This was part of a series on younger Israelis who are shifting further to the right.

(Gemini)

Q: Where was The Guardian's video of a blonde girl taken within the last week? Who was the girl who said (about Gaza):

“Israel is a Jewish state; we should take it because God commanded us to take it. Palestinians should go to any other Arab country; I don't really care, except Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria; those are ours. Or we'll kill them.”

Video

The clip was filmed by a journalist from The Guardian outside a political rally for far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s “Jewish Power” party in Tel Aviv. [1, 2]

Edit: What if we changed a few words:

Hmmm… interesting language. let’s change a few words and see how it looks:

“Germany is a christian state, we should take it because God commanded us to take it. Jews should go to any other European country, I don’t really care. Except Austria, Poland, and Netherlands, those are ours. Or we’ll kill them”.

Source: Reddit comment

More Details:

• The Project: The interview is part of a newly released short documentary by The Guardian examining why a growing number of younger Israeli voters are shifting further toward the far-right ahead of the country’s elections. [1, 2]

• The Statements: During the interview, Serwatien explicitly advocates for the total annexation and settlement of the Gaza Strip, stating that Palestinians must leave or be killed. When questioned on where they should go, she claims they can move to other Arab countries, explicitly excluding Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria because she believes “those are ours too” based on religious conviction. [1, 2, 3]

ABC News, Settler Youth. May 15, 2026.

Atara Serwatien: Meir Kahane was right

The California Courier (Armenian Newspaper) August 3, 2026.

Ramon used to take Israeli high-school students on field trips to Christian sites, but as students and their parents increasingly objected to those trips, most schools gradually stopped offering them. Ramon ended her tours in the mid-2000s.

Some Jewish extremists say they want Jerusalem’s churches destroyed or converted into synagogues. Among them is 19-year-old Atara Serwatien. “It should be a Jewish state,” she explained.

Similar hostility toward Christian images was on display during the recent war in Lebanon, where an Israeli soldier used a sledgehammer to smash a statue of Jesus.

Around half of Israelis believed that entering a church is forbidden, up from 10% in 2008, according to a poll published in September by the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue, an Israel-based interreligious group.

A similar proportion of respondents said they considered Christianity a form of idolatry. These views were more common the younger the respondents got, and among more religious Israelis.

.. Anti-Christian behavior has tested the support of Israel’s staunchest allies in the U.S. When Mike Huckabee took over as U.S. ambassador to Israel last year, he was shocked to discover that evangelical Christian organizations were struggling to obtain visas. A strong supporter of Israel, Huckabee ran a tour company that brought thousands of Christian pilgrims to Israel and the West Bank and never had problems.

Huckabee went straight to Israel’s minister of interior, but the problem persisted, so he turned to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who finally helped release the visas.

Atara has since deleted her X.com account

Tim’s Comment:

While I recognize that Atara’s views are not representative of the whole Israeli electorate, they have held significant influence in Netanyahu’s government. We’ll see what this coming election holds for the future.

I was also struck by the fact that the younger generation is more extreme in their ultra-nationalism than older generations. This suggests that Israel can not easily “grow their way out” of extremism. I also note that even Mike Huckabee was finding that evangelical Christians were finding it difficult to obtain VISAs in Israel. What would it take to influence the perspective of evangelicals like Huckabee?

Glenn Greenwald: The Truth About Palantir CEO Alex Karp

What do you think of Alex Karp’s argument that the most effective way for social change is humiliate your enemy and make them poorer. Put them in fear of what you can do to them. (16:50)

QUESTIONS & AI Answers:

1) Is this PEAK Empire — the point at which its “dominance efforts”result in blowback?

Tim: I wonder whether this emphasis on “dominance” is indicative that the American empire is waning, and military-intelligence companies hope to double down to regain an era of past glory using new technologies of surveillance and control.

However, one might also expect to see aggressive tactics at other times in history. This would be in keeping with the Roman empire’s philosophy. What we see now may be a “naked,” defiant pursuit of dominance. It’s an unmasking. I would expect blowback.

As a tool for achieving submission, it is ineffective:

Because humiliation attacks core identity and human dignity, it rarely produces submission; instead, it generates deep-seated resentment, retaliatory rage, and long-term instability.

When groups or nations feel systematically humiliated, traditional political negotiation often breaks down because compromise is perceived as further self-humiliation. (Gemini)

2) Does Alex Karp have a new philosophy towards “social change” or is this the return to an old mentality? When have countries used a similar approach and what have been the long-term results?

Gemini:

A: The strategy of leveraging fear, economic impoverishment, and deliberate humiliation1 to bend an adversary to one’s will is an ancient approach to conflict. In political science and international relations, this falls under hardline realpolitik, coercive statecraft, or the “politics of humiliation”.

Throughout history, several states, empires, and leaders have adopted similar strategies, and historical analysis reveals recurring long-term patterns and consequences.

2A. Historical Precedents

2a. The Post-WWI Treaty of Versailles (1919)

Perhaps the most prominent modern example of institutionalized economic punishment and humiliation occurred after World War I. The victorious Allied powers imposed a treaty on Germany that mandated massive financial reparations, stripped away 13% of its territory, heavily restricted its military capacity, and forced it to accept total moral blame for the conflict via the infamous “War Guilt Clause”. The intent was to permanently disable Germany as a geopolitical threat and extract heavy costs.

2b. Roman “Carthaginian Peace” and Total Subjugation

In antiquity, the Roman Republic frequently practiced a totalizing form of coercion against major rivals like Carthage. Beyond military defeat, Rome demanded absolute surrender, heavy indemnities, and public symbols of submission (such as the phrase “Vae victis”—woe to the vanquished). The objective was to strip enemies of any capacity or desire to ever challenge Roman hegemony again.

2c. Modern Economic Warfare and “Maximum Pressure”

In contemporary geopolitics, various states use comprehensive economic sanctions, asset freezes, and trade embargoes designed to systematically impoverish adversary populations or collapse target economies, under the assumption that economic pain will force regime change or compliance.

2B. Long-Term Results and Consequences

While strategies built on fear and degradation can achieve short-term compliance, history demonstrates that their long-term results are profoundly volatile and often backfire.

• Revanchism and “Humiliated Fury”:

  Psychological and political studies on conflict show that humiliation is rarely an effective pacifier; instead, it triggers deep resentment and a desire for restoration. In the case of Germany, the harsh economic burdens and profound national humiliation of Versailles created fertile ground for political extremists. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party successfully mobilized millions by weaponizing that exact grievance, promising to tear up the treaty and restore national honor.

• Elimination of Moderates:

  When an enemy population is treated as irredeemable and subjected to systemic impoverishment, moderate voices within that group lose all credibility. The narrative shifts entirely toward survival and radical resistance, empowering hardliners who argue that compromise is suicidal.

• Asymmetric Blowback and Perpetual Instability:

  Crushing an opponent without offering a path to dignity or integration often replaces formal, predictable warfare with asymmetric, underground, or cyclical conflict. When a group or nation is left with nothing left to lose, traditional deterrents based on fear lose their leverage.

• Unsustainable Enforcement:

  Pure domination requires continuous, heavy-handed exertion of force. Over time, the costs—both moral and material—of policing a permanently subjugated, angry adversary tend to exhaust the dominant power itself, leading to imperial overstretch or sudden collapse.

This video explores how the punitive clauses and economic restrictions of the post-WWI settlement shaped the geopolitical landscape: The Treaty of Versailles Terms.

3) How widespread is Karp’s mentality in corporate, domestic, and foreign policy political circles?

The strategy of leveraging power, coercion, and the systematic weakening or intimidation of adversaries—often framed by Alex Karp as creating a deterrent through overwhelming strength and ensuring rivals fear the consequences—manifests differently across foreign policy, corporate strategy, and domestic politics.

While its underlying logic is ancient, its explicitness and acceptance vary significantly across these three domains.

3A. Foreign Policy and Geopolitics: Highly Widespread (Institutionalized)

In international relations, Karp’s rhetoric closely mirrors classical realpolitik and neo-realist deterrence theory (”peace through strength”).

• Statecraft: Major global powers have long operated on the premise that adversaries must be kept in a state of strategic deterrence—meaning they fear the military, economic, or technological superiority of the state.

• Economic Warfare: Comprehensive economic sanctions, asset seizures, and trade embargoes are routinely deployed by superpowers to deliberately weaken adversary economies, induce scarcity, and compel regime change or policy shifts.

• Prevalence: While diplomats rarely use the word “humiliation” publicly, the mechanics of total deterrence, overwhelming military dominance, and economic strangulation are core, mainstream tools of foreign policy for almost all major nation-states.

3B. Corporate Circles: Niche as an Open Philosophy, Common in Practice

In the corporate world—particularly in technology—Karp’s explicit framing of corporate mission through the lens of national security, dominance, and the subjection of rivals is unconventional and polarizing.

• The Tech Contrast: For decades, Silicon Valley largely cultivated a public ethos of utopian idealism, global connection, and cooperation (e.g., mantras like “don’t be evil” or connecting the world). Palantir stands out by openly rejecting this, aligning instead with a muscular, hawkish defense-tech identity.

• Competitive Reality: Behind closed doors, cutthroat corporate strategy often mirrors these power dynamics. Hostile takeovers, predatory pricing, weaponized intellectual property litigation, and campaigns designed to bankrupt or humiliate competitors into submission are standard tools of aggressive market competition.

3C. Domestic Political Circles: Increasingly Mainstream and Visible

In domestic politics, the strategy of systematically delegitimizing, marginalizing, and economically or socially punishing political opponents has grown increasingly widespread amid intense polarization.

• The Mechanics: Modern political conflict often moves past policy debate into total-war tactics: public shaming campaigns, targeted boycotts, legal challenges (”lawfare”), and efforts to diminish the financial or institutional power of political rivals.

• The Difference in Tone: While political actors rarely state openly that their goal is to humiliate or impoverish opponents as a philosophy of governance, the practical application—treating politics as a zero-sum game where the other side must be thoroughly defeated and broken—has become a dominant fixture of contemporary domestic political strategy.

3D. Summary

While foreign policy has institutionalized these concepts under the banner of deterrence and sanctions, and domestic politics frequently practices them through hyper-partisanship, Karp’s distinct contribution is his unflinching, public articulation of these ideas within the corporate technology sector—a space that traditionally prefers to cloak its hard-power ambitions in the language of neutral innovation.

4) What would Karp’s approach look like in religious form?

Transposing Alex Karp’s strategy—using targeted fear, systematic impoverishment, and public humiliation to subduct rivals—into a religious framework yields a doctrine centered on divine subjugation, coercive orthodoxy, and punitive theology.

In a religious manifestation, this ethos strips away redemption and grace, replacing them with hard-power spiritual realpolitik.

4A) Key Attributes of Karp’s Mentality in Religious Form

4a. “Therapeutic” Fear over Benevolent Grace

In traditional spiritual systems, fear of the divine is often framed as reverence, awe, or a deterrent against personal wrongdoing. A Karpian religious approach weaponizes fear as a primary mechanism of operational control:

• Eschatology as Coercion: God or the religious authority is viewed primarily as an active punisher whose ultimate power must be feared by adversaries.

• Psychological Subjugation: Faith is maintained not through internal transformation or moral conviction, but through the psychological weight of overwhelming divine or institutional power.

4b. Divine Retribution & Economic Cursing

Karp’s focus on making adversaries “poorer” translates into a strict Poverty as Divine Punishment theology:

• The “Anti-Prosperity” Gospel: Rather than promising material blessings to believers, this theology promises material destruction, scarcity, and economic degradation for out-groups or heretics.

• Resource Sanctions: Earthly hardship is interpreted as direct evidence of divine disfavor, justifying human efforts to isolate, impoverish, or restrict the livelihoods of spiritual rivals.

4c. Institutionalized Public Rituals of Humiliation

In mainstream world religions, public confession or penance is meant to achieve personal restoration or communal reconciliation. Under this hardline paradigm:

• Degradation over Reconciliation: Public shaming, ritual humiliation, and ritualized submission (such as public recantations) are enforced to break the pride and political standing of opponents.

• Demonstrative Deterrence: The public humiliation of a dissenter serves as a warning to keep others compliant.

4B) Historical & Structural Equivalents

While this mentality directly contradicts core theological precepts in major traditions, versions of this strategy have emerged throughout religious history when religious movements adopted totalizing statecraft:

+---------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Religious Equivalent      | Core Mechanism                                              |
+---------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Heresiology & Anathemas   | Public excommunication and humiliation to destroy credibility|
| Temporal Ban & Interdict  | Economic isolation and resource deprivation by religious law|
| Militant Conquest         | Total submission via fear of military and economic ruin     |
| Militant Inquisitions     | Coerced compliance through trial, humiliation, and loss     |
+---------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------+

• The Inquisitorial Model: The medieval and early modern Inquisitions relied heavily on Auto-da-fé (”act of faith”)—public rituals of shame, confiscation of property (impoverishment), and severe physical penalties to instill fear and eliminate dissent.

• Temporal Interdicts and Confiscations: Historically, ecclesiastical authorities used economic tools—such as seizing land, levying fines, and issuing interdicts that barred communities from commerce and religious life—to force political opponents into submission.

• Rigid Sectarian Excommunication: Certain high-control religious groups use strict shunning, ostracization, and economic boycotts to isolate former members, ensuring they suffer social and financial decay as a warning to those who remain inside.

4C) Theological Distinction

   Traditional World Faiths                     Karpian Religious Form
┌──────────────────────────────┐              ┌──────────────────────────────┐
│ • Goal: Redemption/Virtue    │              │ • Goal: Total Subjugation    │
│ • Tool: Grace & Compassion   │ vs. Contrast │ • Tool: Fear & Impoverishment│
│ • Enemy: Loved or Redeemed   │              │ • Enemy: Broken & Humiliated │
└──────────────────────────────┘              └──────────────────────────────┘

Ultimately, transforming Karp’s thesis into a religion creates an ideology of Theocratic Hard Power. It converts faith from an invitation toward spiritual growth or moral conscience into an instrument for enforcing total dominance over adversaries through fear, economic punishment, and public degradation.

For a broader perspective on how fear-based coercion operates within religious contexts, see this discussion on How Religion Used Your 6 Biggest Fears Against You. This video examines how psychological triggers and threats of punishment have historically been leveraged to enforce compliance.

• Video: How Religion Used Your 6 Biggest Fears Against You | A Therapist Explains

• Kelly R. Minter · 17K views

5) How does this mentality compare to Jesus’s teachings or the wide variety of Confucian, Buddhist, Muslim and Jewish thought?

Tim: Karp’s mentality seems designed to exceed the evils of World War II, creating a more automated force of cruelty and sadism.2 It is contrary to the teaching of the major religions, but in keeping with some aspects of the realpolitik school of foreign policy.

Gemini:

Comparing Alex Karp’s stated strategy of coercing adversaries through economic impoverishment, public humiliation, and fear with major religious and philosophical traditions highlights fundamental contrasts in ethics, justice, and human nature.

While Karp’s approach belongs to the tradition of political realpolitik (where power, security, and strategic advantage dictate ethics), major world traditions largely reject fear, degradation, and intentional impoverishment as valid foundations for social order or conflict resolution.

Comparison Across Major Philosophical and Religious Traditions

+------------------+----------------------------------+---------------------------------------+
| Tradition        | Core Ethic Toward Enemies        | View on Impoverishment & Humiliation  |
+------------------+----------------------------------+---------------------------------------+
| Karp Realpolitik | Fear, humiliation, impoverishment| Pragmatic tools to secure dominance   |
| Jesus/Christianity| Love, non-retaliation, mercy     | Rejected; dignity given to enemies    |
| Confucianism     | Moral example, virtue (Ren)      | Rejected; governance via moral authority|
| Buddhism         | Compassion (Karuna), non-harm    | Rejected; revenge breeds karma & suffering|
| Islam            | Proportionality, restrained justice| Humiliation/unjust harm strictly forbidden|
| Judaism          | Restorative justice, dignity     | Preservation of opponent's human dignity|
+------------------+----------------------------------+---------------------------------------+

5A. Jesus’s Teachings (Christianity)

The ethos described by Karp stands in direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament:

• Love of Enemies: In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus explicitly addresses the treatment of foes: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).

• Non-Retaliation: Rather than using strength to humiliate or impoverish, Jesus teaches non-violent resistance and radical generosity: “If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other also” (Matthew 5:39).

• Restoration Over Subjugation: Christian ethics centers on grace and redemption rather than breaking the opponent’s spirit through terror.

5B. Confucian Thought

Confucian ethics emphasizes societal order through virtue (Ren), filial piety, and proper conduct (Li), sharply rejecting governance or dominance by fear:

• Rule by Virtue vs. Fear: In The Analects, Confucius states that if you govern people through coercion and punishment, they will try to evade them without a sense of shame, but if you lead them through moral virtue, they will develop a moral conscience.

• Humiliation Avoided: Confucianism views the public degradation of others as a failure of moral character. A true leader (Junzi) elevates others and leads by personal example rather than exploiting fear or imposing poverty.

5C. Buddhist Philosophy

Buddhism views the desire to humiliate, impoverish, or instill fear in others as rooted in Three Poisons: ignorance, greed, and ill will (hatred):

• Non-Harm (Ahimsa): The fundamental precept of Buddhism is to avoid causing harm to any living creature.

• Law of Karma: Attempting to force social change through fear and humiliation is seen as generating negative karma, ensuring future suffering for the perpetrator. The Dhammapada teaches that “Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased.”

5D. Islamic Thought

While Islamic tradition includes rules for conflict and self-defense, it explicitly places moral and legal boundaries on how adversaries can be treated:

• Prohibition of Excessive Harm: In Islamic jurisprudence (Sharia), warfare and justice are bound by strict limits. Mutilation, torture, the destruction of enemy livelihoods, or unjust economic ruin of populations are prohibited.

• Dignity in Restraint: The Quran instructs believers: “Do not let the hatred of a people prevent you from being just. Be just; that is nearer to righteousness” (5:8). Forgiveness and restrained justice are presented as superior to harsh coercion.

5E. Jewish Thought

Jewish tradition features a strong focus on justice, human dignity (Kavod HaBriot), and legal constraint during conflict:

• Preservation of Enemy Dignity: The Hebrew Bible contains explicit commands regarding adversaries: “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink” (Proverbs 25:21).

• Restorative and Proportional Justice: Rabbinic tradition emphasizes that even when punishing wrongdoing or engaging in necessary self-defense, an opponent must not be stripped of their basic human dignity or subjected to gratuitous cruelty or economic destruction.

5F. Summary

While Alex Karp’s worldview frames fear, humiliation, and impoverishment as pragmatic tools of hard power to maintain order and security, virtually every major spiritual and philosophical system views those tactics as destructive. Across these traditions, real and lasting social order is built not on breaking an enemy’s spirit through terror, but on justice, moral example, compassion, and human dignity.

