Nima Alkhorshid is an excellent interviewer with his own show – Dialogue Works – which is a highly recommended channel on geopolitics. Here he’s being interviewed by Lt Colonel Daniel Davis. Nima is Iranian by birth, but has worked for a long time as a professor of engineering in Brazil. He was recently back in Iran, over the time of the recent riots, and so is able to give first hand acocunts of events there in the run up to the war. He’s able to present the reality of Iran, which is in sharp contrast to the propaganda found in the mainstream media, and even more in contrast to the delusional utterances of Donald Trump.

Trump has repeatedly said that the leadership in Iran is hopelessly divided, with no common position, so he doesn’t know who to talk to. This is patently false. The entire leadership were part of the IRGC as young men, with the current President as a medic (now a cardiologist). They’ve know each other since the Iran-Iraq war, know how to work together, and are completely united in outlook. Trump is trapped. He knows he cannot win the war, as the US is already critically short of tomahawk missiles and air defence interceptors and lacks the surge capacity to replace them. He knows his attempted blockade is an ineffective stunt, since the US has too few ships to establish and maintain it, and tankers hugging the coastline are protected in any case by onshore weaponry. He would like nothing better than to walk away, declare victory, and spin a narrative about it to the country, but this is not going to work and he knows it, so instead he may choose to escalate despite the catastrophy that would lead to. His narcissism simply won’t let him be seen to lose and be humiliated.

At the last negotiation session in Islamabad, Iran sent a team of experts with a peace proposal and full documentary back up. Trump sent two Israel-first representatives with an obvious bias and no relevant background, and the Vice President, who also has no experience at all in international relations or diplomacy. None of them had the authority to make decisions on behalf of the US, so they were constantly calling home for permission. A final call to Netanyahu ended the negotiations with a flat no to any concessions whatsoever, insisting on the hardline Israeli demand for complete capitulation. It’s clear that there was never a serious attempt at negotiation on the American/Israeli side. Israel’s goal is the utter destruction of Iran, and that has not been achieved. In fact it never will be achieved because Iran is effectively a defensive fortress, far better armed and prepared than they were given credit for. It seems very likely that the deep state wants this war to continue, even though Trump himself would much prefer to be able to walk away. He’s already bored, and he knows how much damage this is doing go his already tarnished reputation and political chances. He’s now posting ridiculous AI mock-ups like this:

The deep state position is expressed by people warmongering Senator Lindsay Graham and naval commander Kirk Lippold, who says that Trump has a constitutional responsibility to resume the attack on the grounds of national security. This is ridiculous as Iran had never posed a threat to American national security, or to the security of its neighbours. It does not sponsor terrorism. Virtually all Islamic terrorism is conducted by Sunni groups funded by western intelligence agencies, not by Shia Iran or its allies.

There is no trust between the warring parties because the US position is amateurish and incoherent, and too many times negotiations have been used as cover for a surprise attack. In the meantime, Israel continues to flatten villages in southern Lebanon, which is contrary to the terms of the ceasefire. Knowing that no common position can be found, Iran’s approach is to endure the pain for as long as necessary. All they have to do to win is to survive, while the US and Israel need a spectacular victory which is not possible. Iran’s founding stroy is that of the sacrifice of Imam Hussein and his few followers in defence of their country against a vastly superior force. Sacrifice for the greater good of the country is in their DNA. This is why hundreds of young people gather around pieces if critical infrastructure and don’t run even of being bombed. This is a culture that honours martyrdom above all. It is also a country that is largely self-sufficient in food and other essentials of life. Oil exports constitute only 20% of Iran’s economy, so even a successful blockade would not be the end of the world for them, and they have already built a rail link for oil export to China in any case. Iran prizes its sovereignty highly and will defend it to the death.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been bragging about his programme – Economic Fury – to destroy the Iranian economy through financial leverage. The original non-violent protests in Iran were the result of his attack on the Iranian currency, znd the protests only turned violent when infiltrated by oursiders armed by the US and Israel and told to be as violent and destructive as possible. This was an attempt to generate a revolution against the government, and it failed. Iran is now busy divorcing itself from US-controlled internet services in favour if their own domestic systems. This is critical for digital hygiene, to limit the spread of foreign propaganda. They’re finding new ways to communicate and do business. Price inflstion is currently a problem, but the government is helping people to shoulder the burden. Support for the government is at an all time high, as the various factions have come together.

Iran is now in a very powerful position, controlling the Strait of Hormuz, which lies in the territorial water of itself and Oman, with which it intends to share revenue from the toll system its has established. The Wall Street traders who orginally coined the term TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) to refer to Trump, have now come up with a new one – NACHO (Not A Chance Hormuz Opens). Trump is delusionally posting this:

And the Wall Street guys are posting this in response:

Once the leader of a cult of personality has reached the stage of being widely ridiculed by powerful people, the cult is very close to its end. Trump mental and physical health are clearly failing, and it’s becoming more obvious by the day. Unfortunately he’s likely to bereplaced by the extremely unpopular JD Vance, who is a tool of the technical industrial complex currently trying to impose a digital control grid on the country and beyond, but that will be a fight for another day.

The war in Ukraine has been an arms race since the beginning. It moved far beyond traditional military technology quite quickly, rendering equipment like tanks virtually obsolete thanks to the new drone warfare. Small and cheap FPV drones were taking out tanks, so tanks had to be equiped with ‘cope cages’ as protection. So-called ‘turtle tanks’ took this to its maximum extent. The next step was mobile electronic jamming of drones, followed by fibre optic drones which could not be jammed, but left spider web like trails all over the line of combat contact. This was followed by placing nets over roadways to prevent access.

