The Army's Precision Strike Missile launches during exercise Valiant Shield in Palau. (U.S. Army)

Between President Bone Spurs and Pentagon Pete's ineptness in promoting and running a needless
Iranian war for Israel, the military has run out of precision ordnance in 5 months of fighting.

US used ‘virtually all’ long-range precision missiles during Iran war, sources say

The U.S. Army has used up much of its stockpile of highly accurate long-range missiles during America’s five-month war with Iran, according to three people familiar with the data, raising concerns about the military’s readiness for future conflicts.

The missiles are principally the Army’s surface-to-surface weapons, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). The U.S. has used “virtually all” of these weapons, according to two of the sources.

And for what? The Strait remains closed, billions of dollars spent, soldiers killed or wounded
with no end in sight as these two geniuses haven't a clue.

Relativity ...

Emergence/rev V - 48" X 48" painting of a MAGI Synthvision Modeler render. - 1983

Ascension the precursor to Emergence/Rev V - 1983

Channeling Vermeer comes to mind as my use of MAGI 3D's software to ensure accuracy of the 3 space of the art directly relates to Vermeer's use of the Camera Obscura to ensure his work was also geometrically accurate as depicted by his The Art of Painting masterpiece.

The Art of Painting -  Johannes Vermeer 1666–1668

Why all of this palaver? Well, nothing happens in isolation.

Suspension's Bridge 1985

Said MAGI painting and collages relate to ...

El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919, color lithograph on paper, 51 x 62 cm

&

Proun 19D El Lissitzky, 1920 – 1921 
Gesso, oil, varnish, crayon, colored papers, sandpaper, graph paper, cardboard,
metallic paint, and metal foil on plywood, 38 3/8 x 38 1/4″ (97.5 x 97.2 cm).
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 

The craziest part? Yours truly didn't know about EL Lissitzki until 8/4/26. :)

Prior to MAGI, the work looked like this ...

and 

I might get back to painting as it doesn't require power, just paint, canvas and a little bit of imagination. :)

The coat hanger scenario

Going west ...

In creating this pix, yours truly was doing a fanciful conjecture. Take a railway and have fun with it. Now, take AI and make it your concierge, your do everything butler so the notion of doing maintenance on all things relating to email, appointments and tasks to do are passed onto a resource that never gets tired. Sound like nirvana but is it?

My AI stack of tools is composed of Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. So when I heard that Google was expanding access to Gemini Spark, I couldn't wait to see what the "always on" AI agent could do.

For those new to Gemini Spark, it's an AI agent that can monitor your inbox, organize files, build documents, schedule calendar events and complete multi-step tasks across Google's apps. Best of all, you don't have to have your laptop open. Google recently began rolling the feature out more broadly, including to subscribers in India, after initially launching it for U.S. Google AI Ultra users.

(Image credit: Gemini Spark)

Prompt: Review my calendar, unread emails and task list. Identify any scheduling conflicts,

prioritize my work, and create a realistic plan for the next five days.

After using this prompt I checked to see if it actually understood priorities (meetings vs. social events) or did it just rearrange my calendar. To my suprise, it not only gave me a quick look at all my meetings, but also showed me the emails I needed to respond to. Talk about a productivity game changer!

All true but there's always a cost ...

Implement Spark and Google's in your shorts 24/7 and has complete access to your most intimate information.
For Google and company, this is a gold mine and trap at the same time. On the good side, it gives new data for AI to process, to build out ever larger LLMs. On the flip side, how does Google process all this messy data? Particularly if you scale this dataset to hundreds of millions of users.

It can't unless it assumes. Pattern recognition systems become overwhelmed
so destructive shortcuts become inevitable. Hence, the art of assume rules.

This is the coat hanger scenario made real.

1. The Compression Tax (Why it Must Assume)

Processing every single variable in an email thread or calendar schedule requires compute for every single item to be analyzed. If the agent actually parsed and weighed the semantic depth of every word 24/7, it would crash the data center and freeze the system instantly.

To survive energy constraints, the agent must compress the data. It cannot process the information in question because that requires too much time, energy, and enough compute to do the job

Instead, it must skim the surface. It looks for a statistical pattern, ignores the nuance, and assumes the rest.

2. The Coat Hanger Bypass

This is where the coat hanger scenario applies.

