Ultraconservative Republican legislators in Idaho quickly released it was a mistake to cut a cost-effective Medicaid program that helped severely mentally ill citizens from ending up in an emergency room, a jail cell or a coffin.

“They realized, well, that was a mistake,” said Sheriff Sam Hulse of Bonneville County, a Republican. “You started seeing deaths occurring in the community. We started seeing the numbers in the crisis system rise. The very thing we told them would happen was beginning to happen.”

The defunded program Sheriff Hulse lamented was, according to new reporting by The New York Times, Assertive Community Treatment (ACT). The program was created in the 1970s after “half a million patients dispersed from state psychiatric hospitals into private homes in American neighborhoods.” Sometimes known as a “hospital without walls,” the $4 million per year program interrupted a cycle that invariably led those suffering from psychotic episodes into hospitalization and/or incarceration … where they’d be stabilized and released back into communities … until their illnesses started the cycle again:

[ACT] provided each client with a team of clinicians who were paid to make home visits and build relationships, sometimes delivering medications on a daily basis. Researchers have found this approach can reduce emergency hospitalizations by anywhere from 40 to 80 percent.

So, for the cost of roughly one or two Tomahawk missiles, ACT forestalled the far more costly prospect of using jails and emergency rooms to temporarily hold and treat patients who often spiraled after missing or refusing to take medication. That, in turn, meant police officers and ER staff were not spending valuable time, and police departments and hospitals were not spending valuable funds, mitigating the fallout of untreated illness.

Sherriff Hulse started dealing with the fallout almost immediately after the state defunded ACT in response to a combination of Trump’s Federal-level tax cuts, impending cuts to Medicaid and a series of state level tax cuts that left the state with a $1.3 billion shortfall. Because Idaho’s state Constitution “prohibits deficit spending,” the governor directed the state’s agencies to reduce spending by 3% to help “‘make way’ for the president’s tax cuts."

Sheriff Hulce said that after the services ended in December, his patrol teams were carrying out 14 involuntary psychiatric commitments per month, more than double the rate from a year ago, and crisis centers had seen a 28 percent increase in demand.

Ironically, the state’s Republican legislators not only reversed the elimination of ACT by the private contractor that administers Idaho’s behavioral health Medicaid program, but they more than doubled the annual budget by allocating $10.4 million from the state’s tobacco and opioid settlements.

It’s an unusual turn for a state that gave Trump 66.9% of its votes in 2024. But, as the Times pointed out, it “may serve as a harbinger for other states poised to make deep cuts in Medicaid” as provisions in his “Big Beautiful Bill” begin to kick-in after the Midterms.

That delay was both a cynical ploy and a tacit admission that they knew voters might not like trading away programs like ACT or, in many cases, their own access to Medicaid in exchange for tax cuts that, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), mostly reward the wealthy:

[ITEP] analysis found that the richest 1% of Americans, or those with incomes of more than $916,900, will receive the largest tax cuts in 2026, an average of $8,850. By contrast, those with an income of between $92,100 and $153,600 will pay an additional $980.¹

It’s a disparity made more maddening by the Trump regime’s profligate spending on a war of choice in Iran that his supporters both in Idaho and around the country were promised would not happen if they returned him to the White House.

Approximately fifteen months later, the impact of the looming cuts to Medicaid, which covers nearly 76 million low-income Americans, portends a hyperscaled version of Idaho’s experience with ACT. As those cuts and new hurdles kick-in, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation estimates somewhere between five and ten million people will be kicked off Medicaid over the next two years. That will force them to use costly emergency room visits hospitals to treat often-advanced illnesses … costs hospitals around the country will be forced to absorb.

Additionally, the loss of Medicaid reimbursements for those former patients will drain valuable funding. That double-whammy of increased costs and declining reimbursements will put an estimated 446 hospitals at risk of closing or reducing care.

Meanwhile, the war on Iran is, according to an analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, costing taxpayers a cool $500 million per day to maintain. - jp

What Medicaid Cuts Mean For American Hospitals
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/07/nx-s1-5776610/what-medicaid-cuts-mean-for-american-hospitals

As Medicaid Cuts Push 446 Hospitals To The Brink, Mark Cuban Says Their Spending And Overpaying Is The Real Problem. ‘Prove Me Wrong’
https://www.benzinga.com/news/topics/26/04/51682264/as-medicaid-cuts-push-446-hospitals-to-the-brink-mark-cuban-says-their-spending-and-overpaying-is-the-real-problem-prove-me-wrong

Rural hospital system asks NC lawmakers for help in the face of federal cuts
https://ncnewsline.com/2026/04/07/rural-hospital-system-asks-nc-lawmakers-for-help-in-the-face-of-federal-cuts/

CT’s potential fallout from federal Medicaid changes outlined in new report
https://www.ctpublic.org/news/2026-04-07/cts-potential-fallout-from-federal-medicaid-changes-outlined-in-new-report

Rural Alabama hospitals named in national report, but state association disputes closure risk
https://www.fox10tv.com/2026/04/07/rural-alabama-hospitals-named-national-report-state-association-disputes-closure-risk/

Bracing for federal cuts, some states are already paring back Medicaid services
https://www.gpb.org/news/2026/04/07/bracing-for-federal-cuts-some-states-are-already-paring-back-medicaid-services

Montana halts doula funding amid budget shortfall, Medicaid cut fears
https://tippahnews.com/national-news/montana-halts-doula-funding-amid-budget-shortfall-medicaid-cut-fears/

Kentucky’s Medicaid budget grows, but concerns remain over care
https://spectrumnews1.com/ky/louisville/news/2026/04/06/kentucky-budget-medicaid

Indiana’s Medicaid program could be ditching a popular discount drug program
https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/2026/04/06/fssa-wants-changes-to-federal-drug-discount-program-for-hospitals/

Reform bills advance as Medicaid expansion threatens Oklahoma budget
https://ocpathink.org/post/independent-journalism/reform-bills-advance-as-medicaid-expansion-threatens-oklahoma-budget

Oklahoma Republicans move to reverse Medicaid expansion
https://www.kosu.org/oklahoma-medicaid-expansion-reversal-threatened

Recent Medicaid expansions sharply increased access to treatment for opioid use disorder, researchers find
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-medicaid-expansions-sharply-access-treatment.html

Postpartum Medicaid extensions reduce uninsured status
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-03-postpartum-medicaid-extensions-uninsured-status.html

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THE SET-UP: Beware of Bortac and Borstar. And no, I am not talking about twin frost giants who battle Thor in the latest Marvel movie mediocrity. Bortac and Borstar are more properly known as the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) and the Border Patrol Search, Trauma and Rescue (BORSTAR). Prior to the second coming of Trump, these Fort Bliss-based units “were once reserved for desert rescues, executing high-risk warrants, conflicts with armed drug cartels, and manhunts.” But now, as a new investigation by Wired just revealed, they’ve become the shock troops in Trump’s crackdown on immigrants:

Under Donald Trump, however, they have been sent into the streets of major US cities. The result is the largest known deployment of BORTAC and BORSTAR agents in US history, a fact made difficult to pin down due to the government's secrecy around their operations. Many of the agents’ identities have remained hidden from the public. The decision to use offensive, heavily armed paramilitary units for street-level immigration sweeps in American cities is a first—a bellwether of the Trump administration’s project to militarize domestic law enforcement operations.

That militarization was on full-display last September when four members of BORTAC spearheaded a controversial, early morning raid (assault?) on an apartment building on the South Side of Chicago:

As feds in body armor rappelled down from a Black Hawk helicopter overhead, others crashed through the building’s doors with battering rams, rounding up residents at gunpoint.

Already this story is nuts. There was no need to pretend to be special forces dropping in to Osama bin Laden’s compound, but that’s what they did:

A group of burly, masked agents wearing helmets and bulletproof vests, and toting suppressor-equipped M4 rifles, moved through the hallways in a rapid, tightly organized file. Padraic Daniel Berlin, a 34-year-old Michigan native and son of a Detroit firefighter, held Yoda, his Belgian Malinois, on a leash. David Dubar Jr., a 53-year-old onetime construction worker, followed closely behind him. Their team leader, Corey Myers, a Marine veteran from the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, checked apartment doors. Paul Delgado Jr., a standout cross-country runner in high school, was the final member of the entry team.

They were hunting down Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang Trump trumped-up into one of America’s most pressing problems. If you believed him, you lived in an America menaced by an army of clinically insane criminals who’d been freed from their straitjackets and sent to occupy apartment buildings around the US. That was the intelligence the BORTAC team received a couple hours prior to the mission:

Gang members were supposedly occupying the building and storing grenades, handguns, and rifles on the second floor, where a suspect with an open warrant for firearms possession lived. This intelligence was never released or substantiated, and Illinois later launched an investigation into whether the property owner had sent baseless claims to the feds.

And what did they find?

At every door approached by his team, Berlin yelled, “Police! Speak to me now or I’ll send the dog!” In a second-floor unit, the BORTAC team detained one man. Further down the hall, Myers noticed “signs of forced entry” and smashed open the door. Tolulope Akinsulie, an undocumented immigrant from Nigeria, happened to be hiding in the bedroom. Without issuing a warning or verbal command, Berlin let go of Yoda’s leash and the Malinois pounced, sinking its teeth into Akinsulie’s leg as he screamed in agony. Yoda bit Akinsulie repeatedly in the leg, hip, and hands before Berlin called the dog off and his team placed the man in cuffs. Akinsulie, who was not a target of the raid and has no known history of violent crime or gang affiliation, was treated for his injuries and taken to the Broadview Processing Center to face removal proceedings.

The raid netted 37 arrests. How many were Tren de Aragua? The Department of Homeland Security wouldn’t say. But an investigation by the Illinois Department of Human Rights has cast doubt on the raid’s premise. It turns out that tenants were battling the landlord in the months prior to the raid. They believe the raid was a set-up by the landlord to remove tenants, which it ultimately did. Tenants’ rights activist Josh Karsh told WLS-TV News in a January report on the raid’s aftermath:

"If these allegations are substantiated, appears that the landlord and property manager may have been using the federal agents as sort of a private eviction force. If that can happen in this building, and it can happen somewhere else, yeah, I mean, it's incredibly egregious."

Egregious isn’t the half of it. As Wired discovered, the violence described above was standard operating procedure during Operation Midway Blitz:

A WIRED review of over 78 incident reports from Operation Midway Blitz found that BORTAC and BORSTAR agents were, as a group, the most violent of the hundreds of federal agents deployed to Chicago. In these documents, CBP employees recorded over 144 discrete uses of force by CBP personnel from September through early November. Sixty-two BORTAC and BORSTAR personnel were involved in these incidents over an eight-week period. Of that group, 25 were involved in two or more incidents, and 16 more used force at least once during this period. Of the 234 federal law enforcement personnel WIRED identified in these reports, BORTAC and BORSTAR agents represent almost a quarter of all personnel involved in documented confrontations with civilians during Operation Midway Blitz.

“Confrontations” is one way of putting it.

BORTAC’s and BORSTAR’s uses of force in Chicago included punching and kicking protesters, throwing tear gas, macing civilians, firing pepperballs and 40-mm foam rounds into crowds, shocking people with tasers, unleashing dogs on deportation targets, and shooting unarmed civilians, killing at least one of them. This violence tracks with a loosening of the Border Patrol’s use-of-force guidelines following Gregory Bovino’s directives, as reported by the American Prospect.

Thanks to a sartorial style that gave-off Gestapo vibes, the since-dismissed Bovino became a focal point of criticism. But his removal isn’t likely to change a culture the recently-deposed head of DHS not only encouraged, but also repeatedly covered-up with bald-faced lies. That said, it may not be fair to lay all the blame on ex-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem or Bovino or the BORTAC team.

The impunity they’ve displayed during the “almost theatrical uses of force that litter newscasts and social feeds” accurately reflect the example set by the President throughout his decade of dominance. His ability to evade accountability, which his most devoted followers see as God’s handiwork, has only emboldened him.

Perhaps that’s why Trump has repeatedly told the world of his intention to commit war crimes. When he says he will bomb Iran’s electricity plants and desalination plants as punishment for not agreeing to his ever-changing set of demands, he is telling the world he doesn’t care if it’s “illegal” to destroy Iran’s vital civilian infrastructure. He’s telling the world he not only operating above the law … he’s operating in spite of the law. In fact, he’s contemptuous of it.

We’re talking about the Commander-in-Chief, folks. He sets the tone down the chain of command and for self-styled, “tip of the spear” commandos like BORTAC, Trump is a giant orange permission slip they essentially carry with them wherever they go.

The same may ultimately be true of the ghoul Trump tasked with remaking US Military in his own image … or, more precisely, in the image he constructed for himself in his book, American Crusade. Both in his book and in his briefings on the destruction of Iran, Pete Hegseth talks about violence, a.k.a. “lethality,” with a passion that borders on necrophilia. Whether that translates into trouble if and when he puts boots on the ground of a hostile nation remains to be seen.

However, Hegseth’s reversal of the US Army’s suspension of personnel who took two Apache attack helicopters for a joyride to Kid Rock’s house was a loud and clear signal that Trump’s impunity can and will be extended to troops who do things their C-in-C likes. That’s why Hegseth undermined the chain of command. It didn’t take long for Hegseth to act after Trump told a reporter he liked Kid Rock and he’d look into the Army’s suspension. Pete ended the investigation and lifted their suspension. And with that intervention he let it be known that there are no hard or fast rules that cannot be broken. Whether you’re raiding an apartment building or bombing a desalination plant, the same principle now applies … there is no principle that trumps Trump. - jp

Pete Hegseth is imbuing violence with a religious righteousness | Arwa Mahdawi
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/28/pete-hegseth-violence-religion-israel-iran

ICE violence, Iran war show just how little Trump cares about human lives
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5804836-trump-administration-contempt-life/

Opinion | ICE violence is not unprecedented; it is fundamentally American
https://dailyillini.com/opinions-stories/columns-opinions/culture/2026/03/26/ice-violence-fundamentally-american/

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According to a new deep dive by Kaiser Health News, two companies—Abbott Laboratories and Mead Johnson—have been waging a “high-stakes corporate battle” for domination of the surprisingly amoral world of neonatal nutrition. It’s a sordid tale epitomized by eavesdropping sales reps who target NICUs, just waiting for opportunities to exploit “vulnerable mothers” with underweight premmies. Their main objective is to “brand” babies before they head home:

In internal documents and other material from litigation reviewed by KFF Health News, formula makers described hospitals as gateways to the much larger retail market because parents are likely to stick with the brand their babies started on. Products used in the NICU help win hospital contracts, and hospital contracts help establish brand loyalty, according to court records.

If nothing else, it is a vivid reminder of the polysemous nature of the word “branding.”

Honestly, the motivation to brand babies differs little from the motivation brand livestock. It’s just business, after all. And that business depends upon being the first brand a baby tastes. If successful, an Abbott Labs sales presentation claims, the first brand a baby tastes becomes the baby’s go-to formula 74% of the time. That’s why reps often make sure newborns get the first taste for free.

You gotta hook ‘em early. Really-really early.

Abbott proposed doing just that with its self-explanatory “first-bottle-fed” strategy. It’s simple enough, but it requires reps to be at the hospital so they can pounce on opportunities to sear Abbott’s brand onto a hungry newborn:

One Abbott document … said more than half of first feedings happen at night, adding, “Nighttime is the right time to drive your business.”

And if Abbott’s night-crawling sales reps can convert nearly two-thirds of the newborns into reliable consumers? It could generate $1.5 billion in sales and big bonuses for the reps who push the most product.

Not to be outdone, a Mead Johnson “University” training document envisions a sales rep skulking around NICU’s hallways until the rep “overhears patient information.” Titled “Advanced NICU Skills,” it helps the representative identify opportunities by imagining a scene set in the rep’s “most important NICU”:

“You overhear the HCP’s” — health care providers, apparently — “stating all of the notes,” it said. “There may be some information that may help you to position your products as a resource for this patient and to handle any objections that the HCP may present you with.”

That’s one way to find the wounded animal in the herd. And if you think that analogy is a bit of a stretch … a Mead Johnson strategy document outlining a “plan to win the hospital war” identified hospitals as ”inflection points for vulnerable moms.” And yes, they are particularly vulnerable when they’ve just given birth to a vulnerable preterm baby. One person’s vulnerable child is another person’s market opportunity. In this case, the moneymaker is human milk fortifier:

Fortifier, a product tailored to preemies, is meant to augment mother’s milk when babies are born prematurely and a mother’s milk alone doesn’t deliver enough nutrition.'

Sounds both reasonable and necessary, right?

Not if you are a parent whose brand loyalty inadvertently put their young child back into the hospital where that loyalty was first established:

In hundreds of lawsuits, parents of sickened or deceased preterm infants have alleged that formula designed for preemies has caused necrotizing enterocolitis, or NEC, a devastating condition in which immature intestinal tissue can become infected and die, spreading infection through the body.

Lawsuits also accuse the manufacturers of failing to warn parents of the risk.

One of the cases on which this article is based, Watson v. Mead Johnson, resulted in a $60 million judgment against Mead Johnson. Another, Gill v. Abbott Laboratories, et al., resulted in a $495 million judgment against Abbott. The third, Whitfield v. St. Louis Children’s Hospital, et al., resulted in a jury verdict in favor of Abbott and Mead Johnson, but the judge found errors and misconduct on the part of defense counsel, faulted his own performance, and granted the plaintiff a new trial.

The cases have involved children like Robynn Davis, who was born at 26 weeks, lost 75% to 80% of her intestine to NEC, suffered brain damage — and, at almost 3 years old, couldn’t walk, couldn’t really talk, and was eating through a tube, as Jacob Plattenberger, an attorney representing her, described in court in 2024.

An attorney for Abbott, James Hurst, said in court that Robynn suffered a catastrophic brain injury at birth, 10 days before she received any Abbott formula, and that her NEC resulted not from formula but from many health problems.

In at least three cases, a federal judge has granted summary judgment in favor of Abbott — ruling for the company before the lawsuits even reached trial.

The formula makers have repeatedly denied fault.

The formula makers have also sought to obscure fault or place it at their competitor’s doorstep. They’ve both done it with a number of questionable studies that could be generously described as “cozy.” Here’s a look at how the sausage is made:

In 2017, Abbott exchanged a series of messages with researchers at Johns Hopkins University about a study on how the composition of infant formula might affect NEC in mice. The email thread became an exhibit in the Whitfield case.

Abbott was both funding and collaborating on the work, a later publication in a scientific journal shows.

Forwarding a draft of the resulting paper to Abbott, David Hackam, chief of pediatric surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in one of the emails, “We hope you like it.” He also requested help from Abbott in filling in information.

“The manuscript looks great!” Abbott’s Tapas Das wrote in May 2017, after a back-and-forth.

But Abbott had some changes, the email thread shows.

“We (VM & DT) made some edits in the text especially to soften a bit with the statement ‘infant formula seems responsible for developing NEC,’” Das wrote.

“Instead, we thought if we could state as ‘infant formula is linked to severity of NEC’. So we made changes throughout the text emphasizing on severity of NEC by infant formula rather than development of NEC by infant formula,” Das wrote.

The Abbott co-authors “proposed routine edits to the article for scientific accuracy and for the consideration of the other authors, some of the most well-respected NEC researchers in the world,” [Abbott spokesperson Scott] Stoffel said.

“Abbott regularly collaborates with and publishes studies with leading NEC scientists for the benefit of both premature infants and the entire scientific community,” Stoffel said.

Amazingly, consumers have to rely on the industry’s heavily-massaged science for answers to questions that may imperil the industry’s bottom line. That’s because…

FDA oversight of infant formula is limited. The agency doesn’t approve the products or their labeling. Whether to report adverse events — illnesses or deaths potentially related to the products — to the FDA is largely at manufacturers’ discretion.

