andrew pandian @Cryptospec1

Now that every team has played a match at the World Cup, here are my first impressions on each team: Mexico: underwhelming South Korea: way better than expected Czechia: slow South Africa: major ass Switzerland: should have won by 7 goals Canada: underwhelming Bosnia and Herzegovina: set pieces very dangerous, everything else bad Qatar: terrible Morocco: definite dark horse, could run deep Scotland: meh Haiti: surprisingly competitive Brazil: worst version of Brazil I have ever seen USA: best version of U.S. I've seen in two decades Turkiye: rollercoaster of a team Australia: more competitive than i thought Paraguay: ass Germany: holy fuck what a destruction Ivory Coast: slow starters, really grew into match Ecuador: underwhelming Curacao: rest in peace Sweden: 5-1 a real stretch scoreline, will be overrated going forward Netherlands: solid Japan: solid Tunisia: manager deserved to be fired Belgium: underwhelming Iran: slept through most of their match New Zealand: slept through most of their match Egypt: can compete with some better teams Spain: snoozefest but will change once Yamal/Williams start Uruguay: underwhelming for most of their match but showed some signs Saudi Arabia: woof Cape Verde: it's not gonna get any better than that Norway: physical team, can cause problems France: top end talent so good, can overcome being terrible for 2/3 of a match Senegal: better than expected Iraq: had some opportunities, not awful Austria: decent Argentina: if Algeria's goalie wasnt a dumpster, we would have concerns Algeria: dumpster goalie Jordan: woof Colombia: underwhelming, gave up quality chances DR Congo: way better than expected Portugal: what the fuck was that Uzbekistan: surprisingly competitive England: powerhouse Ghana: bad but opponent was also bad Panama: very bad Croatia: old af

🚨🚨The AI Pump & Dump Is A Financial Atom Bomb Aimed Squarely At American Retirees.🚨🚨 The wheels are falling off the AI Jalopy: 👉MIT Study: 95% of enterprise GenAI projects deliver ZERO ROI and zero P&L impact. 👉RAND Corporation: 80%+ of AI projects FAIL — most abandoned before launch or worth nothing. 👉Gartner Predictions: Billions in wasted compute, projects getting axed through 2026. Now the Tech Bros are firing workers, hyping fake “AI revolution” propaganda and scrambling for trillion dollar valuations for their IPOs. All the while angling for a government bailout from Donald Trump and a sweetheart deal to enable them to dump their massively overvalued AI stocks onto 401(k)s and pensions of American retirees. This will be the MOST epic pump and dump and when the rug pulls, guess who loses everything? Not them. We NEED to stop this ----->

Ed Davey has just said that I am ‘aiding and abetting’ the destruction of his country. He’s right. Restore Britain is going to destroy his version of our country. And we will replace it with one that works for British men and women, and them only. It will be glorious.

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue. On April 21st, the left screen moved first. I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug. At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy. On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me. At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire. Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83. I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags. My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports. The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026: Reviewed. That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one. Let me show you my flags. March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it. March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it. April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it. April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it. April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it. That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one. The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March. Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012. Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence. Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets. The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade. I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email. The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action. One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared. One account is a coincidence. But there were six. Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000. My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger. March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes. The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event. The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting." Then the White House sent the email again. I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread. I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated. But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed. Zero prosecutions. As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations. I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations. The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still. In my field, we call this price discovery.

Angela Rayner is the bookies favourite to be next Labour leader and Prime Minister. Here she is cosying up to Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock. Different leader, same old shit.

We are not awaiting a collapse; we are in its early stages. Stage One is the visible sabotage we see today, where most of the public remains oblivious or dismissive, blaming 'geopolitical conflict' or 'market forces.' The mainstream media obediently provides this cover story. Stage Two -- widespread mainstream concern over acute shortages, hyperinflation, and the realization that the system is broken -- is imminent. Based on the trajectory of fuel and food prices, this stage is likely only weeks away for North America. Stage Three is mass panic and the acceptance of a new, permanent reality. This is when people realize the abundance of the 20th century is gone, replaced by a managed decline in living standards, mobility, and personal freedom. As detailed in The Coming Storm: America's Descent into Chaos, the fragile systems underpinning our civilization are failing in a coordinated manner. The engineered energy scarcity is the trigger for this final descent.

