ALIENS!
December 2025
Roswell, New Mexico, the Alien Capital of the world. But should it be?
Roswell has claimed the fame and tourism from the UFO crash landing, but there is another side to the story.
What few know is that the crash did not occur in Roswell; the UFO crashed on a ranch outside Corona, New Mexico.
It was a hot day in July 1947, and it had thunder stormed pretty well the night before. William “Mack” Brazel decided it was bad enough that inspecting the ranch was required.
You can see your dog run away for an hour in this country, the New Mexico desert — hot, desolate, uninhabited, untouched by man or machine.
What Brazel stumbled upon forever changed the question: Is there life on other planets?
What looked like a flying saucer had crashed and spread metal debris all over his field. What would you do in this situation?
As ranchers do, Brazel and his neighbor, who was helping him, got to it and picked up debris. There was enough that it wouldn’t get done in a day.
Cell phones weren’t a thing in 1947, and even landlines were shared between multiple homesteads in this desolate part of the desert. Brazel had a long day of cleaning up metal debris and thought he should probably tell someone about this.
The one-time bar from 1947 is still standing, but it's now a laundromat.
When Brazel began telling his neighbors of the mysterious debris he found, it raised some eyebrows.
The debris was described as tin-foil-like; you could crumple it, and it would expand back to a firm structure.
In a small town like Corona with 170 people, word gets around pretty quickly, and it didn’t take long for the news to reach the sheriff.
Conveniently, Walker Air Force Base was just down the road, about 2 hours in Roswell. The sheriff made a call, and the rest is history.
What was once private land has now been purchased by the Federal government as BLM property, partly due to the number of visitors drawn to the starting point of modern-day UFO history.
Corona is busier these days with truckers and the largest wind farm in North America being built right outside of town.
I did make the trek out into the field where the UFO crashed. Talk about the middle of nowhere.
Today, all that is left is a concrete slab where a monument once stood, marking the crash site, but it has since been removed to deter visitors. Remnants of an old clay shack where some metal debris was stored until the government could get it to Roswell are out there.
The rock stacking is by some creative visitors using old clay shack stones.
For transparency, the crater next to the crash site could be disputed. There are more craters like this in the area.
If you would like details on how to reach the crash site, message me and I will be happy to assist.
A 50-year mortgage?
Earlier in November, we heard news of a 50-year mortgage, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
The housing market is more gridlocked than ever before in our lifetime, but a 50-year mortgage?
I do agree that something needs to be done. Owning your own home is one of the cornerstones of the American dream, and it is being taken away from generations.
But let’s run the numbers quick:
On The Money: Would a 50-year mortgage make homeownership easier — or riskier?
Making mortgage payments over five decades spreads the principal payments and can ease cash flow. On a $400,000 loan with 6.5% fixed annual percentage rate, your payment over 50 years is about $2,255 per month. By contrast, on a typical 30-year mortgage, you would pay about $2,528 per month. That works out to a savings of roughly $270 per month.
But over time you’ll be paying much more while increasing risks. The interest on a 50-year mortgage works out to about $953,000 versus $510,000 for the 30-year loan.
I am not a financial advisor, nor have I ever worked in the finance industry, but doubling your interest rate to save $270/month is very idiotic.
$270 is not going out to dinner two to three nights per month. $270 is saying no to a sports game. You can find ways to cut $270/month from your budget.
You won’t build any equity in your home until after year ten with a 50-year mortgage. That is ten years of payments going straight to the bank, and you get nothing.
The cost of living is the top issue among voters, and the Trump administration is desperate, as 71% of potential home buyers are pushing back major life decisions until they secure a home.
Financial trickery will not solve the problem.
At the end of the day, all this financial engineering gets old. You can’t outsmart producing materials and building things.
The US has been playing 4-D chess with ourselves at destroying a simple supply and demand market.
How to destroy the housing market:
There is a supply shortage of houses from the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008
PRINT A LOT OF MONEY year after year
Allow giant hedge funds and boomers to buy houses at ridiculously inflated prices to save the value of their dollars from so much money being printed.
Invest zero of the printed money in building more houses or securing cheaper supply chains for homebuilding.
I hear all the time, “housing is going to crash like 2008,” and I don’t see it.
Like previously mentioned, housing is a simple supply/demand market. In 2008, there was a HUGE supply surplus.
Before the GFC, in the widely famous book, The Big Short, strippers had four houses in FL because houses were going up everywhere, and financing them was as easy as signing your name with no money down.
That is not even close today. Nothing is moving on the market, and I was pulling my hair out on the financing with 20% down and six figures in my bank account.
The only way to fix this problem is to print more money to incentivize house building and to secure material supply chains to drive down material costs.
With 50-year mortgages and talks of 10-year auto loans, if you’re not buying Bitcoin and Gold, I’m not sure what you’re doing.
Pro-Immigration is Pro-Billionaire
Back to the cost of living, because it was a hot topic at Thanksgiving for most families.
After housing, another way to increase affordability is to raise wages.