FPV drones have been a complete game-changer. Concentrations of forces are no longer possible, as they will be seen from above almost immediately, targeted, and taken out as a group, by drone, artillery, or an Iskander missile. Combined with satellite targeting, eyes in the sky have made have made stealth extremely difficult. Drones can be equiped with thermal and night vision. They can enter a dugout and drop a grenade inside. One counter tactic is not to destroy a drone, but to follow it back to it’s operators and take them out instead. Forests and treelines have become important for providing some form of cover. Where cover isn’t available, advances are often made by small squads of motorcycle dragoons, since the motorcycles are fast and manouverable. This is why progress along the frontline has been slow.

Modern warfare is now all about missiles and drones, with the emphasis on drones. Naval drones have also been very effective. The Black Sea fleet is now stationed on the far eastern shore as a result, after several ships were destroyed by exploding drones. Attempts to take out the bridge between Crimea and the Russian mainland in this way have so far failed. Larger airborne drones, such as shahids, gerans, and lancets have been used to target infrastructure, along with Iskander and other missiles, and more recently the medium range Oreshnik, which is hypersonic and can deliver warheads across and range of targets at once. It doesn’t need to carry a warhead, as the damage is done by the pure kinetic energy of the tungsten ‘rods from God’ that it carries, coming down at Mach20.

Last year Ukraine managed to block Russian access to the Starlink system that they’d been using for targeting, battlefield observation, communication, and coordination. This was a significant setback, which slowed the inevitable Russian advance. In response, Russia has been launching its own satellites for this purpose, but it’s also doing something more interesting in anticipation of what may come next. It’s using mesh technology carried by a drone swarm to create a manouverable connection corridor, allowing deep penetration into Ukrainian space before choosing an eliminating a target. Because Ukraine has no way to know the target before the attack, there is no time to act to protect it in advance of the strike.

The most interesting, and disturbing, aspect of this is the reason this method has been chosen. The next phase of the arms race may well be the destruction of satellites in space, in order to blind the other side. The mesh system would allow for visibility and targeting with no reliance on satellites. They are likely doing this in anticipation of an escalation of the war to include all of NATO overly, instead of covertly, as is currently the case. NATO countries have no experience with modern warfare, and blinding them on top of that would prevent them from doing much of anything with conventional weaponry.

The most disturbing aspect of the idea of space warfare targeting satellites is the prospect of a Kessler Event, which could actually occur even without the deliberate destruction of satellites, but is much more likely if this does begin. A Kessler Event is a chain reaction occurring as debris hits a satellite and destroys it, generating more debris which can destroy more satellites, and so on. Low Earth orbit is crowded these days. Such an event could bring the era of satellites to an end for the forseeable future.

Needless to say, the impact of this would be monumental on a global scale. Space debris eventually falls out of orbit, but not for hundreds of years at least. Space station access would no longer be possible, GPS would be lost, and countless other functions would also cease to be possible. Humanity may be about to destroy modernity and deindustrialise itself in many ways at once.

The global financial system is at the end of a debt cycle and a reset is therefore inevitable. Parasitic over-financialisation has already sucked the life out of much of the real economy, as profits accruing to speculators vastly outweigh those that can be derived from doing actual work. Many of the brightest minds have therefore applied themselves to profiting from money chasing its own tail instead of doing anything productive.

Most productive work has been off-shored  from the imperial centres of financialisation to the global periphery through global wage arbitrage. Profits are higher for the owners of transnational capital when third world workers, who can be badly treated and badly paid, are substituted for first world workers with labour proections, especially the middle class. The resulting products can simply be imported back to the financial centre through globalised supply chains, for as long as those exist. Unfortunately over time this dynamic destroys the socioeconomic fabric of the centre of empire, leading to conflict, then supply chains no longer function as they once did. This has happened many times before in history, as it’s characteristic of the peak of a major bubble at the end of empire.

The financial system came close to collapse during the 2008 crisis, but was bailed out at massive public expense, and it’s been on life support ever since. It almost crashed again in late 2019 with the repo crisis, the reponse to which was to create an excuse to print trillions of dollars to stabilise it. That excuse was covid and lockdowns. It was all wargamed in advance, with Event 201, where the focus was not on health, but on control of the population. The system, now functioning in zombie form, was stabilised for another few years, but now the crisis is back. They need another excuse to print even more and control the population even more tightly, and that excuse is the war in West Asia (ie the Middle East).

The problem is that the sovereign debt market, which has been the backbone of the finacial system for decades is now teetering on the brink of a major loss of confidence. Bond yields are rising as a result, reflecting the rise in risk. The extent of current indebtedness is such that rising bond yields will push the imperial economies into a doom loop of exploding debt, where the interest rate on their bonds excedes the growth rate of the economy. The debts of sovereigns are considered assets on the balance sheets of creditors, but the debts have long since reached a scale where they have become unrepayable, hence a loss of confidence in the value of promises to repay is eventually inevitable and may occur sooner rather than later. Already there is the beginning of a shift away from sovereign debt and towards precious metals.

The US is attempting to confront this situation with a technological ‘solution’. It’s working on the introduction of stablecoins, backed by US dollars, which they intend to market globally. Issuers of stablecoins buy US treasury bills to collateralise them, meaning that if a sufficient global market can be found for stablecoins, there would be a continuous market for US debt, the burden which would then diffused around the world. In other words, the US is attempting to bail itself out at the expense of the rest of the world, and to do so through the private sector in a way that is utterly untransparent and unaccountable. The stablecoins are intended to be fully programmable, meaning that their use would be centrally controlled for the benefit of the elites. This approach is the brainschild of the technical industrial complex centred in Silicon Valley, which is attempting to seize control from the financial industrial complex, which in turn had come to dominate the military industrial complex. All three are powerful, but are in competition for supremacy.

