Ian Welsh

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

Information Overlord: West Asia War Overwhelms Political and Business Coverage

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On October 17, 2026

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Nat Wilson Turner = Information Overlord = Flames Up = Phones Out = No Sense of Urgency
What I Wrote This Week

From me as Nate Wilcox at the Let It Roll Podcast

From me as Nate Wilcox — The MMA Draw & the Mad Squabbles Show

Dana White: Eddie Hearn is WEAK — The Mad Squabbles Show (YouTube), 15 Oct.

Saudis play a big game of CHICKEN with Canelo Alvarez as Houthis drone Riyadh — The Mad Squabbles Show (YouTube), 12 Oct.

What I’ve Been Reading and Watching

Trump 2.0 Regime

  • Trump’s furious phone call over missing $5.6m: Alina Habba accuses MAGA loyalist Richard Grenell in feud over her billionaire husband’s money — Daily Mail.
  • Nasty email fight between 2 top Trump appointees spills into the open — Politico. Zampolli is the Epstein associate who brought Melania Trump to the US. “2 top Trump officials, Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau and special envoy Paolo Zampolli, have been embroiled in a monthslong fight that include leak accusations and ‘bizarre’ defamation threats — in emails that include many other colleagues.
    “The emails, which I obtained, show Zampolli and Landau disagreeing over chains of command as Landau admonishes Zampolli to stick to his remit on cultural issues — but devolve into bitter arguments and unproven allegations.
    “I am hereby ordering you–once again–to immediately stop all work on ANY issues not directly tied to cultural diplomacy, including every one of the issues you mentioned in your recent emails,’ Landau wrote to Zampolli, a personal friend of Trump’s, in one email from Nov. 2025.
    “In one email to Zampolli, he said that working on issues outside the scope of his authority ‘and in contravention of my express directives, may expose you to disciplinary action, dismissal, and legal liability.’ Landau wrote that he was ‘committed to a path of insubordination.
    “In two in-depth telephone interviews with me, one of which lasted more than 45 minutes, Zampolli continued his criticism of Landau, saying that he ‘has been attacking me from Day 1’ and ‘everything I did, he tried to destroy it. … Definitely, he has a problem with me.”
  • Trump ally removed from role after report of State Department feud — CNN.
  • He Crafted a Crypto Law for Trump—as His Company Got Millions From a Crypto Giant — Wall Street Journal. “Money from Tether flowed to Nxum while Bo Hines worked in the White House on landmark stablecoin legislation. Once the law passed, Tether hired him as its U.S. chief.”

AI Bubble

  • AI Cockroaches Scurry Out from Under Nvidia, the Most Valuable Company in the World — Big by Matt Stoller. “…the best way to understand where the scammers are isn’t to look at a particular industry sector, but to follow the scammers from industry to industry. As a contact put it, ‘This is like the SPAC craze of 2021. Whatever the hot thing of the day is, that is what the grifters will gravitate to. Shell companies did reverse takeovers with Chinese firms, the biotech bubble, shale, and others. Stock promoters will promote.’ In other words, the same people just move from scam to scam, since unethical stock promotion itself is their business.”
  • Companies rushed in on AI. Now some are pulling back — The Guardian. “Employers are navigating a flood of errors and low-quality work that are sapping employee time, raising privacy and security risks and pushing up costs. Now, some businesses that started off fast and furious on AI are pumping the brakes, implementing restrictions where experimentation was once encouraged, bringing back experienced workers and upping training efforts.
    “C-suite leaders say when it comes to AI, there’s a sense that ‘we’re driving the truck and building it at the same time, and that’s a problem,’ said Johnny C Taylor Jr, president and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management. ‘If we could all rewind … we would have introduced [this] in a more thoughtful, slow way.
    “Despite billions of dollars that firms around the globe have invested in AI over the past few years, major returns remain to be seen: 90% of executives say AI efforts have yet to translate to productivity gains at their companies, according to an Atlanta Federal Reserve working paper. And an Ernst & Young survey published last month found that 36% of senior AI executives at companies with at least $1bn in annual revenue reported an AI incident that led to issues including data loss, financial damage, brand damage or operational disruptions.”

Silicon Valley Crazies

  • A Billionaire Has A Psychotic Religious Break With Reality — Ian Welsh. “Now it’s possible that Thiel is just running an op–that he doesn’t believe any of this and is simply trying to whip up religious folks, especially Evangelicals (a religion that is reversal of much of what Jesus preached) against policies he hates. Being kind, perhaps he genuinely thinks that the world is in danger of world government and it will be achieved thru fear.
    “But I think it’s more likely he’s had a religious psychotic break, confusing his own desires and prejudices with religious teachings.”

