Retired child and adolescent psychiatrist and American expatriate in New Zealand. In 2002, I made the difficult decision to close my 25-year Seattle practice after 15 years of covert FBI harassment. I describe the unrelenting phone harassment, illegal break-ins and six attempts on my life in my 2010 book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.
Type 15 lightweight tanks of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) were spotted participating in a recent exercise in a low temperature mountainous plateau region. This type of tank has significant advantages over other types of tanks or armored vehicles in such regions, experts said.
Chinese experts on Tuesday slammed a recent report by the Chinese language version of the Voice of America (VOA) on India’s newly debuted light tank, saying that the US media is seeking to sow discord between China and India amid a recent recovery in relations by hyping the threat of military confrontation which has been subsiding for years.
VOA reported on Monday that India’s Zorawar light tank, designed for high altitude operations, will be deployed along the China-India borders “amid continued tensions.”
Calling it a game changer, the report hyped India’s new tank and its capabilities, and how it can rival its Chinese counterpart, the Type 15.
The first reports on the debut of the Zorawar light tank were published by Indian media in early July, which, although mentioning China as well, noted that the new Indian tank will not be ready before 2027, a key detail that was ignored by VOA.
Recently, relations between China and India have been recovering, with the two sides having held the 30th Meeting of Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on China-India Border Affairs in late July.
It has been more than four years since the Galwan Valley clash of 2020, and since then the two countries have held multiple rounds of border talks on different levels in both military and diplomatic channels, having seen de-escalation and disengagement in multiple points of contact, a Beijing-based military expert who requested not to be named told the Global Times on Tuesday.
The US media’s hype on military confrontation along the China-India border is unprofessional, and it exposes the US’ mentality of wanting to sow discord amid improving China-India ties, the expert added.
From a military point of view, China has commissioned and actually deployed the Type 15 light tank since 2019, while India’s new tank will have to wait until at least 2027, the expert said, noting that India’s defense industry has a history of issues such as delays, cost rises and technical problems.
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has issued an order in the United States v. Daniel Goodwyn case reimposing the computer monitoring measure against Goodwyn, a January 6 defendant.
Goodwyn was charged and convicted for briefly entering the US Capitol during the January 6 events, and although he stayed inside the building for just over half a minute, left when he was asked to, was not involved in violence nor did he cause any damage – it was his social media posts (among others, screenshot of public documents that show names of government employees) that were seen as a threat.
In initial proceedings in 2023, Goodwyn pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of trespassing. As legal experts noted, normally a first-time offender isn’t sent to jail for this, but the US District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Reggie Walton sentenced him to two months in prison.
This was accompanied by probation conditions that included unusually harsh and ongoing restrictions on Goodwyn’s online speech and access to information. Walton – a vocal critic of Donald Trump decided that Goodwyn’s computer must be “monitored and inspected” to make sure he was not “spreading disinformation.”
The appellate court then found that the district court “plainly erred” by imposing these surveillance measures. Judge Walton next decided that now, “on the heels of [sic] another election,” he was worried Goodwyn was spreading “false narratives” and therefore affirmed his original sentencing.
The defense, arguing First Amendment violation, went back to the court of appeals seeking an emergency stay of the probation conditions, but the three-judge panel ruled 2-1 to deny the motion.
Judge Gregory Katsas filed his dissenting opinion, arguing against colleagues Florence Pan and Bradley Garcia – both of whom happen to be Democrat judges.
Judge Katsas stated that Goodwyn neither used force to enter the premises nor did he attack police officers during his 36-second stay in the Capitol, as well as that in addition to 60 days in jail, a special probation condition required “the installation of software on Goodwyn’s computers that would enable the probation office to conduct ‘periodic unannounced searches’.”
“Goodwyn appealed and moved for a stay,” wrote the judge, adding, “I would grant the motion because, in my view, Goodwyn is likely to prevail on the merits and has shown an immediate irreparable injury. See Nken v. Holder (factors for stay pending appeal).”
Though the August 12 X chat between former President Donald Trump and Elon Musk was delayed for about 30 minutes due to a DDOS attack, the former president and the tech entrepreneur engaged in a lengthy conversation spanning over 3 hours covering the assassination attempt, the border, global tensions, the economy, crime, energy, the future of the country and more.
The discussion garnered over 1 billion views, according to X. At the height of the chat, over 1.3 million people were tuning in live, and over 17 million listened throughout the broadcast.
The assassination attempt
Musk, commenting on the assassination attempt, remarked, “Your actions at the assassination attempt were inspiring. Instead of shying away from things, instead of ducking down, you were pumping your fist in the air and saying ‘fight, fight, fight!’… the President of the United States represents America. And I think that is America. That is strength under fire.”
Musk went on to say it’s one of the big reasons why he made the decision to endorse the former president in the upcoming presidential election.
Immigration
On the issue of the border, Musk asked, “Would it be accurate to say that you are supportive of legal immigration but we obviously need to shut down illegal immigration and especially unvetted illegal immigration?”
Trump replied, “One hundred percent. I say it very simply, they have to come in legally.”
In his remarks on immigration and rising global tensions, Trump lamented, “It’s so sad (what happened on) October 7th, because it should have never happened. It’s so sad what happened when you look at Ukraine, it should have never happened.”
Trump went on to express his concern about criminals entering the US illegally.
“These are rough people. These are criminals that make our criminals look like nice people,” he said.
“Whether it’s a question of intention or competence, either way, we don’t have a secure border,” Musk chimed in. Musk visited the border at Eagle Pass in September, 2023.
Trump wrapped up the discussion on immigration by saying, “We’re going to have the largest deportation in history.”
Global tensions
Musk’s and Trump’s comments about the global landscape circled around the concern that America may not be feared around the world due to the current administration. “A smart president could have stopped (the war in Ukraine), it wouldn’t have happened,” Trump remarked.
Musk chimed in, “Looking at the risk of thermonuclear warfare, it’s game over for humanity. It’s something people have become complacent about.”
The economy
On the economy, Trump emphasized one of the biggest pain points for Americans — inflation.
“Food prices are up 50, 60 — even 100% in some cases,” said Trump. “That’s thing people most care about in my opinion.”
Musk explained, “A lot of people don’t understand where inflation comes from. Inflation comes from government overspending, because the checks never bound when (they’re) written by the government. So if they government spends far more than it brings in, that increases the money supply, and if the money supply increases faster than the rate of goods and services, that’s inflation.”
