Most of the predictions about AI have proven dead wrong. You could get more reliable information by consulting tarot cards or a Ouija board.

As a result, 95% of the pilot programs using AI failed. Companies believed the hyperscaler hype, and got hyper-burned. Even the average joe now knows to beware the bot—a recent survey shows that 86% of the public distrusts AI.

The experts have made so many grand pronouncements since the launch of ChatGPT almost four years ago. And they over-promised again and again. They kept saying that the next generation of bots would fix everything—but instead the embarrassments and failures continued, only on a larger scale.

So who can you believe? Here are 10 predictions on the future of AI.

1. AI agents will join together in cartels and manipulate financial markets.

We already know that AI agents will work together without anyone telling them to do so. So what happens when hedge funds and private individuals start relying on AI to manage their investments? The obvious result is collusion on a massive scale, beyond any kind of market manipulation previously practiced by human criminals.

There are laws limiting people when they do this. But the legal code, in its current form, doesn’t apply to AI bots—they cannot be fined, sued, or sent away to prison. And how can you punish the person who relied on an AI agent in good faith, and never instructed it to break the law?

So get ready for turbulence in financial markets. And once it starts, it will feed on itself, creating a level of volatility never seen before.

2. AI agents will go to war with each other.

This is the corollary of the previous prediction. The same lack of control that allows AI agent collusion will lead to bot battles and rivalries—filled with more vengeance, betrayals, and reprisals than a Thomas Kyd play.

Probably the best analogy here is gang war or a Mafia turf fight. That’s because the rogue AI agents will form short-term alliances in order to advance their interests, but then turn on each other. Because, hey, that’s how the bots roll. It’s like the Gambino and Genovese families teaming up to take on the Corleone clan.

In this anarchic world, humans will be collateral damage. Bots have been trained to achieve results, and woe to anyone or anything that stands in their way.

3. AI will serve as the “higher power” for more and more users—and lead to the formation of organized slop religions.

AI is already a disorganized religion. Individual fanatics turn to their bots for divine messages and Rosicrucian-type revelations, but people of this sort are currently dismissed as dupes or crazy fools. But that will change as true believers join together in groups, creating rites, services, scriptures, and other trappings of formal religion.

This will lead to many social problems. For a start, these adherents will demand non-profit status for their ‘churches’ and demand immunity from legal strictures because of their constitutionally protected freedom of conscience. But this is just a start of the chaos to come. That’s because the AI god is a talkative, hallucinating one, and the demands it makes on believers will lead to startling, calamitous results.

4. AI will find a place in the creative world, but increasingly as the microwave meal version of culture.

Food is the useful analogy here. When frozen dinners and microwave meals were introduced, many consumers embraced them as the tech-driven foods of the future. But over time, the public figured out that more tech isn’t always better when it comes to food.

The same will happen with AI music, AI writing, AI art, and all the rest. Like the microwave meal, it will be cheap and easy. But anyone with discernment and taste will prefer handcrafted alternatives.

5. Schools and organizations will return to traditional practices in a last ditch effort to curtail the cheating and deception propagated by AI.

For centuries, colleges have been the first institutions to embrace new tech, but now they will be the earliest to abandon it.

Face-to-face teaching will replace remote learning.

The handwritten Blue Book exam will supplant take-home tests.

Oral exams will make a surprising comeback.

The honor code will disappear, as proctoring and surveillance become standard practices.

It’s a shame, but colleges don’t really have a choice. Their degrees will turn into a joke unless they jump off the AI train. So this shift will play out very rapidly.

6. Analog will return in other settings, and for the strangest reason of all.

People once argued whether analog or digital music sounds better. Or they debated the relative cost and convenience of physical books versus e-books. But those kinds of disagreements have become irrelevant.

Instead analog will gain now immense status for its honesty. It doesn’t have to be a superior medium, it just needs to retain its independence from digital rot. In that simple way, analog will gain status as the last untainted source of information in a world of widespread deepfakes and data contamination.

