Can’t run an empire with neoliberalism as the operating system

Posted on April 24, 2026 by camelotkidd

Trump’s attack on Iran is proving conclusively that the US can’t run an empire with neoliberalism as the operating system. The evidence mounts every day, from inability to manufacture more than a few precision munitions, to fragile supply chains, to private equity vampires seizing essential infrastructures, to tech-bros proposing to privatize the Pentagon.

Rogue economist Michael Hudson says that the US economy is essentially a Ponzi scheme, where private equity sharpies take over companies and make money by essentially looting them. “After the Wall Street crash in 2008 when Obama bailed out the banks, and the Fed drove interest rates to zero, telling the banks that we are providing you funds at 0.1%, to lend out to the economy. But banks don’t provide money that way, banks lend money for assets, real estate, stocks, and bonds, already issued, already in existence. Bank credit isn’t extended, in the United States or Britain, to finance industrial capital investment. That’s the job of the stock market, if anything, or of companies to reinvest their earnings. Instead, banks lend money out to intermediaries, saying, ‘“You do the job; you find the companies to take over”’. Hence the explosion of private equity as intermediators.”

Unfortunately, private equity has proceeded to bankrupt whole swaths of the American economy by cutting back the quality of what companies were doing, slashing expenses, working labor harder, making them work overtime and cutting quality. 

You, dear citizen, might have noticed some of the malign effects, and it’s fitting that Cory Doctorow coined the phrase enshittification to describe late-stage neoliberal capitalism, where the whole purpose has been to make the elite fabulously wealthy while fucking the rest of us.

Meanwhile, as Hudson details, “this predatory financial system was making so many gains for the companies that were financialized and using their profits not to invest in new capital formation and new factories and means of production; all of that was done abroad; it was sent to China and other Asian countries.”

What’s ironic is that US military planners appear unaware of such developments as they plan to attack China after the neoliberals transferred US manufacturing there.

Where to start?

The financial class, along with the emerging techno-fascist elite have acted to take over government as part of their looting operations. It has resulted in the privatization of sovereignty. When Palantir proposes to assume the governmental role of predicting, surveilling, targeting and murdering, while releasing a techno-fascist tract arguing for an end of democracy and embrace of a Sparta ideal, we’ve entered a new paradigm. The ability to wield lethal force has been the bedrock of statecraft since Hobb’s Leviathan.

Palantir co-owner Alex Karp has recently produced a badly written manifesto that goes a long way to explain why it’s impossible to run an empire on neoliberalism. Even as they loot the republic they exhort the commoners to sacrifice for the greater good, and if they won’t, they propose a draft.

Ancient rulers understood that for an empire to prosper the commoners must be kept solvent–hence the debt jubilee–where the king would cancel debts periodically so that he had soldiers instead of serfs. This behavior wasn’t sentimental but practical. Citizens in desperate straights and miserable are hardly the sort who can defend the far reaches of an empire. Contrast that with Americans who are up to their eyeballs in debt, while the Trump Administration is carrying out savage cuts in social and supplemental food programs, and proposing to cut daycare for members of the military.

The stupid, it burns.

Update: The US spends upwards of a trillion dollars a year on what they laughably call defense but this is the chow our sailors are subsisting on.

“Images obtained by USA Today of poor-quality meals being served to U.S. service personnel in the Iran war have sparked alarm.

The images have highlighted concerns about the welfare of service members and the food being served to them while they are deployed, with the official account for the Democrats on social media dubbing the pictures “disgraceful.”’

I wonder where all that money went?

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What Now?

Posted on April 17, 2026 by camelotkidd

The US government in its present captured state is beyond redemption. Under Trump the US has openly declared itself to be a violent empire that’s above any international laws. The only available courses appear to be a US military coup or a revolution, neither of which seems likely. If Congress wasn’t completely compromised, they’d have already impeached Trump, so there isn’t really a political/legal solution.

The US and Israel’s attack on Iran has made this increasingly obvious, but as I’ve discussed before the captured aspect means that the spell can only be broken by a monumental military defeat or stock market crash. A disaster so pronounced that there can be no escaping the consequences for our feral elite, who seem to fail upwards.

Even worse, simply replacing Trump won’t fix our problems. Trump is perfectly representative of late-stage financial capitalism, with its rampant corruption, extreme violence and incompetence, but there are plenty of similar replacements out there.