Ironically, the gutting of scientific research by the MAGA-MAHA alliance will make the public even more dependent upon companies that fund, staff and rewrite studies of thier products:

The business of infant formula further spotlights a central contradiction in the Trump administration’s health policies. When it comes to food and medical products, the administration has criticized industry-funded research as unworthy of trust. Yet under Kennedy, it has disrupted, defunded, or sought to cut government-funded research, which could leave industry-funded research with a larger and more influential role.

Another avenue is a subscription to Consumer Reports.

The venerable consumer watchdog sent shockwaves through the industry last year when it tested 41 formulas for BPA, acrylamide, inorganic arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury. Although it generated a lot of handwringing, very little has been done at the national level to address CR’s findings.

So, they did it again … this time their scientists “detected contaminants at potentially concerning levels in 26 of the 49 formulas” they tested. - jp

We Tested 49 More Baby Formulas for Lead and Arsenic
https://www.consumerreports.org/babies-kids/baby-formula/liquid-baby-formula-contaminants-test-results-a8639602154/

Profits over Patients
https://thefulcrum.us/health/profits-over-patients-us-healthcare-system-costs-outcomes

For-profit healthcare is booming: See where private equity owns nearly 500 of America’s hospitals
https://www.businessinsider.com/map-shows-private-equity-owned-hospitals-by-state-2026-3

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That’s what 404 Media recently found when it went to Kenya:

Every day, Michael Geoffrey Asia spent eight consecutive hours at his laptop in Kenya staring at porn, annotating what was happening in every frame for an AI data labeling company. When he was done with his shift, he started his second job as the human labor behind AI sex bots, sexting with real lonely people he suspected were in the United States. His boss was an algorithm that told him to flit in and out of different personas.

“It required a lot of creativity and fast thinking. Because if I’m talking to a man, I’m supposed to act like a woman. If I’m talking to a woman, I need to act like a man. If I’m talking to a gay person, I need to act like a gay person,” he told me at a coworking space I met him at in Nairobi. After doing this for months, he, like other data labelers, developed insomnia, PTSD, and had trouble having sex.

“It got to a point where my body couldn’t function. Where I saw someone naked, I don’t even feel it. And I have a wife, who expects a lot from you, a young family, she expects a lot from you intimately. But you can’t, like, do it,” Asia said. “It fractured a lot of things for me. My body is like, not functioning at all.”

Asia eventually hit a breaking point and stopped working for AI companies.

There’s also a very good chance that someone in Kenya is currently poring over “intimate” video captured when someone in America took off their snazzy new Ray-Ban AI Glasses before having sex. If they set the glasses on a night table or dresser, it’s capturing everything the camera continues to see long after the user took the glasses off. On the other end is a worker struggling with the responsibility of vetting and annotating everything Meta’s glasses see.

That’s what a joint investigation by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten also found when they went to Kenya:

Kenyan data annotators, employed as subcontractors in Nairobi, have revealed they are routinely required to manually review extremely intimate, unanonymized footage captured by unsuspecting users of the Meta Ray-Ban AI glasses.

The disturbing testimonies describe a workforce uneasy about peering into the most private moments of users’ lives, including bathroom visits, people undressing, watching pornography, and explicitly filmed sex acts.

The core of the problem, according to the contractors, is a catastrophic misunderstanding of how the product functions. Users often do not realize that the AI assistant and the associated cameras remain active even when the glasses are removed from the face.

“In some videos, you can see someone going to the toilet or getting undressed. I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording,” one worker told the Swedish investigators, speaking on condition of anonymity due to strict confidentiality agreements.

Instead, users are feeding a “hidden stream of privacy-sensitive data” constantly being transmitted “from Western homes to an indistinct hotel in Nairobi” where, as Kenyan news blog Tech-ish.com explained, “thousands of data annotators” are employed by “a major subcontractor to Meta and a familiar name in Kenyan tech labour disputes”:

While these workers are tasked with training the AI by labeling everyday objects such as flower pots, traffic signs, and cars, they are also forced to review the human side of the data collection. They described watching private videos where bank cards were visible by mistake and translating texts where users described graphic sexual desires.

“We see everything – from living rooms to naked bodies. Meta has that type of content in its databases,” an employee said.

These workers are on the business end of the “AI Hype” effect, which two South African investigative journalists described in a new piece for Tech Policy Press:

AI hype is the next chapter in the colonial playbook. It reframes the exploitation of African digital workers as “innovation” and is a tool of power wielded by profiteers of colonial extractivism in the digital age. It functions as a carefully crafted cover story by disguising appropriation in the language of “progress.”

The pair—Marché Arends and Kathryn Cleary—spent a year investigating “the opaque and confusing world of micro-tasking” and “spoke to African digital workers—from Nigeria, to South Africa, to Kenya—who train Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.” It’s a crucial component of AI’s success thus far because:

LLMs don’t actually ‘think’, but depend on carefully curated training data that requires human insight and oversight at every step of the development process.

That requires a lot of manpower and that, in turn, is a lot of overhead for a business already grappling with massive overhead in the form of energy- and water-hungry data centers. Their answer appears to be “micro-tasking”:

Micro-tasking is similar to outsourcing but specific to the AI economy—hundreds of thousands of digital workers (also known as “gig” workers), mostly from Majority World countries, are tasked with refining the answers of LLMs and guiding them toward more sophisticated behavior. Their job is to correct errors, shape responses and, at least seemingly, “teach” the models how to perform.

While it’s common knowledge that AI companies need more and more data to keep their branded AI competitive, it’s likely that most have no idea human labor is essential to LLM they interact with every day. But they are and digital workers in Africa are constantly being recruited to help sustain Silicon Valley’s rapidly growing needs.

In effect, labor is being hoarded like data. But when Arends and Cleary noticed a growing number of onboarded workers sitting idle with no tasks in a job that only pays for each accurately completed task, they discovered labor is not only being hoarded … it is also being hedged:

For a year, we studied the mass recruitment strategies of micro-tasking companies, like Mindrift—a subsidiary company of Toloka, which used to be owned by Yandex—to win training contracts with Big Tech firms, like OpenAI. It was tricky to figure out at first, but once we did, we realized it was a standard copy‑paste strategy: hire en masse despite knowing there is not enough work, to create the illusion of scale. Why? Because scale is a signal to investors to keep pouring huge sums of money into AI development.

In our investigation we describe this practice as “labor hedging,” or a form of corporate bench-warming. In other words: signaling abundance to investors, without guaranteeing work, in order to drive profits.

Here in the US, massive investments in data centers and the technological hardware often referred to as “compute” are absolutely being used to “signal abundance to investors” in order to drive up stock prices and market capitalization. If you are not actively pouring money into compute or planning another massive data center, you are obviously falling behind. By the same token:

Idle workers become proof of “capacity”—a kind of collateral that reassures investors the company can grow at a moment’s notice. That illusion feeds hype, and hype inflates stock market value, transforming precarious labor into investor confidence and keeping the AI industry awash with capital.

In the end, human labor is leveraged not for the work it produces, but for the spectacle of abundance in a gambling game of epic proportions—all in feverish pursuit of something that experts say might not even exist: “superintelligent” AI.

Obviously, Africa is a place where Silicon Valley’s AI overlords think they can get away with “hedging” labor. Arends and Cleary compare this to colonialism:

Each person we spoke with had a unique story but a singular, rather eerie, thread ran through them all: Extractive practices underpin LLM training—wages are held below subsistence levels; AI tutors, annotators, and moderators are treated as disposable; and African expertise is appropriated without recognition. This echoes colonial economies of dispossession.

As 404 Media pointed out, this model is particularly troubling for the workers who are not being “hedged.” They have to try to live with everything they see coming from the panopticon of devices surrounding most Americans most of the time:

These workers are required to stare at horrific content for many hours straight with few mental health resources, are largely managed by opaque algorithms, and, crucially, are the workers powering the runaway valuations of some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world.

But it is not going unchecked. After burning out, Michael Geoffrey Asia decided to push back:

He is now the secretary general of a Kenyan organization called the Data Labelers Association (DLA) and the author of “The Emotional Labor Behind AI Intimacy,” a testimony of his time working as the real human labor behind AI sex bots. As part of the DLA, Asia has been working to organize workers to fight for better pay, better mental health services, an end to draconian non-disclosure agreements, and better benefits for a workforce that often earns just a few dollars a day. Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies.

Ironically, the Africa’s digital workers may ultimately find themselves in common cause with workers in Silicon Valley who, thanks to a growing need to deliver on AI’s promised revolution in productivity, are not being hoarded … they are being let go. - jp

Meta faces fresh storm as moderators complain over content from AI glasses
https://nation.africa/kenya/news/meta-faces-fresh-storm-as-moderators-complain-over-content-from-ai-glasses-5399722#story

Microsoft invests hundreds of millions of dollars in Africa AI push
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“The heart of our agreement is a commitment to using lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks once and for all. We'll get rid of them. We need your help. You have to just tell us where they are. We have amazing weaponry, as you probably noticed over the last short period of time.”

The “last short period of time” most likely refers to the War on Iran he was then-gleefully waging alongside Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. But he could’ve also been referring to his summary executions at sea. He’s racked-up quite a pile of dead, nameless men with that opaque, specious campaign. Or he could’ve been crowing about the airstrikes and “discombobulating” raid that captured Venezuela’s President and its oil, gold and fertilizer.

Hell, he could’ve been talking about the 172 times his regime has bombed Somalia over the last fourteen months.

He’s up to 46 airstrikes so far this year and, if the past is any guide, he’ll quickly break his record of 219 strikes he set during his four years.

Don Jr. and Eric like to gratuitously kill leopards and elephants and various threatened species. But it sure seems like Dad prefers the thrill of killing “the most dangerous animal” of all. While promoting his CCC to the leaders of twelve of the seventeen states in the Shield of the Americas, he became downright effusive about the kinetic force at his disposal:

[S]ome of you are in danger. I mean, you're actually in danger. It's hard to believe. But we're working with you to do whatever we have to do. We'll use missiles. If you want us to use a missile, they're extremely accurate.

How about that? It’s Dial-A-Missile with your host, Donald Trump! Just give him a call, give him a target and Palantir will find them and the optimum moment to exterminate them. Voila! Problem solved. Remember that he implored leaders from a number of South, Central and Caribbean nations to “just tell us where they are” because “we have amazing weaponry” and we’re ready to be your geopolitical exterminator.

And if you think “exterminate” is hyperbole?

Just a few days before the CCC was launched at Doral, the Department of War launched “Operation Total Extermination” with the Ecuadoran military. Yup, not just ‘extermination,’ Pete Hegseth’s War Department accepts nothing less than TOTAL extermination. Here’s how Assistant Secretary of War Joseph Humire described it in his opening remarks to the House Armed Services Committee on March 17th:

On March 3, the DoW supported, at the request of Ecuador, bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border. The joint effort, named “Operation Total Extermination,” is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S., setting the pace for regional, deterrence-focused operations against cartel infrastructure throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Hegseth’s War Department “released a video of a massive explosion” that, according to a new report by The New York Times, supposedly captured “the destruction of what they said was a drug trafficker’s training camp in rural Ecuador.” There’s just one problem. The Times found that the target they sought to exterminate wasn’t a cartel:

The military strike appears to have destroyed a cattle and dairy farm, not a drug trafficking compound, according to interviews with the farm’s owner, four of its workers, human rights lawyers and residents and leaders in San Martín, the remote farming village in northern Ecuador where the strike took place.

And although Hegseth posted the aforementioned video on X with a bold warning to the Western Hemisphere: “now bombing Narco Terrorists on land.” The Times also found a problem with that:

And though the Pentagon said at the time that it had “executed targeted action” against the site at Ecuador’s request, U.S. troops had no direct involvement in the strike shown in the video, according to four people with knowledge of the operation, three of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

Frankly, it is probably a good thing they lied about it because the story reported by the Times is not pretty:

Workers on the farm told The Times that Ecuadorean soldiers arrived by helicopter on March 3, doused several shelters and sheds with gasoline and ignited them after interrogating workers and beating four of them with the butts of their guns. Three of the workers, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation by the government, said the soldiers later choked and subjected them to electrical shocks before letting them go.

..and…

Village residents said Ecuadorean helicopters returned to the farm three days later, on March 6, and appeared to drop explosives on the farm’s smoldering remains. It was at that point, they said, that Ecuadorean soldiers recorded the footage that U.S. and Ecuadorean officials said captured the bombing of a traffickers’ compound.

Sadly, it all sounds eerily similar to the tactics exported around the hemisphere by the now-renamed School of the Americas … which is really what this Shield of the Americas is rehashing—an alliance between ruling elites and well-armed US patrons. But it gets tricky when the death squads you train, arm and direct end up raping and killing five American nuns working as missionaries.

The problems with Operation Total Extermination portend many more to come. What happens when a leader uses US kinetic force to target his or her political enemies, or someone they just don’t like? What happens when the intelligence is just wrong and you take out a dairy farm … or a girl’s school?

We don’t yet have a definitive answer on the provenance of the intelligence used to target the girl’s school in Iran, but the Ecuadorean government said “it had relied on U.S. ‘intelligence and support’” to target the farm, which it claims was used to train “about 50 drug traffickers.”

That, in turn, raises questions about the intel Hegseth’s lethality-minded War Department is using to target the alleged “narcoterrorists” Hegseth ghoulishly stalks at sea. Or the intelligence they used to target the “ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria” Trump proudly announced he’d bombed on Christmas Day to stop attacks on Christians.

Not surprisingly, though, reports quickly called into question the efficacy of bombing Jabo, a village in the Sokoto state in northwestern Nigeria. Here’s CNN:

While parts of Sokoto face challenges with banditry, kidnappings and attacks by armed groups including Lakurawa–which Nigeria classifies as a terrorist organization due to suspected affiliations with [the] Islamic State–villagers say Jabo is not known for terrorist activity and that local Christians coexist peacefully with the Muslim majority.

There’s American power—winning hearts and minds with bombs.

Amazingly, when pressed by Ranking Member Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) about the number of land strikes like Operation Total Extermination, Assistant Secretary of War Humire said, “I don’t have an exact number.”

He didn’t know? Or did he know, but simply refuses to say?

That’s the biggest red flag of all—the profuse lying and repeated incompetence makes it hard to know if the regime is lying to you or simply in over its head. Obviously, it is both at the same time. And the regime is marching to the tune of two men who’ve fallen in love with the destructive power at their disposal. Trump himself said the renaming of the Defense Department was in part because he wanted to be offensive. And he’s certainly accomplished that mission.

Unfortunately, his mission is expanding.

So, too, is his appetite for destruction.

As he told the leaders at his Shield of the Americas summit:

The only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power of our militaries. We have to use our military. You have to use your military. You can't fight these people with ... And you have great police. You have some great police, but they threaten your police, they scare your police. You're going to use your military. In many cases, our forces have already been working closely with yours and the United States looks forward to deepening and expanding that cooperation in the months ahead.

While everybody’s understandably focused in Iran, Trump is quietly turning the Western Hemisphere into a protection racket while, at the same time, using Venezuela’s oil and fertilizer to mitigate the impact of his war on Iran.

I am becoming convinced Venezuela’s decapitation was anticipatory of the Iran War.

And there is no doubt that this presidency is going to be dominated by a strangely unrepentant love of organized violence and of technologically advanced ways of killing people.

At one point during his summit statement, Trump coughed-up a simple solution to persistent problem of narcoterrorists: “We have to eradicate them.”

Back in the first village to fall victim to these marching order, Mario Pazmiño, a retired colonel and former director of intelligence for Ecuador’s Army, told the Times:

“What the army did was attack that house, or farm, and destroy it in its totality.”

I could’ve been a house, or it could’ve been farm. Either way, Hegseth must’ve been ecstatic to find out it was destroyed “in its totality.” - jp

Pentagon Reveals Attacks in Latin America Are Just the Beginning
https://theintercept.com/2026/03/23/trump-operation-total-extermination-ecuador-colombia-cuba/

‘Americas Counter Cartel Coalition’: Inside the US strategy to combat narco terror, confront China, other foes
https://www.foxnews.com/world/americas-counter-cartel-coalition-inside-us-strategy-combat-narco-terror-confront-china-other-foes

The Holes in Trump’s ‘Shield of the Americas’
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trump-us-latin-america-shield-of-the-americas/

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The government is paying back TotalEnergies for federal leases it purchased under the Biden administration to develop two offshore wind farms off the coasts of New York and North Carolina. The Justice Department will use nearly $1 billion in taxpayer funds to reimburse the company for money it spent to purchase leases under the Biden administration.

This publicly-funded consolation prize is Trump’s response to a series of failed attempts to defend his claim that wind power projects should be killed because they pose a risk to national security. That justification, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just noted, quickly followed his loss in an early lawsuit challenging his original, wind power-killing order, which a judge called “arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law.” The renewable-hating Trump regime has since been on a losing steak…

One after another, federal judges have sided with all five wind farms impacted by the Interior Department’s pause, allowing them to resume construction, at least temporarily.

As the Bulletin explains, the gamble on national security did not pay off. Not because there isn’t evidence that “large wind turbines can create ‘clutter,’ or radar interference.” It failed because the problem of “clutter” was already taken into account before the projects were approved:

All of the wind projects the Trump administration is attempting to stall or kill have gone through extensive permitting and review processes with the Defense Department and other federal agencies.

Despite that fact, the regime plowed ahead with its bogus claim and suffered the consequences:

Royce Lamberth, the district court judge who issued a preliminary injunction allowing the Sunrise Wind project in New York to continue, had the opportunity to review the classified report on wind’s supposed national security risks—but was not persuaded.

“Purportedly new classified information does not constitute a sufficient explanation for the bureau’s decision to entirely stop work on the Sunrise Wind project,” Lamberth said from the bench.

Now their answer is to simply buy-out the companies and cut-off a source of energy in the midst of an emerging energy crisis the regime created by its own war of choice against Iran. It’s a source largely insulated from the vicissitudes of Middle Eastern strongmen and zealots. Had they continued, the two TotalEnergies projects alone—located off the coasts of New York and North Carolina—promised to deliver “more than 4 gigawatts of electricity for US households and businesses.” And, the Bulletin reports, the five targeted projects together would “provide cheaper, cleaner electricity to 20 states and Washington D.C.”

You’d think that more energy would be better regardless of the aesthetics of the machines that deliver it. That appears to be the rationale behind Trump’s enthusiasm for propping up coal, which is neither clean nor beautiful. If Trump thinks offshore windmills are unsightly, he should stop by a mountaintop removal project or head downstream from the tailings, coal ash and wastewater coal mining leaves behind.

Those aren’t cheap either. And someone eventually pays, be it for environmental remediation or through illness or from catastrophic flooding. Many of those costs get passed onto taxpayers on the back end when the government has to step in long after the mining company has gone, which has been happening more and more as the diversifying renewable energy market helped put the 19th Century to rest. The broader market has simply been moving on from the source of black lung and acid rain.

But then Trump became Hydrocarbon Jesus and laid his hands on ugly, dirty coal …and gave it new life in Him. Because of this resurrection, the US taxpayer is on the hook for upwards of $500 million to “re-commission and upgrade” dying coal plants. So far, they’ve blocked retirements “in Colorado, Indiana, Michigan and Washington state.” As Stateline recently explained, there’s a lot more … and a lot less … to follow:

Observers expect similar orders to be issued for most, if not all, of the dozens of coal-fired units slated for retirement during the remainder of Trump’s term. Utilities subject to the orders have said they will increase costs for ratepayers, and argue those costs should be borne by the multistate region to which they provide power, rather than just their local customers.

Despite their costs, three of the five plants being blocked from retirement haven’t produced electricity since the emergency orders went into effect, either because they need extensive repairs or because power demands have been met without them.

In other words, many of these plants will need to be subsidized just to be brought online. Taxpayers are being asked to pay to kill a soon-to-come-online source of clean energy and to revive a dying, deadly and dirty fuel.

