Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Short Take on What I’d Be Doing To Prepare for the Pending Economic S**t-show

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On November 17, 2025

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I’ll keep this mercifully short. One commenter in my Friday night econ news post asked, in a kind of oblique way, what would I do in this environment.

Okay, I’ll play — but not without stating firmly and loudly that I am not dispensing investment advice, nor am I licensed any longer to do so. We clear on that?

A liquidity crisis is already here. But this may not be like your father’s ’08 crisis. In ’08, the USD rose — counterintuitively — against every other major currency. Why? The need for USD to cover credit losses was global, and NYC became a literal blackhole for USD. I made an absolute killing on the USD during the ’08 crisis, and afterwards even more on the banks and zero coupon bonds. I made several people fortunes they still retain.

But the crisis now unraveling doesn’t look like one of confidence, it looks like an animal out of a medieval grotesque, certainly not something the Fed can backstop.

Fire in the hole!

Sure, the Fed might do QE. But Congress can’t do a bailout with almost $1trillion in interest payments on US debt imminent and Trump offering $2k bribes to every citizen in America. It’s impossible. What would one call inflation with QE?

What would you call that?

Hyperinflationary?

It’ll be damned ugly whatever happens; whatever you want to call it.

Were I still advising investors I’d be putting them in Yuan interest bearing accounts, I’d be buying silver on the dips, JPY, SKW, and buying way out of the money puts on S&P 500 and NASDAQ. In short, if you can find an affordable way to buy puts on things that are impossible to happen, buy them, because one or two will hit big, and you’ll rake in the money. 

Silver’s in what’s called a secular bull market, not a cyclical one — cyclical means three to five year cycles, whereas secular means, “We don’t fucking have any idea how long ‘dis bitch is going up or down.” This particular secular bull is being driven by a massive externality: China’s draconian export controls of the metal. The problem, right now, from a technical trading perspective, is a failed double-top breakout. This is bearish in the near term, so an under $40 buying opportunity might be realistic. As a side note: China has a VERY long history with the white metal, but not so much the yellow one. I can recommend a good book if you are interested. 

You can invest in the Yuan in several US banks/investment firms. Some accounts are interest bearing, others are just a pure play on the currency. If you want specifics, send me a DM. But the current T-bill replacement is silver, but buy it under $45 if you can. Under $40 is best.

But, for fuck’s sake, avoid paying premiums for silver. What does that mean? If you buy silver coins, buy 99 percent silver grade coins — not the overpriced ones from the US Mint. Buy the off-market ones. Otherwise, the US silver cartel will clean out your gains before you even begin.

Some Thoughts on Epstein’s Non-moral Virtues

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On November 17, 2025

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Obviously, Epstein was scum of the lowest order; a blackmailer, a pimp, a pedophile, and a traitor. (Working with Mossad to blackmail American politicians was surely treason. And given that Israel is a genocidal, religious ethno-state, possibly the most evil country in the world, well…)

But like many effective evil people, Epstein had his virtues. I found this mix of documents from Noam Chomsky particularly interesting:


And, as Glenn points out:

For what it’s worth, I very much doubt that Chomsky had sex with underage girls. And that’s the thing, Epstein was not a one-note pimp and blackmailer, he was a charismatic social chameleon. What Chomsky wanted was intellectual conversation, inside information on politics, and to meet and converse with interesting scientists and scholars (and money, everyone wants money).

So that’s what Epstein gave him. Among scholars, Epstein was scholarly. Among artists, an aesthete. And yet, he was best friends with Donald Trump, who is the philistine’s philistine, a man who is not just without culture, but whose taste can only be described as tacky. A man who thinks a golden shitter is classy and who has probably never read a book.

People of great evil have virtues. Those virtues are morally neutral but real. Epstein was extremely smart and charismatic, and he was able to read people like a book and give them what they wanted. They all thought he was their friend, even as he used them. (And who knows? He may well have actually felt friendly towards a few of them. Certainly, his relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell appears to have been genuinely affectionate.)