The consequences for the US and Israel’s attack are already reshaping the global political and economic order. Crucial resources are curtailed. Countries are increasingly moving away from the U.S. dollar in trade. Supply chains are being disrupted. Economic alliances are shifting, often in ways that bypass traditional Western control. Iran is not solely reacting to these changes—it is actively trying to accelerate them.

What is emerging is a world that looks very different from the one the United States has spent decades trying to maintain.

Chris Hedges compares this moment to the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Britain’s attempt to assert control revealed the limits of its power and marked the beginning of imperial decline. The parallel is difficult to ignore. The United States is not collapsing overnight, but it is confronting a reality it has long resisted: it can no longer dictate outcomes as it once did.

The Trump Administration may not be able to dictate outcomes like previous administrations but they can wreak plenty of havoc on the way down. In fact, Trump has blown-up established rules, norms and structures because the US no longer benefits from them. In the multi-polar world unfolding the US has turned into an arsonist, where if they can’t rule as the dominant hegemon then they will burn it down. Of course, financial insiders are still able to profit from the disorder by front-running Trump pronouncements.

Welcome to the interregnum.

I’m convinced that our K-shaped economy is not going to change unless rich people lose money, while we will have to pry the empire out of the cold-dead hands of our feral elite.

As for the rest of us it will be like the old African proverb: “When the elephants fight, the ants get crushed.”

Stay safe out there and try not to get trampled.

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Be Evil

Posted on April 15, 2026 by camelotkidd

I thought I hated the tech-bros before but this article reinforced just how despicable they are–2026: The Year US Corporations Used AI to Allegedly Help Commit War Crimes and Make Themselves Military Targets: The Untold Story of Google, AWS, and American Corporations Being Accused of Committing War Crimes

It turns out that Google, Amazon, Open AI, Palantir, Microsoft, and Oracle power Israel’s Gaza genocide and enable the US’s double-tap missile strikes on girls elementary schools in Iran. Google turned its mission statement on its head: don’t be evil became be evil. The company removed the iconic pledge quietly in 2018.

The author of the article, Christopher Armitage, writes–“The US military and its Israeli ally run AI targeting systems on cloud infrastructure supplied by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Palantir. Those systems generate kill lists. Palantir’s Maven Smart System, built in partnership with the Pentagon, powered AI targeting throughout Operation Epic Fury; CENTCOM’s commander publicly confirmed the use of advanced AI tools to process battlefield data at a pace unprecedented in American military history.

In April 2024, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham published an investigation in +972 Magazine based on testimony from six Israeli intelligence officers, exposing two of those systems by name. One, an AI program called Lavender, generated a ranked kill list of up to 37,000 Palestinians by analyzing phone metadata, social media activity, and movement patterns, assigning each person a threat score from one to one hundred. A companion program called Where’s Daddy tracked each name on that list to their family home, timing strikes for when they were inside with their families at night. Six active Israeli intelligence officers confirmed to a journalist, on the record, that their military ran a program designed specifically to bomb people when their entire families were home. One officer told Abraham: ““We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building… the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.” Another described the process plainly: “You put hundreds into the system and wait to see who you can kill.”’

Silicon Valley powers Israel’s death machine. Israel’s IDF computer chief described cloud technology as part of “a collection of systems with which the IDF fights,” citing Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in her presentation. After October 2023, the Israeli military dramatically increased its purchases from all three companies in order to accelerate the genocide.

None of this should be surprising. Silicon Valley is a crucial cog in the military/industrial/complex and it powers the US’s death machine too. The tech-bros pretended to be all liberal and woke when the Democrats were in power but they have shown their true colors since Trump’s second coming. Meanwhile, AI is a giant bubble, looking for a profitable function and getting on that sweet Pentagon gravy train solves many of the problems related to the massive debt overhanging the data center build-out. Besides, they’re techno-fascists; so surveilling, tracking and murdering human beings gives them a woody.

Unfortunately for the tech-bros, they picked the wrong country to fuck with.

When the US attacked Iran in February 2026 and began assassinating Iranian military and political leadership, the IRGC looked at what was powering the targeting apparatus and started hitting it. In an amazing bit of schadenfreude, Iran is targeting the data centers that the tech-bros conveniently sited right next door in the Gulf States. The data centers in Bahrain and Dubai are a core part of the AI data center targeting ecosystem, and Iran is methodically eliminating them.