The faction of the global elites representing the financial industrial complex, the public face of which is the World Economic Forum (WEF), is aiming instead for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). These would also be centrally controlled, in this case through the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and would be fully programmable.  As with the stablecoin approach, ordinary people would have access to very little purchasing power, and no control over what that purchasing power could be used for or where it would be allowed to function. Financial geofencing of the population would be simple. So would forcing people into nutritionally deficient diets by preventing them from purchasing healthy food. The WEF frequently discusses the need for people to eat insects rather than meat for instance. Medication (not for health but for maintaining the profits of the pharmaceutical companies while further weakening the population) could be forced on people under threat of cutting off their purchasing power. Dissenters from any government position could easily find themselves completely disenfranchised and unable to purchase anything at all. Freedom of association would be compromised digitally through surveillance, in order to prevent any form of organised resistance.

Both the stablecoin system and the CBDC approach are effectively slavery systems meant to keep the population from being able to react or effectively adapt appropriately to the coming deprivation. Specifically, the elites want to prevent the population from blaming them for the debacle and acting collectively to punish them for it. The only real differences are who will be in overall control of the system and where the benefits of that control would flow to.

Besides an excuse to print money, the war will absolutely guarantee a huge amount of demand destruction, as the lack of energy is going to collapse global supply chains. Energy and GDP are extremely tightly correlated on the way up, but on the way down the effect of energy loss is going to cause a disproportionately large loss of GDP, due to the effect of physical systems for trade going offline.

That demand destruction is sadly going to lead to a great deal of population destruction, with famine being a primary mechanism as fertiliser supply is being substantially compromised. The spring planting season in the northern hemisphere has a short window, and that window is being missed due to both lack of fertiliser and the high price of diesel for the necessary equipment. Some farmers may be able to plant something, but with little or no fertiliser the eventual yields would be way down. Add to that the potential for diesel to be completely unavailable by harvest time, and empty shelves in the supermarkets become highly likely. Events Sri Lanka from a few years ago are a preview of what’s coming. A shift away from commercial fertilisers caused yields to crash and led to a wave of societal unrest.

The southern hemisphere is moving into winter with severe fuel shortages looming. Heating of homes may become problematic, especially in uninsulated homes, and many people, particularly the elderly, are vulnerable to cold. The potential for spring planting in a few months will be substantially compromised at best, and perhaps impossible. Even pasture farming requires a great deal of land and fuel-hungry equipment to manage the large herds and flocks and to take hay off the fields. None of this may be possible if diesel becomes not only expensive, but unavailable, as appears likely in places like Australia and New Zealand due to their position at the far end of a long and vulnerable supply chain for fuel.

Crises are created when necessary to kick the can further down the road, in order for the financial system to live another day. Unfortunately this can only work for so long before the physical system starts to unravel, and once that happens, restoring that level of complexity, developed incrementally over decades, will not be possible, especially in a permanently energy-constrained world. The constraint will be permanent due to the ongoing destruction of physical infrastructure, and damage to oil and gas fields that will have to be shut in. Fertiliser requires energy to produce, so it will also be permanently reduced. This will effectively reverse the Green Revolution which had allowed for continuous population increase for decades, at the expense of creating structural dependencies on fuel, fertiliser, pesticides, and seed controlled by multinationals. Much biodeversity that allowed for successful subsistence agriculture in diverse climates was lost in the process. Now that the vulnerability caused by those structural dependencies is about to be realised, carrying capacity is going to fall worldwide. Carrying capacity is the number of organism a given area can support with degrading the means of that support over time. Desperate people are likely to eat anything that moves and cut down forests for fuel. It’s quite plausible that the current peaking of finance and energy simultaneously, by design, combined with the destruction of substantial amounts of critical infrastructure, could be intended to get the process of population reduction over with as quickly as possible in order to preserve carrying capacity. Too many of our leaders are psychopaths who treat the rest of the population as dispensible. They may well be thinking this way.

I can’t begin to describe the content of this excellent discussion, so I will simply recommend it highly. If we don’t like the apocalyptic direction the world is taking, this is the way we need to shift our perspective.

The Great Depression of the 1930s was primarily a financial event. While the implosion of the financial system prevented producers and consumers from connecting, and led to a great deal of poverty and poor outcomes, the physical infrastructure remained intact. Americans said at the time that they had everything but money – a virgin continent’s worth of resources, plenty of labour, and industrial prospects. A financial depression (ie an economic seizure) prevents these things from being used effectively, but their continued existence allows for recovery once depression conditions ease. This time will be different, and the scale of the coming depression will be far worse, because the physical infrastructure and connecting supply chains are being substantially damaged in ways which are not fully predictable due to the extreme level of complexity involved.

In particular, global energy supply will never recover to its former level. Oil production had already peaked prior to the war, and energy returned over energy invested (EROEI) was already in sharp decline. With global production flat to falling and EROEI falling as well, an energy crisis was already predictable. EROEI determines how much surplus energy is available for society’s purposes, after deducting the amount of energy that must be reinvested in continued energy production. In the early days of the oil industry, one could expect a return of a hundred units of energy for every one invested, but now the ratio is more like ten to one. As oil exploration has come to rely on ever more marginal sources of supply, the amount of energy needed to be invested in regions where production is inherently difficult and risk is much higher (eg deep offshore, arctic regions with no existing infrastructure, politically unstable areas etc) has increased substantially. Add war and the deliberate destruction of critical infrastructure and the result will be a permanent decline in economic potential.

During the previous phase of increasing energy production, available energy and GDP were as tightly correlated as possible, but this is not going to be the case on the way down. The fall in GDP will be much steeper than the decline in energy supply because supply chains will collapse, unemployment will spike, low intensity conflicts will flare up and further damage infrastructure, and the framework within which the economy operates will crumble. Much would have to be rebuilt, but with much less energy to work with, and demands on the supply from every angle, rebuilding to the previous level will not be possible.