Dystopia

  • The Endgame of Surveillance And Autonomous Robots Approaches — Ian Welsh. “…governments and any big corp that cares enough will know exactly where you go, and where you’ve been. They can alter footage to embarrass you or frame you for a crime. They can fairly easily listen in to what you say, even when you’re not using the phone.
    “Then we have autonomous armed robots. The armed robot dogs are already here, same with armed flying drones. The great problem for elites is always the issue of enforcer reliability. This is why Saudi Arabia is getting its ass kicked on the ground, because they deliberately crippled their troops to reduce the possibility of a coup.
    “Now, add in AI, which elites hope will allow them to replace technical workers: the problem with using all this tech is that you still have the enforcer issue: but if the autonomous robots can be maintained and built by AI, well, that problem is lessened. (Some people will still be necessary, but far less.)
    “This enables a full panopticon on daily life, especially for people who use ‘smart’ home devices, which are notorious for the data they send home. They’ll know who you are, what you’re doing, who you associate with, how much money you have, what you spend it on, etc, etc… Then they’ve got their robots to take you out, or they can frame you by altering the video that they have of you to show you committing a crime.”
  • Who Gets Paid: ClipIt and Israel’s $55.5 Million American Campaign — @leahfiles. “So many of you asked me to look into ClipIt, the company paying people by the view to post political clips. I did, and it connects to Israel’s $55.5 million American campaign, Trump’s former campaign manager, Turning Point and the operatives working for the Speaker of the House.
    “A few highlights are below, and the full article with receipts is up on Substack now (link in bio, and it’s free).
    “(1) The man who runs ClipIt goes by ‘Matt Servius’ online and has never been publicly named. Wyoming and Latvian records point to Matīss Tabūns, a 23-year-old in Talsi, Latvia, who formed ClipIt’s American company on May 28, 2025, with a one-dollar stake.
    “(2) Fourteen days later, on June 11, Brad Parscale formed Clock Tower X. It went on to register as Israel’s foreign agent.
    “(3) ClipIt’s own records label a campaign ‘Political’ for December 14 to 21, the week of AmericaFest. In those same days, Clock Tower X took in $6 million from Israel.
    “(4) ClipIt’s campaigns kept Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson out of their clips. Israel’s campaign websites attacked both of them by name.
    “(5) Israel’s campaign made its own clip titled ‘Charlie Kirk,’ and its contract appears written to collect repost rights to content made by outside influencers.
    “(6) Everyone keeps asking who paid. ClipIt paid its clippers from a $20 million crypto wallet that traces back to Stripe’s stablecoin system, and one clipper thanked the boss for his ‘Political Payout of December.’ That means an American company has the name of whoever ordered the political payouts, and that record can be subpoenaed.
    “(7) ClipIt rewrote its terms the day before The Atlantic’s story ran. Then it changed its founding year and blocked visitors from the United States.
    “(8) Israel’s campaign sent $4.4 million for ‘media placement’ to a firm run by Mike Shields. His other firm has been paid $2.98 million by Speaker Mike Johnson’s campaign.
    “(9) Parscale’s Israel firm uses the same Ohio office suite as his company’s White House contract.
    “(10) Turning Point denies working with ClipIt. But, it has paid Jake Hoffman’s firms millions a year, and Hoffman ran Turning Point’s 2020 teen troll farm. The attack operation on X reeks of Jake Hoffman’s troll famrs”

The Leah Files: Who gets paid

Oil Prices

  • Why did China just save the world economy? — Arnaud Bertrand. “This is one of the biggest geopolitical mysteries of the year: why did China just save the world economy?
    “Because, make no mistake, it absolutely did. Analysts are pretty much unanimous on this: had China not dramatically – and I mean dramatically – reduced its imports of oil this year, the price of crude oil would have gone through the roof and dragged the global economy down with it.”

Gulf Money

  • Evaluating the PIF’s Financial Performance and New Strategic Direction — Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “In its new strategy, the Saudi Public Investment Fund seems to focus more on investment returns and less on asset growth. How this will work in practice is less clear, including what it means for the future of existing projects, such as Neom.
    “After more than doubling between 2021 and 2024, the PIF’s assets under management declined by 1% in 2025, from $916 billion to $906 billion. Further, the rate of return on assets under management was -4.4% (author estimate), largely due to the poor performance of the Saudi equity market. The negative return was not fully offset by new investments or incoming asset transfers. Most of the growth in assets under management in recent years has come from the government’s transfer of 16% of Aramco’s equity (valued at around $320 billion) to the PIF.
    “The rate of return on the PIF’s assets under management has been negative in three of the past five years. The average return over this period is estimated at 4.7% per year and was mostly accounted for by a 25% return in 2021. Over the same five-year period, global equity markets have risen by over 10% per year on average, and Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global and Alaska’s Permanent Fund Corporation, which both manage diversified global portfolios, have returned around 9% per year. To put this difference in returns in perspective, if the PIF’s rate of return had been the same as the Norway fund over the past five years, its assets under management could have been $110 billion higher by the end of 2025.”