Meanwhile, China is slowly phasing out coal, but its also the world’s leader in renewable energy and in manufacturing renewable systems. That both anticipates and feeds a global trend reaffirmed by a new study by the British think tank Ember Energy, which found the world building more wind and solar power plants than ever:

In total, 814 gigawatts of solar and wind power capacity were installed worldwide in 2025, Ember Energy announced. Together, the newly installed plants can produce 1.046 petawatt-hours of clean electricity, according to Ember Energy.

The expansion in 2025 was the largest in any single year to date. In 2024, 696 gigawatts were installed; the growth in 2025 compared to 2024 corresponds to 17 percent. Solar energy accounted for the larger share: in 2025, 647 gigawatts of solar capacity were installed, an increase of 11 percent compared to the previous year (582 gigawatts). Wind energy added 167 gigawatts, compared to 113 gigawatts in the previous year, which corresponds to an increase of 47 percent compared to 2024.

And coal?

Ember Energy reported that in the first half of 2025, wind and solar power plants supplied more electricity than coal-fired power plants for the first time.

And European countries Trump excoriates for investing in renewables?

In the European Union, in 2025 – despite partly unfavorable weather conditions, more electricity was generated from wind and solar energy than from all fossil fuels combined for the first time.

It raises a simple question: If energy independence is the goal, why wouldn’t an “America First” president embrace harnessing American wind and American sunshine, even if only to help feed the insatiable AI beast he’s unleashed on a nation with an aging, hydrocarbon-dependent grid? And why not use those coal funds to jumpstart solar panel manufacturing right here in the USA?

The question is underlined by the $2 million per day tab Trump is running-up to attack Iran. And the American people get to pay that tab twice—through an immediate spike to the cost of living and then longer-term through the impacts of a ballooning national debt.

The stakes got even higher after Trump’s threat to bomb Iranian power plants also threatened to turn the Strait of Hormuz into Iwo Jima and, therefore, the global economy into a proverbial “parking lot.” But he blinked, which could be a response to a variety of political headwinds or pressure points, but the price of gas really is the bottom line in US politics. That he likely blinked to avoid another week of rising gas and falling stock prices only underscores the utility of diversifying energy production.

Just imagine if the global economy did not depend on keeping the Strait of Hormuz open. And what if the US did not have to maintain a significant military presence in the Middle East?

That’s exactly the kind of America First policy he sold to war-weary Americans throughout three election cycles. But somehow the Fifth Fleet being based in Bahrain doesn’t bother Trump like US forces stationed around NATO. Then again, how many billions have the Europeans given Trump and his family for services rendered?

For some, his “betrayal” of MAGA and American First is a dealbreaker, but, if you believe the polling, it is not nearly as many as some assume. If you believe CNN’s Harry Enton, MAGA is 100% behind Hydrocarbon Jesus. But polling by his pollsters offers this interesting wrinkle:

A recent poll from the chief pollster for President Trump, Fabrizio Lee and Associates, showed that a clear majority of Republicans support expanding solar power in the United States. In the survey, 68 percent of Republican Party voters surveyed agreed that “we need all forms of electricity generation, including utility solar, to be built to lower electricity costs”. Meanwhile, 70 percent of respondents said they support utility-scale solar deployment when projects use U.S.-produced materials.

But wait, there’s more…

A separate poll from Kellyanne Conway’s KA Consulting revealed that three-quarters of Trump voters surveyed in Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Texas believe that solar power should be used to strengthen and increase the U.S. energy supply. The results of the polls reflect the outcome of a Pew Research Centre survey conducted last spring, which showed that six in 10 Republican respondents were in favour of solar power, as well as nine out of 10 Democrats surveyed.

It also turns out that so-called “Red States” “now leading the country” in solar development and, oilprice.com reports, Red States are now leading the country in terms of solar deployment:

Last year, approximately 73 percent of all new U.S. solar capacity was developed in states that voted for President Trump in 2024, such as Texas, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Arkansas.

…in fact…

Texas recently achieved a new energy milestone when it surpassed California in solar power production to become the top U.S. producer of utility-scale solar electricity. Texas produced over 58.6 GWh of solar power in 2025, compared to California’s 53.7 GWh, according to recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In February, the Texas electricity grid was running on 30 GW of solar power, meaning solar resources contributed around 60 percent of the total electricity demand. During a time of geopolitical turmoil, solar power is helping to keep Texas’s electricity prices stable.

Imagine that.

Amazingly enough, there are places in Trump country where you don’t have to. - jp

Humans are very stupid: Iran war, Strait of Hormuz & climate collapse expose our biggest failure | POV
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Q: Why didn't you tell US Allies in Europe and Asia, like Japan, about the war before attacking Iran? So, we are very confused about -- we Japanese citizens.

A: Well, one thing, you don't want to signal too much, you know. When we go in, we went in very hard and we didn't tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan, OK? Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbor, OK? Right? He's asking me -- no, you believe in surprise I think much more so than us and we had to surprise them and we did.”

The news media didn’t characterize it as an insult or a gaffe. It appears years of working the refs has finally paid off:

Fair enough. Seems like a cheap laugh, but okay.

On the other hand, just writing it off as just a joke misses the admission in his punchline. He admits that his attack on Iran was a sneak attack. And that’s not the first time he’s touted the element of surprise. He’s too proud of himself to hide it. But is it something to be proud of? Is it wise for a nation-state to acquire a reputation for being duplicitous?

That’s how many Americans thought of the Japanese after the “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor.

Now Trump is associating his attack on Iran with a date that still lives in infamy.

Ironically, Imperial Japan was negotiating to end an embargo on oil. There are differing schools of thought about their intentions during the final weeks leading up to a fourteen-part message the government in Toyko sent to the embassy in DC prior to the attack. It was meant to be delivered just before the bombs dropped, but the delegation took a long time to compile the message, perhaps misunderstanding its true nature. They delivered it more than an hour after Pearl Harbor was hit. Just how clear their intentions were in the final communique is a source of debate, but they did plan on informing the US that Japan was pulling out of negotiations.

So, when Trump said, “you believe in surprise I think much more so than us,” he’s both wrong and he’s projecting. He’s wrong because the Japanese don’t “believe in surprise.” Not anymore. In fact, the Japanese government issued an apology in 1994 for failing to properly break off negotiations in 1941. Per the Los Angeles Times:

“There can be no excuse,” the Foreign Ministry said, for Japan’s delay in delivering a message to Washington on Dec. 7, 1941, that it would negotiate no longer.

But the apology wasn’t directed at the United States. The Foreign Ministry said “the statement was directed to the people of Japan.” The Los Angeles Times attributed that to Japanese culture’s “generalized concept of shame” and “the particular sense of shame many Japanese feel about the beginning of World War II.”

Shame is, sadly, hard to find in Trump’s America. To the contrary, shamelessness is the coin of his realm and it is the new standard in international affairs. He set that standard when he shamelessly proclaimed he was taking Venezuela’s oil after capturing its leader.

Like it did with Iran, the US was negotiating when Trump launched his surprise attack on Venezuela’s capital.

The pattern is clear … it is Trump who believes in sneak attacks and it sure seems like negotiations are nothing but a ruse.

Does anybody actually believe Trump would assemble a massive armada and not use it? That’s to say nothing of the troop movements, the prepositioning of aircraft, the evacuation of embassy staff, the signing of an anticipatory Executive Order targeting soon-to-be fertilizer or the way he conveniently took control of Venezuela’s oil before throwing the global market in turmoil.

This war was always on Trump’s to-do list. And I suspect the negotiations were designed to lull the Iranian leadership into exposing themselves to Israeli targeting systems. The negotiations drew them out and made them easier to kill. They foolishly believed Trump was negotiating in good faith. Netanyahu may have forced his hand by, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an apparent moment of truth, launching an attack that made it necessary to join if only to protect US assets from the counterattack. But if so, it would have only been a matter of timing.

It was coming, if not then … then soon.

That said, I do wonder how many of the reported conflicts between the two are just convenient “outs” Trump can use when fielding objections from his Gulf Arab benefactors. It’s a cake-and-eat-it-too mechanism that allows Israel to conduct its brutal brand of civilian-punishing warfare while Trump walks away with plausible deniability.

No, Trump’s little “joke” is more than a crass example of the unrepentant style of “diplomacy” he presaged when he pushed past the Prime Minister of Montenegro at his first NATO summit and jutted out his chin like Mussolini posing on a Roman balcony. The real joke is the claim—which Trump characterizes as a “feeling” he got—that the US had to attack to stop an imminent attack by Iran, which he claims was poised to “takeover” the Middle East.

As Joe Kent confirmed in his resignation and subsequent interviews, Iran posed no immediate threat, nor was it anywhere close to posing a nuclear threat. Netanyahu knew it. Trump knew it. And the Iranians knew they were down to their last bargaining chip—the remaining enriched uranium. In a sense, the first attack on Iran—the so-called Twelve Day War—made the second attack likelier. Had Trump’s beloved bombing run—Midnight Hammer—eliminated the enriched uranium and verifiably so, what pretext would there have been to do what the US and Israel are doing now … which is to lay waste to the country’s infrastructure and hobble it for decades?

This war is not about nuclear weapons. This is about creating another failed state and capturing some control over Iran’s hydrocarbons. An Israeli official admitted that if the Iranian people would be “slaughtered” if they rose up like Trump and Israel suggested. That, in turn, suggested their suggestion is just one of the many fig leaves they’ve tried-on along the way.

So far, none have been able to hide the war boners Trump and Netanyahu get from bombing Iran.

Maybe that’s the point.

They want the world to see them screw the international system and realize there isn’t a thing they can do about it. They are operating with the kind of impunity that ultimately fueled the building of the system they’ve nullified with a ghoulish glee.

Instead of circumspection about the kind of total warfare and defiant inhumanity that led to the world to promise “Never Again,” Trump said, ”you don’t do a ceasefire when you are literally obliterating the other side.” - jp

Joe Kent doubles down: ‘No intelligence’ of an Iran ‘sneak attack’
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/18/politics/video/joe-kent-iran-tucker-carlson-vrtc

‘Iranians Do Not Sneak Attack’: Iran FM Refutes Trump’s Claim Of Tehran Planning Strike On US
https://www.news18.com/world/iranians-do-not-sneak-attack-iran-fm-refutes-trumps-claim-of-tehran-planning-strike-on-us-ws-l-9989162.html

Iran war’s horrors are why we should teach the Geneva Conventions in schools
https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2026/03/19/the-war-in-iran-is-another-reason-the-geneva-conventions-should-be-taught-in-schools/

Attacks on hospitals are surging in war zones. What do the laws of war say about protecting them?
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Israel Killed Over a Dozen Lebanese Paramedics in Three Days, Now Claiming That Ambulances Are “Hezbollah” Targets
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Israel urges Iranians to revolt but privately assesses they’ll be ‘slaughtered’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/17/israel-iran-cable-revolt-slaughtered/

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I find that ensuring robust domestic elemental phosphorus mining and United States-based production of glyphosate-based herbicides is central to American economic and national security. Without immediate Federal action, the United States remains inadequately equipped and vulnerable. Accordingly, I hereby find, pursuant to section 101 of the Act, that domestic elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides meet the criteria specified in section 101(b) of the [Defense Production Act [of 1950]] (50 U.S.C. 4511(b)).

It was a bit of a head-scratcher at the time, particularly given the growing sense of unease among the MAHA crowd after RFK Jr.’s notable reversal on pesticides and glyphosate in his ‘Make Our Children Healthy Again’ report released last September. It didn’t help that, as Deutsche Welle detailed, Trump’s Justice Department also switched sides to support Bayer’s attempt to limit payouts to 65,000 of the 200,000-ish litigants with cancer-related claims due to glyphosate.

Biden’s Justice Department had argued that federal pesticide law does not shield Bayer from state‑court lawsuits, since liability and consumer protection are traditionally matters for individual states.

Plaintiffs — from farmers to home gardeners — brought claims under their own state rules, alleging that Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, causes cancer and that Bayer failed to provide adequate warnings.

US federal law sets national standards for pesticide approval, but does not override states’ public‑safety powers. So even with glyphosate approved by the federal regulator, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), people could still sue if they believed Bayer’s labeling was misleading.

By contrast, the Trump administration has now urged the Supreme Court to accept Bayer’s argument that federal law preempts such lawsuits, effectively narrowing the scope for the 65,000 remaining plaintiffs.

Trump’s team has also reframed the Roundup litigation as an unnecessary burden on business, as it exposes Bayer to massive, unpredictable liabilities even when the EPA has approved its products.

MAHA’s sense of unease about these strange moves quickly blossomed into a feeling of betrayal, particularly among RFK Jr.’s most-devoted supporters—the MAHA Moms:

“Women feel like they were lied to, that MAHA movement is a sham,” said Alex Clark, a health and wellness podcaster for the conservative group Turning Point U.S.A., which is closely allied with the president. “How am I supposed to rally these women to vote red in the midterms? How can we win their trust back? I am unsure if we can.”

The New York Times found much of MAHA’s anger bypassed RFK Jr.:

“Secretary Kennedy has done everything he said he’s going to do,” said Vani Hari, a healthy eating activist and one-time Democrat (she worked to elect President Barack Obama) who has advised the administration on food policy. “He has upheld his commitment to the American people. Now, whether his boss is doing that is another story.”

That story has Trump tightening his embrace of history’s most widely-applied herbicide while simultaneously shielding it from legal consequences. It’s a fairly cavalier approach to the upcoming midterms. The GOP already faces “headwinds” on the economy, on deportation and now on Iran. They will need every vote they can get, including the MAHA Moms and the Podcast Bros who Trump wooed through RFK Jr. and Joe Rogan. They were key voters Trump added to his rock-solid Evangelical base. But he added them by making promises about “no foreign wars” and RFK Jr.’s role.

Now he’s alienated both, and it may be for the same reason.

Trump’s EO does appear to anticipate the attack on Iran.

In fact, it was signed ten days before the attack would threaten the global fertilizer supply chain. On March 18th, The Food Institute noted that fertilizer was “already in short supply” before the war. Approximately one-third of the world’s fertilizer moves through the strait and the longer the war goes, the harder it’ll get:

[Fertilizer] “could become a sparse commodity as the spring planting season approaches, sparking fears of a global food shortage and higher grocery prices if the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz continue much longer.

“Farmers in the coming weeks will start to have to make choices in reference to what crops they need to go ahead and plant. As fertilizer prices increase crop selection is going to become a pivotal aspect,” Babak Hafezi, adjunct professor of international business at American University told The Food Institute.

Both phosphorus and nitrate come from areas that ship their products through the strait, which Iran has blocked since the start of the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign.

Well, that’s quite a coincidence.

Trump just-so-happened to invoke the Defense Production Act before going to war. And he managed to anticipate an impending shortage of phosphorous. Indeed, there has been a shortage. Luckily for Trump, he had a little something in his back pocket:

Late Friday, the U.S. Treasury Department said it was taking immediate steps to allow for more imports of Venezuelan fertilizer “to support our great American farmers.”

That’s a Reuters report from March 13th.

The timing of the “late” Friday announcement is likely meant to slip it in under the radar. Although, Trump has not been bashful about pillaging Venezuela’s oil, which also seems to have anticipated the attack on Iran. It sure seems convenient to have access to Venezuela’s oil and fertilizer right before your next attack is going to restrict the flow of oil and fertilizer.

It might be that we can trace the attack on Iran all the way back to the opening act of the second Trump Presidency—the crackdown on Gaza-related protests on college campuses. That crackdown and the speech restrictions many four-year school adopted, or were forced to adopt, effectively shut down college protesting. Also conveniently timed was the demonstration of force in Minnesota. Was that meant to intimidate Americans who’d no doubt object to an unconstitutional war against a nation that posed no real threat to the United States?

Wars of choice need pretexts. And the regime has offered many. Thus far, none of them have legs. Even worse, none of them have credibility … not with MAHA Moms or Podcast Bros. Despite it all, one question may have finally been answered.

Now we have a pretty good idea why Venezuela had to happen and why it had to happen when it did. - jp

High pesticide-use counties often have higher-than-average late-stage cancer rates
https://investigatemidwest.org/2026/03/16/high-pesticide-use-counties-often-have-higher-than-average-late-stage-cancer-rates/

Analysis finds “hot spots” for glyphosate and cancer in Iowa and other Midwest states
https://www.thenewlede.org/2026/03/analysis-find-hot-spots-for-glyphosate-and-cancer-in-iowa/

New Analysis Maps Glyphosate, Cancer Connection
https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/2026/03/16/new-analysis-maps-glyphosate-cancer-connection/

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That’s Trump’s butterknife-sharp assessment of artificial intelligence after he spent a couple days grappling with a number of AI-generated propaganda pieces churned-out by the Iranian government.

One such concoction depicted the the USS Abraham Lincoln on fire after a successful Iranian attack that never happened. It started with a lengthy social media post … and then a press spray on Air Force One … and then he brought it up again at the first meeting of his remodeled “Trump-Kennedy Center Board”:

[Iran] showed all sorts of things happening in the last two weeks that never happened, between their kamikaze boats that don’t exist, between blowing up the aircraft carrier, one of the great ships in the world, the Abraham Lincoln on fire. They showed it on fire, I called the -- the general.

I said, uh, General, what’s with the Abraham Lincoln? It looks like it’s burning down, no. It’s not burning down, not a bullet was ever fired at it, sir. They know better. They said this is my first glimpse of AI and what they’ve done with it. They showed buildings in Tel Aviv burning to the ground, high-rises burning.

They showed buildings in Qatar, they showed buildings in Saudi Arabia burning and they weren’t burning, they weren’t hit, it was all AI, AI-based. Terrible.

Yup, Donnie. Terrible.

Of course, no one on planet Earth is doing more to accelerate AI. His Executive Orders have essentially given Silicon Valley the keys to the Executive Branch and an EZ-Pass they can use to race past most of the regulatory byways they’d have to take if all the governing agencies were not staffed with indifferent ideologues and industry shills.

Unleashed by Trump, they are flooring-it in the fast lane on the information superhighway … but the AI-generated, flame-engulfed Abraham Lincoln was his “first glimpse of AI and what they’ve done with it”?

Well, he ain’t seen nothing yet.

Last week, Jack Dorsey announced he was laying off four thousand employees at his fintech company Block. That’s 40% of the company’s human workforce. For Jack, it was as much about jump-starting the inevitable culling of human staff in favor of AI as it was a recognition that AI was doing his team’s work better, cheaper and faster:

i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.

Jack may be immune to “market pressures,” but he’s a rare bird if that’s true. Because the market pressures are coming as quickly as those AI companions Google, Meta, Apple and the rest of the major AI companies want to attach to us all like lampreys on the side of a shark.

In fact, one of the things the market loves most is the elimination of employees. No hyperbole — Wall Street loves large layoffs. And they’ve loved it for … ever. Long before AI-driven disruption was a dream typed onto some incel’s subreddit —there was “corporate restructuring” and there were hostile takeovers. Both usually meant a bloodbath, with employees shown the door by a “proactive” CEO who is “positioning the company” for success … which often meant gutting it and selling off the parts.

But AI holds the promise of culling human overhead while actually improving productivity! Kinda like a neutron bomb eliminates the people but leaves the buildings intact.

Now THAT’S exciting!

And true to form, when Meta announced its plan to cull 20% of its workforce in an attempt to reallocate more capital to building out it AI infrastructure, giddy investors quickly rewarded Meta with a 3% jump in its stock price. And they are not alone, either … per CNBC:

Amazon eliminated 16,000 roles in January in an effort to reduce layers and bureaucracy, amid plans to invest heavily in AI.

Software firm Atlassian said Wednesday it’s cutting 10% of its workforce, or 1,600 employees, on plans to direct investments into AI.

So far in 2026, AI has been cited in over 12,000 job cuts in the U.S., according to the latest data from consulting firm Challenger Gray & Christmas.