A single data center holding 50,000 of Nvidia’s current processors contains roughly $1.5 billion in hardware. The drones hitting those buildings cost tens of thousands of dollars each. This is the asymmetric war where Iran is running circles around the US. Instead of attacking aircraft carriers that are heavily guarded, Iran is going after the soft targets that are every bit as important to the US’s war effort. The most expensive military infrastructure in the world sits in commercial districts in Dubai and Bahrain, unfortified, reachable by consumer-grade drones, belonging to billion dollar corporations whose investors care about next quarter’s earnings.

Too bad Iran can’t bomb the data centers that the tech-bros are building here in the homeland. Luckily, in a bit of serendipity, the Iranians are doing us a solid with the blockade of the Straight of Hormuz and concomitant curtailment of petroleum products essential to the furtherance of AI. It turns out that lots of elements crucial to our modern world come from the Persian Gulf.

This black swan event might also, if we’re lucky, take out the private equity vampires that are sucking the life out of the US economy.

Unfortunately, the captains of the tech industry will not confine their war crimes to the periphery of the American empire, They are already providing targeting data to ICE, Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, NSA and the rest of the deep state alphabet agencies that are surveilling, tracking and murdering Americans.

Update: So it’s hardly a surprise that American citizens are revolting against the rollout of AI: “On the morning of Friday, April 10th, a 20 year-old Texas man named Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama was arrested for allegedly throwing a molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s mansion on Russian Hill in San Francisco. Less than two days later, police arrested 25 year-old Amanda Tom and 23 year-old Muhamad Tarik Hussein for allegedly firing a gun at the same house from their car before speeding away. 

Earlier the same week, and thousands of miles away, an unknown assailant fired 13 shots into the front door of city councilman Ron Gibson, who had just voted to approve a new data center in Indianapolis against a groundswell of public outcry. A sign that read “NO DATA CENTERS” was left tucked under the doormat.”

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Priorities

Posted on April 10, 2026 by camelotkidd

By threatening the civilization of Iran and the social cohesion of America, Trump is making the priorities of our feral elite crystal clear. Savage cuts to health care and childcare while massively increasing Pentagon spending to kill more people.

Donald Trump made a characteristically blunt statement last week, inadvertently encapsulating the reigning neoliberal/neoconservative philosophy. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things. They can do it on a state basis; we can’t do it on a federal basis. We have to take care of one thing: military protection,” Trump said at a private lunch at the White House.

What wild is that Trump’s own secretary of state, Marco Rubio, just pointed to this exact kind of thing as a prime example of the Iranian regime’s own villainy. “Imagine an Iran that, instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars, supporting terrorists or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran,” he told George Stephanopoulos this past Monday.

Yeah, imagine that.

Of course, Trump is lying about military protection. Trump is waging aggressive war–vicious attacks on the Iranian people with shifting rationales and increasing brutality and sadism. Unable to degrade Iran’s military capacity, Trump has shifted to making war on its factories, hospitals, universities, pharmaceutical researchers, bridges, and school children. To be fair, he’s simply following the Israeli method of warfare by bombing cities and turning civilians into red mist.

Trump’s 18 minute televised speech on April Fools’ Day merely doubled-down on all his past policies, refusing to admit that he had been disastrously wrong and instead declaring that he would continue his attacks on Iran. He also emphasized that these attacks would now heavily target Iranian civilian infrastructure, perhaps one of the first times that an American president has declared his intent to commit major war crimes in such a high-profile fashion. “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

There is a deeper ideological logic at work here, which is neoliberalism. Neoliberal economics reduces human beings to units in a system, economic cogs with conditional worth. When civilians are treated as expendable targets in a war in Iran, that is not aberration. That is the neoliberal system working as designed. The attack on Iran is part of the larger capitalist class’ projects of imperial domination. As New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman wrote—“McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas,” to point out that neoliberalism requires non-stop violence for the “market” to function properly.

Trump’s budget cuts are not just incidental to making war on Iran. They’re part of the same war that people in Trump’s income bracket are waging on Americans and Iranians alike. It’s not quite the same–bombing hospitals and schools is worse than defunding them. But while the tactics are different, the targets are strikingly similar.

Even as Trump appears to be a psychotic megalomaniac and his administration is filled with advocates of death and destruction, the so-called opposition party favors war too. The Democrats are already attacking Trump from the right, complaining that he has allowed Iran to maintain nuclear enrichment and their missile forces, while maintaining control over the Straight of Hormuz. While Trump committed electoral fraud with his record on starting wars, it’s useful to recall that he ran to the left of the Democratic candidates in 2016 and 2024 in regards to waging endless wars.