Tim’s Final Comments:

Alex Karp’s celebration of humiliation and punishment reminds me of the Romans and their goal of making an example of enemies through subjugating, humiliating and crucifying them in an agonizing public execution.

The US in its actions in Greenland, Venezuela, and Iran, as well as Israel in its impunity, seem to be interested in destroying the post World War II consensus over international law, human rights, and Global Institutions. The advancement of The Board of Peace over the UN, in which Donald Trump has a lifetime veto, strikes many as farce. If we can assume that Alex Karp’s philosophy represents the approach that he and Peter Thiel — a Palantir co-founder — seek to implement in a post-democracy era, we may be presented with the vision for a new “Era of TechnoFeudalism,”3 where “subjects” are controlled by an emerging regime of surveillance, technical and financial controls, fear, and humiliation. Will the public give in or start to resist?

FOOTNOTES:

Transcript

Naza which is this slang term that they use for collateral damage. You know you’re going to hear people say after seeing this film they’re going to be like see I told you it’s not a genocide. This film is actually the best evidence against genocide because in a genocide you don’t distinguish between combatants and civilians. You don’t go to all this trouble. You just kill everyone. That’s your intention. Round them all up and kill them. Kill them all. That’s what genocide is. This entire effort, all of this elaborate stuff that Israel does to try to find a target and figure out who a target is. This proves, of course, that it’s not genocide. This can’t be genocide, right? And you’re going to hear people say that with a straight face. And to be honest, technically they might have a point. They might be right because genocide, as we sort of have, it’s become codified, requires this, you know, special intention. There could be no military targets down below or there can be, you know, no objectives other than just killing all of these people.

And you need this kind of special intention and to prove that it’s there to prove somebody or something is guilty of genocide. And if that’s true, it becomes really difficult to become guilty of this thing. And uh I was alerted to this also by Durk Moses. But in 1947 when this was starting to be sort of written down and and showing up in this way, the Dutch delegation to the United Nations noticed that this has a pretty big loophole, right? It’s really hard to be sort of found guilty of this thing. And they they pointed out saying, “Listen, you can engage in all kinds of actions that end up killing insane numbers of people, even the total population, and it will be excluded from this charge of genocide because of this special intent thing.” As long as you can sort of claim or say that you had an intended target down there that was a military objective and and you could sort of point to that, then you’re out of it. You know, you’re out of the guilty charge of genocide. And they say this is a camouflaged genocide. This is what they would propose, this concept of camouflaged genocide. And they said this should be elevated to be just as punishable. Now, it didn’t work. It didn’t get accepted. It’s, you know, it hasn’t been elevated in our our consciousness as a as a term or a concept of camouflage genocide. But that is precisely what you are seeing in the film Naza.

Now I will say there is one I heard at least one particular charge and walkthrough that would be very much obviously fall even under the difficult sort of label to reach of genocide which was this one soldier talking about demolishing of homes where they had a probability of how many people had evacuated or or actually left the building. And if it was down to just 25%, they would still level the building. Uh, which could have been up to 80 people in these larger highrises. And I think that one pretty much falls under the purview of genocide. It’s pretty hard to make a case that you had a military objective to level an entire building when 25% of the people were still in it. Especially that one, I feel like, okay, yeah, checks the box. obviously the highest level of genocide, but but but I don’t want to get hung up too much on the word because this camouflage genocide concept, I mean, why would you want to commit a camouflage genocide rather than just a regular genocide? Well, obviously you want to hide your intentions from the rest of the world because it’s uh you’ll be a pariah or you’ll get criticism or you’ll lose international legitimacy. There’s a lot of talk about this in the film as well. So, if you wanted to commit a camouflage genocide, you know, how would you do it? Brainstorm how you would do it. My argument is that is exactly what you see in Naza. This is if the Holocaust was the textbook case of genocide that you have to just compare everything to forever. Well, this is the textbook case of camouflage genocide. This is exactly how you do it. You go to all of these great lengths in order to try to prove that your intention was to kill someone with a target. We could again set aside whether any of them are legitimate targets or not. In fact, there’s a few instances in the film where they talk about we knew this guy wasn’t an operative for years, but target anyway, you know, it’s I mean, the system that’s they’re describing in it to fight out to try to identify and figure out who a target should be or could be is absurd and immoral on its face to begin with, but even just set this aside.

And so I I’ve called what Israel is doing the system of maximizing collateral damage. And there there’s one testimony and section in the film about who’s daddy. um the uh policy and AI system they were using to uh wait for targets of theirs to be at home in order to kill them along of course with everybody uh in the house and what that was about. And I think it’s really really damning on this topic. You know, you’ll you’ll hear some some soldiers talk about having a target who they could kill in the battlefield with a with a little bit of effort. And why why are they choosing to wait until he’s at home surrounded by his family in order to kill him? And they’ll tell you, well, it’s just easier when he’s there, presumably because he’s not moving around. He’s sleeping in his in a bed. He’s presumably, you know, you tracked his phone and everything’s still. You drop a bomb, you kill him, and of course everyone else around him. And it’s just easier where you could have targeted him and tried to kill him with just a little bit of effort. I’m sure they could have done it. Maybe two or three bombs rather than one bomb. Believe me, I think we can afford it um in the battlefield, but you’re choosing to wait until he gets home because it’s easier. And the the nasa, the collateral damage around him, that just doesn’t matter at all. Right? This is exactly what you would do in a camouflage genocide. You understand?

So when someone says, you know, it’s not a genocide because they could kill all the Gazans and they haven’t done it and it can’t be genocide and they can’t have the intention of genocide. I will say because they have the ability to eliminate their target with minimal or no collateral damage, but they choose a policy which increases or maximizes that collateral damage. You know for certain it’s a camouflage genocide. And I think the case is closed. But like I said, I think getting hung up on the terms too much is a bit of a mistake. But this is precisely what one would do if they wanted to pull it off. And I think the whole world is taking notes. Um, again, the the the laboratory is producing results in Gaza.

Okay. Another point on uh human shields and this moral and balance argument that I’ve heard uh kind of my whole life. And the argument would go something like, you know, there’s this moral imbalance and asymmetry here where the Hamas or Gazans would use human shields, you know, fire rocket launchers from the middle of schools or something, which by the way is refuted in the film, but let’s just say they do it, you know, if they use human shields, um, they’re doing it because it works, because they know the IDF or the Israelis, you know, will will see the moral dilemma and they won’t drop a bomb on the school just to get the rocket launcher. uh because you know they don’t want to kill those innocent civilians. Whereas if you imagine the reverse, meaning like if the IDF fires a missile from the middle of a kibbutz or something like that, you know, Hamas wouldn’t care. They’d be like, “Okay, cool. We’ll kill everybody in the kabbitz and the rocket launcher. There’s no such thing as human shields here.” And that reveals some kind of moral imbalance between these two parties. Everyone who’s ever made that argument before should be ashamed of themselves and embarrassed when they watch this film to hear that it is precisely wrong. Precisely wrong by their own telling that they are waiting for the target to be surrounded by human shields because it’s easier to kill the target there.

Now, I wish you could even go further in this kind of estimation of like, okay, if they’re in the battlefield taking a a smoke break or something like this and they’re stationary for five minutes, will you drop the bomb on them then? That seems like an easy one, an easy kill that wouldn’t also kill his family. Or will you wait till he goes home because that’s the policy and you’ve been told that’s the policy. Well, that’s the policy. So, off with that argument about moral inequivalency in human shields. It’s always been in this film really lights a fire to any of these people who’ve made this argument before. You know who you are.

Another quick one is the combatant civilian ratios one. Obviously watching the film. Um you know there’s not much more I need to say about all of the debates that I’ve been been in banging my head against the wall trying to get people not to repeat and believe Israeli and IDF lies about these kinds of things. Obviously you just watch the film and there’s .. really not even much to say about that. I don’t even know I have to even be mentioning it anymore if anybody still believes the IDF numbers on uh supposed combat and kill ratios and civilian ratios. Um yeah, I hear Hunter Biden has a meme coin he’s trying to sell you too.

But my biggest takeaway from the entire film is honestly the one that scares me the most cuz as I was watching it, I was thinking Israel will learn from this. you know, what they see and hear in these stories of these people um talking to this interviewer are all solvable kind of temporary unfortunate problems where there’s still too many humans with their pesky little moral emotions getting in the way who are sitting down to do interviews like this and obviously causing a PR problem for them. heard at least like five times where there was testimonies where I would thought like, okay, you know, this is going to be solved when Israel can just get or whoever can just get an algorithm to sit in the chair uh rather than a human. And at that point, I don’t know, maybe we as a species are just evaluating algorithms for killing people at the United Nations and fighting over different, you know, confidence and probability ratios and math problems that become internationally standardized or something. And Israel is leading the way on that charge towards that future. I mean, just the the technicalization of mass killing is and mass murder is just uh beyond chilling in this film. I think we’re at a real crossroads here as a species. And you know, this film is just an absolute nightmare revealed that we’re living through today. And you know, thank you, Israel, for so boldly leading the way and showing the world the the the true limits of indifference and supremacy and this techno dysstopia. You know, thank you so much for that. But I fear that it’s really just the beginning. It really is the laboratory for us. So go see the film if and when you can and watch it when it’s streaming, of course, uh and then raise some hell about it because this cannot be our future. And for Palestinians, it’s a disgrace that it has been and continues to be their present. So yeah, those are my thoughts

Tim’s Thoughts:

I’ve been interested how rhetoric can be used to “camouflage” objectionable policies. I saw it in my use of AI to analyze Israeli Hasbara (propaganda). Likewise, in Gaza it seems there is a rhetorical playbook to cover up any type of war crime in a way that is unfalsifiable. “The journalist was Hamas.” The hospital was located on a “Hamas command center” (disproven, but Palestinians were still unable to prevent their hospitals from being destroyed). The Palestinian adults were being used as “human shields” (but it is still illegal to kill human shields). I’ve heard Francesca Albanese mention the term “humanitarian camouflage”, which describes the way Israel uses humanitarian language to disguise war crimes:

Humanitarian Camouflage:

Disguising your murder attempts using humanitarian language

The world today is divided into two: those who believe Israel’s lies and those who do not. Some do not care, but let us set them aside. Since March 2024, when I presented the first of five reports produced during the genocide, I have described Israel’s use of what I call “humanitarian camouflage”—the deployment of humanitarian language to conceal crimes. Terms such as “collateral damage”, “safe zones”, “evacuation orders”, and “humanitarian assistance” have all been systematically misused. International humanitarian law, which imposes limits on the conduct of war—because even wars have rules, whatever Israel does or believes—has been turned on its head.

The principles of distinction between civilians and combatants, proportionality of military action, military necessity, and precautions during military operations have all been exploded to justify killing and destroying everything in sight. The word “ceasefire” follows the same logic. It was introduced to quell the global popular protests against Israel and its allies—governments like yours and mine. Italy and India are among the most steadfast defenders of Israel at this tragic moment in history. In practice, “ceasefire” has meant: Israel fires, while the rest of the world ceases to pay attention.

“Today, the world is divided into two. Those who believe Israel’s lies and those who don’t: Francesca Albanese.” by Prathap Nair, Frontline, Apr 28, 2026.

Subverting Humanitarian law:

Not long before the current assault on Gaza, during Israel’s 2021 attacks which resulted in the killing of 66 Palestinian children and injuries of 600 more, Israeli military legal experts publicly proposed that, when “considering the military advantage gained by eliminating senior terrorists, it is irrelevant to ask how many children were incidentally killed.”56 In this rationale, IHL proportionality is reinterpreted to render the conscious killing of children, regardless of the number, as irrelevant when targeting suspected ‘terrorists.’ According to this subculture of disproportion, no amount of foreseeable mass killing of Palestinian children in attacks can be deemed anything other than incidental, proportionate, and inherently lawful. 57.

Humanitarian Camouflage: Israel Rewrites the Laws of War to Legitimize Genocide in Gaza, Institute for Palestine Studies, Luigi Daniele, Nicola Perugini, Francesca Albanese, Sept 26, 2024.

NAZA vs the Hannibal Directive

Drone footage released by the Israeli military last month shows the extent of the destruction of the cars fleeing the Supernova rave on 7 October, likely inflicted by Israeli drones and helicopters. (Electronic Intifata / Israeli military)

I see an interesting parallel between Palestinian NAZA (collateral damage) and the Israeli Hannibal directive (Haaretz/paywall), under which on October 7 Israeli military Apache helicopters fired hellfire missiles at the Palestinian militants’ vehicles transporting Israeli hostages to Gaza. Under the Hannibal directive, Israeli soldiers must prevent other Israelis from being taken hostage at all costs. In theory this means undertaking risky shots at Gazan militants that may result in killing the Israeli captive as “collatoral damage” (NAZA). In practice, this can mean killing the Israeli captive (collateral damage) to prevent them from becoming a long-term hostage.

Officially, the Israeli was collateral damage of the Apache Hellfire missile aimed at their captor’s car. Unofficially, the helicopter pilots were also trying to kill the Israeli captives, just as unofficially the Israelis were trying to maximize the number of Palestinian family members as “collateral damage.”

Chapter 7: The Kaliningrad flashpoint

Why are some of the European leaders threatening or giving the impression that they’re threatening this uh Russian exclave? This part of Russia that’s not there you see it on the map surrounded by NATO but not contiguous to uh the Russian mainland. Why the threat just provocation?

Yes. To show the map. We can help people to understand this. Uh before the end of 1991, Lithuania, Barus and the countries to the north, the Latia and Estonia, uh the Baltic states were all part of the Soviet Union. So, Kaliningrad was contiguous inside the Soviet Union. With the end of the Soviet uh union in December 1991, the Baltic states and Barus became independent countries. And so Kaliningrad, which was part of the Russian Federation after World War II, it was East Prussia under Hitler. uh after uh the Soviet Union bore the brunt of defeating Hitler, it became part of the Soviet Union and uh it was contiguous within the Soviet Union. Now it’s not contiguous with Russia because the uh dissolution of the Soviet Union left it as an enclave.

Why anybody would threaten Russia at all in its territorial integrity is beyond me. Anyone who knows the history of Ukraine and says, “Well, Professor Saxs, you Russia did exactly that to Ukraine” doesn’t understand that for 36 years, or I should say 36 years ago, the United States and Germany in the context of German reunification told the Russian leadership in no uncertain terms and no ambiguity and the Soviet leadership in no uncertain terms and no ambiguity that NATO would not move eastward and threaten Russia’s security. We cheated. We lied. We helped to bring in a pro-NATO government through a coup in February 2014.

The Russians have been making the same point for 36 years. Do not threaten us. We don’t want to threaten you. which is exactly what President Putin said last week in a widely reported statement but not reported properly. The statement was we do not want to threaten Europe but Russia has security interests and that is true. All countries have security interests. And it was the United States and Germany that cheated on that core topic. And our top diplomats knew all along that the cheating by the United States to break the commitment of no NATO enlargement would be terrible trouble. But the ones that cheated thought the US is so powerful, uh, so invincible, so irresistible that it could cheat and get away with it. They did not expect this war. Actually, just like Trump did not expect an ongoing war with Iran. They exaggerated American power vastly. They didn’t listen to the Russians. And now until today these Europeans and I helped many of these countries over the years many of them uh Estonia and Poland and many countries in the region including Ukraine they are not thinking straight and they’re going to provoke a disaster unless they understand the real history of this conflict and back off so that Russia can have its security and these countries can have their security. But if they provoke, this will be a bloody disaster. I’m going to play two clips for you. One is General Christopher Donahghue, then the head of Sentcom, this is a year ago

Chapter 8: Avoiding nuclear catastrophe

about Kinenrad, and one is President Putin two days ago on Kinenrad. So Chris, back to back cut number seven, and then cut number one.

If you look at Kaliningrad at its, you know, you can argue back and forth, but it’s about 47 miles wide, surrounded by NATO on all sides. There’s absolutely no reason why that A2A bubble to deter Russia, we cannot take that down from the ground in a time frame that is unheard of and faster than we’ve ever been able to do. We’ve already planned that. We’ve already developed it.

If it comes to a direct attack on the Russian Federation, specifically targeting Kaliningrad or perhaps other territories, then the question of the Russian Federation using all the weaponry at its disposal will inevitably and immediately appear on the agenda.

Are is are human beings suicidal? This is really the issue, right? Do we not understand? Don’t have a nuclear war. How complicated is that really? really how complicated is that? In in my view, it’s very straightforward. Uh Russia should not trespass American red lines and we should not trespass Russian red lines. This is so straightforward. I I want this world to survive for my children and grandchildren. I don’t want it to be blown up over Kaliningrad. And this blustering and bolstering and war planning and game planning is grotesque. It’s much more important that we just understand all sides need security and we should respect the security interests of other powers, especially other nuclear powers, just as we expect them to respect our security as well. It’s mutual. It’s the golden rule. It’s the way to survive on this planet.

Professor Sachs, thank you very much. I know you’re on the other side of the world. Thank you for your time. Safe travels, my dear friend. We’ll look forward to seeing you next week. See you next week. Thanks a lot. Sure. Thank you.

ELSEWHERE:

Kaliningrad (Wikipedia)

Kaliningrad,^[a] until 1946 known in English as Königsberg,^[b] is the largest city and administrative centre of Kaliningrad Oblast, an exclave of Russia between Lithuania and Poland (663 kilometres (412 mi) west of the bulk of Russia). Located on the Pregolya River at the head of the Vistula Lagoon, it is the only ice-free Russian port on the Baltic Sea. Its population in 2020 was 489,359.^[11] Kaliningrad is the second-largest city in the Northwestern Federal District, after Saint Petersburg, and the eighth-largest city on the Baltic Sea

..the original German population fled or was expelled after the end of World War II, when the territory was annexed by the Soviet Union, and in the following few years. In October 1945, only about 5,000 Soviet civilians lived in the territory.^[81] Between October 1947 and October 1948 approximately 100,000 Germans were forcibly moved to Germany,^{[clarification needed][82]} and by 1948 about 400,000 Soviet civilians had arrived in the Oblast.^[81]

Today, the overwhelming majority of Kaliningrad’s residents are Russians settled after 1945, and their descendants. A minority of the population is from other Slavic ethnic groups, including Belarusians and Ukrainians. Kaliningrad today is also home to small communities of Tatars, Germans, Armenians, Poles, and Lithuanians.

TIM’S COMMENTS:

Throughout the Cold War the US’s goal was to defeat the Soviet Union, but “victory” can sometime be defeating. Capitalism was healthier when there was a strong labor movement and a Cold War foe keeping it honest.

Capitalism both values competition and seeks to eliminate it through monopoly/oligarchy. There are American Capitalists who fear Mayor Mamdani and the “leftish” side of the Democratic Party. I see the potential for the “left” to keep the Capitalists honest, hopefully re-invigorating the system (if authoritarianism doesn’t run amuck).

