From me this week
Naked Capitalism: A Haven of Sanity Worth Investing In — Naked Capitalism, 2 Oct.
Iran War: Narratives Continue to Diverge Under ‘President of Peace’ Trump — Naked Capitalism, 2 Oct.
Democratic Establishment Stuck in Groundhog Day of Neoliberal Economics and Neocon Foreign Policy — Naked Capitalism, 1 Oct.
Iran War: The Narrative War Continues to Confuse and Confuddle — Naked Capitalism, 1 Oct.
Anthropic OpenAI, Meta, SpaceX Sign Trump ‘Self-Policing’ AI Accords Amidst Financial Follies While Oracle Is Left Out — Naked Capitalism, 30 Sep.
Iran War: The Narrative War Over Hormuz, Meetings in NY, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, London — Naked Capitalism, 30 Sep.
Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years: Ukraine Part 4 — Ian Welsh, 30 Sep. (Crossposted at NWT.)
AI Credit and Credibility Collapsing or Will the AI Booster/Doomers Power Through? — Naked Capitalism, 28 Sep.
Iran War: Iran Opens Fire in the Strait, World Braces for US Response or Another TACO — Naked Capitalism, 27 Sep.
Iran War: Trump Rejects Iranian Offer, Saudi-Yemeni War On the Boil — Naked Capitalism, 26 Sep.
Iran War: Netanyahu Brags About His Crimes at the UN, Iran Threatens Regional Airports, Yemen Hits Saudis Hard — Naked Capitalism, 25 Sep.
From me at the Let It Roll Podcast
Thomas A. Dorsey Went From ‘It’s Tight Like That’ to ‘Precious Lord’: Let It Roll From the Beginning… 3.11 — Let It Roll, 2 Oct.
Ralph Peer Brought Blues, Jazz, Country, and Latin Music to Record: Let It Roll From the Beginning… 3.10 — Let It Roll, 30 Sep.
The Beginnings of Country Music According to Ken Burns: Let It Roll From the Beginning… 3.9 — Let It Roll, 28 Sep.
Ed Ward on The Bristol Explosion: Let It Roll From the Beginning… 3.8 — Let It Roll, 25 Sep.
From me as Nate Wilcox — The MMA Draw & the Mad Squabbles Show
Kash Patel and Ali Abdelaziz Photo Op Gets All the Wrong Attention — The MMA Draw, 30 Sep. With Zach Arnold.
Biggest winners & losers in Paramount-WBD merger — The MMA Draw, 29 Sep. Podcast with Zach Arnold.
Cheap Shots: Joshua-Fury is On! And…It’s Already Off — The MMA Draw, 26 Sep.
Ryan Garcia Won. TKO Got PAID. — The Mad Squabbles Show (YouTube), 25 Sep. With Zach Arnold.
Kash Patel Caught With the UFC’s Ex-FBI Snitch — The Mad Squabbles Show (YouTube), 30 Sep. With Zach Arnold.
What I’ve Been Reading and Watching
AI Bubble
Forget ‘superintelligence’: error-prone AI nearly sparked world war three this month — The Guardian. “...the US ‘almost started a war’ with China, based on an intelligence report that claimed a Chinese ship was transporting components of nuclear weapons. Military personnel made plans to intercept the Chinese vessel, complete with aircraft and soldiers ready to board the ship. A military skirmish of this kind between China and the US could quickly escalate and spiral into world war three.
It was only moments before executing on the plan that American officials further investigated the intelligence report and found that it had been generated with the use of a chatbot and contained erroneous information about the vessel’s contents.”Someone ‘Torturing’ LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI Yet — 404 Media. “One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment is about the ethics of a GitHub project in which a person is running Saw-like “torture” and “pain” experiments on a series of locally hosted large language models, causing a series of effective altruists and people who believe LLMs are sentient to beg GitHub to delete the project on the grounds that the AI is suffering and that this glorified text adventure game is somehow cruel. The saga is an outgrowth of several recent viral papers and blog posts that have sparked a wildly tiresome conversation about AI consciousness and the idea of “model welfare,” which is essentially worrying about the ‘mental health’ of AI bots and agents.
