When AI Moves Faster Than Your Business Model: Adapt or Perish

 

Anthropic proved software can be built in days, not years. Markets panicked. SaaS cracked. AI won’t kill everyone—but it will expose who’s bluffing, overpriced, and already late to their own funeral.

I watched the screens flicker red and felt the familiar chill run through the market. This time it wasn’t a rate hike, a war headline, or a rogue inflation print. It was code. Not a decade-long rewrite. Not a moonshot product roadmap. Just a few weeks of work, a legal AI tool from Anthropic, and suddenly software stocks were tumbling like dominoes on wet pavement. The sell-off wasn’t polite. It was sharp, fast, and emotional. SaaS and financial services took hits because investors saw something they hadn’t priced in yet: speed that breaks old assumptions.

What shook people wasn’t just that Anthropic launched a legal tool. Legal tech has been around for years. It was the realization that something usable, enterprise-adjacent, and frighteningly capable could be stitched together in roughly 10–14 days. That detail landed like a brick through a window. I could almost hear traders muttering the same question at once: if this can be built that fast, what exactly am I paying for?

That’s when fear takes the wheel. SaaS valuations rest on the idea that software is hard to build, expensive to maintain, and sticky once adopted. Now imagine a world where a lean team with access to a frontier model spins up a product that undercuts years of development. The market didn’t wait to debate nuance. It sold first and asked questions later. I’ve seen this movie before. In the late 1990s, when the internet made distribution cheap, investors declared that brick-and-mortar retail was finished. In the 2000s, when digital ads exploded, print journalism was pronounced dead. Each time, the panic was real, but the extinction story was sloppy.

The legal angle added gasoline. Lawyers are expensive, process-heavy, and allergic to hallucinations. Yet here we are, watching AI draft briefs, summarize discovery, and surface case law in seconds. The irony is brutal. The same profession that bills by the hour is now staring at a machine that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t bill, and doesn’t complain. No wonder markets flinched. But fear has a habit of overshooting reality.

I don’t buy the collapse narrative. I never have. History doesn’t support it. When spreadsheets arrived in the late 1970s, accountants weren’t wiped out. Visicalc and later Excel didn’t destroy the profession; they multiplied its output. By the mid-1990s, Excel was used by over 90% of large firms’ finance teams, and accounting employment kept growing. The same thing happened with databases, cloud computing, and even smartphones. Each wave killed certain tasks, not entire industries. AI is no different. It’s a blade, not a bomb.

What investors are missing is that AI, deployed well, is additive. Chris Kelly hinted at this when he talked about hallucinations and safeguards during his interview at CNBC, a TV channel focusing on business news. Early systems mess up. We’ve already seen hundreds of documented cases where AI generated fake legal citations, invented quotes, and hallucinated precedent. That’s real risk. Lawyers have been sanctioned for filing AI-generated nonsense. But that’s not the end of the story. It’s the beginning of the tuning phase. Every major technology goes through this ugly adolescence. Airplanes crashed before they became safe. Early cars killed pedestrians before traffic laws existed. Nobody concluded that transportation itself was doomed.

The smarter SaaS companies will do what they always do. They will wrap AI in guardrails, checks, audits, and workflows. They will make hallucinations harder, traceability easier, and liability clearer. They will bundle these features, not discount them. People love to argue that cheaper production means cheaper prices. History laughs at that idea. Software pricing has rarely fallen in real terms. What happens instead is feature inflation. You pay the same subscription, but you get more power, more automation, more dependency. The price stays put. The value proposition mutates.

Look at cloud computing. Amazon Web Services launched in 2006 promising cheaper infrastructure. What followed wasn’t a collapse in enterprise IT spending. Global cloud spending crossed $500 billion annually by 2023. Companies didn’t save money. They scaled faster. They spent differently. AI will follow that pattern. Costs may drop at the margin, but demand will explode. When productivity rises, ambition rises with it. A rising tide lifts ships that know how to float.

The market reaction also ignored the partnership dynamic. SaaS firms don’t have to fight AI vendors. They can ally with them. Kelly was right to point out that leaders will partner with companies like Anthropic or OpenAI, embedding models into trusted platforms customers already use. That trust matters. Enterprises don’t want raw models. They want accountability, compliance, privacy controls, and contracts that don’t evaporate when something breaks. That’s where incumbents still have leverage.

Privacy is the quiet killer in this story. AI feeds on data the way fire feeds on oxygen. Upload the wrong document, and you may have just trained a system you don’t control. Governments already know this. There have been documented incidents of sensitive data being used improperly in AI systems, prompting internal bans and policy memos across federal agencies. Enterprises will follow suit. Protocols will harden. Data walls will rise. Companies that can’t manage this will bleed trust, and trust is harder to rebuild than code.

This is where laggards get punished. Not because AI exists, but because they freeze. They deny. They delay. Markets are ruthless with denial. Stocks don’t collapse because technology changes. They collapse because management refuses to adapt. I’ve watched this happen to retailers who ignored e-commerce and media firms who mocked digital ads. The pattern is always the same. First disbelief. Then panic. Then irrelevance.