What’s clear is that both US political parties favor non-stop violence to maintain the American empire. Going further, Trump and the entire US political class has proven itself to be completely dishonest, incompetent, and corrupt. Perhaps the turning point was the end of the Cold War which allowed the neoliberals/neoconservatives to believe they could reassert their dominance over a socialist model that in the previous decades had provided an alternative. But the crackup of the Interregnum of Unreality is at hand, because Trump, in his own ham-fisted way, is destroying the neoliberal American empire in real time.

The shock is likely to be existential: Americans have been so misled for so long by their governments and media about their economic and military strength that the sudden discovery of its limits will be brutal and de-stabilizing. We are now approaching a crisis of the neoliberal ideology which has been forced on us over the last generation or two, and it will rapidly be seen that it has nothing to offer to explain, let alone address, the situation in which we will soon find ourselves.

Update: “The Trump administration’s self-congratulations for the ceasefire with Iran immediately fell apart after Israel bombed Lebanon and killed more than 250 people.

This was a breach of the ceasefire agreement which Pakistan had arranged and announced and which had included Lebanon and other areas of the conflict.

The Trump administration had been begging for a ceasefire for several days. It had been involved (archived) in formulating the message the Pakistani Prime Minister had issued. Trump himself had endorsed the 10-point condition sheet the Iranians had proposed by calling it ‘“a workable basis on which to negotiate”’

With knowledge of the imminent ceasefire members of the Trump administration had (again) waged bets on commodities and won large amounts of money.

But just a few hours after the Israeli attack the Trump administration repudiated two central points of the ceasefire. Lebanon was not included in the ceasefire, it suddenly claimed, and Iran’s 10 point sheet had been “thrown into the trash” even before Trump had endorsed it.”

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Birth Pangs

Posted on April 3, 2026 by camelotkidd

In July 2006, following the the US’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, Condoleezza Rice stated: “What we’re seeing here in a sense is the birth pangs of a new Middle East and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we are pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old one.”

Now, with Trump’s disastrous attack on Iran, the Middle East is poised to be transformed again. But I’m pretty sure Condi didn’t have Trump’s Iran cluster-fuck in mind when she made the declaration.

What’s ironic is that prominent advocates of the attack on Iran claimed that it would drastically alter the political map of the Middle East. And Trump assumed that he would be the US president to “remake the Middle East”, a mad scheme all of his predecessors had resisted since George W Bush’s dismal failure to achieve the same goal, alongside Israel, more than 20 years earlier.

With Iran having apparently now gained the upper hand, there are growing indications that this prediction might indeed come true, though not the way Condi, Trump or all the other neocons envisioned. Prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran had generally been seen as the dominant power in the region. The results of Trump’s war might easily return Iran to that powerful position, while degrading or even eliminating some of the Gulf Arab monarchies that were allowing the US to attack Iran from bases in their country.

Iran has instead made lofty demands of its own to end the war. The closure of all US bases in the Gulf States, Israel ending its hostilities in Lebanon, and returning the occupied territory, relief of all sanctions, acknowledging Iranian sovereignty over the Straits of Hormuz, and war reparations for the atrocities inflicted upon them.

These conditions, if agreed upon, would be tantamount to the complete military and political defeat of the United States in the Middle East and its expulsion from the region. Such humiliation by a regional power such as Iran would not only mark the end of American influence in the Middle East, but it could very likely end America’s tenure as a global superpower.

The Zionist-American war on Iran was intended to be a quick beatdown, starting with the decapitation of Iran’s leadership and ending, hopefully, with a spontaneous regime-change which would culminate with the Islamic Republic’s collapse, or at least total capitulation. There was seemingly no sense in Washington or Tel Aviv that Tehran could fight back at all, let alone cripple the US’s Middle East military archipelago.

Barring a quick turnaround in favor of the US-Israeli war effort, the hosts of these bases may want to begin planning for life without them. If the current status quo persists, with Iran maintaining its missile capacity, its deterrence capacity, control of Hormuz, and with US bases dysfunctional, we are entering a ‘New Middle East’ very different from what bloodthirsty Neocons have been fantasizing for decades.