Hitler was extremely brave and, until he burnt out on amphetamines, intelligent. Genghis Khan was brave, a military and organizational genius, and routinely made his former enemies into his most important subordinates (Subotai, for example), and none of them ever betrayed him. He inspired an insane level of loyalty.

Bravery, intelligence, loyalty, energy, and even certain types of honor are all virtues, but they are morally neutral virtues; they amplify whatever you are, making you more effective. Without bravery and energy, being good or evil doesn’t matter: the person is ineffective. With them, they become saints or monsters.

Epstein appears to have had genuine charm and social ability, as well as a surfeit of brains. That’s what made him so effectively evil. The wealth and generosity with it didn’t hurt, of course, but he was so valuable to Mossad, and many others, exactly because of his gifts.

This lesson, that evil is often comes wrapped in an attractive and impressive package is one we regularly forget. Fair enough, in the Age of Trump — a dribbling idiot who was voted for despite his known leering at teenage girls, his “grab them by the pussy” comment, rape, and his long record of stiffing people who worked for him is the opposite. Any idiot should have known he was self-serving scum who would betray his followers repeatedly.

But we’ve also had plenty of attractive evil. Reagan. Bill Clinton (not his wife, she has the charisma of dead flounder), Obama — the purveyor of hopium. Clinton and Obama were energetic, smart, and charismatic. Reagan was stupid, but charismatic, with a folksy charm that made people think he cared about them, when all he wanted to do (other than an admirable hatred of nukes) was hurt everyone who wasn’t rich. (And then there’s Tony Blair, who now looks like Satan after a debauch, but once seemed so shiny.)

Evil is often attractive. Seductive. We are warned about that often in myth, but again, and again, we forget. Let Epstein remind us.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 16, 2025

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On November 16, 2025

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 16, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

Elite impunity

The Corrupt Roots of America’s Elite Run Deep

David Kurtz, November 13, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]

In reviewing a portion of the 20,000-plus Jeffrey Epstein emails released yesterday, I was left astonished not so much by the chumminess he enjoyed with elites even after he’d served time for soliciting prostitution with a minor but by the messages’ flagrantness, their casual disregard, and their indifference to consequence.

It was perfectly captured by political scientist Ed Burmila: “The crisis of elite impunity that is ruining our society cannot be more clearly or convincingly demonstrated than with the fact that all of these people wrote all this stuff into an email and hit Send.”

Impunity. That’s the word I was looking for.

It is the same impunity that got us Trump. Like Epstein, Trump built a career on a transactional chumminess, mutual self-indulgence, and an alarmingly high tolerance level for misbehavior by the layers of political, business, media, and cultural elites surrounding him.

At it’s most extreme, the misbehavior manifested in both men as abusive sexual misconduct. It’s one of the oddities of this whole spectacle that the question is whether Trump — already an admitted pussy grabber, held liable as a sexual assaulter, and prone to traipsing through his pageant dressing rooms to gawk at young flesh — was also engaged in another kind of sexual misconduct, as if stacking revelations high enough will finally overcome the elite impunity that’s cosseted Trump for more than 40 years….

Liberal Elites Kicked the Door Wide Open for Trump’s Flagrant Corruption 

Dylan Gyauch-Lewis, November 9 2025 [The Intercept]

…While Trumpian corruption is striking in frequency, scale, and just how routine it is starting to feel, this administration was the logical endpoint of the long-standing tradition of elite impunity. The second Trump administration is a striking monument to governmental misconduct, but the ground was broken long ago, with both parties laying the foundation. For the past half century, corporate and white-collar crime have gone largely unenforced. This was the result of both a widespread shift in views of governance (à la the Reagan Revolution) and a coordinated plan orchestrated to enable private wealth to hijack our democracy, as David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher documented in their new book “Master Plan,” building on a podcast of the same name.