Anthropic’s legal tool didn’t kill SaaS. It exposed complacency. It forced investors to ask who is actually building, who is bundling, who is securing data, and who is just collecting subscription checks while hoping the storm passes. The sell-off feels overwrought because markets priced apocalypse when the reality is selection. Some firms will get stronger. Others will fade. Capitalism doesn’t do mercy. It does sorting.

I keep coming back to one simple truth. AI doesn’t end work. It raises the bar. It doesn’t erase industries. It strips excuses. The companies that survive this moment will look back and say the same thing winners always say after disruption. We moved fast. We partnered smart. We controlled risk. Everyone else will call it unfair. When the tide goes out, you see who was swimming naked.

 

 

This article stands on its own, but some readers may also enjoy the titles in my  Brief Book Series. You can also read them  here on Google Play: Brief Book Series.

 

 

Plugged In and Hacked: The Dirty Secret Behind EV Charging

 

Your EV charger may be a loaded gun: hackers can shut down your car, steal your payment data, or slip malware into your vehicle—while you stand there smiling at a charging screen.

I keep hearing the same sales pitch every time I pass a glowing EV charger in a mall parking lot or highway rest stop. Clean future. Smart mobility. Plug in and relax. The problem is that relax is exactly what attackers count on. While drivers watch their battery percentage climb, some EV charging stations have been quietly exposed as soft targets—machines that can be poked, prodded, and in some cases turned against the very cars they are supposed to serve. When the gate is left open, thieves do not knock.

The uncomfortable truth is that some EV chargers were found vulnerable to attacks that could disable a vehicle, steal payment details, or infect a car’s software. This is not sci-fi paranoia. It is the predictable outcome of rushing hardware into public space faster than security thinking can keep up. We built a rolling computer ecosystem, bolted it to the power grid, connected it to payment systems, and then acted surprised when hackers showed up like uninvited guests at an open bar.

I remember watching early demonstrations from security researchers and thinking the tone was almost apologetic. Nobody wanted to be the bad guy who spoiled the electric party. But the data did not care about feelings. In 2022, researchers at Pen Test Partners publicly demonstrated how weaknesses in certain consumer and public EV chargers could be abused. They showed that with relatively modest access, an attacker could interrupt charging sessions, manipulate charger behavior, and potentially pivot deeper into connected systems. That year mattered because it shattered the myth that chargers were just “dumb plugs.” They are networked computers with ports, protocols, and privileges.

The bigger picture became clearer in 2023 and 2024 when industry-wide assessments landed with a dull thud instead of a bang. NCC Group released findings showing that a significant percentage of tested EV charging ecosystems contained high-risk vulnerabilities. In several environments, insecure communication protocols and weak authentication controls made it possible to interfere with charging operations or access sensitive backend systems. Some chargers accepted commands they should have rejected. Others trusted devices they should have questioned. Trust, when given freely, is often stolen.

Disabling a vehicle sounds dramatic, but it is not magic. Modern EVs constantly talk to chargers. They negotiate power levels, authenticate sessions, and exchange status data. If that conversation is hijacked or corrupted, charging can be stopped cold. In edge cases, misconfigured systems could trigger fault states that prevent a vehicle from charging properly until it is reset or serviced. Imagine being stranded not because your battery died, but because a stranger told your car to stop listening to you. That is not just inconvenience; that is leverage.

Then there is the money trail. Public EV chargers process millions of transactions every day. In 2023 alone, global public charging sessions exceeded 1,000,000,000, according to widely cited industry estimates. Each tap, swipe, or app-based payment is a data event. Where there is payment data, there is temptation. Security analysts have repeatedly warned that poorly secured chargers could expose card details or account credentials, especially when operators fail to properly segment payment systems or encrypt data in transit. Traditional gas pumps taught us this lesson years ago. Credit card skimmers thrived there because nobody expected a fuel nozzle to be a crime scene. EV chargers risk repeating that history with newer, shinier hardware. The costume changes, but the con stays the same.

The most unsettling scenario is software infection. EVs are computers on wheels, running millions of lines of code. They receive updates over the air, rely on third-party libraries, and interface with external systems like chargers using standardized protocols such as OCPP. If a charger is compromised, it can become a delivery mechanism. Security researchers have shown that malicious payloads can be positioned where vehicles or backend systems might ingest them, especially in ecosystems where update validation is weak or logging is poor. No credible researcher claims hackers can instantly “take over” every EV on the road, but that is a straw man. Real attackers play the long game. They plant, observe, escalate. Water does not break stone in a day.

History backs this up. In 2015, long before EVs dominated headlines, security researchers demonstrated remote exploitation of connected vehicles through entertainment systems. That moment forced automakers to confront the reality that connectivity equals attack surface. EV chargers are now part of that surface. In 2021, security analysts warned that critical infrastructure attacks were shifting toward edge devices—small, widely deployed systems that are hard to monitor at scale. EV chargers fit that profile perfectly. They sit in public, often unattended, running firmware that may not be patched for years.

Statistics sharpen the edge of this argument. A 2024 industry survey found that more than 60% of charging operators struggled to maintain consistent security updates across their networks. Another assessment reported that over 40% of tested charging systems exposed at least one critical vulnerability related to authentication or data handling. These are not fringe numbers. They describe an ecosystem still learning how to defend itself while already under load.