When you lose your keys in a locked car, you don't map the internal mechanics of the lock (the semantic reality). You shove a rigid, crude wire coat hanger through the weather stripping and blindly fish around until you hook something that feels right, then you rip it upward and pray you get the damn keys.

When Gemini Spark encounters a complex, nuanced email thread between you and a colleague, it doesn't understand the human context. To save computational energy, it shoves a statistical coat hanger into the data block. It blindly hooks a date, a time, and a subject line based purely on probability, bypassing the actual meaning of the conversation, and yanks it out to create a calendar invite.

3. The Destruction of the Semantic Bridge

When you allow an omnipresent agent to operate on "assume" logic without common sense guiding the analysis, you are inviting a blind, rigid algorithm to make crude, brute-force decisions about your life. It assumes a sarcastic comment is a directive. It assumes a tentative idea is a concrete deadline. It uses a coat hanger to pick the lock of your daily routine, destroying the delicate weather stripping of human nuance in the process. Now, magnify this possibilities to hundreds of millions of users and, factor in how much more juice the data center must produce to enable Spark to do it's job 24/7.

Conclusion: The Illusion of Competence

The tech companies are selling the illusion these agents are omniscient assistants.
In reality, because they are bound by the strict thermodynamic limits of pattern recognition and not meaning, they remain just highly advanced statistical guessers.

Keeping the AI out of your inbox isn't just about saving the power grid; it's about refusing
to let a machine use a coat hanger on your semantic reality.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch

Ready, fire, aim/rev XX

Christopher Furlong / Getty

Every time yours truly thinks about the CF known as Trump's and Israel's Iran war, ready, fire, aim comes to mind, particularly when it comes to pissing away ordnance, something often discussed in BRT as the US doesn't understand Von Clauwitcz or The Art of War in any way, shape or fashion. 

Portrait by Wilhelm Wach, c. 1830

Although the United States has been the world’s preeminent military power for decades, it apparently cannot fight a regional power such as Iran for more than a few months before experiencing an armaments crisis. Since hostilities with Tehran began on February 28, the U.S. has reportedly used up two-thirds of its Patriot missile interceptors, more than a third of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors, and a third or more of its prewar stock of Tomahawk cruise missiles. The rate of consumption is all the more striking because a shaky cease-fire had halted most fighting for months. Based on recent production patterns, replenishing the supply of weaponry will take several years.

Making America’s challenge still more daunting is a major shift in war-fighting technology toward cheap, unmanned aerial vehicles. The United States and its allies in the Persian Gulf have been forced to use expensive, advanced air-defense systems—such as Patriot PAC-3 missiles that each cost millions of dollars and have a long production cycle—to shoot down Iranian drones that can be swiftly assembled for about $30,000.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has failed to learn from the war in Ukraine. Iran has learned to mass-produce cheap drones—ones that the Russians first imported and now produce themselves. In other words, their effectiveness had been tested, and their existence was widely known. But that seemed to make no difference to U.S. planners. Perhaps in the arrogant belief that a war with Iran would quickly end in a decisive victory, the Pentagon did not have cost-effective systems ready to intercept these weapons. Neither did the Gulf countries that have counted on American weaponry for their self-defense.

Factoid: Iran is a leading developer of state-of-the art drones.

Shahed 136 drones displayed at an event in Tehran last weekend, one of three models
Iran has supplied to Russia. Photograph: Sobhan Farajvan/Pacific Press/Rex/Shutterstock

Becoming a bank ...

President Trump with Masayoshi Son, the chief executive of SoftBank, and Larry Ellison and Sam Altman after announcing Project Stargate on Jan. 21, 2025.Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

The pix says it all. Masayoshi Son helping Trump to walk, Ellison looking like the living dead and Altman,
a mere afterthought, comes to mind as Oracle is tanking as we speak regarding the vagaries of
AI and the ongoing reality of never ending debt.

On Jan. 21, 2025 — the first full day of the second Trump administration — Larry Ellison woke up in his 33-bedroom, 34-bathroom oceanfront mansion in Florida, got into his Gulfstream jet and headed up to Washington. Ellison, who was 80 and worth in the neighborhood of $200 billion, had an appointment at the White House. He didn’t bother to take a driver’s license — he needed to call someone on the president’s staff to vouch for him at the gate — but there he was, at 2 p.m., standing beside Donald Trump in the Roosevelt Room as the president announced “the largest A.I. infrastructure project by far in history” and told the world that his friend Larry Ellison was just the man to get it done. “He’s sort of C.E.O. of everything,” Trump said. “He’s an amazing man and an amazing businessperson.”

