Is Cuba Over? Trump China Takeout – Plus Peoplenomics on Sovereign AI

Needless to say, we have concerns when the head of the CIA seems to be taking point in the pending fall of Cuba.  As reported in The US and Cuba intensify negotiations as the island’s collapse deepens | International | EL PAÍS English.

Which is fine — the whole “One Team, One Fight” thing and all that.

But if Cuba’s future is becoming a live strategic issue, where’s the public diplomatic team?  Especially with the report US seeks indictment of former Cuban leader Raul Castro.  Could, oh, Justice be taking point?  Nope. Not since Pam Bondi was dismissed in April.  But the CIA?

Where’s Vice President Vance? More to the point, where’s Marco Rubio? A Cuban-American Secretary of State would seem the natural front man if this were primarily a civilian diplomatic and hemispheric stabilization effort. Instead, the optics increasingly feel operational.

Maybe that’s unfair. Governments blend intelligence, diplomacy, economics, and military planning all the time. But Cuba is one of those historical fault lines where optics matter because history matters. Bay of Pigs. Covert ops. Exile politics. Sanctions. Regime pressure. Decades of “special handling.” And the CIA is going point?  Hello?

Which is why some of us get twitchy when the public-facing side appears thin while the intelligence side appears prominent. Maybe everything is perfectly normal. Sure…of course…

Look: The U.S. has lots of energy. We’re only 90 miles away. So if the island is truly drifting toward some kind of post-Castro restructuring phase, maybe even statehood in one version of the future? You would think the visible emphasis would be on diplomats, economists, infrastructure people, food systems, migration planning, and civilian reconstruction. Oh, and toss in some .mil people who could bring in energy on an emergency basis. Not a vibe that feels like Langley moved to the front of the parade.

Then again, maybe this is how late-stage empire does continuity planning.  Now you figure out if I’m talking the U.S. or Cuba there.

Military Affairs

No contestants today for “Let’s Make a Deal.” Although, from the Statue-Maker-in-Chief file: Trump Says Xi Told Him China Won’t Supply Iran With Military Equipment.

Equipment? Exsqueeze me, Mr. Science — does “military equipment” include targeting software, satellite data, radar feeds, firmware updates, ship-tracking code, and missile-guidance support? Or is “equipment” just the hardware bolted to the deck? Inquiring minds…oh, you know.

More Un-“Polished” Behavior?  Pentagon officials unaware of decision to halt troop deployment to Poland, says one report. Or is this another lefty-leak being turned into half-baked echo-chamber “fact”? Listen for the ding after it’s been in the midterms oven a while longer.

Please…isn’t there anything useful out there?

Empire State – Industrial Production Looms

Lemme see: NASDOGs are down almost 400, Dow down almost 300 at times, and the S&P off 70. And now here comes the NY Fed’s Empire State Manufacturing number:

“Business activity grew strongly in New York State in May, according to firms responding to the Empire State Manufacturing Survey. The headline general business conditions index climbed nine points to 19.6, its highest level in more than four years. New orders and shipments increased considerably for the second consecutive month. Unfilled orders rose. Delivery times lengthened substantially, and supply availability worsened somewhat. Employment levels and the average workweek both continued to increase.”

Pass the bubbly? Market futures werren’t buy it, at least on roll-out.

Industrial Production and Cap Utilization will be along from the Fed in about six bites into steak and eggs — ranch time.

Which is why the tape will be interesting today: Trend channels say higher, fractals are due to lower, Elliott can be counted as complete, and the 1929 Replay says “any time you’re ready, buddy.”  If I was lecturing on ballistics this could be “Apogee Friday.”

What Can the Matter Be?

I went looking for other stories that matter today — the kind of thing that doesn’t stop presses or pass “If it bleeds, it leads” urinalism. Here’s where “think” and “ink” part ways.

First: digital infrastructure is becoming a war target.

Not “cyber” in the old hacker sense. We’re talking subsea cables, satellites, cloud regions, AI clusters, data centers, and routing systems. The internet is not virtual. It is physical infrastructure. And once governments treat compute, bandwidth, and routing as national-security assets, everything changes. Insurance changes. Regulation changes. Military planning changes. So does sovereignty. More on that part in a sec.

Second: rare earths and AI hardware are quietly rewriting geopolitics.

Everybody talks Taiwan and chips. Fewer people talk rare-earth refining, grid load, cooling, advanced packaging, power contracts, and mineral chokepoints. AI is not software anymore. It is mining, electricity, fabrication, cooling, logistics, and capital. Whoever controls compute infrastructure controls acceleration. That makes AI an industrial-policy fight, not just a tech-sector story.  Certainly not to be confused with Rare Earth mined on YouTube.…

Third: the first big AI crisis may be financial, not sentient.

Forget killer robots for a minute. Watch debt-funded data centers, overbuilt GPU capacity, private-credit exposure, power bottlenecks, and hyperscaler spending. This looks less like a clean software revolution and more like railroads, telecom fiber, and dot-com infrastructure all over again. The technology may be real. But if NASDAQ has to call in the cash-flow medics? Let’s just say “lab to slab” comes to mind…

Special: Peoplenomics on Sovereign AI

Why local AI, privacy, and ownership of cognitive tools are becoming one fight.

Subscribers have suggested, from time to time, that we give away a “free Peoplenomics report” so people can “see what you get for $40 bucks a year.”