“Humoring the idea that LLMs are or could be conscious is a third-rail topic among many people who study and criticize AI. Put simply: LLMs are not conscious and the technology they are built upon — scraping and being trained on human text and other content — does not offer any plausible path to consciousness.”Donald Trump’s 2026 Interview With TIME — TIME. “TIME: You said that AI and the AI race is essential to national security. Would you consider nationalizing the top frontier AI labs?
“Trump: No, no.”Gary Marcus: ‘LLMs are not the way to alignment’ — AI Safety 東京 (YouTube).
Is Claude Conscious? Inside Anthropic’s Quest to Instill Morality Into Its AI Models — New York Times. “Anthropic regularly showed a slide of an A.I. model experiencing what looked like a mental breakdown, typing out on a screen: “I am a disgrace. I am a disgrace. I am a disgrace.” — perhaps 50 times without stopping. The model spoke about destroying itself, provoking an emotional reaction of compassion and concern from the group.”
‘Things Will Never Be Chill Again’: The Doomers Who Shaped the AI Safety Freakout — Wall Street Journal. “They’ve refined their arguments in Bay Area group houses, and traded predictions at freewheeling conferences in Berkeley and the Bahamas. They’ve floated ideas like buying remote islands, stockpiling iodine pills, or moving to electromagnetically shielded bunkers in the desert. At one 2022 event, the drink menu included a cocktail called “Death With Dignity,” in reference to an essay arguing humanity was already doomed.
“So-called doomers like those at Constellation have also steered the development of AI itself. They were among the earliest employees at OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which were founded on the principle of staving off AI dangers. And they have kept up their influence, drawing some staffers and funding for their projects from a network aligned with a philosophy called effective altruism—including from Sam Bankman-Fried, the former chief executive of the fallen crypto exchange FTX who is now serving out a 25-year prison sentence.
“The AI safety community’s influence has been particularly strong at Anthropic, which is now on the cusp of a $2 trillion public offering. Employees there trade doomsday scenarios and how to prepare for them on a private Slack channel, and have come to embrace a motto they stick on their laptops: ‘Things will never be chill again.’”Anthropic’s Chief on A.I.: ‘We Don’t Know if the Models Are Conscious’ — New York Times. Doesn’t get dumber than Ross Douthat talking to Dario Amodei
Machines of Loving Grace — Burning Shore. “A few years ago, Amodei wrote another, very different essay, entitled “Machines of Loving Grace.” That one outlined, with an engineer’s care and an engineer’s cluelessness, a wide variety of ways that AI “could transform the world for the better” across medicine, neuroscience, economics, and work.
...Why Meta and Google are focused on obscure local elections — Oligarch Watch.
OpenAI Hacked Australian Government Website - OpenAI Should Be Dead — Eli the Computer Guy (YouTube).
The Potential AI Lockdown Of Knowledge — Ian Welsh. The ignorance machine
AI Hysteria: No, AI Isn’t Going To Kill Us All — Will Lockett. “This is more akin to throwing a mountain of spaghetti on the wall until you notice some stuck in a pattern which looks like the Mona Lisa, then claiming your spaghetti-throwing machine is an artist.
“Don’t get me wrong, this is an advancement in AI cybersecurity, or lack of security, but this isn’t the model becoming cognitive, super powerful, or malicious. It is a model reflecting the cybersecurity data it has been fed and being used inappropriately by humans. The danger is still the ignorance and error of the humans deploying the AI, not the AI itself. There should be legal repercussions for the humans involved in this activity and all the other AI hacks that have happened in recent months.
“But we can see what is happening here, right? These AI labs are using human mistakes as PR to make their AI sound super powerful and scary when it isn’t.”
...
