The Long Term Investor

YES.....as I would have expected...but...I am not an "expert".

US consumer spending powers ahead in August; inflation picking up

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-consumer-spending-increases-solidly-123925849.html

The data today is showing that some of the FED people that were out there BLABBING lately are simply....MORONS.

 

The market today.

Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq rise as PCE inflation data meets expectations

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/live...lation-data-meets-expectations-230208648.html

(BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)

"US stocks rose on Friday as investors weighed President Trump's fresh round of punishing tariffs and breathed a relative sigh of relief over an inflation report that came in line with expectations.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) rose roughly 0.6%, leading gains, while the S&P 500 (^GSPC) gained 0.5%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) ticked 0.2% higher. The gains come after three straight days of losses for the major US gauges.

August's reading of the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) index, which contains the Fed-favored "core" PCE measure of inflation, rose as expected. The "core" PCE price index rose 2.9% year-over-year and 0.2% month-over-month in August, both coming in alongside what economists were expecting even as inflation remained sticky and well above the Fed's 2% target.

Meanwhile, investors are studying Trump's new threat to put a 100% levy on imports of branded drugs. The rate will apply to any pharmaceutical company that isn't already building a manufacturing plant in the US, the president said in a social media post late Thursday, but offered no further details. Shares of drugmakers in Europe and Asia faltered after the move.

Imports of heavy trucks and certain categories of furniture also face new heftier tariffs, Trump said, with the new duties to come into effect on Oct. 1 — less than a week away.

The trade salvo adds fresh uncertainty for markets already grappling with concerns about the sustainability of the AI boom and a high risk of US government shutdown. The S&P 500 is eyeing its first weekly loss this month after a Wall Street slump snapped a record-setting rally.

Meanwhile, Trump signed an order approving a deal to spin off TikTok's US operations from China's ByteDance, though Beijing still needs to sign off on the agreement. But the proposed $14 billion price tag was greeted with surprise on Wall Street, seen as undervaluing a global leader in social media estimated to potentially be worth $40 billion."

MY COMMENT

BORING.......simply short term noise and fear mongering in much of the above.

 

I see ZERO clarity in market direction today. So I will leave it here and return after I get back from the studio later today.

 

A small loss for me today in spite of having five of eight stocks in the green. A victim of PLTR and COST. I also got beat by the Sp500 by 0.67%.

 

I ended this week with my entire portfolio at....+21.20%. Last week it was at....+22.83%.

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND EVERYONE.

 

UNFORTUNATELY......I totally agree.....we are living through a massive social and cultural event....a very NEGATIVE event. I am very glad that I will NOT have to be alive when the result of this is fully realized.

The dawn of the post-literate society
And the end of civilization

https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1?r=2gv2

(BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.

— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death"

"The age of print

It was one of the most important revolutions in modern history — and yet no blood was spilled, no bombs were thrown and no monarch was beheaded.

Perhaps no great social transformation has ever been carried out so quietly. This one took place in armchairs, in libraries, in coffee houses and in clubs.

What happened was this: in the middle of the eighteenth century huge numbers of ordinary people began to read.

For the first couple of centuries after the invention of the printing press, reading remained largely an elite pursuit. But by the beginning of the 1700s, the expansion of education and an explosion of cheap books began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society. People alive at the time understood that something momentous was going on. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was reading everywhere: men, women, children, the rich, the poor. Reading began to be described as a “fever”, an “epidemic”, a “craze”, a “madness”. As the historian Tim Blanning writes, “conservatives were appalled and progressives were delighted, that it was a habit that knew no social boundaries.”

This transformation is sometimes known as the “reading revolution”. It was an unprecedented democratisation of information; the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history.

In Britain only 6,000 books were published in the first decade of the eighteenth century; in the last decade of the same century the number of new titles was in excess of 56,000. More than half a million new publications appeared in German over the course of the 1700s. The historian Simon Schama has gone so far as to write that “literacy rates in eighteenth century France were much higher than in the late twentieth century United States”.

Where readers had once read “intensively”, spending their lives reading and re-reading two or three books, the reading revolution popularised a new kind of “extensive” reading. People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, philosophy, science, theology and literature. Books, pamphlets and periodicals poured off the presses.

It was an age of monumental works of thought and knowledge: the Encyclopédie, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Radical new ideas about God, about history, about society, about politics, and even the whole purpose and meaning of life flooded through Europe.

Even more importantly print changed how people thought.

The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.

The counter revolution

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution.