We also need people who can communicate to the American public the abuses that rest of the world is aware of, but the American people are not.

QUESTIONS:

1. How does the US justify breaking the agreement that it made with the Soviet Union to halt the spread of NATO Eastward?

2. Why does the US / NATO think it is to its advantage to further violate its agreement regarding Kalingrad?

3. Is Professor Sachs right that the US thought it could cheat and get away with it?

Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users. Over time, they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers. Ultimately, they degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximise short-term profits for shareholders.

The term was popularised by Canadian writer Cory Doctorow in 2022. The American Dialect Society selected enshittification as its 2023 Word of the Year, with Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary following suit for 2024.

• Wikipedia

You are more likely to fold if you buy into a franchise than you are to fold if you just go out and start your own thing

Chapter 1: The impact of private equity

So, you you had uh you had a business, the little gym, that was part of a franchise. Yeah.

And you wound up having a big dispute with private equity. Now, I follow a guy um Michael Girdley who does a lot of these kind of videos like the rise and fall of and a common denominator is why does everything that you used to like suck now? Like for example, Dunkin’ Donuts. I remember when Dunkin’ Donuts used to be good. Yep.

They they used to be completely different. Now they’re like hockey pucks, but they used to be like donuts that they actually made.

Yeah.

At at the actual location. The coffee was good. It was actually good at one time.

And very often his videos, and he points this out very often, end with private equity took it over and this is what they did. And they just destroyed everything that was good about the thing that they took over. Now you’re you’re we you know one interesting thing about doing these shows on the internet is there all kinds of different pockets of the internet that people go to. I think a lot of people in our pocket are not really that familiar with private equity, what it is, how it works, how much influence it has. So, can you explain some of your background with that, what it is, and how it’s kind of destroying society?

That that’s a lot of questions. So, yeah, that’s a lot of questioning.

Um, okay. So, I did own a little gym franchise. I actually was a broadcast journalist before that and I retired from traveling for work to be closer to

Chapter 2: Defining the predatory model

my kids and I bought this little kids gym and I was like, “This is great. It’s a family-owned franchise and the founders are family-owned and it’s a little family and everything’s going to be great and I can take my kids to work and it was so great and it was for uh like three years until COVID hit and during COVID lots of small businesses and lots of franchises were forced to shut down and I was one of them. I was shut down for 17 months by the state of Maryland. 17 months I was supposed to try to survive somehow with no income, no customers, no revenue as they chose the winners and the losers. And during that time, it left hundreds of these major franchise brands susceptible to to bottom dollar takeovers and hostile takeovers by what’s called private equity. Now, private equity is not in and of itself an evil term. If your mom loans you money to start a business, that is private equity. It’s money you don’t get from the public funds. So, you don’t take it from the SBA or you don’t take it from shareholders. Okay, that’s what it means. But private equity as we know it is something a little more nefarious. The private equity most people reference is something that exists and operates as an extractive exploitative business model. Um, and people have known private equity is bad for a long time. They just didn’t have a word to associate it with. Anybody that is my age or older has seen the movie Pretty Woman probably a bunch of times. And in the movie Pretty Woman, Richard Gear’s character was the CEO of a private equity firm. And she asked him, “What do you make?” And he goes, “I make money.” And she says, “How do you do it?” He says, “I buy up companies that are great and I break them off and sell them for parts.” and she says, ‘Oh, that’s awful. And he was a bad guy during that part of his story arc. He wasn’t a good guy. And at the end, he said, ‘I want to build things again. I want to build America. We’re going to make big ships and make America amazing again. And then he was a good guy because he stopped being a private equity guy and he went to being a good guy. And the lawyer in that movie didn’t want to stop being private equity and ended up hitting the woman and being evil. And that that this is a trope we’ve known a long time. People just didn’t have a word to assign to it, right? So, they’ve always been the bad guys, but they’ve become exponentially worse as administration after administration has loosened restrictions on them, removed guard rails that were meant to keep them from doing horrible things to the American economy. And this is not like a one party problem. Some of the worst expansions of their ability to be exploitative happened under Clinton and then the most expansive happened under Obama. But every single president since Carter has expanded their ability to do harm, has removed guard rails and protections to stop them. And so private equity firms, they exist with very well no oversight. They used to have some oversight through the SEC, but they have no oversight. So they can spend any what they want. They can take debt on any way they want. They can create leveraged debt onto businesses they buy, which should be illegal. I I want to

Chapter 3: The Toys R Us bust out

Well, and that’s what they usually do, right? That’s what brought down Toys R Us, right? it was a successful business and then they just came in and loaded it with debt.

You know, Toys R Us is maybe the best way to explain what private equity does so people understand how it extracts things. Private equity wanted to buy Toys R Us. It was Bang Capital. It was it was somebody that people know and and and are associate with with former presidential candidates, right? Mitt Romney was a Bang Capital senior partner, right? And Bang Capital saw money in Toys R Us. They were like, “Kids need toys. Kids are always going to need toys. We need Toys R Us. Toys R Us was an established business with very deeply entrenched asset lines and multiple streams of revenue. They had brick and mortar stores in every major and minor city in America. But underneath those stores, they owned the real estate. They owned the real estate under every one of their stores. That wasn’t all. They also owned warehouses in every region of the country that were stocked with dead stock items to carry them through an economic downturn. And they owned all of their own freight lines. So they owned all of their trucks and they employed all of their drivers. So they had built all of these amazing things to make it so that they could survive ups and downs in the economy. And being Capital saw that and said, “Oh, we can do better. We’ve got you.” And so they came in and they bought Toys R Us. And within just a few months, they sold all of the land under their stores, their most valuable asset, to their sister company for a bargain basement price and then forced every Toys R Us store to lease it back from them at a premium.

So, their sister company was now making money off the land Toys R Us already owned, right? And when they bought Toys R Us, they didn’t just buy them. They bought them with billions of dollars of debt that they made Toys R Us have to pay back. Toys R Us didn’t owe any debt, right? They bought them and foisted $3.6 billion in debt onto them. And so, it’s like me buying a car and saying the car is going to pay back the loan. That’s crazy. That’s what they do. And so, now they’re paying rent and they’re paying debt back. Then they went to all the warehouses and they liquidated all the assets through third-party liquidators and took away their cushion for economic downturns where they could draw stock and bring things in when they couldn’t afford to do extra ordering. They sold all of it for bargain basement prices less in many cases less than they’d actually paid for it, right? And they liquidated it. Then they sold the warehouses to their sister company and leased them back to Toys R Us again at premiums. Then they sold all of the trucks. They sold all of the trucks.

said, “If you looked at my ex account right now, you would actually see a photo of me uh as my cover image standing in front of a Toys R Us truck graveyard. Literally, they’re wasting away in a cornfield. Happen stance. I live in the middle of nowhere. Four blocks from my house. There’s a corn field of Toys R Us trucks.

Wild.” And so they they sold all of their trucks and then they started using like different rate matchers and brokers to rent trucks from other people when they owned it before and could control their pricing and could control their gas and could control the costs and they rented all that back. And then they what they did was they had them sign a contract with Vang Capital to say you need to pay us every month a management fee to give you advice on how to run your business. Toys R Us had been successful for decades and decades. They had babies arrest. They had bye-bye baby. They had the corner on anyone 16 and under in this country, period. And every pregnancy in America. And they said, “We’re going to teach you how to run your business, and you’re going to pay us, you know, $30 million a month to do it, plus a management fee for every store, and every regional manager, every warehouse manager.” And so now, Bing Capital is using these management fees to dividend back all the money from all the things they sold. They could have used to pay down the $3 billion in debt. They didn’t. They dividended it all back to themselves and put them further and further in debt until one economic downturn came along that was too much. They no longer had the real estate to fall back on. They no longer had the dead stock to fall back on. They never had their shipping lines to fall back on and they buckled. That is private equity in a nutshell.

Chapter 4: Monopolies and franchising

All right. So now if I could just interject one thing because I while we’re on the why does everything suck question, I just want to ask this. So that’s one example. But then like what about like uh Subway or Panera Bread, right? Because as I understand the exit for these private equity firms is either a a sale or an IPO in a relatively short period of time, which means they have to optimize cash flow.

Oh, that’s okay. But they still have to used to be the goal. And that was when they were less evil, right? Because to get to an IPO, you have to prove the business is successful. And when once it’s traded hands once or two two or three times, there’s so much debt on it that you can’t get an IPO out of it anymore.

Okay. So, like maybe the only IPO left right now that I see is particularly successful that I think is going to fold pretty soon is Michael’s craft stores because now that Jo-Ann’s was taken over by private equity.

Michael’s has been through private equity twice and back to IPO.

Right now, all you have left is Michael’s and Hobby Lobby because Private Equity took out Joann’s, it took out Hancock Fabrics, it took out um AC Moore, it took out Dick’s Sporting Goods, it took out all of the art stores. So, we have Michael’s and Hobby Lobby. And Michaels is loaded with debt. Well, Hobby Lobby, who never wanted to be a monopoly, by the way, follows what they call their godly principles and they don’t believe in debt. So, they never ever do any expense from their businesses that they can’t pay back in cash within one quarter. So, they have no debt and they own their land and they own their stores.

But isn’t the feature of it, sorry, that you have to optimize the cash flow, right? So, you have to increase the the profit margins in a very short period of time. Is that right? Because what I really want to know is how did a $5 foot long become a $14 foot long? Because this is what people notice. And Panera Bread, forget about it. I mean, you you need a a mortgage broker just to finance a lunch there. I mean, it’s unbelievable. 859 cup of soup. I mean, ridiculous. Does that have anything to do with the influence of private equity? Because right now, I feel like these companies are hiding behind, well, it’s inflation, things are more expensive now, but that can’t explain it. If you look at these these food chains that have been taken over by private equity, it’s way shittier food for way more money.

Yeah. So, Ror Capital is one of the worst offenders of monopoly private equity creation right now. Ror Capital says they’re not a monopoly because they own two companies and they compete with each other, right? Uh that’s not true. If you own two companies that own all of the stores and you control both of them, you are a monopoly. That’s what they are. Ror Capital has things like they own like five different deli chains including Subway and they own Jimmy John’s and they own Mallisters and right so they have all they have they have Arby’s, they have Duncan, right? They have all these brands and they classify them under Inspire brands and focus brands and so they couldn’t possibly be a monopoly because they just they divide them. But what happens is when they acquire one of these food franchises, they immediately consolidate all of their buying to their existing lines using something called like rebate revenue, which is really kickback revenue, and force the restaurant tourists to start buying through their existing supply chains. So every deli in America before three or four months is now selling the same meat and the same crappy bread that’s coming from their distributor that’s giving them kickbacks on every on every sale. And what a big part of private equity and franchising being like the like the “enshitificition” of everything. That’s people say, right?

The “enshitificition” of everything, right?

Is that it used to be that a franchise was successful when their franchises were successful and paid them a royalty on their profits and their and their revenue. Okay. My franchise, I was supposed to pay 9% roughly 8% in royalties, a 1% like tech fee, and then I had some marketing fees. That was what I was supposed to pay for my business to be successful and for their franchise to be successful. And for 46 years, they were. Then a private equity firm bought the little gym in a hostile takeover, right? It was the same private equity. It’s a private equity firm called Unleash Brands. And they also they’re owned by somebody that also just recently sold the Padres’s to another private equity firm. And when they came in, they immediately started saying I had to buy marketing things through them that I had to sign up for a a call center. Now, people don’t want to talk to a call center about their four-month old baby’s needs. They don’t, right? They gave me like 20 new things I had to spend money on. And I had to give them kickbacks on all of it. And so now all private equity’s business model in franchising has become not that if a if a franchisee is successful, we’re successful. But we’re only successful if we are in their pocket 60 different ways. And so we need to squeeze every penny we can from the franchisee and then the franchisee has to exponentially squeeze it from the customers and they get no say in the matter, right? It makes everything worse.

Chapter 5: Systemic failure and stats

All right. So now what you’re describing and what you described with Toys R Us particularly, it’s what the mob calls a bust out, right?

Like that’s a that’s a bust out. You take over a business, you load it with debt, you’re never going to pay back, and then in the end, you know, with the mob, they would they would very often burn it down for the insurance, but you’re essentially burning it down. In any case, when the mob does it, it’s illegal. And as you said, all of these successive presidents basically made it illegal for private equity to execute a classic mafia scam of of just charging up debt on a taking over a company, charging up debt you’re never going to pay back, selling off all the inventory. I mean, it’s exactly what you just described. It’s exactly a bust out.

And there’s stats to there are stats to like say how this is bad, right? Like right now, if a private equity company takes over a corporation, you are 12 times as likely to go into bankruptcy in that as that business in the next year. The second time they flip it to the next private equity firm, which happens every 14 to 30 months, by the way. They flip them like Pokemon cards. Okay? Right? They squeeze as much as they can and toss it to the next guy and it’s like hot potato to see when it’s going to bankrupt. But then when they kick it to the next guy, you become literally almost a hundred times as likely to go bankrupt in the next two years. The third time it changes hands, you’re almost a thousand times as likely to go bankrupt as any non-private equity owned business. And it’s worse than that, right? You see it in healthcare, you see it in sports, children’s and youth sports. It’s happening. But for the first time ever, two years ago, the SBA, which does not track this, we had to get a report made about it. Some like a franchise economist actually had to do the report on it. For the first time ever, two years ago, business owners were more likely to default on their SBA loans that the taxpayers back if they owned a franchise than if they started a business themselves. That’s never happened. It was always the reason you bought a franchise was because it was a proven business model. Right. Right. That you could be successful because you had the brand recognition, the name, the backing, the customer service support. And now suddenly you are more likely to fold if you buy into a franchise than you are to fold if you just go out and start your own thing. Please clap.

Tim’s Comments:

I’m don’t go out to eat often, but a year or two ago I bought a Subway footlong and was amazed that the price had more than doubled from the $5 footlong. I also worked for a company that was (temporarily) owned by private equity. I say temporarily because private equity firms typically only intend to own a firm for 2 or 3 years. The private equity firm intended to layoff their computer programmers at outsource the work to India, so the programmers left for greener pastures. There is a big learning curve involved in some types of software. The company ended up reversing paths and hiring a new group of American programmers, only to layoff the programmers again. From within the company, it seems counterproductive, but maybe they can find a way to make the numbers work anyway. To me it seems like the continued looting of the economy.

What’s your experience with private equity as a customer or an employee?

The two videos on this page are among the most powerful I’ve seen on the subject of Israel/Palestine today.

My Thoughts

I am a pacifist and do not endorse violence. I think Mearshimer’s caveat (above) about attacking civilians went by too quickly, but I think it is also important for those who do condone revolutionary violence in other contexts to recognize that Israel’s founding fathers wrote that it would be natural for the Palestinians to do everything they could to oppose their plans

The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage.

.. because, contrary to official propaganda, the land was not empty and the early Zionists were seeking dominance, not coexistence.

I was surprised how clearly early Zionists acknowledged internally that they were “colonists” and the Palestinians were the “native” people because some of the arguments I hear today deny “colonization” and treat the Palestinians as a “made up people”.

I’ve only recently become acquainted with early Zionist Ze-Ev Jabotinsky through Jay Shapiro’s episode on “The Wall”. I was surprised that in 1923 Jabotinsky so clearly advocated for a zero-sum theft of Palestinian land and homes through military dominance. The argument for Israel’s justification by the Holocaust1 also appears weaker, as the Balfour Declaration happened in 1917, as part of a decades-long lead-up to its establishment in 1948. This dramatically contradicts Israeli Hasbara that a peaceful one or two-state solution would have happened if not for the “rejectionism” of the Palestinians.

I stumbled upon the concept of the “Mowing the Lawn” in 2023 when i was doing a photo “slide show” at the suggestion of Ray McGovern. As I searched for photos, I stumbled upon older photos of children in rubble from Gaza in the 2000s and 2010s. This demonstrated clearly to me that the “conflict” didn’t start on October 7. John Mearsheimer’s comparison between these “Mowings of the Lawn” and October 7 was especially powerful because he showed that two of these “Mowings of the Lawn” amounted to 3 times the deaths of October 7, something most Americans aren’t even aware occurred.

Up until two or three years ago I had also not heard of the term “Jewish Supremacy.” I’ve hear the term used by Max Blumenthal, and hearing novelist Susan Abulhawa’s closing line (below): “leave or live as equals” strikes me as simultaneously both biting and uncontroversial. I’d be interesting in hearing different perspectives on the claims of “superiority” and “equality.”

More Research

I’d also be interested in hearing what prevented the British from learning the Palestinian perspective in opposition to the early Zionist. Was it hard for Israel to maintain Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” or were the British naturally uninterested in hearing from the Palestinians?

How many Israelis, today, are familiar with the history and these quotes from Israel’s founding fathers? How do Israelis teach this in schools and universities? I would guess it is like American History where the University curriculum includes the new Israeli Historians of the 1980s and 90s, but the elementary and senior high teaching still contains many of the old myths. I found an interview with a leftist Israeli who lived in Germany, and wanted to start a discussion group about looking at the history of Israel-Palestine. She said she was warned not to look into the history.

BONUS:

Here is an account of Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa, which was censored by Oxford Union:

My remarks at the Oxford Union debate

by Susan Abulhawa

I will not take questions until I’m finished speaking; so please refrain from interrupting me.

Addressing the challenge of what to do about the indigenous inhabitants of the land Chaim Weizman, a Russian Jew, said to the World Zionist Congress in 1921 that Palestinians were akin to “the rocks of Judea, obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.”

David Gruen, a Polish Jew, who changed his name to David Ben Gurion to sound relevant to the region, said. “We must expel Arabs and take their places.”

There are thousands of such conversations among the early zionists who plotted and implemented the violent colonization of Palestine and the annihilation of her native people.
But they were only partially successful, murdering or ethnically cleansing 80% of Palestinians, which meant that 20% of us remained, an enduring obstacle to their colonial fantasies, which became the subject of their obsessions in the decades that followed, especially after conquering what remained of Palestine in 1967.

Zionists lamented our presence and they debated publicly in all circles—political, academic, social, cultural circles—regarding what do with us; what to do about the Palestinian birthrate, about our babies, which they dub a demographic threat.

Benny Morris, who was originally meant to be here, once expressed regret that Ben Gurion “did not finish the job” of getting rid of us all, which would have obviated what they refer to as the “Arab problem.”

Benjamin Netanyahu, a Polish Jew whose real name is Benjamin Mileikowsky, once bemoaned a missed opportunity during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising to expel large swaths of the Palestinian population “while world attention was focused on China.”

Some of their articulated solutions to the nuisance of our existence include a “break their bones” policy in the 80s and 90s, ordered by Yitzhak Rubitzov, Ukrainian Jew who changed his name to Yitzhak Rabin (for the same reasons).