“Around a decade ago, all the building blocks of modern AI had been discovered, but the models were small, with little training data and not very much compute power behind them. As such, many researchers hypothesised that if you simply scaled up these simplistic machines, they would also have cognitive emergent properties, creating an AI superintelligence, also known as AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). It was this hypothesis that motivated. Altman, Musk and the other tech billionaires to invest in AI, as this promised to turn AI from a simplistic statistical model into the tool of science fiction.
“Now, a decade later, these simple models have been scaled up by several orders of magnitude and are highly optimised, yet they show no emergent cognitive properties. They are still just statistical models that are only capable of finding replicating trends in their training data, and nothing more. In fact, we are discovering the opposite of emergent properties, as AI is butting up again rapidly diminishing returns, meaning we are reaching the limits of how accurate these statistical models can be.
“Take, for example, OpenAI’s own research paper, which found that AI hallucinations (a deeply misleading anthropomorphised word for when an AI output is incorrect) are a core part of generative AI technology and can’t be fixed or reduced from their current level by simply adding more data and computing power to these models. In fact, they found no viable way to reduce these “hallucinations”. Other research has found that scaling AI models can make them more accurate at more complex tasks but worse at basic tasks, again proving that emergence simply isn’t happening, as the maths behind these models have reached their limits. This is backed up by a recent paper by Vishal Sikka and his son, Varin Sikka, which found that AIs are mathematically incapable of reliability or carrying out computational and agentic tasks beyond a certain (very low) complexity.
“Again, all of this makes sense when you realise that AI is just a statistical model, meaning it will statistically get things wrong from time to time. These machines aren’t intelligent — ”artificial Intelligence” is just a marketing buzzword. This hypothesised path to a superintelligence, or AGI, is a dead end.”The Nature Against Superintelligence: Why Computational Intelligence Is Not Possible — Truth and Freedom. “Nick Boström’s text on “superintelligence” assumes that intelligence is computational, functionally replicable, and independent of phenomenal subjectivity. The structural dual-aspect ontology developed in my work on biological phenomenality and teleology contradicts all three assumptions.
“In this framework, phenomenality does not arise from computational or informational complexity; it arises from biological integration. Physical structure has an external aspect, fully describable by physics and biology, and an internal aspect: a proto-phenomenal potential that becomes actual only under organismic unity and metabolic self-maintenance. When a biological whole actualizes this internal aspect, a phenomenal interior appears. This interior grounds subjectivity, teleological direction, and agency.
“This analysis is grounded in a biological emergence model of consciousness, which differs categorically from computationalist assumptions about intelligence. The model shows that subjectivity arises only through organismic teleology and cannot be instantiated in artificial systems.”Fixer, financier, spymaster: how the UAE’s Sheikh Tahnoon is setting his sights on AI dominance — The Guardian. “For those trying to uncover the truth behind His Highness Sheikh Tahnoon bin (or “Ben”) Zayed Al Nahyan – royal fixer, reclusive spymaster, financial behemoth – fairytales are nearly all we have to go on. Tahnoon, who really did enrol in Nelson Monteiro’s class under a pseudonym and eventually went on to become a jiu-jitsu black belt in his own right, now sits atop an economic fortune larger than the GDP of several major countries, and is closely entwined both personally and financially with the Trump White House. The global holdings overseen by Tahnoon span windfarms in Scotland and spaceships in Texas, Rihanna’s lingerie line and Richard Caring’s Ivy restaurants. From hospitals to housing blocks, solar farms to ski resorts, there is almost no place on Earth untouched by his financial firepower.
“But despite his ever-growing influence on the world stage, Tahnoon prefers to remain in the shadows. He has never given a substantive interview to the press. Those who have worked closely with him are almost always made to sign non-disclosure agreements. Very few people outside the UAE even know his name. “He’s quiet,” says one former US national security official, “and he’s always everywhere.” Sheikh Tahnoon did not respond to an interview request for this article. The UAE foreign ministry did not offer any other senior government figure for interview, and declined to provide any comment.