Along with neocon hubris has been the rank incompetence of US military planning. It’s like they learned nothing from observing Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine with its emphasis on drones and precision strike missiles. Then there’s the grifting of the US military-industrial complex, whose only recent technological innovation has been to increase costs by reducing reliability with their cost-plus pricing. Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has thrown the American empire’s already shattered defense industrial base into total disarray. Commodities and components, like rare-earths and computer chips, central to constructing and maintaining digital and electronic systems, and precision-guided munitions, which before transited the Strait daily are now hard to come by and way, way more expensive.

I’m going to quote big, steaming chunks from: America’s Military Is Never Coming Back From This, because it lays out the calamitous effect the war is having on the US military.

“People talk about how Iran is a ‘second-tier military’ but they ain’t Iraq and this ain’t Desert Storm. This is Desert Shitstorm and Iran is not just a peer military to ‘America’s’, they are demonstrably superior. Just look at the scoreboard, which isn’t school massacres but military targets. Behold, then, ‘American’ airframes burning in the sun while Iran’s rockets are safe underground. The White Empire stood astride the Middle East like Colossus, but now they lie there in a wreck, colossal morons.

It’s not like any of this was a mystery. As the US itself said in a 2024 report called, somewhat hilariously, The Tyranny of Geography,

Moreover, the thousands of short-range missiles that Iran possesses are a factor here. There is no strategic depth. An F-35 is very hard to hit in the air. On the ground it is nothing more than a very expensive and vulnerable chunk of metal sitting in the sun. The refueling and rearming facilities on these bases are also vulnerable, and they cannot be moved. These bases are all defended by Patriot and other defensive systems. Unfortunately, at such close range to Iran, the ability of the attacker to mass fires and overwhelm the defense is very real.

They should have made this report a 15-second ad and run it on Fox because it’s obviously news to Donald Trump. 

It’s not just that the American military is crashing under its own weight, they’re going the wrong way. They brought a fighter jet to a rocket fight and are getting eviscerated. Observe that Iran has no fighter jets to speak of, just as Apple never made phones with keyboards. It’s a completely different business model. This is the age of Tunnel and Rocket Wars, and ‘America’s’ still geared to fight World War II against enemies that don’t exist anymore.

Now ‘America’, in retreat, is parking its 60-year-old airframes out in the open while Iran has modern missiles in tunnel cities.”

Trump once said that to lose dollar hegemony would be worse for America than losing a major war. Yet this is precisely what is in play in this ‘game of chicken’ which Trump started with Iran, but where he is now at a loss for how to exit, without damaging humiliation.

Like the US/Israeli attack on Iran, Condoleezza Rice’s notion of birth pangs and of a new Middle East follow in the intellectual footsteps of A Clean-Break and the Yinon Plan, both designed to remake the region into Israel’s playground. Some intrepid journalist should ask Condi what she thinks about the new and improved birth pangs as a result of Iran’s surprising success against the American empire and their genocidal sidekick.

Update: As the attack on Iran goes pear-shaped and the Straight of Hormuz remains closed, Trump, in a pique of rage, is resorting to the US’s imperial blueprint; attacking hospitals, university’s and factories, while escalating US-Israeli bombings of Iran’s civilian infrastructure. “Over the next two to three weeks,” Trump said, “we are going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”

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La-La Land

Posted on March 27, 2026 by camelotkidd

Our feral elite inhabit a completely different reality.

It’s what Naked Capitalism writer Nat Wilson Turner calls “The Interregnum of Unreality ” and what I refer to as La-La Land.

Trump’s daily social media posts set the standard, becoming more and more unhinged as his Iran adventure goes pear shaped. Nevertheless, he continues to declare victory in the war: “In a certain sense, we have already won.” In reality, there’s been so much winning that we read in an astonishing article from the New York Times: Iran’s Attacks Force U.S. Troops to Work Remotely, since Iran Rendered Virtually All US Gulf Bases Uninhabitable.

I wonder what losing looks like?

The fact that the U.S. initiated this war without a clear achievable goal, without a plan for contingencies or an exit strategy, only adds to the cray-cray. No surprise, but it appears that there is a financial method to the madness, as politically connected insiders are making bank on foreknowledge of Trump’s pronouncements.

Then there’s that old-time-religion where a group of evangelical pastors, led by Paula White-Cain, White House faith advisor, and other members of the Faith Office, have prayed for Trump and the U.S. to succeed in this war. Pete Hegseth, the self-designated Secretary of War, has also made explicit remarks about the religious nature of this war, and the U.S. military has framed it as “all part of God’s divine plan.”

