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oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith
- Posts
- 4,511 from 17 Apr 2007 to 29 Oct 2026
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- weekly (129 in the last year)
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- personal blog
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Latest
October 2026
- The Pendulum of History
- The Status Quo Is a Comic-Book Parody
- Our Vaunted Technology Is Rubbish
- The Homogenization of Decay
- Moral Collapse / Corruption Rewards the Worst and Penalizes the Best
- The Hidden Looting by the Rich leads to the Physical Looting by Those Who've Been Looted
- America Is Already Great; Its Leadership Class Is Not
- Truth Be Told
September 2026
- What's the Point of AI, Anyway?
- Smug Hypocrisy Invites Nemesis
- Since We're All On Board the Hyperinflation Ship, Will It Sail As Expected?
- We Can't Automate Learning, We Can Only Automate Dependence on AI
- Social Media Is Pointless Slag
- We're Living in a Tragicomic Parody
- The Irresistible Temptations of Centralized Power
August 2026
- The Blindfolded Can't Make Informed Decisions--and We're All Blindfolded
- We're Actually Only "Renting" What We Think We "Own"
- The Lit Fuse: Low Interest Rates Ruined the Economy
- The New "Haves" and "Have-Nots": The Difference Isn't What You Think
- "Rogue AI Agents" Aren't Rogue, They're Fulfilling Their Functional Goal: Automating Sociopathology
- In Our "Everything is Disposable" Economy, We're Disposable, Too
- Hell Hath No Fury Like a Rogue AI Agent Scorned
- While We Focused on Fripperies, the Foundations Have Rotted Away
- AI and the Delusions of Increasing Productivity
- I'm Asking You to Support My Work This Month
- The Joyless Pantomime of Optimizing Ennui
- The Joys and Tragedies of Naivete
July 2026
- Get the Flock Out of Here
- Driving Big Brother
- Who Will Solve Our Real Problem--The US is a Neofeudal Autocracy
- The Conflicts Brewing in America's Ten Classes
- AI Is the Apex of Ultra-Processed Life
- Offload Risks onto the Bottom 90% and Immiseration Follows
- Without Subsidies, AI Is Unaffordable
- Sailing the Stormy Seas of AI
- Risk and AI: It's Tricky
June 2026
- The US Economy In a Nutshell: Privatize the Gains, Socialize the Costs
- Five Dynamics That Make Sense of an Increasingly Chaotic World
- What Once Explained Everything Now Explains Nothing
- What If the Work We're Busy Automating Is Needless?
- What AI Is and Is Not-- or, When Electrocution of Innocents Becomes Profitable
- We Don't Need the World, We Only Need Money
- AI's Insurmountable Flaw: "Mass Regurgitation of Misinformation"
- Is AI Reversing Anti-Progress or Is It Accelerating It?
- Choose One: Housing Is Shelter, or Housing Is Just Another Asset in a Bubble Economy
- AI Data Centers Are Not the Railroads of Today
May 2026
- Could Instability Trigger Radical Change In Your Life?
- Why Is Consumer Sentiment at Record Lows?