Trump himself is a byproduct of the wealthy being empowered to violate the law. Seemingly his entire pre-government career was predicated on getting away with gaming bankruptcy law, committing widespread financial fraud, and racial discrimination. Now, in government, he is employing the “blitzscaling” model pioneered by firms like Uber to break the law faster than anyone can keep up with….

The Great Recession was a turning point; the extent of corporate lawbreaking in the financial sector was laid bare. And, famously, hardly anyone ever went to jail. Obama-era regulators, in many ways the acme of our last half-century of the hands-off approach to ruling-class misconduct, earned rebuke and scorn as “the chickenshit club,” afraid to square up against the powerful, if not overtly committed to serve elite interests. Since 2008, it has only become more apparent that the wealthy play by an entirely different set of rules.

Trump’s first election was, in part, built on the argument that he knew “how to play the game.” In this telling, his ability to break the rules was actually an asset because he would break them for you rather than just for the powerful. It was always a dubious pitch, but it’s understandable why — faced with the choice between someone trying to convince you the game that’s obviously been fixed is actually not rigged, and someone who tells you how they cheat and promise to help you get ahead a little bit — people would gravitate toward the latter. Part of the early MAGA mythos was built on resignation to the fact that our rule of law is fundamentally perverted to create two parallel tracks of justice: an unforgiving, punitive, carceral system for most people, and a cushy, consequence-free dinner party circuit for the ruling class.

Dethroning Trump will not be enough to restore real rule of law; the Biden administration is proof enough of that. Donald Trump was excised from the White House with historically bad public sentiment in the immediate aftermath of a failed coup. Under Biden, the Garland Justice Department tried to wind the clock back to 2016 and resume operating the way establishment politicians did in the 1990s and 2000s. It failed spectacularly, allowing bad actors like Elon Musk to grow ever more powerful while continuing to flout the law with impunity. The result was an embittered Trump who faced no real repercussions for his corruption — the worst-case scenario….

To dislodge the hold that corruption has on our government and restore the rule of law, Democrats will need to decide who they really are — and who they’ll fight for.

[TW: More accurately, Democrats will need to decide who they’ll fight against.]

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

We now know why Trump’s DOJ prosecuted Epstein in 2019—and why he died in Trump’s custody

Dean Obeidallah, Nov 13, 2025

The new Epstein document dump tell us many things. But my takeaway is this: Jeffrey Epstein in 2018/early 2019 was increasingly telling people he knew how “dirty Donald” was, that Trump “knew about the girls” and that “I am the one able to take him down.” That means Epstein poised a huge problem to Trump’s 2020 re-election—and more.

To protect Trump, his DOJ suddenly charged Epstein in July 2019. They then denied Epstein bail—forcing him to remain in the custody of the Trump regime. And just a few weeks later, Epstein conveniently committed “suicide.” Trump’s Epstein problem—at least for the 2020 campaign—was over.

Now I will concede there is a level of speculation to this theory. That is why I’m not writing it as a statement of fact but rather one of opinion. But if you see the facts and timeline, it’s clear a full investigation needs to be conducted—either now by a Democratic state Attorney General or by House Democrats if they win the 2026 midterm….

 

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Open Thread

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On November 15, 2025

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Your Late Friday–ermmm, Early Saturday–Dose of Crap Economic News

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On November 14, 2025

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~by Sean Paul Kelley

Good heavens, the economic bad news is piling up like a bad car wreck. So, let’s do some serious rubbernecking, folks, because there is a lot of fucked up shit to watch. Just don’t step in it, okay?

We begin with widepsread reports of large institutional investors (hedge funds, investment banks, boutique investment firms) selling off services stocks like leisure, luxury, hotels, and some retail outlets, like Home Depot. That’s a lot of cash leaving equities. But for what safe harbor? It certainly isn’t private credit, like Blackrock which lost 100 percent on one investment. UBS also lost 100 percent on another private credit deal. Now, Blackrock lost $150 million on the deal, which, for Blackrock, is naught but a silly little rounding error, but as they say, $150 million here, a $150 million there and pretty soon you’re talking real money. That cash won’t go into US treasuries, that’s for damn sure. Seriously, who’d invest in US dollars? I wouldn’t fuck a US treasury with Magic Johnson’s dick.