Although there is plenty of reason to be skeptical about the ability of AI to do everything the “Mag Seven” (Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Telsa & Nvidia) is banking on delivering … the reality is that the market is poised to participate in a brutal feedback loop with increasing AI adoption. The more companies announce big cuts to overhead in concert with big gains in productivity, the more the market will respond with increasing stock prices. Other than the rapidly burgeoning military market for AI applications—which Trump and Beerbong Hegseth are also catalyzing with a their nothing-is-forbidden attitude toward killer tech—what reason is there for the hyperscaling frenzy currently underway?

It’s all about productivity … it’s an impending revolution by orders of magnitude if you listen to the enthusiasts plying their wares on Bloomberg or in shareholder’s reports. That the man most responsible for (quite literally) pouring gasoline on the AI fire has apparently been blissfully unaware of what it is that AI does … is a perfect example of the recklessness of racing into a future of unintended consequences that could be very dark.

Sadly, the intended consequences will mount in the form of human roadkill littered along stretches of the information superhighway already in AI’s rearview mirror. It’s going to leave a lot of us behind. - jp

AI-generated clip and old video shared in false posts about Iran striking USS Abraham Lincoln
https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.A2LM9CQ

Trump Accuses Iran of Using AI as a ‘Weapon,’ Warns Reporters Must Be ‘Very Careful’
https://www.inquisitr.com/trump-accuses-iran-of-using-ai-as-a-weapon-warns-reporters-must-be-very-careful

Shrinking workforce, stagnant productivity? 3 mindsets to power growth in the agentic era
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/03/shrinking-workforce-stagnant-productivity-3-mindsets-to-power-growth-in-the-agentic-era/

Snowflake Research Finds AI-Driven Job Creation Outpaces Job Loss Globally
https://smbtech.au/news/snowflake-research-finds-ai-driven-job-creation-outpaces-job-loss-globally/

Google’s Gemini Task Automation Is Live, And It’s a Preview of How We’ll All Work Next
https://www.uctoday.com/productivity-automation/googles-gemini-task-automation-is-live-and-its-a-preview-of-how-well-all-work-next/

Gen AI Boosts Productivity, But Can’t Turn Novices Into Experts
https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/gen-ai-boosts-productivity-but-cant-turn-novices-into-experts

The AI Productivity Illusion: When Speed Masks Cognitive Cost
https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2026/03/16/the-ai-productivity-illusion-when-speed-masks-cognitive-cost/

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According to an Axios “scoop,” Blair “privately urged” attendees to “stop emphasizing 'mass deportations‘ and instead focus their messaging on removing violent criminals.”

That telling admonition comes on the heels of Kristi Noem’s epic flameout as head of the Department of Homeland Security. Her tenure was a bizarre mix of cosplay, callousness and calumny. Trump decided to drop her after a particularly disastrous appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis compared Noem’s mismanagement style to her experience training and then executing a puppy. Louisiana Republican Senator and noted Foghorn Leghorn impersonator John Kennedy iced her once and for all when he highlighted her $220 million selfie campaign, which funneled money to her associates.

Now that she been reassigned to serve as a glorified Walmart greeter for Trump’s “Americas Counter Cartel Coalition” protection racket, it appears that DHS is attempting to take the “mass” out of mass deportations. That’s sparked a backlash from “allies” who are, according to Politico, “furious at the White House’s new rhetorical emphasis on deporting violent criminals over all unauthorized immigrants.”

However, a separate analysis of court filings by Politico indicates that the retreat is more than rhetorical:

A POLITICO analysis found that immigration habeas petitions peaked at about 300 to 400 per day from Jan. 16 to Feb. 17, at the height of Operation Metro Surge. It was in this timeframe — which includes the Jan. 24 shooting death of demonstrator Alex Pretti — when public opinion began to sour on the Trump administration’s mass deportation tactics.

Habeas petitions peaked at more than 400 on Feb. 6 but have since steadily declined, dipping below 300 per day late last month and approaching 200 per day by early March.

The decline in habeas cases tracks with a similar decline in immigration arrests reported by The New York Times, citing internal DHS data.

In response, “furious” deportation enthusiasts formed the “Mass Deportation Coalition to lobby the Trump administration to refocus its efforts on deporting all eligible migrants.” They’ve got favorable polling and Trump’s repeated promises, but neither of those things seems particularly reliable. The same could easily be said for the current recalibration given the $38.3 billion slated to “acquire warehouses across the country and turn them into detention facilities.”

Dubbed the “Detention Reengineering Initiative,” DHS has targeted buildings that need “expensive renovations to add wastewater infrastructure, water supply and fire protection.” According to Bisnow, that includes eight “Large-Scale Detention Facilities” capable of “holding up to 10,000 people for about 60 days at a time.”

Thus far, attempts to buy warehouses have been hampered by local opposition in a number of states. But where they have purchased warehouses, officials are paying a “eye-popping” amounts that a cynic (like me) might see as a sign of potential corruption. Here’s a sampling from a recent USA Today report:

In February, DHS purchased an empty warehouse in Social Circle, Georgia, for $128.5 million. The property’s current value: $29.7 million, according to the Walton County Tax Assessor’s website.

[I]n Oakwood, Georgia, the government paid $68 million for a warehouse and surrounding land that was appraised in 2025 for a combined $7.1 million, according to Hall County records.

[I]n Hamburg, Pennsylvania, DHS paid $87.4 million for a warehouse that sold in 2024 for $57.5 million, public records show.

And at the fateful hearing that cost Noem her job, New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker accused her of supporting an "incredible empire of for-profit companies that are profiting at rates we've never seen":

"You paid $129.3 million for a facility in my state that was assessed at less than half of that, at $62 million," Booker said to Noem, who has since been ousted by President Donald Trump. "To work for a president who says he's a great dealmaker ... I can't believe he thinks that you're a great dealmaker."

For what it’s worth, USA Today consulted with “experts in federal property acquisition” who speculated that DHS may be paying high prices “to compel developers and commercial landowners to sell their property despite local opposition.”

It’s plausible, but Noem’s track record of conveniently cozy contracting stretches back to her time as governor of South Dakota when the same company—Strategy Group for Media—scored an $8.5 million contract for an ad campaign back in 2023.

In her defense, none of this is unusual for a party that books its meetings at Trump-owned properties:

The Republican National Committee held several meetings at Trump National Doral in early 2020, and the first GOP meeting was held there in 2018, raking in a whopping $630,000 for Trump’s resort, The Washington Post reported at the time. The RNC spent nearly $500,000 on rental and catering alone, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW.

The price tag for the just completed policy retreat at Doral is as yet unknown, but The Daily Beast’s Substack (a.k.a. “The Swamp”) notes “nothing was on the house”:

Rooms at the four-star luxury 643-room Trump National Doral Golf Club start at $600 a night. (You do get access to a pool with a 125-foot water slide, though.) All the expenses—the $1,100-a-night-suites, the $31 burger, and the luxury $420 spa treatments—go into the pockets of the owner.

Amazingly enough, House Republicans were lapping-up luxuries while trying to figure out how to appeal to voters struggling with affordability. And they were doing so at the same time a President who promised to stay out of stupid wars in the Middle East was driving up the cost of living with a stupid war of choice in the Middle East. And that war has already displaced over three million Iranians … many of whom may end up as migrants and asylum seekers thanks to a President who wants to deport all the migrants and asylum seekers. - jp

911 call records show frequent medical emergencies at Camp East Montana as DHS disputes AP report on detention conditions
https://kvia.com/news/top-stories/2026/03/11/911-call-records-show-frequent-medical-emergencies-at-camp-east-montana-as-dhs-disputes-ap-report-on-detention-conditions/

ICE Detainment Center Guards Allegedly Set Up Suicide Death Pools
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/09/ice-detainment-center-guards-allegedly-set-up-suicide-death-pools/

DHS Is ‘Upgrading’ a Detention Facility Rife With Abuse Claims. It Should Close It Instead.
https://reason.com/2026/03/12/dhs-is-upgrading-a-detention-facility-rife-with-abuse-claims-it-should-close-it-instead/

DHS terminates Camp East Montana operations contract, hires new provider
https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/immigration/2026/03/11/new-ice-detention-center-operator-at-camp-east-montana-dhs-says/89101624007/

ICE buys $87M warehouse in Pennsylvania − can local officials block a detention facility?
https://www.inkl.com/news/ice-buys-87m-warehouse-in-pennsylvania-can-local-officials-block-a-detention-facility

Who will profit off of ICE’s new detention warehouses?
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2026/03/09/ice-plan-warehouses-detention-centers

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Israel immediately announced its intention to kill that person.

They didn’t know who it was or what the new leader intended to do. In fact, that death sentence was ordered before the then-unidentified new leader said or did anything. None of that mattered. Anybody other than Trump’s hand-picked leader was already a dead Ayatollah walking.

Let’s be clear about what this means.

Israel is asserting the right to preemptively kill a sovereign nation’s top governmental and religious leader in perpetuity. Who the person is and what they’ve done doesn’t matter. The human being who assumes the role is irrelevant to Israel. It has given itself a kinetic veto and it intends on using it. And you can bet this also applies to every Iranian official and cleric in perpetuity. Iran is Israel’s bombing range now and anyone living within range is subject to summary execution by airstrike. As a result, a nation has been robbed of its borders and its right to self-determination and its sovereignty.

The truth is that there is no inherent sovereignty in this global protection racket Trump and Netanyahu are hyperscaling before our eyes. Nor are there universal human rights. In a world of preemptive killing, no human has an inherent right to exist. Everything is arbitrary. And two self-appointed arbiters are currently demonstrating to the world that they can and will shoot first and ignore questions later. Trump has even bragged about pretending to negotiate in good faith while secretly organizing sneak attacks.

It’s how the US reportedly set-up Israel’s assassination of Khamenei. The Iranians were lulled into believing negotiations were real. They were not. And no, I am not taking Steve Witkoff at his word. They knew Iran’s red lines in negotiations and made sure the bridge they were selling was a bridge too far. Honestly, does anyone actually believe Netanyahu would participate in a negotiated deal? After “yearning” for this bloodletting for “40 years”?

Not when he’s got Kushner managing diplomacy, a religious zealot running the Pentagon and Miriam’s $200 million dollar man in the White House. If you look back at the timeline … it appears that this has been the plan all along, right down to grabbing Venezuela’s oil before a potential oil shock.

Understandably, some of Trump’s devotees prefer to think Bibi twisted his arm during his many visits to the White House. While it might explain why Trump has broken the most important promises he made to war-weary Americans, it doesn’t match his conduct since returning to the White House.

So far, Trump has bombed seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Nigeria and Somalia. Of those, Somalia appears to be his favorite target. The incomparable Dave DeCamp keeps track of Somalia for Antiwar.com:

The Trump administration has overseen a major escalation in US airstrikes in Somalia, which came after President Trump loosened the rules of engagement for the US military in early 2025. AFRICOM launched at least 124 airstrikes in Somalia in 2025, shattering the previous annual record for US airstrikes in the country, which President Trump set at 63 during his first term in 2019.

We’re just nine weeks into 2026 and he’s already bombed Somalia at least 41 times. In addition to adding context to his ongoing feud with Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), it also exposes what a complete and utter fraud his promises have been.

Frankly, he gave away the game during the lead-up to rechristening the Defense Department to the War Department. In explaining the change back in September of last year Trump said, “Defense is too defensive; we want to be offensive too.”

As George W. Bush once said, “Mission accomplished.”

Not coincidentally, the mission Bush accomplished was to bomb the hell out of yet another regime Netanyahu wanted the United States to change. Like he did with Iran, Netanyahu repeatedly warned that Iraq was a threat. He even testified before Congress in the months leading up to an illegal invasion of a bystander nation that posed to imminent threat to the United States.

The main difference between Iraq then and Iran now is the effort W’s administration put into convincing the world to join the “Coalition of the Willing.” They spent a year making their case to the international community. Yes, their case was specious. And yes, they lied about aluminum tubes and yellowcake and the danger of waiting for the “smoking gun” confirmation of Saddam’s phony nuclear program which, W said with a straight face, “could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

They even sent then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN Security Council to lie about Iraq’s bogus mobile bioweapons labs. He humiliated himself. But at least he had the humility to be humiliated.

The same cannot be said of Netanyahu and Trump.

They don’t care enough to bother with quaint notions like building consensus or persuading the public. And they don’t care about the treaties their nations signed when the world decided “Never Again.”

Instead, they are using their combined military superiority to nullify the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions. Netanyahu wrote the epitaph for the “Post-War Order” when he laid waste to an entire society in the Gaza Strip and did so while invoking a Biblical call to exterminate an entire people … a call he invoked again when the bombs started dropping on Iran.

Trump followed up by summarily executing people at sea and then using that as a pretext for taking Venezuela’s leader, its oil and now its gold. And now he and Bibi are using violence, the threat of violence and extortion to divide the world into two camps: With Trump and against Trump.

It was on display on Saturday when, even as the Israelis were intentionally poisoning the air around Tehran by targeting oil refineries, Trump launched his latest product—the America’s Shield Counter-Cartel Coalition:

“The heart of our agreement is a commitment to using lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks once and for all. We’ll get rid of ‘em. We need your help. You have to just tell us where they are. We have, we have amazing weaponry, as you probably noticed over the last short period of time.”

The choice for South and Central American nations is simple—toe the line or suffer the same fate as Venezuela or Iran. Toeing the line means making a “commitment to using lethal force,” which means allowing the US military to hunt down and “get rid of” the cartels and terrorists in your nation. Just open your nation’s door and show us where the bad guys are and we’ll do the rest. If so, you will be in Trump’s good graces.

Your reward will be avoiding punishment.

UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer just got schooled on the rules in Trump’s International System Of Rewards And Punishments. Stuck between the wishes of his constituents and Trump’s expectations, Starmer tried to have both ways. Now he looks weak and silly and he will be forced to genuflect and pay tribute in some way to get back into the Rewards column.

As the protection racket expands to Cuba and Panama or any nation unable to defend themselves against the US war machine and, in the Middle East, the increasingly seamless military partnership between the IDF and the Pentagon, every US ally going forward is going to be forced to decide if they want to endure the punishment that will come if they stand on principles like human rights, national sovereignty and the Laws of War. - jp

US forces strike an alleged drug boat in Eastern Pacific, killing 6
https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-03-08/us-alleged-drug-boat-strike-21000771.html

After sinking Iranian ship, did the US Navy commit a war crime?
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/sinking-iran-ship-war-crime/

Human Rights Watch calls for war crimes probe after deadly attack on Iran girls’ school
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/human-rights-watch-calls-for-war-crimes-probe-after-deadly-attack-on-iran-girls-school/3854956

WATCH: Trump sidesteps responsibility for deadly strike on Iranian girls’ school
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-trump-sidesteps-responsibility-for-deadly-strike-on-iranian-girls-school

Fox News Analyst: ‘I Think the President Knows’ the U.S. Bombed Iranian School
https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/fox-news-analyst-says-i-think-the-president-knows-the-u-s-bombed-elementary-school-despite-denial/

Trump Floats ‘Friendly Takeover’ of Cuba — With Marco Rubio Running the Show
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/trump-floats-friendly-takeover-of-cuba-but-says-it-may-not-be-friendly-either/

How failed nuclear talks became a death trap for Khamenei
https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/how-failed-nuclear-talks-became-a-death-trap-for-khamenei-us-israel-strikes-iran-2876254-2026-03-01

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Anduril, for instance, has used Ukraine to deploy, test and refine its AI-enhanced array of weapons systems. One such system—Altius loitering drones— failed during its debut in Ukraine. There were other notable fails in the US, too. Yet, none of that slowed down Anduril’s move to capture a chunk of the lucrative military hardware market from the traditional defense majors. That got a boost when Anduril’s CEO Palmer Luckey announced his decision to build his gargantuan drone factory in Ohio four days before the former Senator from Ohio was set to be sworn-in as the Veep. Here’s what Anduril told Bloomberg:

Anduril said its relationship Vice President-elect JD Vance, an Ohioan who was an early investor in Anduril while he was working as a VC, did not influence its decision to locate in the state.

Maybe. Maybe not.

It does get awfully cozy inside Trump’s regime.

Veep Vance is also cozy with Peter Thiel. He co-founded Palantir and he just-so-happens-to-be JD Vance’s initial financial backer straight out of college. Palantir’s profile has certainly grown over the last 15 months.

So has its government business.

It is successfully integrating itself into the Federal government through Trump’s presidency.

Maybe that’s because Palantir was also successful in using Ukraine as “a development lab” and in treating Gazans like guinea pigs in CEO Alex Karp’s gamified battlespace. The targeting systems compiling kill lists for Trump’s war on Iran no doubt benefited from two-plus years of Israeli impunity. One innovation is an application called “Where’s Daddy?” that stalked Gazan men until they when home to their families. The missiles we not launched until “daddy” walked into his family’s home or apartment. Both AP and Reuters independently found many nuclear families were wiped out and some extended families were completely wiped off the map in an instant, thus eliminating entire genetic lines.

Similar targeting systems have also been put to work in ICE’s crackdown on non-white immigrants, in the State Department’s crackdown on college students and it is becoming ever-more entangled throughout the Federal government.

More than any tech company, Palantir is leading the transition away from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions. Its integration with the IDF catalyzed and shaped the Conventions-busting rules of engagement that killed 18,457 Gazans under the age of 18 and demolished an entire society.

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis was talking about Palantir and the “technological dimension of a genocide” at Qatar’s “Web Summit” back at the start of February. Varoufakis, who literally wrote the book on techno-feudalism, recounted a conversation that served as a clarifying moment:

I was talking to somebody who worked until very recently for Palantir, and he was telling me that the ‘Gaza event,’ that’s how he described it, was very exciting for technologists … and, while trying to avert a stroke in my head, I managed to ask him, explain to me why?

And he said, “What’s happening in Gaza is terrible, but it was fantastic for us.”

I said, “Please continue. Explain this to me. Why was it fantastic?”

“When you bomb people massively in a densely populated area, they do a lot of things.” And he pointed at my phone that was sitting there just like it is now on this table and he said, “Your phone is now not moving. It’s useless to us. It’s only when you move with it that it produces data for us to be able to train the algorithms.”

So, in a densely populated area like Gaza, you bomb people, if they’re not dead, they run around, they try to escape, they are moved from one place to another, they make phone calls, they try to find their loved ones, they rush to the hospital, the hospital is not there, they run even more … there is a lot of movement and we can train the algorithms and Palantir, using AWS—Amazon service, Oracle service, and so on and so forth—they are training their own AI programs to do what? To be able to be useful in producing AI commodities, products that they sell, let’s say, to the British National Health Service, to hospitals … for what?

For managing personnel inside the hospitals during emergencies. Let’s say there is a bad traffic pile-up, they can deal with that panic. They use the Palantir algorithms for organizing the manner in which the personnel operate.

These people are not immoral. They’re worse, They are amoral.

That came just weeks before Qatar found itself caught in the middle of another war-generated tech “laboratory”—this time in Iran. And the attack on Iran came just days after the CEO of Anthropic was blacklisted as a “supply chain risk” by the Pentagon for refusing to alter the terms by which Pete Hegseth’s lethality-obsessed Department of War used the company’s agentic AI. Here’s what Dario Amodei wrote:

Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.

However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now:

• Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties. To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI. For example, under current law, the government can purchase detailed records of Americans’ movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant, a practice the Intelligence Community has acknowledged raises privacy concerns and that has generated bipartisan opposition in Congress. Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale.

• Fully autonomous weapons. Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk. We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer. In addition, without proper oversight, fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day. They need to be deployed with proper guardrails, which don’t exist today.

To our knowledge, these two exceptions have not been a barrier to accelerating the adoption and use of our models within our armed forces to date.