That horrific policy that crippled generations of Palestinians did not succeed in making us leave. And frustrated by Palestinian resilience, a new discourse arose, especially after a massive natural gas field was discovered off the coast of Northern Gaza worth trillions of dollars.

This new discourse is echoed in the words of Colonel Efraim Eitan, who said in 2004, “we have to kill them all.”

Aaron Sofer, an Israeli so-called intellectual and political advisor, insisted in 2018 that “we have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

When I was in Gaza, I saw a little boy no more than 9 years whose hands and part of his face, had been blown off from a booby trapped can of food that soldiers had left behind for Gaza’s starving children. I later learned that they had also left poisoned food for people in Shujaiyya, and in the 1980s and 90s, Israeli soldiers had left booby trapped toys in southern Lebanon that exploded when excited children picked them up.

The harm they do is diabolical, and yet, they expect you to believe they are the victims. Invoking Europe’s holocaust and screaming antisemitism, they expect you to suspend fundamental human reason to believe that the daily sniping of children with so called “kill shots” and the bombing of entire neighborhoods that bury families alive and wipe out whole bloodlines is self-defense.

They want you to believe that a man who had not eaten a thing in over 72 hours, who kept fighting even when all he had was one functioning arm, that this man was motivated by some innate savagery and irrational hatred or jealousy of Jews, rather than the indominable yearning to see his people free in their own homeland.

It’s clear to me that we’re not here to debate whether Israel is an apartheid or genocidal state. This debate is ultimately about the worth of Palestinian lives; about the worth of our schools, research centers, books, art, and dreams; about the worth of the homes we worked all our lives to build and which contain the memories of generations; about the worth of our humanity and our agency; the worth of bodies and ambitions.

If the roles were reversed…

Because if the roles were reversed—if Palestinians had spent the last eight decade stealing Jewish homes, expelling, oppressing, imprisoning, poisoning, torturing, raping and killing them; if Palestinians had killed an estimated 300,000 Jews in one year, targeted their journalists, their thinkers, their healthcare workers, their athletes, their artists, bombed every Israeli hospital, university, library, museum, cultural center, synagogue, and simultaneously set up an observation platform where people came watch their slaughter as if a tourist attraction;

If Palestinians had corralled them by the hundreds of thousands into flimsy tents, bombed them in so called safe zones, burned them alive, cut off their food, water, and medicine;

If Palestinians made Jewish children wander barefoot with empty pots; made them gather the flesh of their parents into plastic bags; made them bury their siblings, cousins and friends; made them sneak out from their tents in the middle of the night to sleep on their parents’ graves; made them pray for death just to join their families and not be alone in this terrible world anymore, and terrorized them so utterly that their children lose their hair, lose their memory, lose their minds, and made those as young as 4 and 5 year old die of heart attacks;

If we mercilessly forced their NICU babies to die, alone in hospital beds, crying until they could cry no more, died and decomposed in the same spot;

If Palestinians used wheat flour aid trucks to lure starving jews, then opened fire on them when they gathered to collect a day’s bread; if Palestinians finally allowed a food delivery into a shelter with hungry Jews, then set fire to the entire shelter and aid truck before anyone could taste the food;

If a Palestinian sniper bragged about blowing out 42 Jewish kneecaps in one day as one Israeli soldier did in 2019; if a Palestinian admitted to CNN that he ran over hundreds of Jews with his tank, their squished flesh lingering in the tank treads;

If Palestinians were systematically raping Jewish doctors, patients, and other captives with hot metal rods, jagged and electrified sticks, and fire extinguishers, sometimes raping to death, as happened with Dr Adnan al Bursh and others;

If Jewish women were forced to give birth in filth, get C-sections or leg amputations without anesthesia; if we destroyed their children then decorated our tanks with their toys; if we killed or displaced their women then posed with their lingerie…

If the world were watching the live streamed systematic annihilation of Jews in real time, there would be no debating whether that constituted terrorism or genocide.
And yet two Palestinians—myself and Mohammad el-Kurd— showed up here to do just that, enduring the indignity of debating those who think our only life choices should be to leave our homeland, submit to their supremacy, or die politely and quietly.

But you would be wrong to think that I came to convince you of anything. The house resolution, though well-meaning and appreciated, is of little consequence in the midst of this holocaust of our time.

For the sake of history

I came in the spirit of Malcolm X and Jimmy Baldwin, both of whom stood here and in Cambridge before I was born, facing finely dressed well-spoken monsters who harbored the same supremacist ideologies as Zionism—these notions of entitlement and privilege, of being divinely favored, blessed, or chosen.

I’m here for the sake of history. To speak to generations not yet born and for the chronicles of this extraordinary time where the carpet bombing of defenseless indigenous societies is legitimized.

I’m here for my grandmothers, both of whom died as penniless refugees while foreign Jews lived in their stolen homes.

And I also came to speak directly to zionists here and everywhere.

We let you into our homes when your own countries tried to murder you and everyone else turned you away. We fed, clothed, gave you shelter, and we shared the bounty of our land with you, and when the time was ripe, you kicked us out of our own homes and homeland, then you killed and robbed and burned and looted our lives.

You carved out our hearts because it is clear you do not know how to live in the world without dominating others.

You have crossed all lines and nurtured the most vile of human impulses, but the world is finally glimpsing the terror we have endured at your hands for so long, and they are seeing the reality of who you are, who you’ve always been. They watch in utter astonishment the sadism, the glee, the joy, and pleasure with which you conduct, watch, and cheer the daily details of breaking our bodies, our minds, our future, our past.

The sacredness of the olives trees

But no matter what happens from here, no matter what fairytales you tell yourself and tell the world, you will never truly belong to that land. You will never understand the sacredness of the olives trees, which you’ve been cutting down and burning for decades just to spite us and to break our hearts a little more. No one native to that land would dare do such a thing to the olives. No one who belongs to that region would ever bomb or destroy such ancient heritage as Baalbak or Bittir, or destroy ancient cemeteries as you destroy ours, like the Anglican cemetery in Jerusalem or the resting place of ancient Muslim scholars and warriors in Maamanillah. Those who come from that land do not desecrate the dead; that’s why my family for centuries were the caretakers of the Jewish cemetery in the mount of olives, as labors of faith and care for what we know is part of our ancestry and story.

Your ancestors will always be buried in your actual homelands of Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere around the world from whence you came. The mythos and folklore of the land will always be alien to you.

You will never be literate in the sartorial language of the thobes we wear, that sprang from the land through our foremothers over centuries—every motif, design, and pattern speaking to the secrets of local lore, flora, birds, rivers, and wildlife.

What your real estate agents call in their high-priced listings “old Arab home” will always hold in their stones the stories and memories of our ancestors who built them. The ancient photos and paintings of the land will never contain you.

You will never know how it feels to be loved and supported by those who have nothing to gain from you, and in fact, everything to lose. You will never know the feeling of masses all over the world pouring into the streets and stadiums to chant and sing for your freedom; and it is not because you are Jewish, as you try to make the world believe, but because you are depraved violent colonizers who think your Jewishness entitles you to the home my grandfather and his brothers built with their own hands on lands that had been in our family for centuries. It is because Zionism is a blight onto Judaism and indeed onto humanity.

You can change your names to sound more relevant to the region and you can pretend falafel and hummus and zaatar are your ancient cuisines, but in the recesses of your being, you will always feel the sting of this epic forgery and theft, that’s why even the drawings of our children pasted hung on walls at the UN or in a hospital ward send your leaders and lawyers into hysteric meltdowns.

You will not erase us

You will not erase us, no matter how many of us you kill and kill and kill, all day every day. We are not the rocks Chaim Weizmann thought you could clear from the land. We are its very soil. We are her rivers and her trees and her stories, because all of that was nurtured by our bodies and our lives over millennia of continuous, uninterrupted habitation of that patch of earth between the Jordan and Mediterranean waters, from our Canaanite, our Hebrew, our Philistine, and our Phoenician ancestors, to every conqueror or pilgrim who came and went, who married or raped, loved, enslaved, converted between religions, settled or prayed in our land, leaving pieces of themselves in our bodies and our heritage.

The fabled, tumultuous stories of that land are quite literally in our DNA. You cannot kill or propagandize that away, no matter what death technology you use or what Hollywood and corporate media arsenals you deploy.

Someday, your impunity and arrogance will end. Palestine will be free; she will be restored to her multi-religious, multi-ethnic pluralistic glory; we will restore and expand the trains that run from Cairo to Gaza to Jerusalem, Haifa, Tripoli, Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Kuwait, Sanaa, and so on; we will put an end to the zionist American war machine of domination, expansion, extraction, pollution, and looting.

..and you will either leave, or you will finally learn to live with others as equals.

(bold highlights added by Tim Langeman)

Censorship Analysis:

They’d previously edited out some of the most powerful parts of it:

First edit @3:49
and in the 1980s and 90s, Israeli soldiers had left booby-trapped toys in Southern Lebanon that exploded when excited children picked them up.

Second edit @8:38
“if Palestinians were systematically raping Jewish Doctors and other captives with hot metal rods, jagged and electrified sticks and fire extinguishers. Sometimes raping them to death as happened with Dr Adnan Al-Bursh and others.

Third edit @10:52
These notions of entitlement and privilege, of being divinely favourer or blessed or chosen.

Forth edit @11:49
You carved out our hearths, because it’s clear that you do not know how to live in the world without dominating others. You have crossed all lines and nurtured the most vile of human impulses.

Fifth edit @12:18
And they are seeing the reality of who you are and who you have always been.

Censorship history on Reddit:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/Palestine/comments/1hdls4k/oxford_union_deleted_susan_abulhawas_original/

Jewish Voices for Labor:

• https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/how-the-oxford-union-debate-was-won/

QUESTIONS:

1. When does a novelist who prove to be such an effective “debater?”

2. How well do you think Abulhawa persuaded the persuadable that Zionism is a “blight on Judaism”?

3. Because the Israeli side felt the need to interrupt and censor, we are able to see the parts they most objected to. Imagine if we were able to see the most objectionable parts of every document, that its critics wished to block or censor, along with the arguments for their objections. What were the criticisms of the Declaration of Independence (or even this document)? What would look like if readers could the arguments against?

4. What do you think of the choice Susan Abulhawa gave of “leave or learn to live as equals?” Can you foresee a Palestine where Jews, Christians, and Muslims all live as equals?

Footnotes:

I’m sympathetic to that idea and I do think there’s an element of truth to that when it comes to Elon Musk, but I wouldn’t go back and then try to sell you on this podcast that actually I did the cinematography, [laughter] I did the editing, I did the visual effects, I did all of those things or if I didn’t do them, the the tasks were so menial because I had already outlined everything that needed to be done that they were just, you know, essentially NPCs and I’m player one.

Cuz cuz there’s two things about that. I mean, one is okay, let’s admit every CEO is a credit grabber. You know, that’s just a fact. And clout chaser, credit hoarder. Absolutely. Whatever. And many of us are in some ways and can’t help ourselves. Well, I think I was responsible for that. You know, whatever. We get that.

But in this case, there’s something peculiar that goes on in Silicon Valley. And in Silicon Valley, to the founder goes the spoils. And also by creating this image of this extraordinary Leonardo da Vinci like polymath, you’re able to attach value in the stock market that’s way out of proportion to any kind of economic fundamentals.

That money ends up giving you power that is out of proportion to what you actually contributed but now gives you leverage to do things that may be—particularly if you’re not a character of some moral uplift—it may be dangerous for the rest of us. So that was kind of the some of the stuff that that I ended up being interested in, and it’s a complicated story because unlike Elizabeth Holmes, the Tesla is a real car. Some people love their Teslas. For a while I like my solar panel system, but still, you know, the valuation of Tesla is more than all other car companies on planet Earth combined. And1 frankly, it’s a number 16 car company. And the Cybertruck is an appallingly bad car. And Toyota is a much better car company than Tesla is.

But Elon Musk, because people invest in this mythical idea that he created, has access to extraordinary amounts of power and money.

…

Chapter 6: Saving the World as an Excuse

Okay, that’s a character with which I’m very familiar and it’s a character who’s afflicted with something that the cops call noble cause corruption. So the idea is look, it would be a really good thing for the planet if there was an electric car company and that would challenge the big three and force everybody to go electric. In order to get there, I’m going to have to become the person. So I’m going to have to create this fraud. I’m going to have to sue my partners and make them make them say stuff that isn’t true in order to be able to become this kind of larger than life superhero that we’ll invest in.

And by the way, you know, every step along the way and it starts early. You know, Tesla in order to succeed was always cash starved because they didn’t really make money for a long time. And at some point, the VCs were running out of gas in terms of how much cash they were going to dispense on this mission. But there was always the stock market. And for the stock market, what do you do? Well, you can create this image for yourself.

But then once you decide, okay, I’ve got to lie about myself. I’ve got to lie about my accomplishments. What if I lie about what the company actually does? And what if I lie about what the products actually do? Uh I mean, after all, I I have this noble cause and it’s important that we succeed. And if a lot of people start dying because of autopilot or full self-driving, well, collateral damage.

Well, now you’re making moral calculations that are getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. And the fraud is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. And I’m using fraud in a kind of colloquial sense, not proven fraud. But and now you’ve got trouble because now you’re selling a lie and a really big lie. And weirdly, you’re actually undermining the values of the product you claim to represent. Now you’re getting into the Cydro notion of enshittification.

So for all those reasons, what started out as something good starts to turn to something very bad.

TIM’S COMMENTS:

It may be wishful thinking, but I see the opportunity for the pendulum to change and a new approach emerging that reigns in the impunity. It will reign in the free-wheeling companies and attempt to satisfy people under 50.

One of the features of the Police Auditing community is that “Auditors” break down and review the law and the interactions caught on camera. This provides a forum for education and publicity, although true accountability is still often missing.

Here are two cases where police mischarge “loitering/prowling”:

1. Police do a better job, but won’t accept any counter-evidence and won’t do a real investigation by checking with the people who contracted with the cleaner to do the cleaning job. When police perform a false arrest it is often because they fail to a proper investigation. This often occurs because the police officer doesn’t know how to interpret the law or do an investigation. The key step they are able to do is demand ID, but often without knowing whether the public is actually obligated to provide ID.

2. More aggressive. Police officer seems to retaliate for the perception of being “slighted”. Threatens to use a taser and dog. Was the man seated or threatening? Officer Sends away the Lyft car to “teach him a lesson.”

Questions:

1. Do the police in the first incident suspect that the man has likely been asked to do this cleaning?

2. Does the first police officer really expect the worker to have a copy of the cleaning contract on him?

3. Who do the police think they are helping or are they just looking for some resistant interaction?

4. Does the saying that idle hands make for mischief apply to the police?

5. How do Police look at these citizens that they treat them this way?

6. Are some police officers incentivized by the need to compile statistics on ID or arrests?

7. What role does getting ID to search for warrants play in making police feel “safe” and does running people’s ID for warrants function like a lottery card?

8. What would happen in these incidents without cameras?

9. How much do you think race factored into the first incident?

10. What does it mean for police to “flex”?

YouTube Comments:

• Once you ID to them and they run you through the system, 8 years later when you get pulled over, you again give your ID, he runs it and comes back with “what was going on with that grocery store incident a few years back?” That man cleaning the grocery store will ALWAYS have Resisting Arrest pop up EVERY time he’s pulled over - exactly who the cops love to encounter, gives them a chance to really flex

• “Suspect was armed with a broom”

• When is it the best time to sweep walls & ceilings? Would performing these tasks in the day time while people are in the area the best time to perform this kind of cleaning? With dust & dirt falling & floating all around.

• I also do not understand the trend where the cop just repeats what the charge is over and over without explaining and over without explaining what the charge means.

• Like, yeah man, we hear you ‘loitering and prowling’, but what does that actually mean? It just feels like the cops don’t actually know what the qualifications for that charge are and they just use it because they heard someone else say it, like a messed up game of telephone

• So committing no crime and then refusing to show ID is now a crime

• Yes cops can arrest you for anything they feel like and throw you in jail. Sure it will be thrown out in court but nothing is done about the cop and you still end up spending time in jail, missing work and having to pay court costs while the cop gets good boy points for making an arrest. So it’s not illegal but it may as well be since the cops can arrest you for it even if they legally can’t.

• Alot of these cops are on such a power trip.. Its sickening..

• Their need for ID has morphed into an obsession that requires urgent psychological intervention.

• they are like golem looking for his precious

• “ i can see that he works here, but he was trying to dictate” what a great representation of the american police. Do what I say, or else you’re under arrest😂

• 21:00 - Sergeants need to start asking a basic question, “So how exactly did he resist?”

• A lot of cleaning businesses operate doing their customers closure time. it’s basically an overnight job so the fact that he’s saying it’s 12:30 it just doesn’t make sense..

• They love creating criminals to avoid dealing with REAL CRIMINALS!!

• Working at night while black, questioning the authority while black, and not licking the boots of tyrants when they show up.

• Cops need to learn they have 0 authority whatsoever, til a crime occurs or about to.

• Arresting someone outside a cvs that closed 8 minutes ago is crazy.

• I suspect this wasn’t the first time this cop violated the rights of citizens, and what’s worse is that I wouldn’t be surprised if the supervisory structure is well aware they have problem children in their ranks. A fish rots from its head.

• How is their id going to tell them if they should be there or not. Zero investigation

• Clear example of cops creating a problem so they can go hands on and or arrest someone for no reason. They know 100% what these people are doing. Cops going around making up crimes to justify why they should make $150k a year. It’s disgusting behavior and they should be put in prison for stealing tax payers money!!!

• The kids in the 2nd one was not hiding from him. That cops keeps repeating that over and over as if that makes what he did legal. What a jerk

• 9:11 “way past that”.

• The cops wouldn’t even let her call to confirm that they belong there. Didn’t even bother listening to them at all. Just wanted the ID to run them for warrants and got mad when they refused.

• The first guy DID IDENTIFY HIMSELF as a employee of the D & B Sweepers Co. All it would take is for one of the cops to detail the guy for 5 minutes until they called and verified his employment and contact with the company!!! They make people sit and wait for K9 dogs to sniff their cats for 45 min to an hour but can’t take 5 minutes to verify employment??? Idiots!! 🤬🤬. I hope this could SUED THESE IDIOTS for FALSE ARREST, KIDNAPPING, LOSS OF WAGES, FAILURE TO INVESTIGATE, FALSIFYING A POLICE REPORT!!

• That loitering law sounds like guilty until proven innocent.

• It’s insane to me how a cop can wrongfully take someone’s freedom away, and walk away with no punishment (resign). Cops who violate someone’s rights should be forced to endure the same punishment they inflict on others. End Qualified Immunity!

• Even when QI is denied, they still don’t pay out of their pockets.

