My mind is a cacophony of unanswered questions. So much on my mind that I need clarity on.
Someone explain all this to me. Some examples of intellectual juxtapositions I explore in my book, [Like] EXPLAINING BITCOIN TO BUDDHIST MONKS.
Jeans, jeans and more jeans. Not genes!
Are you following [incredulously following as I am…] the most relevant tsunami raging in the world today? It is not the one caused by the 8.8 magnitude quake in Kamchatka that Russia has put a news-blackout on. It is the American Eagle jeans commercial featuring the alluring model, Sydney Sweeney.
For those of you who watch the really important news—none of that “we will perish in the flames generated by the heat of our passions” stuff (sorry for the immodest quote)—I did not know that at my ripe age, I have become culturally and socially schizophrenic. I wear TRUE RELIGION jeans. Have been for two decades. Not American Eagle, that being the latest kryptonite of the unwashed and unhinged ultra-left zealots.
On one hand, I am—appear to be I am told—clearly a disciple of the hip-hop culture. On the other, people who do not know me will try to put me in the “never-American Eagle” jeans camp. In the interest of being entirely forthcoming, today I will wear one of my True Religion jeans while shopping for American Eagle jeans for my granddaughters. Anybody who cares to comment—yup, those are coming—get a life!
Some “highlights” on the sorry state of “law and order and justice” in the US…
Great news from Los Angeles. A man was arrested for setting a forest fire in lovely Runyon Canyon in Los Angeles! Actually it was a couple hikers who took him down “in the act.” He was arrested by the police. It was his seventh arrest for setting fires in Runyon Canyon!
Great news from Texas! A man finally succeeded in brutally murdering his ex-girlfriend. Finally succeeded! It was his third attempt. He was arrested twice previously and freed. Better news: the judges who freed him previously are still sitting on the bench.
New York, news. Again and again… How about the judge who put a twenty-year old in the brutal stabbing of a sleeping subway passenger back on the streets. He had three prior arrests, including two involving weapons and one for slashing his own mother. What could go wrong? “Oh well,” the uber-wise (morally and intellectually bankrupt) New York prosecutors and judges wisely uttered. “It’s the law.”
More good news! A woman sues the US Navy because the noise of the famous Blue Angels (the United States Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron) flying above her home caused distress for her aged cat. Now that is a worthy cause that our fantastic legal eagles can really get behind.
Not enough space here to enumerate the 75 other like situations NOT ENRAGING the population this year. Thus far…
A decade ago, your humble scribe, me, declared that social media is a cancer of the intellect. Years later, I found out that got me blocked from FB! From an account I did not know I had. Zero posts. Somebody on the staff created that account when we were among the first handful of marketers who unsuccessfully tried to make a buck advertising on FB. A badge of honor! Clearly, those people do not have a sense of humor.
Let us add to that: social media is an infection of the brain. 100 people in immediate proximity in Cincinnati witnessing multiple attempted murders by multiple would-be murderers. Most just recording all that on their mobiles and posting on social media. 99 focused on just that.
One of the 100, ONE! called 911 with a luke warm reporting of the attempted murders going on.
Social media: the new amphetamine.
LA County confesses that there are 175,000 homeless people in the county. How about the seven years they have denied MY claim that there were over 150,000, rather than 45,000 – 57,000. The city, county, state governments did not think those heart-breaking, truly pathetic people were worthy of even counting, much less helping. Shame on all of us.
While on tariffs, I am, EU to buy $750 billion in US energy. $600 billion in whatever else. Effectively, we get to a zero mutual tariffs confluence. Why the hell was this not done and done months ago?
Call me a “hopeful” cynic… Japan to spend $550 billion at Trump discretion. Perhaps on semiconductors, energy, pharmaceuticals and shipbuilding. 90% of profits reportedly going to the U.S. I want to live to see that.
No matter. Even some of that would be a good thing if next time I am in Tokyo, I will count twenty-five US made cars on the streets. The first five days.
Four of the top ten automobiles sold in the US are Japanese. Just sayin’.
The world remains on fire. Some highlighted lowlights…
Cambodia and Thailand at war. No worries: the mighty dollar will win. Trump buying peace with tariffs.
Putin will continue his unprovoked war as long as he believes it’s sustainable and offers a pathway to achieving his goals. Somebody listen to me already: choke off the war-money with tariffs and sanctions. Start with Russia and India.
Russia’s response to Trump is to threaten nuclear holocaust and send fighter jets to test defenses in Alaska. The most vulnerable place in the US.
Easy to spill blood with other people’s money. Where is Margaret Thacher when you need her?
Peace negotiated in re DRC … As we wrote in the INFLUENCER when that was reported: what could go wrong?
70 Christians were reported beheaded, again in a church in the DRC, in February. The killings of Christians are worse in Nigeria, with Pope Leo XIV telling crowds at the Vatican that “some 200 people were murdered, with extraordinary cruelty” on June 13 in Yelewata, in Nigeria’s Benue State.
Condemnations are aplenty. But nobody does anything about it. In fact, the world has become unsensitized to this sort of immense brutality. Here is a brutally simple test: ask the first twenty people you encounter if they know where Somalia and the Sudan are. “Africa” is an insufficient answer. Then, do not bother asking about genocide and female mutilation there.
Hamas walks away from cease fire negotiations, again. Just normal stuff. Like from the cease fire that was in effect on October 7, 2023. Their latest demands, if granted—nobody in the Middle East will do that!—would insure another forty years of subjugating the pathetic Palestinians and waging war-to-the-death against the Jews.
