Aggregator

The claws are out.

Mido takes his social media incredibly seriously.

Mido takes his social media incredibly seriously.

With the California’s primary election just days away, Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton is making his final pitch to voters for why he’s the man for the job — outlining how he intends to bring down the state’s cost of living, while putting more money in people’s pockets. 

San Francisco has been more optimistic in recent years, with Mayor Daniel Lurie adopting a more pragmatic approach, and voters staging successful recalls of the most radical and destructive local elected officials. But the race to replace retiring Rep. Nancy Pelosi shows that old habits are hard to break. Three viable candidates dominate, offering voters...

Does Euphoria's leading lady survive the final chapter?

A bizarre sequence of events played out during a second division soccer match in Ecuador on Sunday.

The Democrat Establishment Is Starting To Worry About Spencer Pratt

The last person California Democrats expected to keep them up at night is Spencer Pratt. Yet here we are.

The former reality television personality-turned-independent mayoral candidate has spent the past several weeks doing something that Los Angeles's political establishment convinced itself was impossible: making incumbent Mayor Karen Bass look vulnerable.

Conventional wisdom held that a candidate like Pratt, a former television personality with no governing experience, running as an independent in a deep-blue city, had no realistic path to victory. The conventional wisdom was wrong, or at a minimum, it failed to account for how much patience voters had actually lost with the Democratic Party's incompetence.

At some point, even reliable Democratic constituencies reach a limit for how much they can tolerate. Bass may be finding out precisely where that limit sits.

Between April 19 and May 15, Pratt's campaign has raised roughly $2.7 million. Over that same stretch, Bass pulled in just $282,000. Bass has been raising money since 2024, and her total haul since then is approximately $2.8 million. Pratt nearly matched it in less than a month.

The two candidates are now separated by less than $100,000 in cash on hand, with Pratt sitting on roughly $1.42 million and Bass on approximately $1.32 million.

The money story alone would be enough to rattle the machine. The polls are another story. Pratt has been performing well in the polls, with Bass only leading by single digits in recent surveys, which means Pratt could advance to a runoff with Bass.

In a city where Democratic registration is so overwhelming that Republican candidates don't bother showing up on general election ballots, this is a huge red flag for the Bass campaign.

The Democrat establishment has heard the message loud and clear and is starting to panic. On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an endorsement of Bass - just five days before the primary.

"The work Karen Bass is doing in Los Angeles is making our entire state stronger, with an 18% decline in homelessness while it grew nationally, historic drops in violent crime, boosting film production in L.A., and protecting our communities against ICE. She has my full support for reelection," Newsom said in a statement.

Whatever the merits of the endorsement's substance, its timing speaks for itself. It reeks of desperation.

If no candidate receives a majority on the June 2nd election, a runoff election will be held on November 3rd. Newsom, making an endorsement in the race's final days, is clearly hoping to boost Bass and avoid a runoff.

Pratt was unimpressed by Newsom's 11th-hour endorsement. He responded by calling Newsom and Bass "alleged criminal partners," tying them together through their shared record on the catastrophic January wildfires and the city's homelessness crisis.

"It's not shocking because their alleged criminal partners, not only did they work together in their negligence and burning down 7,000 houses and 12 people alive, but they're both complicit in laundering, what, 24 billion dollars to actually increase homelessness," Pratt said.

He went further, attacking the homelessness statistics Newsom cited and accusing both Newsom and Bass of making them up.

"Those are not real numbers," Pratt insisted. "Anybody with eyeballs in the state of California or Los Angeles knows that there has not been a reduction in one homeless person. Actually, there's been an increase of naked drug addict zombies in front of every kid's playground, every kid's school, every coffee shop."

"They both should be in jail together," he added.

🚨 JUST IN: Spencer Pratt SCORCHES Gavin Newsom for endorsing Karen Bass for re-election

"They both should be in JAIL together."

"They're alleged criminal partners! Not only did they work together in their negligence in burning down 7,000 houses and 12 people alive, but… pic.twitter.com/8KFPuaXYoS

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) May 28, 2026

A runoff now appears likely, and Pratt heads into it with momentum, money, and a message that is clearly resonating.

November represents more than a municipal race. It's a test of whether California's progressive one-party model can withstand sustained confrontation with its own results.

The Democrat establishment has reason to worry. The polls and the fundraising say so.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/31/2026 - 21:45

We have been able to uncover the evidence that on Dec. 16, the Knicks actually defeated the San Antonio Spurs in the finals of the NBA Cup.

California voters can register to vote as “No Party Preference.” But in the 2026 race for governor, Democrats seem to have registered as “No Candidate Preference.” Outgoing Governor Gavin Newsom did not cultivate a successor. And for months, there was no favorite among the many Democrats vying to replace him. Even now, it’s not clear...

The actress was previously married to the late "Dawson's Creek" star from 2003 to 2010.

The actress was previously married to the late "Dawson's Creek" star from 2003 to 2010.

Sanders compared the item to "wallpaper past" in a 1978 interview after selling KFC to investors

AI's Coming Reality Check: When The Physics Finally Hits The Hype

Authored by Chris MacIntosh vis InternationalMan.com,

In five years, we’ll all likely be chuckling and shaking our heads over AI. Because today, the tech feels free and limitless, doesn’t it?

People are generating endless content: images, videos, memes, code snippets, social posts. Companies are bolting AI onto products by default, the way every Fortune 500 company suddenly discovered they were “sustainable” five years ago.

There’s much deliberation on AI right now, and it splits into two main camps of thesis:

• The majority — those who will die on its hill of promise, convinced we’re months away from effective altruism, UBI, and sentient toasters.