I guess since it’s God’s will there wasn’t any need for the Trump administration to have a plan, or any need for accurate information on how things are going. It’s been reported that Trump thinks the war is going great and all the negative press coverage is wrong because the Pentagon provides him a daily “highlight reel” of successful strikes and stuff being blown up in Iran. It’s the new technological “Potemkin Village”, with Trump the distracted, social-media Tsar.

But there is lots of detachment from reality out there, from the corporate media’s cheery pronouncements to Wall Street’s financial complacency in reaction to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and catastrophic downsides that are starting to emerge. Yves Smith asks–“when will Mr. Market awaken from his relative stupor to force some sort of state change? 

Trump was able to sweet talk the markets by pretending that negotiations with Iran were underway, but now there are preparations for a ground attack with elements of airborne infantry, special forces and Marines moving into position. The attack appears destined to occur Friday night after the markets close, naturally.

Former CIA analyst, Larry Johnson lays out the force structure. “…when you see this kind of deployment, it can only be one of two things: it’s an exercise or it’s an actual mission. I don’t see this as an exercise…the fact that it looks like they’re bringing in both SEAL Team Six and Delta Force by and by themselves, those are just, you know, they’re not they’re not an assault force. They’re good at RA, you know, rescuing hostages, that kind of thing, but you know, somehow they’re getting activated, but they’re being accompanied by the 75th Rangers. And I recall in all the exercises that I scripted, when they involved either Delta or Seal Team Six, you always involved the Rangers, you know, at minimum they go in and seize an airfield, you know, and and and accompany that. And then you got the 82nd. So it looks to me like what’s happening that 5-day. So that started on March 12th. March 13 was when Trump activated the 31st MEU, the Marine Expeditionary Unit. They started setting sail. When do they arrive in theater?
Friday or Saturday. Gee, that’s right at the end of that 5-day period.”

There is talk of capturing Kharg Island, where Iran loads oil and gas tankers for shipment, but any cursory examination of the geography of the Persian Gulf, and knowledge of Iranian missile, artillery and drone capabilities, relegates the scheme to La-La Land.

It seems to be a theme, where the ship is taking on water fast while the first class passengers rearrange the deck chairs.

What’s worse is that as deranged as Trump is, nothing will fundamentally change by impeaching him. Trump embodies the American ruling class: greedy, immoral, and overconfident. Even Trump being held responsible for a failed war seems like a remote possibility because it would mean that the deep state has accepted being driven out of the Middle East.

Update: It’s not just Donnie Darko who’s living in La-La land. Melania Trump wants to replace teachers with robots. What could go wrong?

Update 2: Vice President Vance thinks Iran will be using nuclear suicide vests to attack Americans.

We are governed by the dumbest fucking people in America.

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Kill it with fire

Posted on March 20, 2026 by camelotkidd

Our feral elite are determined to install data centers no matter what the plebes want, even if they have to deploy robot dogs to force the issue.

As Americans grow increasingly angry at the rapid encroachment of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers into their communities with the attendant higher energy prices and destruction of aquifers, tech companies are embracing a dystopian solution to protect the complexes: robot dogs.

Woof.

It’s been obvious for a while that the tech-bros view democracy with disdain. Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, Karp and their intellectual lodestar–Curtis Yarvin, speak and write about their techno-feudal vision of an ideal state. They are an increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. They worship The Network State: How to Start a New Country, which outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. 

Of course their wet dreams are hardly popular with the rest of us, hence the need for force to bring about their planned dystopia. But, as I’ve written about before, elite security forces will always be suspect, and the dark fantasy among the tech intellectuals has always been robots, who will always obey. In Survival of the Richest–Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, Douglas Rushkoff, explains that the tech bros like Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, etc. would rather escape than simply make the world more livable for Americans. Rushkoff was the professor of media theory and digital economics, who was invited to to lecture 5 mysterious billionaires on how to survive the “Event”–the societal apocalypse they know is coming. They laughed when Rushkoff explained that maybe sharing their wealth now might preclude the “Event”, and instead wanted to know how to ensure the loyalty of their security guards in the aftermath.

It makes total sense that they are rolling out robot dogs to protect their AI data centers, since the only way in which AI will pay off was if it was employed as full-spectrum surveillance. Going further, it has become apparent that the tech-bros have become politically toxic. When/if the AI bubble pops and when/if it takes down the larger stock market and possibly the entire U.S. economy, they will be seen as the villains they are.