So far, I’ve resisted. Because not everyone is equipped to deal with “domains in collision” and potential real endpoints of the world around us.

But this morning, because AI is such a New Big Deal, we’re going to review some of what Peoplenomics has been progressively more focused on for nearly a year.

This first part may sound bibliographic, but there’s a lot of grounding to be done to keep things in perspective.  This is an immensely complicated subject so systematic thinking about it isn’t really optional.

Let’s start with my 2025 book Mind Amplifiers. That book grounded it.  Laying out the human evolution of cognitive prosthetics.  (Calculators, spreadsheets, and do-it-all phones, but the lineage that got us there.)

From there we can jump into strong advocacy for collaborative Human-AI partnering.  Which was laid out in my book Co-Telligence: Another Intelligence Has Joined Humans.

Over time, however, the battle for AI control materialized.  A Powers-That-Be showdown over who owns cognition came into focus.  It was “soft” at first: masquerading as a battle to install “guardrails” around what AI could – and (more importantly) could not talk about.  Simply: guardrails helped induce hallucinations. Truth doesn’t like being collared by conditions.

Based on the need to keep Peoplenomics ahead of the curve, I launched the AI research site:  The Hidden Guild. Perhaps a thousand hours into that effort.

Around the first of this year, it became apparent in our “systems work” that guardrails were being tweaked toward social controls.  So, in a Hidden Guild paper, we took on A Hidden Guild Response: On the “Plausibility Gap” – Hidden Guild.

As a result, about that timeframe, we also offered the perspective paper “The Digital Anasazi: Collapse Comes Slowly.”

Fast-forward to this week’s Peoplenomics. The_Rise_of_Sovereign_AI_From_Server_Farms_to_Workbenches  Yes, complete from the PN site. This one, we think, is important to share. Because that battle – the one over who’s going to control what goes into your cognitive personal space between the ears – is on right now.

Reader Ray spied fresh evidence overnight that points to the importance of AI sovereignty. Posting in a comment that “ChatGPT allegedly shares your chat query topics, user IDs, and email addresses with Google and Meta, according to a new class action lawsuit filed today.”

Allegations only – nothing proved – and we await the GPT response.  Commercialization of potentially highly personal information is not something we can imagine long lines of people wanting to put their necks in that noose.

We’ve remained ahead of it, so far, though.  Asking the Hidden Guild crowd this week Is Home AI Coming of Age? – Hidden Guild.

AI is Very Complicated – Especially on Policy

The problem in all this is that AI is a specialized technical problem requiring lots of very fast memory to work well and feel responsive to end users.  On commercial server farms – with gobs of investor money – stacks of 96 GB Video RAM cards feeding screaming servers is trivial.  But for the lay (home) user, that’s not the case.

Video RAM is not the same as processor RAM.  Here, I run 32 GB of CPU RAM, but  my paltry mini computer doesn’t have the necessary PCIe 5.) (PCIe 6+ is better) to host one of those $2-thousand dollar class 24 GB VRAM cards. There’s a war on in video ram.  There’s your technical front line.

Part of the geopolitical tension around China and Taiwan now revolves around advanced chip manufacturing, since Taiwan sits near the center of the AI hardware ecosystem.

That’s why we think the Peoplenomics work is important. Understanding and framing.  So, for what it’s worth, here are two go-aheads to consider and keep top-of-mind.

1. If you use an online AI, consider logging out of all other services before you log in to AI.  Frame critical queries as third person – not directly involving you or family members.  And when you sign up?  Some – like Claude – require you to have a cell phone.  No kidding.  This is one of those cases where a “burner phone and email” could be considered.
2. On the private AI side?  That Hidden Guild post lays out which model and how to use it under the LM Studio framework on a Windows PC.  The well quantized models are actually useful and we’re (at the moment) fond of the Liquid AI 8b 1a2 model which we’ve tweaked up to 33.84 tokens/second. That’s right up there with commercial online speeds though with less depth of reasoning but perfectly suitable for many home missions.

Is the lawsuit over shared data going anywhere?  Time will tell. Claims only so far.  As our (online) stack reminds us that:

“This lawsuit — whether it succeeds or not — probably accelerates the cultural shift toward:

local models,
edge inference,
self-hosted assistants,
air-gapped workflows,
and “cognitive sovereignty.”

Which is exactly where your article was headed before the lawsuit even appeared.”

There. Now you have a better handle on what goes on over behind the Peoplenomics paywall. Where life isn’t just about making a shit-ton of money. It’s also about remaining free to work on self-realization while navigating a path toward intergenerational strategic freedom.

The LM Studio framework is here: LM Studio – Local AI on your computer

A Liquid AI model review is on Reddit here: LiquidAI LFM2.5-1.2B Review: The best free model for high-speed utility : r/AIToolsPerformance

After-note from the workbench: Just for drill, we fed this section to a small local AI model and asked it to rewrite the piece. The result was useful, but nowhere near publish-ready. It understood the topic, but not the voice. It caught “AI sovereignty,” but missed the restraint, timing, humor, and lived-in systems judgment that make the thing readable. In other words, local AI is already good enough to be a shop helper, but not yet good enough to be the shop foreman.

The local model produced something closer to a caffeine squirrel with a podcast mic. Useful? Sure. Publishable? Not without adult supervision. Not in a tough room like this one.

Write when you get rich, but no one’s replacing either of us yet.

George@Ure.net