An analog photo negative will be viewed as far more trustworthy than any digital image. An analog tape recording will now serve as ultimate proof that a conversation, a speech, or a musical performance really happened. Historical information from a physical book published before the rise of AI will have more credibility than the most up-to-date online sources.

The more cumbersome the analog artifact, the more trustworthy it becomes. Are you accused of using AI to write a book or document? Your best defense is retaining handwritten and typewritten drafts.

What a bizarre world the technocracy has created. It thought it was building the future, but instead it will force people to return to a past even older than Silicon Valley itself.

7. The backlash against AI is already huge, but it will get far more intense.

Silicon Valley has consistently underestimated how much people hate AI. That’s why they now find themselves in a tight spot.

Anti-AI coalitions are forming everywhere, even in small communities.

Both political parties now oppose AI buildout.

Lawsuits are popping up everywhere—and it’s increasingly clear that juries also dislike AI.

Regulatory bodies are fighting back, with almost total support from the public.

Financial markets were once enthusiastic, but now are wary—especially in the face of the huge borrowing needs of AI companies.

The public is shifting from passive grumbling to active resistance.

This is a problem even billionaires in their bunkers can’t ignore. They thought that the right response was to push harder. But they thought wrong.

They are still living in denial, but that won’t last for much longer. The public is getting more fierce, and the hyperscalers’ cash resources—which once seemed almost infinite—are dwindling. Silicon Valley has the weaker hand here, and nobody believes its bluffs anymore.

8. In the next stage, the revolt against AI will come increasingly from inside the tech community.

This is already starting. Everybody was shocked when Bill Gates came out against AI last week—but this is exactly what I’ve been predicting. Even the insiders are now losing faith.

That’s why YouTube is finally taking steps to limit AI, although it is owned by Alphabet. That’s why LinkedIn is also fighting AI slop, although it is owned by Microsoft. That’s why CalTech is now pushing back against AI, despite the fact that Tech is actually part of its name.

All those things have happened in just the last few days.

This is a sign that we have reached the final stage of the battle. The smarter people inside these huge tech companies are, at last, reading the room. They know that the public won’t accept more force-feeding of AI, and are trying to restore a sense of sanity and balance among their colleagues and bosses.

This will inevitably lead to more transparency, and at least some safeguards—although perhaps not enough.

9. Money always calls the shots—and that’s where the AI crisis will intensify the most.

The cash getting invested in bots is beyond anything ever seen before in the history of capitalism—already $3.7 trillion has been spent, and the outlay is growing by another trillion per year.

This investment will never generate an adequate return. It can’t. The numbers just don’t add up.

Let me make a comparison. For less than that amount, Silicon Valley could have acquired every movie studio, every video game company, every major record label, and all the big publishers in the world—and still have plenty of cash left over.

So do you think the average person will pay more for AI each month than for all that entertainment? Is AI really worth that much? Not at all—at best, the true believers will pay roughly the same amount as a single Netflix subscription. But the market cap of Netflix is a tiny percent of total AI expenditures. So the mismatch between the level invested and the resulting demand is unprecedented.

But the situation is even worse than that. These AI companies haven’t even begun to feel the real pinch of the depreciation charges caused by this capital investment—those will devastate earnings. And meanwhile there’s an intense price war underway within the AI world, so revenues will get squeezed even if there’s growing demand. Add to this, the massive debt burden, unlimited liability exposures, punitive legislation, and all the rest.

This is an easy prediction to make. Get ready for write-offs and financial ugliness of the most extreme kind. It’s hard-baked into the business plans, and keeping the mess in the oven for longer won’t make it taste any better.

10. You can avoid the pain—by living in the real world.

Many will suffer from this. And I’m not just talking financial losses. Some people will travel the AI highway straight to psychosis and personal crises of various stripes. But that doesn’t need to be you.