Western countries appear to have decided that military keynesianism is the way to revive their flagging economies, which are drowning in unrepayable debt and being extremely incompetently managed. This approach involves printing enormous sums of money to spend on the production of military hardware, with a view to stimulating the economy while preparing for yet another unnecessary war. However, economic stimulus cannot help where the problem is a physical deficit rather than a purely financial debacle. The proposed military build up would come at the expense of a civilian economy already trapped in stagnation and decline, pushing countries further into economic depression. If the growth rate of the economy is less than the rate of interest on the debt, one enters an exploding debt spiral, or doom loop. Interest rates typically rise substantially in a depression, reflecting greatly increased financial risk, while growth stalls, making the exploding debt spiral inevitable.

Several different parties to the current wars have either been backed into a corner or have backed themselves into a corner so that the conflicts are now existential for them, and each has made it known that if they’re about to suffer strategic defeat, they would be prepared to take the world down with them. This is an extremely dangerous situation. Russia is fighting against all of NATO, which has been trying to break it up and steal its resources for decades. The war is existential for both parties. Russia will fight to the death, and defeat would lead to the use of the ‘dead hand’ system, firing everything they have if the country is going down. It’s existential for NATO, defeat will means the fragmentation of the alliance and the balkanisation of Europe, likely with a revival of the continent’s earlier levels of violence. Parts of Europe also possesses weapons of mass destruction that might be expected to be used in extremis.

The Gulf war is existential for Iran, Israel, and the Gulf Arab monarchies, and the potential for mass death due to destruction of electricity and water infrastructure is very high. Israel has long said that its last resort would be the Sampson option, meaning the deliberate nuclear targeting of western capital cities. While Iran doesn’t possess such weaponry, it has the ability to hold the global economy hostage through its control over the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf monarchies are in the weakest position, due to their lack of ability to defend themselves despite purchases of expensive American weapons, and their near total dependence on desalination equipment to sustain the population. Destruction of those plants could easily lead to tens of millions of deaths in a very short space of time. Unfortunately, many of the warring parties have added an eschatological element to their position, which is extremely dangerous, as religious imperatives are non-negotiable and lead to entrenched positions that are mutually exclusive. This guarantees worst case outcomes.

The American imperial strategy, which also has a religious element in the form of a crusader mindset, appears to be one of refusing to recognise its terminal decline and doing everything in its power to retain global dominance, if necessary by dragging the whole world down and hoping to be the last man standing, with relative supremacy. The US has spun a political narrative bearing no resemblance to reality and is attempting to defend it at all costs despite there being no actual strategy behind it. The opposing side is all about a comprehensive, decentralised strategy that has been decades in the making. They have known this was coming for a very long time and have prepared for it in ways the US obviously does not understand at all. Iran is now an impregnable defensive fortress. Militarily, America is living in the past, using technology like aircraft carriers that are now obsolete in the era of drone warfare, where a cheap drone can take out a multi-billion dollar weapons platform or radar. It invests in overly complex and extremely expensive technology designed to pad the balance sheets of the military industrial complex, rather than to be effective in combat, and it lacks surge capacity since that is expensive to maintain. It’s already depleted much of its weaponry and cannot replace it, hence the extend ceasefire that America asked for, not Iran.

The empire cannot win this war. All Iran has to do to win is to survive, whereas the American/Israeli side would have to achieve a spectacular victory, and that is pure fantasy. It can achieve only destructionon a global scale, resulting in the deaths of billions of people. Trump wants to be famous, but he’s more likely be infamous, as the face of the end of global civilisation.

In the West, war tends to be discussed and conducted within a framework of national interests, secular incentives, and mechanistically rational responses, but the current war cannot be understood in those terms alone. Predictions of outcomes ground in this kind of analysis will be incomplete at best, and outright wrong at worst. In the US the war is primarily supported by Christian zionists, of which there are twice as many as all the Jews in the entire world. In Israel, the zionist ideology driving the Greater Israel project has consumed approximately 70% of the population. (It should be pointed out that Judaism and zionist ideology are not at all the same thing. In places they may overlap, but in others they’re virtually opposites. It is not remotely anti-Semitic to oppose zionism, and many Rabbis do.) Zionism has become a militant, radical, messianic movement trying to accelerate the ‘end times’. Jewish zionists are trying to bring on the arrival of their messiah, and Christian zionists are trying to bring on the return of their messiah and the ‘rapture’. On the other side of the war, Shia Islam is the foundation of the state, and informs their actions and world view.

None of these people on either side are making purely rational decisions about material interests, but when analysts speak of the war, they do so in a way that implies rational decision-making. The eschatological element is critical to any understanding of events. If rationality were the governing principle, the war would never have begun, and even if it had, it would have been over much more quickly. It simply serves no one’s interests, and an enormous damage has been done to regional infrastructure on both sides. This will take years and hundreds billions of dollars to repair or rebuild, if it can be done at all. Iran can be heavily damaged, but cannot be beaten. The vital infrastructure of the state is all underground. Of course the civilian infrastructure is still exposed, although there is some air defence. The people have a deeply-rooted culture of reverence for martyrdom. They surround targeted buildings in numbers and don’t run if their gatherings are bombed. Good luck defeating 93 million people who have no problem sacrificing even their lives for their country. They are more unified than ever before, despite being a multi-cultural country. Americans and Israelis are much more individualistic. They would not act in this way.

Jewish zionists currently appear to be in the drivers’ seat, using American military power against a major obstacle to Greater Israel. In the process, the reputation of that miltary is likely to be destroyed by being mired in abject failure in the Gulf. Israel has already identified Turkey and Pakistan as its next targets, assuming an easy victory in Iran that isn’t going to happen, indicating a delusional degree of hubris. The country seems to have slipped into national megalomania, calling themselves the ‘chosen people’ and therefore above all others and above the law. They have openly said that they’re inherently superior and others were born to serve them or be expelled from wherever the zionists cast their eyes acquisitively. They believe that others have ‘no soul’, and are not fully human. Their expressed desire is to bomb all of Iran back to the stone age “where they belong”, and they’ve said they’re just waiting for the green light to bomb all of Iran’s civilian infrastructure. This would result in the reciprocal destruction of the infratructure of the Gulf countries and Israel.