It was stunning reveal, particularly in the context of what we now know was an impeding attack on Iran. And let’s dispense with various justifications offered thus far. A report by FOX News foreign correspondent Trey Yingst reveals that the attack was always a fait accompli:

“At the time of the strike, when Operation Epic Fury began, when the Ayatollah Khamenei was actually killed, he was above ground, he did not go into this bunker and that is why the Israelis were able to kill him in part, because he didn’t think that he was going to be targeted,” Yingst told Fox & Friends.

According to Yingst, Israeli officials said that false sense of security was part of an effort coordinated strategy at senior levels between Washington and Jerusalem: “There was a deception campaign, I am told by a senior Israeli official, to make the Iranians think this attack wasn’t even going to begin.”

The official told Fox & Friends that despite visible military preparations, Khamenei’s inner circle failed to move him underground. Part of the strategy involved signals meant to lull Tehran into complacency, including public posts and statements from Trump himself.

“There were a number of posts made and statements by President Trump in the 24 hours leading up to the beginning of this operation,” he said. “All of this meant to deceive Iranian leadership,” Yingst reported.

I think it is safe to say both attacks were always going to happen and both negotiations were holding patterns until everything was in place for an attack. After decades of lobbying the US to pick-off one Muslim nation after another, there was no way Netanyahu was going to let his White Whale escape. Trump has played along throughout … perhaps because MBS wants Iran to be a neutered failed state, too.

If Lebanon, Syria and Gaza are any guide, Israel is bent on turning Iran into a failed state without the ability to protect or preserve its borders or control its own airspace. Israel has shown that it reserves the right to bomb a growing roster of countries and peoples. And that’s not just about killing individual actors or organizations. Israel excels at meting-out collective punishment. With the announcement today of a widening of the bombing to include infrastructure, they are beginning that phase of the war … the toppling not of the government, but of civil society and the society itself. Militarily, they’ve mastered denying people water treatment plants and electricity and healthcare.

When they do that, they generate a ton of usable information for Palantir. People responding to the sudden, catastrophic loss of public services will, apparently, be a data gold mine. Just think of the applications one could sell FEMEA based of monitoring feeling Iranians!

What’s more, Iran is a fantastic place to test fully autonomous drones like those Dario Amodei objected to last week. Iran hasn’t controlled its airspace since the first rounds of bombs fell last year. It is basically a giant bombing range and proving ground. Maybe that’s why the Secretary of War(mongering) is treating the war like a massive live-fire war game. Because the Iranian military is so enfeebled, Hegseth can act with complete impunity … thanks also goes to the ghoulish benchmark in impunity Hegseth’s Israeli partners set in Gaza.

And like Gaza, we can see where this is going.

After Israel metes out its punishment, the nation-state will likely fail to deliver basic services. Internal division and desperation set-in. And after Israel has liquidated everyone Palantir (or any other AI, for that matter) marked for death, Trump’s Board of Peace will roll in with an offer to “rebuild” the infrastructure and “develop” the economy. In trade, the US will require oil and gas. Yes, America is already starting to demand tribute from vassal states. Venezuela just forked over some gold.

Looking back, it now seems clear that Venezuela, which is the only non-Muslim nation he has attacked (although their Iran ties are practically the same thing), was decapitated in preparation for this ultimate move in Iran. Its oil was likely seen as the buffer that would allow him to avoid tapping the strategic oil reserve, among other things. Basically, Trump thought he’d be able to withstand a clogged Gulf for a while by leaning on extra oil from Venezuela. At the same time, President Xi’s China takes an energy hit just a few weeks before Trump meets Xi in China.

Yes, China is looming in so far as it is one of the few nations, if not the only nation that Trump cannot threaten with bombing. Make no mistake, Iran is a demonstration to the world that the US is no longer recognizes the constraints of the post-War order it authored. And it is now moving down the path of full-blown military empire and it will bomb preemptively and without justification. It can do so because AI is making on-demand killing easier and easier with each passing day.

Dario Amodei has now learned that bloodthirstiness is a feature of the Technology-Industrial Complex. His principled stand garnered a lot support and Anthropic can probably challenge Trump’s supply chain threat designation. But Amodei is an outlier in the Valley. He is the bug (even though the Pentagon still used Anthropic’s AI in the initial attack). The problem is that the more the Alex Karps of the world feed on war’s corpses, the easier the Alex Karps will make it to kill with an almost pedestrian ease. In December of last year, Karp remarked in a public dialogue that making current war crimes legal would be great for his business. Sadly, he doesn’t care what that says about him or his business. Quite to the contrary.- jp

US military admits Iranian drones harder to stop than expected
https://www.dagens.com/news/us-military-admits-iranian-drones-harder-to-stop-than-expected

Iran’s $20,000 drones vs $4 million US missiles: How Shahed swarms have challenged the American Patriot
https://www.news9live.com/opinion-analysis/usd-20000-drones-vs-usd-4-million-missiles-how-irans-shahed-swarms-have-challenged-us-army-patriot-2939525

The US is using repurposed Iranian drone technology to attack Iran – a military expert explains why
https://theconversation.com/the-us-is-using-repurposed-iranian-drone-technology-to-attack-iran-a-military-expert-explains-why-277397

Expert: Cyber is the 'fuel' for Israel, US in Iran war
https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-888820

The first AI war? How algorithms and data are reshaping the war with Iran
https://www.ynetnews.com/tech-and-digital/article/sjksd11ikbg

How AI is accelerating ‘the kill chain’ in the U.S.-Israel war with Iran
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.7117662

Trump’s strike on Iran and the new breed of AI wars mean bombs can drop faster than the speed of thought
https://fortune.com/2026/03/03/iran-war-trump-strikes-anthropic-ai-used-in-pentagon-speed-of-thought/

1,000 targets in 24 hours: How US military used AI to hit Iran
https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/donald-trump-us-military-ai-artificial-intelligence-anthropic-claude-maven-ai-systems-iran-war-israel-middle-east-crisis-2878474-2026-03-07

Hacked traffic cams and hijacked TVs: How cyber operations supported the war against Iran
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/03/hacked-traffic-cams-and-hijacked-tvs-how-cyber-operations-supported-the-war-against-iran/

Palantir awarded $1 billion DHS contract for AI and data analytics rollout
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billion-dollar-palantir-contract-gives-213500997.html

The West is superior and must always win. This is how Palantir views the world
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/10/10/the-west-is-superior-and-must-always-win-this-is-how-palantir-views-the-world-a4909001

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Out are the United Nations Charter, the Geneva Conventions and national sovereignty.

Gone, too, are the cooperative structures of international relations built upon that foundation over the decades. They’ve all been rendered irrelevant. The UN Security Council is irrelevant. The Hague is irrelevant. The universal application of human rights is dead. Even more telling is the death of the aspiration to apply human rights universally.

There are no universal principles in the new New World Order. There is no binding agreement or treaty that cannot be broken nor any law or tradition that cannot be transgressed in the name of “protecting national interests.” And there is no need to even define what those “interests” are … there is no need to persuade Congress, the American people or the international community.

That system—the international system—has finally been abandoned.

It’s all being replaced by Trump’s World Order (like everything else he touches, it should bear his name). In it, the President of the United States reserves the right to impose a death sentence on any leader, government, regime, organization or association that he and he alone deems unacceptable. That could mean summary executions of foreign nationals at sea, seizing a nation’s leader, decapitating a government or destroying a regime whether they pose an imminent threat or not.

The President’s perception is the only reality that matters.

As for threats, the Secretary of War just moved the nuclear red line and redrew it front of conventional weapons:

Iran was building powerful missiles and drones to create a conventional shield for their nuclear blackmail ambitions. Let me say that again: a conventional shield for their nuclear blackmail ambitions, our bases, our people, our allies, all in their crosshairs. Iran had a conventional gun to our head as they tried to lie their way to a nuclear bomb.

It’s an amazing assertion. The acquisition of conventional weapons is now a potential justification of preemptive military action? If the United States doesn’t like your stockpile of drones or the missiles your army has built or acquired, the President can launch a prolonged military campaign to eliminate said nation’s capacity for self defense. And it’s all without ever having to obey Article One of the US Constitution, let alone the post-war treaties and agreements that forbid going to war for any reason but self-defense.

The principle of “self-defense” has been turned on its head.

In the Trump World Order, the perception that the United States or its allies are “very nearly under threat" is enough to justify any military action the President sees fit. That’s exactly what the President said at a Medal of Honor ceremony today … the United States was “very nearly under threat” from Iran.

What does it mean to be “very nearly under threat”?

How many nations with conventional weapons could be categorized as “very nearly” threatening enough to trigger another bombing campaign?

How many more Maduros are there to be captured?

How many Khameneis are there left to be killed?

And if a leader or nation or people doesn’t like it?

Would they be next?

That message is far more explicit than it may appear.

Venezuela and Iran are warnings to the world. And the world is learning fast … in the Trump World Order, the simple fact that he can do it is all the justification he needs. Because the world-dwarfing US military certainly can do it, there will be more.

The now-unabashed empire will expand.

That’s why the US doesn’t even bother with fig leaves. Nor does it pretend to hold itself to the standards by which it determines the fate of others. Now it will take the oil and it will assassinate leaders and launch wars of choice, even during diplomatic “talks” that now appear to have been ruses all along. And if the targets of US kinetic action refuse to transition to pliant clients, the US will simply leave behind failed states with no inherent right or ability to defend themselves. They will be subject to punitive military campaigns in perpetuity. - jp

The Trump Administration’s Theory of Constitutional War Powers: “The President Could Decide”
https://www.justsecurity.org/131538/trump-war-powers-venezuela-olc-memo/

WATCH: Limiting Trump’s authority with war powers act is ‘dangerous,’ Johnson says
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-limiting-trumps-authority-with-war-powers-act-is-dangerous-johnson-says

Trump pushes back on mounting criticism about his Iran war battle plan as conflict spreads
https://apnews.com/article/trump-iran-maga-regime-change-2758513ac034ffb75beaa12db68c7bd7

Trump’s Case for War With Iran Faces Growing Scrutiny
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trumps-case-for-war-with-iran-faces-growing-scrutiny-96648cb9

CNN poll: 59% of Americans disapprove of Iran strikes and most think a long-term conflict is likely
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/02/politics/cnn-poll-59-of-americans-disapprove-of-iran-strikes-and-most-think-a-long-term-conflict-is-likely

Trump won’t rule out sending US troops into Iran ‘if necessary’— tells The Post war is progressing ‘way ahead of schedule’
https://nypost.com/2026/03/02/us-news/trump-wont-rule-out-sending-us-troops-into-iran-if-necessary-tells-the-post-i-dont-care-about-polling/

Trump says Iran war to last four to five weeks but could go ‘far longer’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/02/trump-war-iran

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More precisely, what if agentic AI is a smashing success and it sparks the revolution in productivity investors are betting on?

That possibility sent a shockwave through the market this week when a viral memo published over the previous weekend offered a glimpse of what “success” may look like. It was a bit like a pack of dogs being told what they’d get when they finally caught the car they were frantically chasing. On Monday, they suddenly decided to run the other way. Per Bloomberg:

The AI “scare trade” rippled through markets on Monday after a weekend report from little-known Citrini Research warned about the technology’s disruptive impact on the global economy. The note, which laid out hypothetical scenarios set in the future, highlighted food delivery and credit card companies as vulnerable — spurring a selloff in delivery, payments and software stocks.

The S&P 500 fell 1% while an exchange-traded fund focused on software tumbled 4.8%, bringing its drop from a peak in September to around 35% on concerns AI could cannibalize earnings. International Business Machines Corp. saw its worst drop in 25 years.

[Memo co-author Alap] Shah said he was surprised by the market reaction. “I thought there was going to be a small reaction — it was definitely larger than we expected.”

Up to now, the market’s trepidation about AI has been largely contained to the bubble-like quality of AI-sparked growth in market capitalization. That’s led to some hand-wringing over the possibility of it popping like the Dotcom Bubble (or worse). There’s also been no shortage of warnings about AI’s dystopian downsides, including multiple warnings from the widely-acknowledged “Godfather of AI.” And we’re talking about grave downsides … like a one in five chance AI wipes out humankind.

None of it has mattered.

Investors have whistled past every predicted graveyard. Whether it’s massive job losses or the potential rise of Skynet, the market has refused to let a little gloom and doom (or the fundamentals) get in the way of their hyper-scaled dreams of avarice. But something in Citrini’s memo struck a nerve. Perhaps because it wasn’t just another predictable prediction of AI’s eventual failure, but instead it dove deeply into the implications of AI’s economy-altering success.

Set in near-term future of June 2028, the authors describe in great detail the impact of rapid adoption of agentic AI, which IBM describes thusly:

Unlike traditional AI models, which operate within predefined constraints and require human intervention, agentic AI exhibits autonomy, goal-driven behavior and adaptability. The term “agentic” refers to these models’ agency, or, their capacity to act independently and purposefully.

Agentic AI is the AI that can actually do things … and by “things” I mean jobs. And when agentic AI starts doing jobs, the big payoff will come in the form of a quantum leap in productivity and, therefore, booming profits will follow.

After all, isn’t that the real “promise” of AI for investors and for the industries agentic AI is most certainty going to disrupt? All those AI image-making and consumer-facing chatbots are there to collect your information and sharpen responses to prompts.

Mostly, they are there to entice people into a dependent relationship.

For business, though, what is AI if not a far cheaper and much more productive replacement for human beings in variety of jobs and industries?

Citrini Research gamed-out what it would look like if agentic AI does just that:

The euphoria was palpable. By October 2026, the S&P 500 flirted with 8000, the Nasdaq broke above 30k. The initial wave of layoffs due to human obsolescence began in early 2026, and they did exactly what layoffs are supposed to. Margins expanded, earnings beat, stocks rallied. Record-setting corporate profits were funneled right back into AI compute.

The headline numbers were still great. Nominal GDP repeatedly printed mid-to-high single-digit annualized growth. Productivity was booming. Real output per hour rose at rates not seen since the 1950s, driven by AI agents that don’t sleep, take sick days or require health insurance.

The owners of compute saw their wealth explode as labor costs vanished. Meanwhile, real wage growth collapsed. Despite the administration’s repeated boasts of record productivity, white-collar workers lost jobs to machines and were forced into lower-paying roles.

When cracks began appearing in the consumer economy, economic pundits popularized the phrase “Ghost GDP“: output that shows up in the national accounts but never circulates through the real economy.

The notion of “Ghost GDP” doesn’t seem far-fetched in a K-shaped economy. The aggregate GDP number is already effectively ghosting the decline in consumer spending by those sliding down the K’s leg. At the same time, the National Retail Federation recently found that the top 20% of spenders account for over 60% of all consumer spending. They are riding high on the K’s arm, fueled in no small part by the AI-stoked stock market.

They’ve kept on buying, too … because it is a good time to invest and an even better time to open a Securities-Backed Line of Credit (SBLOC) against continuing gains in AI-related stocks. It’s tax-free way to draw cash from stocks. As long as stock prices keep growing they’ll have no problem affording the growing price of groceries. And they have every incentive to keep investing in AI.

But, according Citrini’s scenario, it can quickly metastasize into a self-reinforcing doom-loop:

It should have been clear all along that a single GPU cluster in North Dakota generating the output previously attributed to 10,000 white-collar workers in midtown Manhattan is more economic pandemic than economic panacea. The velocity of money flatlined. The human-centric consumer economy, 70% of GDP at the time, withered. We probably could have figured this out sooner if we just asked how much money machines spend on discretionary goods. (Hint: it’s zero.)

AI capabilities improved, companies needed fewer workers, white collar layoffs increased, displaced workers spent less, margin pressure pushed firms to invest more in AI, AI capabilities improved…

It was a negative feedback loop with no natural brake. The human intelligence displacement spiral. White-collar workers saw their earnings power (and, rationally, their spending) structurally impaired. Their incomes were the bedrock of the $13 trillion mortgage market - forcing underwriters to reassess whether prime mortgages are still money good.

Seventeen years without a real default cycle had left privates bloated with PE-backed software deals that assumed ARR would remain recurring. The first wave of defaults due to AI disruption in mid-2027 challenged that assumption.

This would have been manageable if the disruption remained contained to software, but it didn’t. By the end of 2027, it threatened every business model predicated on intermediation. Swaths of companies built on monetizing friction for humans disintegrated.

The system turned out to be one long daisy chain of correlated bets on white-collar productivity growth. The November 2027 crash only served to accelerate all of the negative feedback loops already in place.

Here’s where agentic AI’s success gets scary … perhaps even scary enough to spark the “scare trade”:

Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting.

It started out simple enough. Agents removed friction.

Subscriptions and memberships that passively renewed despite months of disuse. Introductory pricing that sneakily doubled after the trial period. Each one was rebranded as a hostage situation that agents could negotiate. The average customer lifetime value, the metric the entire subscription economy was built on, distinctly declined.

Consumer agents began to change how nearly all consumer transactions worked.

Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars. Machines do.

Travel booking platforms were an early casualty, because they were the simplest. By Q4 2026, our agents could assemble a complete itinerary (flights, hotels, ground transport, loyalty optimization, budget constraints, refunds) faster and cheaper than any platform.

Insurance renewals, where the entire renewal model depended on policyholder inertia, were reformed. Agents that re-shop your coverage annually dismantled the 15-20% of premiums that insurers earned from passive renewals.

Financial advice. Tax prep. Routine legal work. Any category where the service provider’s value proposition was ultimately “I will navigate complexity that you find tedious” was disrupted, as the agents found nothing tedious.

Even places we thought insulated by the value of human relationships proved fragile. Real estate, where buyers had tolerated 5-6% commissions for decades because of information asymmetry between agent and consumer, crumbled once AI agents equipped with MLS access and decades of transaction data could replicate the knowledge base instantly. A sell-side piece from March 2027 titled it “agent on agent violence”. The median buy-side commission in major metros had compressed from 2.5-3% to under 1%, and a growing share of transactions were closing with no human agent on the buy side at all.

We had overestimated the value of “human relationships”. Turns out that a lot of what people called relationships was simply friction with a friendly face.

That was just the start of the disruption for the intermediation layer. Successful companies had spent billions to effectively exploit quirks of consumer behavior and human psychology that didn’t matter anymore.

Machines optimizing for price and fit do not care about your favorite app or the websites you’ve been habitually opening for the last four years, nor feel the pull of a well-designed checkout experience. They don’t get tired and accept the easiest option or default to “I always just order from here”.

That destroyed a particular kind of moat: habitual intermediation.

DoorDash (DASH US) was the poster child.

Coding agents had collapsed the barrier to entry for launching a delivery app. A competent developer could deploy a functional competitor in weeks, and dozens did, enticing drivers away from DoorDash and Uber Eats by passing 90-95% of the delivery fee through to the driver. Multi-app dashboards let gig workers track incoming jobs from twenty or thirty platforms at once, eliminating the lock-in that the incumbents depended on. The market fragmented overnight and margins compressed to nearly nothing.

Agents accelerated both sides of the destruction. They enabled the competitors and then they used them. The DoorDash moat was literally “you’re hungry, you’re lazy, this is the app on your home screen.” An agent doesn’t have a home screen. It checks DoorDash, Uber Eats, the restaurant’s own site, and twenty new vibe-coded alternatives so it can pick the lowest fee and fastest delivery every time.

Habitual app loyalty, the entire basis of the business model, simply didn’t exist for a machine.

This was oddly poetic, as perhaps the only example in this entire saga of agents doing a favor for the soon-to-be-displaced white collar workers. When they ended up as delivery drivers, at least half their earnings weren’t going to Uber and DoorDash. Of course, this favor from technology didn’t last for long as autonomous vehicles proliferated.

And that’s where the rubber meets the road. Once the agentic feedback loop gets into gear, it could be unstoppable:

AI got better and cheaper. Companies laid off workers, then used the savings to buy more AI capability, which let them lay off more workers. Displaced workers spent less. Companies that sell things to consumers sold fewer of them, weakened, and invested more in AI to protect margins. AI got better and cheaper.