Ellison began by thanking Trump. “We certainly couldn’t do this without you,” he said. “It would simply be impossible.” He then proceeded to sketch out the ambitious plan. Ellison’s database software and cloud computing company, Oracle, and its partners — most prominently OpenAI — were going to invest as much as $500 billion over the next four years into a group of sprawling data centers, 500,000 square feet each, that would produce 10 gigawatts of computing power, using enough energy to power as many as 10 million homes. It was called Project Stargate, after the 1994 sci-fi movie in which Kurt Russell steps through a wormhole and finds himself inside a pyramid on an alien planet. This Stargate would be a portal leading humanity from the postindustrial era to the artificial-intelligence age.

Ellison did cash in, at least at first. He signed the Stargate deal with Altman, putting him in business with the hottest young executive in the A.I. industry. He opened one of the world’s largest data centers in Malaysia, which has provided by one estimate more than one-fifth of China’s A.I. computing power, and developed plans to build another one in the United Arab Emirates.

But his big bet on A.I. was built on an astronomical amount of debt in every imaginable form — bonds, letters of credit, asset-backed securities — available in seemingly unlimited quantities, because the more you spent building A.I. infrastructure, the more you would earn, or so the logic went. Computer theorists called it the scaling hypothesis. It held that advancements in A.I. were directly tied to the generation of unprecedented amounts of computing power to process unprecedented volumes of data. Reaching the holy grail of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., when computers match or surpass human thinking at any task, was going to require bigger data centers and a lot more of them. It all came down to capital expenditures — capex, in the lingo of the Valley. Whoever controlled the most computing power would control the A.I. economy.

Brendan McDermid/Reuters

A year and a half after his triumphant trip to the White House,
Ellison may be poised to become something else: a cautionary tale.

Ellison is personally worth about $55 billion less than he was on the morning he flew to Washington, and more than $200 billion less than he was at his peak in September. Oracle has pushed the limits of the credit market and is facing steeper interest rates from lenders, and its credit rating has been downgraded to a notch above “junk” status.

The hyperscalers — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle — are some of the richest companies in the world, and the stock market is heavily dependent on them for its growth. If Oracle were to falter, the repercussions could be wide-ranging. Americans are more invested in the stock market than ever before, and the A.I. boom has been driving a disproportionate amount of America’s economic growth. Last fall, Gita Gopinath, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, writing in The Economist, estimated that an A.I. crash would wipe out $20 trillion in American wealth — far more than the dot-com crash in 2000 or even the 2008 financial crisis.

In closing ...

Oracle has ceased to be a technology licenser; it mutated into a law firm and a bank. Specifically, a subprime lender for un-renderable technology. Bankrolling OpenAI and chasing the scaling hypothesis is actively killing Ellison's company. Nothing personal, but crocodile tears apply. Remember, as per MIT, 95% of all AI projects fail.
The bubble is beginning to burst in real time. 

Marshall was right ...

The Lobby

Yours truly has waxed "poetic" about Israel with Past as Prolog/4500 detailing
the history of the country, not the lobby. Now comes a book about the lobby and it's about time. 

The following is the U.N.'s map of the proposed partition. The blue areas comprising roughly 57 percent of the land were to be allotted to Jews; orange areas were to be allotted to Palestinians. Jerusalem was to be left under the governance of the international community, because of its historical and religious importance for numerous religions and cultures.

In 1948, with war raging in Palestine, Harry Truman found himself trapped.

On one side were Zionist lobbyists and the president’s domestic political advisers, who were urging him to support the establishment of a Jewish state in as much of Palestine as possible. On the other were his top foreign policy and national security officials, led by the secretary of state, George C Marshall. Their unanimous recommendation was to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state, which they believed would trigger war in the Middle East and endanger the future of US relations with the Arab and Muslim world.

With the exception perhaps of George Washington, no diplomatic or military leader in American history had a reputation for patriotic virtue and skilled devotion to duty comparable to that of Marshall. Truman was in awe of the secretary of state, who, as chief of staff of the US armed forces, had been hailed by Winston Churchill as “the true organizer of victory” in the second world war. After the war, it had been Marshall who launched the plan named after him to rebuild Europe.

