Author: Nicole Foss

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.

The western empire, which has dominated the world for hundreds of years, even before the industrial revolution, is now failing, and its death throes are threatening to take the world down with it. This is the empire’s ‘Sampson option’ – a term usually associated with Israel’s threat to take the world down with them if they appear to be strategically defeated. The empire, a naval power first centred in the UK, and now continued in the US, had long sought to control the heartland of the world in order to prevent the rise of land land power competitor. This was done by controlling client states in sensitive regions around potential rising powers, in order to perpetually raise tensions, create flash points for conflict, and destabilise regions around states of concern. For instance, Israel was envisaged for this purpose decades before the Balfour declaration or the actual creation of the Jewish state through terrorism and destruction. This has worked for centuries, since its inception with Halford Mackinder in 1904, but that strategy is now collapsing.

All wars are bankers’ wars, but the mechanisms for this are poorly understood. Bankers need control over collateral. They need to be the ones to fund projects in order to create assets on their balance sheets that can then be used to leverage further gains through further loans. The clients do the heavy lifting to implement the project, but the bankers always profit, in return for creating currency from thin air, and if the project fails to pay the interest on the loans, they claim the assets as well. They require the ability to use force, but don’t possess this themselves, so they must co-opt powers that do possess this capacity. As such, empires do not belong to the countries they inhabit, they merely use them to perform functions that the bankers cannot perform by themselves. The result is the concentration of wealth in the hands of bankers and their associated elites in specific geographical locations, in this case the West. Host countries are parasitised by empire, and their populations extracted from and exploited in order to amass wealth for the banking cartels which currently rule the world. Host elites benefit from empire directly, and populations might temporarily (just long enough to be lulled into a false sense of superiority and security), but the long term impact on imperial populations is invariably negative.

The current iteration of empire is failing. The debt level has become unsustainable, the ability to successfully project power at a distance is increasingly being seen grossly exaggerated, and fewer vassals states are prepared to both pay for empire and comply with its dictats. There have already been significant failures of imperial strategy envisaged to prevent this decline. The engineered pandemic was intended to lead to the impositon of a comprehensive control grid, but people woke up too early and prevented it from taking hold. The attempt to frighten people with a ‘climate emergency’ supposedly requiring strict control measures has also failed. The empire thought it could use Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia in order to rapidly force it to balkanise into controllable portions, but the result has been a newly self-sufficient Russia that is far more powerful than before the war, and which has already defeated the collective West. Russian and Ukrainian resources will not now become Western bankers’ collateral. Now the Iran project is failing, due to gross under-estimation of Iran’s ability to prepare for conflict, and not only resist it, but to gain considerable leverage against the empire in the process. Now the empire is trying to gain naval control of global choke points for trade, but it lacks the naval assets and firepower to be able to achieve this more than at most temporarily.

The American military industrial complex builds weapons for profit, not for winning wars. It’s weaponry is over-complicated, far too fragile, far too expensive, and lacks manufacturing surge capacity. Trump’s attempts to have industrial outfits such as car manufacturers convert their facilities to weapons production are far too little and far too late. In the few weeks of the war with Iran, the US has already used up some 50% of its interceptors and missiles. It cannot rearm and cannot sustain the conflict, unlike Iran, which has been planning for a long war of attrition for decades. The US cannot tolerate casualties, while Iranian culture is grounded in a narrative of martyrdom as a direct route to heaven. Young people gather in the streets around potnetial targets, ignoring the likelihood of being bombed. This would never happen in the individualistic West. Cultural solidarity is a powerful weapon in itself, and Iran has undoubted escalatory dominance.

According to several different military analysts, Trump was recently discussing the nuclear launch codes with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine. Apparently there was a heated discussion, and General Caine told him no. The situation by no means warrants action that extreme. The ceasefire will be ending very soon, and Trump wants to escalate in order to, in his mind, finish Iran off and extracate himself from the region. He’s already bored with the war, and he knows how desperately unpopular it’s making him. The usual American tactic of simply declaring victory and leaving would not work, as the loss and the humiliation of it would be too obvious. Trump’s dangerously unhinged rhetoric has painted the himself into a corner. The US cannot win this war, but neither can it admit that it lost. Trump’s narcissism guarantees that he can never acknowledge defeat. Even if a deal were reached between the US and Iran, Israel would destroy it in order to ensure the continuation of the war, since their goal is the utter destruction of Iran.