• And the minority — usually older, more experienced types — who don’t fully understand it, but look at numbers, remember the dot-com bust, and think this rhymes. We’ll leave that debate to the dinner parties.

What interests us is something more boring. Physics. Because here’s the thing: AI isn’t free.

Every token represents electricity. Something your average developer, product manager, user, or investor gives precisely zero thought to.

Electricity means power plants, transmission lines, grid infrastructure — yes. It also means hot sheds; capital-intensive data centres and all the equipment, cooling systems, and real estate that go with them. Real things. Physical things.

We are surrounded by hype without consideration for the physics.

Right now, there’s a disconnect between the physical cost of this technology and the price users pay for it.

That gap is being covered by Wall Street, venture capital, pension funds, hyperscaler balance sheets, and strategic spending on “growth” (a word which here means “losses we’ve chosen to rebrand”).

The question is: what happens when that gap closes?

Scenario 1: The Industry Matures

No outright collapse, but financial discipline arrives. A novel concept in Silicon Valley. Low-value usage disappears first. “AI slop” dies because the people generating junk stop when it costs them actual money. Turns out nobody’s willing to pay real dollars to have a chatbot write their LinkedIn thought leadership posts. Tragic.

Serious users — those deriving profit or genuine productivity gains — remain. Growth slows but doesn’t stop. GPU upgrade cycles stretch from two years to three or five or seven. Valuations compress. The froth comes off but the infrastructure remains important.

The boardroom shifts from “infinite logarithmic growth” to “focus only on what’s profitable.” Less bubble burst, more long, slow leak of disappointment. A bit like ESG.

Scenario 2: Energy as the Arbiter

Now overlay structurally higher energy prices. You know, the thing everyone was told wouldn’t matter because we’d all be running on solar and unicorn farts by now. If power becomes materially more expensive while capital markets tighten simultaneously, the economics get a lot harder.

Inference costs rise. Training LLMs gets hella more expensive. Shareholders start feeling like they’re holding the next NFT apes. Spending slows sharply. Many AI firms disappear. Hyperscalers pull back, maybe with taxpayer assistance (they are, after all, strategically important to those in power — funny how that works).

GPU cycles extend further. Seven-plus years between major upgrades becomes normal outside the top tier. Markets correct hard. Confidence takes a long time to rebuild.

This is not the end of AI, but a reset. Users will fondly remember the “good old days” when it was free. When one could generate a movie scene and post on X about how they just ended a billion-dollar production company’s business model. Peak delusion makes for great content.

Scenario 3: AI Actually Delivers

There is also the upside case, though we admit it’s included here much like a “minority” conspicuously placed on a corporate board — a box-ticking exercise.

In this scenario, AI meaningfully increases productivity across enterprises. It reduces costs durably. It embeds itself in everything from coding to logistics to research. The sentient toaster.

Higher energy prices don’t kill demand because efficiency gains outweigh them. Hardware cycles remain short. Today’s valuations look justified in hindsight and Jensen Huang’s leather jacket gets its own wing at the Smithsonian.

For anyone familiar with us, you’ll know we think this is the most unlikely scenario. And yet it’s by far the consensus view. Which, if you’ve been paying attention to consensus views over the past decade (“inflation is transitory,” “ESG is the future,” “commercial real estate is fine”) should tell you something.

The gap between expectations and likely reality remains wide open. For Insider members, you’re familiar with the portfolio positioning and Nasdaq hedge.

What Really Matters

The key variable isn’t whether AI is impressive or useful (it is). The key variable is whether AI becomes a true profit engine or remains a subsidised cost centre dressed up in a hoodie and a TED talk.

If profitable and productivity-enhancing, current valuations are justified and the gravy train keeps chugging. If it remains mostly hype layered over weak economics, spending contracts, hardware cycles extend, and we could have an absolute humdinger of an economic “event.”

A ten-year stagnation would require something extreme: demand dropping significantly, hyperscalers becoming hyposcalers, capital markets wanting nothing to do with AI, and energy remaining expensive — all at once. Stranger things have happened. Just ask anyone who bought Peloton at $170.

Almost 50 years of history show this eventually reverts to the mean… and the pendulum swings the other way.

*  *  *

The AI boom is just one example of a much larger shift already underway—where economics, politics, energy, and culture are colliding in ways most investors are not prepared for. That’s why we’ve prepared a special report, Clash of the Systems: Thoughts on Investing at a Unique Point in Time. In it, you’ll discover the key trends unfolding right now, the risks they pose to your money and personal freedom, and what a contrarian money manager believes you could do to stay one step ahead. Get your free copy of Clash of the Systems now.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/31/2026 - 21:00

It’s rare that candidates get a trial run for an office they’ve never held. But Nithya Raman did — and she failed. As The California Post reported this weekend, Raman used her position on the LA City Council to obtain $4 million in state funding to clear 90 homeless tents from the banks of the...

It must’ve been difficult for Adam Silver to maintain his composure and impartiality when the Spurs won Game 7 on Saturday night. The commissioner’s dream NBA Finals was clinched at that moment, when the flop-happy OKC Thunder lost the torch to the next great phenomenon, Victor Wembanyama. The Knicks are the marquee franchise. Wemby is...

The 14-year-old and a 15-year-old boy were both stabbed in the leg near East 176th Street and Park Avenue in the Bronx.

Becerra's comments are the latest sign of a more moderate approach to climate policy as affordability concerns increasingly dominate California politics.

Investigators believed the girl may have used a knife to inflict "multiple injuries to the horses," police said.

The Maple Leafs announced on May 25 that Max Domi underwent surgery to address an “issue he played through during the 2025-26 season."