With many markets at all-time highs, wages have not moved since the 1970s.
While I think both political parties, from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump, have waged war on low to middle-class wage earners, Donald Trump coming out against H-1B applications was a step in the right direction.
Enforcing a $100,000 fee on H-1B applications would force companies to hire Americans. These jobs provide living wages and even much better in some circumstances.
First of all, what is an H1-B visa? Straight from Google:
An H-1B is a non-immigrant visa for the U.S. that allows employers to temporarily hire foreign workers in specialty occupations. These jobs generally require a bachelor’s degree or higher in a specific field, such as engineering, technology, or medicine, and the applicant must have the degree or its equivalent. The initial visa is typically valid for three years and can be extended up to a maximum of six years.
One thing Trump is terrible at is teaching, and as a President, you need to be a teacher.
The reason the Republicans are against immigration is that it floods a country with cheap labor.
Cheap labor is a double-edged sword:
Millions of immigrants are willing to do the work for less than American citizens.
You are making the rich even richer because profit margins are higher due to cheap labor.
Jeff Bezos would have less money if he paid Americans $80,000 per year than he paid Somali immigrants $30,000/year in Amazon warehouses. Make sense?
This only works if Amazon can’t find people who accept the low wages. If they need people, they will have to pay more.
Bernie Sanders shows the depth of his economic knowledge in situations like this. Open borders make the rich richer. Politicians complain about billionaires, but then allow open borders.
If you really want to increase wages, support the middle class, and go after billionaires? Close the goddamn border and force them to pay higher wages.
It has nothing to do with race or discriminating against anyone.
But, Trump did what he does best. Come out with a hard-line stance on H-1B, then a few weeks later start backtracking. The famous TACO!
While the $100k fee still stands, Trump tried to schmooze his way through it, saying we need the H-1B folks for the following reasons:
Instead of Trump coming out with a hard stance and then backtracking once the critics come in, TEACH.
It’s the same thing with the Chinese foreign exchange students coming to the US for an education.
Trump initially said no more Chinese foreign exchange students at American universities, but quickly reconsidered when Xi made it a non-negotiable in trade talks.
We allow 600,000 Chinese exchange students to take the spots of American students in STEM fields (Science, technology, engineering, and math).
There is a reason Xi Jinping is forcing Donald Trump to allow Chinese students to study in America; our top universities are badass.
We have taught millions of Chinese students, and the thanks we have received are the disappearance of all our manufacturing jobs.
Trump has campaigned on putting America first, but the backtracking on H-1B visas and foreign exchange students is the opposite of that.
You need a middle class that can afford things to have a productive society.
Immigration and H-1B visas have temporarily disrupted that, while the issue of foreign exchange students isn’t helping.
Everyone should read Michael Green’s work on what it costs to live in America right now: My Life is a Lie.
In Green’s work, he argues that the current poverty line is $140,000 for a couple, and it’s hard to argue that if you get out and talk to people.
To bring up the Amazon warehouse jobs again, how much better shape would people be in financially if they could make even $70,000 at an Amazon warehouse? You’d have people lined up to work.
In building a prosperous society, the middle class is the foundation. Let’s start acting like it.
The US Won’t Get Rare Earths
Rare earths have been one of the biggest topics of the year and in my newsletter, and for good reason.
If rare earths run the military, China runs the US military.
The US and China are on the 10th trade deal of the year, so what can you really trust?
When you are in a position of power, you can do the things China does. Prolong talks and give up a little in the short-term to pause things in the long-term to reevaluate to determine what is actually a smart move.
China hatches plan to keep US military from getting its rare earth magnets
China plans to ease the flow of rare earths and other restricted materials to the U.S. by designing a system that will exclude companies with ties to the U.S. military while fast-tracking export approvals for other firms, according to people familiar with the plan.
The “validated end-user” system, or VEU, would enable Chinese leader Xi Jinping to follow through on a pledge to President Trump to facilitate the export of such materials while ensuring that they don’t end up with U.S. military suppliers, a core concern for China, according to the people familiar with the plan.
If strictly implemented, the system could make importing certain Chinese materials more difficult for automotive and aerospace companies that have both civilian and defense clients. Beijing’s plan could still change and its licensing system wouldn’t be certain until it is implemented, the people said.
China’s Ministry of Commerce didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Rare-earth magnets and other restricted materials are used widely in civilian goods such as electric vehicles and passenger jets, but are also needed in jet fighters, submarines and attack drones.
Until we have our own supply chains, any issue with China, and the rare earths will stop immediately. The media talks about the rare earth impact on smartphones and vehicles, but the real problem is that RARE EARTHS CONTROL THE MILITARY! Think to yourself, why in the hell would China send us rare earths so the U.S. can make weapons to point at China? The popular F-35 jet has 900 pounds of rare earths per aircraft.
Here is an issue one month later to piss off China:
America’s chip restrictions are biting in China
Beijing is taking an aggressive approach to help its technology giants squeezed by America’s chip restrictions.