Yeah, I said it. It needed to be said.

Want news even more ominous: JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and my alma mater (for full disclosure) Morgan Stanley were the lead underwriters of a $1 billion increase in AI firm Coreweave’s $2.5 billion revolving credit facility. The term sheet expands the maturity date from 2028 to 2029. Just a year? Did they attempt any due dililgence on Coreweave’s burn rate? It’s gotta be a fuckton fast — see, Americans can do metrics. FTW!

But really, you know that kind of high-tech equipment becomes obsolete and depreciates faster than that loan reaches maturity. There is zero, zilch, nada, niente, nyet, nein, no way Coreweave’s earning increases that rapidly. To quote Yoda, “Coreweave, Apple certainly not you are.”

Apple’s so profitable it prints money.

I mean, seriosuly, Christ on a popsicle stick: Where’s the due diligence? Do investment firms even have compliance departments any more? Where are the regulators?

Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.

But it gets worse: On Nov. 4, Meta agreed to an off-balance sheet $27 billion loan (also known as a Special Purpose Entity, henceforth SPE) from Blue Owl Capital (OBCD). This is financial shenanigans and identical to the accounting legerdemain that led to Enron’s ruin. Pay attention, people. This is getting ugly. Enron butt-hurt ugly is how bad this is starting to look. Let me break this down for you, in case you forgot. An SPE is off-balance sheet. That means the company is under no obligation to report it on its SEC required filings. Get it now? Investors have absolutely no way of knowing how much off-balance sheet debt a particular company has. SPEs = bad juju.

To wit: Oracle has a debt-to-equity ratio approaching 500 percent, and that’s just what’s on the their balance sheet. Has Oracle borrowed any money where the debt is accounted for in an SPE?

Guess what, folks? There is literally no way to know if Oracle has any SPE loans outstanding.

My bet: They do.

Speaking of shit credit, or is it credit shit?

Whatever. Moving on.

JP Morgan notes AI-linked debt now accounts for 14 percent of its investment grade corporate index (CGI IG), surpassing US commercial banks as the dominant sector. Who the fuck knew US commercial banks have turned into stingy mozafukas? Can haz dolerz, puleeze?

“What does it mean?” you query, doing your best to ignore my increasingly insulting expletives.

“I know I’m right about the housing market,” he says, repeating it like a mantra.

Well, it means that not only are AI firms taking on loads of traditionally-financed debt, they are also bulking up with the anabolic steroid equivalent of debt: unknowable and NON-REPORTABLE SPE debt. They pump this iron to finance AI hyper-scaling. No wonder the main character of the (mostly) true movie, The Big Short, Michael Burry, is closing his fund. Dude shorted Palantir and Nvidia and got caught with his pants down. Sadly, Burry forgot John Maynard Keynes keen paroemia (from the ancient Greek, meaning maxim or proverb) from when he lost all his money in the 1929 crash: “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

Also: Beware neologisms created on Wall Street. Today’s new phrase is “data center credit.” Sounds positive, aye? It ain’t. It’s a bullshit phrase referring to debt financed for the AI sector by private credit shops. Tons and tons of bullshit, yes?

“Ha-ha,” he said. “Stupid, stupid!”

There is also news that insurers are placing more than 50 percent of the assets needed to guarantee/backstop annuities and life insurance policies into private credit shops. This is a terrible idea. Annuities are insurance policies designed to pay out in the event you live too long. Life insurance is, well, insurance against not living long enough. This is stupid. Epic stupid and civilization-ending risky. It’s like giving the nuclear football to Beevis and Butthead stupid.

