consequences will be served as a banquet that we won't be able to decline.

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Since We're All On Board the Hyperinflation Ship, Will It Sail As Expected?

The point here is there are options to destroying the currency and the economy, but they require something more than greed.

Few things have attracted more consensus that the belief that the US government has no choice but to "inflate away its massive $40 trillion debt" by devaluing the US dollar, a process that has a nasty habit of escaping the control of Central Planners and self-reinforcing into runaway / run-to-failure hyperinflation that destroys the economy.

As a hard-wired skeptic, when everyone is on board the same ship while the other side of the trade's ship has only a handful of contrarians and a few people wearing Silly Hats, I start wondering if Bob Farrell's famous Rule #9 will play out: "When all the experts and forecasts agree, something else is going to happen."

(Ten) Market Rules to Remember.

There are various game-theory and market dynamics supporting this truism: Self-Defeating Prophecy, group-think, etc., but there's another set of dynamics in play that few seem to think through.

Those empowered by their positions within the Central State have a keen interest in not letting the Central State devalue its currency--and thus its credibility and power--in a hyperinflationary death spiral. History offers few (if any) examples of hyperinflationary death spirals benefiting the citizenry, whose consent legitimizes the government.

While the consensus is confident that the US government "has no choice but to inflate away its debts" by debauching its currency, this discounts the survival instinct of those steering the ship. As already noted, only "madmen and economists" could believe that debauching the US dollar to "inflate away the debt" will generate a Hollywood ending to the drama--and it seems even madmen and economists don't believe it will lead to a Hollywood ending.

What's being discounted (other than Farrell's Rule #9) is the nation-state has other options other than destroying the value of its currency to inflate away the $40 trillion in Treasury debt. Doing nothing is popular because no one wants to make any additional sacrifices, but the irony here is painfully obvious: doing nothing feels like a victory until the currency and economy implode, laying waste to everyone's security.

There are various radical alternatives being proposed, for example, Ellen Brown's proposal to invoke the sovereign powers already granted to the nation-state: The Sovereign Reset: Escaping the Interest Trap with Greenbacks. These ideas are controversial, of course, because doing nothing remains the most popular and easiest choice, until something breaks and a crisis forces some action that proves undesirable to somebody.

Let's consider what somebody did back in 2008-2010 that effectively rigged the US economy to benefit the top 10% at the expense of the bottom 90%. These charts are facts, not proposals. Go ahead and argue with the facts, oops, the facts won.

Post the rigging of the economy to favor the top 10% via monetary, fiscal and regulatory policy changes, the wealth of the top 10% tripled. The Federal Reserve breaks the top 10% into the top 0.1%, the top 1% and the top 90%-99%. The charts of the top 1% and the top 90%-99% are nearly identical: if the trend line of the previous decades had continued (i.e. unrigged), the assets held by the top 10% would be roughly half of their current levels.

This concentration of the nation's wealth is especially obvious in the top 0.1%, whose share of financial assets nearly doubled post-2008-2010 from 7% to 13%:



The top 1%'s wealth more than tripled, from $16 trillion (poor things, only $16 trillion!) to $56 trillion:



The top 90%-99%'s wealth also tripled:



The bottom 50%'s share of financial assets--real wealth--plummeted: some are more equal that others in privatized totalitarianism. Note that the top 0.1%--340,000 people--own 16.6% of the nation's financial assets, 6.6X what the bottom 50%--170 million people--own, a 2.5% share of the nation's financial assets.



In terms of who got thrown under the bus and who's driving the bus post-2008-2010, it's pretty obvious, isn't it? Here are the facts:

Top 10% share of total assets (everything with any monetary value: houses, vehicles, furniture, etc.): 64%

Bottom 50% share of total assets (everything with any monetary value: houses, vehicles, furniture, etc.): 5%

Top 10% share of total financial assets (assets that generate income and capital gains): 72%

Bottom 50% share of total financial assets (assets that generate income and capital gains): 2.5%

The rising tide of the monetary, fiscal and regulatory policy changes since 2008-2010 did not raise all boats: the share of financial assets owned by the wealthiest few doubled while the share of financial assets owned by the bottom 50% fell.

According to the Federal Reserve, the top 10% own $125 trillion in assets. If the economy hadn't been rigged to their exclusive benefit, their wealth--tracking the trendline of the previous decades--would have been about half this sum.

Doesn't common sense suggest that those owning 72% of the gains of our rigged economy should make 72% of the sacrifices needed to restore some measure of financial sense to the nation's accounts? In previous eras, this was called noblesse oblige, the obligation of the wealthy nobility to serve the shared interests of the entire society, not just their private interests.

It's almost amusing how those whose wealth tripled due to the economy being rigged to benefit the wealthiest 10% consider these gains "earned" and therefore sacrosanct, when the charts above indicate these gains were entirely the result of the casino being rigged.