Contributions to Growth in PIF Assets Under Management, end-2020 to end-2025

Latin America

  • Whistleblower Exposes Meta, Bolsonaro, and Cerimedo Election Meddling Partnership — Pan American Dispatch. “On August 18, Fernando Cerimedo was arrested in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, for hiring hitmen to assassinate his ex-partner, Nadia Beller, who was pregnant at the time, after she threatened to go public about his large-scale illegal bot farm operations to throw elections for far-right candidates across Latin America. Still recovering from the multiple gunshot wounds she miraculously survived, she gave an interview this week on the Ventana al Mundo program on Mexico’s public television network, Channel 14. During the interview, she explained how Cerimedo and a member of the Bolsonaro family, who is assumed to be Flavio’s brother Eduardo, met with Meta officials to plot interference in Brazil’s presidential elections. She also said Cerimedo’s largest bot farms are still operating, and that his group is planning to interfere in the Claudia Sheinbaum administration in Mexico.”

What I Watched

Ori Goldberg Tribute Part 2 w/ a Special Introduction by J.G. Michael — Parallax Views (YouTube). Outspoken Anti-Zionist Israelis Are a Rare Breed, RIP to a Real One

Follow and Support My Work at NatWilsonTurner.com

Open Thread

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On October 17, 2026

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

The Death Of Democracy

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On October 16, 2026

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Something I’m seeing in a lot of smart people (and stupid ones too, usually for different reasons) is a loss in faith of democracy.

In one sense this is simple: Democracy hasn’t been delivering for going on 50 years now. Things keep getting worse.

The graphic below is illustrative, but wrong:

It’s wrong because I think everyone knows now that inflation, as measured in the West, is vastly understated. Wages have been rising slower than costs. I feel it on my own life, I have more income than I did ten years ago, and I can’t afford the lifestyle I had before: we’re talking simple things, like mostly eating cheap cuts of pork for meat, and not beef or even chicken. Consumer goods are sometimes cheaper, but usually not, but even when they are they break and are so expensive to repair with all the fancy digital crap in them that it makes more sense to throw them out and by a new one.

Tuition is way up. Medical is way up. In countries where it’s free or cheap, the quality is way down due to defunding, since our elites wants for profit medicine and the first step is making the public alternative crap. Food is up. Housing and rent are way up. Cars are way more expensive (real price, not hedonically adjusted.)

People see that nothing good seems to happen in democracies: life gets worse and worse. When something good does happen, some right wing government gets in power and reverses it, but more often right wing governments make everything worse and liberal governments don’t reverse anything they do, they just accelerate at a slightly slower pace.

So people are looking for alternatives.

This isn’t strange or unusual. In the post-war period many nations wanted to be democracies. They looked at America and Europe and assumed that democracy was part of what made them well off.

Today the shoe is on the other foot: we see how well China is doing. We read how cheap healthcare, food and housing are and we think “it must be the party system.”

The obvious advantage of the party system is that you can do long term policy. When you see nations which did industrialize after WWI what stands out is that they did so in de-facto one party states, places that were run for decades by the same party like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

They see that oligarchs have bought democracy, that what people want doesn’t matter to outcomes, unless elites also want it and that in China the population actually feels that the Party pays attention to what the people both want and need.

So they reason that we should switch to party systems because they seem superior. A sardonic twist on how everyone was down on the Party after the fall of the USSR.

The USSR shows that Party systems aren’t a panacea: they can fail too.

But, basically, democracy is going to keep taking hits and keep becoming less popular. It has failed on multiple fronts: sent industry to china, let housing prices get out of control, knew about climate change and not only didn’t do anything, but accelerated it. Geopolitical stupidity like creating the conditions for a Russia/China/Iran de-facto coalition and multiple insane wars from which ordinary benefit benefited not one whit.

As climate change gets worse and worse it will discredit both Democracy and Capitalism. I don’t think the Chinese have done nearly as much as they should have or could have, but with their heavy electrification program, their mass planting of forests and so on they’re the only nation which has done anything significant. Not good, but better than us.

Democracy has proven unable to reign in capitalism. China executes or life imprisons billionaires who break the law, we bail them out and immunize them from their crimes by fining their companies, but not them, leaving them still rich.

It all adds up to a horrid indictment of our system, and people are not going to put up with it forever. Liberal capitalism and liberal democracy, and perhaps democracy almost entirely, will be replaced by Party systems throughout the world over the next couple generations, starting, I’d guess, in about 15 years or so.

Failure, greed and incompetence have consequences, and the democracy will one of the casualties of our elites depravity.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

 

 

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A Billionaire Has A Psychotic Religious Break With Reality

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On October 15, 2026

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Billionaires are powerful. Peter Thiel isn’t the richest billionaire in the world, but he is an American billionaire who runs the most important intelligence firm in the world, Palantir.

Thiel’s gay, a protestant, and appears to have gone stark raving mad. You’ve probably heard about his Antichrist lectures. A simple summary is:

Thiel has previously written and lectured on the subject, arguing that the Antichrist is not necessarily a person but could come as a global government system. It would take control, he has argued, by exploiting people’s fears around artificial intelligence, climate change or nuclear war.

Exploiting fears? Like the insane 72% of Americans who thought Iraq was involved in 9/11? The massive scare campaign around Iran?