[STRATCOM] US Strategic Command radio traffic extremely unusual tonight.

Donald Trump just wrapped up a disastrous speech in Phoenix, Arizona, at a Turning Point USA event. He started by lying about a supposed deal with Iran, claiming, “We have now secured the Strait of Hormuz. It is ours.” He also said that the United States and Iran would be excavating nuclear sites together to collect “nuclear dust.” Iran has denied all of these claims. Trump also falsely claimed that Iran had announced the Strait of Hormuz is “fully open and ready for business.” That is not what Iran said. Iranian officials have stated the strait will remain open under their control—specifically under the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps—using coordinated, predetermined routes. They plan to charge tolls and assert full control and sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.

I’m watching the numbers flicker on the screen -- Brent crude at $92, WTI hovering near $97 -- and I feel a profound sense of dread. This isn’t a market; it’s a meticulously crafted fiction. We are being lied to on a scale so vast it defies comprehension. The current paper price for oil is a government-constructed lie, a narrative woven by desperate authorities to maintain a false sense of stability while the physical foundations of our world crack beneath us. This manipulation isn’t just an economic curiosity; it’s a trap. While futures traders cheer a modest pullback, the real cost of a barrel -- the tangible liquid that powers tractors, heats homes, and transports food -- has already rocketed into another dimension. This divergence between paper and physical represents the single greatest threat to global order I’ve witnessed in decades. It’s a dangerous fiction masquerading as reality, and its inevitable collapse will redefine everything we know about energy, money, and power. The lie is simple and audacious: that the price quoted on financial exchanges reflects the true value and availability of oil. This is the foundational deceit of our time. Governments and central banks, drowning in debt and desperate to avoid social unrest, have turned market mechanisms into tools of perception management. The goal isn’t price discovery; it’s price suppression. This creates a perilous false sense of security. Headlines tout a "cooling" oil market, while in the physical world, refiners and industrial users are paying premiums of 50% or more. As noted in an analysis of the current conflict, the price of physical Brent crude is "already a hair’s breadth from $150" while the futures price lags far behind. This isn’t a market glitch; it’s a policy. It’s the same playbook used for decades in precious metals, where paper derivatives are multiplied to infinity to suppress the price of tangible gold and silver. The system is designed to make you believe the digital IOU is as good as the real thing -- until the day it isn’t. Read the full article here: naturalnews.com/2026-04-15-com…

I believe tomorrow night Trump will strike the bridges and power plants in Iran, triggering hellfire from Iran. This will be a cascading mass casualty event in the region with the most deaths being in Iran. The horrific part is that no one can stop it, and it is being done only for Netanyahu's wishes to come true. Trump had the opportunity to make a legendary deal with Iran 37 days ago. It would have been a win-win deal for both the U.S. and Iran, but Israel would lose. They did not want Iran to have missiles or drones. So Witkoff and Kushner blew up the deal with lies to Trump, triggering this war. We are at a dark junction in history. If U.S. does these attacks, Iran will respond fast. It has already shared a bank of targets it will respond to in the region and Israel. One madman and his friend, with the strongest army in the world, are dragging us all into hell. I pray I am wrong. I pray for the civilians. I pray for peace.

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

It's going to be an interesting day for sure when the typical American suddenly realizes that when Al Jubail is burned down, the supply chain of lubricants will collapse. And when the lubricants collapse, then trucks don't run and forklifts don't fork. And when forklifts don't fork and trucks don't truck, there's not going to be much food that appears on grocery store shelves. And at that moment all those who have been mindlessly cheering for war on Iran will seize up and begin to ask themselves, "What have I done?" You've fucked yourself is what you've done. You've ALREADY fucked yourself, because these events are being set into motion right now, but you just don't know how badly you've fucked yourself because the fucking is delayed by global logistics and shipping timelines. It won't be long, however, before the self-fucking arrives, and people who know absolutely nothing about lubricants, grease, transportation, engine oil, supply chain logistics and the Al Jubail industrial city will suddenly discover just how fucked they really are.