Some points of interest…
Israel and Gaza, focusing on famine in Gaza…
– 94,000 food trucks entered Gaza in the past 4 years. All honest reporting knows what happened to those.
– 400 trucks from Israel EVERY DAY.
– 100 MILLION meals served in 2 months by U.S. and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Dangerous mission. Hamas may attack this effort, militarily, because they have not been able to loot that food distribution from the poor. It is guarded by the Israeli military. Hamas’ enemy to the death is guarding the feeding of Palestinians.
– 50% of Hamas operating “budget” comes from stealing the food-aid from their people and selling that on the black market all over the Middle East. There is no limit to the cruelty of the savage Hamas to their own people.
– Border with Egypt remains closed.
– Israel continues to mightily fail the international PR war. Amazing. Israel is feeding the hungry among their enemies to the death.
Solution? Flood Gaza with more food than it can be consumed! For the foreseeable future. Destroy the scarcity driven value accomplishing the ultimate goal: feed the hungry, Hamas-oppressed Palestinian people. And starve Hamas of this unholy source of money.
Don’t believe me on the efficacy of this? Look back at the Bass brothers when they tried to corner the silver market. If you are inclined, ask me about a client who asked for my counsel when they came across possibly the biggest cache of 4N-6N (99.99+% pure) aluminum in the world, in what appeared to be a massive real estate acquisition in the ‘80s. The value of a metric ton was some $2,500. The value of a couple thousand metric tons dumped on the market?
Best dump 90% of it in the Pacific lest you want to destroy its value entirely.
Can UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer be as weak- kneed, marginally functioning imbecile and coward as he exhibited earlier this week? Hey Keir: you are so late to the picnic as to be embarrassing. Recognizing a Palestinian state in exchange for a cease fire?
Mr. Starmer: try as I might to be more pedantic, you are a moron. How many times has Israel pushed that just so Hamas can break it? Amazing how you just genuflected to the antisemitic movement in your otherwise fantastic country.
The American educational system is in a state of severe distress. Actually, in triage.
First. Indoctrinating children: you cannot start them young enough. Quintessential Marx.
How dumb are we.
The National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the United States of America asserts to a certainty that we are abjectly stupid. Just take a gander at their official 2025 Handbook.
Some about institutionalized antisemitism. How wonderfully hateful and Marxist of them. Did you know that The Holocaust did not target Jews? The NEA does.
Not quite suicide-bombers training, but a good start. Great thing for our children.
About the University of California, Los Angeles. Mighty UCLA. Mind you, this IS in the US. And it was/is 2024-2025.
While doing a network interview—sitting on the patio at the famed In-N-Out Burger in Westwood, California, one block from the UCLA campus—I witnessed the pro-Palestinian “protests” that with the complicity of the administration, shut down the campus of 47,000 students.
In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. And banned from parts of the campus known as “Jew Exclusion Zones.”
This is in 2024, in Los Angeles, California, in the United States of America.
If time travel were possible, thankfully that is just sci-fi folly, likely Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels—yes, Hitler’s brilliant PR guru GOEBBELS—would have been welcomed as a visiting professor at UCLA. In 2024. In Los Angeles, California. In the USA.
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has agreed to pay $6 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Jewish students and faculty members over the school’s handling of anti-Israel protests, including allowing protesters to ban Jews from a part of the campus known as a “Jew Exclusion Zone.”
Again, in the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith,” a federal court found at the time.
Just think, not that many years ago, I hoped my children would go to college at UCLA. At that time, it was a good confluence of meritocracy and diversity. Alas, they elected their addiction to skiing a criteria for universities preferences. Read that as exceptional skiing available proximate to some first rate universities.
Nearly $1 Billion in temporary cosmetic veneer, thus far… Looks and sounds good but for its essential irrelevance…
The Fed is taking $221 Million off Columbia for their dastardly complicity in championing antisemitism.
Let us do the “relevance-test”: Their endowment is $14.8 billion, and they are getting ~$1.3 billion in federal grants annually. So: no big deal about the $221 million.
The Fed will take $500 Million off Harvard for their dastardly complicity in championing antisemitism.
Again the “relevance-test:” Their endowment is $53 billion, and they are getting ~$2.9 billion in federal grants annually. So: no big deal about the $500 million.
No need to continue with the enumeration. More to come from the Fed.
OMG… The horror of it!
The great outcry by, hmmm, both the washed and unwashed. The President of the US, all 79 years of him, played a solid round of golf in Scotland, Respectable round of golf. While working and jawing (he does that some 19 hours every day) he sinks a nice put. Walks away without taking the ball out of the cup. And the golf world caught fire. THAT many people have nothing more relevant to get bothered about?
Just got “beat up” by no less than two brilliant global thinkers.
I proffered that notwithstanding Trump’s economic sledge hammer making a great effort to mediate between Pakistan and India, the most dangerous place on earth remains Pakistan. It is just that historical and geopolitical witches brew thing. Kashmir as a ready excuse plus the never-ending religious nationalism and domestic pressure-cooker. Admit it or not, they are in fact waging a nuclear proliferation “war.” So… What could go wrong?
Immersive Spatial Computing and Metaverse Growth.
Whoa! I am told by some very smart people that is a biggie! I thought to learn some. Froze at the leap between virtual shopping and virtual buying. I am hoping our smart readers will educate me.
I wish you and yours a fun and productive week.