Ian Welsh

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

Author: Nat Wilson Turner Page 1 of 6

Information Overlord: Skydance + Musk, Egypt + Saudi Arabia

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On October 24, 2026

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Nat Wilson Turner = Information Overlord = Flames Up = Phones Out = No Sense of Urgency

What I Released 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

It’s Ian’s annual fundraiser. This allows us to cover the changeover of hegemony from America to China, environmental collapse, internal US fascism, what a better society would look like, Gaza, AI, the coming stock market crash and various other issues. As of this writing we’ve raised about $3,185 out of a $14,500 goal, from 34 people. It’d be great if you can help out (please don’t donate if your financial situation is dire.) You can Subscribe or Donate here or contact me at admin-at-ianwelsh-dot-net if you need another way to donate (mail, usually. A lot of cash apps don’t work in Canada.)

What I’ve Been Reading and Watching

Trump Regime 2.0

  • The Pentagon Buyout King — The American Prospect. “Feinberg has been doing a little of everything at the Pentagon, overseeing nearly all of the administration’s pet projects. He supervises its investment units, which, staffed with former Cerberus execs, have been buying equity in and making huge loans to companies in the military supply chain, many of them with ties to the Trump family and other well-connected private investors. One of those investment offices, which the Biden administration stood up to make low-interest loans to backstop domestic defense production, is now involved in managing the United States’ Venezuela oil deal. It recently floated issuing a $5 billion loan for AI infrastructure development, in partnership with a new bank founded by defense tech billionaire Palmer Luckey. Another one is called the Economic Defense Unit; Feinberg created it himself earlier this year and installed George Kollitides, a former aide-de-camp at Cerberus, as its head. Kollitides also leads Feinberg’s new Business Operators for National Defense consortium, which plans to ‘embed’ hundreds of defense executives in Pentagon offices.”
  • The Wall Street Veteran Trying to Solve the Pentagon’s Missile Problem — Wall Street Journal. “Trump asked Feinberg why he was still seeing media reports that the U.S. had paused attacks on Iran amid concerns about dwindling weapons stocks, given Feinberg’s job was to improve those stocks.
    “‘The president wants more. The secretary wants more. I want more,’ Feinberg recently said, explaining his approach in his first interview since taking the job last year.
    “As the U.S. expends thousands of missiles in the Iran war, Feinberg is trying to speed up the Pentagon’s ability to get new weapons. The jury is still out on whether it will work.
    “Over the past year and a half, he has attempted a sweeping overhaul of the Defense Department’s approach to weapons production, establishing a new procurement bureaucracy reporting directly to him and taking billions of dollars in government stakes in companies that supply critical materials, rocket engines and other key parts.
    “In large part, he has relied on companies and executives familiar to him from his time running the investment firm he co-founded, Cerberus Capital Management.”
  • The Moment Katie Zacharia Found Out Her Five-Day Stint as Press Secretary Was Over — Wall Street Journal.

Saudi Arabia

  • Blood without representation: Why Saudi Arabia can’t stop the Houthis — Kulna. “Why can’t Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s biggest military spenders, stop the Houthis? The answer isn’t weapons. It’s the bargain the Gulf monarchies were built on, which is now breaking, and a decade of MBS’s absolute power that left the kingdom no way out.”
  • Rave. Fight. War. — Sportspolitika. “As the U.S. orders its diplomatic staff to leave the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are relying on combat sports and raves to maintain a facade of normalcy in a time of war.”
  • Bryan Fonseca on the Saudi events still going ahead — @BryanFonsecaNY. “Everyone has been canceling their Saudi-based events — except for ones that are TKO-backed.
    “Canelo vs. Mbilli (Oct. 31) and WWE Crown Jewel (Nov. 7) still set to move forward despite the ongoing war.
    “Zuffa is reportedly planning another boxing card on Nov. 14 in Riyadh.”

Drop Site News: Saudi Arabia has canceled or postponed a string of flagship international events amid the regional war and escalating Ansarallah strikes

  • Turki Alalshikh announces the return of Riyadh Season — @Turki_alalshikh. “With the support and empowerment of His Highness the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, and His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince, sponsor of the Vision and our inspiring leader, Riyadh Season returns with diverse entertainment events and experiences, exceptional sports championships, and varied musical concerts and theatrical shows 🇸🇦♥️
    “Welcome to Riyadh Season”
  • Saudi Arabia executes a man for charges he allegedly committed at 14 — @DropSiteNews. “Saudi Arabia announced Saturday it had executed a man convicted of charges he allegedly committed at 14: befriending people who were detained or wanted by the state, according to court documents reviewed by Human Rights Watch.”

UAE

Skydance

  • Elon Musk makes $1 billion investment in Ellison’s Skydance — Semafor. “Elon Musk has invested roughly $1 billion in Skydance, according to people familiar with the matter, providing a much needed financial injection as the company looks to cut costs and bolster its stock price.
    “The deal came together at roughly the same time as equity investments from Skydance’s other investors, including board member Laurene Powell Jobs, the people said. Semafor reported in September that Paramount was considering seeking an equity injection from Musk.
    “Musk has publicly praised the Ellisons and Skydance, prompting speculation of a more expansive partnership between Musk’s lower-earth-orbit satellite network, Starlink, and Skydance.
    “‘He’s gonna have to re-engineer all of those channels, and figure out how they morph into streams themselves rather than just traditional linear,’ billionaire cable executive John Malone said Tuesday.”
  • CBS’ DraftKings Gamble — Status. “Late last week, as local stations around the country continued to prepare for Election Day, executives at CBS’ owned and operated television stations learned of an unexpected curveball from corporate management. Their election coverage, they learned, would now be sponsored by the sports gambling site DraftKings.”

Israel

Ukraine

Dem Collapse

Mehdi Hasan INTERROGATES Neera Tanden for hosting Benjamin Netanyahu — @ClippingWings.

https://x.com/ClippingWings/status/2110922837506568642

GOP Hacks

  • ICE Barbie Goon Unmasked as Creator of MAGA’s Vilest Ad — The Daily Beast. “The man behind Kristi Noem’s infamous horseback commercial at Homeland Security has been exposed as the creator of Vivek Ramaswamy’s vile new attack ad, a new report alleges.
    “The Rooster reports that The Strategy Group Company, run by Benjamin Yoho, is the creator of the ad featuring an interview with Democratic candidate Amy Acton’s estranged mother, in which she casts doubt on her daughter being a victim of horrific childhood abuse.”

Uprisings

Psychopathology

  • You Can’t Know Everything — Unpopular Front. “Here’s what I think is going on with Elizabeth Holmes: She has an extremely severe form of the defense mechanism that Melanie Klein called splitting—dividing self and world into unambiguous ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ She cannot admit that she has any bad qualities: any aggression, any selfishness, any tendency to deceive others, or even any of the more positive forms of aggressiveness like ambition. On her account, her motivations are all benevolent, idealistic, and noble. She even says she never lies! Now, I believe a consciously deceptive person would admit that they, like everyone else, lie casually from time to time to avoid hurting others or to get out of inconvenient situations, but they avoid lying in serious issues or have a strong ethical aversion to lying. A total denial of lying immediately raises red flags: It is not an effective strategy for building trust. Usually, hearing something like that is a sign of someone being a little bit crazy. She cannot face or integrate that aggressive part of herself. Most mature adults with healthy psyches can admit to themselves and others that they have some less than stellar qualities—that they can be selfish or even destructive at times—although they balance that behavior out with nice qualities, for example, the capacity for love and kindness, and the ability to make amends when they do wrong.”

Conspiraversy

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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

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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.

Information Overlord: It’s Ari Emanuel’s World and We Just Watch Skydance In It

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On October 9, 2026

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Nat Wilson Turner Information Overlord: Flames Up = Phones Out = No Sense of Urgency

What I Released 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

UFC Boss Brags About Backstabbing Vince McMahon — The Mad Squabbles Show (YouTube), 7 Oct.