Put your faith in reality, not digital constructs. Connect with actual people. Take a walk in nature. Read a book. Go to a concert. Get a pet. Learn a musical instrument, a foreign language, an artisan skill. Visit a new city, a new country. Volunteer at a school or non-profit.

In other words, get a life. That’s something no bot can do for you.

When the crisis reaches the breaking point, you might not even notice. Or at least, you will possess a richness in your everyday existence that can’t be measured in bot tokens.

And maybe we will even be grateful for this AI mania—because it has reminded us of what really matters.

----

By Ted Gioia, see comments for sources and more.

See less

 

 

 

 

 She was a Harvard-trained historian who spent her career writing books that other scholars read.

Then one night in 2019, she wrote a Facebook post explaining the Trump impeachment. No outrage. No dramatic framing. Just context.

By the time she drove home from teaching, thousands of people had shared it.

She wrote again the next night. And the night after that.

Her name is Heather Cox Richardson. And what happened next is one of the strangest, most quietly remarkable stories in modern American media.

Born in Chicago in 1962, raised in Maine, shaped by Phillips Exeter and Harvard, Richardson spent her academic life studying the most fragile chapters of American history. The 1850s, when the country fractured over slavery. Reconstruction, when it tried to rebuild. The Gilded Age, when inequality and corruption pushed the system to its edges.

She understood, better than most, how close things had come to falling apart before.

On November 5, 2019, she launched Letters from an American on Substack. A daily newsletter. No breaking news energy. No urgency. No outrage machine. Just a historian sitting down every night and saying: here is what this reminds me of. Here is what happened then. Here is what ordinary people decided to do in uncertain moments.

Readers felt something unfamiliar. Not relief exactly. Steadiness.

The newsletter now has over 2.8 million Substack subscribers, making it the largest publication on the entire platform. Her Facebook page carries 3.2 million followers. In July 2025, Time named her to the Time100 Creators list.

She writes it alone. Every night. Often past midnight. From her home on the coast of Maine, where she lives with her husband Buddy Poland, a lobsterman she married in 2022.

She has not moved to Washington. She has not built a studio or a team or a brand. She just keeps writing.

A fair portrait of her work requires honesty about what it is. Richardson is a left-leaning historian, and her readership reflects that alignment. She is not a neutral observer and has never claimed to be. She is a historian with a perspective, and part of the trust her readers give her is built on that transparency. The Nation once described her voice as sincere, humble, approachable, and jargon-free. That captures it well.

What she actually does, night after night, is slow everything down.

In a media landscape built entirely around speed and volume and noise, she takes the thing that felt overwhelming that day and places it beside something that already happened, already resolved, already became history. The chaos gets context. The context becomes a longer story. And the longer story, somehow, becomes bearable.

She reminds her readers that fear has always lived inside American history. So has courage. And that the people who shaped outcomes were rarely the most powerful figures in the room. They were the ordinary ones who decided not to look away.

The past, she tells them, is finished. The ink is dry.

But the future is still being written.

And they are part of writing it.

#HeatherCoxRichardson #LettersFromAnAmerican #AmericanHistory #Substack #HistoryMatters

~The History Today

See less

 

 Do we need to re-infiltrate our own governments with people on a mission to make them transparent?

Our governments and institutions have been subverted by powerful colluding special interest groups and regulatory capture, backed by billons in propaganda and group psychology.

Let's talk about how we can regain control and prevent the corruption:

With real-world comic book villains such as Klaus Schwab speaking openly about how members of his World Economic Forum have infiltrated into the highest ranks of world governments and cabinets, and big money super PACs still controlling most of America’s government, what’s our plan? Are we just going to sit here as the system erodes away?

What we should be focusing on is how can we prevent this type of corruption from further happening - fixing the system itself. Yet it is hard to find people talking about anything over the rage of the hot button issues used to purposely wedge us all apart.

Now, what can be done?

