Running Out of Steam - Vox Popoli - (Will this become a model for resistance when DaUS reinstitutes the draft? - CL)

 https://voxday.net/2026/05/21/running-out-of-steam/ 

Is Ukraine reaching its recruitment limit? This is the key factor in both our models. There are some indications that this is the case. A week ago, Branko Marcetic (using Ukrainian sources) provided some relevant numbers in a Responsible Statecraft article, Ukraine’s conscription crisis is getting increasingly bloody; While outside voices insist the war can still be won on the battlefield, young men in the country are violently resisting recruiters to stay out of it. Here are some numbers supporting this conclusion.

The number of complaints over possible violations committed by enlistment officers, received by Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets:

2022 — 18
2023 — 514
2024 — 3312
2025 — 6127

The number of violent attacks against enlistment officers shows the same trend: from 5 in 2022 to 117 in just the first four months of this year.

One can hardly blame the young Ukrainians for attacking the “enlistment officers” who are really straight-up kidnappers. At the end of the day, the odds of surviving a violent encounter with these rear-echelon thugs is a lot higher than surviving one with frontline Russian troops.

Young European men have probably already figured that out, which is why I expect any attempt by any European country to enact a draft besides Russophobic Poland and Finland to meet with literally violent resistance. Why would any European man fight to defend against civilized Russia instead of rapey third-world invaders?

Peak SUV? - (DaRealQuestion - WTF are Americans gonna do about it besides bleating BAAAAAH? - CL)

  It is only about four months into this stupid, evil war that Trump decided to launch and it is only about two months since gas prices got not just uncomfortably high but unsustainably high. It is annoying to have to pay 50 cents more for a gallon of gas because a reckless, arrogant man decided to launch a war for no good reason. It is unsustainable when it costs twice as much to fill up – and we’re now very close to that point. The cost of gas averaged about $2.80 around Christmas – just a little more than four months ago. It is currently – as of May 19 – about $4.50 per gallon.

A little more than four months ago, it only cost about $60 to put 22 gallons of regular unleaded in a large, V8-powered SUV such as a Chevy Tahoe. It currently costs about $100 to fill the same tank. If we have not arrived at the point of unsustainability, we’re surely close to it. Its too early to know exactly how soon the bottom will fall out but it is inevitable that it’s going to fall out. The used car lots will fill up with large SUVs with V8 engines – the fire-sale prices notwithstanding because (again) even if it is affordable to buy one, most people still won;t be able to (or want to) feed one.

Then the market for new ones will collapse – and when it does, it will probably result in the collapse of several vehicle manufacturers that have become completely dependent on the profits made selling large SUVs (as well as large trucks).

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/05/eric-peters/peak-suv/ 

NVidia (Finally) Admits The Obvious - Denninger

 Their "monopoly" is gone.

No, their stock price didn't crash, but they all but admitted Huawei is going to be the lead in China when it comes to the chips run there -- particularly for AI, but not only for AI.  Their CEO, in other words, admitted in public what anyone who actually read any of the material related to Huawei, China and others over the last several years already knew (and which I've pointed out repeatedly.)

Whistling past the market's detonation everyone is.

Why?

Because the same is going to happen domestically, and "AI" isn't going to actually be what people believe......

......Even people who I know are quite intelligent have bought into the BS of those pumping this stuff: The tasks that we as humans find trivial -- and I remind you that the human brain consumes about 20 watts to do everything it does, most of which is consumed keeping your organism alive -- are those which computers require terawatts of power to emulate and they still cannot manage it because there is in fact no actual inference going on.  We don't know how the brain does it (even if the brain is in the head of a cat) and thus we can't reproduce it.......

https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=255447 

.....Oh by the way this does not demonstrate out-of-scope thought since it is simply a search through existing facts -- albeit a very fast one which is what computers are good at.

But the claims of firms like Microsoft's recent pronouncement that 60% of all jobs -- all white collar work -- will be replaced by AI within the next 18 months -- do not pass the giggle test.

That is not going to happen and yet the entirety of the market's current levels are based on that being true.

It is not true.

No computer has ever acted out of scope.

Not even once in the history of computing, yet humans do it every single day.

That humans do so is why with roughly 20 hours of training and a tenth of a kilowatt-hour of energy expenditure a 16 year old human can operate a motor vehicle with 99.9% success thereafter (and improving) while the computer, which cannot, is forced to have a corpus of billions of miles of travel in order to understand that a semi trailer across the road is dangerous -- and when the corpus is missing the current specific danger it decapitates you by driving under said trailer because it cannot actually infer anything.

The "AI" is not hallucinating; it is following its programming.

Oh Look, Truth On Iran! (But do we want to hear it! - CL)

 https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=255443 

Incidentally there is no evading the recession (or worse) that this adventure is going to cause.  It is already roughly half as long as the 1974 oil embargo that led to eight years of economic Hell in America.  I came of age during it and I remember every bit of it.  Attempting to attenuate it with "rate cuts" and more government spending, given our fiscal position, debt, and the exponential increase in financing and costs that will generate, if it is tried, will guarantee a 1930s-style outcome and lead to the very real possibility of our government collapsing.

That must not be done and we must not, as Americans, permit any attempt at it.  In fact the opposite; we must gut the medical monster like a fish right here, right now, put a permanent stop to the now-exponential and parabolic increase in CMS spending and the extraction that sector imposes on everyone else.  That is the only way to get the federal budget, state budgets and personal balance sheets of the American people under control and at the same time all cross-subsidies on energy and similar, including any and all that are attempted to be put in place for "AI" and similar must be barred.