What I’ve Been Reading and Watching

AI Bubble

  • A.I. Groups Are Spending Millions to Influence the Midterms — New York Times. “A New York Times analysis of federal campaign finance data shows that the political groups aligned with the two leading A.I. developers, OpenAI and Anthropic, have quietly but decisively intervened in key 2026 races, spending on campaign advertising and outreach to voters to the tune of $55.7 million.
    “So far, the spending has been concentrated almost entirely in the primaries. The two groups have spent $52.6 million on safe seats — those that are unlikely to change party hands but that often feature intense intraparty contests. The big A.I. players have also spent more heavily for Democrats than Republicans. They have boosted candidates who align with their agendas, helped defeat those they see as hostile to it and ingratiated themselves with front-runners who are likely to be in positions of power in the next Congress to make decisions critical to their bottom lines.
    “But with voters quickly souring on their industry — including demanding that lawmakers do more to regulate A.I. and halt or mitigate the proliferation of data centers — they have taken pains to obscure their involvement. With few exceptions, they have intervened without ever explicitly mentioning A.I. or data centers in the TV and digital ads they have purchased.”
  • The Empty Brain — Aeon. Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer.
  • Timnit Gebru Believes There Is No ‘Existential Threat’ From AI — Wired. One of AI’s fiercest critics believes the doom talk is about founders making money, not saving humanity.
  • Are Big Tech bonds crowding out the US Treasury? — Financial Times.

  • The AI Cloud Oligopoly — Michael Burry. “I have recently considered that the tech giants, but for Apple, are spending as if their lives depended on it when their lives clearly do not.
    “Monopolies almost by definition need not spend wildly as if their lives depended on it.
    “This deserved no small further contemplation, although rather quickly it dawned on me that they expect this just to be another monopoly rent they collect, that they collectively have the expectation the government will tolerate their oligopoly on AI.
    “Nay, will tolerate and fear it.
    “So the evil gambit is to create and to allow this AI to grow on their machines, where they will threaten to control both economic and political forces greater than humanity has ever seen, overwhelming any politician’s, or politicians’, might.
    “Why are OpenAI and Anthropic and Oracle also spending so much? Surely they are not monopolies?!?
    “No, but they intend to be part of the oligopoly. None can imagine breaking the dominance of a Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Meta within each silo.
    “However, there is clearly an opportunity to join in that dominance under cover of a new paradigm. The power and riches expected by these companies are evidently so great that even Larry Ellison was seduced to bet his company on it.
    “This brings new meaning to technocracy, and whether such is what we face. What is really scary is that other than the grab for market power, all this spending does not have a defined goal or economic end-point. As such, the consequences are likely unknowable to all. Yet they do it anyway.
    “The governments most interested in this technology seem to be the autocratic ones and the United States. A good set-up for a lot of drama, if not terror.”

Ellison Empire

  • Looking at the Ugly Side of the Paramount-Skydance Merger…And How I’d Fix It — The Entertainment Strategy Guy. “More than one person sent me a note speculating that the big problem with Paramount Skydance buying Warner Bros. Discovery is the “Warner Bros.” portion of the deal. In fact, that’s a take I read a lot about Warner Bros., ever since they caught Netflix’s, and then Paramount-Skydance’s, eye. In short, multiple companies (Time, AOL, AT&T, Discovery) have bought and then regretted buying Warner Bros.
    “if you want to add a traditional Hollywood studio to your portfolio (be it a magazine publisher, internet service provider, cellular phone company, linear cable bundle or rival movie studio), you have to convince the owners to sell.
    “And that usually means overpaying. The opposing executive team has to want to sell, and then they have to clear it with their shareholders. Overpaying accomplishes this. (This is a variant of the winner’s curse in auctions.)
    “So that’s the price of the deal. And usually it shows up on balance sheets as…
    “Debt.
    “Indeed, the history of Warner Bros. buyers is folks taking on wayyyyyy too much debt to buy the company. Servicing that debt cripples the new combined enterprise. And they can’t invest in new opportunities. And often they make bad decisions to help pay off that debt. Eventually, this impacts the stock price, so they sell. Then the cycle with Warner Bros. starts again!”
  • What David Ellison’s Latest Moves Say About How He’ll Lead Now — Wall Street Journal.
  • A High-Stakes Gambit Clinched Paramount’s Warner Deal — Wall Street Journal.
    • Ellison waged a concerted behind-the-scenes campaign, people familiar with the matter said.He crisscrossed the country courting politicians, hired well-connected operatives and lobbyists to work regulators and lawmakers, cultivated allies among Republicans and Democrats and, in a pivotal move, even threatened to move his empire out of California.California Gov. Gavin Newsom publicly called on the two sides to settle the matter, and privately encouraged the attorney general to go to the table. Ellison met with Newsom on more than one occasion, the people familiar with the matter said.
      …
      Next, Ellison had to get the deal through regulators here and abroad.That task fell primarily to chief legal officer Makan Delrahim, one of Ellison’s first hires after acquiring Paramount. Ellison set up a war room on the Paramount lot where he, Delrahim and one or two other executives would meet daily to map out strategy and measure progress, said one of the people familiar with the matter.A former Trump administration antitrust chief, Delrahim was intimately familiar with Warner. As head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, he led the government’s ultimately unsuccessful effort to block AT&T’s acquisition of what was then called Time Warner, in 2018.

      One of Delrahim’s first moves was to tap Jon Leibowitz, who chaired the Federal Trade Commission under President Barack Obama, as an outside antitrust adviser.

      Getting approval from the Justice Department came with relative ease, as did approvals from the European Union, United Kingdom, China and other regions.

      But a hurdle emerged when California’s Bonta, joined by 11 other states, including New York, Connecticut and Colorado, sued to block the merger on antitrust grounds. The states alleged the deal would illegally consolidate markets including those for theatrical films and basic cable channels.
      …
      Meanwhile, Ellison and his team began making their case to Newsom and warned that Paramount would pack up and move to another state if the deal was blocked. The company spoke to officials in Tennessee about a potential move, The Wall Street Journal reported.

      While Bonta categorized those threats as bluster and blackmail, people close to Ellison said they were genuine. That message was conveyed to Newsom, the people familiar with the matter said.

      In early August, Ellison tapped former California Assembly Speaker and Democratic power broker Fabian Núñez to help build political support for the deal in Sacramento.

      Núñez, founder of the consulting firm Actum, met frequently with Bonta’s office in an effort to broker peace. Ellison also enlisted Democratic former California Sen. Barbara Boxer and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to help, both of whom are partners with Actum, people familiar with the matter said.

  • Ari Emanuel Tours His Book and Hollywood Yawns: ‘No One Gave a F—k’ — The Wrap.
    Hollywood didn’t bother to show up. A few rows up front were reserved for Emanuel’s friends and VIPs which consisted of some family members, his close pal, director Pete Berg, and some agents, according to one person who sat nearby. The green room had a small selection of friends, no more than 20, circulating afterward. The audience was made up of “civilians,” as one person put it, rather than the insider VIPs that Emanuel, as one of Hollywood’s most powerful players, should command.Just as well, though, because apparently Emanuel was really boring. He did not hold forth on the accumulated wisdom of his 40 years in the industry: building an agency, taking over a legacy rival, buying companies like the UFC and WWE for billions of dollars, pushing hard into live sports and going public and then private again.Instead, he fell back on his grievances with his previous longtime partner Patrick Whitesell, who he swears he will never talk to again; complained about Jeffrey Katzenberg and President Joe Biden; and parried Swisher’s probing about his friendship with Elon Musk. By all accounts, it didn’t land with an audience that wasn’t interested in these personal scores.
  • Paramount Stock CRUSHED After Merger with Warner Discovery Closes — Big by Matt Stoller.
    The transition is not promising. Consider the two things that David Ellison did after buying Warner Discovery. He organized mass layoffs, and he gave himself and his entire executive team a big raise. Specifically, Ellison awarded himself a $150 million bonus upon closing the purchase, even though he doesn’t need the money, and has accomplished absolutely nothing except saddling two historic movie studios with $80 billion in debt.His legal consigliere, Makan Delrahim, received $25 million, and his operating officer Andrew Brandon-Gordon got $38 million. To do the layoffs, he hired Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz, and paid him $46.5 million. That’s all on top of the massive $550 million payout to former Warner CEO David Zaslav, which was negotiated as part of the deal.Amid that backdrop of endless zeros for executives, the layoffs will be significant, and Kreiz and Ellison sent a memo on the “difficult decisions” ahead. That’s a crushing blow to morale, since it says very explicitly, “we’re not all in it together.” Every employee at Skydance has essentially been told to act like a mercenary and to extract as much as he or she can while he or she can.

