An agree upon lie ...

𒂼𒄄 ama-gi4 written in Classical Sumerian cuneiform

When reading the amazing NYTimes opinion piece titled an amargi, one readily sees there's a practical solution to the world's debt problem just as there's a practical solution to keep a car engine working if one understands what the system needs in order to survive. 

• The engine must have oil to enable the pistons to move up and down in their cylinders because without lubrication, the engine will seize. 
• The same requirement applies to water as it enables the engine's cylinder assembly to run at proper temperature, thus avoiding an engine meltdown while driving. 

In an internal combustion engine, a head gasket provides the seal between the engine block and cylinder head(s).

Its purpose is to seal the combustion gases within the cylinders and to avoid coolant or engine oil leaking into the cylinders.[1] Leaks in the head gasket can cause poor engine running and/or overheating.

This also applies to money.

When analyzing the August 2026 economic reality,  a $40 trillion U.S. debt and a $350 trillion global debt, the core structural flaw of modern finance is ... Money is an agreed-upon lie.

It's not a law of physics. It's an artificial ledger. And like all ledgers, if you do not account for the friction of the system, the debt load, the engine will eventually melt down.

Money is the ultimate illusion. It was invented to handle the give and take of business transactions
with as little friction as possible.

The ancient Mesopotamians invented money but today's bean counters believe that money is reality.
They treat the $350 trillion debt as an unbreakable physical law, completely forgetting that money's just a construct designed to grease the wheels of the business transaction.

It matters not what form money takes. Sea shells, gold, paper, copper. Nada.
It's the worth ascribed to such entity that counts. 

Compound Interest (The wealth engine of the creditors)

In a perfectly frictionless reality, debts could compound forever but in reality, the world's engine will seize.

Every transaction generates heat. Compound interest equates to running the engine at redline without an exhaust pipe. The debt snowballs, the debtor defaults and the structural integrity of the society begins to break, something that's beginning to happen as we speak.

an amargi ...

Illustration by The New York Times

Amargi ... Ama-gi is a Sumerian word written 𒂼𒄄 ama-gi4 or 𒂼𒅈𒄄 ama-ar-gi4. Sumerians used it to refer to release from obligations, debt, slavery, taxation, or punishment. Ama-gi has been regarded as the first known written reference to the concept of freedom, and has been used in modern times as a symbol for libertarianism.

When you think about money, one realizes it's an agreed upon lie of what something is worth and is an entity transactional by nature. It's an artificial construct enabling the world to conduct business.

The U.S. federal debt has hit $40 trillion. Add the debt owed by U.S. states, corporations and consumers and the figure rises to about $77 trillion in debt, set against an annual G.D.P. of about $32 trillion. The interest on all of it is compounding constantly. It’s not just the U.S., either. Globally, there is $350 trillion in debt, roughly treble global G.D.P. It’s like snowpack on a mountainside. It may look stable right now, but it’s creating the conditions for an avalanche. We are past the point where we can deal with our current debts in normal ways. The options open to us are extremely unlikely or highly destructive: Grow our way out of it, raise taxes, inflate the debt away or wait for the economic fallout.

Ancient societies had another method to deal with debt. It was called an amargi — a blanket declaration of public debt cancellation. All public debts written off. Disappeared. It sounds laughable, I know. But, really, that’s just because the idea has been buried so deeply in history you’ve probably never heard of it. In the ancient world, it presented a pragmatic solution to an intractable problem. And now, faced with impossible-to-repay debts that are weighing down our economy, is the time to look at the amargi and the lessons it offers about how to think about finance.

The ancient Mesopotamians are credited with inventing money. They invented loans and compound interest. They understood this system and its propensity for breakdowns when debts spiraled. That’s why they invented something else, too. About 4,400 years ago, a Mesopotamian king named Enmetena issued an edict. Essentially all public debts, he declared, were canceled. (Amargi typically left debts between merchants in place.) People who had been sold into bondage were freed. Similar edicts gave back land to farmers who had lost it to creditors. The campaign itself was called “return to mother,” the origin of the Sumerian word “amargi.” The word loses something in the translation across eons and languages, but essentially it’s a synonym for “freedom.” The concept was codified in the Old Testament book of Leviticus, which decreed a “year of the Lord’s favor” every 50 years.