If choking off global supply chains, firing military generals, causing millions of people to be displaced, thousands of deaths to innocent civilians, losing access to the Straight of Hormuz, putting the petrodollar in jeopardy, causing insecurity to the gulf states, and increasing the price of fertiliser, oil and gas is “winning”…god only knows what “losing” looks like.

The US Is Now Firing All Its Top Generals [So Far 12 We Hear] This is a sign that not only is a ground invasion now more likely, but that the US is facing perhaps its greatest ever strategic defeat. Trump, Hegseth & Co. have been telling us for weeks that Iran has no air defences left, that its navy is gone, its military battered & its ballistic missile arsenal crippled. Everyday Iran shoots down more drones & frequently fires on US-Israeli aircraft. Iran continues to fire ballistic missiles at will & periodically escalates its rate of fire, like we saw against Tel Aviv yesterday. The navy also continues to function, as it hides its assets underground. Trump claims the Strait of Hormuz is open for the taking, yet lashes out at the US’s NATO allies for having common sense & not sending their ships on a suicide mission. They claim they are bringing hell to “the regime”, yet they are bombing majority civilian targets & all Western intelligence agencies, & even Israel assess, that regime change does not appear to be possible. The global economy is taking a beating, the Gulf States will never be the same & the US’s influence that it has been building there, especially militarily since the 1980’s - is being dismantled. Israel is getting battered by Hezbollah in Lebanon, a group that Washington & Tel Aviv claimed had been defeated. Iran isn’t having to cover up its losses or lie to its own people, inventing fake victories around the clock to compensate. The US is constantly publishing cope content, as Israel desperately censors everything it can, to an extent that it is laughable how low their admitted soldier casualties are. Iran, a country whose military budget could be paid for by the F-35 fighter jet programme’s costs for a hundred years, not only fired on the F-35, but has battered most of the US’s bases in the region. The once dominant super power is now so desperate it seeks a disastrous ground invasion that is only for show. A move that will play right into Iran’s hands & even if they manage to take some islands, it will come at a massive cost while failing to open the Strait of Hormuz. The Israeli strategy of simply battering Iran’s civilian infrastructure& hoping this will lead to regime change in the long term, like happened to Syria, is one without any clear off-ramp for the US. The US’s desperation is so bad that it announced it would lift some sanctions on Iranian oil, lifted sanctions of Russia, while scrambling to somehow stop oil prices skyrocketing by making fake victory announcements & meaningless threats that are quickly abandoned. If the US chooses to actually end the war by simply leaving the region, Iran will emerge as the major power in the region. If there’s no agreement where the sanctions are lifted, along with other Iranian requests, the US can run, but Israel will continue to be targeted. This is nothing short of a disaster for the US. And no, not even nuclear weapons are going to help. Assuming things continue as they are, the US will face its worst ever strategic defeat, one that will have repercussions for it well beyond the region.

