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The Costs for the Western World
All it took was the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s mere announcement that it would close the Strait of Hormuz. And suddenly it was clear that no insurance company would cover the costs if the Revolutionary Guard actually sank a ship. This financial weapon alone was enough to trigger a global disruption of supply chains. Not a single shot had to be fired. So American farmers are now waiting for fertilizer[1]. In vain. Because ships cannot transport fertilizer through the Strait of Hormuz. But farmers in the U.S. are mostly Trump voters. They will thank Trump..
But far more painful for the U.S. economy is the collapse of the Arab sheikhdoms in the Persian Gulf.
Apparently, no one expected that the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or Bahrain would come under such massive attack from the Iranians.
There is no effective air defense. They were so confident. So confident that they didn’t even set up bomb shelters in the sheikhdoms. The U.S. had concentrated all its defensive capabilities on Israel. The Americans hadn’t thought about the Arabs. That has left a bitter taste in the Arabs’ mouths.
But the U.S. military also suffered losses. In the first two weeks of the current war with Iran, Iran destroyed U.S. military bases in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, causing an estimated $800 million in damage[2]. Oil and gas fields in Saudi Arabia and Qatar were severely damaged and have had to temporarily scale back production. The United Arab Emirates had been focusing on diversifying its economy. It was well on its way to becoming a transportation hub between Europe and Asia. Even tourism was flourishing in the artificial landscapes built on reclaimed land from the lagoons. The goal was to attract start-up companies. Anyone who was anyone in the financial world bought an apartment in Dubai. Money was borrowed from the many bank branches that had sprung up overnight.
All of that is now over in one fell swoop. It’s every man for himself. Flights through the Dubai hub have been canceled indefinitely. Surely no one wants to go on vacation anymore with bullets whizzing by. And as for the up-and-coming entrepreneurs, all you can see now are contrails on the horizon. Money is now being stashed elsewhere. It didn’t pay off to let the Americans use their own sandy soil for a military buildup against neighboring Iran. Now the sheikhs are left high and dry. No insurance company will cover any damages. The War Exclusion Clause in the fine print of the insurance policy states that insurers will not compensate for damage caused by acts of war. The sheikhs must now pay for this out of their own coffers instead. And said coffers have so far been lavishly filled by revenues from oil and gas production. In some sheikhdoms, citizens aren’t even taxed. The lavish profits from oil and gas sales are invested in U.S. government securities. Or in future-oriented industries such as artificial intelligence.
U.S. dominance in the IT sector is largely based on surplus funds from the Arab monarchies. And this is now becoming quite painful for the U.S. Unfortunately, Arab investments in U.S. future projects that were already firmly planned must now be redirected from overseas to repair the ailing infrastructure in the Arab world. It remains unclear to what extent the slowdown in Arab capital flows will affect the development of artificial intelligence. However, highly challenging times could be on the horizon for Nvidia and OpenAI.
Heavy Backlash for the Cloud Technology
One piece of news got lost in the fog of war: the Iranian Revolutionary Guard destroyed a total of three Amazon data centers in Dubai and Bahrain[3]. Why Amazon? Well, we all know from personal experience that Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer. But Amazon has since established a second pillar of its business with its subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS). This makes Amazon one of the largest providers of commercial cloud infrastructure. In addition to Amazon Web Services, the main players in this field are Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Clouds are data centers with enormous storage capacity that offer extremely fast computing power. Anyone can rent capacity there. Clouds are, first and foremost, completely neutral tools. What matters is what customers do with them. The clouds handle complex financial transactions. The cloud designs large-scale projects in the blink of an eye. But it can also scrutinize and spy on the population with unprecedented speed and high resolution. And then, using the data obtained, ultimately manipulate social development in its own interest.