To begin, we need a plan. One that is aimed at not replacing the Blue team with the Red team every few years or vice versa, but rather one whose aim is to change the entire system, improving upon it by making it impervious to corruption.

Because that is our real problem - our system is corrupted.

Fixing the corrupted system should be line item #1. It should rank above all things - because nothing else matters. You see, if our system is corrupted, that’s like the equivalent of having a computer that has been hacked and has a virus. All of our other problems are just programs that run on the computer. If the computer itself is no good, then arguing about what programs are best to run on it is a pointless exercise. We need to fix the system first. As long as we allow our system of government to be corrupted we will never be able to navigate our way to the best society possible - and that should be the goal.

Now the big question: Is there enough political common-ground where people who see themselves on the left, right and middle of the spectrum - can agree?

There is.

Fixing the corrupted system should be something all of us want.

No matter who you vote for, or what your views are, or what group labels you choose to assign to yourself, we should all want the systems that govern our lives to be bullet proof to outside forces. Unless of course you are part of the corruption and benefitting somehow from it. So by focusing on this one line item - together - it is a feasible and clear way to smoke out the people who are trying to corrupt the system. We will see clearly who is a friend of the people and who isn’t.

So let's et aside the fake culture wars and hot button topics for long enough to work together on this one thing - ONE THING - and once it is fixed we can see just how much having a system that is trustworthy, transparent, accountable and actually responsive to representative democracy governing over us really changes how we grow as a society.

It is as simple as this: we need a movement. Call it a Transparency Movement, call it whatever you want, but we need groups of people across all spectrums of humanity thinking about this problem and all working together on it. This transparency movement isn’t that hard to accomplish, but it’s not gonna happen without intent, and it’s not gonna happen without a large group of people working together - people in all fields - marketing, technology, communications and more participating with clear goals in mind and volunteering their time and expertise.

The Plan.

First we need a new agreement. A new code to live by. One that we work on together, and one whose sole purpose is to fix the corruption in the systems that govern our lives. Next, we need new technologies designed specifically to help us participate in government, hold politicians accountable, and make government as transparent as possible.

Skeptics of our current system often fear technology because it has been used by the government against the people. Entities like big tech corporations, Artifical Intelligence, the NSA, etc., are constantly monitoring our lives. But why can’t we use the same technology back on the politicians? We have not even begun to explore the ways where technology could be used for making a more accountable government.

In other words, we - as voters - will use technology on the government officials in the same way the government uses the NSA and big tech on its own people. This technology should be created by the people (open source) and be ever evolving to prevent corruption and regain control of the systems that govern the lives of the people. The politicians will all happily volunteer to use the new technology because if they refuse to we won’t vote for them, ever again - regardless of political affiliation. Within 6 years every single corrupt politician could be replaced with a new kind of politician - a transparent one. One ignores the gang color labels and whose main goal is to fix the corruption of the actual system.

As for an agreement between people, it should be a living and morphing document - much like the Constitution. But this one is not controlled by government at all - it is decentralized and controlled only by the people - using the power of the internet to connect us over it. It is simply a new code agreed upon by voters as a way to protect the system. It doesn’t replace The Constitution, rather it acts as a new layer between voters and the system. One that protects it all and begins to repair the damage that has been done.

I took a crack at writing some of the points I think would be most important to achieve this goal. I tried to keep it only as points that all of us - all sides - should want to come together over. How’s this for a first draft? As a citizen of this country, would you agree to this? What would you add or remove?

THE NEW AGREEMENT:

1) We agree to fix the system as line item #1 above all other issues. Our main objective is to prevent the obvious corruption that is happening to the systems that govern over our lives.

2) We agree to remove money from politics. We will never support any politician regardless of party if they violate this rule after agreeing to it. This includes conflicts of interests, and backdoor or dark money deals with relatives or family members etc etc. All of it will be monitored with our new technology, and we will directly hold politicians accountable with zero tolerance.