Shortages of advanced semiconductors are so acute that the government has begun intervening in how the output of China’s largest contract chip maker, Semiconductor Manufacturing is distributed, according to people familiar with the matter. Chinese authorities are trying to give priority to the needs of tech conglomerate and national champion Huawei Technologies, which uses SMIC technology to make artificial-intelligence chips, the people said.
Chinese tech companies are fighting to secure limited domestic capacity and, in some cases, labs are smuggling coveted supplies of high-performance Nvidia chips.
If China is figuring out how to ration the most advanced AI chips, why in the hell would they help the US military with rare earths?
What can you actually trust that comes from the Trump administration? From trade deals that don’t make sense to China deals that are complete, to having more meetings month after month.
I know I say this is the tenth trade deal to come out as a smartass, but after four or five that change a month later, it gets difficult to predict the future.
As investors, all we are trying to do is predict the future with some level of certainty.
Printing money will be needed to change the rare earth situation, and it’s only a matter of time before we can no longer hold chips over China’s head, requiring the printing of even more money.
2026 will be here shortly, and the Trump administration has a lot to prove:
Cost of living
Rare earths
Immigration
Energy
Trade
No leader in the world would sign up to tackle these issues in the era of record debt, interest, and entitlement payments.
At the end of the day, you can’t earn $1 and spend $2.
Michael Burry Shuts it Down.
The most famous investor who shorted the 2008 GFC housing crash is closing his fund.
To say Michael Burry is a regular dude would be a stretch, but you can’t be normal to make huge bets against the status quo.
Michael Burry of ‘Big Short’ fame is closing his hedge fund
In a letter to investors dated October 27, Burry said he would liquidate the funds and return capital, “but for a small audit/tax holdback” by the end of the year.
“My estimation of value in securities is not now, and has not been for some time, in sync with the markets.”
Burry has stepped up criticism of technology heavyweights, including Nvidia and Palantir Technologies , in recent weeks, questioning the cloud infrastructure boom and accusing major providers of using aggressive accounting to inflate profits from their massive hardware investments.
In his post on X, Burry said he spent about $9.2 million buying up about 50,000 put options on Palantir, which he said would allow him to sell the stock at $50 apiece in 2027. Put options convey the right to sell shares at a set price in the future and are typically bought to express a bearish or defensive view.
Burry is shorting the entire AI market.
I could write a whole newsletter about the questionable business models of AI companies and how intertwined they are, from OpenAI to Google to NVIDIA.
Betting on future cash flows succeeding is what the whole AI market is doing, and, to put it simply, that is gambling.
The scarier thing is that short sellers keep the market healthy by shorting the bullshit. But with endless money, printing this art is fading.
Endless money printing is giving the zombie companies life. The short sellers could be 100% right that a company is worthless, but the money printing keeps them alive.
“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” —John Maynard Keynes.
Continually losing money when you are actually right, but the system doesn’t allow you to profit from the situation, is precisely what these short sellers are facing.
The markets work if you let them.
Propping up the zombie companies isn’t healthy for anyone.
Lifestyle
Credit cards are not the best move for everyone.
If you can’t pay it off every month, I encourage you not to use credit cards.
For the last five years, I have been a big proponent of travel credit cards because I travel frequently, and they make my life better.
Recently, that has changed.
Let me introduce you to the Coinbase One Card.
All credit card rewards are in Bitcoin.
Have you traveled lately? If you have, you know traveling is busier than ever, and it diminishes the rewards for everyone.
Huge Delta guy over here, and the Delta Sky Club used to be the place to go. Free food, drinks, and a place to chill for a while. Not anymore.
Now, it is so busy with people, it’s not even worth the free drinks.
Finding an empty area of the airport to read and have coffee brings me more peace and fulfillment than the Delta Sky Club ever did.
The Coinbase One Card is $50/year, but if you believe in Bitcoin, that is nothing. And my Delta Card was over ten times that expensive annually.
The Coinbase One card gives you a Bitcoin reward depending on the assets you hold with Coinbase:
Under $10k = 2%
Over $10k = 2.5%
Over $50k = 3%
Over $200k = 4%
I transferred enough Bitcoin to be at the 2.5% reward on every purchase, as that is my sweet spot for now, but I hope to reach the 3% spot in the future.
I have been using it for about a month now and have already received 0.001 Bitcoin, or about $100 in free Bitcoin.
I have spoken at length on Bitcoin in these newsletters, and if I can get to even .01 in free Bitcoin rewards, that will be worth more than unlimited upgrades to first class and free beers at the Delta Sky Club.
Investments
My cash stash is at an all-time low, and it’s been mentally challenging as I build it back up. Some months, there is a lot to talk about with changes and news in my investments. And some months, there isn’t much to talk about as I try to make slow tactical decisions. This month is one of those months where there isn’t much to talk about, but let’s run through them.
Cash - $5k
Say what you want about me, but I do put my money where my mouth is, hence why my cash is at a five-year low due to buying Bitcoin and Gold. I do have a plan to rebuild this to 10% of my liquid net worth. It may even include selling some stock after the new year.
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