No–actual legitimate issues. Climate change is real, nuclear war is possible and the very founders of AI constantly publicly worry about AI ending humanity. (Well perhaps the AI bit is bullshit.)

Now it’s possible that Thiel is just running an op–that he doesn’t believe any of this and is simply trying to whip up religious folks, especially Evangelicals (a religion that is reversal of much of what Jesus preached) against policies he hates. Being kind, perhaps he genuinely thinks that the world is in danger of world government and it will be achieved thru fear.

But I think it’s more likely he’s had a religious psychotic break, confusing his own desires and prejudices with religious teachings.

And the generous reading fades the more one knows:

He describes the ICC as part of the emerging ideological architecture of the Antichrist, likening language on the ICC’s website to the antichristic talk of peace and safety in 1 Thessalonians. Thiel notes that the ICC’s arrest warrants for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant have limited where they can travel.

The ICC warrant meant Netanyahu couldn’t visit Poland on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp; though Poland’s president said he wouldn’t enforce it, Poland’s authority to defy the ICC wasn’t clear, and so the Israeli PM didn’t come.

Hungary, which belong to the ICC, allowed Netanyahu to travel to their country, with zero consequences, so this is false.

But the bigger point is that he’s weaponizing the Bible to say that doing good is bad. Netanyahu has lead a genocide, there isn’t a single human rights org in the world that I know of that has concluded anything else, and anyone who two brain cells to rub together knows it is true, because it’s been livestreamed and Israeli politicians are very clear that they want to get rid of all Palestinians, and a super-majority of Israelis agree.

Thiel’s been very dedicated to this message. He repeats it over and over again.

And what he’s saying is batshit insane. He’s either gone crazy or is acting crazy and to some extent it doesn’t matter which.

But because he’s a billionaire, and an important one (the US Vice President is his creature, plus he’s shown a vicious willingness to use his power to destroy his enemies), no one has pointed that what he’s saying is crazy.

Being good at making money doesn’t mean you’re smart or wise about anything else. We hang on the words of billionaires as if they’re pearls of wisdom, but the more billionaires we have minted, the worse the economy has become for a super-majority of the population.

If you want a Bible quote, here’s one for you: “by their fruits you shall judge them.”

By the fruits of Western billionaires, they’re terrible people and any advice they give, whether they’re having a break with reality or not, are meant to benefit them and their class, and not anyone else.

Google made search worse to juice profits. Facebook knew scammers were on their site, knew who many of them were, and did nothing, because they were making money off them. We now have online gambling and prediction markets which make casinos look like a good deal. Enshitification is word, and a thing, and it’s driven by billionaires caring only about themselves and their profits.

Anyone who listens to them without running what they say through “this person only cares about themselves” is a fool.

But Thiel’s gone a step further. The Antichrist?

Come on.

This worship of wealth as meaning someone is wise and smart is foolish. Most of them are only good at making money and buying political power. But beyond that foolishness, a sane society would look at Thiel’s Antichrist claims and laugh him out of the public sphere as a lunatic. That we don’t shows how far our societies have fallen into “The Emperor’s New Clothes” territory.

Until we purge the entire oligarchic class in the West, we will never have widespread prosperity or an information commons which is useful. It’s that simple. In the meantime, can we at least not pretend that religious mania is worth listening to?

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Texas Senate Race Features Fictions About Talarico vs. Plentiful Paxton Scandals

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On October 14, 2026

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The Texas GOP used to be really, really good at ruining Democratic candidates. Today’s GOP? Not so much.

This year’s Texas Senate race continues to astonish and amaze.

The Democrats have nominated State Representative James Talarico, a slightly less smarmy, not-gay Pete Buttigieg-type who has managed to offend virtually no one despite battling and beating the noxious Jasmine Crockett in a racially charged primary.

For their part, the Republicans nominated the once-impeached, often-indicted Attorney General Ken Paxton after a $130 million primary.

You have to give Texas Republicans some credit; almost 1.3 million of them voted against Paxton in the first round of the primary. Unfortunately for the GOP, only a little more than 500K of them showed up for the runoff, and Paxton’s hardcore MAGA supporters came out in force, nearly matching their opening round numbers, crushing the incumbent US Senator 63.8% to 36.2%.

Even with Paxton’s extremely checkered past featuring everything from accusations of stock fraud to multiple sex scandals and a tabloid-friendly “Biblical divorce,” Paxton might have cruised to victory had it not been for Donald Trump’s war of choice against Iran and the ensuing rise in gasoline prices around Labor Day.

Or maybe it was the $40M in ads Talarico and his allies ran between the May runoff and the GOP’s September convention vs less than $27 million by Paxton-aligned groups. Not long after, a desperate GOP poured over $122 million into ads in September, but that doesn’t seem to have mattered much.

Perhaps it’s because the modern Texas GOP doesn’t know what it’s doing.

For comparison, let’s review the résumé of one Karl Rove. Though commonly derided as a RINO (Republican In Name Only) today, Rove was the most feared and most successful political operative of his era.