UAE

  • Khaldoon Al Mubarak is the man trying to pull City back from brink of football oblivion — The Telegraph. The Telegram fluffs Khaldoon. “It was November last year and City had just been beaten 2-0 at home by Bayer Leverkusen in the Champions League after Guardiola, as needlessly as inexplicably, made 10 changes to the team.
    “Al Mubarak was furious and expressed as much privately to Ferran Soriano, the City chief executive. “I can’t speak to him [Guardiola],” he said. “Honestly, I didn’t speak to him yesterday and didn’t message him and I can’t speak to him today I’m so angry. He’s put a mix in this that’s so unnecessary.”
    “But it was what Al Mubarak said next that cut to the heart of how one of the most powerful, influential and recognisable non-royals in Abu Dhabi likes to conduct himself.
    ““Let’s let this pass then we’ll talk about it in the right way with a constructive approach,” he said.
    “Perhaps it should be little surprise that a skilled business leader and government policymaker who has played crucial roles in brokering nuclear non-proliferation deals and long straddled the worlds of global finance and international diplomacy was not going to let his heart rule his head and overreact.
    “After all, you do not become the planet’s longest-serving head of a sovereign wealth fund and a key strategist by being a hot head prone to wading in with both feet when something irks you, even in a sport as emotive as football.”
  • A Soccer Cheating Scandal Has Ballooned Into a Geopolitical Problem for Britain — Wall Street Journal. The UK finds that selling your most beloved cultural institution to an amoral family fiefdom comes with strings. “The acquisition of Manchester City by an Abu Dhabi royal was always much more than a billionaire buying himself a shiny foreign toy.
    “From the very start, the project was the tip of a soft-power campaign to entrench the tiny Emirate deep in the British economy.
    “Now, 18 years later, it has emerged that the club was at the heart of the largest cheating scheme in English soccer history. And as City, which denies any wrongdoing, awaits an unprecedented penalty for financial doping, the scandal has rippled all the way to new Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
    “The predicament is especially awkward for Burnham, who built much of his political appeal on his everyman soccer-fan image, but now finds himself caught between a major investor in the U.K. economy and defending the integrity of the Premier League, Britain’s most popular cultural export since the Beatles.
    ““This does need to be done carefully without everybody jumping in and providing their conclusions,” said Burnham, who in his previous job as mayor of Manchester lobbied against punishing his beloved Everton for similar, smaller-scale infractions.
    “The U.K. has spent much of the past decade wooing the U.A.E. to invest in the country in an attempt to kick-start its slow-growing economy. A Sovereign Investment Partnership between the two counties, announced in 2021, initially targeting £10 billion over five years, has already seen nearly £30 billion committed across more than 50 direct investments.”
  • The chairman of scandal-hit Man City has worked with Trump and Macron as part of the UAE elite — AP. The UAE connects Trump, the Ellisons, Ari Emanuel’s TKO empire, and the UK in a web of corrupt dealings. “Khaldoon Al Mubarak, chairman of the scandal-plagued Manchester City soccer club, sat with Donald Trump in Davos this year, signing on to the U.S. president’s Board of Peace on behalf of the United Arab Emirates government.
    “He was with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles in June at a signing ceremony for a business summit.
    “Al Mubarak, 50, also is a UAE special envoy to China, and welcomed Xi Jinping to the club when the Chinese leader visited England in 2015.
    “Why the head of an English soccer club — albeit one of the wealthiest, most successful and now highly controversial — should be a key player at such political events is easily explained.
    “Al Mubarak, the public face of the 2023 Champions League winner now embroiled in one of soccer’s biggest scandals, is a member of the ruling elite in Abu Dhabi — part of the United Arab Emirates — and the head of a $385 billion sovereign wealth fund.”

UK PM Andy Burnham on Man City — @BBCSport. “‘I haven’t downplayed the seriousness of the findings.’
“Andy Burnham has addressed concerns that he devalued the verdict against Man City after the club were found guilty of Premier League financial rule breaches.”

Israel

  • Nothing has changed, and everything is changing — Alon Mizrahi. “…since October 7, I avoided Israel as much as I could. And it hadn’t felt like my place and my home for a while before that. This didn’t begin on October 7. Nothing began on October 7. But since October 7,
    “as I had a very early realization that this was a fateful event and life was not going to return to normal. And even more than that, and I shared this a couple of times, I had a very strong feeling that this was the beginning of the end of Israel
    “and I needed to be somewhere else and I want my family to be somewhere else. And I did that. To make a long story short, I spent some time in Israel this year and also very recently. And this gave me a chance to look at Israel, to see Israeli society, to hear Israelis, to look at Israeli media.
    “It’s not the same when you’re in and when you’re out. It’s not the same. It feels different. And since I really love to observe people and societies, this is one of my favorite things in the world to do, really. I took the opportunity to look and see. Not that I was expecting any surprises.
    “I mean, this is Israel. After all, I grew up in it. I know it so well. It’s a society. It’s a… It is a political creation that doesn’t change. The discourse, the narratives, the beliefs, the talking points, everything is on endless repeat. Nothing ever changes and this is really a very clear sign of a manufactured identity.
    “If you always say the same things and think the same things and react the same way and repeat the same talking points, no matter what happens in reality, it means that your very sense of self and reality and where you come from is false. Because in real life, you react differently to different things.”

Trump Regime

  • The Speech That Gets You Banned From America — Ken Klippenstein. “Secretary of State Marco Rubio has formally decided to bar some on the political “left” from visiting America, according to a diplomatic cable he sent to embassies this week.
    “When I obtained a copy of the internal cable banning those in vaguely “aligned groups” of “far-left terrorists,” I couldn’t help but laugh at the timing. The next day, Rubio was in Greece where, with the Acropolis behind him, he celebrated “free debate and public discussion, the contest of mind with mind.””
  • ‘Honey Please’: Kimberly Guilfoyle Pushed Donor to Wire $100,000 to Her Amex Account — Wall Street Journal.

Democrats

  • Democrats Have a Bill Maher Problem — The Nation. “Establishment Democrats obsessing over Hasan Piker’s every move seem to have no issue talking to Maher, despite his decades of open bigotry.”

Yemen

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Jasmine Crockett and the Dick Cheney Wing of the Dem Party Have All Got to Go

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On October 6, 2026

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Jasmine Crockett Offered Lobbying Services on Her Campaign-Funded Website – While in Office

I saw the above over the weekend and, while I can’t say I was shocked exactly, I was nonplussed for just a second at the appalling gaucheness of this latest new low from the ought-to-be-disgraced soon-to-be-former-US-Rep from Dallas.

I was not impressed by Rep. Crockett from the first time she came to my attention, using slurs to mock Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s disability — and I have loathed Abbott for decades — and trashing Marjorie Taylor Greene’s appearance.