More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying.

Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.

In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.”


Most remarkably, in late 2024 the OECD published a report which found that literacy levels were “declining or stagnating” in most developed countries. Once upon a time a social scientist confronted with statistics like these might have guessed the cause was a societal crisis like a war or the collapse of the education system.

What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history.

Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait.

The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.

If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.

Our universities are at the front line of this crisis. They are now teaching their first truly “post-literate” cohorts of students, who have grown up almost entirely in the world of short-form video, computer games, addictive algorithms (and, increasingly, AI).

Because ubiquitous mobile internet has destroyed these students’ attention spans and restricted the growth of their vocabularies, the rich and detailed knowledge stored in books is becoming inaccessible to many of them. A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children1.

An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishmentthe next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

“Most of our students”, according to another despairing assessment, “are functionally illiterate”. This chimes with everything I’ve heard in my own conversations with teachers and academics. One Oxbridge lecturer I spoke to described a “collapse in literacy” among his students.

The transmission of knowledge — the most ancient function of the university — is breaking down in front of our eyes. Writers like Shakespeare, Milton and Jane Austen whose works have been handed on for centuries can no longer reach the next generation of readers. They are losing the ability to understand them.

The tradition of learning is like a precious golden thread of knowledge running through human history linking reader to reader through time. It last snapped during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as the barbarian tides beat against the frontier, cities shrank and libraries burned or decayed2. As the world of Rome’s educated elite fell apart, many writers and works of literature passed out of human memory — either to be lost forever or to be rediscovered hundreds of years later in the Renaissance.

That golden thread is breaking for the second time.

An intellectual tragedy

The collapse of reading is driving declines in various measures of cognitive ability. Reading is associated with a number of cognitive benefits including improved memory and attention span, better analytical thinking, improved verbal fluency, and lower rates of cognitive decline in later life.

After the introduction of smartphones in the mid-2010s, global PISA scores — the most famous international measure of student ability — began to decline. As John Burn Murdoch writes in the Financial Times, students increasingly tell surveys that they struggle to think, learn and concentrate. You will notice the tell-tale mid-2010s inflection point:

The Monitoring the Future study has been asking 18-year-olds whether they have difficulty thinking, concentrating or learning new things. The share of final year high school students who report difficulties was stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but began a rapid upward climb in the mid-2010s.


And, as Burn Murdoch says, these cognitive issues are not restricted to schools and universities. They affect everyone: “[the] decline in measures of reasoning and problem-solving is not confined to teenagers. Adults show a similar pattern, with declines visible across all age groups”.


Most intriguing — and alarming — is the case of IQ, which rose consistently throughout the twentieth century (the so-called “Flynn effect”) but which now seems to have begun to fall.

The result is not only the loss of information and intelligence, but a tragic impoverishing of the human experience.

For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence.

The classics have been preserved over the centuries because they contain, in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, “the best that has been thought and said”.

The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading non-fiction — science, history, philosophy, travel writing — we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.

Smartphones are robbing of us of these consolations.

The epidemic of anxiety, depression and purposeless afflicting young people in the twenty-first century is often linked to the isolation and negative social comparison fostered by smartphones.

It is also a direct product of the pointlessness, fragmentation and triviality of the culture of the screen which is wholly unequipped to speak to the deep human needs for curiosity, narrative, deep attention and artistic fulfilment.

World without mind

This draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence represents a tragic loss of human potential and human flourishing. It is also one of the major challenges facing modern societies. Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy.

As Walter Ong writes in his book Orality and Literacy, certain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing. It is virtually impossible to develop a detailed and logical argument in spontaneous speech — you would get lost, lose your thread, contradict yourself, and confuse your audience trying to re-phrase ineptly expressed points.

As an extreme example think of somebody trying to simply speak a famous work of philosophy. Say, Kant’s 900-page The Critique of Pure Reason or Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. It would be impossible to do. And also impossible to listen to.

To produce his great work Kant had to write down his ideas, scratch them out, think about them, refine them and then rework them over many years so they added up into a persuasive and logical whole.

To properly understand the book you have to be able to have it in front of you so you can re-read bits you don’t understand, check logical connections and meditate on important passages until you really take them in. This kind of advanced thinking is inseparable from reading and writing.

