Peter A Delgado II

Milton Friedman on what produces inflation

Billy Waugh, the "Godfather of the Green Berets," served on secret missions for decades, even into his 70s. He enlisted as a teenager, fought in Korea and multiple Vietnam tours with MACV-SOG, survived being shot in the head and left for dead during the 1965 Battle of Bong Son, and later conducted the first combat HALO jump in US military history. After a brief detour as a mailman, he spent nearly three decades with the CIA tracking high-value targets including Carlos the Jackal and Osama bin Laden in Sudan, then at age 71 was among the first Americans on the ground in Afghanistan after 9/11. He died in 2023 at 93 having spent more than 50 years on the front lines in dozens of countries. "De Oppresso Liber" Never forgotten

For those who say it’s time for universal care. I am all for it. It would be nice if we could find a way to reduce the cost of care and make it available to everyone, for anything. But it will take work to get there. Other countries with Universal Care make “Most Things available to All People”. It’s not perfect. In our country, we make “Everything available to Most People”. The question for this country, unlike others, is how we can make the best possible care and therapies, regardless of cost, to everyone ? Read @AbdulElSayed ‘s book on Medicare for All. He wisely had more questions than answers. Medicare for All ? Global Budgets ? Or something else ? It’s a difficult path from where we are to “E4E” Healthcare. ?Everything for Everyone) My hope is that we can put together a Simpson Bowles type, Blue Ribbon Commission. One that includes representatives of all stakeholders. From all different type of patients. Including rare disease parents. Rural and Urban Hospitals. The most expensive hospitals that offer unique care. Pharma companies that offer everything from genetics to Cell and Gene Therapies. You get the point Some people think we can just tell all those working in the healthcare system what to do. That’s the fastest way for this to fail. We need to be as close as we can to being on the same page. And we need to figure out a non partisan manner of running our American version of Universal Care. No reason we can’t start now

“We are living in an era when sanity is controversial and insanity is just another viewpoint—and degeneracy only another lifestyle.” — Thomas Sowell

I've posted the lead story in the Wall Street Journal tonight below. The caption was: "Apple Beat Wall Street Expectations With Boost From Higher Prices, but after the (poor) conference call guidance, it's now changed (more accurately) to: "Apple's Growth Machine Is Slowing. High Prices Might Not Save It." I slogged through the first part of the conference call where Apple's CEO mentioned the growth percentages for segments where Apple's results were strong, but somehow neglected the percentages where they weren't so hot (iPad revenues -10% Y/Y, Wearables -8% Y/Y, Services (slight miss). The first part of the call was all spin & propaganda - "thrilled" and "excited" etc. I even learned the important fact that Apple is using more recycled components in their products to protect the earth (I almost needed a barf bag). But as usual, the truth had to come out with the guidance: significantly lower revenue growth in the current quarter, further deterioration in Service business growth - partly due to lower fee rates in "certain countries" (which will only worsen with time), lower product margins (that are still supported - for now - by lower cost "carry-in inventory"), and an "unprecedented impact" from memory price hikes which will negatively impact current quarter results and continue into 2027. As usual, analysts did their best to support the Apple (and Wall Street) cause, asking softball and leading questions - with no one even mentioning the Duo (foldable phone) screen cracking problem or the poor yield rates at their Chinese manufacturers that are the primary cause of the Duo's long lead times. The problem for the Apple spinmeisters is that the stock is priced for perfection and this guidance is far from that. A quote from the WSJ story: "Oppenheimer analyst Martin Yang noted that Apple stock trades at 36 times next year’s expected earnings, a premium to the overall market, even though its earnings are only expected to grow 1%, which is slower than its tech peers." The so-called stock market's "safe haven" is a very dangerous place for investors to hide. wsj.com/tech/apple-beats-wal…

HERO TEACHER WHO WRESTLED THE OREGON SCHOOL SHOOTER FOR HIS GUN SPEAKS OUT FOR THE FIRST TIME: "IT ALL HAPPENED SO FAST" On October 15, a 16-year-old blasted his way into Silver Rail Elementary in Bend with a shotgun and opened fire on a special needs classroom. Three children, ages 5, 8 and 11, and 25-year-old teacher Megan Lambert were killed. Teacher Cassidy Schutz didn't run. She threw her phone at him, tackled him, and fought him on the floor for the gun. She kept him busy until Kaylub Giamanco, a dad with two daughters at the school, came in and ended it. The gunman still had about 44 more shotgun rounds on him. Police say she almost certainly prevented more bloodshed. Schutz is now asking for privacy as she heals from what she called an "unimaginable reality." She had no weapon and no training for this, just the will to protect those kids. Cassidy Schutz is a true American hero 🇺🇸

🚨 IT'S OFFICIAL: DR. OZ JUST PERSONALLY CONFRONTED FRAUDSTERS IN NEW YORK CITY Nick Shirley recorded a bombshell in this same area! A Medicaid fraud probe is now scrutinizing over 100 PROVIDERS OZ: "THIS IS FRAUD." WOMAN: "I know sir..." OZ: "It's YOUR JOB to stop this. This is stealing from the American taxpayer!" Imagine one of the president's own appointees showing up to your "business" confirming you're stealing from taxpayers in huge numbers! He walked into adult day care centers in Flushing, Queens, with the FBI and NYPD, and the BILLING didn't match what he saw: "It doesn't look very crowded here." They were billing wheelchair transportation, and Oz saw NO wheelchairs. Some attendance sheets were even signed with FUTURE dates

