Last week’s posts on Moon of Alabama:

• Sep 29 – Meta – MoA Cleanup After Moving

• Sep 29 – Moldova’s Pro-EU Party Wins Vote Due To Manipulation And EU Interference
  Related:
  – Moldova: another EU-managed election – Thomas Fazi
  – Disaster for EU as ‘Trumpist’ politician wins election in major European country – Daily Express
  – Georgia’s police use water cannons to push back protesters trying to storm presidential palace – AP via Yahoo

• Sep 30 – A Bizarre Plan For Gaza
  Related:
  – What remains of Gaza? (archived) – Financial Times
  – Trump and Blair’s Gaza Plan: A Blueprint for Occupation, Not Peace – Hala Jaber
  – Gaza civil defence says at least 57 killed in Israeli strikes since dawn as Trump urges Israel to halt attacks – MSN
  – Abu Dhabi’s regional ambitions and deepening strategic ties with Israel – Middle East Eyes

• Oct 2 – Musing About Trump’s Recent Moves
  Related:
  – Donald Trump’s Dangerous Tilt Towards War at Home and Abroad – Sonar 21
  – Venezuela as America’s next foreign policy disaster – Asia Times
  – Trump’s Imminent War(s) and Economic Damage as His Legitimacy Crumbles – Naked Capitalism
  – With Venezuela and Iran, Is the U.S. Trying to Revive the Petrodollar? – Naked Capitalism

• Oct 3 – Is The AI Bubble Ready To Pop?
  Related:
  – Debt Is Fueling the Next Wave of the AI Boom (archived – WSJ
  – The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy — and four times the subprime bubble, analyst says – Marketwatch
  – How long can Nvidia stay ahead of Chinese competition? (archived) – Financial Times
  – OpenAI Is Just Another Boring, Desperate AI Startup – Where Is Your Ed At

• Oct 4 – Ukraine – Russian Hit On Freight Train, Passengers Hurt
  Related:
  – The Russia-Ukraine War and its Origins – From the Maidan to the Ukraine War – Ivan Katchanovski <–Free book to download!– Formation of the assault forces: Syrsky’s loyalist guard. – Events in Ukraine
  – Ukraine war at crossroads as Trump pulls out – Indian Punchline
  – Trump Has Been Bamboozled About Ukraine’s War Prospects – Sonar21– Russian missile upgrade outpaces Ukraine’s Patriot defences (archived) – Financial Times
  – Ukraine and Russia exchange strikes in escalating attacks on energy sites – TRT
  – Russian air attack across Ukraine damages energy networks, kills five (archived) – Washington Post

Ukraine has lost the drone war against energy facilities. Zelenski is throwing the towel:

> “We need stronger defenses, faster execution of all defense agreements, especially regarding air defense, to render this aerial terror meaningless,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Telegram. “A unilateral ceasefire in the skies is possible, and it may open the way to genuine diplomacy. America and Europe must act to force Putin to stop.” <

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Other issues:
Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review – OT 2025-230

The Telegraph claims that Russian drones hit a civilian passenger train in Ukraine.

Russian drone strikes Ukrainian passenger train

A “savage” Russian drone strike on a passenger train in Ukraine’s Sumy region has injured dozens of people, Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday.

The Ukrainian president posted a video of a burning carriage, surrounded by shattered glass and splintered iron, that was hit in the strike.

Emergency services are at the scene in the city of Shostka and have begun tending to the wounded, said Mr Zelensky.

“The Russians could not have been unaware that they were striking civilians,” he added. “We’ve heard resolute statements from Europe and America – and it’s high time to turn them all into reality. Lip service is not enough.”

In the video, a man in an orange hi-vis jacket can be seen walking towards the burning train, while another picks something up from the debris.

The train was heading to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and passengers were on board when it was struck at a railway station, Oleh Hryhorov, the governor of Sumy, said.

The status of the casualties was unclear on Saturday morning, with Mr Zelensky saying only that “so far, we know of at least 30 victims”.

Ukrzaliznystia, the Ukrainian state railway company, said there was a second strike on the Shostka train as an evacuation was under way. It said that three children were among the wounded.