The classicist Eric Havelock argued that the arrival of literacy in ancient Greece was the catalyst for the birth of philosophy. Once people had a means of pinning ideas down on the page to interrogate them, refine them and build on them, a whole new revolutionary way of analytic and abstract thinking was born — one that would go on to shape our entire civilisation3. With the birth of writing received ways of thinking could be challenged and improved. This was our species’ cognitive liberation.

As Neil Postman puts it in Amusing Ourselves to Death:

Philosophy cannot exist without criticism . . . writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist-all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

Not only philosophy but the entire intellectual infrastructure of modern civilisation depends on the kinds of complex thinking inseparable from reading and writing: serious historical writing, scientific theorems, detailed policy proposals and the kinds of rigorous and dispassionate political debate conducted in books and magazines.

These forms of advanced thought provide the intellectual underpinnings of modernity. If our world feels unstable at the moment — like the ground is shifting beneath us — it is because those underpinnings are falling to pieces underneath our feet.

As you have probably noticed, the world of the screen is going to be much a choppier place than the world of print: more emotional, more angry, more chaotic.

Walter Ong emphasised that writing cools and rationalises thought. If you want to make your case in person or in a TikTok video you have innumerable means for bypassing logical argument. You can shout and weep and charm your audience into submission. You can play emotive music or show harrowing images. Such appeals are not rational but human beings are not perfectly rational animals and are inclined to be persuaded by them.

A book can’t yell at you (thank God!) and it can’t cry. Without the array of logic-defeating appeals available to podcasters and YouTubers, authors are much more reliant on reason alone, condemned to painfully piece their arguments together sentence by sentence (I feel that agony now). Books are far from perfect but they are much more closely bound to the imperatives of logical argument than any other means of human communication ever devised.

This is why Ong observed that pre-literate “oral” societies often strike visitors from literate countries as remarkably mystical, emotional, and antagonistic in their discourse and thinking4.

As books die, we seem to be returning to these “oral” habits of thought. Our discourse is collapsing into panic, hatred and tribal warfare. Anti-scientific thought thrives at the highest level of the American government. Promoters of irrationality and conspiracy theories such as Candace Owens and Russell Brand find vast and credulous audiences online.

Laid out on the page their arguments would seem absurd. On the screen, they are persuasive to many people.

The rise of these emotional and irrational styles of thinking poses a profound challenge to our culture and politics.

We may be about to find out that it is not possible to run the most advanced civilisation in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society.

The end of creativity

The age of print was characterised by unprecedented dynamism and cultural richness. Reading is a foundation stone of the creativity and innovation that is fundamental to modernity.

It is not the case that for a society to benefit from the culture of print that every citizen must be a bookworm. And yet if one habit unites the leaders, inventors, scientists and artists who have forged our civilisation it is reading. Serious readers are over-represented in almost every area of human achievement.

Take great politicians: Teddy Roosevelt claimed to read a book a day, Winston Churchill set himself an ambitious programme of reading in philosophy, economics and history as a young man and continued to read voraciously throughout his life. Clement Attlee recalled that he read four books a week as a schoolboy.

Or consider popular culture (not usually thought of as a particularly literary field of human endeavour). David Bowie read, in his own words, “voraciously”. “Every book I ever bought, I have. I can't throw it away”, he once said. “It's physically impossible to leave my hand!” A list Bowie wrote of his hundred favourite books includes works by William Faulkner, Tom Stoppard, DH Lawrence and TS Eliot.

In a recent book about his song-writing career Paul McCartney cited “Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde and Allen Ginsberg, of French symbolist writer Alfred Jarry, Eugene O’Neill and Henrik Ibsen” among the authors who had inspired him.

Thomas Edison read deeply throughout his life. So did Charles Darwin. So did Albert Einstein. Ironically, even Elon Musk claims that he was “raised by books”.

Reading enriches creative work by giving men and women of genius access to the vast and priceless trove of knowledge preserved in books — “the best that has been thought and said”. The discipline of reading equips them with the analytical tools to interrogate, refine and revolutionise that tradition.

As Elizabeth Eisenstein argues in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, the invention of the printing press helped to catalyse a series of cultural revolutions which forged the modern world: the Renaissance, the Reformation and the scientific revolution. Other historians would add the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights and the industrial revolution.

Eisenstein explains how the tendency of reading to foster innovation played out in Renaissance universities. With the invention of printing students had increased access to books allowing “bright undergraduates to reach beyond their teachers’ grasp. Gifted students no longer needed to sit at the feet of a given master in order to learn a language or academic skill.” And so,

Students who took advantage of technical texts which served as silent instructors were less likely to defer to traditional authority and more receptive to innovating trends. Young minds provided with updated editions, especially of mathematical texts, began to surpass not only their own elders but the wisdom of ancients as well.