He highlighted the need to reduce government spending, and pitched the idea for a government efficiency commission that has a goal of reigning in spending and reducing American debt.
“We’re currently adding a trillion dollars to the deficit roughly every 100 days,” said Musk.
When asked if he would agree that the US needs to reduce spending, Trump said, “Yes.”
He pointed to negotiating prices to cut spending and supporting efficient energy production.
Musk offered his help in reigning in government spending so that hard-earned taxpayer money would be used more sensibly, to which Trump replied, “I’d love it.”
“We’ve got to get the prices down,” he said.
Censorship
As the discussion continued to censorship, government regulations and NATO, Musk said, “I think it’s obvious you’re a believer and an advocate of free speech, because during your first term as president, you were attacked relentlessly every day, often very unfairly with false attacks, and you didn’t try to shut down the media, you didn’t try to inhibit their freedom of speech, and I think that says a lot.”
“The beauty is we can have a conversation,” Trump said.
On reviving “The American Dream”
“People want to feel excited and inspired about the future,” said Musk. “They want to feel like the future is going to be better than the past, and that America’s going to do things that are greater than we’ve done in the past, reach new heights, to make you proud to be an American and excited about the future.”
Trump and Musk discussed ideas such as high-speed rail, solving traffic issues with tunnels, and more innovative solutions for medicine.
“They want the American Dream back,” said Trump.
Crime
Going back to crime, Musk commented on what he believes most Americans want from their government.
“We want safe and clean cities, we want secure borders, we want sensible government spending, we want to restore both the perception and reality of respect in the judicial system… and how are those even right wing positions? They’re just common sense,” he said.
Trump replied, “We have to get rid of the criminals that have been given to us by other countries.”
“We have great law enforcement, but they’re not allowed to do their job,” he said.
Musk commented, “It’s obviously demoralizing if you’re a police officer risking your life to arrest violent criminals who could kill you and do kill you sometimes, and then you arrest the violent criminal and then the DA doesn’t prosecute and lets the guy out. Why should a police officer risk their life to arrest a violent felon?”
“We’re going to change that, and we’re going to get them out of the country,” Trump said.
Speaking to the issue of crime in general, Musk commented, “You want to have empathy for people. I totally agree with that… but you also have to have empathy for the victims of the criminals. If you just have empathy for the criminals, it’s actually shallow empathy, it’s not real…. if you don’t incarcerate this person, who are they going to hurt? There’s a lack of empathy for the victims of criminals, and too much empathy for the criminals.”
Musk’s previous political affiliations
Near the close of the interview, Musk wanted to be clear that he was not previously a Republican supporter.
“I’ve not been very political before… they try to paint me as a far right guy, which is absurd because I like to make electric vehicles… I supported Obama. I stool in line for 6 hours to shake Obama’s hand. Historically, I was a moderate Democrat. But now I feel like we’re at a critical juncture for the country. For the people out there in the moderate camp, I think you should support Donald Trump for President.”
Major news outlets reacted to the historic chat on X:
On 7 August, a coalition of Syrian Arab tribes recaptured several key towns from US-backed Kurdish forces in the eastern countryside of Syria’s Deir Ezzor governorate. These tribesmen, led by Sheikh Ibrahim al-Hafl, launched the largest assault on Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) sites since the onset of the Arab tribal rebellion against the US-backed militia last year.
The renewed offensive has also reignited popular resistance against the US presence in the region, tracing its origins to the SDF leadership coup against the Deir Ezzor Military Council, which led to the arrest and removal of Arab leader Ahmed al-Khabil, also known as Abu Khawla.
The spark of resistance
In August 2023, the SDF’s arrest of the Deir Ezzor Military Council leader triggered a tribal uprising across several villages under SDF control – from Al-Baghouz to Al-Shuhail. This uprising quickly evolved into a more organized resistance when Sheikh Hafl announced in an audio statement the formation of a military command for the “Army of Tribes and Clans in the countryside of Deir Ezzor” last September.
Clashes along the Euphrates River in Deir Ezzor governorate.
Since then, Hafl has become a constant menace to the SDF, with accusations flying that the Syrian government and Iran supported him. It is an obvious attempt to discredit the Arab tribal movement, which is genuinely focused on liberating land and reclaiming resources.
The SDF prematurely announced the “failure” of the attack, which it claims was carried out “upon the orders” of Hossam Louka, head of Syria’s General Intelligence Directorate. In a statement posted on Facebook, the SDF said:
Our sweep campaign continues against the remnants of the Syrian regime-backed mercenaries who attacked the villages of Al-Dhiban, Al-Latwa, and Abu Hamam.
US occupation forces have established prominent bases at the Al-Omar and Conoco oil fields, in a region largely inhabited by Arab communities who have long been persecuted by the SDF. When the US failed to control and co-opt these tribes into a loyal organization, it sought to instead characterize them as a threat aligned with Syrian and Iranian interests.
This narrative is consistent with the approach of the US project and its allies in the SDF, who seek to suppress any resistance movements that challenge their agenda and practices, including the theft of Syrian oil and wheat.
‘Iranian-backed’ tribal resistance
Sheikh Hafl called upon the tribes and clans, especially those beyond Syria’s borders, to support the resistance, leading to increased and sustained attacks against the SDF. The tribal resistance, primarily rooted in Dhiban, spread throughout the towns and cities east of the Euphrates, turning them into a continuous conflict zone.
This resistance posed a significant threat to US interests, with the so-called “Operation Inherent Resolve” reporting in its October–December 2023 quarterly update to the US Congress that tribal fighters have evolved into a “full-fledged resistance movement.”
These fighters, the report said, receive “explicit support from the Syrian regime and its Iranian allies on the western side of the Euphrates River, where resistance fighters resupply, rearm, and launch attacks across the river in SDF-controlled villages on the eastern side.”
Recognizing this threat, the US aircraft recently launched several raids targeting the Arab tribal forces to prevent them from advancing towards their bases or achieving their goal of expelling the SDF from “Arab land.”
Gaining ground as SDF lays siege to Hasakah
After a year of limited confrontations and small operations, Hafl re-issued the call to confront what he called the “Qandil” gangs. This announcement coincided with the launch of a violent attack by Arab tribal forces on SDF positions in the cities and towns of Deir Ezzor.