Not only did he propel the utterly mediocre George W. Bush to two Texas gubernatorial terms and two terms as POTUS, but Rove also ratfucked an entire generation of Texas Democrats.

Karl Rove, King of the Ratfuckers

Rove systematically targeted the most talented young Democrats — with a special eye for Hispanics — and took them out with career-ruining capers that ensured the once-dominant party would go down and stay down for decades.

Here’s a quick and dirty run-through of his résumé:

I was directly involved in the 60 Minutes caper, having helped break the story that Ben Barnes, the Vietnam-era Speaker of the Texas House and later Lt. Governor, had admitted to helping George W. Bush get into the Texas National Guard. We thought that the 60 Minutes story would be a critical blow against Bush in his re-election campaign, and instead the story somehow became a tale of a forged version of a real document that right-wing bloggers instantly caught, supposedly by catching an on-screen glance that revealed a font face that didn’t exist at the time of the document’s creation.

60 Minutes thought it had carefully vetted the story and established that the document was true, but they never thought to check and see if the copy of the document they had was a forgery. Turns out that Bush’s people had had extensive access to his National Guard records in the 1990s and presumably left many such Easter eggs behind.

Point being, the guy was dangerous and a master of narrative manipulation who would stop at nothing to win elections and destroy his political opponents.

Now let’s compare and contrast with today’s GOP.

The Talarico Ohio Hospitalization Farce

The TL;DR version: James Talarico caught the flu and was off the campaign trail for 9 days. While he was away, a cast of online nitwits spawned a rumor out of whole cloth that he was in an Ohio mental hospital, and multiple big-time right-wingers, including Laura Loomer, Stephen Miller, the Paxton campaign, Elon Musk, and Paxton himself, amplified the tale.

This account did some interesting forensics on how the calumny spread online:

The masterminds are getting some richly deserved attention:

Jacqueline Sweet has some juicy allegations about Nick Sortor. Transphobic journalist Jesse Singal has quite a bit of dirt on the woman on the lower right who goes by @TickleTexts

The caper is being linked directly to the Paxton campaign.

Karl Rove, they ain’t.

But the kerfuffle seems to have unleashed a whole torrent of no good, very bad press about Paxton, all of which has the nasty trait of being fact-based.

Paxton’s Remarkable News Cycle

I’m just going to bullet point the headlines, because the dude is drowning in scandal:

He’s also closely tied to his peers at the top of the GOP ticket:

All I can say is, if Texas voters send this rancid scumbag to the US Senate, we deserve what we get.

Polling Shows Something Very Unusual

But the latest ReconMR/Siena poll has one particularly encouraging bit of news. It shows Talarico up 48% to 44% for Paxton, with Talarico down a point since September. But the cross-tabs showed something very interesting:

Dem: Talarico 92-2
Republicans: Paxton 87-7
Indies: Talarico 60-30

White: Paxton 49-45
Black: Talarico 67-19
Hispanic: Talarico 50-41

Austin region: Talarico 74-21
DFW: Talarico 49-41
Houston: Talarico 46-44
Rural: Paxton 55-37
San Antonio/South: Talarico 56-39

As former Texas Tribune editor Evan Smith pointed out, no Democrat running statewide has cracked 25% among rural voters in six straight elections.

The Endgame of Surveillance And Autonomous Robots Approaches

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On October 13, 2026

15 Comments

Back in the late 2010s I covered the onrushing surveillance state heavily. Having said most of what I wanted to say, I let it lie for the time being. But now it’s almost here. The NYTimes has a decent article on what Uganda is doing (and if a third world nation can do it…) Of course the article blames it mostly on China.

Ugandans have discovered that, increasingly, there is nowhere to hide. Civic life here is defined by thickening webs of state surveillance built with foreign help. Chinese cameras and facial-recognition software monitor the streets; Russian radio frequency chips implanted in license plates have been tracking cars in real time; Israeli software plunders the private contents of phones. Technology has created an intrusive eye that never blinks — a stealthy weapon for dictators keen to stifle speech and thought.

But worse than that is this:

Leaked internal documents revealed Toka’s technology can reportedly locate cameras, remotely access them, watch live feeds and even alter live or previously recorded footage while concealing evidence the system was compromised.

YES, THEY CAN ALTER LIVE OR PREVIOUSLY RECORDED FOOTAGE WHILE CONCEALING EVIDENCE THE SYSTEM WAS COMPROMISED.

Hmm I wonder where that ability could come in handy? The stated purpose for altering footage? “Masking of on-site activities” during “covert operations.”

Yeah, right. I mean, I’m sure it’ll be used for that, but more sinisterly it will be used to alter footage to frame people. Given how often police lie on the stand and fake evidence you know this will happen. Imagery is going to have to be discounted in trials, and we’ll have to go back to witnesses, but you know that won’t happen soon, this is just too convenient for any cops or intelligence organizations. You don’t even have to use a honey trap, you can just change the footage.