Oil prices are soft/down to flat. Texas rig counts are down again this month (rig counts are considered a leading economic indicator).

Now to news out of the Big Apple tonight, that absolutely shrivels me testes. Say it with me like a pirate! As my little sister used to say to me, “You are so not fun.”

Anywho: The head of the NY Fed convened an emergency meeting of bank heads to discuss one of the Fed’s key lending facilities. I’m almost certain this is in response to the rising private credit losses, and how they resemble Bear Stearns blowing up two subprime hedge-funds in 2007, the precise moment the 2008 financial crisis began.

Most distressing is today’s down volume high. It’s one like we’ve never seen before. The downward volume and amount of stocks closing on the downside blew out a 35 year high. This screams louder than Rob Halford singing “Victim of Changes” live at the US Festival in 1983. It’s also an indicator of deeper stresses affecting equity markets.

This is what we now call, in the algorithm-trade dominated age, a mechanical sell-off. All of Wall Street’s proprietary algorithms saw red and initiated the mother of all sell offs. This already spectacularly, terrifyingly narrow advance is getting narrower, and it is growing more brittle by the day. Why worry? Are markets worried about private credit shops lending to off-balance sheet AI SPEs? Is liquidity getting tighter? Risk limits getting ripped to shreds? Doesn’t really matter. It’s a big signal that should overpower the noise. But it won’t. 

Wall Street’s useful idiots will do their duty and cheer until the real crisis begins to unravel. Sooner now, than later. You can bank on that. Just don’t do it in US dollars. That would be dumb. Epic-like dumb. 

Piling the shit higher and higher: Sallie Mae off-loaded $6bn worth of student loans to KKR recently. How better to clean up a balance sheet than selling debt with a 10 percent non-performing rate? Makes sense to me, but I’m just some guy in pajamas.

More great economic news: Large corporate bankruptcy filings, as of mid-November, rise to a 15 year high. That’s higher than the COVID-19 crisis. To date, 655 public companies have filed for bankruptcy. Good times, aye?

Finally, a positive thought, in a manner of speaking. The only thing the equity markets have going in their favor right now is this: the almost impossible to prevent or deny Christmas rally. It’s damn near as reliable as the Monsoons.

So, if the econ shit does hit the fan, it’ll happen after January 1.

American “AI” Is a “No Win” for Society

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On November 13, 2025

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Let’s lay out the big picture for LLM-style AI.

It is a statistical prediction of what should be the next word or symbol. That is why it required so much data to train and why, even if we had the tech, we couldn’t have created it 20 years ago: There wasn’t enough data in digital format. It is not intelligent. It is not conscious. It is just an algo trained with a TON of data and which used massive amounts of processing power (and thus electricity) to produce results. Hallucinations are part of the tech, they cannot be eliminated, which means that LLM “AI” will always make mistakes and many will almost certainly be the sort of mistakes trained humans rarely make.

The current build-out in the US involves only a few companies, all in a huge circle jerk, and they make up 40% of the entire public stock market’s value. Neither Open AI nor Anthropic actually make a profit, and it costs more to do a query than is made even from paying customers, let alone all the free ones. There is absolutely no question in my mind that they are in a bubble.

The maximalist claim for “AI” is that it will become so smart it can replace at least 40% of jobs. (Or smart enough.) The more realistic claim is that it’s good for some things and can replace some workers by making those who remain more efficient. Plus, after all, most tech companies don’t care if their products are shit as long as they make money. See Google for “who cares what you think, it’s us or no one. You’ll use our product no matter how shit it is.” (Ironically, Search is one of the few things AI is better at than incumbents.)

So here’s the thing: no matter whether AI is a real tech or not, it’s in a bubble. (The internet was real, it had a bubble.) No one actually knows who’s going to make money from AI. The big internet winners (Amazon, Facebook, Google) came after the dot-com bust. The Feds may backstop and/or bailout, if they do, it will hurt everyone not involved.