I can already hear the counterargument whispered in glossy boardrooms. No confirmed mass attacks. No viral meltdown. No reason to panic. Fair enough. Panic is useless. But denial is worse. Cybersecurity history is littered with warnings that were ignored because the damage had not yet scaled. Retail breaches, hospital ransomware, pipeline shutdowns—all of them followed the same script. Early warnings. Limited incidents. Then a single coordinated strike that turned complacency into headlines.

What makes this story alarming is not that EV chargers have vulnerabilities. Everything does. What stings is the mismatch between the green utopia narrative and the gritty reality of rushed infrastructure. We told drivers to trust the plug without telling them about the locks. We celebrated innovation while quietly accepting shortcuts. A fast road still leads to the same cliff.

Yes - you heard me right.  I am not an outsider throwing stones. I use technology. I believe in progress. But belief without scrutiny is how systems rot from the inside. EV charging networks are critical infrastructure now. They deserve the same paranoia we apply to power grids and financial networks. Harden the protocols. Enforce authentication. Patch relentlessly. Audit constantly. Because the next attack will not announce itself with flashing lights. It will look like a glitch, a declined payment, a car that just will not charge.

When that happens, we will pretend to be shocked. We should not be. The warning signs are already plugged in, humming quietly at the curb, waiting for someone curious enough—and careless enough—to listen.

 

 This article stands on its own, but some readers may also enjoy my Brief Book Series titles. Read it here on Google Play: Brief Book Series.

 

AI Is Hungry—and Journalism Is Dinner: Washington Post Announces Mass Layoffs

 

When AI enters the newsroom, nothing is sacred. Sports, books, foreign wars, local lives—all disposable. What survives is power-friendly content and a public kept blind by design.

I read the news about The Washington Post the way you read an obituary for someone who is still breathing. One-third of the workforce gone. Sports and books tossed aside like yesterday’s paper. Foreign desks hollowed out. Metro gutted. The official language was calm, corporate, antiseptic. Focus. Stability. Reinvention. But behind that language I heard a familiar sound. The low, wet chewing of a machine that never gets full.

This is not just about layoffs. This is about appetite. Artificial intelligence is a digital glutton, and it does not nibble. It inhales. Jobs, industries, traditions, craft, context, memory. It eats the margins first, then the center, then the soul. The sports desk and the book section are not random casualties. They are the organs that take time, judgment, and lived experience. AI hates time. It hates patience. It hates anything that cannot be scraped, summarized, and monetized at scale. When the forest is gone, the termites still ask for more wood.

The publisher says the paper must focus on national news and politics. That sounds noble until you hear what is missing. Sports connects cities. Books shape minds. Foreign reporting explains the world beyond our borders. Metro tells you who you are and where you live. Strip those away and you do not get sharper journalism. You get a thinner product optimized for clicks, rage, and algorithmic churn. You get a paper that sounds important but knows less and less about the world it claims to explain.

Executive editor Matt Murray said the traffic has plummeted in the last 3 years amid the AI boom. That sentence matters. It admits the quiet truth. Readers are not leaving because journalism suddenly forgot how to report. Readers are leaving because AI floods the internet with cheap summaries, auto-written explainers, and synthetic certainty. When everything looks like news, nothing feels necessary. The machine does not care if it replaces truth with plausibility. It only cares if you scroll.

I think about the foreign correspondents who begged to keep their jobs. The Cairo bureau chief laid off alongside the entire Middle East roster. A correspondent in Ukraine losing her job while still inside a war zone. That is not trimming fat. That is cutting muscle and bone. AI cannot smell a street after an explosion. It cannot read fear in a mother’s eyes. It cannot tell you when silence means more than a quote. Those things do not scale. So they get cut.

Former editor Marty Baron called this one of the darkest days in the paper’s history. He knows what darkness looks like. He led the newsroom through investigations that mattered, through political pressure, through an era when facts were under siege. He remembers when journalism was expensive because democracy was expensive. Now we are told democracy must be cost-efficient. A cheap lock invites a thief.

Ownership always matters. Jeff Bezos bought the paper for $250m in 2013 and once spoke eloquently about the need for a free press. He built a retail empire by perfecting logistics, automation, and ruthless efficiency. That same DNA now shadows the newsroom. Warehouses without workers. Delivery without drivers. Content without journalists. It is not personal. It is structural. AI is the ultimate warehouse manager. It does not sleep. It does not unionize. It does not complain when you erase entire sections of a 150-year-old institution.

The irony cuts deep when you compare this collapse with The New York Times, which added about 450,000 digital-only subscribers in the last quarter of 2025. That is not an accident. The Times invested heavily in depth, games, cooking, audio, and global reporting. It treated journalism as a product worth paying for, not a cost to be minimized. One paper fed its readers. The other tried to out-starve the algorithm and lost.

AI defenders say this is progress. They say machines free humans for higher work. I have heard that song before. In the 1980s, factory automation promised better jobs. Instead, entire towns hollowed out. In the 2000s, digital advertising promised sustainable journalism. Instead, Craigslist gutted classified revenue, and Facebook siphoned attention. In 2010, algorithmic feeds promised personalization. Instead, they delivered polarization. The pattern is clear. Technology promises abundance, then concentrates power, then calls the wreckage efficiency. When the horse throws you, the saddle still wants credit.