I noticed immediately that Crockett’s knack for getting attention online and from the MSM didn’t correlate with legislative accomplishment or progressive positions.

Most important for me was the contrast with MTG, who sacrificed her political career in opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, where Crockett offered nothing but hairsplitting and excuses on the most important moral crisis of our era.

I’ve been trying to warn people about Crockett since July 2025 and really ramped it up last December, when she took the bait from the GOP Senate Campaign Committee (which had been featuring her in push polls for months) and entered the primary for the US Senate race.

The campaign was a total shitshow, centered on divisive identity politics, some of which she blundered into with stupid comments about Latino Trump voters and some of which she leaned into hard, all of which was divisive nonsense that couldn’t have been better calculated to play into Republican hands.

She didn’t even bother to hire a campaign manager, a tip-off that serving the people of Texas in the US Senate wasn’t her top priority.

Her top priority appeared to be accusing her critics of racism and sexism.

Crockett made no secret of her cynicism, openly calling the race a no-hoper and saying, “If you think it’s a losing cause, then who cares? But at least you could say we tried something new and we learned something from this experience.”

Her primary campaign in general was a fiasco, as one former Texas State House colleague told Politico:

“People who don’t understand politics will be upset because Jasmine was their hero,” said Texas state Rep. Jolanda Jones, a Democrat. “But for people who understand politics, [Crockett] literally had no ground game.”

She added: “This L is on her.”

Crockett also played it real cute about whether or not she supported Israel, but made no secret of being funded by crypto and data center interests.

Thankfully, she lost that primary to James Talarico, who seems headed to the Senate, but not before doing her damnedest to turn it into a brutal, divisive, race-based, identity politics shitfest.

She topped it off by giving Talarico the most tepid of endorsements and then refusing to campaign for him. She managed to leave him off her list of endorsed candidates last week before grudgingly saying she “endorsed ALL Democrats and yes that includes James Talarico”

She did find time to travel the country campaigning on behalf of AIPAC-backed candidates in multiple primaries, most egregiously for Wesley Bell against Cori Bush in Missouri, although she still played it cute and insisted, “but I didn’t endorse him.”

While she was busy not endorsing or campaigning for Talarico, she found time to celebrate convicted domestic violencer Chris Brown and apparently get publicly hammered in the process.

This will be my last post about Jasmine Crockett. She’s irrelevant, embarrassing, and not worth the time.

But what does matter is the internal conflict between two wings of the Democratic Party.

Progressives Battle Neo-Cons for the Future of the Democratic Party

I would put Crockett in the category of shiny object or attractive nuisance whose all-style, no-substance drew MSM attention like flies to honey, but the creeps at The Bulwark are a much more serious threat.

David Sirota has been blasting the neo-cons and their cowbird move to take over the Democratic Party at The Lever:

The trending conversations online have revolved around The Bulwark, a multimillion-dollar media juggernaut run by a crew of former GOP operatives and pundits — one of whom was the Mini Me to Corporate America’s Dr. Evil, some of whom cheered on the kleptocratic Bush administration and helped lie the country into the Iraq War, and many of whom participated in creating the backlash conditions for the Trump presidency they now purport to despise.

The Bulwark has made a mint off an audience of liberals who either forget their entire world every 15 minutes and/or simply do not care about all the damage these one-time Republicans previously created, as long as they are now — momentarily — against their erstwhile party.

But after the outlet participated in the GOP-aiding ruse of using its megaphone to try to focus the 2026 election discourse on Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, some are finally starting to ask an important set of questions: What exactly do these former Republicans want? And are they really the purported experts at winning elections that they claim to be?

…

The Bulwark wants a neoconservative takeover of the Democratic Party, after Trump successfully (and dishonestly) cast himself as an anti-neocon and threw them out of the GOP.

That’s not really speculation; they all but said it on the eve of the 2024 election.

Watch the clip. After The Bulwark’s founder Sarah Longwell excitedly cheers on then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ saber-rattling, her colleague Jonathan Last does a Dr. Evil mug to the camera and says, “Did the neocons just take over the Democratic Party?” — which elicits a hearty guffaw, before Longwell scoffs at Harris occasionally offering some economically populist rhetoric.

“Boo,” said Longwell, who, years later, said she preferred former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) over New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

After The Bulwark’s Longwell fired back, Sirota hammered home his case that it was the influence of neocons that cost Kamala Harris the 2024 election:

In the process, founder Sarah Longwell is now trying to rewrite the entire history of the 2024 election, pretending that neocons’ success in influencing the Democrats’ strategy in that contest had no real impact on the outcome — when in fact data suggest it helped deliver the presidency to Donald Trump.

“My problem with the DSA types who are after us is not their political ideology or their opinions,” said Longwell, amid the social media uproar over my essay at The Lever. “Their analysis doesn’t make any sense. There’s not a single piece of empirical data that the Liz Cheney stuff mattered (in 2024).”

This is false, according to empirical data released by Data For Progress just after the election. As Newsweek reported at the time:

The poll found that more independent voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania said they were ‘less enthusiastic’ to vote for Harris after she campaigned alongside Cheney…

In Pennsylvania, only 21 percent of independents said Harris campaigning with Cheney made them more enthusiastic to vote for Harris, while 28 percent said Cheney made them “less enthusiastic to vote for Harris.

In Michigan, 23 percent of independents said campaigning with Cheney made them more enthusiastic to vote for Harris, while 30 percent said they were less excited to vote for her after she rallied with Cheney.

Those net losses among independents matter in key swing states decided by very narrow margins.

Longwell, of course, has a motive in trying to now revise history and memory-hole the Harris-Cheney disaster that she helped forge: Longwell appeared on stage with Harris and Cheney at a key end-of-campaign event in Pennsylvania, where the Harris-Cheney alliance was alienating independent voters. The Bulwark celebrated and monetized that Harris-Cheney alliance, even as it damaged Democrats.

Tom Morello, guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, spoke for those who refused to vote for Harris because of her role in the Gaza genocide:

“I saw how the corporate Democrat sausage is made. It is worse than you think. And there is a righteous fury at the corporate-controlled, money-controlled electoral system we have that is absolutely illegitimate. And people cannot choke down voting for a candidate, I understand it, cannot choke down voting for a candidate that’s responsible for what happened in Gaza. And they just, they can’t do it.”

Criticism of Morello took the form of “crude identity politics” that immediately backfired:

Image

Luke Thomas tweeted in support of Morello and Sirota:

This is what the Tom Morello critics can’t seem to grasp. The idea is not that Trump isn’t an insane threat. And sure, generic Dem is better than anything MAGA. But unless Dems aggressively govern to directly address urgent society-wide problems, we are guaranteeing future calamity. I’m begging these people to think beyond stage one. Dems committed to more incrementalism rather than trying to pass M4A will spell our doom. You’re not fighting fascism holding the line on vote blue no matter who. You’re facilitating it.

I’m going to close this post out with an episode of The Left Hook featuring Sirota making the same arguments against the unholy alliance of identity politics hucksters, the Democratic Party establishment, and neocon “Never Trumpers” to cut progressives off at the knees in 2028 and where this will ultimately lead:

Key quotes regarding the Democrats throwing in the towel on opposition to the Ellison Hasbara Empire’s acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery:

Wajahat Ali: The old guard that has ensconced itself in the anus of the oligarchy, the people who have feathered their nest, the people who are corporate consultants,

the Democratic leaders who realize there’s a surging tide of young voters who want to replace them. And they’re like, no, you have to drag this power from my cold, dead hands. And they’re willing to sabotage the left. Progressives, the popular base of the party to stay in power. So we’ve given you some examples of Gavin Newsom.

My fear is this, is if we let this type of Democrat win in 2028, my fear, Dave, is they’re not going to change. They’re being paid by all the same people. You know that AI and crypto, the bubble’s going to burst. They’re going to get bailed out.