There is a substantial difference between the oil price in the paper market and that of physical oil for delivery. The paper market is being manipulated to manage the price and keep markets calm, hence the scale of the coming energy emergency is not being accurately reflected. In other words, the market is not pricing in the actual degree of risk. In contrast, the physical market, where prices are substantially higher, is exhibiting a form of panic as the supply shock looms. Asia is now receiving only 6% of its normal amount, and both Australia and New Zealand are down stream from Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Taiwan, where their supplies of finished fuels come from. None of these locations have much in the way of reserves of their own, and so will not be sending supplies further along the supply chain. Australia has already received its last shipment. South Korea has already declared a state of emergency and is warning of an end to modern life.

At some point in the not too distant future, the paper and physical markets will be forced into convergence. Bets placed in the options market that the price would fall, due to misplaced optimism around peace talks or far too much faith in Trump’s manipulative pronouncements, are going to be forced to buy when the option runs out, and they will have to buy at the spot price. This is short squeeze, and it will be very painful. At that point a price surge is extremely likely. The US will likely be the last to feel the effects, but not by much, as the crunch will be global.

Bond markets show that risk is rising, with the exception of China, which is now being perceived as a haven of relative safety. China has substantial oil reserves and is much less vulnerable than most of the rest of Asia. However, the US is acting to cut off China’s supply in as many ways as it can, with export blockades from suppliers to attempting to gain control over vital shipping choke points. The Strait of Malacca is the most critical, and the US is seeking control over it through deals with Malaysia and Indonesia. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has explicitly said that China is the target. China may now begin to provide its ships with a military escort as a result, daring the US to act against them. China has critical leverage over the US due to its control over rare earth elements necessary for American military production.

The US appears to be moving towards using their navy to enforce a global protection racket, extorting the rest of the world in a form of piracy. It’s doubtful whether this would be at all possible though, since the US does not have military superiority compared to the rest of the world combined. In fact the perception of US military prowess has been signifcantly dented due to its failures in West Asia (ie the Middle East). First they failed to deter Ansar Allah (ie the Houthis) from controlling passage through the Red Sea. The declared victory and left, but the actual result was obvious. Now they’ve failed to defeat Iran and are failing to fully contain shipping in the Gulf of Oman. The ships cannot approach the coast of Iran or they will come within firing range. The tentative ceasefire is almost over, so their ships will have to retreat further and be even less effective. The psychological warfare of issuing threats will only go so far if not backed up by actions.

To add insult to injury in the energy markets, a whole series of refinery explosions have occurred in recent weeks all across the world, on top of the destruction of Russian infrastructure by Ukraine (as a proxy for NATO). This cannot be a coincidence. Some entity is attempting to force the world off fossil fuels, in line with Agenda 2030. Given the scale of the damage, repairs, if possible at all, would take months to years, so a global supply shock more severe than all previous oil shocks combined is guaranteed.

Chris Martenson is an excellent, data-driven energy analyst. Energy is the ability to do work, hence energy and GDP are extremely tightly connected. The coming energy crisis will be the worst in human history, as never before have we had so far to fall in such a short time. The pace of change will be exceptionally difficult to adjust to. Oil is the lifeblood of the economy. Prior to the war we produced about 86 million barrels/day, but now we’re down by 10million barrels/day. Over the 48 days of the war, the world is missing 480 million barrels of oil, which cannot be made up later. The world last produced 76 million barrels/day in 2011, when the global economy was 36% smaller than it is today. GDP will be forced back to that level in a rapid supply shock, and the longer the war and disruption go on, the worse the situation will get. As the war is unlikely to be over soon, and disruption would continue for years afterwards, a global economic depression, with massive demand destruction, is now guaranteed.