Frankly, none of this should be surprising. Whether or not agentic AI progresses exactly or even roughly the way Citrini projects, the bottom line is that their projection matches Silicon Valley’s disruptive business model. What Citrini describes may not ultimately happen, but it is ultimately what many of tech bros want and expect to happen.

As if on cue, Jack Dorsey announced Thursday on X (a.k.a. the platform he’d formerly named “Twitter”) that he was laying off 4,000 workers at Block, the fintech company he co-founded. That is nearly half of Block’s 10,000 employees gone in an instant. And why did Dorsey drop the axe?

we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.

He added in a letter to shareholders:

The core thesis is simple. Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company. We’re already seeing it internally. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better. And intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week.

I don’t think we’re early to this realization. I think most companies are late. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes. I’d rather get there honestly and on our own terms than be forced into it reactively.

“Within the next year” eerily lines-up with the timeline laid out by Citrini. As Fortune explains, it may be the starting gun:

[S]ome experts warn Block’s layoffs could trigger the reality depicted in Citrini’s viral post, setting in motion a chain reaction of layoffs across the professional landscape.

“Whereas the job market effects of AI in 2025 were still quite ambiguous, AI capabilities have advanced rapidly in the past few months,” Anton Korinek, an economist who focuses on the economic impact of transformative AI, told Fortune. “This may be the beginning of a new trend where white collar jobs become threatened more seriously by AI. Once a few companies start the trend, competitive forces may induce others to follow suit.”

It also likely to have sparked Wall Street’s sell-off today. The market had mostly stabilized after Monday’s “scare,” but Dorsey’s announcement drove home Citrini’s point.

And don’t sleep on Anthropic’s falling-out with Pentagon Pete Hegseth. At issue was Pete’s desire to use Anthropic’s AI in ways Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei simply couldn’t abide:

“Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner. However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”

Amodei specifically objected to using “Claude” for mass domestic surveillance and for fully autonomous weapons. AI-run surveillance can, Amodei explained, create “a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale.” And it’s “frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.”

In response, Trump announced Anthropic would not only lose its current government contracts, it was also blacklisted as a national security supply chain risk and, therefore, no company with NatSec contracts can do business with Anthropic.

That raised a whole set of questions for the burgeoning relationship between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon. Sadly, Alex Karp at Palantir and Palmer Luckey of Anduril don’t have any of the qualms raised by Amodei. Because Anthropic is privately-held, there was no stock price to drop. But it adds another alarm to the overall wake-up call that may have finally hit The Street this week.

Let’s face it, we as a polity and a society and a species are in desperate need of a wake-up call. It is shocking to think of how little public debate there has been since ChatGPT was launched on November 30, 2022. Throughout the meteoric rise of AI, we’ve been sleeping behind the wheel of a metaphorical Tesla, content to have the latest whiz-bang gizmo making our lives “easier,” impressing our friends and ourselves with one gadget after another. Each iteration, though, makes us more and more dependent and makes them richer and richer … but it’s all worth it because you can take a nap in traffic? Or because your 401k was really strong last year?

Citrini’s memo, which I recommend reading in-full, is just asking us to at least pump the brakes. And we’d better do it soon, because it looks like we’re headed for a cliff. - jp

Citrini Research

THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS

Preface…

Read more

a month ago · 6613 likes · 83 comments · Citrini and Alap Shah

Citadel Securities demolishes viral AI doomsday essay, arguing the real ‘Global Intelligence Crisis’ is ignorance of macro fundamentals
https://fortune.com/2026/02/26/citadel-demolishes-viral-doomsday-ai-essay-citrini-macro-fundamentals-engels-pause/

White House Economist Calls Citrini AI Report ‘Science Fiction’
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-24/white-house-economist-calls-citrini-ai-report-science-fiction

AI Is Proving a 100-Year-Old Prediction True
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-02-27/ai-is-proving-a-100-year-old-prediction-by-john-maynard-keynes-true

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That’s what Rep. Maxine Dexter recently told Houston Chronicle columnist Lisa Falkenberg after the Oregon Democrat visited a 7 year-old detainee at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center. Located about 75 miles to the south and west of San Antonio, Dexter made the trip to secure the release of the Crespo-Gonzalez family. They were taken into custody in Portland while seeking medical attention for their 7 year-old’s chronic nosebleed and fever. But instead of arriving at a local urgent care, they were grabbed and eventually dumped into CoreCivic’s family-style prison.

Rep. Dexter, who was initially denied entry, was ultimately successful in securing the family’s release and escorted them back to Oregon. But back in Dilley, roughly 450 parents and 500 children continue to languish while the nation’s second largest private prison company profits off their internment. In Trump’s first year, CoreCivic has seen its ICE-related business grow by a staggering 45%. That, in turn, translated into $269 million in contracts … which is not a bad return on the $3.69 million CoreCivic invested in lobbying throughout 2025.

Amazingly enough, that growth is only good enough for fifth place on The Project For Government Oversight’s “top ten” list of companies profiting off Trump’s attempt to cleanse immigrants from the population:

That list is found in a completely overlooked analysis by POGO Investigates and the Investigative Reporting Workshop (IRW) published amidst increase scrutiny of the inhumane conditions inside CoreCivic’s Dilley facility.

If you believe their website, the children detained at Dilley are enjoying comfortable lives in CoreCivic’s care:

CoreCivic is responsible for providing residential services in an open and safe environment that offers residents indoor and outdoor recreational activities, life skills, counseling, group interaction, and access to religious and legal services.

They even have a reassuring “virtual tour” through Dilley’s amenities. But, as The New York Times reported, the stories coming out of Dilley describe a far “different reality” of “inadequate medical care, lights kept on all night, scant drinking water and little education.” Here’s more from the Times:

The detention center is surrounded by barbed wire, and most families sleep in rooms shared with other families. Children often lose weight and get sick. Recently, there were two confirmed cases of measles. Some children have become suicidal and had panic attacks, families and lawyers say.

The Houston Chronicle’s Falkenberg was a bit more specific:

The morning porridge has worms – not all the time but enough that the kids remember. Food is often moldy, expired, repetitive and lacking in adequate nutrition. Water has a putrid smell, and moms say it’s making their kids sick.

Falkenberg also notes:

That’s not the worst of what parents and kids have reported to lawyers, legal aid groups, journalists and visiting Congress members about the conditions at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas.

Here what one of those lawyers told her:

[Michigan attorney Eric] Lee, who represents a mother and her five children confined at Dilley for eight months, said the 5-year-old twins are hardly eating and the 9-year-old is verbalizing suicidal thoughts. Schooling is virtually non-existent, he said, and even urgent medical care has been denied. When one of the twins had appendicitis, the child was initially given only Tylenol, Lee said, and later was forced to “writhe in pain” for hours at urgent care before finally being taken to San Antonio for surgery.

Obviously, there is a significant gap between the “virtual” and the “reality.” The problem for DHS is that the gap is starting to be filled-in by the kids they are often holding for weeks and months beyond the court-mandated limit of twenty days.

On the 9th of February, ProPublica published drawings and letters from eight children currently trapped inside CoreCivic’s glorified ATM machine. The despair expressed in their handwritten letters struck a chord. It sparked renewed scrutiny of both Dilley and the growing population of warehoused children, which has increased six-fold since Trump returned to the White House. It also sparked a crackdown by official at Dilley, who, according to reports, raided “the cells of families to confiscate and destroy children’s letters and drawings depicting the inhumane conditions of their imprisonment.” Per Truthout:

Univision correspondent Lidia Terrazas shared a video of a mother explaining what guards had done to items belonging to her developmentally disabled child.

“15-year-old Cariexis Quintero, who has the intellectual capacity of a 7 y/o, described how guards in the Dilley Detention Center stormed in her room looking for drawings and letters, they destroyed what they found,” Terrazas said in her post.

“This is just one of several similar complaints I’ve received,” Terrazas added.

The incident has not been widely reported and, therefore, no official statement has been made about the raid. As for conditions inside Dilley, the DHS told The New York Times:

“Detainees are provided with three meals a day, clean water, clothing, bedding, showers, soap and toiletries.”

“Children have access to teachers, classrooms and curriculum booklets for math, reading, and spelling. All of this is generously funded by the U.S. taxpayer.”

It appears that taxpayers’ “generosity” is not trickling down to the kids. Instead, DHS Secretary Noem plans on lavishing some of that generosity on herself.

The story of Noem’s coveted luxury jet plane offers a telling juxtaposition to Dilley’s dire conditions. While she’s emboldened to open a “mile-high club” on the taxpayer’s dime, the companies clamoring for contracts have little motivation to do less than the bare minimum. Both benefit from the complete lack of oversight by the GOP-led Congress. An oft-troubled company like CoreCivic is probably further emboldened by the Trump regime’s rhetoric and, more importantly, its unconstitutional approach to rounding-up immigrants. - jp

ICE, Inc.: The Top Companies Profiting from Trump’s Immigration Crackdown
https://www.pogo.org/investigates/ice-inc-the-top-companies-profiting-from-trumps-immigration-crackdown

ICE-Cold Cash: Private Prison Companies and Executives Have Donated Millions to Members of Congress
https://theappeal.org/ice-cold-cash-private-prison-congress-donations/

Immigration officials plan to spend $38.3 billion to boost detention capacity to 92,000 beds
https://apnews.com/article/ice-detention-facilities-expansion-warehouses-c61c3e23c4246e94a760b4d979cb9c48

The Next Phase of ICE’s $38 Billion Detention Plan: Centralized, DHS-Owned Warehouses
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-19/trump-s-immigration-push-to-warehouses-could-cut-out-corecivic-geogroup

More to Every Story: How some cities are restricting private immigration detention facilities
https://www.krem.com/video/news/special-reports/more-to-every-story/more-to-every-story-how-some-cities-are-restricting-private-immigration-detention-facilities/293-b2306419-67c4-46ac-b150-bcebf5ed2e89

Hundreds protest Romulus ICE detention center ahead of council meeting
https://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/2026/02/hundreds-protest-romulus-ice-detention-center-ahead-of-council-meeting.html

Spokane city council members discuss ordinance proposing ICE detention ban
https://www.krem.com/video/news/local/spokane-city-council-members-discuss-ordinance-proposing-ice-detention-ban/293-9e5872ca-b542-4cc6-8810-aec5007b3d4d

911 calls offer glimpse of medical emergencies at family ICE detention center
https://www.scrippsnews.com/investigations/ice-inc/911-calls-offer-glimpse-of-medical-emergencies-at-family-ice-detention-center

ICE deported a nearly 9-month pregnant woman from Dilley over the weekend
https://www.sacurrent.com/news/san-antonio-news/ice-deported-a-nearly-9-month-pregnant-woman-from-dilley-over-the-weekend/

“I Have Been Here Too Long”: Read Letters from the Children Detained at ICE’s Dilley Facility
https://www.propublica.org/article/ice-dilley-children-letters

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He can distract the public’s gaze for a day or two, but airstrikes and insults have failed to keep the story from stalking him like a brain-starved zombie. No matter how much distance he tries to put between himself and Epstein, it just keeps on coming.

The most audacious attempt to kill the zombie came on Valentine’s Day when his personal law firm of Bondi & Blanche used an overdue reporting requirement in the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA) to claim the Department of Justice was in full compliance with the EFTA. According to their assessment, the DOJ has “met the requirements of the Act” and “released all ‘records, documents, communications and investigative in the possession of the Department’."

If true, that means an estimated 3 million documents will either remain heavily redacted or never be released. And that might be an undercount. The UK’s Channel 4 News analyzed internal emails among investigators and found references to 50 terabytes of material in 2020 and 14.6 terabytes of material in 2025. So far, the public has seen about 300 gigabytes of material … which translates to about 2% of the grand total mentioned by investigators last year.

That gap underscores the main problem with the Valentine’s Day letter—nobody trusts her. And some of the people she needs to convince the most—disaffected and disillusioned MAGA voters—trust her the least. Bondi, who once bragged about having Epstein’s client list on her desk, has no credibility left after denying the client list ever existed. That only reinforced the disdain she invited when she touted a big release of files to MAGA influencers that turned out to be binders full of nothing.

She made it worse by slow-walking the files through the DOJ. That, along with the faulty, uneven but Trump-friendly application of redactions allowed by the EFTA, helped fueled the belief that she’s been running a cover-up for her boss.

If so, it would explain a lot.

Why else would Bondi, Dan Bongino and Kash Patel ride into town with guns-blazing, ready to round up a pedo ring they (and Qanon) helped make infamous … but then, once they began rooting around in the files, suddenly jump off their high horses to tell us their posse had come up dry?

Could it be the “more than a million” mentions Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said he got when he searched for their boss in the unredacted files?

Imagine their position. They open the files. His name is everywhere. And then came the choice. The truth? Or Trump?

We saw Patel’s choice play out on Joe Rogan’s show. We just saw Bondi use a series of scripted insults and economic bulletpoints to proclaim her choice in a Congressional hearing room. And then there’s Bongino slinking back to the microphone that helped propel the Epstein story in the first place.

The one character who seems to have kept his cool throughout the cover-up is the guy who worked as Trump’s personal lawyer before landing in the DOJ. He’s Trump’s insurance policy. Blanche is functioning as a criminal defense attorney and the President is his client. Trump’s dream has come true—he’s got a loyal, unscrupulous lawyer working on his behalf at the top of the DOJ. No doubt, Blanche made sure his client’s name is redacted everywhere it needs to be.

But that’s not enough. Just claiming “that’s all folks” and moving on isn’t going to cut it.

Blanche’s sophomoric sophistry and Bondi’s scripted outrage might’ve held the line if House of Representatives hadn’t come together in almost complete bipartisan agreement to pass the EFTA. That vote came in spite of Trump’s arm-twisting, too. He couldn’t even convince Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) to side with him. When it zoomed through the Senate and went straight to his desk, the task before Bondi & Blanche was clear—the files could never be fully released as outlined in the EFTA. So, it appears they opted for an old intelligence trick … the “limited hangout.”

A well-worn tactic of psychological warfare, The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential defines it thusly:

A limited hangout or partial hangout is a tactic used in media relations, perception management, politics and information management. A limited hangout gives a taste of the truth that is stage-managed and controlled. It misdirects away from the depth of the scandal, withholding key information that could damage the powerful.

The entry includes a quote from Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA):

A limited hangout is "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further."

The problem is that the public is so intrigued by the redactions, omissions and official obfuscations it can’t stop thinking about pursuing the matter further. In fact, the public has been primed by Trump himself to be suspicious and think the worst of people who work in government.

After all, it’s a rigged system.

And there’s no clearer example of a rigged justice system than the over one thousand female survivors pleading to the DOJ and the President in vain while, at the same, a lot of wealthy, well-connected men continue to walk free. That’s technically true … because Ghislaine Maxwell somehow found her way out of prison and into a minimum security camp. Funny how it followed an interview with Blanche.

And therein lies the rub.

By doing stupid shit like moving Maxwell without a viable cover story or yelling about “THE DOW!” when asked about prosecuting co-conspirators … only heightens MAGA’s suspicions and the general public’s interest. Take a look at Harry Enten’s quick hit on CNN:

The best part is the fact that Americans were primed to grab hold of the Epstein story by the MAGA media scrum that emerged during Biden’s term … by self-serving sycophants like Patel and Bongino … and by Trump himself.

Perhaps it’s fitting that Trump’s fate is now increasingly intertwined with “The Epstein Files” in much the same way “Hillary’s Emails” entangled his opponent during the final weeks of the 2016 campaign. The auspiciously (or suspiciously) timed releases helped rescue Trump from the abyss almost immediately after the public heard him brag about grabbing women’s genitals whenever he pleased.

Whether the appearance of the emails was a coincidence or collusion, Trump knew exactly what to do. He repeated “Hillary’s Emails” over and over and over again until the phrase itself became a brand with a message: “you can’t trust her.” It fit well with the branding campaign he was running in lieu of a traditional political campaign. “Hillary’s Emails” and “I love Wikileaks” didn’t quite become earworms like “build the wall” or “drain the swamp” or “the system is rigged,” but the emails reinforced Americans’ uneasy feeling that elites like Hillary dance through the raindrops while the God-fearing people in Sarah Palin’s “Real America” get hosed.

And that’s where The Epstein Files differs from Hillary’s Emails.

There was no actual evidence of a pedo-trafficking ring in a pizza parlor basement. And her emails were NOT redacted by a team of Hillary’s sycophants. Imagine if her emails first went to Perkins Coie and attorney Marc Elias for vetting and scrubbing instead to Wikileaks under Assange?

That’s exactly what Trump got when the DOJ refused to fully and immediately comply with a law he signed. Instead they used used each illicit day that passed as an opportunity to hide the names and accusations Trump wanted hidden.

And it’s not just the heavily-redacted Trump in there, but also Treasury Secretary Howard Lutnick, Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr., Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, Navy Secretary John Phelan, Fed Chair nominee Kevin Warsh, Elon Musk and Steve Bannon. Add to that former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta … who appears to have been rewarded for keeping his mouth shut, which he continued to do long after Epstein met his inevitable death in Federal jail cell.

That death happened in 2019 while Trump was in office. “Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide” was a punchline … a laugh and a nod and a wink at the same time. It was also an admission that we live in an America where you cannot trust the people in power to tell the truth.

Trump went far by conflating authenticity with honesty.

But that Teflon is wearing thinner with each passing week the Epstein Files remain a mystery to be answered. That’s a problem he can only solve by coming clean and releasing the files. If history is a guide, he’d rather be consumed by the cover-up. - jp

Putin, women, favours: DOJ files reveal Jeffrey Epstein’s efforts to build Russian ties
https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20260217-putin-women-doj-files-reveal-jeffrey-epstein-build-russian-ties

White House Shrugs Off Lutnick’s Epstein Ties
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/us/politics/trump-howard-lutnick-epstein.html

Epstein files list growing, wreaking havoc on highly powerful executives
https://www.newsnationnow.com/vargasreports/epstein-files-list-growing-wreaking-havoc-on-highly-powerful-executives/

The Epstein files have brought a wave of resignations and investigations
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/17/epstein-files-resignations-investigations/

New Mexico lawmakers pass measure aimed at investigating Epstein’s Zorro Ranch
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/17/politics/epstein-ranch-new-mexico-house-committee

Essex Police assessing Stansted Airport private flights tied to Epstein files
https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/home-news/epstein-files-stansted-airport-private-flights-b2922284.html

Epstein Files Linked to Global Crimes Against Humanity: UN Experts
https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/law-order/3808757-epstein-files-linked-to-global-crimes-against-humanity-un-experts

The Epstein Files Were Always Going to Break the Internet
https://ddia.org/en/the-epstein-files-were-always-going-to-break-the-internet

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And now here we are in the 21st Century and energy is evolving yet again.

Spurred in large part by the climate-altering fallout of burning oil, renewable energy production from wind and sunlight is advancing quickly and a growing roster of nations is turning to increasingly cheaper energy from solar panels and wind turbines to meet more and more of their energy needs.

The United States is, of course, refusing to participate in that evolution. In fact, Trump made it official today when he and the dead-eyed shill he has running the EPA (into the ground) announced the official end of climate change as a thing.

They rescinded the “endangerment finding”—a 2009 determination that six greenhouse gases posed a threat to the America’s health and welfare. That, in turn, will be used to dismantle climate- and emissions-related regulations associated with the now-scuttled finding. It also means the functional end of any and all support for “clean energy” or “renewables.” And by “support,” we’re not just talking about direct government subsidies for renewable projects, many of which are part of Biden’s Inflation Reduction act. Per Reuters:

Trump has also removed tax incentives for wind and solar projects and his administration has slow-walked permits for renewable energy on federal land, as well as private and state lands.

Private and state lands, too?

Is the goal is to strangle the renewable energy industry in the United States?

Of course it is.

That was underscored in the lead-up to the endangerment announcement when Trump directed the Energy Department to provide $175 million to coal plants in Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia. Some of those plants, like many coal-fired plants in the US, were slated for retirement. But now taxpayers will be funding “modernization” efforts to keep these costly anachronisms open in perpetuity.