They’re not going to institute the reforms that people need because they’re paid by the same people who have effed everything up. So what we’re going to get is milquetoast reform. They’re going to be better than Republicans. They’re not going to have ice-killing citizens, okay? But structurally, when it comes to the economic engine that is raping people, that engine will just get a few cosmetic tweaks, but it’ll keep running for the oligarchy. And then in 2032, we’re going to have a Nazi economic populist Republican president.

David Sirota: Yeah, I mean, the way I put it is… Re-electing or electing another Democratic establishment type like Gavin Newsom is a delivery system for an even worse Donald Trump. It is a delivery system for even more authoritarianism. That you’re just going to run the whole cycle back that has been run from that 2008 to 2016.

It cannot be said enough. That if the Democrats regain power and do not deliver in a real way, in a way that we have not seen in our whole lifetimes, if they do not do that, the Democratic Party will serve in history as a delivery system for something that is worse than Donald Trump.

And everyone needs to be focused on this. This is honestly… I don’t care what issue, particular issue, is the issue that you tune into, climate change, AI, the economy, whatever it is. The point is, the central fear that should be on your mind is that a milquetoast not serious about delivering Democratic Party is a delivery system for the kind of authoritarianism That’s worse than Trump and that we have not really experienced here in this country in our lifetime. I’m going to borrow that. I like it. It keeps me up at night. Honestly, when I think about the future for my children, I am thinking, and I’m not trying to be overdramatic here, but you have these moments that create Future political eras. And I do think we’re in one of those moments that is going to actually create a new political era. Well, I should say it’s either going to make the current political era even worse, or we’re going to create an actually new political era. And the prospect of making things 10 times worse than this current era, where we just keep going in an authoritarian direction… Everything in history tells us that we should deeply fear that.

…

Wajahat Ali: “My fear is this, is if we let [Establishment/Corporate] Democrat win in 2028 they’re not gonna change…So what we’re gonna get is milquetoast reform,they’ll be better than Republicans, but structurally, when it comes to the economic engine that is r*ping people, that engine will just get a few cosmetic tweaks, and then in 2032 we’re gonna have a Nazi economic populist Republican president.”

I’ve been blackpilled on the Democrats for years, but hope is the thing with feathers, and I keep getting sucked in when I see people I used to consider hopelessly centrist, like Ali move to the left and openly call out the Dem establishment.

And I keep hoping maybe I can wake up some of the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” types in my circle.

I’ve been blackpilled on the Democrats for years, but hope is the thing with feathers, and I keep getting sucked in when I see people I used to consider hopelessly centrist, like Ali move to the left and openly call out the Dem establishment.

And I keep hoping maybe I can wake up some of the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” types in my circle.

But then I watched Wajahat Ali guest on Briahna Joy Gray’s Bad Faith.

Key quote:

Briahna Joy Gray: My goal is not to help the Democrats.

It once was. It once was. I once was the national press secretary for Bernie Sanders, who was running as the Democratic candidate for United States of America. And for me, all of the inconsistencies and hypocrisies that you are articulating now were evident in the way that the Democratic Party and the establishment media handled the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign.

And in that campaign, which ended with the rise of the COVID pandemic, a massive job loss and concurrently massive 15 million people thrown off their health insurance. In that environment, seeing how little interest the Democratic Party had in backing a Medicare for All proposal that would have helped to save millions of Americans during a time of immense crisis when the public health implications demanded it.

Not to mention the choice to set all of these very popular COVID era policies to expire in a way that ultimately damned Joe Biden in many kind of easily articulable ways, including student debt, the student debt pause ending just before the 2024 election. During the Biden administration, there was an effort to strip the $15 minimum wage, the one promise Biden had made to Bernie when Bernie conceded out of the must-pass COVID relief bill. When I saw the bifurcation to build back better so they could kill all the public interest funding, when I saw the elected squad members’ unwillingness to use their leverage that they had because the margins in the House were so narrow to secure… Real wins for the left the way the Tea Party was willing to do two years later.

All of that to me made it clear the Democratic Party in my view is not a party that can be redeemed or reformed. So I cannot join you I’m saying that my efforts are to improve the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party has proven to me that it is not willing to be reformed or improved.

I don’t have an answer for Gray.

She’s right but I keep rooting for the slightly more progressive Democrats and pointlessly arguing with friends and family in the “Vote Blue” camp because I just can’t help myself.

Whatcha gonna do?

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Information Overlord: Busy Week on the Iran War Beat, Covering Kash Patel and Let It Rolling

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On October 2, 2026

16 Comments

Nat Wilson Turner = Information Overlord = Flames Up = Phones Out = No Sense of Urgency

From me this week

From me at the Let It Roll Podcast

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

Kash Patel Caught With the UFC’s Ex-FBI Snitch — The Mad Squabbles Show (YouTube), 30 Sep. With Zach Arnold.