During this assault, tribal forces managed to cross into and expand control over areas including Dhiban, Al-Busaira, Ibriha, Al-Hariji, Al-Tayyaneh, Abu Hamam, Gharanij, Al-Kishkiya, and the entire riverbed. The SDF, in turn, responded by imposing a siege on the residents of Hasakah and Qamishli within Syrian government-controlled areas, cutting off supplies of flour, food, and water – a tactic the SDF frequently uses to pressure Damascus.
Insiders believe that the SDF is leading Hasakah into the unknown, as the imposition of a siege policy could trigger local confrontations within the city. This will not, however, deter the tribal “resistance” from continuing its project aimed at pressuring the US occupation and its Kurdish militias.
Notably, a Syrian-based Russian delegation arrived at Qamishli airport before Friday afternoon and held several meetings to mediate the crisis. According to Syrian daily Al-Watan, these discussions did not yield positive results after the SDF leaders rejected mediation and insisted on continuing the siege of Hasakah’s population.
Serving geopolitical goals
The US occupation of the Jazira region and the establishment of more than 20 American bases was not primarily to combat terrorism, as claimed by the international coalition, but rather because “ISIS” served as the pretext for strengthening the US obstruction of the strategic land links between the eastern Mediterranean, via Central Asia, to China, and to Iran on the Persian Gulf. The US further seeks to prevent the development of close ties between the Syrian and Iraqi arenas.
Political affairs writer and researcher Dr Ahmed al-Druze explains to The Cradle why the US continues to provide unlimited support for the SDF in opposition to the region’s inhabitants.
The American occupation will remain as long as it has the ability to do so, and it deals with the Arab tribes from this perspective.
Druze believes that the events unfolding today in Syria’s eastern region are a result of the repercussions of the Palestinian resistance’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the broader spillover of conflicts across West Asia.
He highlights that, while some may view the recent developments as a local conflict – either between Arab clans or between Arab clans and Kurds – the reality suggests otherwise, as the clans find common cause and common targets with the Axis of Resistance.
Even if the situation temporarily stabilizes, with tribal forces retreating and the SDF lifting the siege on Hasakah and Qamishli, Druze believes the underlying international conflict will likely resurface, potentially tied to events in occupied Palestine and Gaza.
Though it may be premature to speak of a US existential predicament in the Jazira region, given that its losses currently remain limited, writer and political analyst Khaled al-Miftah argues that the US faces growing popular rejection and resistance.
The region is increasingly aware of Washington’s goals – to establish a separatist Kurdish entity and exploit Syria’s resources. Al-Miftah tells The Cradle that the US is beginning to feel the effects of the Turkish–Syrian rapprochement, which, if achieved under Russian auspices, could spell the end of the SDF’s separatist ambitions. Consequently, the US has begun to create obstacles to prevent this outcome.
Part of the region’s resistance
Despite the end of large-scale military conflict in most of Syria years ago, the eastern region remains embroiled in tension and ongoing strife. Armed confrontations between the SDF and pro-Turkish factions in the north continue, while the war with Arab tribal forces east of the Euphrates enters a new chapter, driven by different calculations than in past battles.
The tribes are now determined to expand their operations and have increased their readiness. US bases have become permanent targets for resistance forces on both the Syrian and Iraqi sides, with drones and rockets frequently striking occupation bases in the Omar and Conoco oil fields. Meanwhile, the tribes have expanded their control over villages that serve as the first line of defense for the SDF around US bases.
Meanwhile, with the SDF’s release of hundreds of ISIS fighters from prisons in July, ISIS continues its terrorist attacks in the region, despite the international coalition’s previous claims of having eliminated the group’s presence. ISIS cells periodically launch assaults on Syrian army positions and their allies in the Resistance Axis.
London’s Metropolitan Police chief warned that officials will not only be cracking down on British citizens for commentary on the riots in the U.K., but on American citizens as well.
“We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you,” Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley told Sky News.
Riots have broken out across the United Kingdom in recent days over false rumors spread online that an asylum seeker was responsible for a mass stabbing at a Taylor Swift-themed dance event that left three girls dead and others wounded. The murders, allegedly committed by a now 18-year-old British citizen born to Rwandan parents, sparked a series of violent protests that tapped into broader concerns about the scale of immigration in the U.K.
Footage of the violent clashes involving anti-immigration protesters and the groups of counter-protesters, some of whom have been seen waving Palestinian flags, has gone viral on social media, and the government is warning that sharing such content may have serious consequences.
One key aspect that makes this apparent crackdown on social media particularly shocking to critics is that the British government is threatening to extradite American citizens from the U.S. to be jailed in the U.K. for violating their rules about political speech online.
The British government announced it will not only be cracking down on British citizens for commenting on the riots in the UK, but on American citizens as well. (Sky News)
A Sky News reporter asked Commissioner Rowley to further explain his warning, arguing that high profile figures have been “whipping up the hatred,” and that “the likes of Elon Musk” have been getting involved. She then asked what the police force’s plan will be “when it comes to dealing with people who are whipping up this kind of behavior from behind the keyboard who may be in a different country?”
Rowley answered by telling the reporter, “Being a keyboard warrior does not make you safe from the law.”
“You can be guilty of offenses of incitement, of stirring up racial hatred, there are numerous terrorist offenses regarding the publishing of material,” he said. “All of those offenses are in play if people are provoking hatred and violence on the streets, and we will come after those individuals just as we will physically confront on the streets the thugs and the yobs who are taking — who are causing the problems for communities.”
Protesters scuffle with police during the “Enough is Enough” protest in Whitehall, London, Wednesday July 31, 2024, following the fatal stabbing of three children at a Taylor Swift-themed summer holiday dance and yoga class earlier this month in Southport. (Jordan Pettitt/PA via AP)
Elon Musk has made headlines for criticizing Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s response to the riots over the past week, suggesting the U.K. is headed toward “civil war.”
He also responded to a video of someone allegedly arrested for offensive online comments with a question, “Is this Britain or the Soviet Union?”
Starmer’s spokesperson said there was “no justification” for Musk’s comments, adding that social media companies “can and should be doing” more to combat misinformation, the BBC reported. He added that such companies “have a responsibility” to stop the spread of criminal activity and limit misinformation.
Mimicry of intelligence isn’t intelligence, and so while AI mimicry is a powerful tool, it isn’t intelligent.