- The Overstuffed Freezer Analogy
- When Unfairness Is Systemic, the Consequences Are Flight, Resistance, Revolt
- Inequality, AI and Digital Life Are Undermining Society
- We've Optimized Fragility, Failure, Denial--and Rage
- Chaos Unleashed: When "Irrational" Makes Perfect Sense
- When US Treasuries Play a Reverse Card
- What Would Be Truly Bullish? Actually Fixing What's Broken
- Recession and Revolution: Our Experience Isn't a Model or System
- Why We're Helpless When Things Break Down
April 2026
- AI, Money, Human Nature and the Problem with Problems
- Sex, Money and Demographics
- Mercantilism: China and Beyond
- When the Cost of Truth Is High, We--and AI--Lie
- The Questions Nobody Asks as AI Replaces Human Workers
- Sell Now: Here's Why
- College Graduates Are Losing the Clone War
- I'll Turn Bullish When This Happens
- Welcome to the Theater of the Absurd
- Automating Our Dependence Will Cripple Us
- Our Post-Truth, Post-Trust World
- Oil, Inflation and Recession
- The Inevitability of the AI Depression
- Disney World's New Theme Park: The White House and Congress
March 2026
- The "Good News" Is Always the Same: the Stock Market Is Up--Until It Isn't
- Is a "Democracy" That's For Sale Still a Democracy? No, It's an Oligarchy
- The Illusion of the Shortcut (Self-Employment Series)
- The AI Depression
- Risk and Privilege
- Welcome to the Stockyard of Unaffordability
- Why Credit Creates Bubbles That Break the Economy
- Why AI Malware (and Harmful Second Order Effects) Are Out of Control
- This Polycrisis Is Unique
- Paging Nostradamus: You Have a Margin Call
- Iran, En-Lai, Napoleon, Mike Tyson and Model Collapse
- Perverse Incentives Have Created a Runaway Media Monster
- Things Change
- The War
February 2026
- The Decay of our Quality of Life No Longer Aligns with the Narrative
- How We Got Here: Moral Flexibility Leads to Moral Decay
- Money Is Funny That Way: The Case for USD Supremacy
- What Defines a "Good Economy"? Social Mobility and Not Losing Ground
- Small Business in the TINA Economy: Competing for the Scraps
- What Few Understand About Money
- Self-Employment Series #2: Ownership Is Not Freedom
- A Market Crash and Recession Are Bullish, Not Bearish
- The Banality of Evil and Those Who Said No
- Re-Set: Reversing the Debt-Debasement Death-Spiral
- Owning Your Work in a World That Rents Your Life
- Power and Impunity
January 2026
- The US Economy in a Nutshell: A Few Winners, Everyone Else Loses Ground
- Why the Next Recession Will Be the Catalyst for Depression
- The Fatal Limits of the Technocrat Class
- The Epic Struggle Just Ahead
- Lessons from China's Cultural Revolution
- Narrative Control Made Easy: Us versus Them
- Why Is Everything Such a Hot Mess?
- The Perverse Incentives Dominating Our Lives
- We Can Discern Cycles and Waves, But Not the Outcomes
- Channeling Napoleon and Chou En-Lai
- Pretense, Staging, Expediency: the "Solutions" That Implode the Whole Shebang
December 2025
- Everyone's a Lender Now: Shadow Banking USA
- The Good News Is People Are Realizing We're On Our Own
- My Christmas Letter
- Insane Financial Imbalances and Social Revolution
- All the Dominant Models Are Collapsing
- The Wile E. Coyote Insight: What We "Know" Is More Dangerous Than the Unknown
- The Perilous Journey Ahead
- How We Fail: The Empire Is Forever
- Why We Fail
- Greed, Centralization, Monopoly, Ruin
- Model Collapse: The Entire Bubble Economy Is a Hallucination
- Why Healthcare Is in a Death Spiral: Follow the Money
November 2025
- 24 Things I'm Grateful For
- A Stoic's Thanksgiving Gratitude
- The Middle Class Is Cracking
- Is AI a Catalyst for Growth--or For Collapse?
- What We've Lost
- Inequality Then and Now: Now It's Too Late
- Did the "Solution" Solve the Problem, Or Did It Just Make Somebody Rich?
- The Risk of AI Isn't Skynet
- The Inevitable Drift Down from "Can't Lose" Owning Stocks to "Can't Win"
October 2025
- Yes, Everything Crashed--Just Not For You
- The Revolution Trilogy
- Anatomy of AI Cold Turkey
- ZIRP or ZAP? Will the Fed's 'Zero-Interest Rate Policy' Return, and Will It Work?
- Could a Rip-Your-Face-Off Rally in the Dollar Trigger a Global Financial Crisis?
- The Crisis and Revolution Hidden in Plain Sight
- If We Measured the Economy by Quality-of-Life Instead of GDP, We'd Be In a Depression
- The Year When Everything Happens in No Particular Order
- The True Meaning of Stoicism
- Look Out Below
- The Golden Age of Spectacle
- Will AI Crash the Economy?
September 2025
- Price Doesn't Reflect Value, and We're Paying a Steep Price for Confusing the Two
- Can Social Security Be Saved for Future Generations?
- Money, Credit, Growth and Depression: It's Complicated
- Is This the Last Bubble?
- The Moral Decay of Debt
- Precarity and the Point of No Return
- "Upgrade Now" To Get What Was Previously Included At No Extra Charge
- The Garbage Time of History Is Global
- Entitled, Demanding--and Shunned
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