Karen Kwiatkowski on the Iran war: a tale of two empires

Our military footprint in the Gulf and the region has contracted; this will continue.  What we just watched over the past 100 days was an unusually vivid moment in the long slow collapse of the US military and financial empire. 

Conversely, tiny Israel saw its fluid borders expand in all four directions.  The cover of this war coincided with new bases in Somaliland, new gas fields through occupation of southern Lebanon and Gaza, massive Israeli expansion through land and political purchase in Greece, Cyprus, and Albania, and the exponential erasure of Gazans, Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians. 

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A truly defensive military and intelligence apparatus, at a fifth or even a tenth of what we spend today, as well as a structural jettisoning of special alliances that animate the current defense budget and focus, including but not limited to Israel, are now within reach for the US, in part because of what happened over the past 100 days.  The empire will oppose any changes in this direction, but our dry shell of an empire has few choices. 

In a strange way Trump will bring the troops home, and end US wars of choice, and like the captain of the Titanic, he will ride the ship, damaged by arrogance and overreach, into the deep. 

But before the empire fades, it retrenches, and global war-mongering becomes totalitarianism at home, national intelligence becomes domestic surveillance, AI looks inward to identify potential enemies of the state, and maps their communities for decimation or economic lockdown.

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Today, we are in the midst of the collapse of two empires, one tiny and vicious, the other lumbering and lazy.  These two empires suffer different illusions, but Israel, under fascist Zionism, has dibs on discipline and seeks to rule.

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US imperial retrenchment has been happening under our very noses, slowly at first with our devalued currency and never-ending wars, but the pace is quickening.  Notably in this 250th year after the Declaration of Independence, every American needs to be prepared for war at home.

~ Karen Kwiatkowski, "The US Empire is Retrenching, Bringing Imperialism Home," LewRockwell.com, June 15, 2026

 

Ed Zitron on AI ROI

I think people are conflating a semiconductor rally with an underlying successful business, which doesn't really exist.  Anthropic's current revenue growth, which is deeply questionable and the fact that they "leaked" profitability - manipulated by Elon Musk, of course - their growth is coming because people cannot measure how much an AI task actually costs.  And a couple months ago, Anthpropic actually started charging their enterprise customers the actual token rates.  What this has led to is suddenly businesses are saying, "Oh, how much money are we spending?"  Uber's COO Andrew McDonald said that they are having trouble justifying the AI spend based on the actual return when one can actually measure it.  So you've got a thing where you can't measure the costs and you can't measure the return on investment.  What do you call that?  You call it a thing without an ROI.

~ Ed Zitron, EZ Primary Research CEO, interview on Bloomberg Businessweek Daily, June 4, 2026

 

Aristotle on knowledge

The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge. 

~ Aristotle

 

Dan Niles on the importance of OpenClaw

The one thing you have going on right now that you didn't have during the internet build out, on January 30th you had the formalization of this thing called OpenClaw [a free, open-source, self-hosted autonomous AI personal assistant/agent], which really kicked off the whole agentic [AI] move by corporations.  So Dan Nathan, instead of prior to that saying, "I'm going to ask ChatGPT a question, it's going to give me an answer" might go to ChatGPT and instead of asking, "Well, how did internet stocks perform in the late '90s?" you might go and ask ChatGPT, "Hey, go to Bloomberg, pull down data for all of these 20 internet companies, then go to the SEC website and go look at the 10-Ks and Qs, see if there were any writedowns, and then go and see what the news stories were at The Wall Street Journal, and then create a spreadsheet where I'm putting all of this data."

When you do that, that takes 10 to 100 times more tokens [basic units of text that the LLM reads, processes and generates; 100 tokens ≈ 75 words] and you can see that in the tokens being generated.  And so you have this step function change in compute demand caused by that that started on January 30th.  So I think you're going to see very strong demand for at least another year until you sort of anniversary that, and I think stocks continue to go higher because of that.  

Do I think we're in a bubble?  100%.  Do I think we're going to get a 30-50% drawdown at some point next year?  Yes.  But, do I think you can make a lot of money between now and then?  I think the answer to that is also, yes.