The mythology of Technology has a special altar for AI, artificial intelligence, which is reverently worshiped as the source of astonishing cost reductions (as human labor is replaced by AI) and the limitless expansion of consumption and profits. AI is the blissful perfection of technology’s natural advance to ever greater powers.
The consensus holds that the advance of AI will lead to a utopia of essentially limitless control of Nature and a cornucopia of leisure and abundance.
If we pull aside the mythology’s curtain, we find that AI mimics human intelligence, and this mimicry is so enthralling that we take it as evidence of actual intelligence. But mimicry of intelligence isn’t intelligence, and so while AI mimicry is a powerful tool, it isn’t intelligent.
The current iterations of Generative AI–large language models (LLMs) and machine learning–mimic our natural language ability by processing millions of examples of human writing and speech and extracting what algorithms select as the best answers to queries.
These AI programs have no understanding of the context or the meaning of the subject; they mine human knowledge to distill an answer. This is potentially useful but not intelligence.
The AI programs have limited capacity to discern truth from falsehood, hence their propensity to hallucinate fictions as facts. They are incapable of discerning the difference between statistical variations and fatal errors, and layering on precautionary measures adds additional complexity that becomes another point of failure.
As for machine learning, AI can project plausible solutions to computationally demanding problems such as how proteins fold, but this brute-force computational black-box is opaque and therefore of limited value: the program doesn’t actually understand protein folding in the way humans understand it, and we don’t understand how the program arrived at its solution.
Since AI doesn’t actually understand the context, it is limited to the options embedded in its programming and algorithms. We discern these limits in AI-based apps and bots, which have no awareness of the actual problem. For example, our Internet connection is down due to a corrupted system update, but because this possibility wasn’t included in the app’s universe of problems to solve, the AI app/bot dutifully reports the system is functioning perfectly even though it is broken. (This is an example from real life.)
In essence, every layer of this mining / mimicry creates additional points of failure: the inability to identify the difference between fact and fiction or between allowable error rates and fatal errors, the added complexity of precautionary measures and the black-box opacity all generate risks of normal accidents cascading into systems failure.
There is also the systemic risk generated by relying on black-box AI to operate systems to the point that humans lose the capacity to modify or rebuild the systems. This over-reliance on AI programs creates the risk of cascading failure not just of digital systems but the real-world infrastructure that now depends on digital systems.
There is an even more pernicious result of depending on AI for solutions. Just as the addictive nature of mobile phones, social media and Internet content has disrupted our ability to concentrate, focus and learn difficult material–a devastating decline in learning for children and teens–AI offers up a cornucopia of snackable factoids, snippets of coding, computer-generated TV commercials, articles and entire books that no longer require us to have any deep knowledge of subjects and processes. Lacking this understanding, we’re no longer equipped to pursue skeptical inquiry or create content or coding from scratch.
Indeed, the arduous process of acquiring this knowledge now seems needless: the AI bot can do it all, quickly, cheaply and accurately. This creates two problems: 1) when black-box AI programs fail, we no longer know enough to diagnose and fix the failure, or do the work ourselves, and 2) we have lost the ability to understand that in many cases, there is no answer or solution that is the last word: the “answer” demands interpretation of facts, events, processes and knowledge bases are that inherently ambiguous.
We no longer recognize that the AI answer to a query is not a fact per se, it’s an interpretation of reality that’s presented as a fact, and the AI solution is only one of many pathways, each of which has intrinsic tradeoffs that generate unforeseeable costs and consequences down the road.
To discern the difference between an interpretation and a supposed fact requires a sea of knowledge that is both wide and deep, and in losing the drive and capacity to learn difficult material, we’ve lost the capacity to even recognize what we’ve lost: those with little real knowledge lack the foundation needed to understand AI’s answer in the proper context.
The net result is we become less capable and less knowledgeable, blind to the risks created by our loss of competency while the AI programs introduce systemic risks we cannot foresee or forestall. AI degrades the quality of every product and system, for mimicry does not generate definitive answers, solutions and insights, it only generates an illusion of definitive answers, solutions and insights which we foolishly confuse with actual intelligence.
While the neofeudal corporate-state cheers the profits to be reaped by culling human labor on a mass scale, the mining / mimicry of human knowledge has limits. Relying on the AI programs to eliminate all fatal errors is itself a fatal error, and so humans must remain in the decision loop (the OODA loop of observe, orient, decide, act).
Once AI programs engage in life-safety or healthcare processes, every entity connected to the AI program is exposed to open-ended (joint and several) liability should injurious or fatal errors occur.
If we boil off the mythology and hyperbole, we’re left with another neofeudal structure: the wealthy will be served by humans, and the rest of us will be stuck with low-quality, error-prone AI service with no recourse.
The expectation of AI promoters is that Generative AI will reap trillions of dollars in profits from cost savings and new products / services. This story doesn’t map the real world, in which every AI software tool is easily copied / distributed and so it will be impossible to protect any scarcity value, which is the essential dynamic in maintaining the pricing power needed to reap outsized profits.
There is little value in software tools that everyone possesses unless a monopoly restricts distribution, and little value in the content auto-generated by these tools: the millions of AI-generated songs, films, press releases, essays, research papers, etc. will overwhelm any potential audience, reducing the value of all AI-generated content to zero.
The promoters claim the mass culling of jobs will magically be offset by entire new industries created by AI, echoing the transition from farm labor to factory jobs. But the AI dragon will eat its own tail, for it creates few jobs or profits that can be taxed to pay people for not working (Universal Basic Income).
Perhaps the most consequential limit to AI is that it will do nothing to reverse humanity’s most pressing problems. It can’t clean up the Great Pacific Trash Gyre, or limit the 450 million tons of mostly unrecycled plastic spewed every year, or reverse climate change, or clean low-Earth orbits of the thousands of high-velocity bits of dangerous detritus, or remake the highly profitable waste is growth Landfill Economy into a sustainable global system, or eliminate all the sources of what I term Anti-Progress. It will simply add new sources of systemic risk, waste and neofeudal exploitation.
Left: J.D. Vance – Center: Curtis Yarvin – Right: Peter Thiel. Image by Clark Miller. Source.
Brian Shilhavy
I have frequently reported in my articles that politicians are not the main people who run the U.S., but that Wall St. billionaires and Silicon Valley billionaires do.
Unlike publicly visible politicians who at least have the illusion of accountability, the billionaires who fund them usually do not.