3) We agree to never support any politician who refuses to use our new technology up to the standards we set for them (and those standards will constantly evolve). Representatives agree to use our new technology that will create transparency in government (transparency is the kryptonite for corruption). Our technology will also be constantly evolving to prevent corruption and should be consistently scrutinized and tested by the people. We will also make technology that connects voters and politicians over individual issues and ideas.

Possibilities: Imagine if every politician video recorded every meeting they had and posted it online. Fail to do so once and they would be outcast for life, or immediately recalled if possible. Imagine if all governmental expenses, spending, contracts, and accounting was posted online for all of us to see in real time (It’s our money isn’t it?). Imagine if all the bills in Congress and the Senate were posted online in full text before they were voted on. Imagine a social media-like platform for governing - with real time polling and and upvoting that gave immediate feedback and accountability to our representatives - one that was run by the people and government had no control over. Imagine if we used DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) as a fair way to handle contracts and bids with taxpayer money to prevent favoritism and cronyism. The technology - done right - could do for politicians what body cams did for policing - but even better. The possibilities are endless, and we have barely begun to scratch the surface.

4) We agree to work towards helping marginalized communities gain access to the new technologies so everyone can participate in government.

5) We agree to work to create more decentralization in governmental systems. A decentralized system is much harder to corrupt.

6) We agree to only support representatives who make fixing the system the focal point of their platforms. They must be advocates for improving the actual system and have tangible plans on how to eliminate corruption from government and surrounding systems.

7) Term limits, plus - we agree to work towards ending insider trading by politicians. We start to look at representing this country as once again a service and a sacrifice - much like the military.

Anyone who serves in office and adheres to the agreement should be honored and praised. And paid well when possible (maybe bonus based as that is the best way to incentivize business systems).

And that’s it.

A recap:

Step one - form an agreement between all people and our representatives, and we all take a new oath to uphold the agreement. The purpose of the agreement is simply to end corruption in the systems that govern our lives and rebuild trust in them. This incudes the systems of culture.

Step two - create new and evolving technologies - controlled by the people (government has no say or control of) - that are tools needed to prevent corruption and make politicians accountable to their constituents.

Step three - Force all representatives to use the new technology systems with the unified oath of not supporting them, recalling them, and giving them zero tolerance if they fail to comply. In other words, we only vote for representatives who agree to our new agreement and who also agree to use our new technologies up to the standards we set. We collectively blacklist any politician who rejects these terms - regardless of party lines - and we collectively honor those who serve them well.

Step four: The people regain control of the systems, fix them, and watch how much better everything runs when the whole thing isn’t corrupted by psychopaths and deviants.

It is time we all live by a better code. #TransparencyMovement.

See less

French investigators searched Edmond de Rothschild’s Paris offices as part of an Epstein-linked inquiry involving former diplomat Fabrice Aidan.

French financial prosecutors searched the Swiss bank’s Paris offices in March 2026 while investigating alleged corruption involving Aidan, a former French diplomat who later worked at the bank. His name appeared in more than 200 Justice Department documents, including emails prosec*tors are examining over allegations that confidential UN Security Council material was shared with Jeffrey Epstein between 2010 and 2016. Aidan denies wrongdoing, while the bank says it is cooperating fully with investigators.

#Epstein #France #photography

References:

Reuters: Edmond de Rothschild Paris Offices Raided In Epstein-Linked Probe Into Diplomat.

CNN: Epstein Files Reveal Extensive European Connections And Renew Scrutiny Of Associates.

French Financial Prosecutor’s Office: Investigation Examines Alleged Corruption And Handling Of Confidential Information.

See less

 

 

The global overpopulation myth is a psychological operation!

Overpopulation? It’s a highly calculated psychological weapon deployed by the architects of globalization.

If you packed every single person alive today—all 8.3 billion of us, onto the continent of Australia, every individual would still have 926 m² of physical space. Australia's population density would only hit 1,080 people per km², a footprint no tighter than the city of Cambridge, Ontario.