Many surveillance devices now don’t just watch, they listen. They often have thermal imaging, face and gait recognition. It’s harder and harder to avoid them identifying you. Even without chips, America’s flock cameras monitor all car travel by scanning license plates.

Then there’s the phones most people carry everywhere. They’re mobile listening and tracking devices and it’s trivial to take over the camera as well. I tend not to carry a phone with me most of the time, but it’s becoming more and more difficult to navigate life without a phone these days. Indeed, in China, it’s essentially impossible and I expect it won’t be more than a few years before it’s true in most of the West.

So governments and any big corp that cares enough will know exactly where you go, and where you’ve been. They can alter footage to embarrass you or frame you for a crime. They can fairly easily listen in to what you say, even when you’re not using the phone.

Then we have autonomous armed robots. The armed robot dogs are already here, same with armed flying drones. The great problem for elites is always the issue of enforcer reliability. This is why Saudi Arabia is getting its ass kicked on the ground, because they deliberately crippled their troops to reduce the possibility of a coup.

Now, add in AI, which elites hope will allow them to replace technical workers: the problem with using all this tech is that you still have the enforcer issue: but if the autonomous robots can be maintained and built by AI, well, that problem is lessened. (Some people will still be necessary, but far less.)

This enables a full panopticon on daily life, especially for people who use “smart” home devices, which are notorious for the data they send home. They’ll know who you are, what you’re doing, who you associate with, how much money you have, what you spend it on, etc, etc… Then they’ve got their robots to take you out, or they can frame you by altering the video that they have of you to show you committing a crime.

It’s silly to think they won’t take advantage of this to lock societies down and attempt a full authoritarian state where rebellion is impossible.

This has always been the endgame of the new communications, AI, and robotics techs, as I wrote well over ten years ago and it’s far worse than 1984, because in that novel they couldn’t store the information, someone had to be watching the camera feed. Likewise as age verification (to protect the kiddies, honest) becomes ubiquitous, getting information the state or oligarchs don’t want you to have will become harder and harder. Ban the sites they don’t like, forbid workarounds, keep track of everything you do and overcome the information problem. In the old days a group like the Stasi might know a great deal, but they couldn’t analyze every individual: AI makes that possible and firms are already working on pre-crime tech to predict who’s a radical or otherwise a danger to the state or those who profit from it. The first step, of course, will be de-banking, which doesn’t even need a court to find you guilty of anything.

Know everything, predict what people will do, make sure that they get only the information you want and if necessary, deal with dissidents with autonomous robots who are (they hope) utterly reliable.

It’s what authoritarians have always wanted, and it’s almost here.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

 

Hypocrisy, Ansar-Allah, and the Military Revolution

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On October 12, 2026

16 Comments

There have been a lot of condemnations of Ansar-Allah for hitting airports in Saudi Arabia. (They have hit every major airport except those in Mecca and Medina, multiple times and civilians have been killed.) I think a reminder is in order.

First, that this new war started when the Sauds hit Sana’a airport, but also:

The Saudi-Emirati coalition conducted more than 227 airstrikes on Sana’a Airport between March 26, 2015, and February 2022. (The airstrikes are documented in the United Nations)

2015: 67 airstrikes

2016: 62 airstrikes

2017: 7 airstrikes

2018: 47 airstrikes

2019: 7 airstrikes

2020: 15 airstrikes

2021: 12 airstrikes

2022: 10 airstrikes

Hundreds of thousands of Yemeni were killed by the Saudi/US blockade of food. The Sauds regularly hit hospitals, weddings, funerals — all the usual. They might as well be Israelis.

So I don’t want to hear crocodile tears now. The airports that are being hit are, unlike Sana’a during the siege, military targets. The Houthis have no airforce.

In addition to airports Ansar-Allah has been hitting refineries, pipelines and other oil infrastructure, essentially at will. The Sauds CANNOT protect their infrastructure. It is impossible.

This is a military revolution. Defense against missiles and drones is very hard, even Russia can’t stop constant attacks on their oil infrastructure, and they still have a decent stock of interceptor missiles. The Sauds are basically out, because America’s stocks are terminally low and Saudi Arabia is low on the priority list for what few there are (Israel gets first pick, then America.)

But even when there are lots of interceptors, drones and missiles are hard to stop, and the new offensive weapons are easier to make and cheaper than the defensive ones. This is especially the case for drones, but is also true for many missiles. In such a case, the strategy is to just to run the defenders out of missiles or overwhelm their launchers with huge strikes.

Over 10 years ago I wrote that drones would be a weapon the weak. This is half true, but it’s true enough, and it’s now been proved over the board.

Understand clearly that this IS a revolution in military affairs, and that it means that any nation which is serious and decent sized can create a missile and drone deterrent that is very hard to stop. If they have a lot of mountainous terrain, even better, but Ukraine is almost entire flat land.

Right now the US is still able to bully Latin American countries, but its clear that it’s lost the ability project power significantly bey0nd the Americas. The Iranians have picked up strikes against tankers, and it’s clear that the previous slow pace was a decision, and the decision has changed.