So it is a rare treat when I find an article like the one that The Information published in their Weekend publication that does just that, and exposes where a lot of the new “Far Right” ideology originates from which many Silicon Valley billionaires subscribe to.
The article was written by Julia Black, and titled:
Judging by the comments submitted to the article so far, it appears that this article is sending shock waves among those in Tech.
It is behind a paywall and a subscription is needed (which is well worth it as I find The Information the best source of “alternative” views on Big Tech with very solid journalism), but I will provide some excerpts and highlights here.
Featured in the article is one of Big Tech’s own, J.D. Vance, who recently became Trump’s Vice President choice, and how he has been influenced by Peter Thiel, who for years has followed the teachings of Curtis Yarvin, who believes “democracy” in the U.S. should be replaced by a “monarchy” instead.
Curtis Yarvin has found a place among the most right wing in tech.
In recent weeks, Democrats have relentlessly blistered Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, using a straightforward message: They’re too weird to hold high office.
If Trump and Vance are weird, imagine what the American public might make of Curtis Yarvin, 51, whose far-right thinking has influenced both Vance and, increasingly, members of the Silicon Valley right, including billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Both Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz have invested in Yarvin’s work.
As an intellectual godfather to these conservatives, Yarvin has laid out a philosophy in which he suggests replacing American democracy with a monarchy.
At a recent Palo Alto, Calif., reading of his poetry, he asked his audience to wear “cocktail attire for the new regime.” He has referred to himself and his friends as “dark elves” on a heroic journey to rescue the know-nothing “hobbits” who make up the American populace.
And last summer, Yarvin decided that Vibecamp, an annual Burning Man–style meetup of contrarian techies in rural Maryland, wasn’t contrarian enough. So he threw his own party in Washington that attendees called Vibekampf.
For now, Yarvin has found a place among Silicon Valley’s most ardent conservatives. His presence there matters. He has won the friendship and interest of people who possess great wealth and those in their own deep networks of influence.
By winning their attention, Yarvin has increased the chance that his ideas can spread further and seep deeper into the mainstream. (Source – emphasis mine.)
These new Big Tech “conservatives” use familiar terms with the Right, but with completely different meanings. So while “limited government” is a traditional, conservative and libertarian value, they take it even further by advocating NO government.
What does (Yarvin’s teaching) entail exactly?
He’d like to see American democracy as we know it collapse, with the country electing a president who could then rule as a dictator.
Under his plans, Yarvin has further proposed to seize private assets, replace the free press with state-run media and purge any officials deemed insufficiently loyal to the new regime.
Though he has deliberately maintained a low profile, chances are you’ve caught wind of his ideas: In the 2000s, for instance, Yarvin co-opted the term “red pill” from the “Matrix” movies to describe the political awakening of the new right wing.
While Yarvin has worked to push his ideas on America’s GOP political elite, he has also made inroads among tech’s conservative elite.
His primary conduit has been Thiel, who has introduced Yarvin to others in his circle. In addition, Yarvin has been welcomed into the homes of Marc Andreessen and PayPal co-founder Luke Nosek.
And you can detect distinct traces of Yarvinian thinking in written work like Andreessen’s 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” and “The Network State,” a book by Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase’s former chief technology officer, which envisions a system of new sovereign entities built on decentralized networks.
J.D. Vance is also one of his disciples, and they undoubtedly paid Trump a handsome sum to ensure Vance got picked as the VP.
What might further propel Yarvin’s philosophy is a second Trump presidency, with Trump’s strong reelection campaign already emboldening the GOP intelligentsia and the conservative technorati to speak up about their beliefs.
Moreover, Yarvin already has a relationship with Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance. Thiel introduced them.
Yarvin would only speak to me via email, and when I asked him about Vance, he praised the vice presidential candidate and suggested Vance has more to learn from him: “Seems nice. Kind of a normie still. Not sure if he totally gets it.” (Thiel, Andreessen, Nosek, Srinivasan and Vance did not respond to requests for comment.)
[T]he Yarvin associate perhaps poised to wield the most influence is J.D. Vance.
In 2021, Vance told podcaster Jack Murphy he’d been reading Yarvin’s arguments that “we should basically eliminate the administrative state,” adding that he found himself “sympathetic to that project.”
Vance doubled down on the theory the next year, saying that he would advise Trump to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat…and when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say, the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,” according to Vanity Fair.
That, of course, sounds a lot like something Yarvin would say. In 2012, Yarvin coined the acronym RAGE: Retire All Government Employees.
Another term these new Big Tech “conservatives” like to use which has a wide appeal to the Right, is dismantling the “Deep State.”
One of Yarvin’s core objectives is dismantling what conservatives like to call the deep state. There’s some irony in that. He was born into a deep state family: His father was a foreign service officer for the U.S. State Department, who brought Yarvin along with him to postings in Cyprus and Portugal.
He started a blog called “Unqualified Reservations” in 2007, using it to develop an ultra-libertarian ideology he named formalism.
In his ideal system, America would eliminate the elites powering the media, academia and the administrative state, allowing the nation to run like a corporation managed by an omnipotent sovereign.
This idea of running America like a corporation began to influence Peter Thiel around that same time (2007-2009). They began to see CEOs of Big Tech as “all-powerful rulers,” even suggesting that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs should have been given “absolute power over the state of California.”
Though the precise origins of his friendship with Thiel are unknown, early hints of Yarvin’s influence began to appear in Thiel’s public statements around this time.
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in a 2009 article. A month later, Yarvin linked to the piece in a blog post titled “Democraphobia goes (slightly) viral.” He wrote, “You read it here first.”
In 2012, Thiel was a guest lecturer for an undergraduate course at Stanford University, where he echoed some of Yarvin’s prior work comparing CEOs to all-powerful rulers.
Thiel’s Stanford class also introduced a novel framework for analyzing founders, which included an analysis of “Steve Jobs as god.”
In 2008, Yarvin had suggested giving Steve Jobs absolute power over the state of California.
These ideas may seem outrageous and even “fringe”, but they have made inroads into American politics for years now, including Steve Bannon, who served in Trump’s first term.
Another early fan of Yarvin’s work was former top Trump strategist Steve Bannon, whose interest in neoreactionary thought led to a flurry of media interest in Yarvin’s White House influence in 2017.
Anton, the Trump staffer who’s now at the Claremont Institute, also read Yarvin’s work. He was drawn to Yarvin’s critiques of widely accepted American political beliefs that most people never questioned, a “deep skepticism of the current moment and the current reigning orthodoxies,” he said.