The report comes with this picture which is credited to have been posted by the Ukrainian president.

bigger
The picture seems to show a damaged and burning passenger car. But other pictures from the scene show a freight train with its locomotive in flames while a passenger train is standing undamaged on a parallel rail track some twenty meters away.

biggerIt seems that only the freight rain was hit. As the Ukrainian outlet Strana writes (machine translation):

Cont. reading: Ukraine – Russian Hit On Freight Train, Passengers Hurt

At Naked Capitalism Yves Smith published a paper by Servaas Storm:

The AI Bubble and the U.S. Economy: How Long Do “Hallucinations” Last?

Yves writes:

This is a devastating, must-read paper by Servaas Storm on how AI is failing to meet core, repeatedly hyped performance promises, and never can, irrespective of how much money and computing power is thrown at it. Yet AI, which Storm calls “Artificial Information” is still garnering worse-than-dot-com-frenzy valuations even as errors are if anything increasing.

Storm’s introduction:

This paper argues that (i) we have reached “peak GenAI” in terms of current Large Language Models (LLMs); scaling (building more data centers and using more chips) will not take us further to the goal of “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI); returns are diminishing rapidly; (ii) the AI-LLM industry and the larger U.S. economy are experiencing a speculative bubble, which is about to burst.

I happen to a agree with the arguments and conclusion.

The current Large Language Models are part of the Generative Artificial Intelligence field. GenAI is one twig on the research tree of  Artificial Intelligence. LLMs are based on ‘neural networks’. They store billions of tiny pieces of information and probability values of how those pieces relate to each other. The method is thought to simulate a part of human thinking.

But human thinking does much more than storing bits of information and statistical values of how they relate. It constantly builds mental models of the world we are living in. That leads to understanding of higher level concepts and of laws of nature. The brain can simulate events in those mental model worlds. We can thus recognize what is happening around us and can anticipate what might happen next.

Generative AI and LLMs can not do that. They do not have, or create, mental models. They are simple probabilistic systems. They are machine learning algorithms that can recognize patterns with a certain probabilistic degree of getting it right. It is inherent to such models that they make mistakes. To hope, as LLM promoters say, that they will scale up to some Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) know-all machines is futile. Making bigger LLMs will only increase the amount of defective output they will create.

(Yesterday I watched a video of Jon, a baker in Mesa, in which he mentions how he had asked an LLM to half a recipe he was going to make. It did that correctly for all but one ingredient. The model had divided the amount of water needed by ten. Jon’s test bake had failed.)

Cont. reading: Is The AI Bubble Ready To Pop?

U.S. President Donald Trump is pushing his country into an uncomfortable direction. What might be the reasons for him to do so?

His recent address to a gathering of all military commanders included the demand to fight the ‘enemy’ within the country:

He did, however, speak with great moral clarity about certain classes of Americans whom he views as a grave threat:

• The American left: “They’re really bad. They’re bad people.” Again, he’s talking about Americans here.
• His own domestic political opponents: “They’re vicious people that we have to fight, just like you have to fight vicious people. Mine are a different kind of vicious.”
• American journalists: “sleazebags.”
• Residents of American inner cities: “animals.”

His Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called on flag officers (Generals) to follow a conservative ideology. He has also announced a reduction of flag officer positions which will give him the chance to weed out those officers who have a more liberal standpoint.

Trump wants the military to use U.S. cities as training grounds (archived):

It was at that moment that the president recounted a conversation with his defense secretary: “I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

This seems to be, together with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) raids, a preparation for countering severe domestic unrest.  But there is, so far no reason for any a big unrest to happen. The U.S. society is generally not a rebellious one. Why would Trump perceive that unrest is coming?

On the other side Trump is clearly preparing for a more global war.

Another round of war with Iran is imminent. Air-tankers have been deployed to the Middle East, Israel’s air defenses have been beefed up with more THAAD launchers and a carrier group is entering the Mediterranean.

The increase of forces near Venezuela is also continuing. It is clearly a build up towards a regime change attempt (archived).

Trump has increase intelligence sharing with Ukraine to allow for deep strikes into Russia.

At the same time the U.S. seems to have largely given up on militarily countering the rise of China.

Regime change in Iran and Venezuela could bring a huge amount of additional energy resources under Washington’s control.

When the big stock market crash that everybody is warning (archived) about (archived) will finally happen, the U.S. economy will get severely damaged.

Unrest in the U.S. could then become real.

Having control over additional resource assets would dampen the negative effects for the U.S. dollar and debt position.

Is Trump expecting something like that?