Sports and books being scrapped tells you everything. Sports writing is not just scores. It is history, rivalry, failure, redemption. Books are not just reviews. They are arguments with the dead and conversations with the unborn. AI can summarize a novel in 200 words, but it cannot tell you why a sentence ruins your sleep. It can list stats, but it cannot explain why a loss still hurts 20 years later. Those sections are being sacrificed because their value is human, not algorithmic.

The Washington Post Guild warned that cutting workers would weaken the paper and drive readers away. That warning will age well. You cannot shrink your way into relevance. You cannot automate trust. You cannot replace reporters with prompts and expect loyalty. Readers know when a paper is written by people who live in the world versus systems trained on the leftovers of yesterday’s reporting.

I write this because this is personal. I am a professor and a writer. I am a reader too. When a major newspaper decides the world is too expensive to cover, the cost does not disappear. It gets paid later, in ignorance, in confusion, in policy built on half-knowledge. AI does not care about that bill. It will be long gone, chasing the next dataset, the next disruption, the next mouthful.

This moment is not unique. It is a signal. AI is not just coming for factory floors or customer service lines. It is coming for culture. For memory. For institutions that take time to build and seconds to dismantle. The sports desk and the book section are early casualties because they remind us that life is more than politics and breaking alerts. A machine that wants everything must first erase what slows it down.

The Washington Post says these steps will strengthen its footing. Maybe in the short term. Maybe the balance sheet breathes easier. But journalism is not just a business. It is a public good that survives on credibility. Once that is gone, no algorithm can synthesize it back. You cannot replant a forest with sawdust.

AI will keep eating. That is what gluttons do. The question is not whether it will stop. The question is what we are willing to lose before we admit that something essential is being swallowed whole.

 

 

If you’re looking for something different to read, my  Brief Book Series titles are available on Google Play Books. You can also read them here on Google Play: Brief Book Series.

 

China’s Rare-Earth Weapon Freaks Out the West, but Brazil Is Quietly Cashing In

 

China’s mineral chokehold terrifies the West, supply chains are one crisis away from collapse, and Brazil is emerging as the quiet winner of the next resource war.

I did not step inside a warehouse in Brazil’s northeast, and I am not pretending to have dust on my shoes or a helmet under my arm. I am a college professor and a writer watching this unfold from the outside, reading balance sheets, policy papers, trade data, and history. Still, the story is loud even from a distance. In the state of Bahia, at a facility known as APINK Warehouse, Brazilian Rare Earths is building one of Latin America’s first rare-earth separation plants. You do not need to be there to understand what it means. The math alone tells the tale.

Rare earths are a cluster of 17 elements that sit quietly at the heart of modern power. They do not glitter like gold or pump like oil, but they decide who builds missiles, electric vehicles, wind turbines, smartphones, and radar systems. China understood this early. Today it controls about 70% of global rare-earth mining and roughly 90% of processing. That is not market leadership. That is leverage. When Beijing tightens its grip, factories thousands of miles away start to choke. When one hand holds the tap, everyone else learns the price of thirst.

The West learned that lesson the hard way. Last year, China imposed export restrictions on key metals, machine parts, and even engineers. The effect rippled fast. American and European manufacturers cut output. Carmakers struggled with shortages of super-magnets. Green-tech firms delayed projects. Defense contractors whispered about supply risk instead of boasting about capacity. By November, a one-year truce was declared. Few believed it would last. Truces built on political mood swings rarely do.

Donald Trump saw the vulnerability clearly. The United States had built advanced industries on a supply chain controlled by a strategic rival. That is not just bad economics; it is a national-security gamble. Trump’s response was blunt. He pushed for alternative suppliers and challenged China’s pricing tactics directly. Corporations did not wait for speeches. They started hunting for new sources immediately. That hunt leads straight to Brazil.

Brazil holds nearly 25% of the world’s known rare-earth deposits, second only to China. That single statistic shifts the global balance. Brazil also brings cheap electricity, decades of mining experience, and engineers who know how to operate at scale. This is not a greenhorn entering the game. Brazil has history here. In the 1950s, a Brazilian company called Orquima was the world’s largest rare-earth producer, extracting metals from monazite sands. Then came fear of radioactivity, heavy regulation, and nationalization. China stepped into the vacuum and never let go. History is ruthless with countries that abandon the field too early.

Now Brazil wants back in. In November, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed a decree making rare earths a national-security issue. In January, his government began drafting a national strategy. The language sounds bureaucratic, but the impact is real: special financing, public-procurement options, and streamlined procedures. Brazil is signaling that rare earths are no longer just rocks in the ground. They are tools of statecraft.

The money alone is not the main attraction. The global rare-earth market is worth only a few billion dollars a year, small compared with Brazil’s iron exports. The real value lies downstream. Rare earths feed high-tech manufacturing. They anchor magnet production, battery systems, and defense components. Control the input, and you gain influence over entire industries. That is why this story is not about mining profits. It is about leverage.