The amargi was a response to a persistent problem that was recognized in the ancient world: Debt compounded until it destabilized society. Get enough citizens sold into slavery and enough abandoned farms and society crumbles. Nobody to grow the crops. Nobody to serve in the armies. The amargi was a relief valve, a final rebalancing tool. It was declared in the ancient Near East regularly when new rulers came to power. These actions were magnanimous but also practical. They allowed society to reset rather than being forced into monetary collapse.

Enmetena's foundation stone contains the first known mention of the word Ama-gi

The reason the practice often worked in the first place was because the ancient world understood something about our monetary system we have mostly forgotten: Money is an invented social construct. It isn’t real, not in the way a tree or a stone is real. The system of money and credit is a thing humans made up. It’s a record-keeping device for distributing resources. And since money is a human creation, we can alter it when needed.

It's the economy stupid. :)

Stowaways ...

An Artemis II astronaut photographed the cratered Moon and crescent Earth from Orion in April 2026. Credit: NASA. The image is illustrative and is not one of the microbial-survival maps from the study.

Nice to know, Aspergillus niger, a familiar fungus growing in wet places like the bathrooms on the USS Lincoln, can become stowaways from hell when astronauts visit the moon, something rather disquieting to say the least. 

A. niger growing on potato dextrose agar

There are others potential stowaways as one can well imagine as nature finds a way, always.

A NASA-led study published in August 2026 mapped small niches near the lunar south pole where human-associated microbes could remain viable. The most persistent candidate was Aspergillus niger, a darkly pigmented fungus common in warm, damp buildings and repeatedly detected in spacecraft environments, including the International Space Station.

Its advantage was specific. Among the organisms considered, A. niger had the highest measured resistance to ultraviolet radiation, surpassing even Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterium so resistant to radiation and desiccation that it is routinely used as a benchmark for biological toughness.

The new work did not place living mould on the Moon. It combined existing laboratory survival measurements with detailed models of sunlight, temperature and terrain. What emerged was a map of where dormant microbial cells might endure for days, not where they could grow into a lunar ecosystem.

Any questions?

Moral courage not spoken here ...

President Trump walks to board Air Force One in Maryland.
(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Read the piece. This tells you everything about Trump.

Trump shrugs off concerns about dismal conditions on USS Abraham Lincoln

President Trump said Friday that he isn't concerned about the state of the USS Abraham Lincoln, despite calls from lawmakers to investigate reports of mental health issues for those onboard.

Why it matters: The San Diego-based aircraft carrier has been deployed for nine months, and numerous reports have indicated that crew members' families are concerned about a lack of food and other basic supplies.

• At least one sailor has gone overboard, prompting the Navy to launch an investigation and The Military Times reported that other crew members have also tried to go overboard.

What they're saying: Speaking to reporters Friday, Trump said he didn't think the ship had been deployed "nearly long enough."

• He also disputed that the family members of the 5,000-plus crew were concerned about their well-being, and pointed toward the USS George Washington coming to relieve the Lincoln from its Middle East deployment.
• While taking questions from the press Friday, a reporter mentioned families were worried, to which Trump replied "no they're not."

Zoom out: The Navy Times, The Military Times, and Stars and Stripes were among the first to report on conditions aboard the carrier.

• The ship hasn't made a port call in at least 200 days. Generally, those occur every 30 to 45 days unless operational demands interrupt plans.
• Family members of those aboard told The Military Times that the crew lacks basic items like hygiene products and faces other quality-of-life issues, including contaminated water.
• Low morale and exhaustion are also rampant among the crew, several families said.

The other side: Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao said in a statement that there has been no loss of life on the ship and that "a small number of mental health cases were treated."

• Cao said that meal plans on the carrier "were adjusted when fresh resupply was unavailable, without a single meal being missed," but he did not address allegations of other supply and quality-of-life issues.

For the record: "There is no question our young men and women have been pushed to their limits—but they have never broken. They are rightly tired—but have never been out of the fight," Cao's statement said.

If Patton was around, the shit would hit the fan in a nanosecond and heads would roll, fast. 

George S. Patton

“Moral courage is the most valuable and usually the most absent characteristic in men”

― George S. Patton Jr.

Houston, we have a problem.

Harbor tug boats guide Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln at the Naval Base in Guam on December 11, 2025. Valerie Lynn Maigue/US Navy/File

As a former officer in the Army who was respected by his people, anger comes to mind in terms of just how bad the living conditions became during the months at sea the Lincoln was deployed without the respite of a port call and resupply of essential goods and services, a FUBAR for the ages based on a CF of an illegal Israeli/US sponsored war with no end in sight. 