JUST IN: Iran threatened to hit Jubail for decades. It never needed to. The Strait of Hormuz did the job. Sadara Chemical Company, the $20 billion joint venture between Saudi Aramco and Dow Chemical, has indefinitely shut down all production at its Jubail complex in eastern Saudi Arabia. Every line halted. Every cracker cold. Every reactor idle. The company says it cannot provide a resumption date, calling it “contingent on domestic and international factors,” which is corporate language for: we do not know when the strait will reopen, and neither does anyone else. Sadara is one of the largest integrated petrochemical facilities on earth. Its cracker produces 1.5 million tonnes of ethylene per year. Its 26 downstream units convert that into 750,000 tonnes of polyethylene for packaging and pipes, 350,000 tonnes for films and coatings, 360,000 tonnes of ethylene oxide for detergents, plus propylene, polyols, and isocyanates feeding construction, automotive, textiles, and agriculture across three continents. Total capacity exceeds three million tonnes. All of it offline. Not because a missile hit the plant. Because the feedstock arrives by sea through a passage the IRGC now controls with a toll, a clearance code, and a $2 million fee in yuan. This is what economic chokepoint warfare looks like when it works. No warhead. No crater. No dramatic satellite imagery of burning infrastructure. Just a phone call from the operations manager to the board saying we cannot source naphtha and the cracker cannot run without naphtha and the naphtha cannot arrive because the strait is not open and the strait is not open because a war that started 4,000 kilometres away has turned the most important waterway on earth into a permissioned corridor. The plant is intact. The plant is also useless. Asia is hit first and hardest. China, India, South Korea, and Taiwan are the primary importers of Gulf polyethylene and ethylene derivatives. Packaging plants are already rationing. Polyethylene spot prices in Asia and Europe spiked 10 to 15 percent within hours of the announcement. Construction supply chains that depend on polyethylene pipe and insulation are extending lead times. Automotive interiors, textiles, consumer electronics casings, and agricultural films all trace back to the same cracker that is now sitting cold in the Saudi desert because the molecule that feeds it cannot pass through a strait 1,500 kilometres away. The 2026 financial results for both Aramco and Dow will be materially impacted. Sadara cost $20 billion to build over a decade of construction. Its output feeds global supply chains that generate multiples of that value downstream. The shutdown is not a line item. It is a systemic event that demonstrates what happens when one geological chokepoint controls the feedstock for an entire industrial ecosystem. Iran did not fire a single missile at Jubail. The toll regime, the insurance bifurcation, the yuan payment system, and the selective clearances achieved what a barrage of Shaheds could not: the indefinite closure of a facility that took a decade to build and serves customers in 50 countries. It cannot restart until a strait that nobody controls is declared “open, free, and clear” by a president who posted on Truth Social that the alternative is the Stone Ages. The plant is intact. The plant is silent. And the molecule that would make it run is sitting in a tanker that cannot move. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

Ignore the BS and follow the money 💸👀 Former BlackRock fund manager Ed Dowd on Iran: "The credit creation system needs constant growth" "If this turns into World War III or extended war, the amount of debt required to fund that war is going to be in the trillions." "We're getting to the end of this multi-generational Ponzi scheme." "Is the timing of this suspicious? I think a little bit." This clip of Dowd (@DowdEdward), a former BlackRock fund manager and co-founder of Phinance Technologies, is taken from an interview with Michelle Makori (@MichelleMakori) posted to the Miles Franklin Media (@MilesFranklinCo) YouTube channel on March 26, 2026. ----------------Partial transcription of clip--------------- Makori: "When you and I last spoke, you said that the US is not going to give up dollar dominance without a fight, that they're not going to go quietly into the night. Is this Iran conflict that fight?" Dowd: "Okay, let's talk for a second. You know, look, the credit creation system needs constant growth and flow and bigger injection amounts. And the crises are coming sooner and sooner. So we're getting to the end of this, this multi-generational Ponzi scheme. And it needs constant, you need to constantly feed the credit creation growth. "Coming into 2019, we had problems in the plumbing. We were going to global slowdown, but then magically Covid appeared and we had war-like spending. And that floated the credit system along for another several years and here we are only six years later and it's wobbling again. So we need even more credit creation. So one way to do that is have a war. "So I don't know, I'm not in the room. Is the timing of this suspicious? I think a little bit. The powers that be, the actual people running the show, are the Deep State, the administrative state. And if they want war, war is what we're going to get. And it's going to require a tremendous amount of spending and it will give good cover for a financial collapse. "But do I know that for sure? No. But the timing of the war is awfully suspicious. Private credit started to have serious problems and then boom, we're in war. Makori: "So you mean an excuse to just create more liquidity because it's gone the opposite way right now." Dowd: "Well it is now. But, so you will get a financial reset, but down the road, if we're in, if we're in, if this turns into World War three or extended war, the amount of debt required to fund that war is going to be in the trillions. And that'll keep the system alive after a brief, you know, pause in financial assets, you know, stock markets will go down 40, 50%. "So it saves the system. It doesn't prevent the system from resetting a little bit, but it saves the system. You need constant credit creation."