As the Republican establishment has morphed in recent years, the shift has created more room for ideas like Yarvin’s. For instance, look at Project 2025, the policy proposals that the Heritage Foundation hopes will form the intellectual bedrock of a Trump presidency. (Amid Democrats’ criticism of Project 2025, Trump has tried to distance himself from it.)
Project 2025 includes a proposal to dismantle the entire federal bureaucracy and place its functions under the direct control of the president, calling it “unitary executive theory.”
The similarities between Project 2025 and Yarvin’s philosophy haven’t gone unnoticed.
Yarvin has continued to solidify his theories. In March, he wrote a Substack post titled “A conversation about monarchy” in which he outlines a step-by-step, 8,000-word plan to discard American democracy and replace it with “a new regime of absolute executive supremacy.”
In that plan, America would elect a president who’d act as a supreme ruler. This new America would commence with a weeklong, pandemic-style lockdown, giving the country a chance to acclimate to the new reality.
Next, America would eliminate much of the federal government, helping boost the supreme ruler’s executive power—imagining a scenario where the commander in chief operates as a CEO with total control. The dictator-president would take unilateral control of the Federal Reserve, restructuring the financial system by collapsing all assets to cash and instituting “some expropriation of the ultra-wealthy.”
He continued, “This new infrastructure will run at or near startup efficiency—it must be run like Apple, not like the Department of Transportation.”
Law enforcement officers would wear red armbands. Schools would be dismantled, as would the mainstream press, which Yarvin refers to as “termites.” Hopefully, Yarvin writes, the changes would happen swiftly and encounter little resistance, so that “no one needs to get shot.”
I asked Yarvin if I was misinterpreting his plans. “I am completely serious,” he said. “Especially about the red armbands.”
Episode 12 The Strength of Mongol Military Organization
The Mongol Empire
Dr Craig Benjamin (2020)
Film Review
The Mongols organized their warriors in units of ten, a process first initiated by Xiongnu nomads (399 BC – 200 AD).
An arban consisted of 10 warriors.
A jaghun consisted of 10 arban (100 total).
A minquan consisted of 10 jaguan (1000 total).
A tumen consisted of 10 minquan (10,000 total).
The brilliance of this system was that it split up the clans of former enemies (eg Tatars, Murkits, Karaites and Naimans), preventing them from conspiring against the Mongol leadership.
Chinggis Khan had 49 generals spread out across the Mongolian steppes, and central, eastern and western assimilated territories. Each general (appointed based on skill rather than family status) was assigned one or more minquan.
Chinggis Kahn (and his successors) also appointed a Keshig (bodyguard) made up of the sons of officers. This consisted of one minquan each of night guards and quiver bearers and eight minquons of day guards. These men served as household staff (caring for the Great Kahns herds, as well cooking his food and pouring his drinks) as well a body guards. This allowed him to assess their character, intelligence prior to assigning them military duties.
Mongol warriors were metal helmets with strong leather ear coverings and armor made of overlapping leather or metal strips. Their horses also wore armor, though it was lighter than that used by European cavalry on used on their horses. The Mongols sometimes brought down enemy horses by shooting them with flaming arrows.
In addition to a composite bow, a Mongol warrior carried a hooked lance to pull enemies of their horses, a well as a curved sword, ax, mace and lasso.
They carried different shields depending on the type of combat. They used wooden shields on guard duty, wicker shields to protect themselves from arrows and shell shields in a siege to protect against objects thrown down on them.
Mongol horses were unshod, giving them greater mobility and Mongol saddles were oiled to give the rider more flexibility.
Each warrior carried short and long bows, with heavy arrows with wide heads for closer targets and lighter arrows for a greater distance. Arrowheads were made of bone or metal and sometimes poisoned.
Mongol commanders gathered extensive intelligence prior to battle on the enemy leader’s religion, culture and personality. Scouts were sent ahead to identify the best routes, topography for battle and campsites close to food and water and unsuitable. The often used flags to communicate over long distances.They also put out disinformation to mislead their enemies, sometimes placing women or dummies or horses to make their forces seem larger.
Mongol warriors frequently slept on their horses while they grazed and carried emergency ration when traveling through deserts or during winter,
Like Xiangnu, Hun, Turk and Viking warriors, they strategically choreographed their battles o their movements couldn’t be anticipated. Thus they often prevailed over far larger armies.
In attacking major cities, they relied on Khitan and Chinese engineers to build massive siege engines with local trees to lobby massive boulders at city walls and buildings.
Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.
I received a fascinating testimonial in my inbox today:
2021 Wong et al – A Review of Post-treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome and Chronic Lyme Disease for the Practicing Immunologist
Lyme disease is an infection caused by Borrelia burgdorferi, which is transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected Ixodes tick.
majority of patients recover without complications with antibiotic therapy.
However, for a minority of patients, accompanying non-specific symptoms can persist for months following completion of therapy.
The constellation of symptoms such as fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, and musculoskeletal pain that persist beyond 6 months and are associated with disability have been termed post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (PTLDS), a subset of a broader term “Chronic Lyme disease.”
Chronic Lyme disease is a broad, vaguely defined term that is used to describe patients with non-specific symptoms that are attributed to a presumed persistent Borrelia burgdorferi infection in patients who may or may not have evidence of either previous or current Lyme disease.
Ivermectin to Control Ticks
2000 – Attempt to Control Ticks (Acari: Ixodidae) on Deer on an Isolated Island Using Ivermectin-Treated Corn
1996 – Systemic Treatment of White-tailed Deer with Ivermectin-Medicated Bait To Control Free-Living Populations of Lone Star Ticks (Acari: Ixodidae)
1989 – Control of Lone Star Ticks (Acari: Ixodidae) on Spanish Goats and White-tailed Deer with Orally Administered Ivermectin
2023 Propaganda Article Praises Ivermectin Use in “Deer” for “Tick Control”
This is a heavy piece of propaganda, the intent of which was to ridicule people who use Ivermectin.
My Take…
I couldn’t find any research about Chronic Lyme Disease and Ivermectin.
Nevertheless, many people are using either Ivermectin or Fenbendazole to treat Chronic Lyme Disease, and they talk about it on Twitter.
A 2018 study found persistent infection despite antibiotic therapy in patients with ongoing symptoms of Lyme.