The war seems extremely unlikely to end any time soon, given that it’s now existential for Iran, Israel, and all of the Gulf states, all the latter of which are heavily dependent on the desalination plants that may be next to be destroyed. As hosts of American bases, and allowing the use of their airspace for attacks on Iran, they’ve made themselves legitimate targets. The entire region may go up in smoke – potentially nuclear smoke – before this is over, which would leave all global supply chains in tatters and the global economy in ruins. Deglobalisation would occur very quickly, with every nationality for itself. The potential for utter global chaos is uncomfortably high. There seems to be little prospect of an agreement, since the non-negotiables from each camp don’t overlap at all. The demands are mutually exclusive. The american side is widely regarded around the world as aggreement incapable, given the extent of policy flip-flopping, the sending of incompetent negotiators, the use of negotiations as cover for a surprise attack, and the regular assassinations of the other side’s negotiating team.

Each side thinks it has leverage over the other, and both do to some extent, but Iran can outlast the US by a considerable margin. They’ve been preparing for this for decades. In contrast, the US cannot sustain this effort. They’re running very low on air defence interceptors and missiles, and have no industrial surge capacity to replace them. Their ships are far from home for very long periods, and morale is very low. As a raging narcissist, Trump, will not stop without something he can spin as a victory. Losing face is his worst nightmare, so he will double down on his demands, ensuring that no agreement can be reached. This only guarantees an obvious and catastrophic failure later. He’ll be blamed for all of it, although he was by no means the only architect of the ongoing disaster, or even its driving force.

This situation is occurring because an empire in decline is refusing to do so with dignity, and instead insists on taking much of the world down with it. Having reached peak resources in many way is also a major driving force. The global financial system is at the end if a major debt cycle, and the global energy supply, which was already peaking, has now seen much of its infrastructure blown up. Humans fight like cats in a sack when the wealth pie is shrinking, and that’s exactly where we find ourselves.

Chris Martenson is an excellent analyst. I strongly suggest following his work, starting with watching the video posted above. The graphs in this post come from the video. Subscribing to his channel, and his online community if you can afford it, is highly recommended. In this presentation, Chris goes through the math of what’s happening with the global oil market, and the implications for the future of the global economy. The picture is stark indeed. GDP is extremely tightly correlated with oil consumption, meaning that as available supply is cut, the economies of countries will be forced into contraction, with some countries faring better than others due to native supplies and refining capacity or lack thereof. Less lucky countries are going to suffer considerably, and in the relatively near future.

Trump has been loudly announcing to the world that they can rely on US oil production to fill the gap, but this could not be further from the truth. The US is a net importer of the long chain hydrocarbons that everyone needs in order to make diesel, kerosene, and bunker fuel. Its normal exports are of short chain hydrocarbons that are not refinery feedstocks and cannot be used to produce these essentials. The US is currently exporting from its own strategic reserve, which is an incredibly short-sighted move. It will not be able to keep this up for long, and when this fails, prices will spike as the futures price, which has been artificially suppressed, and the spot price converge at an eye-watering level. In the meantime, price suppression has encouraged subsidised use, which will deplete available supplies even faster, and hasten the coming price and availability shock. The illusion of normality will die abruptly.

The US has been increasingly relying on tight oil production, since its conventional reserves peaked in the 1970s. However, much of what comes out of these wells is light oil and even shorter chain hydrocarbons. This is the foundation for US exports, and the US must import from places able to produce heavy oil to blend with its own production in order to match the input requirements for their refineries. Refineries are tooled to take a certain blend, and retooling them is extremely expensive. This is why Venezuela was so important to the US, although it will actually take a long time to ramp up any significant level of production for export there. Venezuelan oil is extremely heavy, and would be the perfect companion to American production. Venezuela is also very close to the US, so there would be lower transport costs.

Tight oil has taken off since 2008, but that too is now peaking. All recent growth has been coming from the Permian basin, but that too is now flattening out. This means US oil production is going to go into decline in the relatively near future. Additional drilling will not change this situation, as the sweet spots have already been drilled. Trump is living in fantasy land if he thinks he can do anything about this. Even allowing reserved land to be drilled is not going to make a difference, especially since reserved land tends to be in far flung places with little no existing infrastructure. All of that would have to be built in advance, at great cost in both capital and energy, meaning that no production could arrive before crisis hits, and even then the energy returned over energy invested would likely be very low. This is critical, as it means any new production would result in relatively little of the surplus (above the energy cost of producing more energy) necessary to maintain socioeconomic complexity. Long before any of this could happen, society will have been forced to simplify drastically.

Chris goes into considerable detail as to the impacts of the war in the Gulf. Of course the actual situation will significantly worse, because the war with Iran will not end tomorrow, the war between Russia and Ukraine is also going to have an ongoing impact, and energy infrastructure, such as refineries and storage tanks, is being blown up all over the world with remarkable frequency. It beggars belief to think that these fires and explosions could be coincidental.

For this reason the math Chris presents is the ultimate best case scenario, although even this would not look like best case to anyone still expecting a return to some semblance of normality. Gulf crude oil production has fallen by 14.5million barrels/day, tanker capacity is down by 50%, and fields have been damaged through necessary production shut-ins. The proportion of oil available for export, as opposed to oil consumed in the countries which produce it, has fallen even further.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has run the numbers, quoted by Chris, for a scenario where the war stops tomorrow. They project a potential 70% recovery after three months, rising to 88% after six months. The world is currently missing 870million barrels of oil after the two month war. Add to this the inevitable deficits during the modelled recovery, and the missing total would be 1631 million barrels. There is no capacity to make up this lost production. This means a global depression, unevenly distributed, is already baked in the cake, as a best case scenario.