Terrifying WW3 warning. If the US or Israel dares to drop a nuclear weapon on Iran, Russia and China will immediately enter the war kinetically. They know that if Iran falls, they are next. The world is standing on the absolute brink of nuclear annihilation.

When was the last time you said anything about the “reach” of the US and Europe when it comes to projecting military power into the Middle East? The US has killed thousands of Iranian civilians. And yet this is not “terrifying” enough for you to comment on. Instead you cover the US attacks like a fan boy. And Iran demonstrates a retaliatory capability, and suddenly it’s “terrifying”. Iran did not start this war, another little detail you always leave out. But now that Iran has survived and is striking back, it’s “terrifying.” The lack of balance in your coverage is manifest.

My net worth peaked at $1.2 million. None of it was real. I don't mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off. I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier." The frontier closed last week. It's a mobile app now. Last year I mass DM'd 340 people the phrase "you don't understand how early we are." I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me. I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor. In a video game. With no legs. The avatars didn't have legs. I thought that was bullish. "The legs are coming," I told my Discord. "Legs are a roadmap item." Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis. I called myself a "digital land baron." I put it in my Twitter bio. I put it in my LinkedIn headline. I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts. My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment. My actual apartment has furniture. Location, location, location. My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court. I held. Diamond hands. That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait. A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users. He said I didn't understand the technology. I didn't. I still bought more. We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts. We voted to "acquire strategic parcels." The vote passed unanimously. I voted four times. My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY." The slide had a rocket emoji. That was my entire financial model. In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000. It's worth $14,000 now. I don't talk about the Ape. I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera. My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was. I said "digital art on the blockchain." She asked why it cost more than her car. I said "you don't understand Web3." She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment." She's not in my Discord. Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million. It's worth about $90,000 now. I felt better about mine after I heard that. That's community. WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero. We're all gonna make it. None of us made it. But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something. It doesn't. But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus. Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse. I need to say that again. $84 billion. More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines. They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets. It lives on as a mobile app. My beachfront villa is now a mobile app. Location, location, location. Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that." Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025. That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun. They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables." The pivot took four years and $84 billion. I pivoted too. I'm an AI real estate investor now. I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models." I don't know what that means. I gave him $40,000. He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan. The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank. Q4 is always blank. That's where the exit scam goes. My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes. I said $1.2 million. He said "current market value." I said $6,400. He stared at me for eleven seconds. I know because I counted. He asked if I had any other investments. I showed him my NFTs. He stared for longer. I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance." He asked if I'd considered a 401k. I told him a 401k was "legacy finance." He told me to leave his office. The metaverse is dead. I don't accept that. I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car. Location, location, location. The location is nowhere. But I'm early. I'm always early. That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.

Iran is exporting more oil through the Strait of Hormuz than before the war — mainly to China — while closing it off to the rest of the region’s oil/gas producers with mines and attacks on vessels. As I reveal in this article, the Trump administration has no plans to reopen the Strait any time soon which, given how predictable closure was, is further proof Trump has stumbled into this war without proper forethought.

Andrew Neil @afneil

4 months ago

ANDREW NEIL: Trump's gambling his presidency on Iran and right now it’s far from clear it’s a gamble he will win. mol.im/a/15633179

141 42 287 356K 15

So after all this paper shenanigans we find silver is still in backwardation. You can't cure a huge physical shortage by manipulating the paper price. The manipulation has nothing to do with physical supply and demand. It's to prevent a Western financial crisis due to idiotic choices made by clowns. Precisely why 2008 happened.