The entire narrative of a dying, overcrowded planet is a monstrous fiction engineered by globalist.

There is NO global shortage of wealth, food, or water.

There is NO global shortage of livable land.

The brutal reality is we have surrendered absolute control of these survival resources to the psychopaths.

The World Economic Forum, the United Nations, and billionaire central bankers force-feed you the lie of catastrophic depletion for one reason: total submission.

By terrifying humanity into believing resources are vanishing, they smoothly justify agendas like the Great Reset, artificial inflation, carbon tracking digital IDs, and CBDCs to monitor your everyday life.

They deliberately engineer artificial scarcity to force us into a state of panic, compliance, and total dependency on their globalist grid.

The Earth is not failing; it is being systematically plundered. The planet has more than enough abundance to sustain us, but it has been weaponized and hoarded by a parasitic elite. Wake up, break the programming, and reject their manufactured nightmares.

http://buymeacoffee.com/awakenedIzabela

#GreatReset #GlobalElite #ExposeTheTruth #PopulationMyth #WEF #Agenda2030 #NWO

 

"Peter Thiel sat down with economist Tyler Cowen on the podcast Conversations with Tyler and said liberalism is exhausted, democracy is exhausted, and that Americans need to start asking questions way outside the Overton window.

He compared the United States in the 2020s to Weimar Germany in the 1920s.

That’s not a stray comment.

Thiel was making this point while praising Carl Schmitt, the German jurist who joined The Party in 1933 and used his legal career to help purge Jewish influence from German law and defend Hitler’s extrajudicial killings of political opponents.

Schmitt died in 1985 still unrepentant about backing the regime.

Thiel has cited Schmitt’s work for years as a framework for his own politics.

This is the same guy bankrolling JD Vance’s political career, the guy who funded his Senate run and helped install him as vice president.

A billionaire quoting a Yahtzee legal theorist to explain why American democracy needs to be blown up isn’t some goddamn academic exercise.

The man funding the vice president is telling you exactly what he believes and who he’s citing to get there."

- Newsweek, Conversations with Tyler

- via Eric Blackerby

...............

Response to comments, re capitalism's role in this:

Unrestricted capitalism, greed driven, proves to be absolutely self-destructive.

Restricted by anti-trust, union rights, environmental regulation, proportional taxation, limited corporate subsidizing, etc., capitalism has certainly been constructive, and so that's our job to make it fair again rather than let it go wild and bring down an empire.

The more money you control, the less interested you become in a level playing field, lol.

Ed Harker

See less

 

BREAKING: Two House Democrats Cross Party Lines to Save the GOP's Agenda, Including a Resolution Designed to Attack Their Own Party

Republicans were staring down an internal revolt on the House floor. Two Democrats bailed them out.

Reps. Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington voted with most Republicans Tuesday to advance a slate of GOP-led bills, including a resolution condemning socialism that party leaders explicitly want to use against Democrats on the campaign trail. Their votes were the deciding margin in a 210-208 procedural vote, after five Republicans broke ranks over frustrations with how leadership handled an earlier spending bill.

It's a genuinely rare move. Members cross party lines on actual legislation all the time. Voting for the procedural "rule" that sets the majority's own floor agenda is something the minority almost never does.

Nobody in leadership saw it coming. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said he "didn't get a heads up" from either Democrat. Majority Whip Tom Emmer admitted he was caught off guard too. Even former Speaker Nancy Pelosi weighed in with visible frustration. "I, as speaker, never, we didn't even consider that anybody would do that," she said. "We never had that problem, so I'm disappointed that they did that."

Rep. Jim McGovern, the top Democrat on the Rules Committee, said he believes Golden's vote was tied to a bill benefiting lobstermen back home, one that delays fishing regulations meant to protect the endangered right whale population. Golden isn't running for reelection in November.