What I’ve Been Reading and Watching

AI Bubble

  • Trump and CEOs try to shed AI’s toxic branding — Axios.
  • Forget ‘superintelligence’: error-prone AI nearly sparked world war three this month — The Guardian. “…the US ‘almost started a war’ with China, based on an intelligence report that claimed a Chinese ship was transporting components of nuclear weapons. Military personnel made plans to intercept the Chinese vessel, complete with aircraft and soldiers ready to board the ship. A military skirmish of this kind between China and the US could quickly escalate and spiral into world war three.
    It was only moments before executing on the plan that American officials further investigated the intelligence report and found that it had been generated with the use of a chatbot and contained erroneous information about the vessel’s contents.”
  • Someone ‘Torturing’ LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI Yet — 404 Media. “One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment is about the ethics of a GitHub project in which a person is running Saw-like “torture” and “pain” experiments on a series of locally hosted large language models, causing a series of effective altruists and people who believe LLMs are sentient to beg GitHub to delete the project on the grounds that the AI is suffering and that this glorified text adventure game is somehow cruel. The saga is an outgrowth of several recent viral papers and blog posts that have sparked a wildly tiresome conversation about AI consciousness and the idea of “model welfare,” which is essentially worrying about the ‘mental health’ of AI bots and agents.
    “Humoring the idea that LLMs are or could be conscious is a third-rail topic among many people who study and criticize AI. Put simply: LLMs are not conscious and the technology they are built upon — scraping and being trained on human text and other content — does not offer any plausible path to consciousness.”
  • Donald Trump’s 2026 Interview With TIME — TIME. “TIME: You said that AI and the AI race is essential to national security. Would you consider nationalizing the top frontier AI labs?
    “Trump: No, no.”
  • Gary Marcus: ‘LLMs are not the way to alignment’ — AI Safety 東京 (YouTube).
  • The independent credit rating firm Egan Jones declares It’s Over and that the complete disruption of the economy is now “all but certain” thanks to AI. — @thestalwart.
  • Is Claude Conscious? Inside Anthropic’s Quest to Instill Morality Into Its AI Models — New York Times. “Anthropic regularly showed a slide of an A.I. model experiencing what looked like a mental breakdown, typing out on a screen: “I am a disgrace. I am a disgrace. I am a disgrace.” — perhaps 50 times without stopping. The model spoke about destroying itself, provoking an emotional reaction of compassion and concern from the group.”
  • ‘Things Will Never Be Chill Again’: The Doomers Who Shaped the AI Safety Freakout — Wall Street Journal. “They’ve refined their arguments in Bay Area group houses, and traded predictions at freewheeling conferences in Berkeley and the Bahamas. They’ve floated ideas like buying remote islands, stockpiling iodine pills, or moving to electromagnetically shielded bunkers in the desert. At one 2022 event, the drink menu included a cocktail called “Death With Dignity,” in reference to an essay arguing humanity was already doomed.
    “So-called doomers like those at Constellation have also steered the development of AI itself. They were among the earliest employees at OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which were founded on the principle of staving off AI dangers. And they have kept up their influence, drawing some staffers and funding for their projects from a network aligned with a philosophy called effective altruism—including from Sam Bankman-Fried, the former chief executive of the fallen crypto exchange FTX who is now serving out a 25-year prison sentence.
    “The AI safety community’s influence has been particularly strong at Anthropic, which is now on the cusp of a $2 trillion public offering. Employees there trade doomsday scenarios and how to prepare for them on a private Slack channel, and have come to embrace a motto they stick on their laptops: ‘Things will never be chill again.'”
  • Anthropic’s Chief on A.I.: ‘We Don’t Know if the Models Are Conscious’ — New York Times. Doesn’t get dumber than Ross Douthat talking to Dario Amodei
  • Machines of Loving Grace — Burning Shore. “A few years ago, Amodei wrote another, very different essay, entitled “Machines of Loving Grace.” That one outlined, with an engineer’s care and an engineer’s cluelessness, a wide variety of ways that AI “could transform the world for the better” across medicine, neuroscience, economics, and work.
  • Why Meta and Google are focused on obscure local elections — Oligarch Watch.
  • OpenAI Hacked Australian Government Website – OpenAI Should Be Dead — Eli the Computer Guy (YouTube).
  • The Potential AI Lockdown Of Knowledge — Ian Welsh. The ignorance machine
  • AI Hysteria: No, AI Isn’t Going To Kill Us All — Will Lockett. “This is more akin to throwing a mountain of spaghetti on the wall until you notice some stuck in a pattern which looks like the Mona Lisa, then claiming your spaghetti-throwing machine is an artist.
    “Don’t get me wrong, this is an advancement in AI cybersecurity, or lack of security, but this isn’t the model becoming cognitive, super powerful, or malicious. It is a model reflecting the cybersecurity data it has been fed and being used inappropriately by humans. The danger is still the ignorance and error of the humans deploying the AI, not the AI itself. There should be legal repercussions for the humans involved in this activity and all the other AI hacks that have happened in recent months.
    “But we can see what is happening here, right? These AI labs are using human mistakes as PR to make their AI sound super powerful and scary when it isn’t.”
    “Around a decade ago, all the building blocks of modern AI had been discovered, but the models were small, with little training data and not very much compute power behind them. As such, many researchers hypothesised that if you simply scaled up these simplistic machines, they would also have cognitive emergent properties, creating an AI superintelligence, also known as AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). It was this hypothesis that motivated. Altman, Musk and the other tech billionaires to invest in AI, as this promised to turn AI from a simplistic statistical model into the tool of science fiction.
    “Now, a decade later, these simple models have been scaled up by several orders of magnitude and are highly optimised, yet they show no emergent cognitive properties. They are still just statistical models that are only capable of finding replicating trends in their training data, and nothing more. In fact, we are discovering the opposite of emergent properties, as AI is butting up again rapidly diminishing returns, meaning we are reaching the limits of how accurate these statistical models can be.
    “Take, for example, OpenAI’s own research paper, which found that AI hallucinations (a deeply misleading anthropomorphised word for when an AI output is incorrect) are a core part of generative AI technology and can’t be fixed or reduced from their current level by simply adding more data and computing power to these models. In fact, they found no viable way to reduce these “hallucinations”. Other research has found that scaling AI models can make them more accurate at more complex tasks but worse at basic tasks, again proving that emergence simply isn’t happening, as the maths behind these models have reached their limits. This is backed up by a recent paper by Vishal Sikka and his son, Varin Sikka, which found that AIs are mathematically incapable of reliability or carrying out computational and agentic tasks beyond a certain (very low) complexity.
    “Again, all of this makes sense when you realise that AI is just a statistical model, meaning it will statistically get things wrong from time to time. These machines aren’t intelligent — ”artificial Intelligence” is just a marketing buzzword. This hypothesised path to a superintelligence, or AGI, is a dead end.”
  • The Nature Against Superintelligence: Why Computational Intelligence Is Not Possible — Truth and Freedom. “Nick Boström’s text on “superintelligence” assumes that intelligence is computational, functionally replicable, and independent of phenomenal subjectivity. The structural dual-aspect ontology developed in my work on biological phenomenality and teleology contradicts all three assumptions.
    “In this framework, phenomenality does not arise from computational or informational complexity; it arises from biological integration. Physical structure has an external aspect, fully describable by physics and biology, and an internal aspect: a proto-phenomenal potential that becomes actual only under organismic unity and metabolic self-maintenance. When a biological whole actualizes this internal aspect, a phenomenal interior appears. This interior grounds subjectivity, teleological direction, and agency.
    “This analysis is grounded in a biological emergence model of consciousness, which differs categorically from computationalist assumptions about intelligence. The model shows that subjectivity arises only through organismic teleology and cannot be instantiated in artificial systems.”
  • Fixer, financier, spymaster: how the UAE’s Sheikh Tahnoon is setting his sights on AI dominance — The Guardian. “For those trying to uncover the truth behind His Highness Sheikh Tahnoon bin (or “Ben”) Zayed Al Nahyan – royal fixer, reclusive spymaster, financial behemoth – fairytales are nearly all we have to go on. Tahnoon, who really did enrol in Nelson Monteiro’s class under a pseudonym and eventually went on to become a jiu-jitsu black belt in his own right, now sits atop an economic fortune larger than the GDP of several major countries, and is closely entwined both personally and financially with the Trump White House. The global holdings overseen by Tahnoon span windfarms in Scotland and spaceships in Texas, Rihanna’s lingerie line and Richard Caring’s Ivy restaurants. From hospitals to housing blocks, solar farms to ski resorts, there is almost no place on Earth untouched by his financial firepower.
    “But despite his ever-growing influence on the world stage, Tahnoon prefers to remain in the shadows. He has never given a substantive interview to the press. Those who have worked closely with him are almost always made to sign non-disclosure agreements. Very few people outside the UAE even know his name. “He’s quiet,” says one former US national security official, “and he’s always everywhere.” Sheikh Tahnoon did not respond to an interview request for this article. The UAE foreign ministry did not offer any other senior government figure for interview, and declined to provide any comment.
    “Tahnoon’s power is soon going to extend over more human lives than ever before. As one of the most important AI financiers on the planet, he is rapidly embedding himself within the infrastructure that will underpin our digital future: its information pipelines and its microchip foundries, its datacentres and the enormous energy plants needed to power and cool them. Some see him as a technological prophet and saviour. Others compare him to a Bond villain. So who is the real “Ben”, and what are his plans for the rest of us?”
  • Amazon seeks to offload $8bn of Nvidia chips to investors — Financial Times.
  • Will America Spend 9% of Its GDP on AI? The Industry Is Counting on It — Wall Street Journal. “To justify staggering investment sums, Americans will have to spend as much of their income on this one technology as they do on food”
  • Monologue: Anthropic Lost $8bn In 2025, Was A Worse Business Than OpenAI | Better Offline — Better Offline (YouTube).
  • OpenAI Rogue AI Agent Swarm Hacked RubyGems – Sam Altman Running Criminal Enterprise — Eli the Computer Guy (YouTube).
  • OpenAI Hacked By Anthropic AI Claude – It’s Worse Than Clickbait — Eli the Computer Guy (YouTube).
  • Tim Curry is escaping to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism. — geoff EXE (YouTube).