Modern students who are unable to read are once more reliant on the authority of their teachers and are less capable of racing ahead, innovating and questioning orthodoxies.

These students are just one symptom of the stagnant culture of the screen age which is characterised by simplicity, repetitiveness and shallowness. Its symptoms are observable all around us.

Pop songs in every genre are becoming shorter, simpler and more repetitive and films are being reduced to endlessly-repeated franchise formulas. Studies suggest that the number of “disruptive” and “transformative” inventions is declining. More money is spent on scientific research than ever in history but the rate of progress “is barely keeping pace with the past”.

Doubtless many factors are at work, but this is also precisely what you would expect of a generation of researchers who spent their childhoods glued to screens rather than reading or thinking.

Even books themselves are becoming less complex.


If the literate world was characterised by complexity and innovation, the post literate world is characterised by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation. It is probably not an accident that the decline of literacy has ushered in an obsession with cultural “nostalgia”; a desire to endlessly recycle the cultural forms of the past: the television shows and styles of the nineties, for instance, or the fashions of the early 2000s.

Our culture is being transformed into a smartphone wasteland.

Cut off from the cultural riches of the past we are condemned to live in a narcissistic eternal present. Deprived of the critical tools to question and develop the insights of those who went before us, we are condemned to endlessly repeat and pastiche ourselves, superhero film by superhero film, repetitive pop song by repetitive pop song.

Most of all, this increasingly trivial and mindless culture is a calamity for our politics.

The death of democracy

Amusingly from the perspective of the present the reading revolution of the eighteenth century was accompanied not only by excitement but by a moral panic.

“No lover of tobacco or coffee, no wine drinker or lover of games, can be as addicted to their pipe, bottle, games or coffee-table as those many hungry readers are to their reading habit”, thundered one German clergyman.

Richard Steele feared that “novels raise expectations which the ordinary course of life can never realise”. Others fretted that reading “excites the imagination too much, and fatigues the heart”.

It is easy to laugh at these anxieties. We have spent our whole lives hearing how virtuous and sensible it is to read books. How could reading be dangerous?

But in hindsight, these conservative moralists were right to worry. The rapid expansion of literacy helped to destroy the orderly, hierarchical, and profoundly socially unequal world they cherished.

The reading revolution was a catastrophe for the ultra-privileged and exploitative aristocrats of the European aristocratic ancien regime — the old autocratic system of government with almighty kings at the top, lords and clergy underneath and peasants squirming at the very bottom.

Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments.

And the old feudal hierarchy was justified not so much by logical argument as by what Walter Ong might have recognised as very pre-literate appeals to mystical and emotional thinking.

This was what historians of the seventeenth century know as the “representational” culture of power, the highly visual system of monarchical propaganda which forced the fearsome and awe-inspiring image of the king onto his subjects. The regime displayed its power in parades, paintings, fire-work displays, statues and grandiose buildings.

The system worked in an age before mass literacy. But as knowledge spread through society and the analytic, critical modes of thinking fostered by print took hold, the whole mental and cultural atmosphere which sustained the old order was burned away. People began to know too much. And to think too much.

The feudal order seems to be fundamentally incompatible with literacy. The historian Orlando Figes has noted that the English, French and Russian revolutions all occurred in societies in which literacy was approaching fifty per cent.

Robert Darnton’s book The Revolutionary Temper chronicles the chaos unleashed on the old regime in France by the age of print. Knowledge spread through French society with disastrous effect: political prisoners wrote bestselling memoirs publicising their unjust incarceration by the state; ordinary people consumed pamphlets about the exorbitant and unjust wealth enjoyed by aristocrats; the government’s disastrous finances were suddenly debated by an incredulous and furious public rather than behind closed doors in the back rooms of Versailles.

Meanwhile the analytic, critical modes of thinking began to eat away at the mystical and emotional underpinnings of the old order. The philosophes and radical thinkers of the Enlightenment, supported by a growing middle class readership, began to ask the kinds of critical questions that are pre-eminently print-based in their tone. Where does power come from? Why should some men have so much more than others? Why aren’t all men equal?