If I am wrong about AI and the maximalist claims are true then what will happen is a massive replacement of tens of millions of workers. Since those people will now have almost no income, that will lead to a classic demand depression. A great depression like the one in the 1930s. The only way out would be a massive guaranteed annual income. Given our rulers and ideology, we’d probably have food riots long before they realized they were risking their own throats.

If it is a real tech, but not that big a deal, it will lead to a shittier economy where even more mistakes are made, and it’s even harder to find a human being to fix anything. Which is what tech wants: they want everything automated and certainly they don’t want to have real customer service.

And, if it is a real tech, as I have noted before, China is actually going to win. Their models are 20 to 30 times cheaper to run, and are open source. If your business uses AI you will use open source if  you have half a brain, because with open source one of two major providers (Anthropic/Open AI) can’t just raise prices or change the model. To use closed source would be so stupid that even most American CEOs will not do it. Certainly no one with sense outside American vassal swarm will be so stupid.

So:

  1. Maximal AI leads to a great depression.
  2. Moderate AI leads to a shittier economy and shittier projects.
  3. There’s a bubble either way
  4. At the end of it China’s AI models will be used far more than American ones anyway. The US has already “lost” the AI race and can’t even see that. (Why? Fundamentally because they’re greedy and want to become billionaires of trillionaires. Genuine open source AI won’t print nearly as many rich people.

America can’t win at anything that matters any more, because the people who lead America are stupid, liars and so greedy they can’t think of anything but money. (See Trump, who is the avatar of all these vices.)

 

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Trump Has Achieved Biden Levels of Delusion and Denial

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On November 11, 2025

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I mean…

Not to mention firing BLS workers because he didn’t like the stats, which even Biden didn’t do. Given how dubious most BLS stats relating to inflation are already, that’s some impressive cope.

The fact is that prices keep going up, and if you aren’t in the golden AI Ponzi Scheme, the economy sucks.

Rosenberg Research did some analysis:

If they aren’t in expansion, they’re in contraction. This is also known as a recession, even if they didn’t shade it.

Some further supporting data:

 

Sure doesn’t look like those tariffs are causing manufacturing to flood back into the US, does it? Data centers and power station building are both AI-related, and as for hospitals, they are part of a protected oligopoly, or, they were until the ACA subsidies were cut. That’s not likely to be good for the health “industry,” which would be wonderful — except that people will die and suffer as a result. “Get rid of part of the shitty way we provide health care now without replacing it with something else.”

Anyway, unless you’re in a monopoly/oligopoly, and have some control, or you’re connected to the AI spigot, the economy is ass. And remember, major tech companies are engaging in mass layoffs, so just working for tech companies won’t protect you; the reverse is true. Unless you’re actively working on AI, you’re first to the gallows, as their workers are where they’re starting with the replacements.

For decades, I warned coders (“engineers”) that their days of being King Shit of Turd Island, pretending their skills were super-special, would eventually come to an end. The moment senior management could figure out how to replace them, they would. Unless you’re truly at the very top of your field, you’re always replaceable — mediocre isn’t as good as average, but it’s usually a LOT cheaper.

Anyway, the end days are nigh. There isn’t much left of the middle class in America, with little left for the rich to steal. The US either changes its politics radically (and Trump has always been a billionaire whose policies are good for billionaires) or the US continues its descent to becoming an unutterable shithole for about 80 percent of its population.

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On the Necessity of Bearing Witness

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On November 11, 2025

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Some stories are too difficult to tell in the hours, days or weeks after you experience them. Over time, however, they fester; begging to be told; becoming more insistent as the months and years pass. Some even begin to haunt a writer more and more, day by day until the tale must be told. Last night’s nightmare compels me to relate my tale now.

In late November of 2008 my bus from Vietnam to Siem Reap developed issues and required a stopover in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. It had been a sleeper bus so we were told we’d have a full day in the capital and the bus would leave the next day. Traveling plans like war plans rarely survive contact with the road. Growing ever more patient with detours, I inspected my guidebook, back when using Lonely Planet’s was a thing, and planned my day.