The incident of the sailor going overboard, which has not been previously reported, adds to a growing list of concerns about the crew on the ship. Several Democratic lawmakers are calling for answers after concerns were raised by families of sailors aboard Lincoln about the deteriorating living conditions and worsening mental health during the ship’s record-breaking deployment.

Since the Lincoln left its home port of San Diego last November, the aircraft carrier has been deployed for more than 250 days after being redirected to the Middle East to support US operations in the war with Iran, now entering its sixth month. With more than 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard, it has not made a port call in more than 200 days, setting a modern-day record for consecutive days at sea, according to Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

A sailor directs an F/A-18E Super Hornet on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea, Feb. 14, 2026. The Lincoln has been deployed more than eight months, and families of its roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines are bringing concerns about mental health and the risk of self-harm to Navy leaders.
(Daniel Kimmelman/U.S. Navy)

“There have been widespread reports of shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns,” aboard the ship, he said in the letter, as well as “disruptions in the mail system, which have caused many care packages in route to the ship to be lost in transit for months.”

In a statement to CNN, the US Navy said, “We have not observed an increase in suicidal ideations or attempts aboard the ship. We take every service member’s well-being seriously and have religious, medical and mental health professionals available to assess and address concerns as they arise.”

USS Abraham Lincoln

Houston, we have a problem. 

Wag the Dog/Rev 2

 

Eric Lee/Getty Images

When Trump became president in 2024 and pardoned the January 6th rioters, yours truly said Brown Shirts.
I warned he would move toward implementing National Emergency Powers as needs warrant, particularly if his poll numbers tanked. People laughed. They aren't laughing now.

With Trump's and Bibi's war with Iran acting as catastrophic loss leader and gas and food prices spiraling ever upward, the orange menace is now talking seriously about declaring a national emergency in order to short-circuit the projected bloodbath the GOP might finally face in the midterms.

SA insignia aka The Brown Shirts

President Donald Trump is openly hinting at taking over the midterm elections
by declaring a national emergency.

Newsmax’s Wayne Allen Root interviewed Trump just after midnight Tuesday morning, and said that Trump had the right to declare a national security emergency next month, forcing through photo identification, proof of citizenship, limits on mail-in ballots, and other heavy voting restrictions. Trump seemed to like that suggestion, but didn’t want to tip his hand.

Trump is afraid of massive Republican losses in November’s midterms, and has been unsuccessfully pushing his allies in Congress to pass the draconian SAVE Act. With that appearing more unlikely each day, Democrats and other Trump critics are raising concerns that he may take drastic action, such as declaring a national emergency and maybe deploying legions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to the polls.

In fact, Democrats have been trying for close to a year to get documents from the Department of Homeland Security regarding its policies and memos on sending ICE agents to polls. Agents were seen at polling places in Texas during its May primaries and in California in June, but when Democrats used the Freedom of Information Act to investigate, they were sent useless press clippings.

If Trump tries to invoke national security to take over federal elections, it would shatter precedent and could set off lawsuits and protests across the country. His repeated, disproven claims about voter fraud and rigged elections suggest that he’ll make the same excuses in November. The question is how to ensure a fair and accurate result that can stand up to his attacks.

If that doesn't work, the Wag the Dog gambit might.

“O, full of scorpions is my mind!”

― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Shield Font

 

Image - ShieldFont

The predator/prey arms race applies as Shield Font is building fonts able to shield content from AI's 24/7 never ending heist in order to feed its LLM, something most interesting to this old designer because selecting appropriate fonts for any given project was an essential part of the creative process. :)

A new “AI-proof” font was designed to be hard for AI agents to scrape, but you can’t tell by just looking at it. Unlike other anti-AI fonts that use letters that are difficult for bots to read, ShieldFont swaps out words behind the scenes to poison the data that automated scrapers take without permission.

ShieldFont was designed as part of a project created by a group of professionals including the Brazilian creative studio Seneda & Abrucio and the Danish type foundry PlayType. It shields text from large language models (LLMs) by garbling sentences in the HTML source code, leaving automated scrapers to sift through sentences filled with decoy words that make a sentence incoherent. Thanks to a custom font on a backend, though, the real text is displayed for a human reader to see.