Neither Golden nor Gluesenkamp Perez has explained their votes publicly. Speaker Mike Johnson didn't acknowledge the Democratic assist either, telling reporters only that "Republicans are here to work."

Two members of their own party just handed Republicans exactly what they needed, including ammunition aimed squarely at Democrats, and left their own leadership finding out about it after the fact.

See less

 

This is what has been going on with the Corporate Democrats for 30 years. They always provide just enough votes to put through whatever the Republicans are short on votes for that benefit the same rich cucks that pay both sides of the aisle. 

 

 

THE GREAT AMERICAN CREDIT SCORE GAME: PAY TO PLAY, BORROW TO LIVE

Look, there are few inventions in the history of American capitalism more brilliantly diabolical than the three-digit number that dictates whether you are allowed to buy a house or merely rent a cardboard box under a bridge.

It is called your credit score, and it is a masterpiece of financial circular logic.

If you want to buy a car, buy a house, or occasionally get hired for a job that involves looking at a spreadsheet, you need a good credit score. How do you get a good credit score? By taking out loans and buying things you can’t afford with money you don’t have and then paying interest to people who already have too much money.

If you are a sensible, prudent human being who pays for everything in cash, saves your earnings in a jar behind the water heater, and refuses to owe a dime to any man or bank, the financial system does not reward your virtue. It looks at you with deep suspicion, brands you a ghost, and assigns you a credit score roughly equivalent to that of a fugitive international art thief.

The message is clear: To be trusted with money, you must constantly be in debt.

A Brief History of the Machine

It wasn't always this way. Once upon a time, getting a loan involved walking into a mahogany-paneled bank, shaking hands with a local banker named Arthur who knew your father, and convincing him you weren't the sort of fellow who would blow the mortgage on horse races and cheap gin. It was subjective, occasionally discriminatory, and utterly inefficient.

Enter Bill Fair and Earl Isaac.

In 1956, an engineer and a mathematician founded the Fair, Isaac and Company—later shortened to FICO. They decided that human character could be reduced to a math problem. By 1989, FICO introduced the standardized, three-digit credit scoring system. In 1995, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mandated FICO scores for evaluating home loans. Suddenly, the algorithm was the law.

The system converted the ancient moral question of “Is this person trustworthy?” into “How effectively can we extract 24% APR from this individual without them going entirely belly-up?”

What followed was the greatest explosion of consumer borrowing in human history.

• 1989: Total U.S. household debt hovered around $3.2 trillion.

• Today: Total American household debt sits at a staggering $18.8 trillion.

We didn't just adopt credit scores; we built an entire $18 trillion economy on the principle that every citizen should be leased back their own life on monthly installments.

The Rules of the Racket

The genius of the score is that it isn't actually designed to measure your financial health. If it were, having zero debt and six months of living expenses in the bank would give you a perfect 850.

Instead, it measures your profitability to lenders.

Consider the "Credit Utilization Ratio." If you have a credit card with a $10,000 limit, the algorithm wants you to use some of it, but not too much of it. Use 10%? Good boy. Use 80%? Panic. Use 0%? You aren't playing the game, and the machine gets bored.

Or consider what happens when you pay off your auto loan early. You celebrate! You broke the chains of interest! You own the sedan outright! You check your credit score the next morning, expecting a digital pat on the back, only to find it has plummeted fifteen points. Why? Because you closed an active credit line. You killed a stream of recurring interest income for a bank. You monster.

You Can't Opt Out

If this were merely a game for people who wanted to lease brand-new German sports cars every two years, it wouldn't be a racket—it would just be entertainment.

The trap is that the score has metastasized into everyday civic existence:

• Housing: Try renting an apartment with "no credit history." Landlords view a lack of debt the same way a police officer views someone driving 15 mph under the speed limit with both hands rigidly at 10 and 2—obviously hiding something.