• They released her when they realized she had a medical device attached to her and didn’t Wana process her in jail and the extra work that takes. This proves they knew she wasn’t an actual criminal and just wanted to punish her.

• The cop was so obnoxious in this interaction. Keeps asking the guy a question then when he goes to answer it cop tells him to listen and talks over him.

• “I was pretty cool with you” after threatening him with a taser and dog if he even twitched wrong

• This was obviously retaliation for not wanting to ID.

• What pisses me off is I have a clearance and getting falsely arrested like this could put that and my career in jeopardy. Even a payout like that would be less than what my career is worth so I’d unfortunately have to surrender my rights and comply in these situations.

• “Can you make it an emergency please. I got one resisting.” Pan to guy relaxing on bench

• If a cop’s pay was garnished to pay for lawsuits won against them, how quickly do you think they’d learn the laws they’re supposed to be upholding?

• Opening the interaction with “if you dont ID youll be charged with interference” shows how unknowledgeable these cops are about the job they are supposed to be doing

• 9:02 What type of person enjoys ruining peoples lives just because they can?

• Asserting “resisting” charges for refusing to ID should be an immediate revocation of that officer’s law enforcement license. Resigning, being allowed to work somewhere else, is not good enough.

• Calmly sweeping in full view under bright lights. Yep, dangerous criminal.

• 8:20 these cops know they are wrong. And until they are force to pay the lawsuits from their own bank account this will continue.

• Also loved how the guy wouldn’t engage after he was arrested. The cop really wanted the interaction rush, but he was denied.

• Threatening to taze and sick a dog on someone who clearly isn’t resisting is some next level 💩. That guy clearly shouldn’t be an officer of the law.

• So if they present ID what would that tell the cops? They need to talk with the owner of the property, but the cop’s can’t be bothered to do police work.

• When police officers asked for IDs a lot of times they are on a fishing Expedition

• Ole officer Rippyon was wanting to copsplane to the guy that he’d just arrested so bad he couldn’t stand that he was exercising the 5th.

• Never, ever, attempt to persuade a tyrant to change their mind... you are wasting your breath. After being arrested, you NEED to identify (it isn’t for you to decide, if the arrest is legal or not). Once you’ve identified, request a lawyer, say that you prefer not to answer questions and SHUT UP, especially be quiet in the back of the cop car! Take the ride, and win in Court. The process (and the hours of lost sleep that you will suffer) is the punishment.

• But but but I’m addicted to running names for warrants…

• There is a less than 0% chance that second officer said “you’re detained.” He was clearly looking for a fight and he’s a liar.

• Can’t wait for the next story about him wherever he gets hired at next.

There is some question about whether Alex Karp is putting on a “Mad Scientist” act to make Palantir seem intimidating, or is he on drugs, or is this his authentic persona. His approach strikes me as representing the approach of an A-plus moron: someone who has a high IQ but acts foolishly. His company is the leading military-intelligence contractor that did/does:

• Israel’s military and intelligence AI, conducted surveillance and targeting in Gaza, as depicted by Naza the film

• ICE / DHS: Surveillance and targeting

• US Army: $10 billion contract

• Maven Smart Systems: $1.3 billion. “battlefield intelligence”

• IRS / Treasury: $1.5. Mega API unified internal database

• CDC/HHS: $443 million: disease surveillance

• USDA: $300 million: farmland management and food supply chain security, SNAP fraud detection.

• UK: £800 million: National Health Service

• Ukraine: battlefield intelligence and targeting

An example of A-plus Moron-style thinking is proposing that it would be a victory to engage in a nuclear war which would result in 10 million Americans surviving, while only 10,000 Russians survive.

Another example is an advanced technical “solution” that ignores history or morality.

Here are a few Alex Karp clips which show naked American arrogance:

Alex Karp tells the journalists what they should ask him.

Wildly Celebrating Investor Success

46 min: Is this the purest statement of Peak American Empire?

More:

• Glenn Greenwald: The Truth About Palantir CEO Alex Karp

QUESTIONS:

1. What do think of Alex Karp’s persona? To what do you attribute his frenetic behavior?

2. Do you agree with Karps’s description of how Palantir helps working class white men?

3. Do you believe that the USA is a superior culture that must maintain its dominance so that it is not ruled by its adversaries? (NYTimes ~ 43 min)

4. What do you think of Alex Karp’s argument that the most effective way for social change is humiliate your enemy and make them poorer. Put them in fear of what you can do to them. (Glenn Greenwald, 16:50)

5. What effect do you think dyslexia has had on him? (NYTimes ~40 min)

• Total Child Amputations: UNICEF and the Palestinian Ministry of Health estimate that approximately 4,000 children make up a significant portion of the total estimated 6,000 to 10,000 amputees across Gaza.

• Daily Amputation Rate: UNRWA and UNICEF reported that at the conflict’s peak, an average of 10 children lost one or both legs every day.

• Historical Scale: The United Nations declared Gaza as having the highest number of child amputees per capita in modern history.

• Medical Conditions: Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and WHO noted that many of these procedures were performed with limited or no anesthesia due to severe medical supply shortages and damaged healthcare infrastructure.

Source: Gemini

Children’s educator Ms Rachel have come under fire from pro-Israel Supporters for highlighting the lives of fans like Rahaf who have suffered amputations in Gaza.

ELSEWHERE:

• Gaza’s amputees face life in war zone with little treatment, less hope, Reuters

• There are more child amputees in Gaza than anywhere else in the world. What can the future hold for them? The Guardian

• ‘No one looks at me’: 12-year-old amputee in Gaza on what the war cost him, CBC

• UNICEF Delivers Wheelchairs for Gaza’s Children, UNICEF

QUESTIONS:

1. Do you believe that most Americans are aware of the thousands of children that have suffered amputations, many of which occurred without anesthesia?

2. What would Americans do if 10 children a day in Houston or Phoenix had to have their limbs amputated, many without anesthesia, totaling 3,000 to 4,000 children?

3. What do you think of accusations of anti-semitism against those like Ms. Rachel who bring attention to these child amputations?

4. Do you believe that seeing amputees like this will turn their Palestinian brothers, sisters, cousins, and neighbors into “Anti-semites?”

27:00

You know the weird or the thing to wrap our minds around this is that this is part and parcel of the political process of how this whole project is developing because if we look at the reaction from the European Union for instance or from the United States they wag their fingers against illegal settlements the evil settlers. They even put sanctions on illegal settlers but they never put sanctions on the state of Israel. Right.

It’s never it’s it’s it’s it allows for taking apart a thing that actually belongs together, right? And say like no, no, no, no. We uphold international law because we are very displeased with those illegal settlers, but the system that enables the settlements in the first place is left perfectly intact.

You’re you’re absolutely right. and uh and even the recent British initiative to apply sanctions again it’s a slap on the hand when it’s uh the Israeli Israeli settlements don’t produce that much produce for export and all that and even then there was a caveat for religious reasons again Israel has been the darling of the west of course and uh I think that there is a tremendous reluctance to apply sanctions.

Look, uh, compare the ease with which sanctions have been applied to Russia with the absence of sanctions from the European Union or from the United States uh, to Israel for something which appears to many people to be genocide. No one, you know, no one seriously talks about, you know, genocide in Ukraine, but uh in Israel, in Palestine, in Gaza, it’s quite clear. And yet, uh sanctions are not applied. But I think that um we live in different times when there is no shame, no embarrassment. It’s it’s open. It’s in your face. This double standard is in your face.

Israel in a way has been a leader in that. Uh it had enjoyed impunity and it really didn’t care and now many other countries don’t as well. Yeah. But you know if we compare this to 30 years ago uh dur the Oslo process and then the Oslo Accords and so on. I mean we find the same similar kind of duplicity but it was it was much better uh uh camouflaged in the language of humanitarianism in the language of we’re trying to achieve a two-state solution. Today Bengavier and Smrich and and even Netanyahu they have no qualms whatsoever to go on a podcast and say like no no never ever two-state solution we will do everything we can to expel them. I mean they they they openly talk about that that 30 years ago in my view was probably not possible. I mean what does this degradation of also the language and the bluntness with which the Zionist project is now being implemented tell us about you know where the Zionist project itself stands.

Well I think it tells us not so much not only about the Zionist project but about the western world. Yeah. Uh the Zionist project has been pretty open about what it wanted. It it did have wonderful diplomats like Aba Iban who knew how to present the case and who was very eloquent and so on. Today people say they don’t really care about presenting the case because they lost it in public opinion but they don’t care about they do care about public opinion but they have a control of the government. I think that’s very important that support for Israel in a way uh is expressed by the ruling classes and I don’t mean only the political ruling class the economic ruling class. Israel is a very important country, not only because it’s an outpost of the West in in West Asia, but also because it is an example of how you deal with dissident, how you deal with opponents. And what you see today in Britain, in France, in the United States, opinions are being qualified as terrorism. Yeah.

But this is new. This is new. And uh Israel has been a leader. And also another very important use of Israel by western elites or ruling classes. I don’t like the word elites but since everyone uses it I sometimes slips into my vocabulary. Uh uh Israel is a very useful supplier of technology knowhow surveillance and control of population. They have had tremendous experience with Palestinians and they export this knowhow tested on Palestinians to many countries uh including Canada where I’m speaking from. Uh so that’s why the governments usually are very supportive of Israel. they have to pay lip service like this recent sanctions on uh that will be may be applied to West Bank. Uh but by and large I think that someone like Chancellor Mertz he blurted out when Israel attacked uh Iran they’re doing dirty work for us and that’s the feeling many people in in the ruling classes have. Israel does dirty work for us. Well, and then the United States joined that uh a year later or not half a year later. Uh so we have to see Israel not as an isolated case, not as something that stands out but something that leads the way of the Western world.

Yes, it does. I I completely agree. I mean, in in an essay that I recently wrote, I made the argument that we should rather think of Israel as an integrated part of the body politic of the West that just then allows, you know, you throw the ball back and forth. There’s things that Israel can do that the United States internally couldn’t do. There’s things that the settus can do that the Israeli government can do, can cannot do. Um but overall they work they work together as part and parcel of something that still for any intended purposes is a colonial project of of expansion of expansion of a system into the lands of another people that is now um ground to a uh grind down and you we we when you look also at the warfare of Israel it’s at war with all of the surrounding countries. It’s occupying Syria. It occupies Lebanon. it I mean it fights on so many fronts and it has a war with Iran. This is like an an the an integral part of an entire uh warfare approach. And if you look at the Europeans they support that. Maybe they put sanctions on settlers but that allows them not to put sanctions on on the government that still allows them to say like overall Israel is a democracy and we as a value community we stand together. We protect against terrorism. Terrorism is applied against the Arabs. never never ever um as a term against the the actions of the Israeli government. I mean it just seems so all connected to each other.

Yes, they are connected and I’m glad that we’re discussing Israel in the context of the political west uh because it is part of the political west. It’s a bit it’s more outspoken. It’s more in your face. But again, it provides the example definitely for the right wing and extreme rightwing in Europe and elsewhere, but also to the people in power today in who are not extreme right and who uh really learn from Israel. You have to realize that the Zionist network has been extremely effective not only in terms of public opinion, not in terms of purchasing CBS and CNN and Tik Tok to control the discourse uh but also in infiltrating into police forces. No, municipal police forces. They take policemen from somewhere in Midwest for a trip to Israel to learn techniques and know how from Israeli police. Uh, and we’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of subsidized finance strips. So the the the commitment of the Zionist lobby is extremely strong and uh uh you know in a way uh they put uh the money where the word is. So yeah.

Yeah. And and and it works. That’s the point. It’s an it’s an it’s an integrated system that actually then on the other end produces the realization of the Zionist project which is a relatively recent project right about I mean in its current form.

Yeah. And I think also it’s important to understand that the size of lobby is so important and so powerful uh because you have a soccer field and there’s only one team on the on the field. We don’t have a Palestinian lobby. they don’t have a pro Palestinian lobby. So in a way it’s uh it’s not surprising that they’re winning. They’re winning for the ruling class. They are not winning in public opinion. But uh again we we can talk about democracy in the political west. How is it that many of the policists pursued nowadays are not supported by the population such as militarization and dismantlement of the welfare state.

Yep. They they they go together. But I again maybe just to come back what this change tells us because I don’t know whether or not you saw this but what’s happening in uh Thailand at the moment. This is a very interesting case where uh Israeli tourists and long-term residents managed to um get so much attention on their behavior which has little or nothing to do with the Palestine issue, little or nothing with the the settlement of the of Palestine, but everything with the with the way that that now little mini colonies are forming on a couple of islands in in Thailand and that now that there’s an indigenous Thai opposition to that form not of colonialism but of of misbehavior and of abuse of the Thai um legal system because they managed to create like vehicles that would allow them to control majority stakes in uh in in land in property and so on which is supposed to to belong to ties 51% there’s a law about that and that created now an entire backlash although the Thai population used to be quite supportive of Israel especially after uh octo October 7th um whether I just wonder if the the way in which um the Israeli system is also like shaping minds at the moment whether that now is creating a a its own backlash in the in the wider world or maybe I’m over interpreting.

No, you’re not over interpreting. But let me give a a two-part answer. You’ve used the word colonial in a porative sense twice. Yes. It’s no longer working. Read Marco Rubio’s speech in Munich. He called on Western countries to be proud of their colonial past and colonial herit inheritance and so on. And this is the world we live in. Yes, in the past colonial was a bad word. I don’t think it is anymore in political west. Uh so we have to realize that by even you know if you call it a park height say Israel say well so so what uh it’s not an it’s not a matter of being shamed you cannot shame someone who is proud of what he’s doing so that’s what about colonialism so colonialis like colonialism you know I’ve written a lot about it and given interviews but you have to realize that this whole colonial enterprise of the 500 years of the west has been is being rehabilitated and in front of our eyes and it’s a very important

QUESTIONS:

1. Is Israel’s approach to dealing with dissent — calling critics “Anti-Semites” / “Terrorists” — being adopted by other countries

2. Who are the politicians who act without shame?

3. What is the best approach for dealing with shameless oponents?

4. What are examples of politicians disowning things at the individual level (settlers) while maintaining the larger system?

5. How many local police forces in your region have been directly or indirectly trained by Israel?

Gemini Summary

This episode of Neutrality Studies features host Pascal Lottaz interviewing emeritus professor Yakov Rabkin (University of Montreal) regarding the detention of academic Artyom Kirpichenok in Israel, followed by a broader critique of the Israeli justice system, Western foreign policy double standards, and Israeli political culture.

1. Detention of Artyom Kirpichenok

• Background: Kirpichenok is a 51-year-old Middle East specialist based in St. Petersburg and a dual Russian-Israeli citizen who previously studied and served in the military in Israel.

• Arrest: Upon arriving in Israel on August 2, he was detained immediately.

• Legal Conditions: He was held for 20 days before being allowed to see a lawyer. Official details remain minimal due to secret security trial protocols, though his lawyer indicated he faces espionage charges—allegations Rabkin dismisses as illogical given Kirpichenok’s residence outside Israel and public critical writing.

2. Security Courts and Israel’s Legal System

• Two-Tiered Justice: Rabkin argues that Israel’s judicial system is ideologically aligned with Zionism and applies distinct standards to security cases versus standard civil matters.

• Palestinian Imprisonment Statistics: Over 1 million Palestinians have been imprisoned by Israel since 1967, with military court conviction rates exceeding 99%.

• Dual Law in the West Bank: Israeli settlers are governed by civil law, while neighboring Palestinians are subject to military tribunals. Rabkin compares this ideological alignment within the judiciary to historic authoritarian regimes.

3. Western Double Standards & Geopolitical Role

• Selective Sanctions: Rabkin criticizes Western governments (US, UK, EU) for applying minor sanctions on individual settlers while leaving the state structures supporting settlements intact. He contrasts the rapid imposition of Western sanctions on Russia with the lack of structural sanctions on Israel over its military operations in Gaza.

• State Utility: Western elites tolerate Israel’s actions because Israel serves as an outpost in West Asia, testing ground, and exporter of population control, surveillance technology, and law enforcement training used by Western police forces.

4. Colonial Ideology and the “New Hebrew” (Muscular Jew)

• Rehabilitation of Colonialism: Rabkin notes a shift in Western political discourse where colonial inheritance is increasingly defended rather than criticized.

• Socialization: Israeli education emphasizes physical assertiveness and uncompromising strength (the concept of the “muscular Jew”), framing consideration as weakness. Rabkin links this systemic socialization to disruptive behavior by Israeli nationals abroad, citing examples in Amsterdam and Thailand driven by a culture of state-backed impunity.