President Harry Truman shakes hands with secretary of state George Marshall in Washington DC
on 29 May 1947. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In the mid-1940s, Marshall pushed quietly but steadily against the Zionist movement’s proposals to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. He was concerned that American support would open opportunities for the Soviet Union to exploit Arab anger, put Middle Eastern oil supplies at risk in the event of a war between the Soviet Union and the United States, and require the deployment of unavailable American troops to prevent bloodshed and instability in Palestine. These were, indeed, the strongly held views of virtually all of Truman’s most important military and foreign policy advisers.

Truman was personally and deeply moved by the suffering of Jewish survivors of the Nazi “Final Solution”, but also irritated by and at times furious with the constant hectoring to which he was subjected by campaigners for recognition of a Jewish state in Palestine, including the World Zionist Organization and a host of other Jewish delegations, friends and politicians. Despite his personal exasperation, he could not ignore them. Coming in an election year that would pit him against Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, pressures from the Zionist lobby forced him into an excruciating and embarrassing position.

Such a move, according to Marshall, would be a “transparent dodge to win a few votes”, he said, leaving the “great dignity of the office of the President … seriously diminished”. Marshall declared he would not personally be able to vote for Truman should he bow to political pressure on the issue. A shaken Truman closed the meeting by saying he agreed with Marshall.

However, within two days, exquisitely sensitive to the tenuousness of his hold on the presidency and the power of Zionist sympathizers to throw New York’s electoral votes to the Republicans, he ordered that the US recognize Israel.

From 1948-2026 ...

The fact is that from Truman to Trump, most American presidents have caved to the demands of Israel and its advocates. Driven by the fear of domestic political defeats, presidents have regularly rejected or abandoned foreign policies that both they and their most senior advisers believed were in the best interests of the US and at the expense of making meaningful progress in bringing a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The greatest story in geopolitics and in American domestic affairs
is how the far-right government of a small Middle Eastern country
came to hold a controlling interest in United States foreign policy.

Past as prolog indeed.

The smell of desperation ...

US President Donald Trump posted online that to avoid a large military attack, Iran must open the Strait of Hormuz and put aside its nuclear programme [Aaron Schwartz/AFP]

The smell of desperation applies as Iran holds all the cards. The strait remains closed, Iran still has ordnance and the US is running out of same. The question to ask is, is Iran even talking?

Why has Trump halted attacks?

Trump earlier said in his post that the US was “locked and loaded and ready to go against the Islamic Republic of Iran” but Tehran and other Middle Eastern countries asked him to hold off on new attacks.

“Based on this request, I have agreed, for the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL,”
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform.

He said the deal “would include the Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran’s nuclear threat”.

“The Country of Israel joins me in this commitment. Get to work, everybody, and get it DONE,”
he wrote in the post.

Interesting ... He's demanding total capitulation and pretending it's a negotiation.

The question to ask is two fold. Trump and Bibi can't survive if Iran "wins" as Trump will appear weak and Bibi faces an upcoming election while the hard liners in Iran remain in power.

In closing, people far smarter than me have said, just stop fighting. No negotiation.
Both parties agree to disagree, the Strait reopens and Iran becomes the true hegomon of the region.  

Update: As of 8/3/26 ... 

United States President Donald Trump has described Iran’s leadership as “unbelievably duplicitous”, saying Tehran asked for talks to end the war and then announced that no discussions were being held.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry said Tehran was pursuing multiple diplomatic tracks and that it was not currently holding direct negotiations with the United States.

Chasing a dream ...

FotoField / Shutterstock / Futurism

Chasing a dream applies even if the dream itself becomes a nightmare as limitless money tends to cloud one's mind in conveying a vision even if there is none. Zuck's a prime example of why this take applies.

Despite having almost nothing to show from his enormous spending on AI,
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is doubling down.

Earlier this week, the social media company announced during its second quarter earnings call that it was raising capital expenditures from $125 billion to at least $130 billion, a clear sign that it’s not taking its foot off the pedal.

Yet amid renewed concerns that the tech industry may be nearing the edge of a cliff thanks to its obsession with building out enormously expensive data centers without a clear path to profitability, investors sent back a clear signal in return. Meta’s shares nosedived following its announcement, plummeting over 11 percent over the last five days alone.