Back when he wrote for Naked Capitalism, Lambert Strether, came up with a sound response to robots. “Kill It With Fire”. I heartily agree. I’m not scared of technology, but I am scared of the sociopaths/psychopaths who control our world and wield said technology.

Because, of course, in the U.S., the billionaires will own the robots. They’ll own the corporations, the capital and the political process. They will still require a small subset of the professional/managerial/caste drones but the rest of us will get shit. No jobs, but also no Universal Basic Income (UBI), and no prospects for the future for us or our children. There will be simply a growing underclass structurally locked out of the new automated, digital economy, where human labor is superfluous.

Now do you see why they are releasing the robot dogs?

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King Croesus

Posted on March 17, 2026 by camelotkidd

Trump’s Iran adventure is going so swimmingly that he could be our first anti-imperialist president by destroying the American empire.

In a way that history doesn’t repeat but rhymes, Trump is behaving like Croesus, ruler of the Lydian Empire. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Croesus considered attacking the Persian (Iranian) Empire of Cyrus. When he consulted the oracle of Delphi he was told that if he invaded, he would “destroy a great empire.” He did so and the oracle proved correct, but the Persians were victorious and the empire that he destroyed was his own.

Trump, our first billionaire president, is “rich as Croesus”, but the oracle he consulted was himself. As is becoming clearer from President Trump’s statements and those of his staff, along with press reporting, the US has launched a major war without the input of the experts who are there to advise the President on such matters. The State Department, Pentagon, National Security Council Staff, Defense Intelligence Agency, and NSA were simply bypassed because, as White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, President Trump “had a feeling” Iran would attack.

Iran had been warning for months – since the last US/Israeli surprise attack in June – that if they were attacked again they would not hold back on US bases in the region and that they would close the Straits of Hormuz. Trump and Netanyahu attacked anyway, and Iran has done what it said it would do.

This is surely one of the worst military disasters in US history. There are no military options available beyond the unthinkable: the use of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz is closed, oil is about to go out of control, and the global economy, along with the US dollar, is set to crash.

Similarly to Croesus, Trump launched his war against Persian with the full expectation that he could achieve regime-change against the heavily overmatched Islamic Republic. But the indications are that Iran is prevailing, and if the US’s bases are destroyed and naval forces are driven from the region, the hold of the American Empire over the oil wealth of the Gulf will probably come to an end. Under such a scenario, Trump may indeed achieve regime-change just as he boasted, but the regime that was changed would be his own.

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Operation Epstein Fury

Posted on March 13, 2026 by camelotkidd

The corporate media is working overtime to suppress and censor any notion that the attack on Iran was related to Jefferey Epstein, sexual blackmail, Mossad, or Israel.

Here’s the Bezos Post, author laying it on thick–“To erode public support for the joint U.S.-Israel military operation, Iranian state media has sought to portray those countries’ leaders as part of a corrupt and depraved “Epstein class” or “Epstein regime.” While such content often fails to gain much traction outside Iran, the message is spreading through generically named “news” accounts that researchers say appear to be using the Epstein conspiracy theories to serve pro-Iran talking points to a global audience.”

And, to no one’s surprise, the ADL calls Operation Epstein Fury–“conspiratorial rebranding”.

Unfortunately for the powers that be the dogs are no longer eating the dogfood. A majority of likely American voters believe that Donald Trump launched the war on Iran at least in part to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that had engulfed his presidency, according to a new survey.

I’m amazed anyone in the corporate media or the ADL, for that matter, still thinks that Americans will believe anything they say after all of the lies. Since 9/11 we’ve been fed one big-fat whopper after another. And the lies are getting more unbelievable. It’s like they’re not even trying anymore.

Even worse, the Epstein scandal just won’t go away, because its connections to sexual blackmail, Mossad, Israel and the Rothschilds points to why Trump attacked Iran. I’m not saying the Epstein scandal is the only reason, but it sure sounds more plausible than anything Trump has said to justify his actions.

Trump and his merry band of fuck-wits appear to be living in La-La land. Here’s a transcript of Trump sounding like your grandfather after he developed dementia—“Everything’s fine our country is uh doing really Well, I stronger and our country is uh doing really well. I mean, at a level that nobody thought. We took a little excursion because we felt we had to do that to get rid of some evil. And uh I think you’ll see it’s going to be a short-term excursion. How good? It’ll be a short-term excursion. Everything is going well.”

Uh huh.

