Markymark

What paralysis of intellect has us channelling wages to banks through the financialisation of shelter while remaining beholden to foreign powers for the basics of modern life? We export raw abundance, reimport finished dependence, and call it sophistication. We ship coal overseas, buy back the carbon as solar panels, and congratulate ourselves on moral progress. We have treated house prices as national success and productive capacity as an afterthought. We have built a system resilient neither to strategic rivalry nor to disruption in the Middle East. Australia has spent years confusing asset inflation with prosperity, financial engineering with statecraft, and imported complexity with sovereign capacity. We sell raw materials, buy back dependency, import people and call the margin prosperity. We congratulated ourselves for efficiency while dismantling redundancy, resilience and national competence. The class that calls itself the nation’s intelligence can inflate land, subsidise demand and recite targets, yet cannot secure fuel, rebuild industry or think beyond the next property cycle. And then comes the NDIS, handled with the usual implied moral vulgarity, as though a serious country must choose between caring for the vulnerable and maintaining a productive base. Social obligations can’t float above material reality . It must eventually rest on that reality . A country that hollows out energy, industry, logistics and housing will eventually discover that its promises exceed its capacity. Our aging demographics guarantee it You cant secure the vulnerable by dismantling the machinery that funds their support. The NDIS is threatened by the same order that hollowed out the real economy and then feigned surprise when the social contract became expensive. Donald Horne was right. Australia is a lucky country run by second-rate people. For a long time, distance, endowment and inertia concealed the fact. That cover is thinning. A nation that cannot tell the difference between wealth and extraction, between resilience and rhetoric, between civilisation and a housing bubble, will learn the lesson the hard way.

Between this and the Google paper I think 7 out of the 8 researchers were Iranian heritage who have made the biggest compression innovations.

Bill Ackman manages $15.5 billion in AUM at Pershing Square. Estimated YTD loss is -19% of NAV vs. SP500 -7.14%. Here's his top 7 holdings by size: 1. Brookfield: 18.15% 2. Uber: 15.90% 3. Amazon: 14.28% 4. Google: 12.46% 5. Meta: 11.37% 6. QSR: 9.47% 7. Canadian Pacific: 8.12%

By refusing to submit to the Islamic project and insisting on a sovereign nation-state, Israel forced the region to accept the legitimacy of nation-states. Without Israel, without a single sovereign, non-Islamic state planted in the Middle East, the path to reestablishing a caliphate would have been wide open. A caliphate is more dangerous than the Nazis ever were. The caliphate once stretched from Spain to India, launching invasion after invasion into Europe. If the Ottoman Caliphate had simply been replaced by an Arab one after its collapse, the West would have lived under constant threat. That’s why Israel’s existence matters. Its very presence blocks the return of the caliphate. Israel gives legitimacy even to the Arab nation states. That's why Israel is the stumbling block in the eyes of the Muslim Brotherhood. That is why they are obsessed with erasing Israel: without Israel, the dream of resurrecting the caliphate becomes possible again. This is why the free world must stand with Israel, not just for Israel’s survival, but for its own.

It’s time for Proof Of Human.

Major notes from the weekend on Iran: 1) Combined Force strikes started hitting IRGC Ground Forces units in the Kurdish regions. 2) We have confirmed that IRGC members are at least two cycles behind on pay. 3) *Coincidentally,* I'm sure, the IRGC Ground Forces Commander went on a tour visiting these forces. In combination, these three notes indicate a high risk of desertion throughout the IRGC. 4) Separately, we have the attack on Diego Garcia that, frankly, justifies the war in and of itself. The base itself isn't terribly significant, its not that "Iran can get Diego Garcia! We have to go to war!" The issue is that Iran constantly lies about everything to do with its nuclear program. Taqiyya. They've issued fatwas against nuclear weapons, then simultaneously enrich uranium to levels only usable in weapons while developing long-range ballistic missiles. "Its for medical purposes!" No, it wasn't, and it couldn't be. Uranium enriched to this degree has no medical uses. "Its for self-defense!" Then why were you hiding a long range ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear weapon to London? The fact they were developing these weapons while consistently lying about it, in the face of all the world being united against their acquisition of the weapons, combined with all of their past acts of terrorism and piracy, absolutely justifies this war. 5) On Negotiations: These are being played very close to the chest, but here's what I've been able to gather... Witkoff and Kushner are keeping lines of communication open with non-IRGC elements of the Iranian State—if I had to guess, I'd expect officials within the Republican Government. If not Pezeshkian himself, then probably people with access to him. It seems abundantly clear that the situation in Iran is at this point A Tale of Two Cities. One is an IRGC-Cleric alliance propping up the corpse of the Velayat-e Faqih. The other is the Republican-Reform alliance propping up the still in-tact organs of state outside of the IRGC's control. We are almost certainly negotiating with one of these 'cities,' and not the other. This is what I expected would be the prelude to final resolution. The existing power structures in Iran will continue to pull support away from, and rallying support against, the IRGC. At this point, it appears the plan is to reach a pre-negotiated settlement with the Republican-Reform Government while hammering the IRGC on all available fronts and enabling a fairly smooth transition of power. Mass uprising is probably now the backup plan, with total dismantling of Iran's infrastructure the backup to the backup plan.