Refiners are currently working with their commercial reserves, which cannot fall below a critical level in order to keep oil flowing smoothly through the facility without sucking in air or sludge from the bottom of a tank. That critical minimum level is now being reached. As for strategic reserves, the total available for the four largest holders combined is about half of the number of missing barrels to date.

A critical theshhold has been reached. If the disruption to supplies doesn’t end very soon, the global damage will be catastrophic, and the associated death rate will be appalling. People have no idea what’s about to hit them. Everyoneneeds to wake up and come together to help each other to survive this.

The American war plans that are currently being executed go back decades. General Wesley Clarke told us this in 2002 when he revealed that there were plans to attack seven countries in five years, ending with Iran. All the other targets have already been taken out. All were countries not yet vassalised by the Rothschild-controlled financial system and/or had resources that the empire wished to co-opt. Iran is the last man standing on the list, which has taken much longer to execute than originally planned. Iran has both an independent central bank and energy resources, but doesn’t present an easy target at all. In fact it appears that the US/Israeli military machine has grossly under-estimated the scale of the task.

Iran is more united than ever before, and both far better protected and far better armed than had been assumed. Iran is essentially an unconquerable fortress, with military assets protected deep under mountains where they’re safe from all forms of bombing, and the empire’s military machine appears to be stuck in the past, failing to understand the dynamics of the new forms of assymmetrical warfare. Missiles, drones, satellite surveillance, and instant communications are the the new weapons that matter. These lessons should have been obvious from the war in Ukraine, where all of this has been on full display for years, but hubris has evidently prevented those lessons from being learned. The US is now bogged down in a war it cannot win andcan ot seem to extract itself from. Doing so is urgent for them due to the fact that their stocks of air defence interceptors and missiles are running dangerously low, and the empire lacks the surge capacity to produce more in any timeframe that matters.

The war plans have a progression beyond the current target. The ultimate target is China, which has been the empire in the ascendancy for some time, as the American empire enters terminal decline under an avalanche of debt combined with severe military over-extension. A multi-polar world is emerging, and the old empire is doing its best to maintain its former global hegemony. To do this, it must disable the rising power in the east and do so by tackling its allies and support system. Any resources it could potentially claim and use as collateral for its debt burden in the meantime would be a bonus. It’s already failed to balkanise Russia and prevent its energy exports to China, and its clearly failing in Iran as well, which is the critical pivot point for the multipolar world, connecting the land routes required to circumnavigate naval blockades.

Iran has full control over the Strait of Hormuz, and the US has imposed a naval blockade in the Gulf of Oman, out of range of Iranian missiles. It is also bombing land routes, such as railways and pipeline, for export of Iranian oil eastwards. The blockade has managed to reduce exports of Iranian oil by about half, but is unlikely ever to be more successful than this, given the paucity of ships required to police it and the area of ocean that they required to cover. The US is also boarding ships bound for China in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, which is clearly an act of piracy. It isn’t only Iranian oil blocked from reaching China, but most oil and gas from the whole of West Asia (ie the Middle East).

China has, of course, long since seen this coming and been preparing for it. They have months of strategic reserves, and some alternative sources of supply. They’ve also been electrifying everything in sight as quickly as possible, in order to run on coal and ‘renewables’ instead of oil. The ‘renewables’ (which are not really renewable to to dependence on oil, concrete, and mined minerals) bet won’t work out any better for them than it has for Germany in the long run, due to very low energy returned over energy invested and short lifespan, but may help temporarily. Coal is the workhorse they’re betting on, but unless they can do coal to liquids at scale quickly, they’ll still have a liquid fuels problem if the effects of the war cannot be substantially reversed.

The US appears to be thinking that if it can’t out-compete the Far East, and it can’t, then it will cripple the world economy in order to be the last man standing. If it can’t rise, then everyone else must fall in order for the old empire to maintain relative superiority. The result will likely be billions of casualties in collateral damage, but the empire doesn’t care. It has no regard for human life at all. This is the American version of Israel’s ‘Sampson Option’, which says that if Israel is about to be strategically defeated, it will take the whole world down with it with its nuclear weapons. Russia also has a system like this, called the ‘Dead Hand’, which will fire their arsenal if the central government is taken out. Other powers may also have a similar mindset. This doesn’t bode well for a world caught up in a war cycle, as someone is going to be strategically defeated. The US is imploding and heading for civil war, so it’s the most likely candidate. Its legacy will be one of utter destruction and the beggaring of the world.

Palantir is the face of the developing technical industrial complex (TIC), which is currently challenging both the financial industrial complex (FIC) and the military industrial complex (MIC) for global domination. The technological control they’ve already achieved through the theft and integration of vast amounts of data on billions of individuals is staggering. Now they plan to use that power to gain monopolistic control over the entire population, as Founder Peter Thiel has long sought to do since giving up on the ideas of democracy and freedom years ago.

This power has already been used to deal death on a large scale, using Gaza as the testing ground. Specific individuals were targeted for even the most tangential connections to Hamas. They were monitored until returning home by a programme named “Where’s Daddy”, whereupon their entire apartment complex would be destroyed by a missile strike, killing potentially hundreds of people along with the intended target. It’s patently obvious that human life has no value to those who treat wars as a video game. Palantir has also been used to target undocumented immigrants in the US, allowing them to be seized and used as profit centres for the private prison system. Most of these people have lived their lives peacefully and paid their taxes, despite never being able to claim any benefits, but were targeted, often brutally, in any case. Palantir also bought the NHS health data in the UK and is now in control of that system, very much not to the benefit of the citizenry. It will be used to detect ‘pre-crime’, in other words identifying dissidents, categorizing them as terorrists, and incarcerating them for profit and forced labour. This is the most ruthlessly fascistic system ever developed, and it intends to take control of the entire world. Humans are to be used as non-player characters in a huge video game, where enormous casualties are a feature, not a bug.