How it works

ShieldFont works using ligatures, the technical term in typography when two letters next to each other in a word are combined into a single glyph. Ligatures are designed for aesthetics, so letter combinations like fi in “fish” or fl in “flow” look naturally spaced instead of visually cluttered. When a program sees these specific letters next to each other, it swaps two characters for one that combines the letters into a single glyph. ShieldFont works in a similar way, except instead of letters, it swaps out whole words.

Shield Font

Amazing site, amazing tech. :)

8.3 ...

The stock market has thrived under President Trump.
Image source: Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok.

8.3 Trillion Reasons the Trump Bull Market Is Running on Borrowed Time

Although the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJINDICES: ^DJI), S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC), and Nasdaq Composite (NASDAQINDEX: ^IXIC) typically rise under most presidents, their annualized returns with President Donald Trump in the White House have been well above average. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI), coupled with Trump's favorable corporate income tax policies, has fueled growth on Wall Street.

But the Trump bull market appears to be running on borrowed time. While a laundry list of headwinds exists on Wall Street, including historically pricey valuations and record margin debt, it's a quarterly reported economic data point that strongly suggests a course correction is coming.

However, the latest money market fund data follows a worrisome trend.

During the first quarter of 2026, total financial assets held in money market funds ballooned to an all-time high of $8.29 trillion. Even though we'd have expected capital to flow out of money market funds when the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) began cutting interest rates in September 2024, inflows never slowed. Despite yields on fixed-income assets declining, investors have continued to pile in -- and that's a big-time worry.

History offers investors little reassurance about the evolution of AI. While empowering software and systems with the tools to make autonomous, split-second decisions is a multitrillion-dollar opportunity, history shows that every game-changing technology has taken several years to mature. This lengthy pace of optimization, which investors always seem to overshoot, leads to the bursting of bubbles with next-big-thing technologies.

Historical precedent points to valuations also being unsustainable. The S&P 500's Shiller Price-to-Earnings (P/E) Ratio, also known as the Cyclically Adjusted P/E Ratio (CAPE Ratio), nearly tipped the scales at 43 in early June. It's the second-priciest valuation multiple since January 1871

Pucker time/rev II

FUD ... Fear, Uncertainty & Dread - Image source: Getty Images

The Stock Market Is Doing Something Observed Only 6 Times Since 1871 --
and the Previous 5 Occurrences Ended in Disaster for Wall Street

History can be a powerful teaching tool, with past events on Wall Street having the uncanny ability of foreshadowing the future.

Most investors rely on the time-tested price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio when valuing public companies or the broader market. Although the P/E ratio works great for quickly evaluating mature businesses, it's easily tripped up by recessions, which can turn earnings per share (EPS) negative.

The valuation tool that's demonstrated it can provide apples-to-apples valuation comparisons spanning more than a century, and isn't disrupted by recessions since it takes trailing 10-year EPS into account, is the S&P 500's Shiller P/E Ratio. You'll also see the Shiller P/E referred to as the Cyclically Adjusted P/E Ratio, or CAPE Ratio.

Despite being introduced by economists less than 40 years ago, the Shiller P/E Ratio has been backtested to January 1871. Over this 155-year and nearly seven-month period, it's averaged a multiple of 17.4. But as of the closing bell on July 27, the S&P 500's Shiller P/E Ratio was nearly 40.5.

8.3 applies.

Night of the living dead ...

 

President Donald Trump holds up an image taken from his Truth Social account as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. watches during a meeting to sign an executive order about vaccines,
Monday, Aug. 10, 2026, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington.
(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Night of the Living Dead applies. Bone Spurs, holding up an executive order potentially
killing children by limiting their access to vaccines.

RFK Jr, looking like Gollum's father, makes the orange menace actually look good by comparison. 

When seeing this pix, one sees just how far down this once great nation has gone
in the year of our lord 2026.

Sculpture of Gollum catching fish at Wellington Airport, New Zealand, 2013, to mark the release of
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey[1]

Trump signs order calling for spacing out childhood vaccines, against medical groups’ guidance

The order advocates separating the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine into three different single-disease shots and administering all childhood immunizations at separate appointments whenever possible. Read more.

Why this matters:

• President Donald Trump called the announcement a “major victory for parents rights, religious and constitutional rights, and for the gold standard science.” Speaking about the order at the Oval Office on Monday, Trump repeatedly suggested the number or timing of vaccines could play a role in rising rates of autism spectrum disorder, even as scientific consensus and decades of studies have firmly concluded there is no link.
• Public health experts have raised concerns that spacing out shots as Trump suggests can lead to an increased risk that children become infected with a vaccine-preventable disease before returning for another visit.