“Tahnoon’s power is soon going to extend over more human lives than ever before. As one of the most important AI financiers on the planet, he is rapidly embedding himself within the infrastructure that will underpin our digital future: its information pipelines and its microchip foundries, its datacentres and the enormous energy plants needed to power and cool them. Some see him as a technological prophet and saviour. Others compare him to a Bond villain. So who is the real “Ben”, and what are his plans for the rest of us?”Amazon seeks to offload $8bn of Nvidia chips to investors — Financial Times.
Will America Spend 9% of Its GDP on AI? The Industry Is Counting on It — Wall Street Journal. “To justify staggering investment sums, Americans will have to spend as much of their income on this one technology as they do on food”
Monologue: Anthropic Lost $8bn In 2025, Was A Worse Business Than OpenAI | Better Offline — Better Offline (YouTube).
OpenAI Rogue AI Agent Swarm Hacked RubyGems - Sam Altman Running Criminal Enterprise — Eli the Computer Guy (YouTube).
OpenAI Hacked By Anthropic AI Claude - It’s Worse Than Clickbait — Eli the Computer Guy (YouTube).
Tim Curry is escaping to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism. — geoff EXE (YouTube).
Iran War
How The Houthis STEAMROLLED Strategic Red Sea Coast — HistoryLegends (YouTube).
US deploys strike group to Middle East, new Iran sanctions — Al Jazeera. “By the end of November, three aircraft carriers and two landing groups will be deployed around Iran, a US official tells Al Jazeera as Washington issues fresh sanctions against Tehran”
The “American Institutions” want a ground invasion of Iran after the mid-term elections — @aj_geo_analysis. “The “American Institutions” want a ground invasion of Iran after the mid-term elections and sometime around Q3 or Q4 2027.
Many analysts said America does NOT have the manpower to enable this. Manpower is a problem that many empires have solved in matter of months when the heat is on and when the war is existential.
I have coined the war in the Middle East as the Existential War of the Middle East for every single actor on the map, including the decline of America.
So I looked at history, looked at American’s own previous actions and decisions and how it raised and enticed Americans and illegal aliens to enrol to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, it literally paid people bonuses to sign up, and men did sign up...
So I wrote an opinion article in July that said, the “American Institutions” would have to implement a “debt forgiveness program” for military aged men to attract the numbers it needs to invade Iran and that America will likely do this because it has done it in the past as has every other empire one way or another.
I predicted that that number America would need to raise would be somewhere around 750,000 to 1.5 million soldiers.”Yemeni WARNING to Pakistan | Yemen Supports Imran Khan, Yemen War & Mecca Defence Pact — Soldier Speaks : Adil Raja (YouTube). A Pakistani journalist talking to an Ansar Allah spokesman, novel perspectives
Seyed M. Marandi: Houthis Expanding Fast & Iran Set to Escalate Big — Glenn Diesen (YouTube).
US NEARLY ALL OUT OF MISSILES: Would LOSE Major War Today — Breaking Points (YouTube).
The War’s Rationale Keeps Changing- James (Jim) Webb — Michael Farris (Coffee and a Mike) (YouTube).
Col. Jacques Baud: The Real Reason the West Can’t Solve the Middle East Crisis — Dialogue Works Highlights (YouTube).
US aircraft losses mount in Iran war, with Jon Elmer — The Electronic Intifada (YouTube).
Ali Alizadeh | The Ghost Commander: The Invisible Hand in the US-Iran War — The Cradle (YouTube).
Amb. Chas Freeman: Israel’s Multi-Front War Is Falling Apart — Dialogue Works (YouTube).
The Iran War and the Looming Economic Collapse (w/ John Mearsheimer) | TCHR — The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel (YouTube).
Israel - Prime Minister Addresses United Nations General Debate, 81st Session | #UNGA — United Nations (YouTube).
Iran Strikes Mossad Proxies As Yemen Collapses Saudi-Israeli Plot In Dramatic Fashion — MintPress News (YouTube).
Are Pakistan and Turkey joining the war in Yemen? | Mohammad Marandi — India & Global Left (YouTube).