Let me be clear: I am no fan of war or atrocity porn, but I do understand its allure, although I am, thankfully, largely immune to it. On the other hand and possibly more importantly, I also recognize and empathize with the need to preserve places where truly reprehensible atrocities of human history occurred. They are to be preserved that future generations witness, feel, and have the opportunity to comprehend even the smallest portion of the enormity that took place underfoot. Maybe, just maybe, such lessons might be passed on to others who will never be able, or be allowed, to experience such hallowed ground.

Many practicing and secular Jews make pilgrimages to sites where the Shoah occurred. I’ve inquired why and each query has been answered universally. They describe a compulsion to bear witness, to honor the fallen, that they remain alive in living memory. Hard to argue with. Because the Armenian genocide occurred in a more dispersed manner Armenian pilgrims face much more significant hurdles. But, when possible Armenians likewise honor their ancestors. I cannot speak to what happened in Rwanda in 1994. I am aware of such places in Guatemala, heard in faint whispers where no gringos are welcome, nor visit, quite understandably.

How to explain how my choices that day were made? I may have only been 13 years-old but the 1984 movie ‘the Killing Fields’ left me with a powerful impression. An impression I recalled that November day and I felt oddly, inexplicably, duty-bound to see what I did not want to see. The killing fields were not my first stop that day however. That honor (poor word choice, I know) fell to the former interrogation and torture center of the Pol Pot Regime’s perceived enemies Tuol Sleng. Here I endured, what I can only describe as a feeling of almost unbearable witness to sickening crimes.

Two, and only two, examples need suffice.

First, in one room of the prison sat a metal frame bed where regime “enemies” were restrained. Once restrained, electrical leads were attached to the frame. Most expired for no reason at all. Sometimes the guards just left the room to have a smoke. At others they left to eat lunch. But most often the guards let them die because they knew no questions they might ask would be satisfactorily answered. They knew they were killing regular people, completely innocent.

The second example is this photo, a photo that haunts me to this day. The walls of Tuol Sleng are papered with them, all of them innocent and to this day they go unnamed. If you cannot feel the fear radiating from this photo you are devoid of the empathy gene.

In all I spent about two hours wandering through Tuol Sleng. I will never return.

But, my day was far from over. After walking out of Tuol Sleng I hailed a tuk-tuk and asked him to take me to the killing fields, which are about two kilometers outside of Phnom Penh. What I recall most vividly about this horrifying place was the care I had to take where I walked. (NOTE: click on the following links at your own risk.) The ground was uneven and I was told at the entrance to stay on the high ground, as the sunken spaces were mass graves. Christ, I shudder visualizing it even now. Then there were what I can only describe as large glass cases, best suited as terrariums for large pythons or boa constrictors. Each case was filled with one of the following: femurs of the dead, human ulnae and radii, and hip bones. Piling Pelion on top of Ossa, mason jars filled with human teeth sat atop each glass case. Finally, the Cambodians being Buddhists made a four story glass stupa—a Buddhist reliquary—filled with human skulls.

Towards the end of my increasingly heavy-hearted meanderings I noted crimson rays filling the sky. I hailed a cab to my hotel, shambled up to my room, slouched off my backpack and sank onto the bed, sighing deeply from emotional exhaustion. I didn’t know what I felt—except despair. I walked downstairs and asked where the nearest bar was. Now, I am not one to drink alone; but, I confess that I was incapable of dealing with what I was feeling at the time. So, I sat down, alone and in silence and got drunk. Not tipsy, but drunk. I barely recall making it back to my room, but I did. The last thing I recall thinking before I passed out was, “I’m going to be haunted by this for a long time.”

The next morning after dreamless sleep, no ghosts woke me up. All that greeted me were overcast skies, a wicked hangover and my noon bus ticket to Seam Reap.

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