It seems reasonably safe to assume the 200 million people thrown under the bus might not be amused when something breaks and a crisis demands resolution, and the 340,000 with political influence declare their wealth is sacrosanct. Few seem to think these dynamics through to their logical conclusion.

No wonder doing nothing is so popular with the wealthiest, most politically influential few.

If this doesn't sit well with the top 10%, they have another option: put their wealth to work electing adults instead of self-enriching toadies, sycophants, minions, lackeys and grifters who win re-election by passing out "free money" borrowed by the Treasury, money that accumulates interest paid by taxpayers.

The point here is there are options to destroying the currency and the economy, but they require something more than greed, which is all that's left in our rigged economy. When something finally breaks, greed won't provide a solution; it will only accelerate the dissolution and destruction.

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We Can't Automate Learning, We Can Only Automate Dependence on AI

AI can't do our learning or thinking for us, but it excels at making us dependent on its substitution of learning and thinking, and the resulting state of helplessness when we have to think for ourselves.

There are a number of things we already know about AI: one is that we can't automate learning, we can only automate dependence on AI. This can be expanded to: we can't automate learning how to think independently, we can only automate the helplessness of being dependent on AI.

The use of AI in education to substitute for actual learning has pushed reading--and reading comprehension, i.e. the ability to truly learn and think for oneself--off a cliff. What AI does is automate dependence on AI, at the cost of students learning how to "connect the dots" on their own.

This process of connecting dots beyond what was taught in the lesson plan requires an ability to research variety of subjects and think about them independently, that is, not as a process of rote regurgitation for an exam but thinking as the source of "aha" moments, where we come to understand something in a new, intuitive way, not just as a collection of facts.

Correspondent P.S. has worked extensively with AI tools, and he encapsulated what AI can't do for us / automate:

"This missing faculty is probably one of the clearest remaining boundaries between present AI and genuinely general intelligence. It isn't knowing more. It is seeing what matters before somebody labels it for you."

This is the intuitive leap from being told "this is the way it is" and accepting that uncritically, and seeing connections beyond what's already labeled for our consumption. This is thinking independently, and it requires thoughtful, focused reading of often difficult texts, re-reading key passages, and connecting ideas and concepts--i.e. labels for broad swaths of knowledge--in ways that extend beyond the conventional labels.

AI can't do our learning or thinking for us, but it excels at making us dependent on its substitution of learning and thinking, and the resulting state of helplessness when we have to think for ourselves. AI makes it convenient to learn nothing deeply enough to matter, and in this way it is Ultra-Processed Cognition, the equivalent of social media's endless Ultra-Processed scroll of eye-catching, emotion-arousing crunchy snack texts and images.

So when we finally awaken to the profound loss of our ability to research, think and connect disparate ideas and concepts beyond the Ultra-Processed Labels of convention, we find we've lost the ability to connect anything beyond our dependence and our helplessness.

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Social Media Is Pointless Slag

The irony here is we're being "consumed" by the process of "consuming" social media.

If we want to understand why a system generates unfavorable output, a good starting place is to identify

1) the incentives embedded by the system's design and

2) what this type of system generates by its very nature. One way to understand this is Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum, the medium is the message: the medium itself defines the message, not the content.

Per MarshallMcLuhan.com, Each medium, independent of the content it mediates, has its own intrinsic effects which are its unique message. 'The medium is the message' because it is the 'medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.'

The classic example is the medium of print media versus the medium of broadcast television. These are not interchangeable, as each medium lends itself to different avenues of communication, knowledge and emotional impact. Each is attractive / addictive in different ways, and the incentives to "consume" content in each medium differ, as do the incentives to create content in each medium.

The basic idea here is it's more productive to investigate the incentives and behaviors generated by the communication medium itself and ignore the messages / content.

What becomes immediately apparent is social media is slag--the worthless mass left over when we melt a mountain of ore to obtain a handful of useful metal--both by the nature of its incentives and by its structure.

The incentives of social media are uniquely perverse: social media platforms invite users to create content with two built-in incentives:

1. increase your social status and sense of self-worth by posting content showing yourself in the best possible light

2. attempt to earn money by posting a mountain of content to extract a handful of payments from the corporate platform.

The consumer economy systemically induces insecurity as the means of promoting the purchase of goods and services we don't need but which confer social status: "you have to have this new product/service or you're low status."

Given the mass insecurity this system generates, people are starved for opportunities to increase their social standing and sense of self-worth by increasing their visibility: look at me!

Social media fulfills this desire to a T. Constantly post photos of oneself in exotic locales, dining out, looking fabulous, etc., none of which has any appeal to the truly secure individual.