***It’s worth noting that this highly simplified account clearly excludes many of the factors the shape the unfolding of history: economics, climate, individual men and women, blind chance. Print alone cannot usher in peace and democracy (witness the consequences of the Russian revolution). And print cannot abolish the innate human tendencies towards partisanship and violence (witness the aftermath of the French revolution). Print is certainly not immune to fake news and conspiracy theories (witness the lead-up to the French revolution). ***

But you do not have to believe print is a perfect and incorruptible system of communication to accept it is also almost certainly a necessary pre-condition of democracy.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman argues that democracy and print are virtually inseparable. An effective democracy pre-supposes a reasonably informed and somewhat critical citizenry capable of understanding and debating the issues of the day in detail and at length.

Democracy draws immeasurable strength from print — the old dying world of books, newspapers and magazines — with its tendency to foster deep knowledge, logical argument, critical thought, objectivity and dispassionate engagement. In this environment, ordinary people have the tools to understand their rulers, to criticise them and, perhaps, to change them.

Postman cites the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 in which both presidential candidates spoke at incredible length and in remarkable detail as one of the summits of print culture:

Their arrangement provided that Douglas would speak first, for one hour; Lincoln would take an hour and a half to reply; Douglas, a half hour to rebut Lincoln’s reply. This debate was considerably shorter than those to which the two men were accustomed . . . on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond.

When Postman was writing in the late 1980s, such debates were already impossible to imagine. Ironically the televised debates that he criticised as degraded, uninformative and over-emotional strike twenty-first century viewers as almost comically civilised and high minded.


Politics in the age of short form video favours heightened emotion, ignorance and unevidenced assertions. Such circumstances are highly propitious for charismatic charlatans. Inevitably, parties and politicians hostile to democracy are flourishing in the post-literate world. TikTok usage correlates with increased vote share for populist parties and the far right.

TikTok, as the writer, Ian Leslie puts it is “rocket fuel for populists”.

Why does [TikTok] benefit populists disproportionately? Because, almost by definition, populism thrives on emotions, not thoughts; on feelings not sentences. Populists specialise in providing that rush of certainty you get when you know you’re right. They don’t want you to think. Thinking is where certainty goes to die.

The rational, dispassionate print-based liberal democratic order may not survive this revolution.

Into the moronic inferno

The big tech companies like to see themselves as invested in spreading knowledge and curiosity. In fact in order to survive they must promote stupidity. The tech oligarchs have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat. Dumb rage and partisan thinking keep us glued to our phones.

And where the old European monarchies had to (often ineptly) try to censor dangerously critical material, the big tech companies ensure our ignorance much more effectively by flooding our culture with rage, distraction and irrelevance.

These companies are actively working to destroy human enlightenment and usher in a new dark age.

The screen revolution will shape our politics as profoundly as the reading revolution of the eighteenth century.

Without the knowledge and without the critical thinking skills instilled by print, many of the citizens of modern democracies find themselves as helpless and as credulous as medieval peasants — moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking. The world after print increasingly resembles the world before print.

Superstitions and anti-democratic thinking flourish. Scholarship in our universities is shaped by rigid partisanship not by tolerance and curiosity. Our art and literature is cruder and more simplistic.

Many people are now as suspicious of vaccines as the uneducated yokels of the eighteenth century satirised by the cartoonist James Gillray more than two hundred years ago.

As power, wealth and knowledge concentrate at the top of society, an angry, divided and uninformed public lacks a way understand or analyse or criticise or change what is going on. Instead more and more people are impressed by the kinds of highly emotional charismatic and mystical appeals that were the foundation of power in the age before widespread literacy.

Just as the advent of print dealt the final death blow to the decaying world of feudalism, so the screen is destroying the world of liberal democracy.

As tech companies wipe out literacy and middle class jobs, we may find ourselves a second feudal age. Or it may be that we are entering a political era beyond our imagining.

Whatever happens, we are already seeing the world we once knew melt away. Nothing will ever be the same again.

Welcome to the post-literate society."

1
"When George Orwell reported on a newly-published study of children’s reading habits in 1940, he found that children were “voluntarily” reading works by Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson, GK Chesterton and Shakespeare. These children, he noted, were “aged between 12-15 and belonged to the poorest class in the community”."

MY COMMENT

I do NOT agree with the authors politics.....but that does not matter. I totally agree with where we are headed.

Dont believe it.....just look at the reading books and "readers" used in schools in various grade levels from about 1860 through about 1930.

We are......SO SCREWED......and very few know or even care if they do.

 

I like this little article.....although we are far from being in a bear market right now.