According to Zuckerberg, all that extra AI spending was “accelerating every part of our core business.”
He also claimed that some of the tech would be sold off to other businesses.

But whether the company will have anything compelling to offer them remains dubious at best. Meta has been burning through its funds at an alarming rate. Even strong revenue numbers — a 28 percent increase this latest quarter compared to the same period last year — couldn’t stem the bleeding, with free cash flow sinking to the lowest level in at least five years thanks to AI spending.

Despite committing well over $100 billion to the tech, Meta has been practically absent from the frontier AI model race. Its so-called Superintelligence Lab has turned into a “soul-crushing gulag” plagued with
rock-bottom morale — and most importantly, it’s not getting results.

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism.
Source: Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images; Shutterstock

The loss of ethics ...

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock

Your's truly loves books. Paperbacks, hard copy, you name it. If something has to go, the item in question is donated to the library whereupon a huge book fair in my town, puts it out for people to peruse and perhaps buy. Thus far, most of the work gets sold. The rest is donated to schools and other entities wanting people to have access to said resource. In reading Futurism's piece about Anthropic, the loss of ethics applies.

Traditionally, books have been good for two things: reading, and looking nice on a shelf.

But AI companies are interested in neither.

To those building large language models, books are nothing more than fodder to be devoured en masse before being spit out like fishbone. Often, they’re happy to use digital books — or even better, pirated digital books, as Meta has been accused of doing, and as Anthropic was forced to pay a $1.5 billion settlement to authors for also doing.

But many companies, including Anthropic, have turned to ingesting physical books instead, which they can buy countless used copies of on the cheap. According to the settled lawsuit, Anthropic used a hydraulic powered cutting machine to neatly remove the pages from the books it procured from book resellers and then scanned them using industrial-grade imaging equipment. In other words, it was literally ripping off authors’ books to train its AI.

This process took advantage of a legal concept known as first-sale doctrine, which allows a buyer to do what they want with a purchase without the original copyright holder’s say-so. And since Anthropic was turning
the original physical texts into digital ones — rather than redistributing them as new copies — a judge found this to be “transformative,” and therefore protected by fair use.

This is akin to the ancient Greeks and the notion of seeing a sculpture without paint,
something considered obscene.

True colors

54 years later ...

Image by Noel Johnson. Data source: MIT World3 ‘Business as Usual’ model (Meadows et al., 1972).

A truly excellent article by Noel Johnson on Medium on the Limits to Growth brings back memories as I too wrote pieces on LTG back in 2021/3 echoing some of Johnson's thoughts about a 54 year old prediction proving out to be all too true in terms of accuracy most astounding in this writer's opinion.

Recently, I found myself gazing at a line graph that felt more like a mirror than a piece of data. It wasn’t a graph of last year’s inflation rate. It was a 1972 forecast of the future, shown on a computer model known as World3. This model was created by a group of MIT researchers working for the Club of Rome and was used in the authored book, The Limits To Growth.

When the world3 model was first introduced, the entire scientific community basically laughed at it. Most economists dismissed it as "Malthusian," and politicians ignored it. We had entered into a period of unprecedented economic expansion and the concept that there would be an end to this type of expansion seemed like a total buzzkill from another era.

Sunset/rev L

Yesterday, I viewed the recent update to this information. What was interesting to see was how well the chaos of the 2020s supply chain fragility, along with the increasing costs of raw materials and the overall sense that our global economy is beginning to sputter, was nothing short of predictable. In fact, if you look at it now, a decade ago we mapped out exactly where we’d be today. We aren’t drifting wildly through history. We’re tracking a decades old systems model with alarming accuracy.

Growth does not cease due to lack of creative solutions. Growth ceases due to increased resistance within the system. As we deplete resources with increasing ease of access, we are forced to expend greater amounts of both energy and capital to obtain each subsequent unit of production. This phenomenon is referred to as diminishing returns on investment.

Lastly.

This is the Innovation Trap. Technology is a means of directing energy and materials, not a miraculous source of energy. Advanced technology often requires more complexity, not less. Rarer minerals, more accurate production and a highly specialized international supply chain are all necessary. Each ‘solution’ we design adds a new layer of upkeep and a new set of dependencies.

Technology is quicker and more effective, it is also far more prone to malfunction when the surroundings change.

And we haven't even discussed global warming, habitat destruction or the impact of forever wars.

And so it goes -  K. Vonnegut.