During the initial part of the war they effectively destroyed all US bases in the Middle East, including radars. It would take tens of billions to rebuild them, but since they can’t be defended (the US had plenty of interceptors at the time) that’s pointless. Odds are that most of the permanent US military presence in the Middle East will never return.

It is impossible to overstate just how much the calculus of force has changed: the US can no longer simply sit aircraft carriers off any prepared country’s coast and bomb the hell out of them.

Likewise this makes building up troops for ground operations very difficult. Think about trying to invade Iran. Where would you stage the troops that Iran can’t hit even as you’re trying to bring them in? There will be no major invasion of Iran, because it’s straight up impossible. In the Gulf War the Americans spent months building up forces nearby, that can’t happen any more.

Now Iran and Russia and China and Ansar-Allah were early adopters of this technology, and there are still lots of countries which have no significant drone or missile forces, but only complete incompetents haven’t noticed how effective they are, and you can be sure the technology will spread. If Ansar-Allah, in the most impoverished country in the world, can build drones and missiles (with some Iranian help) and if Iran, the most sanctioned country in the world could do so, there are few countries which couldn’t do the same if they really wanted to, and there are plenty of helpers available for them: China, Russia, Iran, even Ansar-Allah.

So this military revolution will spread, and as it does, the ability of the US to project power will be radically reduced. Further, in time, the tech for long-range missiles capable of striking the US will be developed and spread, and the US will no longer be able to go to war and think “but they can’t hit the homeland.”

All of this will come to be. It cannot be stopped, only slowed. And with Chinese sanctions on the US and Japan crippling their war industries, plus the US’s pathetic financialized military-industrial complex being ridiculously expensive and slow to manufacture anything, the US will not even be able to keep up.

Plus, a lot of countries are target poor. The US and its allies aren’t. One of the reasons Ansar-Allah is going hog wild hitting Saudi infrastructure is that after over a decade of being bombed to hell there isn’t much for them to lose. Their missiles hit targets which matter, while the Sauds mostly are reduced to terror bombing, which won’t stop the Houthis any more than it did the North Vietnamese.

The world is changing, things are happening, and the world order is changing completely.

 

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 11, 2026

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On October 11, 2026

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 11, 2026
by Tony Wikrent

 

War on voting

If Trump Steals an Election, Here’s What to Do – Nonviolent rebellion has proven again and again to be the most effective way of ousting even a determined autocrat.

Neil Abrams, October 7, 2026 [The New Republic]

… The institutionalists who once stymied Trump’s authoritarian ambitions are long gone. In their place are MAGA flunkies committed to doing the president’s bidding. With their help, he could conceivably defy any resistance from Congress and the Supreme Court.

Leading experts agree that the U.S. has transitioned to authoritarianism during Trump’s second term. The days when constitutional checks and balances were enough to keep a rogue president in line are over. What’s more, defeating a Republican at the ballot box no longer guarantees that he will accept defeat.

Still, Trump is not some omnipotent demigod casting thunderbolts at will upon his hapless subjects. No dictator can rule without the people’s consent. Withdraw that consent, and he is just another guy with a spray tan and a chancy comb-over.

Nonviolent rebellion—the strategic use of protests, strikes, and similar methods—has paralyzed authoritarian regimes and forced despots from power the world over. It can work in America too….

If the conventional political process is not sufficient to restore democracy, nonviolent rebellion remains the most effective tool. To counter GOP election theft, Americans might have to mount a rebellion of their own. The good news is that our fellow citizens have already produced one such movement during Trump’s second term.

When jackbooted federal thugs began forcing Minnesotans into unmarked vans, Minneapolitans responded. First, they got organized. Activist groups trained citizens in specific resistance tactics. They also established support networks for immigrant families who had been forced into hiding….

 

Random Stories. Or Are They?

Joyce Vance, Oct 09, 2026 [Civil Discourse ]

Trump is calling in the election-denier faithful to meet with him in advance of the midterm elections. We know this in part because people like Ed Martin have said so. He announced that Tina Peters, the Colorado elections clerk who went to prison for election crimes and was recently pardoned, met with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss election integrity and “the plans” for the upcoming midterm elections.

According to a local Colorado reporter, Peters’ attorney said the plan involved “seizing ballots nationwide” and a “strategy for a potential civil war,” although there’s no word on whether those topics were actually discussed and what the President’s views on them are….

 

Tina Peters Has Trump’s Ear on the Midterms

John Light, 10.07.26 [Talking Points Memo]

President Donald Trump is, apparently, being advised on the midterms by former Colorado elections clerk Tina Peters. The two met Monday at the White House.

Peters was convicted in 2024 of a series of state crimes related to a plot to undermine the results of the 2020 election. Colorado’s Democratic governor then commuted her sentence earlier this year amid a pressure campaign by Trump.

After the meeting on Monday, former DOJ official and longtime conservative gadfly Ed Martin helpfully blabbed about what the two discussed, enthusing to the MAGA news outlet Real America’s Voice he was “going to break some news.”