Trump is the Most Powerful person of All Time

of them said, “You are all that matters to me.” Um, it’s about as good a summation. You get the idea. The Secret Service was quite alarmed by them, the these letters. And she’s still in the employee. Yes. Because what he will say, she’s ever present. She’s arguably, you know, she would be in more consistent presence in meetings than just about anyone. She sits um inside the room with a laptop open and she’s in every meeting. Yes. But so those three were there. We walk in, the president walks in, we’re looking around uh at the gold. Um and this is when he had started putting um uh challenge coins onto bare places in the wall. Uh and he comes in and he said, you know, very polite and says, “Nice to see you.” And in, you know, this was 17 days into the war in Iran and so we thought there might be like, you know, maps on his desk or and instead he’s got pictures of trees and he picks them up and he says, “I’m I’m I’m these are maple trees that he’s looking at. He’s picking maple trees for the White House grounds.” He says he’s good at picking trees. And then and then under there or maybe nearby are, you know, pictures of his ballroom designs and he’s talking about the columns. And so we that was about 10 minutes, I would say, right? Maybe 15. maybe 15. So we we were only given an hour, by the way. And so we sit down, we we ask a few questions, and then we asked him a question about power. And the question about power was something we had been talking about a lot. This was somebody who had just taken the country to war without consulting Congress. Um you know, had been blowing up boats uh uh coming up um from Central and South America uh without consulting Congress um just doing it. And so we knew that he had been talking to people about how powerful he saw himself in comparison to other US presidents. So we asked him a question about that, how he sees himself. And he he tells Natalie, “Go get the printouts.” And so he or whatever it was. So he she comes back in. She’s got these two printouts. They’re two pagers. And she hands them to us. They’re unmarked. They’re just, you know, it’s like you were printing out of your home printer. And he says that this was something put together by a historian. And the the the thesis is stated at the top which is that Donald Trump is the most powerful person who’s ever walked the face of the earth. And then it goes through a list of very notable figures um you know of history. Alexander the Great, Attilla the Hun, um the Caesars, Tamarlain, Hitler, Mao, Stalin. And he’s not looking at this through a moral lens. He calls them the top 10. The top 10. They’re the top 10. And the point that and he’s just reveling in and do you think he’s trolling you when he’s saying this? No, he was because he’s he’s shown this document to allies like he’s proud of the document. this this we we learned after we had seen this uh that he had been showing it to people like he was very proud of this and so and the idea was it goes on this document to say that uh he is more powerful than they are because of the American military because of his communications reach uh because he’s the president of the US uh and and uh that he’s willing to use power uh in a way that that not everyone of the US presidency that others don’t. That was the takeaway he wanted us to have. And the the kota to this was that it was not a historian. It was a guy who reads a lot, but who was was golfer Gary Player’s caddy um who I guess Player introduced Trump to him. Anyway, but they kept saying to us, he’s a historian. He’s atorian. We went down this rabbit hole finding the guy. But it was it was a remarkable moment. We have both spent a fair amount of time around Trump and listening to him describing himself in these terms historically speaks to frankly it was really our premise of how he is approaching this term. But he wants to leave an unerasable mark on the world and be seen as a capital G capital M great man of history. And the interesting part of that is throughout this reporting it was pretty obvious to us early on that he was far less responsive to domestic political pressures than he was in the first term. So in the first term, you know, poll numbers go down. He would be very reactive to that. You don’t think he’s being reactive right now? You don’t think that this this ceasefire in Iran is related to the midterms? It’s not black and white. I’m not saying he’s not at all reactive to it. And obviously this war very clearly he thinks is going badly, going poorly. I actually think it’s less about the midterms than just it’s just he’s kind of doesn’t have the patience for this long drawn out conflict and it’s not going well. Gas prices. We’re really low on munitions. It’s actually when you talk to people in the Pentagon, it’s a real problem. National crisis actually longrange munition. So it’s not black and white, but he’s far less um reactive to it. And you’ve seen that he’s more willing to take big risks than he was in the first term. He went to war in Iran without even talking to Congress. George W. Bush, as flawed as that decision-making process was, it went through Congress to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. He went and snatched Maduro, a sovereign head of state, out of his bedroom in the middle of the night in his pajamas. U sent Delta Force into Karacus. He didn’t talk to anyone in Congress before he did that. He didn’t talk to anyone in Congress before he launched a trade war against the whole world. So he is willing to take these risks that in the first term he simply was not willing to take. Okay. And then the then the the other question which relates to where he thinks his power lies is this idea that Congress and the Senate have not held him to account in the same way and how he uses his own influence to prevent them from doing that. So, we write extensively in the book about how he and his political team decided that they were going to lord over the Republican party with, to quote them, it’s their words, an iron fist. And Trump likes to talk about people ruling with strength and with an iron fist. And he has used that description for all manner of leaders, whether it was me espazito in Brooklyn, the democratic uh machine leader or uh Xihinping. But uh that is how they see the need to keep members of Congress, the Republican Congress in line. And they made they had one loss which was Matt Gates, which I still actually forget that he had been nominated to be the AG briefly. That was the one they pulled. When it became clear that Pete Hegsth might have problems, Trump and his allies and allied uh conservative groups went to town on Joanie Ernst, the Iowa senator who was expressing concerns. Suddenly, her divorce records were being talked about on Twitter. She was facing a primary challenger. She’s now not running again. He has ended the career of people who go against careers of people who go against him. It doesn’t mean they don’t leave a mark. It’s obviously, you know, you saw Bill Cassidy and Tom Tillis have attacked him, but um they’re both leaving office now and that’s they have put a premium on that. Um, I mentioned the idea of trolling earlier and I wanted to come back to it because there’s lots of things that he says that sometimes people take seriously and then other times people

Reporting Assumes False until proven True

that? [laughter] Um it was the hardest journalistic project either of us have done um by a very long distance. Uh we killed ourselves on this work and we actually left on the cutting room floor a painful amount of material like what thousands of p thousands of pages of reporting that we there was a 1% or 2% or 5% doubt in our minds about its accuracy or there was a dispute dis you know two different accounts of a conversation that we couldn't square and we just weren't by the way how did you decide who in this case given that you have all of these people who I imagine are trying to tell you all sorts of crazy stories and they all have their own motivations and in how did you decide who to trust? Well, trust is not even a word that we consider. Um we have a policy of assume false until proven otherwise. Literally, we've had that policy for quite a long time with Trump. And I think people have a misconception. Um, in the first term being a Trump reporter was basically walking around with a bucket and just catching the the vomit. You know, everyone was fighting, everyone was leaking. You would have an almost real time stream of consciousness out of the overall situation room. This term it could not be more different. There's a reason I think one of the reasons the book is resonating, hopefully there are others, is you haven't seen this kind of reporting inside the room from this administration. It hasn't really existed. And the reason is it's because it's hard. It's really hard to get inside those rooms. And so, a it's a lot of hard work. B, we don't take anyone's one, you know, there's no single source, one person's account. You don't get that from here. And we just worked really, really hard. There's I don't think there's a huge like secret or um glib line to describe it. It was just us working really really hard and benefiting from, you know, I've covered him now for 11 years consecutively. Maggie's covered him for even longer. you develop deep and wide source networks in that time and and they pay off. And also um you know there are people uh even though the most senior people it's a very tight disciplined in the circle there are people um who in the administration there's not that many of them but there are some who are alarmed by what they're seeing and and taking great risks in some cases to speak to us. So we take that responsibility very seriously of protecting those people. Um, and there's a lot of information in in the book that, you know, could get people in a lot of trouble and we take that responsibility very seriously. Um, so Vance, uh, Vice President Vance, as you know, has worried um, apparently aloud about this idea that there was taping going on in the situation room and that's where you got this stuff. Um, can you speak to any of that? No, we're just not going to talk about sources. No way, mate. No, [laughter] I had to try. Um but I would I would note that um this book has been out for three days. Uh some of the excerpts ran well ahead of time uh including on scenes in the situation room and and no one has disputed the reporting. Okay. So here's my question. You get this big sitdown interview with the president at the end of the process. Are you thinking he first of all, did you think he was going to meet with you? Did you not think he was going to meet with you? What did you when when when you're going into this having now worked on this as long as you did, how much did he know and his office know about sort of where you were coming in with this stuff and what was that meeting even like? Should I tell him the thing when I would test? Yes, you should.

QUESTIONS:

1. How much does the President think about the average American, as compared with his own Power and place in History?

2. Why does Trump like to talk about his power?

3. If Trump is so powerful, why does Trump have to tolerate critics?

4. Who are Trump’s role models?

5. How has Trump changed journalism?

How Palantir has become part of the killchain:

Kill chain (military)

The term kill chain is a military concept which identifies the structure of an attack. It consists of:

• identification of target

• dispatching of forces to target

• initiation of attack on target

• destruction of target^[1]

Conversely, the idea of “breaking” an opponent’s kill chain is a method of defense or preemptive action.^[2]

Military

F2T2EA

One military kill chain model is the “F2T2EA”, which includes the following phases:

• Find: Identify a target. Find a target within surveillance or reconnaissance data or via intelligence means.

• Fix: Fix the target’s location. Obtain specific coordinates for the target either from existing data or by collecting additional data.

• Track: Monitor the target’s movement. Keep track of the target until either a decision is made not to engage the target or the target is successfully engaged.

• Target: Select an appropriate weapon or asset to use on the target to create desired effects. Apply command and control capabilities to assess the value of the target and the availability of appropriate weapons to engage it.

• Engage: Apply the weapon to the target.

• Assess: Evaluate effects of the attack, including any intelligence gathered at the location.

This is an integrated, end-to-end process described as a “chain” because an interruption at any stage can interrupt the entire process.^[3][4]

Proposed terminology

The “Five Fs” is a military term described by Maj. Mike “Pako” Benitez, an F-15E Strike Eagle Weapons Systems Officer who served in the United States Air Force and the United States Marine Corps.

Designed to update the Kill Chain to reflect updated, autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems, the “Five Fs” are described in “It’s About Time: The Pressing Need to Evolve the Kill Chain”^[5] as follows:

• Find encapsulates the unity of effort of Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Operating Environment, matching collection assets to commander’s intent and targeted areas of interest. This inevitably leads to detections, which may be further classified as an emerging target if it meets the intent.

• Fix is doctrinally described as “identifying an emerging target as worthy of engagement and determines its position and other data with sufficient fidelity to permit engagement.”

• Fire involves committing forces or resources (i.e., releasing a munition, payload, or expendable)

• Finish involves employment with strike approval authorities (i.e., striking a target/firing directed energy/destructive electronic attack). This is similar to a ground element executing maneuvers to contact but then adhering to prescribed rules of engagement once arriving at the point of friction.

• Feedback closes the operational OODA loop^[6] with an evaluative step, in some circumstances referred to as “Bomb Damage Assessment“.

North Korean nuclear capability (Example)

A new American military contingency plan called “Kill Chain” is reportedly the first step in a new strategy to use satellite imagery to identify North Korean launch sites, nuclear facilities and manufacturing capability and destroy them pre-emptively if a conflict seems imminent. The plan was mentioned in a joint statement by the United States and South Korea.^[7][8]

QUESTIONS:

1. What are the downsides of having a killchain that responds in seconds or minutes across thousands of miles?

2. What are the downsides of integrating a private company like Palantir within that “killchain” process?

3. How could these systems be hacked, and what sort of exploits can we envision?

4. Does the public approve of AI-driven killchains that seek to “act first” in an automated way to sensors in signals in an automated way.

Last week, I referenced the demand for “Public Servants.”

People from Florida, Texas, and Lebanon are filming requests for help, and they are jokingly tagging Zorhan Mambani with their hope for change.

• What’s one problem that you wish someone in your town would fix?

Chapter 1: The phenomenon of Mayor Mamdani

Every single day I love Zorhan Mamdani a little more. [gasps and laughter] Would it be wrong of me to say that I’m jealous of New York right now? Mamdani, my power went out. I live in Lebanon is please come fix this mom. [laughter] Mamdani, who who are you who are you crushing on right now? Mamdani, right? And and what and what do you like about him? Guys, I just read a whole comment section planning to wear white and ties and doing acts of service on mom Donnie’s birthday in New York. Living in a city with an effective politician is one thing. Living in a city with an effective politician who cares about kids is another. Living in a city with an effective politician who cares about children and who people are excited to be around and see. That’s a whole different ball game. And Donnie, I need your help. Can you tell Walmart to add Apple Pay? Cuz this is my seventh time leaving Walmart with nothing.

Chapter 2: From local fixes to global fame

If you watched the first video, you already know how this started. New Yorkers began tagging Mayor Zorhan Mamdani on Tik Tok about potholes, and the potholes started getting fixed within hours. That alone was strange enough. Then it jumped to the Atlantic. In the middle of a blackout in Lebanon, one Tik Tocker pointed a phone at the dark ceiling and asked a mayor 8,000 km away to turn the power back on. A few seconds later, the lights came back. Nobody is claiming Mamdani controls the Lebanese electrical grid, but the clip spread anyway because by then tagging him had stopped being a New York joke. People in Cairo, Manila, London, and Koala Lumpur were already doing it, too, for reasons that go a lot deeper than potholes. So why has a guy who used to represent one neighborhood in Queens become the person strangers overseas call first when something breaks? Would it be wrong of me to say I’m jealous of New York right now? [gasps] Why do they get Mamdani? [laughter] Why they get Mamdani? Why can’t I have him, too? [laughter] Why can’t I have him too? Why can’t we have [laughter] him two to nothing?

Chapter 3: Direct appeals for public aid

Mamdani, we need your help. Look at this park. People come here to play volleyball, hang out, enjoy the community. But there’s a problem. The sports are getting old and construction has left the park blocked off. But this park has so much potential. So, Mamdani, we need your help. Can you help bring Atoria Park back to life? Like, share, repost, and tag him in the comments. And let’s make sure that he sees this video. Let’s show him how much this park means to the NYC community. And let’s see that story park. Mamdani, my power went out. I live in Lebanon is please come fix this month. Wow, man. Mamdani is so good. He’s so good. [laughter] Thanks, bro. That’s actually funny. And Mamdani, I need your help. Can you tell Walmart to add Apple Pay? cuz this is my seventh time leaving Walmart with nothing because they don’t add Apple Pay. We need you. I’m in Florida, but this New York, there’s Walmart in New York. So, please, Mamdani.

Chapter 4: The personal connection

Many New Yorkers have been calling Mamdani the mayoral Muslim Batman. You may have seen online that Mamdani has made an effort to fix and change certain issues due to public and online outcries from civilians. Some of these civilians have said that Mamdani has gone above and beyond helping local problems and started helping them in their personal lives. Hi, Mamdani. We need you to fix this. It’s at Kingston Highway. Um, and it’s been here for like since last September, I think. And it’s getting all of our feet wet and it’s just wasting water. Yeah, we need to get this I think. Mamdani, we need to get this fixed quick and we got to get it fast. and our feet are getting wet and this is pissing all of us off. So, Mamdani is getting wet. Mamdani, please walk in and get this fixed quick on Kings Highway, East 15th Street. Thank you, Mamdani. Have a great day. This message is for Mayor Mamdani. I have something for you to fix. Except I’m in Texas. Um, can you still fix us though, please? Mamdani, who who are you who are you crushing on right now? Mamdani. Right. And And what And what do you like about him? Everything, [laughter] right? I’m literally having a whole body feeling moment. I’m going to cry. [laughter] Living in a city with an effective politician is one thing. Living in a city with an effective politician who cares about kids is another. Living in a city with an effective politician who cares about children and who people are excited to be around and see, that’s a whole different ball game. I’m a social

Chapter 5: A focus on children and youth

worker who worked in foster care for years. And let me tell you something, I ain’t never seen nothing like that. I called from my daughter yesterday. She was so excited on the phone. She’s like, “Mamdani, Mamdani, guess what? Mamdani in the school. We can see him through the window.” Let me show you the picture, you guys. Child is giving him of his garment. These kids just love Kwami so much. I do have to come in with some more proof, y’all, because I was at an event with Mamdani and the first openly gay prime minister of the Netherlands. Yes, that the Netherlands. And it was just such a beautiful event because they were at a queer youth center. These youth have experienced things like homelessness and hardship. Look at how precious he is. But Mamdani backs it up with more than just like appearances. This is the same mayor who appointed Director Taylor Brown to the first LGBTQIA affairs office, y’all. And she was there. That’s my girl. Mayor, Mamdani, and a big PM. Listen to the youth talk about their creative projects. But y’all, I’m so honored to be in a city where they care about queer youth. And Mamdani loves the kids and the kids love Mamdani. That’s it.

Chapter 6: Economic success and policy

Mom Donnie, bestie, what is going on here? What is that? Oh my goodness. You can see dangerous. Where we at? Ralph and Mason making on that. That’s where we are in bedside. Huh, this is interesting. Zorhan Mamdani has just announced that New York’s economy grew by 4% in quarter 2, more than any other state. He then says, “Want to grow get your business off the ground? Hire only the best. There’s only one place to do it, New York.” Which is very interesting because I remember every millionaire and billionaire saying that New York was going to become a communist hole and that businesses were going to leave and that every single rich person was going to like die and like burn alive because they had money and like all the poors were going to like claw at them for all their all their all their money. But it had the best quarterly growth of any state economically and businesses are booming there under a democratic socialist. What? What? No, man. So, all those things were wrong and lies. They were lying. All the rich people were lying. They’ve never done that before. That’s not like them. [snorts] Crazy. Start back home because the New York requests got a lot more personal once people

Chapter 7: Requests and legislative impact

realized someone might actually be watching. An 8-year-old in Brooklyn named Maxim Kakitz asked Mamdanito reopen a playground in Bay Ridge that had been shut for almost 2 years. His parents posted it. A month and two million views later, park officials wrote back on his account, “We hear you loud and clear, Max. Enjoy the playground.” Mamdani later said the kid helped inspire a city-wide plan to speed up park repairs. An 8-year-old moved a city department that is not nothing. Then it got messier because not every request has a tidy ending. Two brothers who run a cafe in East Harlem, Raheem and Muhammad Dio, filmed themselves asking Mamdani for help after racking up $12,000 in fines and losing their permit. The city didn’t wave a wand, but a council member, a member of Congress, and someone from the mayor’s office all reached out after the video went up. The cafe still closed. Muhammad said it anyway. They’re listening to us. They are generally trying to help, and that gives me hope. That’s a lower bar than problem solved and people are still grateful to clear it. Somewhere between those two is the guy from Brooklyn who skipped infrastructure completely and just asked me for dating help. Mamdani responded with an actual list of spots for a good meet cute. Make of that what you will. Even elected officials have caught on. A Bronx Assembly member, Chantel Jackson, spent years filing the normal complaints about a dangerous blocked curb ramp through normal channels and watched nothing happen. She posted a video instead, tagged Mamdani and the Department of Transportation, and had a crew ripping up the sidewalk for a permanent fix 4 days later. Her verdict: Isn’t that insane what we have to do? When a sitting legislator decides Tik Tok works better than her own office, you know the format has teeth. It didn’t

Chapter 8: The global tag-a-thon

stay in New York for long. A comedian in Los Angeles asked her own mayor, Karen Bass, to mine her pothole. Bass played along, posting one video finding a parked car blocking the hole, then another showing a crew filling it in. The format had officially become bigger than the man who started it. Then it went fully global. A Tik Tocker gave Mamdani a deadline to build high-speed rail between Malaysia and Singapore. Apparently unaware the number seven train doesn’t even leave Queens. During a flood in Manila, someone begged him to make the rain stop. In Cairo, a group pleaded for trash cans, paved roads, and better transit, captioning it, “Summoning Mr. Mandani.” And in London, one resident live streamed a packed underground platform asking for more trains, while another wanted the tube fitted with air conditioning. None of these people live anywhere near his five burrows. All of them tagged him anyway, which raises the real question. What did a New York mayor do to make strangers on four continents treat his name like a help desk? Here’s the part that isn’t really about potholes.