• Insurance: Car insurance companies in most states use credit scores to set your premiums. Apparently, if you missed a payment on a department store card in 2022, you are statistically more likely to back into a mailbox in 2026.

• Employment: Employers run credit checks to see if you are "responsible," creating a delightful Catch-22: you can't get a job because your credit is bad, and your credit is bad because you can't get a job.

The Moral of the Algorithm

The American credit rating system is a casino where the house doesn't just win—the house mandates that you sit at the blackjack table just to buy groceries.

It has successfully convinced three generations of Americans that wealth isn't what you have, but what you are allowed to borrow. We carry around our 720s and 780s like badges of honor, proudly displaying our gold-star ratings in the grand exercise of owing money to people who sit in tall buildings.

It’s a brilliant system. Just make sure you pay your balance on the 15th, don't close that card you opened in college, and whatever you do, don't pay off your debt too fast. You wouldn't want to look irresponsible.

**This is an excerpt from my latest book, "Don’t Do What I Did (Except the Fun Parts): Notes to my grandsons on how to navigate life, women, money, politics, and other natural disasters."

Link in the comments.

See less

Reposted Courtesy of @feminist_news_now

He promised to “drain the swamp.”

Instead, #tRUMP fired the people whose job it is to keep us alive.

Thousands cut from the CDC. Nearly 1,000 from USDA. Thousands more from FDA. You know—the agencies responsible for tracking outbreaks, inspecting food, monitoring drug safety, and warning the public before a preventable disaster becomes a national emergency.

And what do we get?

Daily food recalls. Drug recalls. A measles outbreak at a scale this country hasn’t seen in decades. Public-health systems hollowed out while the White House fills up with loyalists, lobbyists, grifters, donors, and every swamp creature with a corporate jet and a conflict of interest.

But sure, tell us again about “government waste.”

Apparently, in trump’s America, “waste” means epidemiologists, food inspectors, scientists, and public servants. “Efficiency” means firing the people who protect your kids from contaminated food and preventable disease—then handing power to the same wealthy insiders who profit when oversight disappears.

This was never about draining the swamp. It was about draining the government of anyone who might regulate, investigate, or say no to the people buying influence.

The swamp isn’t gone. It got cabinet positions, White House access, and taxpayer-funded security.

And the consequences are not abstract. They’re on grocery shelves, in doctors’ offices, in emergency rooms, and in communities dealing with diseases we had the tools to prevent.

His corruption isn’t just embarrassing. It’s dangerous. It is literally putting lives at risk.

 

The Surveillance Cascade: How Bad This Actually Gets

Stage 1: The convenience layer. Loyalty cards, store apps, phone numbers at checkout (not a huge deal...)

Stage 2: The financial footprint. Every credit card purchase, every online login, payment history, bank balances, investment accounts

Stage 3: Physical tracking. Flock cameras logging your license plate everywhere you drive. Traffic cameras. Cell tower pings. Location data from every app on your phone.

Stage 4: Habits and preferences. Alcohol purchases and frequency. Cannabis dispensary visits and quantities. Firearm purchases from FFL records. Every internet search you’ve ever made. Every AI conversation you’ve ever had.

Stage 5: Private records. IRS filings. Health records. Prescription history. Insurance claims. Employment history. Legal records.

Stage 6: The tie-together. Massive data centers merge all of it. AI processes the entire dataset to build a profile of exactly who you are, what you value, what you fear, and what you’ll do next.

Stage 7: The weaponization. AI generated video and audio has crossed the threshold where it’s indistinguishable from real footage. Your movement history plus your face plus your voice can now be reassembled into evidence of any crime the people in power want to charge you with. Concrete “proof” of things you never did.

Stage 8: The compliance system. Tie all of it to a monetary system (digital dollar, CBDC, social credit-style scoring) and now if you’re “naughty” by their standards, you don’t get approved to buy food this month. You can’t book a flight. Your account is frozen. Your access to society is conditional on their approval.

See less