It already has.

Burning Down the House ...

“Watch out, you might get what you're after...

I'm an ordinary guy, burning down the house.”

— Talking Heads

The 1984 Jonathan Demme masterpiece Stop Making Sense of Talking Heads performing Burning Down the House live is better but I digress.

The real issue is the fact Google's burning down it's house in order to feed it's LLM and stiff creators and people needing information unfiltered and not processed into AI slop.

To whit.

The boffins in Silicon Valley finally got exactly what they wanted: total control of the data. And in the process, they are currently burning their own house to the ground.

For twenty years, the internet operated on a basic exchange. Human creators (publishers, writers, artists) provided (the content). Google provided (the traffic). It was a symbiotic relationship because if vendors made money from people doing the search, Google would get a cut of the sale. Vendors were happy because there was no friction. 

Butch Cassidy c. 1900

I'm looking for a hat. A Derby or Bowler. I type in the prompt. Where can I find a Derby or Bowler hat? The response, XYZ companies showing product, pricing and availability. I select the company and buy the hat. Google gets a cut and the company in question is happy as Google's cut is akin to CC companies getting a cut.

You can still do this but it's getting harder as Googles push to feed its LLM and not us shows, in realtime, that the system's beginning to break down. 

Now the AI Overviews and the LLMs take presidence. Google's gotten greedy. They decided they didn't want to route traffic anymore; they just wanted to scrape the content, summarize it with an AI, and keep the user on their own site. They achieved a "Zero-Click" search rate of over 70%.

They found the goose that laid the golden eggs, and in their infinite, ego-driven wisdom,
they slaughtered it to get all the gold at once.

Now, they're starving.

1. Model Autophagy (Eating Their Own Exhaust)

Because Google and the AI labs choked off the traffic, the publishers are dying. NPR called it an "extinction-level event," and massive chains are threatening to block Google's crawlers entirely.

Liz Reid, Google's head of search, speaks at a Google I/O event in Mountain View, Calif., on May 14, 2024. While many factors often drive traffic fluctuations, publishers say the introduction of Google's AI Overviews has led to dramatic declines for news outlets and other online information sources.
Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

With human creators abandoning Google's ecosystem, the AI labs have hit a catastrophic data wall. They are running out of fresh, high-quality human intuition to train their next generation of models. Their solution? Train the new AI on the output of the old AI.

In computer science, this is triggering Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD). When a pattern-matching machine trains on synthetic "slop" instead of organic human truth, the data degrades. It loses the nuance, the lateral leaps, and the human spark. It homogenizes into absolute nonsense. The machine is literally choking on its own exhaust.

2. The Internal Mutiny (The Gulag)

But it’s not just the data that's breaking down; employees inside these companies are shattering.

The engineers now realize they have no purpose. Inside Meta, thousands of employees have been forcibly reassigned to perform mindless human-in-the-loop AI training tasks. Internal leaks reveal engineers referring to their own applied AI units as "The Gulag," stating: "I have no purpose in life. It feels like I'm just given these random tasks. I don't have agency anymore."

Over at Google DeepMind, over 600 employees recently staged a fierce internal revolt over executives selling out their safety protocols for military contracts.

Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle; Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times via Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI

Wartime Google lives ...

The people who built the machine are realizing they are trapped inside it.

And lastly ...

USA Today Co. has made a deal with software company Palantir to analyze and monetize user behavior, the company announced on Thursday.

In its Q2 earnings call Thursday morning, USA Today Co. chairman and CEO Mike Reed told investors he expects the partnership to “strengthen how we collect, connect and activate audience data to drive more effective and faster monetization across our platform.”

“Every visit, every session, and every moment of attention creates a signal,” Reed said. “When we connect those signals, they become actionable intelligence that allows us to engage users more effectively and monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value. 

Channeling Orwell, USA Today is losing customers so leverage on the remainder by spying on them.

Great business model eh?

The Reality Check

You cannot build a functioning system by strip-mining the physical world and ignoring the cost.

The tech bros built a god-like calculator, but they forgot they needed the people to actually feed it real meaning. They isolated themselves, automated away their own purpose, and alienated the entire publishing world.

The house is actively burning. Can Google change course before it's too late?

No one knows, do one? - Fats Waller