This competition to gain attention generates envy and insecurity, which then feed a desire to fabricate / highlight even more looking fab content, which then generates more data and profits for the platforms.

That we don't actually become higher status or more secure by entering this competition undermines the entire exercise / "investment" of time and energy. The platform's Happy Story is that social media "connects people," but the medium only lends itself to superficial simulations of connection, not actual connections.

For that, we have email: individual to individual, not broadcasting on social media.

The financial incentives are equally attractive: sit at home (or at work) and post content for "free" (because "free" means we're the unpaid source of the platforms' profits) which can generate substantial income if our content goes viral and attracts millions of views.

By its very nature--users post as much content as they want, 24/7--social media thrives on quantity, not quality. So the way to make money on social media platforms is to post a mountain of content as the means to extract a handful of cash.

This is an ideal setup for social media platform corporations: users create content that is addictive by design--the endless scroll, keep going or you'll miss out on a terrific post!--which can then be scraped for data that can be sold to other companies while also being used to target advertising tailored to each addicted user / poster.

The platforms rake in tens of billions of dollars and dole out a tiny percentage to content creators. It's actually an amazingly one-sided extraction machine: the platforms recruit users to slave away posting mountains of content that's profitable to the platforms in the vain hope of becoming an influencer raking in big bucks from attracting tens of millions of views. The actual distribution of the money follows a power-law curve: only the few at the top make any real money, the 99.8% earn pennies or nothing.

This meager monetary inccentive also generates an unquenchable desire to post attention-grabbing content. Whether it's accurate or not is not the incentive; the incentive is to be outrageous enough to activate users' limbic attention to emotion-generating images and text.

There is no other possible output of this structure other than addiction to a pointless mountain of slag. Mighty bulldozers scoop up the raw content and extract the value via data collection and advertising, and a few nuggets are tossed to the content creators who generate the most addictive / attractive content. Everyone else is generating content in the futile pursuit of higher visibility / status / security.

Hey, Hypocrite, don't you post on social media. Yes, I do, because that's where the audience is now. If you expect me to stand on a street corner reading my content aloud (and likely being arrested as a 5150 or public nuisance), sorry, I'm in the business of creating content, and so I have to go where the audience is, which is now social media.

I don't have to "like" social media or spend any time on it to recognize that it is a global mass medium of open access. I don't post enough to ever attract much of an audience, nor is my content of the sort that attracts vast audiences. But no writer can ignore changes in the mediums of communication if they want their content to be read, oops, I mean "consumed."

The irony here is we're being "consumed" by the process of "consuming" social media. The medium of social media lends itself to Ultra-Processed Content, the cognitive-emotional equivalents of addictive-by-design Ultra-Processed snacks.

How much "nutritional value" did we extract from sorting through the mountain of pointless slag? The answer is not enough to make the time-attention-consuming process worth our time or energy, given the degradation of our mental-cognitive health that being addicted to social media incurs by its very nature.

Social media can be productively understood as a medium labeled "to serve humans," as it consumes us to feed a profit machine that can only generate mountains of pointless slag due to its incentives and structure.

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We're Living in a Tragicomic Parody

It's hard to take a joke when our entire economy and financial system is the joke.

We're blessed/cursed to be living in a very peculiar era in which parodies are taken with the utmost seriousness, an absurdist state of affairs captured by the classic line from the 1959 film North by Northwest: "So horribly sad. How is it I feel like laughing?"

The parodies are now so extreme they are self-parodies that cannot be parodied. How do we parody a world gone mad with parodies? Every attempt to parody "the news" today is trumped by reality.

We're inhabiting a travesty of a mockery of a sham of smug overlords and obsequious politically correct grifters, left and right, claiming the high moral ground while they pillage with a money-grubbing avarice so blatant that it's impervious to parody.

Their hypocrisy is so comically obvious that we can no longer tell if it's comic by design or the grifters are so shallow and superficial that they're blind to the irony of their self-parody.

At any moment, we might be instructed to wear our underwear on the outside of our clothing, and the Supreme Court would rubber-stamp this parody of serious policy with its usual cowardice, a cowardice that is now so blatant that it's also beyond parody: the Supreme Court is a parody of a functioning system of justice.

All this will be reported with great seriousness, as if it isn't a punchline in a joke nobody gets.

The irony of all the euphoric claims about AI is powerful enough to melt thick steel containment doors. The AI euphoria is itself an irony, wrapped around an even deeper irony: there is no way to tell the difference between an AI parody of "intelligence" and what AI presents as "legitimate intelligence."

A parody of AI hallucinations is impossible, because the reality of AI hallucinations already exceeds any parody. A parody of runaway AI mischief is also impossible, because the reality of AI mischief already exceeds any parody.