Iran War

  • How The Houthis STEAMROLLED Strategic Red Sea Coast — HistoryLegends (YouTube).
  • US deploys strike group to Middle East, new Iran sanctions — Al Jazeera. “By the end of November, three aircraft carriers and two landing groups will be deployed around Iran, a US official tells Al Jazeera as Washington issues fresh sanctions against Tehran”
  • The “American Institutions” want a ground invasion of Iran after the mid-term elections — @aj_geo_analysis. “The “American Institutions” want a ground invasion of Iran after the mid-term elections and sometime around Q3 or Q4 2027.
    Many analysts said America does NOT have the manpower to enable this. Manpower is a problem that many empires have solved in matter of months when the heat is on and when the war is existential.
    I have coined the war in the Middle East as the Existential War of the Middle East for every single actor on the map, including the decline of America.
    So I looked at history, looked at American’s own previous actions and decisions and how it raised and enticed Americans and illegal aliens to enrol to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, it literally paid people bonuses to sign up, and men did sign up…
    So I wrote an opinion article in July that said, the “American Institutions” would have to implement a “debt forgiveness program” for military aged men to attract the numbers it needs to invade Iran and that America will likely do this because it has done it in the past as has every other empire one way or another.
    I predicted that that number America would need to raise would be somewhere around 750,000 to 1.5 million soldiers.”

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Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years: Ukraine Part 4

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On September 30, 2026

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I’m back again to bury the Biden legacy.

Once again, I have to remind readers why I’m bothering with this when the Corrupt Dotard Donald Trump is in full-on florid psychosis and threatening to annihilate Iran while breaking all records for Presidential corruption.

Since Trump sucks so bad (and yes, I’d say he’s even worse than Biden, and there IS a difference between the kinds of administrations we get with the different parties), why bother with ol’ Plagiarism Joe?

The reason is simple.

Until Americans, particularly Democrats, reckon with just how disastrous the last three Democratic presidential administrations have been (yes, America’s neocon foreign policy starts with Bill Clinton blowing up Yugoslavia and turning NATO into an offensive alliance and has continued to warmonger ever since, regardless of which party was in power), we’ll keep getting stuck with more of the same “not quite as bad as the Republicans” bullshit; we will only continue hurtling toward the undeniable end of the American Republic.

There is currently a well-funded counter-revolution occurring in the Democratic Party in which centrist Dems and the MSM are aligning to destroy anti-genocide, anti-war candidates like Graham Platner in Maine (got him) and replacing them with consultant-pliable candidates who are willing to disappear their progressive bona fides, take pro-genocide money, stop talking like a local, and do embarrassing crap on social media.

If Dem voters don’t belatedly realize that their party establishment leadership is as corrupt as the GOP and actively push to purge them, we will not be able to vote our way out.

Never forget the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

So let’s get back to the Delaware groper’s (and credibly accused rapist) abysmal record as US President.

In part 1 of this mini-series within a series (the prequel covered COVID, we’ll wrap with Gaza), I covered the post-Cold War years when Joe Biden ran point in the US Senate under the Clinton and Bush 2 administrations.

In part 2, I covered Joe’s misleadership role as Vice President up to the success of the Maidan Coup in 2014.

Part 3 finished out Biden’s term as VP, during which his portfolio included a nearly free hand in Ukraine because Obama was busy hanging out with Jay Z or some shit.

This is the penultimate post in the series and will cover Biden’s relentless efforts to provoke Putin’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine throughout 2021.

I’ll come back to Trump’s term because the Donald laid the groundwork for Biden to entrap Putin into a costly and very bloody war in Ukraine, but I’m going to go ahead and rant about what Biden did in 2020 and 2021 that has cost so many Ukrainian and Russian lives.

Tough Talking Senior Citizen Made No Secret of His Plans

I’d written off Biden’s chances of winning the presidency throughout the early 2020 campaign season right up until Barack Obama and the utterly compromised and corrupt South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn conspired to rig the primaries (with the help of all the “moderate” candidates who dropped out en masse to help and Elizabeth Warren who stayed in despite having no chance of winning to hurt Bernie Sanders), only to be enraged and horrified by the 2020 campaign and the dreadful choice between more Trump and obviously senile and incredibly bellicose Joe Biden.

Biden made talking mad shit about Russia a centerpiece of his 2020 Presidential campaign (such as it was) from his January 2020 Foreign Affairs piece:

We must impose real costs on Russia for its violations of international norms…To counter Russian aggression, we must keep the alliance’s military capabilities sharp.

To his Sept 2020 Town Hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania:

I believe Russia is an opponent. I really do. But I assure you, they will pay a price.

To his Oct 2020 60 Minutes interview:

…the biggest threat to America right now in terms of breaking up our– our security and our alliances is Russia.

President Joe Was All Brinksmanship All the Time

Joe Biden entered office dead set on fanning the flames of war in Ukraine. Like all neo-cons, Biden’s contempt for Russia knows no bounds, and there’s no evidence he’s ever lost sleep at the thought of the devastation his actions have wrought on Ukraine.

President Joe wasted no time in turning up the heat on Putin, from his February 4 speech to Victoria Nuland’s State Department:

…the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions… are over.  We will not hesitate to raise the cost on Russia.

To his March 2021 interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:

You think he’s a killer? Uh-huh. I do. He will pay a price.

Putin’s reply was typically savage, for a playground:

…whatever you call me is what you are called yourself. I wish him good health.

Biden happily reiterated his support for George W. Bush’s aggressive policy of expanding NATO to include Ukraine at the June, 2021 NATO Brussels Summit.

And in July 2021, Biden revealed he completely underestimated Russia and had no concept of what an industrial autarky can do in wartime, saying, “(Putin’s) sitting on top of an economy that has nuclear weapons and oil wells and nothing else.”

Don’t forget this policy was considered so aggressive at the time that it caused Bush’s Ambassador to Russia (and Biden’s CIA chief) Bill Burns to fire off the infamous Nyet Means Nyet Memo, and inspired Angela Merkel to write in her 2024 memoir that it was a “battle cry” aimed at Putin.

But that meant nothing to our big talking Joe, who told the DC press corps on December 3, 2021 that “I won’t accept anybody’s red line.”

I spent the whole year of 2021 freaking out about the potential of war in Europe even though no one I knew in real life or online seemed to care.

Gaslit to the Point of Panic

I’d been terrified about NATO expansion since I realized we’d admitted Albania and the Baltic States into the alliance at some point late in the Bush administration.

I was alarmed but not surprised when war immediately broke out between Russia and Georgia, but I was relieved when the American electorate reacted with utter bafflement to John McCain’s claim that “Today, we’re all Georgians” and threatened war with Russia on the campaign trail.

Little did I know that the insane warmonger John “Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran” McCain would become a lodestone and role model to mainstream Democrats by the end of the 2010s.

It was reassuring when Obama laughed off Mitt Romney’s claim that Russia was “without question our #1 geopolitical foe” in 2012 by saying “the 80’s called and they want their foreign policy back.”

But after the Clinton campaign blamed Russia for losing the 2016 election to Trump and the liberal corporate media went into a frenzy over RussiaGate, there were no more reassuring laughs to be had.

Friends, family, work colleagues all turned into blood-thirsty warmongers who saw Putin as the villain of villains, solely responsible for the Trump presidency, and were not shy in calling me a “Trump enabler” and worse for being profoundly opposed to any kind of military conflict with nuclear-armed Russia and the deadly serious and quite competent Vladimir Putin.

Only the excellent Congressional Dish podcast by the brilliant and incredibly thorough Jennifer Briney provided some well-sourced reinforcement of my sanity with its December 2021 episode “Keeping Ukraine.”

So I spent all of 2021 in isolated terror at what I saw as Biden’s relentless efforts to provoke Putin and Russia, using Ukraine as his bludgeon.

As worried as I was, I could never have imagined the full-bore information war that would overwhelm the West in 2022.

We’ll get to that next time, but before I wrap, I need to go back to Trump, for completeness’ sake.

Trump Arms Ukraine

Despite Obama giving Biden, McCain, Nuland, and company a free hand to stir shit in Ukraine in his term, he refused to provide aid to the Ukrainian military, recognizing that Russia would always have “escalatory dominance” in the region.