Fortunately, the scope of what they ultimately plan will lie outside the range of what future reality can hope to deliver. The energy required to increase, or even maintain, the necessary complexity is very unlikely to exist in a future where so much energy infrastructure all around the world is being deliberately destroyed. The destruction is part of a plan to reduce the global population to a more ‘managable’ size, and to do so quickly, before countries and individuals have a chance to prepare for the engineered crisis. This is exactly what psychopaths could be expected to do in the face of approaching non-negotiable resource limits in energy, fresh water, fertile soil, expansion space, financial engineering/’creative accounting’ fraud etc.

These people are manifestly delusional. They believe that the Epstein class is a different species from the rest of us who are classed as some kind of undifferentiated biomass. They believe they can create their own reality, and through their own ‘brilliance’ they expect to find a way to live forever. Naturally this means they would need to create ‘lebensraum’ (living space) for their own immortal descendents, and to save resources for these hypothetical immortals, the ‘useles eaters’ must be removed. Great wealth leads to great hubris, and major departures from reality, but reality bats last. This attempt at extreme centralisation will ultimately fare no better than previous less ambitious attempts throughout history, but it can be expected to make an enormous mess of the world in the meantime. Communities must urgently come together to support each other through the crisis. We need to outlast their ability to harm us.

This is the manifesto that Palantir just published, followed by insightful commentary from many different writers:

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.
2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.
3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.
4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.
5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.
6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.
7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.
8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.
9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.
10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.
11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.
12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.
13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.
14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.
15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.
16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.
17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.
18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.
19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.
20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.
21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.
22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska

🔮👁️ Palantir Must Be Stripped of All Government Contracts

If you want to understand exactly what the Silicon Valley billionaire class actually thinks of the working class, you do not need to read between the lines; you just have to read their own terrifying manifestos.

‘One of The Scariest Things I Have Seen’: Alarms Sound Over ‘Technofascist’ Palantir Manifesto | Common Dreams

Scholars alarmed by Palantir’s technofascist manifesto promoting AI weapons, mandatory national service, and authoritarian dominance.

Palantir: the world’s most evil company

At the cutting edge of dystopia and genocide

The following is by Michelle Blair from Collective Evolution on Facebook. No link from facebook is postable unfortunately.

“Palantir recently posted a 22 point manifesto to its social media feed stating “Because we get asked a lot.”

This document deserves to be read carefully as the company is deeply embedded into the US government at the moment, and is making it’s way to other governments. It is one of the most concerning companies on Earth due to what it’s doing.

Let’s look at a couple of points before breaking this down further, I included some of Yanis Varoufakis’ takes on the points as they are spot on:

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

Yanis: Silicon Valley owes an immeasurable debt to the ruling class who bailed out the criminal bankers that wrecked the livelihood of the majority of Americans. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley will defend that ruling class to the death (literally!), in the name of the majority of Americans whom they treat with contempt – i.e., like cattle that have lost their market value.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

Yanis: Palantir shall give nothing away for free. It cares uniquely over its own growth which it pursues by sowing fear so that it can sell a fake sense of security.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

Yanis: Glory to brute force! Ethics is for suckers. The West needs more of Palantir’s murderous software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

Yanis: AI-powered killer robots are coming. The task is to profit magnificently by building killer robots first and ask questions later. To be able to do so, Palantir will do whatever it takes to avoid at all cost any international treaties that limit AI-driven killer robots.

It goes on. But I want to talk a bit more about Palantir first.

Palantir was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and three others. Its two primary platforms, Gotham and Foundry, are not simply software products. They are the connective tissue of the modern American surveillance state.

ICE runs on it. The IRS now runs on it. The Pentagon runs on it. The NYPD and LAPD run on it. The Israel Defense Forces run on it while conducting operations in Gaza.

The company is named after the palantiri, the seeing stones in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, objects that allow their holders to watch everything, everywhere, all at once.

Interestingly, in the books, every single palantir that survives into the later ages gets corrupted by Sauron. The stones drive their users toward madness and ruin.

The CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, was the only investor willing to fund Palantir in the early days when Silicon Valley passed. Federal contracts grew from 4.4 million dollars in 2009 to 970 million dollars in 2025 under the current administration. The stock surged 200 percent in a single year. CEO Alex Karp was the highest paid executive in America in 2024, with 6.8 billion dollars in reported compensation.

This is not a technology company in any conventional sense. It is a nervous system being grafted onto a government, one that will be very hard to remove later on.

Peter Thiel, Palantir’s chairman and largest shareholder, wrote an essay in 2009 for the Cato Institute. In it he stated plainly that he had come to believe freedom and democracy were no longer compatible with each other.

The man who chairs the company now embedded inside ICE, the IRS, and the Pentagon has publicly wished, in writing, that the Constitution were weaker so that a sufficiently ambitious person could take hold of the country’s direction.

He is not hiding this. He wrote it down and published it.

Thiel is also the primary financial patron of JD Vance, the current Vice President of the United States. He invested roughly 15 million dollars into Vance’s 2022 Senate primary campaign.

Curtis Yarvin is a blogger and self-described neoreactionary thinker. His program, translated out of the elaborate prose he wraps it in, is straightforward. Abolish democracy. Install a CEO-king, run the country like a corporation, let the people who are actually capable of running things get on with it without the friction of public accountability.

At CE, we’d call this a way of running company or country that puts money making and technology first, not human well being. this type of system would likely be void of the sacred, void of deep meaning as it seeks to make things very machinistic.

Peter Thiel invested in Yarvin’s company Tlon in 2013 through his Founders Fund. In private messages that later became public, Yarvin described himself as coaching Thiel and said Thiel was “fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”

We have written before about how the ideas that shape our world rarely arrive through official channels. They arrive through the people who fund the thinkers, who fund the politicians, who fund the platforms. The ideology is upstream of the policy. Always.