Diplomacy is woven into every ton of ore. The United States faces shortages of critical minerals across the board, from copper and nickel to obscure elements like scandium and yttrium. Washington is eager. In July, Trump imposed 50% tariffs on most Brazilian imports, partly to influence the trial of former president Jair Bolsonaro over an alleged coup plot. That same month, the American ambassador quietly met Brazilian mining firms to express interest in buying their future output. That is not contradiction. That is realism. Power talks in private even when it postures in public.

Lula initially said Brazil’s minerals were not for sale. Then he floated the idea of a rare-earth deal in exchange for tariff relief. If the United States hesitates, others will not. The European Union, Japan, and South Korea all face the same mineral squeeze. Buyers are lining up. When scarcity rules, ideology takes a back seat.

Still, Brazil’s path is not smooth. Today, the country has only one operating rare-earth mine. Serra Verde opened in 2024 and plans to double non-Chinese supply of heavy rare earths, the most valuable category. It has struggled with production. Ionic clay deposits are tricky. A nearly $500m loan from an American aid agency is expected to help stabilize operations. Dozens of other projects remain stuck in licensing. None are likely to produce before 2028. Processing is another hurdle. Many miners want to extract in Brazil but refine elsewhere due to expertise gaps and capital constraints.

Protectionism complicates matters. Lula has warned against foreign countries digging holes and taking Brazil’s minerals. The sentiment plays well politically, but the economics are harsh. Rare-earth mining is capital-intensive. Many operators are foreign-owned because Brazilian markets cannot easily absorb the risk. Brazil already imports Chinese steel made from Brazilian iron, a reminder that moving up the value chain is easier said than done. Rare earths offer strategic leverage, not guaranteed industrial transformation. You cannot bully chemistry into obeying slogans.

What changes the equation is pricing. For years, China used predatory pricing to crush competition, recouping losses through magnet and electric-vehicle sales. That model cracked when Trump signed an agreement with MP Materials in California. The deal guarantees a floor price of $110 per kilogram for neodymium-praseodymium oxide, roughly double China’s rate. That sends a clear signal to the market. Higher prices invite new players. Australian, Brazilian, and American firms are stepping in. Many will fail. Consolidation will be brutal. But the country sitting on a quarter of known deposits usually survives the storm.

From where I sit, the picture is stark. The West is nervous because it built its future on a fragile supply chain. China is confident but no longer untouchable. Brazil, quietly and without fanfare, holds the strongest cards it has had in decades. The APINK Warehouse is not just a facility. It is a symbol of a shift that cannot be unseen. When giants fight over the road, the one who owns the land sets the toll.

 

 

This article is part of a larger idea I explore in “Mines, Magnets, and Mayhem: How China’s Rare Earth Monopoly Could Cripple the West”, one of my short books on Google Play. Read it here on Google Play: Mines, Magnets,and Mayhem.

 

 

 

Yes-Men with Missiles: Taiwan at the Edge of Xi’s Silence

 

Xi fires generals, crowns loyalists, and silences dissent. History shows what comes next: overconfidence, miscalculation, and war. Taiwan sits in the crosshairs while truth is purged from China’s command room.

I keep hearing that China is the world’s safe bet, the steady hand in a chaotic age. I don’t buy it. Not now. Not after watching Xi Jinping rip the top off his own military and call it discipline. When a leader starts firing generals instead of listening to them, history doesn’t whisper. It shouts.

On January 24, China’s defense ministry quietly confirmed what insiders already feared. Two of the most senior generals, including Zhang Youxia, were under investigation. This was not routine. This was seismic. The last time China purged its military leadership at this level was 1971, when Mao’s chosen heir Lin Biao died fleeing an alleged coup. That episode ended in paranoia, paralysis, and decades of scars. I look at today and feel that same chill. When the palace goes silent, the storm is already inside.

The purge is not happening in isolation. In 2025 alone, Chinese authorities investigated over 1,000,000 people for corruption and political deviation. That is 60% more than just two years earlier. Those numbers are not about cleaning house. They are about fear as policy. The Communist Party sits above the law, beyond the reach of a free press, policing itself with purges instead of sunlight. Cadres retreat into tight circles, trust evaporates, reformers freeze. Power becomes lonely, and loneliness breeds bad decisions.

Nowhere is this more dangerous than inside the 2,000,000-strong People’s Liberation Army, the force meant to fight China’s wars. The PLA’s own newspaper accused the fallen generals of insubordination and of poisoning the army’s “political ecology.” That phrase stuck with me. It sounds clean, even noble, but it hides something ugly. Politics is now valued more than experience. Loyalty matters more than judgment. Obedience outranks truth. A sharp knife in the wrong hands still cuts the holder.

On paper, China looks terrifying. Its navy is larger than America’s. Pentagon estimates say Beijing plans 9 aircraft carriers by 2035, compared with America’s 11. Its nuclear arsenal is projected to reach at least 1,000 warheads by 2030, double what it held in 2023. Hardware sells fear. Numbers impress. But wars are not spreadsheets. They are chaos, friction, and human error. And that is where Xi’s purge becomes truly dangerous.