Chapter 9: Frustration with bureaucracy

Almost everyone who has ever reported a problem to a government office knows the specific exhaustion of being transferred, logged, and forgotten. You call it in, you get a case number, and the case number goes nowhere. Chantel Jackson, an actual assembly member with actual access, said it best. Isn’t that insane what we have to do? If a sitting legislator has to become an influencer to get a curb fixed, it’s not hard to understand why an ordinary resident with no access at all would rather film a Tik Tok than sit on hold. That’s the frustration underneath the jokes. The affection comes from somewhere else. The moments where someone actually answered. Maxim’s playground reopened with a message using his own name. The Dialo brothers didn’t get their cafe saved, but they got real people from real offices calling them back. And Muhammad’s quiet, “That gives me hope,” says more than a government statement ever could. A mayor’s spokesperson put it plainly, saying, “The office treats a social post the same as a 311 call.” “Maybe that spin, maybe it’s sincere. Either way, people are choosing to believe the sincere version, and that choice is doing a lot of emotional work. Now take that same hope and ship it overseas where nobody can pretend Manny has any actual authority. The Cairo group asking for trash cans and paved roads isn’t confused about jurisdiction. The Manila flood post wasn’t really expecting weather control. The Lebanon blackout clip knew perfectly well that the power coming back on was a coincidence. What they’re actually doing is pointing at a version of government that listens then holding it up next to the one they’ve got. When a London commuter films a packed two platform and says, “We need more trains.” He’s not asking Mam Danny to run the underground. He’s asking why nobody running it locally will say something that direct back to him. That’s where the nickname comes in. Nobody in these clips has

Chapter 10: A shift in political expectations

called him the real Batman on camera, at least not yet. But the comparison fits the tone people are already using. The bat signal joke, the summoning captions, the running bit about him being somehow intercontinental. A mayor who answers a kid’s playground post isn’t a superhero. He’s closer to proof that the signal can occasionally work, which might be the more useful idea. None of this erases the actual work. Park crews, DOT workers, small business staffers, and city agency employees did the physical fixing every time, and they deserve the credit a viral caption rarely gives them. What’s changing isn’t government, it’s expectation. A generation that grew up watching institutions stall has started testing a theory. Maybe the fix isn’t a better form. It’s a bigger audience. Sometimes that theory holds up. Sometimes a cafe still closes anyway. But enough people have seen it work once that trying it no longer feels naive. That’s a strange kind of progress earned one pothole, one playground, and one deeply confused blackout coincidence at a time. So, back to that blackout in Lebanon for a second. The power coming back on had nothing to do with New York City Hall and everyone making the joke knew it perfectly well. What was real was the impulse behind it. The hope that somebody somewhere might actually be listening. That hope showed up in a Bronx curb ramp, a Brooklyn playground, and a two platform in London. And it’s not going away just because one mayor can’t personally fix all of it. What’s one everyday problem you wish someone in your own city would finally take seriously? Tell me in the comments.

QUESTIONS:

1. What sort of experience do people often have when they make a request of government?

2. What does this Mamdani joke say about the thirst for “Public Servants?”

3. What level of “success” is need to persuade the average

   1. “man on the steet

   2. small business owner

   3. Democratic party official

   4. large investor?

4. Is this just cosmetic change for the existing system?

5. Most of the things Mamdani is doing look like basic “meat and potatoes”, combined by high responsiveness — potholes, rent, port-a-potties. What do you think are the ambitious things that Mamdani is doing or promoting?

ELSEWHERE:

• @nycmayor on Instagram

• @NYCMayor on X.com

Chapter 4: Vance claim’s he’s “doing God’s work” even if that brings the end times

I’m trying to focus on is doing as much of God’s work as possible right now and if that leads to the end times. Okay.

Chapter 5: Trump regime calls Iranians “radical mullahs” but Vance is working to bring end times

Okay. So, this is a man who is part of a regime as you like to call it and I’ve I’ve copied you. um that talks about the radical mullahs in Iran and how you can’t trust them and they’re a bunch of the theocrats and fundamentalists and they’re not rational and they’re evil and um all the tropes about you know Muslims wanting to go to to um uh wanting to die uh so they get into heaven all the racist things like that right and yet here he is saying out loud that two things were stunning to me but I then I’m going to ask you about this like to To me, it was just stunning because one is he admits that he wants he’s fine with the end times coming and the other is that he sees this as a Christian value. Well, you know, we I’ve you you know my views. You know, when Zionism is uh when

Chapter 6:

Zionism is not a true Jewish or Christian value, Al-Qaeda is not Islam you have Jews saying that we’re not Zionists, then you can’t say Zionism is a Jewish f. When you have Zionist Christians who say when you have Christians who say I’m not Zionist, then you can’t say that Zionism is a Christian value. When you have Muslims saying that I don’t like al-Qaeda and ISIS, then you can’t say that Islam is ISIS or al-Qaeda. Right? So, uh, his values are obviously not the Christian values that I hear from my Christian friends or my Jewish friends or my Muslim friends.

Chapter 7:

Christ and Moses would oppose genocide and uh they they support genocide and Christ or Moses uh they uh they would be you know the first to condemn and stand up against genocide right so uh they are the enemies of Christ and Moses in in in Shia Islam and in Islam we do

Chapter 8:

Islam says people have to protect the oppressed, not kill them also have the end times but human beings areo supposed to strive to support the oppressed and to to bring an end to oppression. In the Quran, it says that the inheritors of the earth are the oppressed, right? So it’s okay to I mean we no one knows when the end times are and and but the point is that your responsibility as a human being I mean if you don’t you know as a as a moral human being Christianity Muslim Islam Judaism you know all religions aside as a human being your responsibility is to is to is to oppose uh aggression and and murder and slaughter. or whoever it comes from wherever it wherever it comes from all right not bring it not bring it about not endorse it not close your eyes uh in the face of it so you know it depend you you know they’re

Chapter 9:

Ends don’t justify the means they’re to say that okay we are going to bring in all these Jews into Palestine so that we will have the rapture meaning like millions of them will die that is you know they used to say you know the ends justify the means right you know and They would often say that the communists are like that. They they would they end with well that’s this that’s that’s and that is utterly immoral. So you know whether you’re ISIS or you’re al-Qaeda or you’re Christian Zionist or a Jewish Zionist or you’re I don’t know a Hindu uh extremist or whatever you are the ends don’t justify the means. You cannot reach moral uh you know morality through immorality right? I cannot, you know, I cannot slam, I cannot lie about you and undermine you and hurt you even though I’m lying for some greater good. No, it doesn’t work that way. So you you you when you when you see these sort of things, you know that you know and it’s it’s amazing to me and it’s amazing to all of us to see like how some people would support ISIS when like they were slaughter you recall when they

Chapter 10:

The height of immorality were taking all these people who they captured by a river and just shooting them in the head and throwing them and like a,700 people and then we saw how a lot of people supported that online or in Syria when they were sending ISIS through Turkey and then Jordan into, you know, into the country and they were burning people alive or and then a lot of people supported that or pretended that all these were like fringe groups and all that justifying it. That’s the height of immorality. Well, the same is true in Gaza. The same is true elsewhere. So Vance, in my opinion, he’s an he’s an my opinion, he’s an enemy of Christianity, just like Netanyahu is an enemy of Judaism.

Chapter 11:

Vance is an enemy of Christianity — “Netanyahu is an enemy of Judaism”

QUESTIONS:

1. What does JD Vance think is the “Lord’s Work” he is doing?

2. What leads JD Vance to think that his work may bring about the “end times”

3. What do Christian and Muslim perspectives on the end times have in common?

4. Can “End Times” politics be compatible with good governance, pursuit of the greater good, and responsibility, or does it always lead to extremes?
   

   Thanks for reading openpolitics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Transcript:

23:02

of a referendum on how Trump has done and Trump is willfully ignoring the fact that he is probably the least popular president in since they started keeping records. But being trounced at the polls uh in November is going to be not only devastating for the Republican party, but it’s going to be de devastating for a man whose ego is basically bigger than his brain. Um and so uh this is this in part is really affecting um how some of the Republicans are actually approaching Trump now. So, we um last week we had the unheard of process where a bunch of Republicans joined with the Democrats to deny further military action um to Trump to to require war powers um uh authorization by the

AI: Brave:

What can AI discern, using only the phrase ..

Q: “a man whose ego is basically bigger than his brain”

A man whose ego is bigger than his brain exhibits egomania or an inflated rogue ego, where an exaggerated sense of self-worth crowds out executive function and reality. Psychologically, this is not merely conceit but a fragile ego driven by insecurity, trauma, or a need for validation, leading to behaviors that are self-absorbed, defensive, and lacking in accountability.

Key characteristics and impacts include:

• Lack of Self-Awareness and Accountability: He rarely accepts criticism, refuses to apologize, and believes he is infallible, often dismissing others’ opinions as attacks.

• Social and Emotional Deficits: He dominates conversations, listens poorly, and prioritizes his own image over genuine connection, making deep relationships difficult or impossible.

• Superficial Success: While he may appear confident or successful on the surface, his ego is often a mask for fear of inadequacy, keeping him stuck in superficial achievements and preventing authentic growth.

• Negotiation and Interaction: Dealing with such individuals requires tactical empathy, showing deference, and avoiding direct challenges to their ego, which they perceive as hostile threats.

This condition is distinct from a strong ego, which involves healthy self-esteem and confidence without the need to diminish others or deny reality.

The Healthy Ego

But before I continue to put the Ego in its place, I really should give it its due. The Ego, in its healthy form, serves a necessary function, and we couldn’t get by without it.

The executive Ego that I am referring to helps you to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and helps you to act in accordance with that reality. When functioning well, it doesn’t use denial or avoidance when things get scary. It helps you to tolerate frustration and stress, delay gratification, restrain overly selfish desires, and manage internal conflicts well enough that you don’t go apoplectic when the waiter brings you ceviche instead of cerveza.

It gets you to pay your taxes, shovel snow, and brush your teeth no matter how boring those things are. It will get you a car, put gas in the tank and drive within the lines.

But it has no idea where to drive or what it’s driving for.

It’s kind of a bummer, but the reality is that we have to spend a couple of decades building up an Ego, only to have to trim it down to size eventually.

The Unhealthy Obsessive-Compulsive Ego

The Inflated Rogue Ego is the embodiment of the unhealthy obsessive-compulsive personality. The compulsive part fights for order even when it’s not necessary. The obsessive part likes to think, and it likes to think that life is all about control. The emotions that it values most are those of mastery and righteous anger, not so much peace, love and that feeling you get when you savor a piece of finely crafted caramel chocolate truffle.

Gratification is allocated strictly on a morals-and-merit-based system.

Like any dictator, the unhealthy Ego convinces you that it can solve all of your problems if you hand things over to them, and then it conveniently forgets that it said it was going to serve. Typically, in the case of those with obsessive-compulsive personality, it says that it can save you by fixing that disturbing doubt about whether you are good–morally good. It says, “Just let me run your life with discipline, planning, and perfectionism and all will be well.” Instead of serving you, it demands that you serve it. It promises protection but delivers depression.

QUESTIONS:

1. What you think of AI’s response to the query about a man whose ego is larger than his brain?

2. Were you aware that a healthy ego helps you tolerate frustration and stress, delay gratification?

3. What would society be like if youth were taught to recognize the difference between a healthy and unhealthy ego?

4. What do you think of the suggestions for Negotiation and Interaction: Dealing with such individuals requires tactical empathy, showing deference, and avoiding direct challenges to their ego, which they perceive as hostile threats?

1:10:22

.. And fundamentally, we need lawmakers to actually be educated on how technology works. And I don’t mean just, oh, we need to make sure they know what LLM can do. They need real understanding and also a financial understanding. And fundamentally across the board, this is not just legislation wise. We need a better understanding and clarity into the actual financials of these companies. We need to reform private company valuations. And this is a really specific one, but I have a point. We need to make it illegal for private companies to disclose something called annualized run rate. This is when a company says we annualize a period, usually a month, but they never define it. And they say this* 12 equals this. Anthropic said they have $65 billion in annualized run rate. They don’t say what period or how that’s calculated. That should be illegal. That should no longer be illegal. You shouldn’t be able to do it. We need to stop thinking of kill switches and big sexy ideas. And we need to think of the practical ways to stop this industry doing the most harmful things. What I am discussing would be more effective than any AI slowdown. It would actually immediately stop these companies from acting in ways that are malevolent. It wouldn’t be perfect, but these would be changes that would quickly rein them in. And I do overall think we need to massively change how private companies disclose stuff. The public relations industry has through the AI industry allowed genuine what I think will eventually be seen as bordering on financial crimes to happen.investors to be misled. All because we have a media ecosystem that fails its readers, fails its listeners, and fails the average person. Ed Zitron is the CEO of Easy Primary Research and writer of the newsletter I read all the time. Where is your ed at? We will link to it in our show notes. Also, thanks to Matt Stler of the American Economic Liberties Project, whose recent piece that we just republished at the lever, you can see it at levernews.com. Ed, thanks so much for taking time today. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to another episode of Lever time. [music] Lever time is a production of The Lever. This episode was produced by Natalie Bondorf. Our theme music is by Nick Byron Campbell.

QUESTIONS

1. Do you agree that an AI “slowdown” is desirable?

2. This seems like nabbing Al Capone for tax fraud. How often is the “solution” to a problem found in a round about way like this?

3. Are there other accounting “solutions” to American problems?

Yes, research and legal data indicate that individuals on the autism spectrum (ASD) are disproportionately vulnerable to being mistakenly suspected, wrongly arrested, or falsely charged with crimes.

Although autistic individuals are statistically no more likely—and in many contexts less likely—to commit crimes than neurotypical individuals, studies show they are roughly seven times more likely to interact with the criminal justice system. These interactions frequently lead to misunderstandings, wrongful charges, or false confessions due to distinct behavioral and social factors.

Key Drivers of Wrongful Charges and Misunderstandings

• Misinterpretation of Social & Nonverbal Cues: Law enforcement officers rely heavily on body language to gauge guilt or deceit. Behaviors common in autistic individuals—such as avoiding eye contact, maintaining a flat affect, laughing inappropriately due to anxiety, or responding with delayed/literal answers—are often misinterpreted as guilt, evasion, or lack of remorse.

• Sensory Overload Misconstrued as Resistance: Police interactions typically involve flashing lights, loud sirens, raised voices, and sudden physical contact. These triggers can cause intense sensory overload, leading to “stimming” (repetitive movements), freezing, or a meltdown. Officers unformed in neurodiversity often misread these involuntary panic responses as resisting arrest, intoxication, or active aggression.

• Vulnerability to Coerced or False Confessions: Autistic individuals are statistically far more vulnerable to making false confessions during interrogations. High compliance with authority figures, difficulty anticipating long-term legal consequences, susceptibility to leading questions, and a desire to escape high-stress environments lead many to agree with false police narratives just to end the interview.

• Social Naivety and Exploitation: Autistic individuals can be coerced, manipulated, or framed by peers or online actors to carry out illegal tasks (such as transporting illicit goods or handling cyber-hacking scripts) without fully understanding the criminal context or malicious intent.

• Misconstrued Fixations and Threat Assessments: Intense specialized interests (e.g., chemistry, transportation networks, or security systems) or blunt, unfiltered language can be misread by authorities as preparation for a crime or a literal threat when no criminal intent exists.

Systemic Context & Interventions

In recent years, disability rights groups and legal scholars have pushed for specific safeguards, including specialized autism training for law enforcement, the mandatory presence of an advocate or support person during questioning, and pre-trial diversion programs tailored to neurodivergent individuals.

Tim’s Comment:

• I suspect that people on the Autism spectrum are disproportionately chosen as patsies (framed) to take the fall for a crime others committed.

QUESTIONS:

1. Do you agree that people on the Autism spectrum are disproportionately likely to be charged with a crime?

2. What do you think about the theory that they are targeted for framing to take the fall for a crime that others did?

3. Do you think that police ought to be required to interrogate and consider evidence against someone the suspect is on the Autism spectrum?

4. Would it be useful to look backwards to see if the government has wrongly convicted people because it misinterpreted the behavior of those on the spectrum?

RELATED:

Jan 6 Pipe bombing Suspect: Brian Cole Jr

• NBC: D.C. pipe bomb suspect Brian Cole diagnosed with autism, attorneys say in motion for release

Just Human

Reading J5 Pipe Bomber Brian J. Cole Jr.'s Interview and Confession

At 7:06 a.m. on December 4, 2025, Brian J. Cole Jr. was arrested while walking to a 7-Eleven near his home. The FBI took Cole to a staging area and then to the Washington Field Office, where they interviewed him…

Listen now

22 days ago · 22 likes · 9 comments · Just Human

• Transcript, (pdf) Courtlistener.com

• Autism Within the Criminal Justice System

• Cambridge: Autistic defendants are being failed by the criminal justice system

11:59

We’re at a moment where um I think Americans want something that that speaks to this moment that’s different, which is how the Republican party was born. And so I think mom donni is one version of that. Um that that people want leaders who they feel in one way or another are in the moment or up to the moment. And but you’re right that um for someone to be doing that who is the mayor of a major city, it does suggest interesting things about the government and the government guess what being ours like you would actually call him a public servant.

How how how many other politicians right now would you apply that to? It’s not I mean there are many locally but but people whose name you know we know that’s sort of out there being used all the time. We you know we certainly don’t use it anymore for national politicians.

I mean as as you and I were talking beforehand Congress isn’t even meeting but but but not Yes. And I want to talk about that. But but there are there are national people who are public servants for sure who’ve taken huge hits being you know and I I mean let’s start with Andy Kim for example senator from New Jersey.

So but but I would even I mean you could make an argument about a lot of people and why they are in why they’re doing what they’re doing and um but the I think what jumps out to me there is that it did not it used to not I’m going to put this badly. There has been a period in which being a public servant said you were a sucker and that you know really what politics was about was sort of being savvy and getting stuff for your people. And you know I think of the way that the u people like uh Sarah Palin sort of d tried to drag Barack Obama over the coals for being a community organizer or even the idea that the words social justice warrior was actually a compliment right until very recently.

Well, this is like diversity is bad, equity is bad, justice [laughter] maybe those maybe those people have always been there, but they are um that but you know they tended not to get the limelight because they just seemed like suckers. I guess I don’t know.

That’s interesting. I mean, I what I was thinking of obviously was um certainly Trump um who’s not only [clears throat] not a servant of any kind, but he thinks he’s a king, but um also some of the MAGA people in Congress who you know, if if Congress isn’t meeting, if you’re not willing to have town halls with your constituents, if you appear to have no interest in their interest at all, then yeah, you’re not thinking of yourself as a public servant, never mind calling yourself a public servant. But you’re right. There are many people who are acting that way. Um, and who would probably accept that label. So, um, I agree with with your correction to my big sweeping statement. Um, but you know, I think it’s kind of tied up with accountability where I keep I always say we’re in a crisis of accountability where no one wants to be or often is being held accountable for anything. And public servant goes with that. Public servant, the public is a big part of it, right? us. So public servant means, you know, serving our interests, which means they’re accountable to us for what they do. And that’s not generally speaking how a lot of the government is behaving right now. That mammi is kind of in a different model as I said before, but um I think that’s some of what’s happening right now.

But but isn’t that actually what gave us our great reform periods is finally people standing up and going the government should be working for us?

Well, right. I mean, so that so that’s um related to what you said before about the economic changes and and having these big moments. I always and I think these things probably go together. When I talk about the 1850s, I talk about the 1960s. Um I talk about the 1790s. Um I talk about and now I talk about those as moments when um generally speaking Americans knew there was some big issue on the line that that the United States was in a place where 1850s obviously slavery was that issue. 1960s civil rights is that issue. 1790s actually democracy was the issue in which Americans were learning how loud a voice they could have and the people in power thought the less the better. So I’ve always when I talk about that I say there are moments when people can feel that there’s some major fundamental aspect of Americanness that’s under debate and that that makes people that riles people up. It brings people into the conversation who maybe aren’t there all the time. Obviously that could affect the economy as well.