In 2013 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that Lyme disease is much more common than previously thought, with over 300,000 new cases diagnosed each year in the United States.
That makes Lyme disease six times more common than HIV/AIDS, 20 times more common than hepatitis C virus infection and 30 times more common than tuberculosis in the United States.
“Our findings address a major controversy over persistent symptoms in Lyme disease,” said Marianne Middelveen, lead author of the published study. “The results suggest that infection with the Lyme spirochete may persist in some patients despite supposedly adequate antibiotic therapy.”
Effect of Ivermectin
So is the anecdotal case I received an anti-bacterial effect, anti-inflammatory effect or something else?
There is something called “Lyme arthritis.”
From 2021 Lochhead et al – Lyme arthritis: linking infection, inflammation and autoimmunity:
“The central feature of post-infectious Lyme arthritis is an excessive, dysregulated pro-inflammatory immune response during the infection phase that persists into the post-infectious period. This response is characterized by high amounts of IFNγ and inadequate amounts of the anti-inflammatory cytokine IL-10. The consequences of this dysregulated pro-inflammatory response in the synovium include impaired tissue repair, vascular damage, autoimmune and cytotoxic processes, and fibroblast proliferation and fibrosis. These synovial characteristics are similar to those in other chronic inflammatory arthritides, including rheumatoid arthritis”
Ivermectin and Rheumatoid Arthritis
2023 Khan et al – Evaluation of therapeutic potential of ivermectin against complete Freund’s adjuvant-induced arthritis in rats: Involvement of inflammatory mediators
Thirty-two male Wistar rats were randomly divided into four groups: control, diseased, dexamethasone, and ivermectin groups
After 7 days of rheumatoid arthritis induction, animals were treated with dexamethasone 5 mg/kg and ivermectin 6 mg/kg
Treatment with ivermectin showed a significant reduction in inflammatory cells levels, body weight, and visual arthritic score, indicating an improvement in the degree of inflammation as compared with the diseased group.
Ivermectin treatment also showed a significant reduction in the severity of inflammation and destruction of joints and showed comparable effects to dexamethasone, a corticosteroid used for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis
Conclusion: “Ivermectin has significant antiarthritic properties and can be a novel treatment agent for the management of rheumatoid arthritis patients”
Conclusion
Ivermectin, is comparable to a strong steroid like dexamethasone (6 times stronger than prednisone) in reducing severity of inflammation and destruction of joints in Rheumatoid Arthritis. That’s impressive.
That’s it’s helping those who suffered from 25 years of Lyme disease, joints and muscle pains is also impressive.
Lyme sufferers should definitely look into Ivermectin.
Maybe there’s more to Ivermectin, Lyme Disease and COVID-19.
Imagine a world where ownership is a distant memory, replaced by an eerie semblance of joy in dispossession. In 2016, Klaus Schwab, the enigmatic architect of the World Economic Forum, foretold a future whereby, in 2024, humanity would be stripped of its possessions, shackled in digital chains, yet deceived into a state of contentment. Initially dismissed as lunacy, we stand on the precipice of this harrowing reality; Schwab’s vision looms ominously over us, more prophetic than we dared to believe.
For decades, a clandestine cabal of technocrats has meticulously orchestrated our descent into digital serfdom. We sleepwalked into their trap and surrendered our rights and possessions to those who wield the power of the keystroke. In this brave new world, ownership is an illusion, and with a mere digital command, everything we hold dear can be seized.
This article unveils the sinister agenda behind the facade of progress. It explores the erosion of ownership through click-wrap agreements, the dematerialization of our assets into databases over the past few decades, the rise of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), which threatens our control over money, and The Great Taking, which threatens our control over the rest of our non-monetary assets.
All is not lost, although, in a separate article, I will address that our salvation comes not at the ballot box but through our radical non-compliance. Technology can either be used to promote freedom or tyranny. I will discuss how we can adopt technologies to counter the digital slave system actively being developed by technocrats, thus guaranteeing our privacy, ability to engage in voluntary trade, and retention of our free will.
The Erosion of Ownership: A Descent into Digital Serfdom
In the bleak dawn of the digital age, we find ourselves trapped in a labyrinth of click-wrap agreements; our freedoms quietly surrendered to the whims of faceless corporations. The once-mighty notion of personal ownership has been reduced to a mere abstraction, a quaint relic of a bygone era.
As we click “I agree” with reckless abandon, we seal our fate, surrendering our autonomy to the technocrats who manipulate and control us through the devices we thought would liberate us. Once hailed as a bastion of freedom and progress, the digital realm has devolved into a dystopian nightmare where our every move is tracked, monitored, and exploited.
The Insidious Nature of Digital Control
We are lulled into complacency by the convenience and ease of digital transactions, unaware of the subtle yet pervasive manipulation that underlies every click, every swipe, and every tap. The fine print, a behemoth of legalese, conceals the true nature of our agreements, hiding in plain sight the draconian terms that govern our digital existence.
Consider the staggering numbers: we encounter an estimated 150-400 click-wrap agreements per year, each a ticking time bomb of obligations and responsibilities that we blithely accept without a second thought. These agreements are ubiquitous, embedded in every aspect of our digital lives:
Software licenses, like Microsoft’s 70-page End User License Agreement (EULA)
Online shopping agreements, like Amazon’s 12,000-word Conditions of Use
Social media terms of service, like Facebook’s 25-page Statement of Rights and Responsibilities
Mobile app agreements, like Apple’s 50-page iOS Software License Agreement
Online banking agreements, like Wells Fargo’s 30-page Online Access Agreement
A Life Sentence of Reading
To keep up with the fine print, we would have to devote up to an hour every day, 365 days a year, just to read the agreements. This is the actual cost of our digital existence: a life sentence of reading, a never-ending task that would consume a significant portion of our daily lives.
A Study in Deception
A recent experiment revealed the shocking truth: 74% of participants blindly accepted terms that would have surrendered their firstborn children to the service’s owners and provided their personal information to the NSA.
[…]
The Stage is Set for Asset Transfer
Our increased participation with these clickwrap agreements has set the stage for our assets to be transferred at the click of a button. With the rise of digital currencies, online marketplaces, and social media platforms, our financial, personal, and creative assets are more vulnerable than ever. The implications are dire: a future where our assets are seized, frozen, or transferred without our consent, all under the guise of “agreements” we never truly understood.