I keep coming back to Taiwan. American officials believe Xi has ordered the PLA to be capable of taking the island by 2027. Some analysts think Taiwan could not hold out long without outside help. The United States approved an $11.1bn arms package in December, but there is no treaty that forces Washington to fight. That gray zone is exactly where miscalculation thrives. When leaders believe their own propaganda, they roll the dice with other people’s lives.

The seas around China are already a pressure cooker. The Taiwan Strait is a constant flashpoint. The East China Sea simmers with disputes involving Japan. The South China Sea stays hot with overlapping claims. Chinese jets buzz Western aircraft. Warships shadow each other at dangerous distances. One collision, one misread signal, one nervous trigger finger, and the world holds its breath. In moments like that, a leader needs advisers who can say “stop.” Who will say it now?

Zhang Youxia once could. He had something rare among China’s top brass: real war experience, earned fighting Vietnam in 1979. That conflict should still haunt Beijing. China went in confident and came out bloodied, exposed, and humiliated. Superior numbers and revolutionary pride did not save it from logistics failures, poor coordination, and fierce resistance. Overconfidence turned into a lesson written in graves. The past does not forgive those who ignore it.

I also think of Russia. I think of Ukraine. Moscow marched in with swagger in 2022, expecting Kyiv to fall in 3 days. It did not. Russian forces underestimated Ukrainian resistance, overestimated their own readiness, and paid the price. By 2024, independent estimates put Russian casualties, killed and wounded, well over 1000,000. Equipment losses ran into the thousands. Sanctions hollowed out the economy. Prestige burned. Xi has studied this war. He has heard Western leaders warn him what an attack on Taiwan would do to China’s economy. And yet he is building a system that punishes dissent and rewards silence.

Since 2022, Xi has ejected 5 of the 6 uniformed officers on the Central Military Commission, the PLA’s highest command body. What remains is Xi himself and a political commissar focused on fighting graft, not fighting wars. This is not a team. It is an echo chamber. Imagine a crisis over Taiwan erupting at sea or in the air. Missiles lock on. Ships maneuver. Allies debate. Phones ring. Xi asks for advice. Who tells him the truth? Who tells him the risks are enormous even with all that shiny hardware?

I write this  because neutrality feels dishonest. I am worried. Not because China is weak, but because it is strong and increasingly blind. Yes-men in uniform are not a sign of confidence. They are a confession of fear. Power that cannot tolerate dissent is power afraid of its own reflection.

Xi prizes obedience. He is 72. Few doubt he will use the next party conference to cement his rule. Stability, he will say. Certainty, his spokesmen will repeat. But certainty without humility is a trap. History shows it again and again, from Vietnam to Ukraine. Overconfidence is the deadliest weapon a leader can wield.

If Xi truly wants to secure China’s future, he should remember this: armies do not fail first on the battlefield. They fail first in the mind, when truth is replaced by loyalty and caution by applause. The world should worry, not because war is inevitable, but because the guardrails are being quietly removed.

 

 

This article is part of a larger idea I explore in “China’s Military Mirage: The Overestimated Power of the People's Liberation Army (PLA)”, one of my short books on Google Play. Read it here on Google Play: China’s Military Mirage.

 

 

Two Million by Spring: Russia’s Slow Collapse

 

When casualties reach two million by spring, the Russia-Ukraine war stops being war and becomes a warning: nuclear powers can rot, panic, and explode outward.

I keep staring at the number because it refuses to behave like a number. Two million. It doesn’t sit quietly on the page. It paces. It sweats. It growls. By spring of 2026, this year, that figure may stop being a warning and start being a fact: 2 million soldiers killed, injured, or missing in the Russia-Ukraine war. Not rumors. Not vibes. A body count so obscene that history itself flinches and looks away.

This isn’t a war anymore. Wars have arcs, fronts, victories, endings. This is something colder and uglier, a slow-motion collapse of a nuclear-armed power bleeding itself dry in public while the world pretends the math still makes sense. I hear people say “attrition” like it’s a strategy. Attrition isn’t a strategy. Attrition is what happens when nobody knows how to stop the machine and nobody wants to admit they built it.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies didn’t scream when it released its numbers. It didn’t have to. The data did the screaming. By their estimate, Russia alone suffered about 1.2 million casualties between February 2022 and December 2025, including as many as 325,000 dead. Ukraine, with a smaller army and population, absorbed between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties, including up to 140,000 deaths. Stack those numbers together and you’re already flirting with 1.8 million. Keep the current pace, and spring tips it over the edge. Two million. The kind of figure that turns generals into accountants and soldiers into inventory.

I have seen this movie before, just in black and white. In World War II, the Soviet Union lost an estimated 26 to 27 million people, military and civilian combined. That trauma became the spine of modern Russian identity. “Never again” wasn’t a slogan. It was a scar. And yet here we are, watching Russia rack up the largest military losses suffered by any major power since that war, all for territorial gains measured not in miles, but in meters. Fifteen to 70 meters a day in key offensives. That’s not a blitz. That’s a funeral procession inching forward while the band keeps playing.

I imagine a soldier on the line muttering to himself, half joking, half broken, asking what kind of empire moves at the speed of a parking lot. Nobody answers him. The drones buzz. The artillery answers instead.