So far pending deliveries have been made and reserves are being drawn down, so the crisis has yet to hit, but it won’t be long. Countries with little in the way of reserves, or reliant on long supply chains will be particularly vulnerable. Producing and exporting countries are likely to cease exporting in order to keep their reserves for themselves, further reducing supplies available to others. Refining capacity will be important, in order to produce specific fuels and feedstocks. The lack of it will be a very significant problems, as cargos of finished fuels will be in high demand and will go to the highest bidder. In a very few weeks, prices are going to spike considerably, and availability is going to be a major problem. Supply chains for many products are going to be substantially disrupted, perhaps permanently. Once a scarcity mindset kicks in, fuel hoarding will be rampant, for those countries and consumers able to afford it.

Besides the war itself, a significant amount of energy infrastructure around the world has recently been destroyed, particularly in Russia and Ukraine, but also refineries and gas storage in places like America, Mexico, and Australia. In addition, fertiliser plants have been exploding, and fertiliser is also in acute shortage due to the war and its blockage of transport. The scale of the destruction and the timeframe suggest that these were not all accidents. As Chris Martenson says, “once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, but three times isene y sction”. It seems that the global elites have decided not to waste a good poly-crisis, but to accelerate it in order to push their agenda of depopulation and control. Demand destruction, immobilisation, and control over the food supply are foundational apects of Agenda 2030.

A wide range of hydrocarbons are now referred to as petroleum, but the longer chain hydrocarbons are the really neccessary ones for the global economy. Short chain hydrocarbons are not oil and cannot be used to produce the diesel, kerosene and bunker fuel that keep the world moving. Without these products, industry, agriculture, shipping, air travel, and distribution throughout the economy would grind to a halt. The US is fond of bragging about its energy reserves, but it produces mainly short chain hydrocarbons, which it exports, and must import heavier grades. This is the primary reason for its invasion of Venezuela, although it will take a long time to bring in the very heavy grade Venezuelan oil in a meaningful quantity. Oil from Iran and Iraq is perfect for US refineries. The US remains a net energy importer, exporting about 4million barrels/day and importing 6million.

Refineries are designed for specific grades of crude, and cannot easily be retooled to operate on different inputs. The outputs they’re designed to produce are spoken for in many different and complex supply chains, so any retooling of a refinery would disrupt countless aspects of the economy. The supply chains are too complex to be adequately modelled, so specific results and knock-on effects are impossible to predict accurately.

Because the war has caused a virtual ceasation of transits through the Strait of Hormuz, production was backing up in the Persian Gulf. Once storage was full, production was shut in, but this is problematic, because once the fluid injections guiding the oil towards outlets have ceased, the oil spreads out again within the field, and may not be able to be concentrated in the right area. In other words, production shut ins damage the field, and if restarted, production would be at a permanently lower level. Production of some 8-9million barrels/day have been shut in in the Gulf countries.

The US currently seems fixated only on their stock market, which is no indicator of the health of the real economy, and is currently elevated artificially by the bubble in AI stocks, which resemble a circular firing squad of financial engineering. The American regime is constantly manipulating the market and raising expectations skyhigh by spinning economic narratives that bear no resemblance to reality, and when reality asserts itself, it will come as a tremendous shock. Collective dashed expectations are extremely dangerous, especially in a highly polarised country with more guns than people. The regime is currently trying to control the flow of global trade into the future by attempting to control all the major maritime choke points, primarily with a view to halting the rise of Asia in general and China in particular. A deal being negotiated with Malaysia and Indonesia could confer control of the Strait of Malacca, which is the most critical in the world.

This oil shock will be larger than all previous ones combined, and it will happen at the same time as 20% of LNG is offline, fertiliser is missing for planting season, as well as sulphur for extraction, helium for computer chip manufacture, and many other critical inputs for the global economy. The real crisis has not yet begun, but it will start soon. Far too many people are energy-blind, and sleepwalking into disaster completely unprepared. Awareness must be raised, and communities must band together for mutual aid.