How Bear Markets Work

https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2025/09/how-bear-markets-work/

(BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)

"It’s hard to believe we’re debating a potential bubble right now considering we had a mini-blink-and-you-missed-it bear market in April.

That downturn feels like an out-of-body experience because it happened so quickly.

That first week or so of April saw back-to-back down days of -5% and -6%. A few days later the market was up almost 10% in a single day and we were off to the races.

These V-shaped rallies feel like a product of the information age where markets move faster than ever and are being driven more and more by outlier events.

That’s how it feels at least.

However, if you look at the average path of every bear market since 1950, the current iteration looks pretty darn close:


It’s not perfect but you get the waterfall drop followed by the big recovery on the other side of it. V-shaped rallies are nothing new. That’s the norm.

We’ve seen a similar profile in sector performance this year:


Technology and communication services (basically tech) both experienced massive drawdowns earlier this year but are now each sitting on 20%+ gains for the year. That’s another V.

Of course, these relationships are not set in stone. Consumer stocks also got hammered in the downturn but haven’t seen similar year-to-date gains.

Bear markets have some symmetry to them, at least in the short-term.

In the long-term, bull markets versus bear markets are asymmetric. Things are not balanced.

Look at the gains versus losses:


The bear markets are blips.

To be fair, those losses don’t feel like blips when you’re in them. Bear markets can be brutal. Losing money is not fun. Seeing a large portion of your portfolio get vaporized can cause you to question your sanity as an investor.

And yet…the bull markets completely overwhelm the bear markets.

It’s not even close.

That’s the beauty of the stock market. Despite all of the lousy things that can and will happen at times, it still pays to stay invested over the long haul.

You just have to survive many short hauls to get there."

MY COMMENT

YES.....you have to simply ENDURE the bear markets, drops, and corrections to capture the long term gains. Any investor over a lifetime is going to experience at least 5-10 bear markets, a good number of corrections, and various short term dips.

This is just part of the reality of being an investor. It is the price you pay for being able to achieve the gains.

 

It never hurts to start the day with some good economic news....even if all the so called "experts" did not see it coming.

US pending home sales rebound in August amid low mortgage rates

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-pending-home-sales-rebound-140141321.html

 

Screw the government shut down. Who cares.....simply political games....from our heroes in Washington DC. I am sure the media loves it.....another topic to fear monger.....but investors have seen this little game many times and simply know it is all BS and will quickly pass.....so who cares. About all these events do is allow government employees to get a week or two off with pay....if they even happen....which most of the time they dont.


S&P 500, Nasdaq climb with government shutdown in focus

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/live...h-government-shutdown-in-focus-133119858.html

(BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)


"US stocks mostly climbed on Monday as investors eyed a looming US government shutdown that risks delaying the release of the all-important monthly jobs report later in the week.

The S&P 500 (^GSPC) added 0.4%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) popped nearly 0.9%, with the the two gauges poised to build on Friday's rebound. Meanwhile, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) slipped more than 0.1%

Markets are assessing the odds of a US government shutdown on Wednesday this week, as a standoff between Republicans and Democrats goes down to the wire. A meeting between President Trump and congressional leaders is set for Monday, likely the last hope of avoiding a halt to federal funding. Odds of a shutdown are seen over 70%, according to Polymarket.

The risk is leaving an air of doubt over whether the government will release key economic data as scheduled. That includes the highly anticipated monthly jobs report on Friday, key to the Federal Reserve's policy setting and so, too, the bets on interest rate cuts that have helped buoy stocks.

Last week, jobless claims fell short and GDP growth was revised higher, fueling speculation that the Fed may not cut rates as aggressively as hoped. That puts even more weight on the September jobs report, amid forecasts that nonfarm payrolls grew 43,000 and the unemployment rate stayed at 4.3% for the month.

At the same time, investors are regrouping from a losing week that saw cracks emerge in AI-focused stock trading as well as surprise tariff announcements from President Trump for Oct. 1. On Monday, Trump added to those tariff announcements by proposing new duties on movies and furniture.

Despite that, stocks are still on pace to finish September — and the third quarter — with gains. The S&P 500 is up 2.8% month-to-date, while the Dow has added 1.5%. The Nasdaq, boosted by tech, has rallied 2.9%.

Shares in Carnival (CCL) rose after the cruise line raised its annual profit forecast and posted better-than-expected quarterly earnings on Monday. The docket this week is light, with Nike's (NKE) report on Wednesday set to be the highlight. Wall Street is starting to look ahead to third quarter earnings season, which big banks will get underway in earnest in mid-October."