 ~ Dan Niles, "We're 100% in a Bubble and Dan Niles is Still Buying," RiskReversal Media, 6:00 mark, May 29, 2026

 

Dan Niles on agentic AI and the need for compute

With agentic [AI] you're doing multiple actions, multiple calls to APIs, opening up applications like an Excel or a Bloomberg or a CNBC website or SEC website, etc. and doing all of these things.  So you need an orchestration engine.  You need something that goes ahead and organizes all of that.  That's what CPUs do very well.  If you go back to training, you're just doing the same thing over and over again where you are training these AIs.  That's what a GPU does incredibly well, and that's why you saw an Nvidia absolutely explode higher because CPUs weren't really valuable in training.  You move to chat-based AI, again, that's pretty decent for a GPU, but now when you move to agentic, that's great for a CPU.  So you went originally from about 8 GPUs for 1 CPU.  When you move to agentic, that ratio gets closer to 1-to-1.

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Agentic [AI] requires 10 to 100 times more tokens than chat-based AI.

~ Dan Niles, "Dan Niles: Be Nimble - 30-50% AI Crash By 2027," The Master Investor Podcast with Wilfred Frost, 11:40 mark, May 12, 2026

 

Dario Perkins on the AI capex debate

With U.S. tech stocks melting higher, the bulls are clearly “winning.” Two forces are driving this revival in sentiment. First, revenues across the AI ecosystem have surged, which seems to contradict the bears’ worries about data-center profitability. Second, we are seeing extremely strong demand for compute, which helps to alleviate investors’ worries about “overinvestment.” 

From our perspective, however, the debate about the sustainability of AI capex hasn’t been settled. Far from it. That’s because what we are seeing now is still largely just the result of revenue recycling, rather than the entry of new funds from outside the AI ecosystem. 

To illustrate: This year the hyperscalers are set to spend around $700 billion on data centers. That is a huge sum. Not only does it directly boost the revenues of the companies that provide the infrastructure, but the hyperscalers are also booking revenues from the recycling of those investments, either as order backlogs (“commitments” from the likes of OpenAI) or as “other revenues” (derived from the hyperscalers taking an equity stake in their customers and then recording large capital gains). 

Meanwhile, it is the model developers and the hyperscalers that are still driving much of the increase in demand for compute, as they put those massive AI investments to work. This whole ecosystem is massively circular; and while those circular dynamics clearly have a lot of momentum, that, in itself, isn’t enough for medium-term sustainability. For AI capex to be sustainable over the medium term, there needs to be a much larger share of revenue (and compute demand) from outside the ecosystem, particularly from business and consumer demand. Capex recycling isn’t enough. 

~ Dario Perkins, "The AI capex debate—who is right?," Macro Picture/TS Lombard, May 21, 2026

 

Kevin Duffy on U.S. aggressions against Iran

The world doesn't trust Iran because it has memory-holed past U.S. aggressions: 

1953 - CIA-led coup overthrows democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh; installs U.S.-friendly Shah, authoritarian monarch. 

1957 - SAVAK (secret police) is established with CIA and Israeli (Mossad) assistance; this becomes the Shah’s primary tool of repression. 

1979 - U.S. first imposes sanctions after the Shah is overthrown; these undergo a major expansion in 1995 under Clinton. 

1980-1988 - U.S. backs Saddam Hussein in Iran-Iraq War, costing hundreds of thousands of Iranian lives 

1988 - USS Vincennes “mistakenly” shoots down civilian Iran Air Flight 655 on July 3 over the Strait of Hormuz. All 290 aboard are killed, including 254 Iranians and 66 children. The US calls it a tragic error in a combat zone; Iran views it as deliberate. 

2025-2026 - US and Israeli strikes on Iran (starting late February 2025/early 2026) cause thousands of Iranian deaths, including a missile strike that hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in southern Iran, costing 156 lives, 120 of them schoolchildren.

~ Kevin Duffy, tweet, April 28, 2026