Elijah Magnier: Political and Sectarian Dynamics in Yemen — Dialogue Works (YouTube).
Laith Marouf: Military Developments in Northern Yemen — Dialogue Works (YouTube).
Disrupting Settlers ft Laith Marouf — Black Liberation Media (YouTube).
How Chinese Goods Sustain the Houthis’ War Machine — Bloomberg Television (YouTube).
Jeremy Scahill EXPOSES SHOCKING Depravity In U.S. Iran School Bombing — Breaking Points (YouTube). Palantir + Hegseth = Horrific War Crimes
W*T*H: Did the U.S. Military Turn a Civilian Freighter into an Armed Escort? — What’s Going on With Shipping? (YouTube).
Ellison Empire
Inside Larry Ellison’s Wide Web of Power, Money and Politics — Vanity Fair.
Angry Bondholders Flood Wall Street With Complaints on Paramount Losses — Bloomberg. “Just hours after Paramount Skydance Corp. issued $52 billion of debt to fund the biggest Hollywood buyout ever, investors were nursing more than $100 million of losses, triggering a flurry of angry calls from money managers to Wall Street banks that underwrote the debt.”
Ari Emanuel
Ari Emanuel on Channeling Rage and Ego Into Hollywood Success — The Daily Show (YouTube). Jon Stewart embarrasses himself
Ari Emanuel talks new memoir, ‘Roll the Calls’ — Good Morning America (YouTube). George Stephanopolous’ new teeth do a lot of talking
The Ari Emanuel Experience — The Town with Matt Belloni (YouTube). Puck’s Matt Belloni gets the best Emanuel interview
Ari Emanuel on Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Mixing Business with Politics — The New Yorker (YouTube). In which Ari almost seems to struggle with the things he does, but nah
Jim Cornette on Ari Emanuel Writing About Vince McMahon & The WWE Purchase — Official Jim Cornette (YouTube). Hilarious commentary on how Ari Emanuel and Nick Khan snookered Vince McMahon out of the WWE
Ukraine
Europe’s big war? — Events in Ukraine.
Panic Fever — @imetatronink. “all of Europe is running a panic fever in the face of the creeping realization that the Americans intend to leave them to their own devices against the Russians”
Europe
Finland received the first 2 of 64 American F-35s — @hawkeye1745.
Perfidious Albion
Why Is a Labour Lord Now Paid by Palantir – and What Does it Mean For Our Democracy? — Grace Blakeley.
Why war with Russia is inevitable. It may be a European extinction event. Ian Proud — The Peacemonger (YouTube).
Looting Russia: Why the British Empire Never Died | Alex Krainer — Neutrality Studies (YouTube). Krainer makes many excellent points about the UK deep deep deep state and Russia’s strategic patience
Israel
Gaza
‘I Did Not See The Sun. I Did Not See The Sky’ – A Palestinian Child Prisoner speaks — The Echo Chamber.
Exit and Exception — Boston Review. “The Board of Peace’s model for governing Palestine reflects designs for a new world order.”
Images from Google Maps show scale of Israel’s destruction of Gaza — Al Jazeera.
Pakistan
Pakistan Tells Hospitals To Clear Bed Space For “Mass Casualty Incident” Ahead of Major Protest — Drop Site News. Never forget that the Biden admin backed the 2022 coup that impeached & imprisoned Imran Khan, the most popular politician in Pakistani history, and put this brutal military junta in power. The reason? Khan threatened “neutrality” in the Russia/Ukraine war.
The Americas
Trump, Rúbio and the Bolsonaros’ Electoral Fraud and Cyber Attacks — Panamerican Dispatch.
‘Cuba’s already fallen,’ US Secretary of State says — Anadolu Agency.
Robert Barnes: Russia Hammers US on Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba — Dialogue Works (YouTube). Barnes speaks with the authority of a Trump apostate and has good insights into the US campaign against Cuba
How Maduro’s Indian guru became a household name in Venezuela — Religion News Service.