MY COMMENT

Talk about meaningless concern. RIGHT....the government shut-down might cause....doubt over whether the government will release key economic data as scheduled. REALLY....does anyone even care...I dont. OMG....the government data....that is ALWAYS WRONG.....might be delayed a few days. BIG WOW.

At the same time....here we are at the end of September with the big averages ALL UP....for the month and more gains appear to be happening today. Seems like very....GOOD NEWS....to me.

 

No one is talking about what really matters.....EARNINGS. We will move into October this week and at the end of the month we will be....once again....into earnings....this time for the third quarter.

FUNNY....I see nothing happening regarding the various dire......fear-mongered topics....that we had to endure a few months ago as we were supposedly heading towards a recession. I am too lazy to do it....but the list of negative events that we have had to endure over this year would be EPIC if you went back and compiled them into a long list.

I would welcome earnings every six months....or.....even annual reports. These quarterly reports happen so quickly......earnings basically NEVER end. I dont think they serve any purpose for investors. I am sure the "traders" love it......since they trade the short term volatility that constant and continuous earnings reports cause. It is all simply a BIG DISTRACTION that jerks the markets around.

 

I heard a bit about these sodas as I was driving back from Houston last night.

From PepsiCo to Taco Bell, dirty soda is taking over

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/27/dirty-soda-swig-taco-bell-pepsico.html

"Key Points

• Utah-based drink chain Swig kicked off the dirty soda trend, which is now helping revive the sluggish beverage category.
• The trend has moved from restaurants to grocery stores, with PepsiCo planning to launch two more ready-to-drink dirty soda-inspired beverages next year.
• According to Datassential, 2.7% of U.S. eateries offer a carbonated soft drink that includes cream or milk, up from 1.5% a decade ago."

“Dirty soda” drinks use pop as a base, followed by flavored syrups, cream or other ingredients."

MY COMMENT

Seems like we have been doing these drinks for decades. We called them Italian cream soda......we called them flavored soda. We kept many different bottles of syrup in the pantry in our house back in the 1990's. BUT.....WTF....if you are under age 40 and stumble onto something..... "new".....it is a an amazing discovery. Nothing....existed before the internet.

A nice fad.....using a product that has been around for as long as there has been soda.

 

Last week was a fear and FED driven....joke. It should have been a good week...yet the media amplified the FED through the roof and killed any chance for a great week. We are seeing some nice....positive....reality so far this week. Although keep in mind we are only talking about a few hours so far. The word of the week will STILL be:

ENDURE.....as usual.

YES....there is no recession on the horizan....consumers are still resilient.....earnings are very good bordering on great....wages are up.....the big tariff driven inflation never happened....investors are heading to an EPIC close to the year......etc, etc, etc. What else is new.

 

As has been typical lately....there is actually nothing going on. That is a good thing. So...time to sit, wait, and watch. AND.....potentially make some money.

 

I have backed off a little bit from my earlier gains.....but....I continue to have five stocks in the green and some good gains so far today. My red stocks today....HD, COST, and AAPL.

Poor COST......just give up and....SPLIT THE STOCK. Four or five for one. It is called......PSYCHOLOGY.

 

PLTR has had a wild ride so far today. Nothing new.....it is a very....BIG RISK, HIGH REWARD.....stock not suitable for everyone.

I own it and will continue to do so. I like this little story that is a nice summary of theeir current booming financials as well as the risk in the stock.

Why Investors Are Excited About Palantir Stock Again

https://www.barchart.com/story/news/35088663/why-investors-are-excited-about-palantir-stock-again

(BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)

"Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has quickly progressed from a backstage player to one of the most talked-about artificial intelligence (AI) winners in the market. Investors are excited about its major government contract wins, booming commercial usage, a new AI product stack, and a succession of high-profile partnerships.

PLTR stock has climbed an impressive 138.2% year-to-date (YTD), and its strong second-quarter results explain why investors are taking a fresh look at the company.

Valued at $424.7 billion, Palantir is a software company that specializes in big data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and decision-making platforms. Its tools, Gotham, Foundry, and the Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), integrate massive amounts of data from different sources, analyze it, and use it for insights and operational decisions.