Yarvinis the ideological permission structure. The intellectual framework that makes what Palantir is building feel not just acceptable but necessary to the people building it. You do not need everyone to believe the idea. You need the people with the resources and the access to believe it.

The Epstein Connection
First, let me mention Point 18 of the manifesto Palantir published: “The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service.” And now the Epstein connections they wouldn’t want you to know about…

In November 2025, the House Oversight Committee released the Epstein files. The DOJ followed with additional releases in February 2026.

What those documents show is that Peter Thiel corresponded with Jeffrey Epstein from roughly 2014 through early 2019. This continued for eleven years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction as a registered sex offender, and right up until months before Epstein’s 2019 arrest on federal sex trafficking charges.

Epstein referred to Thiel as his “great friend” in private messages to associates.

Epstein invested 40 million dollars in two funds managed through Thiel’s Valar Ventures in 2015 and 2016. That investment has since grown to roughly 170 million dollars. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has described Epstein and Thiel as co-owners of the Valar fund. Thiel’s representatives dispute the word co-owner while confirming Epstein was a limited partner.

Epstein, in recorded conversations, floated Palantir as a company Barak should seek a role at through the Thiel connection.

I want to be direct about why this matters, because it is easy to let it get lost in the noise of everything else.

This is the capital structure of the company now building ICE’s deportation platform. The chairman of a 400 billion dollar surveillance company took transformative money from a convicted sex offender a decade after that conviction, used that person as a relationship broker with former heads of state, and is now embedded at the center of the American government.

The Government Is Now Running On Palantir
ICE signed a 30 million dollar contract with Palantir in April 2025 to build what they are calling ImmigrationOS, an AI platform designed to track self-deportations and feed the mass deportation operation being run by Stephen Miller. Miller reportedly holds a personal financial stake in Palantir.

Palantir employees have been embedded inside the IRS, helping build what Senator Ron Wyden described in a June 2025 letter as a single searchable database of every American’s tax records. Multiple members of DOGE, the entity that selected Palantir for this work, are former Palantir employees.

Trump hired Gregory Barbaccia, Palantir’s former head of intelligence and investigations, as the federal Chief Information Officer.

The Pentagon handed Palantir roughly 10 billion dollars in Army contracts in August 2025. The Navy signed a nearly 1 billion dollar software contract in November 2024.

Palantir’s lobbying spend went from 2.4 million dollars in 2020 to 6.1 million dollars in 2025. They hired Miller Strategies, the lobbying firm most closely associated with the Trump administration.

Again, CE has spoken about the Moloch dynamic, the way systems create incentive structures that reward certain behaviors regardless of the ethics of the people inside them. What we are looking at here is something related but distinct. This is not just a system producing bad incentives; it’s a specific group of people, with a specific ideology, deliberately constructing the infrastructure that will make their vision of the world structurally permanent.

Going back to the 22 points…

Point 6 calls for national service as a universal duty. A draft, in plain language. Working class kids in the field. Palantir employees running the dashboards from Palo Alto.

Point 12 argues that the atomic age is ending and a new era of deterrence built on AI is beginning. Nuclear weapons were governed by international treaties. AI weapons, under this vision, are governed by Palantir’s contracts.

Point 21 states that some cultures have produced vital advances while others remain dysfunctional and regressive.

This is civilizational ranking. Published by a company that has access to every American’s tax records, immigration status, license plate movements, and targeting data. The question of which cultures are deemed regressive, and whose software will act on that determination, is not abstract.

Point 22 calls for resistance to what it describes as “a vacant and hollow pluralism.”

As Yanis translated: According to Palantir, Blacks, Muslims, most Asians, and of course women, are inferior untermensch. Blokes in America, and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted putting these subhumans in their places in the name of inclusivity. It was a mistake. Such subhumans must never be allowed in, except as servants or sex service providers – at least until we can improve our robots, in which case we won’t need them at all.

Once again, what we bring up all the time around Breaking The Illusion is important here. The story we have been told about how power works in democratic societies is not an accurate description of how power actually works. It is a story designed to produce a particular kind of citizen. One who believes the system is fundamentally oriented toward their wellbeing, who trusts the institutions, and who therefore does not look too carefully at what is actually being built.

Palantir is what you find when you look carefully, and systems like this have always been there.

The people building this are not operating in a vacuum. They are operating inside a worldview. A specific, coherent, deeply held set of beliefs about what human beings are, what society is for, and what the future should look like.

They feel that most people are not capable of governing themselves. That the people who are capable of running things should be freed from the friction of public accountability to get on with it. That competition is the fundamental law of human existence and that the winners of that competition have earned the right to shape the world. As you might sense, this is not a new worldview, it is a very old one dressed in new language.

And the reason it keeps returning, in different forms across different eras, is that it speaks to something real about how power concentrates when systems are not designed to prevent it. When incentives reward the accumulation of advantage. When the people with the most resources are also the people with the most influence over the rules.

Also, as we’ve always said, removing Thiel or Karp or any individual from the picture does not change the underlying conditions that produced them, nor does it rid the worldview driving their ideas. The conditions are the problem. The worldview is the problem. The incentive structures are the problem. And the fact that the general public is not thinking on a deeper level allows all of this to go on unchallenged as people argue over partisan politics.

Ultimately, what changes all of this is a shift in collective consciousness. A genuine reckoning with the story we have been living inside and a willingness to ask whether it is actually true.

Is ruthless competition really human nature? Is scarcity really the fundamental condition of existence? Is the person with the most resources really the person best suited to make decisions for everyone else?

The evidence, when you look at it honestly, says no to all three. But we have built a world that answers yes. And we have built companies like Palantir to enforce that answer.

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By Michelle Blair, CE staff writer.”

Good Dog: The Palantir Manifesto, Plasma Gods, and the Externalization of the Hierarchy

You Have Been Very Good.