What makes this worse isn’t just the scale. It’s the silence. Moscow hasn’t released meaningful casualty figures since September 2022, when it claimed just under 6000 deaths. That number has aged like milk in the sun. Kremlin spokespeople dismiss outside estimates as unreliable, insisting only the Ministry of Defense can speak the truth. But the ministry doesn’t speak. It locks the door and turns up the radio. In the gap, independent groups like Mediazona and the BBC have pieced together over 160,000 confirmed Russian deaths by name, using obituaries, social media posts, and local records. That’s not propaganda. That’s bookkeeping done with trembling hands.

Ukraine plays its own careful game with numbers, constrained by morale and security. President Zelenskyy said in early 2025 that more than 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed. Even that figure, sober and restrained, points to a nation paying in blood for every square inch it refuses to surrender. When a smaller country absorbs half a million casualties, that’s not resilience alone. That’s existential hemorrhage.

People love to say Russia is in no rush to settle. Of course it isn’t. Empires rarely hurry to admit they’re shrinking. But the battlefield tells a different story. A 1000-kilometer front line locked into a grinding stalemate. Advances slower than almost any major offensive in the last century. This isn’t momentum. This is inertia powered by bodies. When the drumbeat doesn’t change, the march becomes a trance.

Meanwhile, the war leaks into everything. Apartment blocks on the outskirts of Kyiv turn into graves overnight. Ballistic missiles and swarms of drones trade places in the sky like vultures arguing over a carcass. Oil depots burn. Infrastructure bleeds. Civilians die in twos and nines, small numbers that add up to a permanent ache. The front line isn’t just a line on a map. It’s a pressure wave rippling outward, warping politics, energy markets, food supplies, and nerves.

And hovering over all of it is the unspoken nightmare. Russia is not just any wounded giant. It’s a nuclear-armed one. History tells us what happens when great powers feel cornered. Imperial Japan in 1945 kept fighting as cities burned. Nazi Germany fought street by street long after defeat was certain. The lesson isn’t that desperation guarantees escalation. The lesson is that rational cost-benefit thinking erodes under humiliation and loss. A drowning man doesn’t negotiate with the water.

I hear the counterargument already. Russia has manpower. Russia has depth. Russia can sustain this. That line worked in 1943. It worked because the Soviet Union was fighting for survival against an invading army that aimed to exterminate it. Today, the story is inverted. Russia is the invader, and the losses aren’t forging unity so much as hollowing out a generation. Demographers have warned for years about Russia’s shrinking population. Add hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed men of fighting age, and the long-term damage becomes structural. Economies don’t just lose workers. They lose fathers, engineers, teachers, and future births. You can draft men. You can’t draft time.

The truly terrifying part is how normalized this has become. Two million casualties doesn’t trigger emergency summits. It triggers panel discussions. Analysts talk about “sustainability” as if this were a supply chain problem. I catch myself doing it too, slipping into abstraction because the raw truth is unbearable. But abstraction is the luxury of those not being shelled.

By spring, when the ground thaws and the casualty count likely crosses that line history swore it would never see again, we’ll still argue about credibility and narratives. We’ll still debate who’s winning. But the ledger will be clear. A nuclear-armed power will have sacrificed more soldiers than any major power since World War II for gains so small they have to be measured with a ruler. That’s not strength. That’s decay with a flag draped over it.

I don’t pretend to know how this ends. Wars like this don’t end cleanly. They curdle. They metastasize. They dare someone to make a catastrophic choice just to break the stalemate. That’s the reckoning lurking behind the number. Two million isn’t just a count of the dead and broken. It’s a warning flare arcing into the dark, telling us the rules are dissolving. When the graveyard grows faster than the map, the map is lying.

And if we keep pretending this is just another conflict, history won’t forgive us. History already knows where this road leads. It’s been here before. It just hoped we’d learned enough not to walk it again.

 

 

I couldn’t let this go, so I wrote “Putin’s Dangerous Gamble: How the Invasion of Ukraine Backfired on Russia”  to work through it honestly and completely. Read it here on Google Play: Putin’s Dangerous Gamble.

 

 

Obi Aguocha Must Be Out of His Mind, for Defending Fear as Freedom in Anambra

 

Every Monday, Anambra buries billions—and Lawmaker Aguocha brings the shovel. Fear rules, and fools call it peace.

I have heard a lot of bad takes in Nigerian politics, but Obi Aguocha’s statement about the Monday sit-at-home policy takes the crown, the robe, and the whole damn throne. What Lawmaker Obi Aguocha is saying is complete nonsense. I mean, not the polite kind of nonsense—the full-blown, head-scratching, jaw-dropping type that makes you wonder if the man even lives on the same planet as the rest of us. Either he’s too dumb to understand how this ridiculous Monday sit-at-home order is destroying businesses and jobs in Anambra State, or he needs to see a doctor for a cognitive check. Because there’s no other explanation for a supposed lawmaker defending paralysis as policy and fear as freedom.