Palmer Luckey explains why China is advancing so rapidly in technology and why the United States is struggling to keep up 🇺🇸🇨🇳 “The reason China is doing so well with advanced technology isn’t that they have a lot of people. It’s that they made a series of decisions that make high-tech companies much faster and much more effective. They have very low-cost energy. You can complain about all of their coal plants, but the net output is that they have a very, very low cost of energy. You have a really favorable labor environment. You have a very favorable logistics and supply chain world. You have very favorable laws regarding the extraction and processing of metals, minerals, and rare earths. People ask me, ‘Palmer, what can we do to catch up with China?’ I say, ‘We need way more energy. We’re probably going to need to burn a lot more fossil fuels, and we’re probably going to need to relax labor laws.’ And they say, ‘I want to catch up with China, but I don’t want to do any of the things they’re doing to lead.’ You have to make a choice at some point. It’s not really possible to say, ‘I want to win, but I’m not willing to do anything to do that.’”

Barack Obama was using USAID to pretend to send money to a country for “aid” and instead laundering it to the Cayman Islands He would then use that money to fund and train “Rent-a-Riots” for protests to overthrow governments Sound familiar? Mike Benz on Joe Rogan: “A scandal during the Obama USAID era. We were running a number of rogue USAID operations in Cuba at the time. — I'm simply showing the American people where your tax dollars are going and how these things are structured in order to systematically fool you and to fool Congress and to fool the White House: — USAID pumped $1.2 billion in, and we sponsored these activist groups and these civil society organizations to learn how to use Facebook, learn how to use Twitter, lose, learn how to use hashtags, learn how to coordinate street protests so that everyone knows where to go, what street to show up on, what kind of slogans to know, to use in order to create the pro-democracy predicate for it.” He talks about how Obama funded a Twitter clone that would be used to push propaganda in Cuba to inspire these protests and overthrow the government (Mike Benz explains how Barack Obama overthrew many governments) “So what they did is they took the exact same thing as Twitter, same user interface, same like, and retweet button zunzunio is, is the Cuban slang word for hummingbird. So just, it means it's it's bird, it was the Twitter bird, the whole thing. But the whole trick about it was you have to make it look like it's coming from the Cubans if you're going to do this operation — We can get into the deeper layers of this, but contractors were funded by USAID The data would then be used for micro targeting efforts towards anti and pro government users. In Cuba, the developers aim to, at first used non-controversial content such as sports and music and hurricane updates — What was the plan the whole time? Once they built up enough subscribers, they would begin to introduce political messages through social bots and encourage dissent in this, in this astroturfing — the whole point is, once they hit a critical mass, they would create ‘Rent-a-Riots” “You're using Cayman Islands bank accounts. You're saying it's, you're earmarking it for Pakistani aid.” But the money was never sent to Pakistan, it was sent to the Cayman Islands to fund this whole operation All this and much more is broken down extremely well in this video. This is INSANE

BREAKING: Palantir's Alex Karp says OpenAI will never IPO. His theory: nationalization is the only real exit. When asked what the S-1 risk factors look like, Karp's answer was simple: there is no S-1. The liability exposure from frontier AI is so large that no public market can absorb it. The only entity big enough to backstop it is a government. If Karp is right, OpenAI doesn't become the next Google. It becomes a utility. Or a weapon. The most valuable AI company in the world may have no clean path to public markets. Is nationalization actually the most likely outcome for frontier AI labs?

“Falcinheve” Portrait of SpaceX Falcon Heavy, construction paper, 2026

This is the real reasons Dario Amodei and OpenAI want tighter AI regulation because open models are rapidly taking over the market beneath them. Vercel’s AI Gateway data shows that open weight models now account for 78.4% of token volume, compared with only 21.6% for closed models while Open models represented roughly 40% of token volume in June, meaning their share has nearly doubled in only three months. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash alone generates 59.3% of the tokens moving through the gateway and by comparison, Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Sonnet 5 each account for only 1.7% of token volume. However, the spending data tells a very different story. Closed models still capture a disproportionate amount of money because they charge much more per token. Claude Opus 4.8 accounts for 13.7% of spending despite representing only 1.7% of token volume while Anthropic’s five listed Claude models collectively capture 36.9% of total spending. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash has the opposite profile because it processes most of the tokens on the gateway but accounts for only 5.1% of spending, which shows how aggressively open models are competing on price. This is the threat facing closed model companies. Developers may still use expensive proprietary models for their hardest tasks but they are increasingly sending high volume workloads to cheaper open alternatives and as open models improve, developers could begin routing more premium workloads toward them as well. Open weights also give companies more control over their infrastructure. Developers can download these models, run them on different cloud providers, fine tune them for specific applications, and avoid depending entirely on one company’s API and this reduces the pricing power and customer lock in enjoyed by OpenAI and Anthropic. If open models keep closing the performance gap, OpenAI and Anthropic could lose the one thing that matters most, pricing power. If you enjoyed reading this, make sure to follow @MelvinInvests for more.

The Clarity Act may be done in the Senate, but the House is still taking up crypto legislation today. At 10AM ET @WaysandMeansGOP will mark up its crypto tax bill. At the same time, @FinancialCmte will begin marking up a handful of bills, including the House’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve bill, introduced by @RepNickBegich earlier this year.