“There is local control,” Martin said of U.S. elections. “However, the laws that govern the system, like safety and national security, are federal laws. So Tina Peters, famous Colorado clerk, was in the Oval Office today just two hours ago talking about this question. The president’s taking it seriously.”

Martin claimed that voting machines are compromised by foreign governments (a familiar, baseless allegation), and suggested that Peters and the president were discussing what he could do about it.

“If the Congress won’t pass the Save America Act, and they won’t, the president’s going to have to do what he’s going to do,” Martin said. “And it’s not a local issue when it’s national security, and it’s clearly national security. So we’ll see how it plays out. But again, four weeks from today, we have an election that has to be safe, has to be secure.”

 

Election Denier’s Lawyer Reveals Trump’s Chilling Midterm Plan – Notorious election fraudster Tina Peters recently met with the president to discuss the midterm elections.

Hafiz Rashid, October 8, 2026 [The New Republic]

 

Docs Reveal New Details About Dramatic Admin Efforts to Substantiate the Non-Citizen Voting Myth

Khaya Himmelman, 10.08.26 [Talking Points Memo]

We got new details this week about exactly what the administration has been up to thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Over the past year, ICE has reviewed millions of records and investigated hundreds of nonprofits suspected of helping noncitizens register to vote, according to internal records that were obtained by the nonprofit Democracy Forward. “The information revealed in the documents should concern all Americans and is further evidence of an alarming attempt by the executive branch to undermine our elections,” Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement.

The records note that these investigations were, in part, meant “to identify specific organizations that may be predatory in nature, particularly those suspected of illegal registration and voter encouragement.”….

 

Military Mobilizes for Upcoming Elections

Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 10-06-2026]

… “Foreign malign influence” is the U.S. government’s official euphemism for censoring tweets, Facebook posts, TikTok videos and myriad other online speech thought to imperil Americans’ ability to think correctly. This is part of what the military will be doing with growing intensity as election day nears….

Both major parties, whatever their disagreements, share a consensus view that Americans’ beliefs and even voting decisions are not their own, but rather the result of shadowy foreign influence campaigns. So much so, in fact, that Congress has codified in law a definition of “foreign malign influence” that of course focuses on “public opinion within the United States.”

Even if there’s the best of intentions, the government using “public opinion” and “malign” in the same sentence is dangerous….

 

Republicans’ New Plan to Save the Senate: Start a Race War in Minnesota

John Light, 10.09.26 [Talking Points Memo]

As polls show Republicans doing poorly in safely red states, the party is looking toward blue states in which its candidates might have a chance. One such state is Minnesota, where Senate candidate Michele Tafoya (R), a former sideline reporter for Sunday Night Football, is polling well. And so I can only guess it is with the election in mind that President Trump is trying to stir up some racial tension, going so far as to encouraging Minnesotans to “fight back” against their Somali immigrant neighbors.

The state has been “taken over by Somali Immigrants” he wrote on Truth Social yesterday. “There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back.”

He want on to attack Governor Tim Walz (D) as “an incompetent thief who doesn’t want to get involved” before concluding “The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back!”

The attacks rest on the same panic about fraud investigations in the state that prompted last winter’s federal invasion of Minneapolis, leaving two American citizens dead. Republicans have returned to those talking points after an 18-year-old American citizen born to Somali immigrant parents was arrested earlier this week after allegedly plotting an attack on the Mall of America with an assault rifle, inspired by ISIS. It’s unclear how realistic his plan was. Tafoya, the Republican Senate candidate, has leaned hard on the details of that arrest, while also describing voter concerns about “crime” and supposed “Somali gangs.”

Elsewhere, Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), who represents a red seat northwest of Minneapolis, offered the idea that his constituents were facing “enemy combatants.”

“This is another one that you’re going to hear at the ballot box,” he said on Fox Business. “Democrats […] are not talking about it, they are not offering solutions, and they are not holding these fraudsters or these criminal gangsters — which I would argue are enemy combatants, more than anything — they’re not holding them accountable.”….

 

Meet the second-year lawyer defending Trump’s plans to seize ballots” [American Doom].

[American Doom, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20261006]

“On Sept. 20, the Justice Department responded to allegations contained in a Democratic National Committee lawsuit that the agency was planning to seize ballots in November. The DOJ then said it would need until just a few days before Election Day to respond.” More: “In paragraph after paragraph, the DOJ argued that all of that background material — Trump wishing he had seized voting machines, endless threats to arrest election officials, the removal of the DOJ guidelines for active elections — was “impertinent” to the FOIA requests demanding information about ballot seizure plans. That’s certainly one interpretation. Another is that all of that background is entirely pertinent to the issue of whether records regarding ballot seizure plans exist, and whether the DOJ has to release them under FOIA. The response was simply remarkable, I thought. Who wrote it? I wondered.”

 

ICE probed hundreds of voter registration groups across the U.S.

[Democracy Docket, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2026]

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