In the second quarter, the software and AI leader not only surpassed the billion-dollar revenue threshold for the first time but also showed accelerating momentum in both commercial and government markets. Palantir's U.S. business remains the driving force behind its success. Overall U.S. revenue increased 68% year-on-year (YoY) and 17% sequentially, accounting for 73% of overall revenue. U.S. Commercial was the standout performer, climbing 93% YoY and 20% sequentially. That segment now contributes 31% of company revenue, up from 23% a year ago, underscoring how quickly private-sector adoption is ramping up. Meanwhile, U.S. Government revenue also impressed with 53% YoY growth and 14% sequential growth. Together, these trends helped lift Palantir’s total revenue by 48% YoY in Q2, far outpacing prior guidance.

Palantir’s profitability expanded along with its top line. Adjusted earnings per share (EPS) stood at $0.16. The company's Rule of 40 score jumped to 94, marking the ninth consecutive quarter of progress, a rare thing in enterprise software. Free cash flow remained strong at $569 million, with expectations of $1.8 billion to $2 billion for the full year. Palantir also repurchased 2.5 million shares, ending the quarter with $6 billion in cash and U.S. Treasuries.

Bigger Deals Could Lead to More Success

Palantir also saw unprecedented deal activity with high-profile clients in Q2. It booked $2.3 billion in total contract value (TCV) and $684 million in annual contract value (ACV). It closed 157 deals worth at least $1 million, including 42 worth more than $10 million. Existing customers are also spending more. The company's top 20 now average $75 million in trailing 12-month revenue, a 30% increase YoY.

The AIP platform is key to Palantir's current momentum. Management stated that customers are replatforming their software on AIP, citing speed to value and competitive advantage. While the commercial segment is rapidly expanding, Palantir hasn’t forgotten its roots. The company is generating robust demand from the government as well. The U.S. Army awarded Palantir a 10-year enterprise agreement worth up to $10 billion. The U.S. Space Force awarded a $218 million delivery order, while the ceiling for the Maven Smart System contract was lifted by $795 million to meet surging demand.

The strong quarter prompted Palantir to raise guidance significantly. Q3 revenue is projected at $1.085 billion, representing 50% YoY growth. For the full year, Palantir now expects $4.15 billion in revenue at the midpoint, reflecting a 45% growth rate. U.S. Commercial alone is now expected to exceed $1.3 billion in revenue, growing at least 85% for the year. Importantly, Palantir continues to expect sustained GAAP profitability in every quarter of 2025.

Analysts who cover Palantir expect earnings to increase by 56.7% in 2025 and 31.8% in 2026. Palantir's stock is expensive, trading at 211 times 2026 estimated earnings, but it also reflects investors’ enthusiasm about the company’s long-term growth prospects.

Is PLTR Stock a Buy, Hold, or Sell on Wall Street?

While investors’ excitement for PLTR stock has renewed, analysts remain cautious owing to the company’s unconventional methods and high valuation.

Overall, PLTR stock is rated as a “Hold.” Among the 21 analysts that cover the stock, four rate it a “Strong Buy,” 14 say it is a “Hold,” one rates it a “Moderate Sell,” and two say it is a “Strong Sell.” PLTR stock has surpassed its average target price of $157.72. Its Street-high estimate of $215 implies the stock has upside potential of 20% from current levels.

Palantir seems to have reached a true turning point after two decades of developing its software and AI backbone. Its government contracts provide a foundation of stability and scale, while accelerating commercial adoption shows how the broader AI economy is tilting in Palantir’s favor. For investors, the story is no longer about potential, which is why it is once again commanding investor excitement.

Although the recent rally may tempt some shareholders to take profits, Palantir still stands out as a compelling long-term growth story worth holding onto."

MY COMMENT

As usual..... my take is..... this is an exceptional company with great management. BUT....it is a fairly HIGH RISK holding....and NOT suitable for many investors that have a lower risk profile.

This is certainly NOT a stock for people to just jump on board. DO YOUR RESEARCH......and make sure it is right for you.

This is a high momentum stock. I tend to like high momentum stocks.....since many of my big cap holdings like NVDA, MSFT, AAPL, AMZN, etc, etc.....have been high momentum companies at earlier points in their history. BUT....that is one of my....BIASES......and I have a high risk tolerance.

 

BUMMER.....I see that GOOGL has joined the....DARK SIDE....in my portfolio today. I still have a good gain....but it has faded some.

 

I have no idea about CRWV.....It is too new, young, and unproven for me with my stock picking criteria.

I do notice that the graph above omits one critical element.....$100BILLION going into OpenAI. I think that makes OpenAI the actual overwhelming leader for NVDA investment.....assuming that the entire amount actually happens.