So maybe maybe my cultural approach and your economic approach do they go together in this way? I I would personally I would say that it’s the economic thing that wakes people up to recognize that the government isn’t working for them. That it’s when you start to feel like you no longer have a shot at the American dream, which I would argue that is fundamentally um for most people the idea that if you worked hard, you would be able to live and support your family and they’d be better off than you were. And when you stop thinking that that you can believe that that’s the case when it isn’t for a long time, but then when you finally realize it, you get really pissed off.

But that maybe we can work backward because like you and I both have been all over the rising authoritarianism now for literally decades, you know, since at least George W. Bush. And nothing seemed to grab people. I mean, I I’m exaggerating, but but things like Abu Grae and, you know, the fact we were we were putting people in in third party torture detention centers and all that stuff, nobody seemed to pay any attention at all. And now they are.

And what do you think our trigger issue is now?

Well, I mean, what is you said there’s slavery, there’s democracy, there’s I would say the concentration of wealth in the 1890s. What do you think our center issue is now that people are waking up?

Well, I know what I would I know what I would say the answer is, but I actually don’t think this is what people are responding to. Although maybe now they are. For a long time, I’ve said, you right now we’re deciding about democracy.

Um and and by democracy in part I’m talking about what you’re talking about which is who’s the government actually working for? Does the government represent us? Um but I I don’t know if I’m satisfied with that answer because I don’t I’m first of all I think a lot of people have tuned out that message because it feels kind of ethereal. So um you know it’s democracy related to that. It’s race related to that. It’s um you know as you put it earlier like you know can people still get the American dream? It’s oligarchy. It’s all of these things are happening right now. So, I don’t know right now if there is one issue or do we sort of bundle it all under democracy. I do think that um Americans feel at this moment that in one way or another [snorts] things are going in a way that they’re not happy with and that that there’s some fundamental aspect of the United States and what it is that is at stake. And whether they want to call it democracy, whether they want to call it um you know out of control racism, whatever people, however they define it, I and and that’s true for the MAGA people too, right? That they’ve decided that you know the crazy crazy Democrats and liberals like what are they doing? It’s not American. That somehow now we all feel that we’re fighting about something that’s fundamentally American. I don’t think that’s necessarily true, but I think a lot of people think that.

Well, one of the things I I would argue that every one of these things we are talking about is ultimately about democracy. What is this country supposed to do? But it takes different shapes. And the reason I asked that is because and the reason that I you know I know you’ve never heard of this word, but there’s this thing called contingency.

Oh my gosh, what a great word that is. I will have to use that word sometimes.

I just put my trademark on it. Joanne, I’m teasing Joanne because like like I use it every called Contingency, but like you can’t get out of a conversation with Joanne without talking about contingency.

My students, you should have you should have t-shirt.

You should have swag made. [laughter] I should have contingency swag.

Think about that a little.

But the the protests against data centers really came kind of out of the blue for me. It was not like if you had said to me a year ago, and mind you, you know, my friend Nancy, your friend too, um went on a trip through Virginia a couple of years ago and she came back and she said, “Oh, Heather, you just don’t have any idea about what’s happening with these giant centers.” And and I was like, “Really?” Because I live in Maine. I don’t see any, you know, I I I heard it and I She’s always great on on everything, but it didn’t process for me as something that could become a big deal.

Right. That’s true. And and I wonder if these protests against data centers are symbolic of people are protesting the data centers because they’re loud and they’re taking all our water and all our energy and all those sorts of things, but because they are the symbols of the billionaire oligarchs who are trying to take over our society right there in our towns. And it’s a place where instead of going, I really don’t like Open AI, you can say, get this piece of crap out of my backyard. And and when I think about this moment and where American political anger is, I don’t think it’s just over the data centers. I think the data centers are the symbol of why are you taking away my neighbors? What you know, right? the same way that the petition campaign was not just about petitions.

I think you’re right. But what I was saying earlier is I don’t know if a lot of Americans are thinking about that as being about democracy. I agree with you in one way or another. It’s about democracy. But when people are saying, “I don’t want those data centers in my backyard. What gives you the right to do it?” And then even to close off public hearings about them, right? That was the last thing that the EPA was trying to do is like, oh, and now you don’t even get to have input about it. People understand that that’s affecting them. They don’t like it. They feel that in that sense government isn’t protecting their interests, that the oligarchs are trampling on them. My point right now is and it’s better than it used to be, but I still somehow think that, you know, democracy is at risk doesn’t ring powerfully enough with people as it should or as I think it should as a political historian. So that’s that’s what I’m hedging on. I agree with you. I think it’s all about democracy. And I think if people thought about the fact that it’s about government’s proper relationship with you and the kind of power you should have over the government and that that’s democracy, then I I think that would be clear. But sometimes I’m not sure that that’s clear. Sometimes I’m afraid that democracy feels like an ism to some people.

But but think about take us back to the revolution. um not the revolutionary war um which the distinction between that and the revolution in people’s minds before the revolutionary war that the framers made founders made um most Americans didn’t care at all right they just wanted things to settle down you know you had the patriots and you had the loyalists but the whole middle of the country were just like would you please all just leave us alone right

well yes and no I mean it depended kind of like the data centers if something near them was being affected by the laws coming down from parliament that were taxing things and doing things that they hadn’t done before that that came down to people in the middle of the country. If for example um they wanted to buy a newspaper and now it was going to be a lot more expensive because it needed to be on stamped paper or um they had a deed to the land that they were on. now like just even the deed was going to be expensive because it had to be on you know the stamp act is is a thing that I talked about for your series that that got people thinking about they didn’t call it rights necessarily always the average person thinking about their rights under the British government and how they suddenly felt that they weren’t they were being violated and they had no way to object act, right? People when people think no taxation without representation, they focus on the taxation part and they don’t focus on the representation part. And that was a big part. Uh so, you know, I wouldn’t say they’re just saying leave us alone. Some were for sure, but I would say there was kind of a brewing sense that, you know, we’re treated lesser then and we have no way to be angry about it. that that wasn’t just in cities and certainly wasn’t just elite people.

So that’s actually really helpful because one of the things that I have seen on social media are complaints that it took the diesel crisis to get people to pay attention to the truly horrible things that are happening in this country and have been happening as as I say for at least two years. Um, and people are like, “Yeah, all this stuff was happening, but it took the diesel for cost of diesel going through the roof for you to care about any of that.” And that’s actually really interesting because what the Stamp Act did, you know, as you just laid out, is it meant that even if you weren’t at a place where you could see um, you know, a patriot being harassed by loyalist soldiers or whatever, um, you couldn’t get away from it. And one of the things about this diesel uh the you know the price of diesel going through the roof and now Trump saying well I’m gonna start the war again after the midterms which is um his reported to be his inclination um by a major newspaper last night. I’m not going to say which one because I’m afraid I’ll get it wrong. But um the idea that he’s basically saying I’m going to keep it quiet till the midterms because you all hate it. But then as soon as midterms are over I’m going to do more. that idea that you can’t get none of us in this country can get away from the results of the rising cost of diesel for home heating of oil but also everything we buy

I was going to say anything that’s being moved shipped yes so it’s sort of like our own stamp act well right and and that’s you know what the stamp act did and it was the first sort of thing in the what becomes the leadup to the revolution although they don’t know that at the time is it brought what was a brewing controversy about colonial rights down to everyday citizens and it did it in a way that spread widely. So it it woke people up to the idea that something was happening and it wasn’t just where you were and that’s the you’re right the diesel thing is doing the same thing that suddenly it’s not just like it’s some government thing it’s about politics it’s about parties it’s about no it’s actually come all the way down. It’s pretty much about all of us in one way or another. It’s going to shape or affect us in one way or another. And yeah, that becomes an equalizing experience. That becomes a moment that doesn’t feel as though it’s about politics. It feels as though it’s about, you know, everyday things in a way that really matters. It’s something that brings people together, which is one of the reasons why the Stamp Act really mattered in the leadup to the revolution. Yeah. So, I actually really like and certainly would not have made the connection between how people feel about diesel uh and the price of diesel and how they feel about suddenly every piece of paper needing a stamp on it, which is a way of taxing it. I haven’t made that connection, but you’re right. It makes it every day. It it makes it part of your life. You can’t get away from it. Um and you don’t feel that you have any power to affect change.

Well, especially considering that we had neither us nor our representatives had any say about this Warren run and we appear not to to continue not to have any say in it and that I mean but the next piece of that as you’re saying that which I think is right I am looking like yesterday I think I’ve totally lost track of time um you know there the news broke that Russell vote who’s the head of the office of management and budget is planning and the Trump administration planning not to distribute another billion dollars of um appropriations that Congress agreed to. Congress in Congress the only group that can decide how to spend our money. And of course, Johnson has thrown the House out of session. So there’s nothing people can do to complain. And then after the midterms, we’ve got the pieces of that budget reconciliation bill that the Republicans passed back in July of last year that’s going to dramatically affect Medicaid, which is going to turn around and, you know, all those cuts. We’re going to lose even more of our care. And our we’ve already lost our birthing center uh in in in my whole area, the the closest hospital where you can have give birth is an hour away. and that um I I wonder as we watch these pieces come closer and closer to people’s lives, what comes next if you think about the revolution and the revolutionary war and then you look at the fact that Trump is it’s almost like he’s congealing that as he loses power in some areas he lashes out in others and he’s using the places where he still has running room to do stuff like threatening Cuba again and I just h how do we how do we regain power as of the people without a cataclysm right um I don’t well before I even think about that I do want to make clear the implication of everything that we’re talking about and that you were just saying so folks Congress is us as far as branches of government go they’re all us particularly we vote for presidents and we vote for our representatives. But, and it’s obvious, but I feel the need to say it anyway, when the executive branch or the president or whoever else is floating around in that sphere ignores what Congress has the right to do and Congress MAGA congressmen also appear to have no interest in doing what they supposed what they are supposed to do. What they are literally saying is that we don’t matter. That is what it means. we the people don’t matter. They’re just dismissing us. Now, back to your other question. What do we do to address that? How do we address that? I mean, you know, in the long sweep of American history, often, this is not going to be um it’s not going to seem like a solution because we’ve been saying this for a long time. often there’s some kind of huge mass protest because there there’s always and this was true before we were a country because colonies colonists have a very strong sense or certainly British colonists have a very strong sense of what they would do because colonies have charters and so they understood their rights they understood what their colony was they probably knew in one way or another the people who were governing them and thus when they felt that they suddenly had no voice that was real. That wasn’t like, you know, that darn Congress. It was like, hey, as a colonist, I’m do this or that or the other thing. And now I can’t protest. So, there were all of these protests and sometimes rebellions, you know, Bacon’s rebellion when these uh gentrified young men thought they were due land, they should get land, and the government wasn’t serving them in the way that they wanted it to. So, they rose up. Um, generally speaking, again and again and again, there’s one in New York in the 18th century. Um, you can sort of march through time, you know, the whiskey rebellion, the there are a whole series of these and rebellion sort of sweeps a lot of what it is under the rug. But these are moments when people said, “Wait a minute, we’re we have not only are things not fair, but we can’t do anything about it.” And that’s where generally, who knows about now, but generally speaking, Americans have a strong sense that it’s their right to be able to speak up and affect things. Now, right now, not operating really well. So, your question is what happens next? And I don’t know the answer to that. But but I think if you look at the whole sweep of American history, no matter how people are what words people are using for it, they have a sense that they have certain rights. And when the government is violating those rights, if they don’t feel that there’s a way that they can protest, they get angry. Maybe and maybe they have a mass protest, maybe, you know, whatever or a mass boycott or whatever. But that’s a that’s a and gripe is too trivializing. That’s a an outrage that that Americans and even British colonists who were in North America have always felt. They’ve been very tied to their understanding of a system that in one way or another should represent them in some way. even even parliament although that becomes a big issue over time. So I’m trying to think here how you avoid a conflration and the there we of course we have you’ve just outlined the answers to that. We’ve got the 1890s, the 1930s and the 1960s when especially rising politicians recognized the divorce between the ideals of the country and the way they were being executed and recognized the extraordinary power of the people that that is growing. They’re starting to complain in a really big way in each one of those three periods. [snorts] And they they adjust the government to the desires of the people. And we get the progressive era, we get the New Deal government, we get the civil rights movement. And I mean, this is your field. Doesn’t it doesn’t it seem like the answer to that is making it freaking clear that we’re really pissed off?

Yeah. and and and then you look right now and one of the things that um that I mean you’re seeing all through the news all sorts of Republicans jumping ship from Trump right now, which I don’t believe. I mean, I think they say anything they can at this point to get elected, but the fact that they feel obliged to do that. Um that’s that to me is a significant marker. Not that they’re going to do it, but the fact that, you know, Susan Collins after this thing about the billion dollars last night came out and called it illegal. Well, she’s under huge pressure, not only because she’s unpopular and Trump is unpopular in Maine, but also because she’s implicated in this pretty major scandal, uh, pay-to-play scandal. So, the fact that she’s like, uhoh, I got to do something to make the people happy. I will call this illegal when she, you know, she’s just been concerned now for a very long time. Yes. Um I I thought that again I don’t think for a second her voting will change or anything, but the fact that they’re starting to hear it, rising politicians hear it, too.

Well, right. And obviously it’s tied to an election, right? You know, I mean, that’s why they’re hearing it. And it is true. It’s noteworthy that regardless of whether people actually are backing away from Trump or not, they’re acting that out because they suddenly have to think about the public because there’s going to be Exactly. So suddenly we matter and our opinion matters. So they will perform what they feel they need to perform to get our votes and then they will go back to doing whatever the hell they want to do. So on the one hand, you know, it shows you why our votes are so important. It’s obvious. It should be obvious to us, but you know, they are bowing down to the importance of our votes. It’s also why they’re trying so hard to repress them and negate them and everything else that they’re doing. But what we’re watching is people saying again and again and again that we actually have the power and thus they have to please us for a little window of time. [snorts] Well, so but but I’m making the case um yeah, I’m on the road now. I’m making the case that this is about the midterms for sure, but the midterms are not going to be the magic shift. You know, Trump or JD Vance will still be in power and this is going to be momentum that is building. And I I always go back to the election of of uh 1930, you know, after Herbert Hoover gets elected in a landslide in 28. Then then he takes office in 29. There’s the crash in October of 29. And in the midterms of 30, uh, the Democrats make huge gains, but they don’t win control. It’s actually they get control because I think 14 Congress people die, man, at that point die between um the election and when Congress goes into session, which is almost a year later. It’s the elections in November, they go into session in December the next year. And um um and so at that point, the Democrats get more power. But um but it’s not really till 32 when you see the the landslide for FDR that things really turn around. So that momentum has to keep building. Well, right. And that’s I want to reiterate that because you’re totally right. A and it and it many of us will not be feeling that, right? because we’re so angry and what’s happening feels so wrong that it feels as though there should be a big shift now. We’re too outraged and it’s too corrupt. How can there not be a big shift? And what’s important about what you just said is if there isn’t, and there very well may not be, it’s momentum. What we’re looking at is is moving ahead, pushing things ahead. So, you know, I I would urge people if it isn’t a massive blue wave in the way that they want it to be, not to think, “Oh, well, we lost. It’s over.” What we’re watching now, and what you and I were just talking about, was evidence of it. What we’re watching now is the the power of people who object to what’s happening making itself felt in one way or another. And that’s it’s going to take some time for that to build up and and have a big impact, but it matters that it’s happening. It it matters big time that it’s happen

QUESTIONS:

1. What image or person do you envision when you think of a public servant?

2. Who do you think of as the “public servants” of today?

3. Do you agree that the “public servant” has been seen as a “sucker” previously?

4. What hope do you have for a rivival of public servanthood?

15:34

Britain needed the Countries that supplied its Resources to be Non Democratic

Yeah. I well I think two things I think first of all the idea that capitalism the postwar capitalism was kind of the best model. I think that is something that you can only really say from the perspective of Europe and North America.

that those conditions in Europe and North America was heavily reliant upon

the emiseration of people in the global south. You know, the NHS was built off

of cheap migrant labor and also the rents and debts that were taken from

the former colonies. You know, there’s a reason why the same government that built the NHS in Britain basically

thwarted the possibility of there to be a similar kind of social democracy in Iran at the same time because there was kind of there was a mutual

interdependence between that because capitalism had to extract from
somewhere. So I think that’s that kind

Political Systems that Resist Consolidation of Power

I think when it comes to you know any political system can go any economic system can go in in a particular direction I think that that obviously you know no there’s no you can’t design a system that is completely unable that will never ever evolve into something worse but I think this is where you can have systems that do not incline towards consolidating power and this is where the questions around you democratic ownership of workplaces, democratic stake in the economy and also understanding the economy to not be a beast that operates on its own but is a is a political economic system and therefore there has to be democratic systems that override um whatever we are told is the economic lo the logic of a particular economy. So what my argument is that capitalism has in its DNA a much stronger um kind of impulse towards the consolidation of power and and e economic and political power because it is ultimately centered around the concept that a small number of people should own the means of production. Um and that the vast majority of people should be workers who sell their labor to those capitalists. Whereas a kind of a socialist system is tries to kind of have an internal guard rails around by having democratic ownership and saying, you know, we’re not going to have a small number of people own the means of production. The means of production are going to be collective. Now, can forms of power and forms of corruption emerge in that system? Absolutely. But I would say it’s less likely um in one than in the other, which is where it’s actually always been about a small number of people um owning capital and owning the means of production. That’s kind of the definition. Um you can’t have a capitalism where the vast majority of people are owners. Does history show it’s less likely in one than the other? I suppose sort of like actually existing 20th century history. Well, I mean, I would say that I mean, obviously the one that you’re referring to here is is kind of is Russia. Um, I would say that obviously there’s been a there was a lot of experiments with socialism in that post-war era that were like deliberately thwarted. I mean, I can speak to kind of like my own context. You know, my parents grew up in, you know, a social were born into social into a kind of socialism under narcissism and obviously it had it was a dictatorship. It had deep problems within it. But at the same time, there was an economic redistribution program that completely transformed the lives of so many people.

QUESTIONS:

1. Are there reasons to doubt when the West says it wants its trading partners that are egalitarian, democratic and inclusive? Under what conditions would the West benefit from a well-educated and democratic “Global South?”

2. Would the West prefer to see a Russia that is a more-democratic value-added economy or a resource exporter under the sway of the West?

3. Why does power consolidate in Capitalism and Socialism?

4. How has power consolidated in Russia, as the the Soviet Union dissolved?

5. How hasa power consolidated in the US since the 1950s?

6. What’s the difference between a Capitalism in which all workers own the means of production and Socialism?