But that’s not all.

He also just signed an Executive Order directing the US Military to go out of its way to buy energy from coal-fired plants. Like his obsession with both tariffs and President McKinley, the move epitomizes Trump’s 19th Century thinking. He’s attempt to coal-roll back the clock and, in the process, he’s setting the US on a lonely course in a world that acknowledges the reality of anthropogenic climate change and increasingly wants to do something about it.

But it’s worse than that.

It’s taken as a given that China and the United States are locked into an existential fight to determine the shape the things to come. Pundits and politicians of both parties regularly refer to China as America’s “main adversary,” and the dreaded “Chinese Communist Party” is the latest in a long string of existential foes the US uses to justify outlandish defense spending and the maintenance of empire.

Some even call this fight Cold War 2.0.

If, indeed, the United States is trying to “win the future,” as the stakes are usually framed, one might argue it is mind-bogglingly stupid to reject the rapidly developing technologies that recently propelled renewable energy past coal “as the world's leading source of electricity” in the first half of 2025. It is, in effect, the US unilaterally disarming at the very moment when its “main adversary” is cornering the market on an energy source that promises to free it and dozens of other nations from dependence on imported oil and, therefore from OPEC’s iron grip.

The guarantor of OPEC’s hydrocarbon racket is, ironically enough, the US Military … which has its Fifth Fleet headquartered in Bahrain and its Combined Air Operations Center housed at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. Like the coaling stations of old, the US Military depends on a network of bases to keep oil and gas flowing from its oily Persian Gulf partners to the world and, in the process, to keep US empire relevant. It also helps the US defense budget growing year after year

Even more ironic, though, is the recent move of the Gulf’s petrostates toward investment in renewables. Just within the last few days we’ve seen investors from the UAE pour money into a 500MW solar project in Zambia, cement a green energy partnership with Tajikistan and finalize a deal for “a specialized solar and battery storage project” to support a data center. As for the Saudis, Solar Quarter reports:

Saudi Arabia has set a target to generate 50 percent of its electricity from clean energy sources by 2030. To support this goal, the country has developed a renewable energy project pipeline of about 130 GW. Under the National Renewable Energy Program, authorities have recently awarded 14 GW of new solar and wind projects. These developments are aimed at reducing reliance on fossil fuels and cutting carbon emissions.

So, while the Emiratis and the Saudis enjoy the short- and medium-term benefits of their well-paid man in White House doing everything he can to extend the viability of their oil and gas, they are planning for a future he’s rejecting. Amazingly enough, they are starting to do so in concert with … China.

A January 2026 policy note from the Middle East Council On Global Affairs explores the growing interdependence between China’s world-dwarfing renewable industry and the Gulf States’ unique combination of capital, sunlight and wind:

Simply put, the Gulf states’ resource endowments synergize with China’s energy storage prowess. The Gulf boasts unparalleled potential in solar, wind, and hydrogen energy, facilitated by the region’s geographical attributes. It experiences world-leading solar irradiance levels, with daily averages reaching up to 6.5 kilowatt-hour per square meter (kWh/m²) and direct normal irradiance ranging from 3 to 6.5 kW/m² per day,¹⁰ rendering it ideal for concentrated solar power (CSP), concentrated photovoltaics (CPV), and photovoltaic applications. Its wind resources are equally robust, particularly along the Red Sea coast, where windspeed often surpasses the 6.9 m/s threshold for economically viable large-scale wind farms.¹¹ Furthermore, the abundance of natural gas in the region, exemplified by Qatar’s production, enables cost-effective blue hydrogen generation via carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS), building upon established traditional energy infrastructure for seamless integration into global hydrogen markets.

China is well-equipped to meet their needs:

While the Gulf states are hampered by gaps in storage technologies and infrastructure, China excels at mitigating the variability of [wind, solar, and hydrogen] through its advanced energy storage ecosystem, which encompasses a comprehensive supply chain from materials to system integration, with leading installed capacities in pumped hydro and electrochemical storage that enhance grid stability and renewables uptake. This mutual reinforcement—Gulf resources fueling scalable projects and Chinese innovations ensuring reliability—creates a virtuous cycle, mitigating the Gulf’s storage deficit while providing China with expansive markets for its exports.

The partnership is already underway:

Chinese entities have actively infused capital and expertise into Gulf-based renewable projects, most notably through the Silk Road Fund’s 2019 acquisition of a 49% stake in Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power Renewable Energy Holding.¹³ This has facilitated joint ventures in large-scale solar initiatives such as Dubai’s Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, contributing to the United Arab Emirates’ Net Zero 2050 ambitions while leveraging China’s manufacturing prowess for cost-efficient scaling.

This influx has enabled Gulf nations to rapidly expand their clean energy capacities, with Chinese firms participating in projects totaling approximately $9.5 billion across the Middle East, between 2018 and 2023, including solar and wind manufacturing facilities in Saudi Arabia.¹⁴ Conversely, the Gulf states, through sovereign wealth funds and national champions, are channeling substantial resources into China’s renewables sector as a hedging mechanism against oil price volatility. For instance, Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power has secured over 1 gigawatt (GW) of projects in China, encompassing a 132-megawatt (MW) solar photovoltaic portfolio in the Guangdong province in partnership with Sungrow Renewables, and a 200 MW wind portfolio with Mingyang Smart Energy, with initial investments amounting to $312 million and long-term plans reaching up to $50 billion by 2030 for up to 20 GW in clean power assets.¹⁵ Abu Dhabi’s CYVN Holdings also invested $738.5 million in the Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer NIO in 2023,¹⁶ underscoring the Gulf’s strategic bets on China’s dominance in electric vehicle (EV) and battery technologies.

Meanwhile, the United States is throwing roadblocks in front of EVs, fighting in court to stop windfarms from coming online and pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a strange effort to keep coal from going the way of the dodo. - jp

China’s Coal-Fired Power Generation Falls 1.9% in 2025 as Renewables Overtake Demand Growth: Wood Mackenzie
https://solarquarter.com/2026/02/12/chinas-coal-fired-power-generation-falls-1-9-in-2025-as-renewables-overtake-demand-growth-wood-mackenzie/

With Renewables Ascendant in China, Coal Is Moving Into a Supporting Role
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-coal-backup-power

Analysis: Clean energy drove more than a third of China’s GDP growth in 2025
https://finchannel.com/analysis-clean-energy-drove-more-than-a-third-of-chinas-gdp-growth-in-2025/129230/corporate-social-responsibility/2026/02/

China’s Clean Energy Boom Reshapes Global Economic Power Dynamics
https://discoveryalert.com.au/chinas-clean-energy-boom-economic-strategy-2026/

China’s Green-Tech Push in Latin America Is Gaining Traction
https://americasquarterly.org/article/chinas-green-tech-push-in-latin-america-is-gaining-traction/

With the increase in solar energy, Brazil can rival China in terms of renewable energy reach; this expansion contributes to the creation of millions of jobs, boosting the Brazilian economy.
https://en.clickpetroleoegas.com.br/With-the-increase-in-solar-energy--Brazil-can-rival-China-in-terms-of-the-reach-of-renewable-energies%3B-this-expansion-contributes-to-the-creation-of-millions-of-jobs--boosting-the-economy./

India speeds clean energy shift, narrows gap with China
https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-international/2026/02/12/U54QDEWQVFHVDBF2UAGQK6ZLXE/

The Age of Electricity is a massive opportunity for Australia, if it can match China’s speed and scale
https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-age-of-electricity-is-a-massive-opportunity-for-australia-if-it-can-match-chinas-speed-and-scale/

G7 countries lag three times behind China in solar and wind energy development
https://ecopolitic.com.ua/en/news/g7-countries-lag-three-times-behind-china-in-solar-and-wind-energy-development/

The World Needs China’s Climate Technology. That’s the Dilemma
https://time.com/7373140/china-world-leader-climate-energy-technology/

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Think of it as the new “Trickle-down.”

Like that iconic phrase, “K-shaped” may eventually say as much about the ethos of this era as it does about its economy. Oddly enough, the two may be bookends of a decades-long transformation from Demand to Supply Side economics. As the K-shaped recovery has hardened into the K-shaped economy, it appears that the supply side has reached a sort of critical mass in terms of hoarding capital and controlling assets. They have financial power and they live very comfortably in an inflationary economy. They can afford the affordability crisis.

That’s been showing up in retail sales. The National Retail Federation took note in an intro to a newly-released assessment of K-shaped retail spending:

Consumer spending has been one of the bright spots in this economy, but when you dig under the surface, not all segments of consumers are performing equally.

That’s something of an understatement. Their findings confirm one of the key indicators of the K-shaped economy: “the top 20% of spenders…accounted for over 60% of total spending” in 2025.

“Over 60%” is a significantly larger share than earlier assessments from other sources, which ranged between 40 and 50%. So, how did they arrive at that?

[W]e worked with our partners Pyxis by Bain & Company and Affinity Solutions to examine credit and debit card data and look for some clues. The data was broken down into spending deciles, which closely map to income levels. As illustrated in the chart below, you can see that there is a very real difference in spending growth in discretionary goods when you break it out by consumer spending levels.

I recommend visiting their web page to peruse the five additional charts that point to a growing bifurcation between those riding the upper arm of the K and those sliding down its leg. It’s as if two different economies exist side-by-side. But one of those economies is eclipsing the other. Here’s NRF’s Chief Economist:

What’s really notable is that, even though the bottom seven deciles saw negative growth in spending on discretionary items on a year-over-year basis, the grand total for all incomes was actually positive for the year. That’s because the top 20% of spenders in this category accounted for over 60% of total spending. Essentially, strong spending in higher income segments is masking weakness among lower income segments.

That “masking” effect is going to be a bigger problem the longer the arm and the leg continue to head in strikingly divergent directions. Unfortunately, the K’s ever-wealthier arm can single-handedly lift the entire economy in traditional metrics like gross domestic product and overall retail sales. The arm can hoard, generate and spend enough to both off-set and exceed the forced frugality of the leg. That not only “masks” the struggles of the bottom 80%, it ultimately eliminates them as a concern … particularly if growth in GDP hits 3, 4 or 5%!

Who in power will listen to complaints during 5% growth?

It hit 4.4% in Q3 of 2025, but that hasn’t translated into increased consumer confidence. At the same time, lower consumer confidence hasn’t dampened the market. The same is true of the dwindling job market and its continuing wave of layoffs.

The arm can afford to ignore the leg.

The economy enjoyed by the wealthy investors, corporate executives, highly-paid professionals and successful entrepreneurs has decoupled from the economy endured by the rest of us.

The demographics of this divide was the theme of the Kearney Institute’s newly-released Consumer Stress Index for the last quarter of 2025. Like RSF, it focuses on the K-shaped economy. More precisely, it dives deeply into the demographics:

Here is how they describe “Life on the arm of the K”:

At the very top are “comfortable” individuals whose names and faces include those who regularly appear in the media with super-high incomes, traced back in some cases to beneficiaries of generational wealth and, in others, to success at the top of the tech boom who have amassed extreme wealth over the past 20 to 40 years.

Slightly below them, but still well above everyone else, we find the “stable/responsible,” consumers who are stable and getting by just fine. These are high-income individuals, who budget well, and perhaps live in lower cost of living (LCOL) areas.

At the bottom of the arm, dangling perilously close to the middle or leg of the K, we have the “on thin ice”—high earners whose lack of budgeting and profligate spending has them overleveraged and exposed. While they appear to be doing well from the outside, they are only a step away from real financial trouble.

And “Life on the leg of the K”:

Lower-income earners can also be divided into three segments, starting at the top of the “leg” with consumers who are “comfortable.” Their incomes technically put them in the bottom of the K, but their overall financial position is more secure on a day-to-day, year-to-year basis thanks to a variety of factors.

Next are those who are “stable/responsible,” relatively lower-income individuals who are constrained in their ability to spend but who have managed by choice and/or necessity to find ways to live within their means.

Toward the bottom of the leg, we find low- to no-income people who are truly “on thin ice.” These are folks struggling to pay their basic bills at the same time they are being crushed under a mountain of structural debt-promoting forces.

Kearney also noted:

Within these profiles often lie additional frustrations. For instance, many consumers on the leg of the K do not feel like they have benefited from economic growth in recent years, as they are often minimally invested in the stock market or major real estate holdings. Even when “net worth” looks good on paper, it’s often tied up in illiquid assets such as mortgages or retirement accounts, and is not being used to improve daily life.

That’s the thing about the K-shaped economy … it’s also the K-shaped society. And lifestyles are diverging, despite the All-American expectation that our lifestyle will continue to improve. Instead, the K portends a sharp decline in lifestyle for some time to come as the K is reinforced by the corporate world’s attempts to adjust and exploit the altered landscape. Take a look at these datapoints compiled this week by Empower Financial Services:

Many consumer-facing companies are seeing a divergence in spending among income groups. Delta Air Lines reported that revenue from premium seating was up 9% in the fourth quarter of 2025, while revenue for basic economy seating was down 7%. Premium seat sales are expected to exceed coach sales for 2026.¹⁹

Coca-Cola has seen higher-income earners drive sales growth among premium brands like Fairlife dairy, Topo Chico sparkling water, and protein beverages like Core Power. The company points to middle- and lower-income consumers being under pressure and seeking value.²⁰

McDonald’s cited a “two-tier economy” and declining traffic among lower-income customers for a recent move to revive its “Extra Value Meal” combos.²¹ At the same time, there’s been a double-digit increase in higher-income customers, which McDonald’s says are also seeking value.²²

A bifurcated trend has also developed among big-ticket purchases like autos, where the average price of new car has risen to $51,000. The share of new-car buyers with incomes of less than $100,000 has dropped to 37% from 50% in 2020. In contrast, car buyers with incomes of more than $200,000 has grown to 29% from 18% during that same period.²³

Given the growing gap, those moves may just be the beginning:

Overall household debt hit a record high of $18.59 trillion the third quarter of 2025, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, but the load isn’t always balanced.¹³ A 2025 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found credit card balances among lower-income households to be well above pre-pandemic levels — a notable divergence from higher-income households that carry less debt since that period.¹⁴

Housing tells a similar story. Equity in U.S. homes is near an all-time high of $35 trillion thanks to surging property values, with many Americans enjoying ultra-low mortgage rates below 4% or owning properties outright.¹⁵ Meanwhile, new and aspiring homeowners are grappling with elevated listing prices and mortgage rates. Many remain on the sidelines: The share of first-time buyers hit an all-time low of just 21% in 2025.¹⁶

The S&P 500® is up more than 130% since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, another boost for higher-income households more likely to own stocks or retirement funds.¹⁷ Soaring AI-related stock valuations in particular have created a “wealth effect,” accounting for about $180 billion in consumer spending over the past year, according to one estimate.¹⁸

The most maddening part of this is AI’s “wealth effect.” That’s because the very thing that’s shaping this economy is also widely predicted to dislodge a significant number of those who are “on thin ice” in the shrinking middle. That will, of course, cascade down the K’s leg. And if AI is a bubble and it does burst, many of the people at the top-end of the K will not only survive it, they will likely retain enough purchasing power to once again go bargain shopping for discounted assets during the downturn. That, in turn, will further concentrate wealth and companies like Delta might fully exit the “downmarket,” leaving those passengers to flying cattle-cars like Spirit.

This, as Kearney aptly put it, is the K-shape of things to come:

At its simplest level, K economics suggests “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.” When you look at the history of free-market capitalism, the K economy seems easily empirically verifiable…

Despite that, Kearney wouldn’t throw in the towel just yet. As they point out:

…all models are subject to disruption and interpretation, and this one is no exception.

And what’s the example given?

For example, the G.I. Bill of 1944 allowed legions of “leg consumers” to literally jump into the “arms” of the K.

It is indeed ironic that they cite one of Demand Side economics’ biggest successes. Legions of “leg consumers” used their new purchasing power (a.k.a. “demand”) to shape the economy of the 1950s. It was an economy that also sparked the modern conservative movement, which ultimately took control in 1980 and began to dismantle Demand Side economics and replace it with Milton Friedman’s neoliberal, Supply Side, Trickle-down “Reaganomics.”

Here’s hoping it doesn’t take a Great Depression and a World War to get a leg up again. - jp

Is retail spending really K-shaped?
https://nrf.com/blog/is-retail-spending-really-k-shaped

Hidden dimensions of the K-shaped economy: detailing how income, lifestyle, and circumstance shape consumer stress and spending
https://www.kearney.com/industry/consumer-retail/consumer-institute/stress-index/q4-2025-update

The K-shaped economy: What consumers should know
https://www.empower.com/the-currency/money/life/k-shaped-economy-what-to-know-news

Chipotle is targeting the top of the K-shaped economy
https://www.businessinsider.com/chipotle-price-changes-core-customer-shaped-economy-2026-2

America’s K-shaped economy has turned restaurant winners and losers upside down
https://www.businessinsider.com/america-k-shaped-economy-breaking-fast-food-playbook-2026-2

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That’s the response Jersey City Councilman Jake G. Ephros got last Sunday when he objected to warrantless searches and seizures during ICE’s sweep in the Garden State’s second largest city. That incident, reported by NJ Advance Media, came on the heels of a recent disclosure by a pair of whistleblowers. They shared a DHS memo that opened the door to ICE agents forcibly opening doors without a judicial warrant.

Authored by acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, the memo empowers agents to forcibly enter a home without a judicial warrant and “arrest and detain” suspects if a judge has issued a “final order of removal.” Although the copy shared with The Associated Press and members of Congress is dated May 12 (2025) and addressed to “All ICE Personnel,” it wasn’t widely circulated. When it was shown to "select DHS officials,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal said it came with a caveat:

“[The Whistleblowers’] disclosure claims that the memo was rolled out in a secretive manner in which some agents were verbally briefed while others were allowed to view it but not keep a copy,” Blumenthal said. “It was reportedly clear that anyone who openly spoke out against this new directive would be fired.”

Obviously, Lyons felt it prudent to conceal the memo’s expansive interpretation of the Fourth Amendment. Perhaps he didn’t want to defend a Constitutionally questionable change to long-standing DHS policy:

Although the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has not historically relied on administrative warrants alone to arrest aliens subject to final orders of removal in their place of residence, the DHS Office of General Counsel has recently determined that the U.S. Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the immigration regulations do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants for this purpose.

The New York Times explained the memo’s revised legal rationale:

The memo … centers on a federal law that empowers agents to make warrantless arrests of people they believe are undocumented immigrants, if they are “likely to escape” before an arrest warrant can be obtained.

ICE has long interpreted that standard to mean situations in which agents believe someone is a “flight risk,” and unlikely to comply with future immigration obligations like appearing for hearings, according to the memo. But Mr. Lyons criticized that construction as “unreasoned” and “incorrect,” changing the agency’s interpretation of it to instead mean situations in which agents believe someone is unlikely to remain at the scene.

In other words, we don’t want agents getting bogged-down in arcane, time-consuming tasks like compliance with the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. If the agents “believe someone is unlikely to remain at the scene” while they get a warrant, they can just grab the battering ram and have at it. After all, they have a quota to reach.

Having seen how many of the agents conduct themselves, the notion that an undertrained agent ginned-up on Stephen Miller’s latest Goebbels impersonation need only “believe” something to nullify the Fourth Amendment on an ad hoc basis is one of the more discomfiting consequences of Trump’s second election win.

It’s even more alarming given the timing of the memo, which followed a number of reports detailing Trump’s displeasure with the slow pace of his promised mass deportations.

On March 5, The New York Times reported on the regime’s “growing frustration about the pace of arrests and deportations.” On March 11, The Atlantic noted that “at its current pace, ICE is nowhere near delivering what Trump promised.” To rectify that shortcoming, unnamed officials were “considering ways to help ICE boost its numbers, including legal tools to potentially give officers new authorities to enter homes.” And that’s were Todd Lyons comes in. He replaced the then-acting Director of ICE Caleb Vitello when Vitello was punished with a demotion for not deporting enough immigrants. As if on cue, Lyons delivered “new authorities to enter homes” on May 12 in the now widely-applied memo.