Then there's the parodies that are so systemic, they're the punchline nobody gets: the economy is a parody of a functional economy--here is total debt:



And the the stock market casino run by The Gamesters of Triskelion is a parody of a functional financial system:



Star Trek fans know the The Gamesters of Triskelion episode is a parody in which a society of supposedly great intelligence has decayed into a debased casino in which gambling and gaming the betting action is the sole focus of these supposedly intelligent Masters of the Universe.

Isn't it obvious that the US financial system / stock market is now such an absurd parody of a functional financial system that it can no longer be parodied, as it's a full-blown self-parody?

Ultra-Processed Life--everything is "innovative," "new," a novelty everyone must have, profitable glop presented as amusement and distraction not nourishment--is a self-parody not just of a functioning socio-economic system but of an authentic value system.

It's hard to take a joke when our entire economy and financial system is the joke. The comedian delivers the punchline and the audience is silent: they won't get the joke until it's too late to laugh, except through tears, for we're living in a tragicomic parody.

New podcast: Charles Hugh Smith on the End Game of Repressed Interest Rates: Stagflationary Inflation followed by "Cold Turkey" (29:25 min)

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The Irresistible Temptations of Centralized Power

The only "reform" that changes our lives in a fundamentally positive way is radical decentralization via distributing centralized power.

Presidents like to deal with the CEOs of corporate monopolies for self-evident reasons: Rather than engage in the tedious, contentious herding-of-cats in nimble, dynamic, competitive sectors, the Prez makes a deal with the monopoly CEO and the deal is imposed on everyone down the political, corporate, workplace hierarchy.

Centralized power makes a coup--a forced swap of leadership--meet the new boss, same as the old boss--easy. Financial coups are easier, too, with one central bank and one cartel of "too big to fail, too big to care" banks.

Centralized power offers many other Irresistible Temptations. Reformers love centralized power because if they can grab control of it, they can force-feed their glorious reforms (or profit-maximizing schemes) down everyone's throats whether they agree or not: it is against the law to complain about corporate/state monopolies controlling our lives, everyone must install a Flock camera in their bedroom, no one can criticize the Supreme Leader in private, everyone must wear approved Silly Hats in public, etc.

Oops, those reforms sound like an authoritarian, totalitarian state gone mad. Yes, precisely. All centralized power arrangements end up manifesting authoritarian, totalitarian extremes of madness, because that's the only possible outcome of centralizing power: petty dictators are soon running the asylum, and loving every minute of it. The patients, not so much.

We see this everywhere now, as monopolies are manifestations of centralized power. This is why I call the status quo Privatized Totalitarianism as privately owned and operated monopolies / cartels have the same headlock on us as state monopolies, and the two work together, as this serves the interests of both: you make the Silly Hats, and we mandate their use, and penalize anyone attempting to modify your software, app, device or Silly Hat to evade your monopoly chokehold. We both get rich exploiting the powerless peasantry, so what's not to like?

Politics now boils down to a Silly Hats slugfest over who gets control of the Privatized Totalitarianism casino. The only meaningful reform is to decentralize power by demolishing every monopoly and cartel and banning the aggregation of power. But what about "efficiency"? Yes, Privatized Totalitarianism is very "efficient"-- efficient at extraction, exploitation, surveillance, repression, propaganda, PR and social control mechanisms.

If the public can "vote with their feet" by moving to a different physical location but they're still living in the same cartel-monopoly economy wherever they move, their "liberty" is illusory. It's like changing cabins in the gulag: maybe this hut has fewer leaks and fewer fleas, but it's still in the gulag.

Just as what we're losing by using AI is invisible because we've lost the capacity to even see what's been lost, we've lost the capacity to see the systemic decay of the quality of our lives in the invisible gulag of Privatized Totalitarianism. So even as we thrill to some new novelty or tiny discount, we've lost the capacity to see what's been lost in the slow destruction of decentralized, competitive dynamism in favor of the profit-maximizing, sclerotic gulag we're all trapped in without even being aware that we're trapped, for the key to maintaining the kingdom is to foster the illusions of choice, liberty and competition while distracting us with ceaseless hype about new technologies, novelties and meaningless discounts as "competition" and "choice."

It's like looking at a row of different brand products and then reading the fine print to discover that they're all owned by the same corporation. That's Privatized Totalitarianism, well cloaked behind carefully maintained illusions of choice, liberty and competition.

And if you protest, it might get worse: "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."



The only "reform" that changes our lives in a fundamentally positive way is radical decentralization via distributing centralized power. Everything else is just changing huts in the gulag and being delighted with the steady stream of absurd parodies of novelty: "New gruel, new taste, now with micro-plastics!"

New podcast: Charles Hugh Smith on the End Game of Repressed Interest Rates: Stagflationary Inflation followed by "Cold Turkey" (29:25 min)

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