For three years now, the South-East Nigeria (comprising of Anambra, Enugu, Imo, Abia, and Ebonyi States) has lived under a weekly hostage situation dressed up as solidarity. Every Monday, markets lock up, schools shut down, and streets look like scenes from a post-apocalyptic movie. It’s like God pressed pause on development and forgot to unfreeze it. All this because a group of gun-toting thugs decided that staying home equals liberation. And instead of fighting for sanity, Obi Aguocha is here defending it like it’s some sacred cultural festival.

Let’s be real. The Monday sit-at-home order started as a protest—fair enough. Nnamdi Kanu’s arrest stirred emotions, and the people wanted justice. But what began as a political statement has become an economic suicide note. IPOB itself has disowned it. Yet every week, lives are lost, wallets emptied, and the future mortgaged. The South-East bleeds over ₦10 billion ($7.10 million) every Monday, according to economic estimates. Multiply that by 52 weeks and you’ve got a region bleeding half a trillion naira annually. That’s not activism—that’s assisted collapse.

Walk through the cities of Onitsha or Awka in Anambra State on a Monday morning, and you’ll see the real tragedy—empty roads, closed markets, and frightened faces. The smell of fear mixes with dust and hopelessness. Schools sit like abandoned shells, and children stare out of windows learning nothing but silence. That’s what Aguocha calls “peace.” That’s not peace—that’s paralysis with a press release.

And then he opens his mouth to scold Governor Soludo for trying to end it. He says Soludo’s actions are “unconstructive” and “counterproductive.” Oh really? So doing nothing while the region burns is “constructive”? Maybe Aguocha would prefer Soludo to organize a committee to study the philosophy of fear instead of fixing it. He even said Soludo “unleashed terror on silent agitators.” Silent agitators? My foot. The only thing silent in Anambra on Mondays are the gunshots—right before they hit their targets.

Aguocha talks about “rights.” He says Soludo can’t compel traders to open their shops. Fine. But can criminals compel them to close them? Can fear now dictate market hours in a supposed democracy? The irony is suffocating. When a man defends oppression because it wears his tribe’s uniform, he’s not defending justice—he’s enabling tyranny. Aguocha’s words drip with hypocrisy disguised as concern. Let’s call this what it is: cowardice polished with grammar. The man talks about “fragile peace” like we’re talking about fine china. The South-East doesn’t have peace—it has quiet terror. It’s the kind of quiet you hear before a storm, the kind that fools think is stability. Markets have died. Transport workers starve. Teachers cry. Businesses flee. And Aguocha calls this “progress.” Someone should check his pulse; he might be mistaking rigor mortis for calm.

Governor Soludo may not be perfect, but at least he’s doing something. The man is standing in the fire while others are roasting plantain from a distance. He’s trying to drag Anambra out of a ditch dug by fearmongers and opportunists. And Aguocha? He’s too busy lecturing him about “rights” from the comfort of Abuja, probably sipping coffee while Anambra counts coffins.

When Aguocha says Soludo’s policies could “reignite violence,” it’s almost laughable. Brother, the violence never stopped. It’s been ongoing—just quiet enough for people like you to pretend it’s peace. You don’t end terror by tiptoeing around it; you end it by crushing it. Ask Colombia. Ask Northern Ireland. Ask anyone who’s ever had to choose between fear and freedom. The only people who benefit from this nonsense are criminals and cowards—and Aguocha sounds far too sympathetic to both.

The sit-at-home order has turned the South-East into a weekly ghost town. Investors have fled. Students are falling behind. People can’t feed their families. You can’t build a nation where half the week is wasted on fear. And yet this lawmaker—who should be fighting for development—chooses to defend decay. If stupidity were a currency, he’d be a billionaire by now.

And let’s talk about his obsession with “silent agitators.” These so-called agitators have burned buses and businesses, killed teachers, and forced children to stay home. They’ve made Mondays a curse word. But Aguocha sees them as misunderstood heroes. Maybe he should spend one Monday walking through Onitsha without security. Let’s see how long that sympathy lasts when the first gunshot rings.

There’s a Yoruba proverb that says, “If a man lets his eyes close because he doesn’t want to see evil, evil will find him in his sleep.” That’s what Aguocha is doing—sleeping through disaster and calling it peace. The South-East doesn’t need silence; it needs sanity. It doesn’t need lectures from Abuja; it needs leadership on the ground.

Soludo is right to challenge this madness. You can’t rebuild a society while obeying the orders of ghosts. You can’t educate children by keeping them home out of fear. You can’t revive commerce while kneeling to criminals. Ending this forced sit-at-home Mondays isn’t oppression—it’s liberation. It’s not tyranny—it’s therapy.

So yes, what Obi Aguocha is saying is complete nonsense. Either he’s too dumb to see the damage, or he’s too comfortable to care. But here’s the truth: no region has ever prospered by normalizing fear. Mondays in Anambra should be for business, not for burial. If Aguocha can’t grasp that, then maybe he should take his own advice and stay at home—permanently. Because the South-East Nigeria needs thinkers, not talkers. It needs builders, not bureaucrats. And if defending insanity is his idea of wisdom, then, truly, the man’s head needs a ‘brain’ reboot.

 

 On a different but equally important note, readers who enjoy thoughtful analysis may also find the titles in my “Brief Book Series”  worth exploring. Read it here on Google Play: Brief Book Series.