For what it’s worth, “new authorities to enter homes” is the sorta thing the US Congress is supposed to establish through the legislative process. Instead, Lyons just tweaked existing policy to find exactly the thing (a new authority to enter homes) the regime was pining for in the weeks leading up to the May 12 memo. It sure seems like Lyons “knew the ask” when he took the gig. And he delivered. What he delivered, constitutionally speaking, was explained by the wonks at Just Security:

The Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure applies to citizens and noncitizens within the United States. The Supreme Court has famously stated that “physical entry of the home is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed.” As Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “When it comes to the Fourth Amendment, the home is first among equals.” In other words, the home receives the highest protection under the Fourth Amendment. Consistent with this principle, the Supreme Court has also said that to enter a home to conduct an arrest, the government must have an arrest warrant or qualify for certain narrow exceptions to the warrant requirement (such as an emergency involving a threat to life). The DHS memo treats I-205 administrative warrants as the functional equivalent of traditional criminal arrest warrants — which permit law enforcement to enter homes to make arrests — but these two warrants are very different from a Fourth Amendment perspective.

Perhaps more than any of the eight other amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights, the protections afforded by First and the Fourth Amendments define the tangible contours of freedom in the United States. These protections are essential bulwarks against a government that seeks to impose its will on individuals. The ability to silence or to imprison unjustly are powers often used by regimes unconstrained by the rule of law or a document as powerful as the US Constitution.

Right now, we are watching those protections erode under the guise of a mass deportation that is casting a much wider net than many Americans might realize.

It certainly came as a surprise to “Jon,” a 67 year-old naturalized US citizen who asked The Washington Post to hide his full name out of fear of retribution. Last October, he’d read a WaPo story on the effort to deport an Afghan refugee identified only as “H” who’d “begged federal officials to reconsider, telling them the Taliban would kill him if he was returned to Afghanistan.”

After 27 years as a US citizen, Jon felt compelled exercise the rights that made his adopted home “a country unlike any in the world”:

“Unconscionable,” Jon thought as he found an email address online for the lead prosecutor, Joseph Dernbach, who was named in the story. Peering through metal-rimmed glasses, Jon opened Gmail on his computer monitor.

“Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life,” he wrote. “Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.”

That was it. In five minutes, Jon said, he finished the note, signed his first and last name, pressed send and hoped his plea would make a difference.

Instead of making a difference, though, it made Jon a target:

Five hours and one minute later, Jon was watching TV with his wife when an email popped up in his inbox. He noticed it on his phone.

“Google,” the message read, “has received legal process from a Law Enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google Account.”

Listed below was the type of legal process: “subpoena.” And below that, the authority: “Department of Homeland Security.”

That’s how it began. Soon would come a knock at the door by men with badges and, for Jon, the relentless feeling of being surveilled in a country where he never imagined he would be.

Jon was losing his footing on the slippery slope:

Google hadn’t provided him a copy of the subpoena, but it wasn’t the conventional sort. Homeland Security had come after him with what’s known as an administrative subpoena, a powerful legal tool that, unlike the ones people are most familiar with, federal agencies can issue without an order from a judge or grand jury.

Though the U.S. government had been accused under previous administrations of overstepping laws and guidelines that restrict the subpoenas’ use, privacy and civil rights groups say that, under President Donald Trump, Homeland Security has weaponized the tool to strangle free speech.

Administrative warrants. Administrative subpoenas. Not Judicial. Administrative.

Homeland Security is not required to share how many administrative subpoenas it issues each year, but tech experts and former agency staff estimate it’s well into the thousands, if not tens of thousands. Because the legal demands are not subject to independent review, they can take just minutes to write up and, former staff say, officials throughout the agency, even in mid-level roles, have been given the authority to approve them.

Imagine handing Trump and bevy of underlings the administrative power to pore over the lives and digital of anyone, regardless of citizenship. Sadly, you don’t have to imagine:

In March, Homeland Security issued two administrative subpoenas to Columbia University for information on a student it sought to deport after she took part in pro-Palestinian protests. In July, the agency demanded broad employment records from Harvard University with what the school’s attorneys described as “unprecedented administrative subpoenas.” In September, Homeland Security used one to try to identify Instagram users who posted about ICE raids in Los Angeles. Last month, the agency used another to demand detailed personal information about some 7,000 workers in a Minnesota health system whose staff had protested Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s intrusion into one of its hospitals.

How many of these subpoenas have been issued is an open question. Google “is not required by law to inform users of government requests,” but they do “unless it’s legally prohibited from doing so or in exceptional circumstances, such as when someone’s life is in jeopardy.” While other companies are more opaque, Google and Meta told WaPo they’ve…

…received a record number of subpoenas in the U.S. during the first half of last year, as Trump began his second term in office, according to the companies’ most recent reports. Google, which has shared subpoena data since 2012, was sent 28,622, a 15 percent increase over the previous six months.

And like Google and Meta….

…Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Snap say that they … alert their users to administrative subpoenas unless they’re barred from doing so or in extenuating circumstances.

T-Mobile and TikTok, in contrast, say they notify users when required to by law. Verizon and AT&T wouldn’t tell The Post whether they provide any notice, and X did not reply to questions.

Another open question is how many of those subpoenas resulted in a knock on the door by Federal agents:

It was about 9:30 on the morning of Nov. 17. On his porch, [Jon] found a local officer, in uniform, with two men in slacks and sport coats.

“We’re with Homeland Security,” he recalled one of them saying.

They showed him their badges.

One of the federal agents showed him a copy of the email to Dernbach.

“We want to hear your side of the story,” he recalled one of them saying.

Jon explained the genesis of his email and remarked that the “message to Dernbach … was an opinion, protected by the First Amendment.

The investigators agreed that the email broke no law, he said, but they pointed to his mentions of Russian roulette and the Taliban. Perhaps, they conjectured, the prosecutor felt threatened.

That was absurd, given the context, Jon thought, but he didn’t say that.

After about 20 minutes, the men thanked him for his time.

But Jon had one more question.

He sometimes returned to England to visit family, and he and his wife had planned to travel over Christmas to Puerto Rico for their 40th wedding anniversary.

“I hope this doesn’t mean I’m going to get stopped at the airport,” he said. “Am I on a list now?”

Of course not, he said the men told him. He had nothing to worry about.

But when the time came for their trip, what may have been a coincidence didn’t feel coincidental:

At the airport outside San Juan, they waited at baggage claim until every other passenger had left. Their luggage, they were told, remained in Philadelphia.

“Is this a coincidence?” he asked his wife.

The bags arrived at their cruise ship later that night, and the couple opened them in the cabin.

Nothing looked out of place in his wife’s, but in Jon’s, he found a notice from the Transportation Security Administration.

“Your bag,” the standard form read, “was among those selected for physical inspection.”

It did not explain why.

Jon didn’t want to talk about what it might mean, not then. So he took a photo, closed the bag and tried to go to sleep.

Jon has since tried to move on with this life, but it’s difficult for an enthusiastic citizen who…

…watched President George H.W. Bush sign the Immigration Act of 1990, a bill that the Republican praised for recognizing “the fundamental importance and historic contributions of immigrants to our country.”

That was then and this is now … and now Jon is understandably jaded:

“There are no real safeguards anymore,” he said, “until people recognize that we’re all potential targets.”

That reality is starting to dawn on some enthusiastic supporters of the Second Amendment, but it took the public execution of a gun owner expressing his First Amendment rights to get there. - jp

DHS AI Surveillance Arsenal Grows as Agency Defies Courts
https://www.techpolicy.press/dhs-ai-surveillance-arsenal-grows-as-agency-defies-courts/

Homeland Security is trying to force tech companies to hand over data about Trump critics
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/03/homeland-security-is-trying-to-force-tech-companies-to-hand-over-data-about-trump-critics/

ICE demanded Maine sheriff’s employment records following his criticism of arrest
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2026/02/03/mainefocus/mainefocus-police-courts/ice-demanded-maine-sheriffs-employment-records/

Erie officer out after probe into anti-ICE social media post
https://www.axios.com/local/boulder/2026/02/03/erie-police-officer-out-anti-ice-facebook-post

How ICE Already Knows Who Minneapolis Protesters Are
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/technology/tech-ice-facial-recognition-palantir.html

ICE has expanded its mass surveillance efforts. Online activists are fighting back.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/29/ice-tracking-tools-protesters-00755703

‘I am not afraid’: Disabled woman violently detained by ICE vows to keep speaking out
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/04/politics/video/i-am-not-afriad-disabled-woman-violently-detained-by-ice-vows-to-keep-speaking-out-lcl

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But what if you had foreknowledge of a future event and you cashed-in by placing timely, predictive bets that are the functional equivalent of insider trading on the stock market?

That’s exactly what appears to have happened when a series of anonymous wagers were placed on Polymarket just hours before the Trump regime revealed it had captured Venezuelan President Maduro.

In fact, the suspiciously prescient bets rolled-in even as Delta Force fighters rolled-out on their mission to capture the Venezuelan leader. When Trump announced Maduro’s capture a few hours later, a bettor identifiable only by a blockchain code scored a $436,000 payday because they “predicted” Maduro’s fall. As The Telegraph noted:

Within hours, the account, which was created a few days earlier, had cashed out and has not traded since.

Welcome to the not-so-brave new world where tech gamifies and monetizes anything and everything possible. As The Guardian aptly put it:

Polymarket and its rival Kalshi have gamified all corners of life – from tomorrow’s weather to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl outfit – and in effect, turned reality itself into a casino.

Polymarket and Kalshi are the two top online prediction markets with a combined valuation of $20 billion. Ironically, Polymarket’s good fortune can be traced to an auspiciously-timed reversal of fortune that, like the Maduro trade, begins with a pre-dawn raid. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal described it in their deep dive into prediction markets:

Just before dawn on Nov. 13, 2024, FBI agents smashed through the door of Shayne Coplan’s penthouse apartment in Manhattan, barged into his bedroom and grabbed his phone.

Federal prosecutors were investigating whether the cryptocurrency-based betting platform he founded, Polymarket, where users can wager on everything from presidential elections to the identity of the next James Bond actor, was violating laws designed to prevent money laundering.

Fourteen months later, the fortunes of the shaggy-haired 27-year-old couldn’t be more different. The Justice Department has dropped its probe. Donald Trump Jr., whose venture-capital firm is an investor, joined the company as an adviser. The New York Stock Exchange’s parent company struck an investment deal that boosted Polymarket’s value to $9 billion and made Coplan a billionaire. And his startup, which had long been off-limits to U.S. users, was cleared to launch a betting app for them.

Polymarket’s rise comes as wagering on sports, bitcoin, elections and just about everything else has grown ubiquitous, and barriers between traditional investments, crypto and gambling are eroding.

Isn’t that an interesting chain of events?

Coplan’s rapid ride of from perp to paydirt is a perfect example of corruption that is so blatant, it almost seems like they want people to see it. In this instance, Copland’s business scored the equivalent of a preemptive pardon. Once Trump’s DOJ dropped the investigation and let Copland and Polymarket off the hook, Polymarket just-so-happened-to land a key investor—the President’s son!

Donald Trump Jr-backed venture capital firm 1789 Capital announced a deal rumored to be in the “double-digit millions of dollars,” according to a Reuters report last August. And yes, it is “rumored” because they haven’t disclosed the details of an investment by the President’s son in a business the President’s DOJ decided to stop investigating. What’s more, that business’s model is thriving in no small part because the President’s *unique style* of governance is constantly generating new opportunities to place bets on the President’s next move.

Even today a reporter on The Julie Mason Show commented on the uncertainly surrounding Trump’s next move on Iran. Guessing what he will do next, though, isn’t a parlor game. Don Jr. has a significant financial stake in a business that is actively monetizing speculation about his father’s official decisions as President.

Given Trump’s reputation for impetuous moves and capricious decisions, prediction markets must’ve looked like a golden opportunity to the Trumps. After the Supreme Court legalized sports betting in 2018, the appetite for wagering quickly spread to that year’s midterm election. It portended explosive growth in betting on all things political. That growth was, however, curtailed by the Biden Administration. Here’s The Guardian:

Event contracts are considered derivatives, so online prediction markets fall under the jurisdiction of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), who, under Biden, had fought hard to block them.

Election markets are “contrary to the public interest”, Rostin Behnam, former CFTC chair said in 2023, adding that regulating them would be both “impractical” and force the agency to act as “an election cop”.

Guess what happened next?!?!

But under Trump, the CFTC has pulled back. It dropped its legal fight to ban Kalshi’s election markets, and permitted Polymarket to operate domestically under its jurisdiction.

Business has been booming ever since: the total value of bets bought on the sites in just the month of December surpassed $8.3bn, up 1,300% from February, according to DefiLlama data. That’s about the same as the monthly sales of Target.

So, not only did the DOJ drop their investigation, so, too, did the CTFC … the one agency tasked with protecting the American people from fraudsters, scammers and corrupt business practitioners.

You know that wasn’t going to last.

And it didn’t.

Among the first things Trump’s acting chair of the CFTC did upon taking the reins was to “move away from ‘regulation by enforcement.’” Regulation without enforcement sure sounds like a euphemism for not enforcing laws you or your cronies don’t like. Perhaps that’s why the CFTC:

…implemented a reorganization of the Division of Enforcement, resulting in the elimination of a number of specialized task forces — including the Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies Task Force and Environmental Fraud Task Force…

Free from criminal investigation and then freed from regulatory constraints, Polymarket has since taken off … in no small part because President Trump happens to be a constant source of things to wager on. Here’s an excerpt from The Washington Post’s recent deep dive into prediction markets:

Betting on political events on prediction markets has grown sharply in recent months. There is $129 million at stake on political markets on Kalshi, the company said. About 370,000 people are staking more than $90 million on politics at Polymarket, which lacks regulatory approval to serve American bettors, according to a Washington Post analysis of data provided by Dune Analytics.

Many of those wagers hinge on actions by President Donald Trump or his administration, including whom he will name as the next Federal Reserve chair, whether the United States will strike Iran in the next six months, and even the words Trump might say in his State of the Union address next month.

Many already harbor suspicions about the timing of Trump’s tariff threats and corresponding moves in the stock market. Here’s ProPublica from May of last year:

More than a dozen high-ranking executive branch officials and congressional aides have made well-timed trades since Trump took office in January, most of them selling stock before the market plunged amid fears that Trump’s tariffs would set off a global trade war, according to a ProPublica review of disclosures across the government.

All of the trades came shortly before a significant government announcement or development that could influence stock prices. Some who sold individual stocks or broader market funds used their earnings to buy investments that are generally less risky, such as bonds or treasuries. Others appear to have kept their money in cash. In one case unrelated to tariffs, records show that a congressional aide bought stock in two mining companies shortly before a key Senate committee approved a bill written by his boss that would help the firms.

If you think about the daily barrage of jolts Trump inflicts on the news cycle … the sudden policy shifts, seemingly impetuous tariff threats, off-the-cuff insults and insinuations … his “Presidency” might be better thought of as a glorified stock manipulation scheme. That’s what Paul Oudin, Assistant Professor of Law at ESSEC Business School, pondered in an April 2025 entry on the Oxford Business Law Blog:

Whatever one may think of the Trump administration’s recent shifts in tariff policies, they sure provoked wild swings in securities’ prices worldwide. About ten days ago, President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing tariffs ranging from 10% to 46% on various US trading partners, knocking down stock prices across the globe and triggering fears of a recession. A week later, he signed another order bringing those rates to 10% for three months—except for China, whose unwillingness to cooperate was rewarded with a whopping 125%, then 145% rate— thereby provoking an immediate surge in stock prices.

The substantial agitation in stock markets caused by these changes in tariff policy created fantastic trading opportunities for anyone who had prior knowledge of the forthcoming policy changes. Trump himself was very much aware of this, as he enthusiastically announced to his followers on his social media platform Truth Social on Wednesday 9 April that ‘THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!’ (emphasis his) just a few hours before announcing the new tariff policy.

The question of whether he’s just “aware” of it or he’s actively manipulating markets is one that seems unlikely to be answered as long as Congress remains in thrall to Trump. In the interim (that’s assuming this is an interim until the House flips), the Departments of Justice and Treasury are, like the CFTC, going out of the their way to ignore enforcement of regulations. The Wall Street Journal surveyed the landscape for white collar criminals and found an inviting path has been paved by Pam Bondi’s Justice Department, which has…

…stepped back from the kinds of complicated investigations into foreign bribery, money laundering and public corruption that former department leaders often cited among their greatest successes.

Along with that shift, administration officials have undone a number of notable Biden-era white-collar prosecutions. In some, the department dropped charges against executives that were pending. In others, Trump has used the pardon power to forgive a string of top company officials charged with or convicted of crimes related to their businesses.

Predictably, WSJ also reported, one of the “most notable shifts” has been in foreign bribery cases. Simply put, enforcement (there’s that word again) of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act “fell off a cliff” in 2025:

The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which share authority to investigate violations, brought about 33 cases a year against companies or individuals between 2015 and 2024, according to data maintained by law firm Gibson Dunn. This year, the Justice Department brought six new FCPA cases. The SEC brought none.

As for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC):

The SEC under the Trump administration brought four enforcement actions in nine months against public companies, according to data from Cornerstone Research. The agency brought 52 enforcement actions against public companies during the prior three months, when it was under the Biden administration.

I can almost guarantee that behind many of these decisions there are stories similar to Polymarket’s otherwise improbable tale of sudden success. That’s because the Administration is bursting with billionaires and populated with industry insiders. Most of them joined MAGA because they wanted something. Silicon Valley wanted lots of “somethings” and they’ve mostly gotten them all. But they’ve given, too … just like the legion of corporate and private donors who paid to play Trump’s gamified presidency.

Sadly, Trump’s “transactional style” is often referred to without the obvious implication that Trump can be purchased … that there is a potential price tag on every decision … that there is usually something of value going out in trade. Like flattery, it’s often framed as lever foreign leaders can use to navigate his mine field. But what it’s also done is inure far too many of us to the idea that everything is rigged and corrupt and politicians are corrupt and self-dealing all the time. “At least Trump doesn’t try to hide it” is presented as a step-up from the sleazeballs who actually have the good taste to at least try and hide their corruption … that is, unless they kinda get caught gaming the prediction market with insider knowledge.

Unlike the still-unrevealed source of pre-9/11 put options on United and American Airlines, the author of the Maduro bets used their crypto wallet and is safely obscured by blockchain’s cryptographic codes. The author of the put options remains hidden because the Philip Zelikow-led 9/11 commission conveniently decided it was neither necessary nor prudent to reveal the trader’s identity. That extra layer of inherent anonymity makes crypto an attractive option for malicious or illegal transactions.

It’s no wonder that the Trump Family has gone all-in on crypto after Trump turned on a dime during the 2024 campaign. At the time, his conversion from Bitcoin critic to Crypto-Bro champion looked like pure electoral opportunism. It quickly became obvious that the family’s opportunism was also financial. - jp

The Wild Markets Behind Polymarket’s ‘Truth Machine’
https://www.wsj.com/finance/regulation/polymarket-prediction-markets-kalshi-dd4702d6

Millions in bets ride on what Trump will say, do or invade next
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/28/polymarket-kalshi-trump-prediction-markets/

On Polymarket, ‘privileged’ users made millions betting on war strikes and diplomatic strategy. What did they know beforehand?
https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2026/jan/30/polymarket-prediction-markets-betting

You can bet on anything in Trump’s America. Insiders are cashing in
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/01/14/the-insider-trading-craze-taking-over-trumps-america/

America’s shift to an insider economy
https://www.ft.com/content/1d3b1f8c-7968-4dcd-8982-9295da15a186

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