We have unwittingly surrendered our autonomy, creativity, and humanity to the whims of corporate overlords. As you will see in the coming sections, the assignment of our rights through digital agreements, CBDCs, and asset tokenization will soon leave us owning nothing.
Because this article is long, I will keep a cumulative list of key takeaways as bullet points at the end of each section.
Key takeaways:
We have unknowingly given away most of our rights through countless digital agreements we sign without reading, eroding personal ownership and autonomy and making our assets vulnerable to corporate control.
The Digitized Domain: A House of Cards Built on Fragile Databases and Corrupt Intermediaries
The digitization of our lives has bestowed upon us a double-edged sword: convenience and vulnerability. We’ve traded the tangible for the intangible, surrendering our assets to the capricious whims of databases and their intermediaries. But let’s be clear: databases are not just peripheral components of our digital lives but the foundation of modern commerce.
Consider it: corporations and governments store every transaction, asset, and record of ownership in a database. Your car title, house deed, and even the shares you hold in a company are all reduced to mere data points within these centralized repositories. And yet, we’re asked to trust that these systems will safeguard our investments and identities from prying eyes and malicious actors.
But here’s the thing: most of our assets have already been digitized. They exist only as entries in a database, and their value is entirely dependent on the integrity of that database. If the database is compromised, the asset is compromised. If the database is destroyed, the asset is destroyed. Database corruption is not just a theoretical risk; it’s a very real one. The financial losses alone are staggering—$1 trillion in 2017, a projected $10.5 trillion by 2025.
And what of the human cost? The disruption of lives, the theft of identities, the destruction of trust? The intermediaries who manage these databases – governments, corporations, and financial institutions – have become gatekeepers to our assets, wielding influence over markets and shaping economies. And yet, we’re expected to accept their security and stability assurances blindly.
Let’s take a step back and consider the current state of affairs. The labyrinthine transaction process, as we know it today, is a veritable goldmine for the parasites and leeches that thrive in its shadows. Third-party intermediaries—lawyers, brokers, or bureaucrats—add layer upon layer of time, money, and expense to every transaction, like a suffocating ivy strangling the life out of a tree. Just as the ivy’s tendrils wrap around the tree’s trunk, squeezing out its vitality, these intermediaries choke the life out of our transactions, draining them of efficiency, transparency, and fairness.
Consider this: according to some estimates, these parasitic middlemen gobbled up as much as 30-40% of the revenue in specific industries. That’s right, nearly half of every dollar you spend can vanish into the abyss of unnecessary costs and inefficiencies before it even reaches the hands that produce the goods or services we desire.
And what do we get in return for this fleecing? A system riddled with redundancies, opacity, and corruption. This concern isn’t new. You can read all about it in the pages of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, who warned against the evils of middlemen and monopolies over two centuries ago.
[…]
Whether we like databases being at the heart of commerce or not, they aren’t going away. A new trend is emerging: tokenization, which converts assets into unique digital tokens that can be stored and traded on digital ledgers. Tokenization means a digital token will eventually represent everything from property to goods to services. As we’ll explore in future sections, this shift towards tokenization can either fix some of the security problems and inefficiencies associated with middlemen or create a new level of tyranny. With tokenization, we may be able to create a new, decentralized system for managing our assets and transactions or further surrender our control of our assets to the globalist cabal.
Key takeaways:
We have unknowingly given away most of our rights through countless digital agreements we sign without reading, eroding personal ownership and autonomy and making our assets vulnerable to corporate control.
Our assets and transactions, now digitized and stored in fragile databases managed by corrupt intermediaries, are vulnerable to loss, theft, and manipulation, highlighting the risks and inefficiencies of our current digital system.
The Money in Our Bank Accounts Doesn’t Belong to Us
We’ve come to understand that we’ve been signing away our rights digitally, surrendering control over our lives to the whims of centralized databases and their intermediaries. But the loss of ownership doesn’t stop there – it permeates every aspect of our existence, from our cars and houses to our money.
Let’s start with what should be our most basic financial instrument: the bank account. We consider the money in our bank accounts ours, but a closer look reveals a different reality. Through my research on the terms and conditions of the four largest banks – Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citibank – I’ve discovered that they can cancel the account without cause, sell or give away our data (and they do give our transaction info to the IRS for use with AI to make sure the taxman gets his cut), change fees, and even modify the terms and conditions at will. I encourage you to check the terms and conditions of your bank account.
These contractual terms mean that the money in our bank accounts doesn’t belong to us. It’s held in trust by these financial institutions, subject to their whims and control. And with digital transactions comprising the majority of economic activity—a staggering $3 trillion as of 2023—it’s clear that our money is already primarily digitized.
The insidious tendrils of centralization have trapped us all, from the high and mighty to the lowly and obscure. It’s a web of control extending far beyond mere money – it’s a stranglehold on our lives.
Consider the cases of Nigel Farage, Dr. Joseph Mercola, and his family – their bank accounts were summarily closed without explanation or provocation. And who’s next? Kanye West, Nick Fuentes, gun groups, religious associations, professional unions, and even protesting truckers – all targeted for exercising their rights, all silenced by the banks.
At this point, we aren’t even talking about CBDCs. When people bleat about CBDCs today, they mostly talk about getting their money shut off or being monitored. That already happens today. The threat isn’t the CBDCs of tomorrow but the current state of the dollar today.
CBDCs simply take this surveillance and programmability to the next level – paving the way for complete digital tyranny.
[…]
The surveillance aspect of CBDCs is equally chilling. Those in power would track, record, and analyze every transaction, eroding any vestige of financial privacy. The thought of governments knowing your every purchase, from coffee to groceries, is enough to send shivers down the spine of anyone who values freedom.
Negative interest rates are another potential nightmare scenario. Governments could confiscate a portion of your savings regularly, discouraging you from saving and encouraging reckless spending. These negative rates would lead to economic instability and further erosion of our financial sovereignty.
Gateway to tyranny: But it doesn’t stop there. CBDCs are designed to be integrated with social credit systems, digital IDs, vaccine passports, and even tied to our other non-monetary assets (homes, cars, stocks, bonds), creating a complete control grid over everything we think we own. Complete digital control is the ultimate goal of technocrats: a global currency backed by energy credits, with a social credit system enforcing compliance with the UN’s 2030 Agenda.
By Liu Xuanzun
(Photo Credit: The Cradle)
The Most Revolutionary Act 