There is no other alternative to what is an obvious and impending economic disaster if we do not do so.

Observations from the Xi-Trump summit, by Hua Bin - The Unz Review

 Much ado about nothing

Full text:

https://www.unz.com/bhua/observations-from-the-xi-trump-summit/ 

There is no getting around about the fact the US is an oligarchy

If there is still any residual illusion among some Chinese that the US is a “democracy” to be replicated, the passenger list on Air Force One puts that to rest for good.

Chinese netizens have noticed there are 5 billionaires among the 17 corporate chieftains accompanying Trump to Beijing – Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jensen Huang, Larry Fink (Blackrock), and Steve Schwarzman (Blackstone).

According to Forbes, there are between 12 to 15 billionaires among Trump’s cabinet members and advisors, not including Trump himself.

The delegation to Beijing represents the interest of Corporate America at the most elite level from tech (Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Micron, Qualcomm) to Wall Street (Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Visa, Blackrock) to Big Ag and aerospace (Cargill, Boeing, GE Aerospace).

These celebrity/billionaire CEOs are not your average corporate worker bees on the trip to do a few deals. They are the literal ruling class of the US.

The US government today is captured by oligarchic interest thoroughly. It is led by a real estate billionaire who is getting richer through crypto deals, insider trading, and various “pay to play” schemes.

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The state exists to serve the interests of these oligarchs.

Beijing also invited several high-profile business executives to the state dinner including Lei Jun (Xiaomi), Liang Rubo (ByteDance), Yang Yuanqing (Lenovo), and Cao Hui (Fuyao Glass).

These are also self-made billionaires, but none has any political influence over Xi or the Chinese government.

They have no conduits to power such as lobbies, think tanks, political donations, and SuperPACs.

There was a time when some Chinese lived with the illusion that “democracy” is better than one party rule and the US is a democracy.

But “rule by the rich” is plutocracy, not a democracy. The two don’t co-exist, meaning you cannot be a plutocracy and a democracy at the same time.

Trump’s merry gang of bandits on Air Force One has shown to these unsuspecting Chinese who really rule the US.

It makes one wonder – who is thinking now it is better to be ruled by Trump, Larry Fink, and Elon Musk than by Xi and the CPC?

Excising the Corporate Cancer - Vox Popoli - ( First rule - erase your entire HR dept! - CL)

 This CEO did the right thing in firing his entire HR team, even if he still harbors misplaced confidence in the utility of Human Relations for the corpocracy:

Bolt’s CEO has defended his decision to fire the company’s entire HR team, claiming they had been ‘creating problems that didn’t exist’. Ryan Breslow, the co-founder and chief executive of US fintech firm Bolt, said the department was scrapped as part of sweeping layoffs aimed at returning the struggling business to ‘start-up mode’.....

https://voxday.net/2026/05/20/excising-the-corporate-cancer/ 

....Eliminating the HR department in its entirety was one of my top recommendations in Corporate Cancer. Like the legal department, it is entirely unproductive. But unlike the legal department, it is unnecessary, it does not mitigate risk, and it is actively counterproductive. The average company would see better results from paying their HR employees to stay home full-time without having any contact with anyone in the organization for any reason.

DEEP TRUMP: The conman who saved America from the Thucydides Trap, by Laurent Guyénot - The Unz Review - (Ladies and gentlemen, meet the object of our delusions! - CL)

 How can one not feel sorry and ashamed today for having believed in Trump? I’ll be honest: although I hold no responsibility in Trump’s election, I feel ashamed for having placed any hope in him.

The Trump phenomenon resembles a form of collective hypnosis. It has a religious dimension that makes it unique in American political history. For the believer, every failure, every scandal, every lie is proof that Trump is fighting against the Deep State, the Fake News, the Swamp, the Washington elite, the Democrats, the New World Order, the FBI, and who knows what else. The Q psy-op was particularly successful in tapping into the religious imagination of Americans who were distrustful of the government. This is well explained by Marjorie Taylor Green, who admits she “fell for that in late 2017 and 2018”:

it’s basically a cult. … What it does, it takes a layer of truth and then it twists it into a lie. … Q was very successful. It was probably one of the most successful psychological operations I’ve ever seen because it did use the layer of truth and the things that people were most passionate about and was able to use that and twist their belief to pull their full faith and trust into … an anonymous person or an anonymous entity.

Full text: https://www.unz.com/article/deep-trump-the-conman-who-saved-america-from-the-thucydides-trap/ 

...There is no trace in his books of a word of wisdom or a touch of humor. In fact, Trump has no literary or philosophical culture, and it shows.

What is also clear in Trump’s books is his narcissism. Every sentence comes down to: “I’m the best and I know everything about everything.” Trump isn’t just a salesman; he’s also the product.

Following the opening of Trump Tower in Manhattan in 1983, the massive promotion of his book The Art of the Deal turned Trump into a celebrity. Tony Schwartz, the book’s co-author—who, according to Schwartz, actually wrote the entire book (with Trump’s contribution limited to deleting the least flattering passages)—has said since 2016 that he is haunted by guilt for having helped Trump become president. Trump, he says, lies constantly without the slightest inhibition or guilt. “There is an emptiness inside Trump. There’s an absence of a soul. There’s an absence of a heart.”

The third element that helped craft Trump’s image as a billionaire hero—the equivalent of a saint in the religion of money—is the reality TV show The Apprentice, co-produced by Trump himself and airing since 2004, in which Trump essentially sells himself.