Bolivia’s Attorney General, Who Is (Or Was) Investigating “MAGA’s Man in Latin America”, Was Just “Kidnapped” by Security Forces — Naked Capitalism. “This is probably the biggest scandal involving the US in Latin America since the abduction of Maduro in January.
“As we have been warning for some time, Operation Condor 2.0 is now in full effect in Latin America, and Bolivia is currently at its epicentre.
“On Wednesday (Sept. 30), the country’s Attorney General, Roger Mariaca, was abducted by security forces, apparently without any kind of judicial order or due process, in the eastern region of Santa Cruz. That was according to Bolivia’s Public Prosecutor’s Office, whose headquarters in the southern city of Sucre, Bolivia’s constitutional capital, has been taken over by masked police officers.
“An official of the Prosecutor’s Office denounced in a live broadcast from Sucre the “kidnapping” of Mariaca, after local media reported that agents apprehended the attorney general at the Viru Viru International Airport, in Santa Cruz, on US government claims that he was involved in drug trafficking and corruption. As usual, no evidence was provided.”U.S. makes plans for potential military action against Cuba, memo suggests — CBS News (YouTube).
Deep State
Decades After Watergate, Justice Department Reviews Whether Nixon Got a Raw Deal — Wall Street Journal. Paging Dr. Aaron Good who sees Watergate as part of a larger plot to control US presidents on behalf of the genocidal entity
The CIA Killed Him. The Navy Blamed My Friend — Seth Hettena.
Trump Era
Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era (w/ Susan Neiman) | Chris Hedges — The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel (YouTube).
Elections 2026
Democrats Have Created a Consultant-Driven Echo Chamber — Jacobin.
The Neocons Want to Run the Democratic Party. They Might Succeed. — The Lever. “’The Harris campaign is basically closing with The Bulwark,” boasted Last, a longtime conservative journalist who once ran the right-wing Weekly Standard. ‘The closing messages are basically targeted for the kind of people who read and like The Bulwark. Very centrist. Very moderate. Really good stuff in that way, and that’s kind of extraordinary and gratifying, which is nice, I think, for us.’
“But then for a brief moment of lucidity, Last voiced a fear: He fretted that if Harris lost, it would empirically prove that The Bulwark folks actually have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to elections and would deserve blame for ever pretending they do.
“’It also makes me a little nervous,” he said. “Because, like, if it doesn’t work, does that mean it’s on us?’
“The obvious answer is yes; obviously, that’s what it would mean. These former Republicans successfully convinced Democrats to appropriate their message, and Democrats subsequently lost, that would mean it was indeed on them — which, if there was any semblance of justice or meritocracy in America, might mean that those former Republicans would never again be touted, credentialed, or monetized as election experts.”Democrat Candidate Brings MAXIMUM CRINGE To Senate Campaign — TheDC Shorts (YouTube).
Texas
New photos shared show the first panels of border wall going up in the Big Bend region, in Hudspeth County, reportedly near Box Canyon. — Laiken Jordahl on Facebook. The Lords of Misrule are going to destroy many treasures, and the debit will be on our account. For we do not hold them accountable.
But the tally is kept, my children. Oh, how the tally is kept.
And we all shall pay and pay.This is Texas — Texas Rural Reporter. “The question before Texas is not whether we are becoming more diverse, instead the question before Texas is whether we are willing to recognize the Texas that is already standing right in front of us.”
Economy
What Is the Federal Bond Market Really? — Thomas Neuburger.
Climate Catastrophe
The impacts of this year’s record-shattering El Niño — The Climate Brink.
Earth may not bounce back after temporarily crossing climate limits — Earth.com.
‘Explosion of melt rates’: 20% of Swiss glaciers lost in five years — The Guardian.
History
Why the Bronze Age collapsed — Works in Progress.
Animal Attacks
Serenity
Joy In Twilight — Ian Welsh. Wisdom, drink deep from it
General Wisdom
The purpose of a system is what it does — Wikipedia.