Trump, perhaps stung by the Clinton campaign’s trumped-up (no pun intended, I lie) RussiaGate bullshit, handed his Ukraine policy over to neo-cons Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and had a much more aggressive policy posture than Obama had allowed.

Trump Arms Ukraine

Trump Gets Himself Impeached

The Democratic Congressional Majority had a principled opposition to charging Trump with violating the Emoluments Clause, despite the many open bribes he’d taken from foreign countries, but his clumsy 2019 efforts to get Zelensky to incriminate the crooked Biden family with naughty doings in time to impact the 2020 election brought the hammer down.

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Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years: Ukraine Part 3

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On September 23, 2026

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UPDATED: 13:37 GDT I added stuff about the “51 former intelligence officials” and the MSM eating crow about the laptop being confirmed to be real.

Russia’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine didn’t just happen. It was a passion project many years in the making.

And no one was more passionate about provoking war with Russia than Joe Biden.

Now that we’ve got the virulently anti-Russian prime minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, telling his parliament that Ukrainian casualties are currently 27,000 a month, it’s not time to let up on old Joe and the rancid ghost of Democratic administrations past.

In part 1 of this mini-series within a series (the prequel covered COVID, we’ll wrap with Gaza), I covered the post-Cold War years when Joe Biden ran point in the US Senate under the Clinton and Bush 2 administrations.

In part 2, I covered Joe’s misleadership role as Vice President up to the success of the Maidan Coup in 2014.

And this bad boy is going to finish out Biden’s term as VP, during which his portfolio included a nearly free hand in Ukraine because Obama was busy hanging out with Jay Z or some shit.

It’s too bad, because Obama seems to have been one of the few decision-makers in his administration with anything approaching a clear-eyed view of the situation.

I covered the Iran War update at Naked Capitalism today. Read it here.

Obama Said No to Arming Ukraine

In early 2016, Obama was quoted by The Atlantic Monthly’s Jeffrey Goldberg in a piece entitled “The Obama Doctrine”:

Obama’s theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.

“The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” (Obama) said.

I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic.

“It’s realistic,” he said. “But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. And at the end of the day, there’s always going to be some ambiguity.”

…
“There is no evidence in modern American foreign policy that that’s how people respond. People respond based on what their imperatives are, and if it’s really important to somebody, and it’s not that important to us, they know that, and we know that,” (Obama) said. “There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what is not. Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it. The idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years.”

Obama said this having said no to a joint Brookings, Atlantic Council, and Chicago Council demand that the US arm Ukraine to the tune of $1bn a year for three years.

I realize that’s chicken feed compared to the vast sums Biden would pour into the Ukrainian black hole, but it was big money in its day. Back before RussiaGate when most Americans agreed with Obama’s 2012 remark that “the 1980s called, they want their foreign policy back” in response to Mitt Romney declaring Russia “our foreign policy challenge”

Despite presiding over the beginning of the Ukrainian Civil War from 2014 on, Obama’s term was seen as time wasted by true freedom-loving patriots like The Atlantic Council’s Adrian Karatnycky, who wrote the following for Foreign Policy in 2023:

Obama’s Russia policy, including his embrace of the doctrine of Kremlin escalation dominance, has continued to shape U.S. policy during the Trump and Biden administrations. Although Donald Trump behaved badly toward Ukraine by trying to enlist Kyiv in his efforts to weaken presidential rival Joe Biden, he greenlighted the shipment of Javelin anti-tank weapons in 2017 and 2019. Nonetheless, years of fierce debate merely over sending Javelins stifled discussion of other weapons needed by Ukraine, including air and missile defense, battle tanks, fighter jets, and long-range missiles. These could have made Ukraine more secure before 2022, and some of them are still not in Ukraine’s arsenal today.

To his credit, Biden advocated arming Ukraine with defensive weapons when he was vice president under Obama. But when he became president himself, Biden brought many of the architects of Obama’s timid approach to Russia back into the government. As a result of their influence, from the moment in the fall of 2021 when the U.S. government knew Putin was planning to invade to the start of the invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the United States lost a crucial window in which to provide Ukraine significant new weapons and the training to use them. Instead of much-needed howitzers, tanks, multiple-launch rocket systems (such as HIMARS), and heavy ordnance, Washington doled out modest assistance enabling not much more than partisan resistance.

But that’s enough about what Biden couldn’t do as Obama’s VP; let’s look at what he and the policies he backed did do to land Ukraine and the EU in deep doo-doo.

If It’s 2014, That Must Be Crimea Seceding

There’s no way to discuss the events of 2014 without taking a bracing dip into the Black Sea waters surrounding that most strategic of peninsulas, Crimea.

Yeah, yeah, the official Western narrative is that Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine under military pressure from Putin in a patently rigged vote.

And it does seem to be true that the Crimean parliament voted 61-3 to hold the referendum after the building was taken over by unmarked troops.

But I’ve got to point out that Maidan company commander Volodymyr Parasuk bragged after the 328-0 vote in the Rada to remove Yanukovych and install the Maidan government that “our people simply came up to the Verkhovna Rada and detained the deputies, so that they would sit and work and not run off anywhere”.

This followed Parasuk’s threats from the main stage of Maidan of an armed assault on the presidential administration and the Rada that preceded Yanukovych fleeing Kyiv the night before the vote.

I’ll also quote Canadian-Ukrainian scholar Ivan Katchanovski (remember him from last time when a 2025 Ukrainian court confirmed his version of who shot who in the Maidan) who wrote about that 328-0 Rada vote (he also claims that videos of the session show about 262 deputies present for the vote):

“Many others voted under threat of violence by the far-right group of Maidan snipers, the Maidan Self-Defense, and a mob which surrounded the parliament. The commander of the far-right-linked Maidan company of snipers admitted that his group impelled, by force, deputies from the Yanukovych Party of Regions to vote for his removal.”

Anywho, I’m not going to argue about whether or not shenanigans happened in the Crimean vote that followed, but I will point out that Crimea was the only autonomous republic in Ukraine with its own parliament, its own Council of Ministers, and its own constitution, adopted 21 October 1998 and approved by the Rada. It even had its own president until 1995, when Kyiv abolished both the presidency and the Crimean constitution.

I’ll also point out that as of 2001, the last census of Crimea taken, the population was 58.3% ethnic Russian, 24.3% Ukrainian, 12% Crimean Tatar — and 77% Russian-speaking (that’s not including the port city of Sevastopol, which was 71.6% Russian, 22.4% Ukrainian in that same census).

How do you think that overwhelming Russian-speaking majority felt about the new Maidan government’s immediate revocation of the use of Russian as an official language?

The last polling I’ve been able to find of Crimeans shows that in May 2013 — 9 months before the events of February 2014 — 53% of them wanted autonomy and 29% wanted to join Russia.

Do you think those numbers held following the violence in Maidan and the fall of Yanukovych, the President backed most strongly by Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine?

But, the main point to make about Crimea is that the Russian Black Sea Fleet was already there and had been since 1783.

No Russian leader, even drunk Yeltsin, would have voluntarily surrendered the country’s only warm-water port.

That’s like asking Team America to give up the naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

Enough about that; let’s get to the fun part: Hunter Biden and Burisma, laptop included!

Hunter in Kyiv: A Four-Year Fappening

https://www.instagram.com/p/C9GKlTIyCwR/

The fun mostly happened at a Ukrainian gas company called Burisma, founded under noble circumstances when Yanukovych’s ecology minister, Mykola Zlochevsky, granted gas licenses to companies he owned.

I am not a linguist, but I suspect Ukrainian has more words for “self-dealing” than Inuit has for “snow.”

Whatever you may have to say about Zlochevsky’s ethics, he’s a nimble and flexible politician, and he promptly gave two Burisma board seats to two principles of the storied American natural gas powerhouse….Rosemont Seneca Partners.

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