Unfortunately, due to decades of ever more sophisticated propaganda, our feral elite seem to believe Trump’s bluster about how much we are hurting Iran and how the war is nearly won, promises of somehow forcing the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and providing insurance for tankers, when the brutal reality is that Iran has the means and weapons to enforce the closure for as long as they desire.

I saw some epic trolling from Alireza Tangsiri, Commander of the IRGC Navy: “We guarantee the security of any oil tanker, under any flag, that can convince an American destroyer to escort it through the Strait of Hormuz.”

It sure will be interesting to watch events wrench the Trump administration, national security state and corporate media out of the propaganda daze that Nat Wilson Turner calls the Interregnum of Unreality.

Update: Just to be clear, I’m not Iranian.

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The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Posted on March 11, 2026 by camelotkidd

Trump more and more resembles the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, from Fantasia, where Mickey Mouse starts something that he can’t control.

During negotiations, Trump and Netanyahu cast the spell of death and destruction with their cowardly assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and savage bombing attacks, culminating in a strike on a school, killing 170 children.

Indeed, Trump set in motion the machinery of death and destruction without a way in which to stop it, although he is trying. “I THINK THE (IRAN) WAR IS VERY COMPLETE, PRETTY MUCH”, CBS reported, citing an interview.

But Trump doesn’t get to decide when the war ends, and neither does Israel. Iran has been preparing for this conflict for decades and they will have a say. Here’s how a senior Iranian political official responded: “Trump is seeking, through intermediaries, to connect with us and Washington to end the war, but at the same time, he claims the opposite. Trump states in interviews with American media that there is no specific timeline for ending the war, which contradicts the messages he is sending to us.”

Since WWII, the US has attacked and destroyed scores of Third World countries who have antiquated weapons and poorly trained militaries. The US is accustomed to being so much stronger that they can negotiate a meaningless treaty, or they can simply leave.

Not this time.

As Iran continues to pummel US bases in the Gulf States and to rain down ballistic missiles on Israel, they will be the ones who will set the terms. And Iran could reshape the Middle-East and torpedo the petrodollar system, claims heterodox economist, Michael Hudson.

“Iran has announced that it will fight until it achieves three aims to prevent future wars. First and foremost, the United States must withdraw from al its military bases in the Middle East. Iran already has destroyed the backbone of radar warning systems and anti-aircraft and missile defense sites in Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, preventing them from guiding U.S. or Israeli missile attacks or attacking Iran. Arab countries have bases or U.S. installations will be bombed if they are not abandoned.

The next two Iranian demands seem to far-reaching that they seem unthinkable to the West. Arab OPEC countries must end their close economic ties to the United States, starting with the U.S. data centers operated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. And they not only must stop pricing their oil and gas in U.S. dollars, but disinvest in their existing petrodollars holdings of the U.S. investments that have been subsidizing the U.S. balance of payments since the 1974 agreements that made to gain U.S. permission to quadruple their oil-export prices.

These three demands would end U.S. economic power over OPEC countries, and thus the world oil trade. The result would be to dedollarize the world’s oil trade and re-orient it toward Asia and Global Majority countries. And Iran’s plan involves not only a military and economic defeat for the United States, but an end to the political character of the Near Eastern client monarchies and their relations with their Shi’ite citizens.”

Crazy, huh?

I’m positive that Trump didn’t see this scenario coming. I mean, the number of shocking tactical errors by Trump and his team of morons are piling up and are having an impact. The failure to see that killing Khamenei, who has now been replaced by his son, a hard liner who has always wanted Iran to have a nuclear deterrent, was a major act of stupidity. 

The war against Iran is far from over. Trump is increasingly unhinged and the water is rising fast.

Update: Geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar lays out the new realities.

“For all practical purposes, the Strait of Hormuz is blocked because of panicky Western insurance withdrawal. Not because Tehran blocked it.

China receives 90% of total Iran crude oil exports; that represents 12% of total Chinese imports. The key point is that China still has access to Iranian exports as well as Saudi, Emirati, Kuwaiti, Qatari and Iraqi exports: that’s because the strategic partnership Tehran-Beijing is iron-clad, meaning that Chinese-bound tankers can cross the Strait of Hormuz back and forth.

Beijing-Tehran negotiated a bilateral safe passage, operational since last Friday, in what for all practical purposes is a multilaterally-closed crucial maritime corridor. It’s no wonder that more and more tankers are now texting on their transponders the magic words Chinese Owned (italics mine). That’s their naval diplomatic passport.”

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