But it is primarily the world’s more advanced military powers that have cornered the cloud market. And that is precisely why the shrewd Iranians have set their sights on Amazon’s data centers. For it is in the Middle East, in particular, that data centers are concentrated. And these data centers primarily serve the United States and Israel in their warfare. The data centers provide the infrastructure in which the war against the rest of the world is automated thanks to artificial intelligence. Autonomous machines locate war victims and then kill them based on their soulless algorithms. This is how a city park in Tehran came to be heavily bombed. This city park is called “Police Park.” But there are no police or other armed personnel there. Our colleague AI had been prompted to carry out its blind strike by the misleading name.
The ruthless genocide currently being perpetrated by Israel against Iran and Lebanon did not happen by chance. This genocide follows a pattern that was tested and refined over many years during the war against the people of the Gaza Strip. The operation is called “Project Nimbus.” A collaboration between Amazon Web Services and the Israeli government. With the participation of the two Israeli defense contractors Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. The Palestinians are being completely monitored and scrutinized. The Israeli settlers receive precise information about their Palestinian victims.
Samer Abdelnour sums it up:
“Israel’s regime of Apartheid and military occupation subjects six million Palestinians to extreme levels of surveillance and violence, and this acts as a laboratory for developing, experimenting with, and testing weapons later sold to the global arms market as ‘field tested’.
Moreover, the rapid digitalization and use of AI for military purposes is deepening the globalization of violence and widening complicity with violence in horrifying ways, invisibilizing crimes against humanity within servers and code. This is exemplified by ‘Project Nimbus’, an Israeli initiative to integrate cloud computing and AI into the operations of its state agencies, including its military and police.“[4]
This use of cloud technology to subjugate entire populations met with massive resistance as early as 2021 from employees at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.
The employees addressed the global public in an anonymous open letter, protesting the insidious use of cloud technology for inhumane purposes. In the open letter, the shocked employees write:
“Continuing this pattern, our employers signed a contract called Project Nimbus to sell dangerous technology to the Israeli military and government. This contract was signed the same week that the Israeli military attacked Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – killing nearly 250 people, including more than 60 children. The technology our companies have contracted to build will make the systematic discrimination and displacement carried out by the Israeli military and government even crueler and deadlier for Palestinians.
Project Nimbus is a $1.2bn contract to provide cloud services for the Israeli military and government. This technology allows for further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land.“[5]
Unfortunately, this wake-up call was completely lost amid the general uproar over COVID-19 policies. But we should take this danger seriously. For we must not believe that this dystopian development will pass us by. What is being tested in Palestine and now in Lebanon and Iran is, in the long run, also directed against us. The automated mass suppression and destruction techniques being tested there will sooner or later be used against us as well. Every organism strives for growth. So does militarized cloud technology. The insidious part is that our very personal, very private data resides on the same platform as military applications. The magazine Fortune describes this in striking terms:
“The boundary between commercial cloud computing and military operations has largely vanished. The Pentagon’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability and its Joint All-Domain Command and Control networks run on the same commercial infrastructure that serves banks and ride-hailing apps. Meanwhile, several news organizations have reported that the U.S. military used Anthropic’s AI model Claude—which runs on AWS—for intelligence assessments, target identification, and battle simulations during the Iran strikes.“[6]
In a nutshell: the military is footing the bill for the party in the cloud.
Militarism is gradually devouring civilian life.
Iranians are already facing a life-or-death struggle against this dystopian threat.
And the Iranians are holding their ground bravely.
By disrupting and halting the financial foundations of this fascist-like technology, they are also fighting for our freedom.
Given all the mainstream framing of the “abhorrence of the mullah regime,” that sounds like quite a shift to get used to at first. Anyone who adopts this framing of abhorrence participates in the notorious dehumanization of the enemy. They shut the door on their compassion for the Iranians. The Iranians, however, are fighting for their survival and their dignity as a free nation. This is, of course, something entirely exotic to the eerie new Epstein world. But we should not close our minds to the fascination of undomesticated people in Iran.
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The Most Revolutionary Act 