Then there’s the undeniable upside of profit-motivated healthcare, both for investors and the corporate leadership that serves them. For health insurers, it means denial of coverage whenever and wherever they can. Every procedure, office visit, hospital stay and prescription they refuse to cover is money in the bank. For health systems and for-profit hospitals, it’s all about revenue generation. They want high-value procedures and lengthy hospital stays. Pharmaceutical companies want more and more users, and they invent new drugs to treat new conditions. And then there is private equity’s disastrous foray into healthcare. They seek cash cows to milk until they ultimately slaughter them and sell off the steaks.

The profit motive has served them all well.

Perhaps too well.

That’s the message Republicans attempted to embrace when a group of hospital and healthcare system CEOs faced a House Ways and Means Committee searching for “the root causes of rising health care costs in the U.S.” The Hill noted one of the challenges Republicans face now that they’ve decided to flip their script:

The hearings show Republicans are acutely aware that affordability is a top issue among voters ahead of the midterm elections and are willing to show they are holding accountable the corporations and executives they were once allied with.

Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) set the tone early when he likened the prices the CEOs charge to “borderline extortion." Then the reliably pro-capitalism conservative said this:

“Our local hospitals and physicians have been replaced by mega-corporations that put quarterly earnings over quality care. When hospitals have no competition, it’s no wonder that the sky seems to be the limit for prices.”

The unavoidable fact is that “quarterly earnings” will always trump “quality care,” and Rep. Smith knows it. That’s the nature of the Neoliberal beast unleashed by the Reagan Revolution. The bottom line is the only line that matters. Healthcare is not exempted from Friedman’s Doctrine. And that means a CEO’s sole obligation is to maximize profits for shareholders. Period. End of story.

That cold reality has made healthcare a perennial issue ever since Harris Wofford won a special election for the Pennsylvania Senate seat left vacant by the death of John Heinz in 1991. The Democrat trailed popular Republican Dick Thornburgh by as much as 47 points before pulling off “a shocking 55-to-45 victory.” Guided by the then-unknown duo of James Carville and Paul Begala, Wofford focused on voters’ angst about the cost of healthcare. His solution? National health insurance.

Pollster Mike Donilon explained his candidate’s upset victory to The Washington Post:

From the beginning, voters favored some form of national health insurance by a margin of five to one; 52 percent of them favored it strongly. Donilon tracked this group throughout the campaign and by election day, 65 percent supported Wofford. That suggests that more than 30 percent of the voters picked Wofford on the health care issue alone.

…and…

“People talked about this with a great deal of fear and anxiety,” said Donilon. “These were people who do have health insurance, and fear the choices they could face if they lose it: Do they pay their mortgage, pay their kids’ tuition or pay to take their kid to the hospital?”

That was echoed in a New York Times report on Wofford’s come-from-behind win:

Debbie W. Klotz, a 37-year-old homemaker from York said: “I liked national health care for the simple reason that being unemployed, we are paying our own health insurance, and we can’t afford it, but we can’t afford to do without it.”

And Maryanne O’Brien Donohue, a Scranton homemaker, said, “I really feel this is a time when the Democratic party is representing the middle class.”

Thirty-five years have passed and the Democratic party is once again banking on healthcare to help it reconnect with middle and working class voters. And it probably will, particularly as the impact of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” is increasingly felt in the months leading up to November. People losing healthcare is a PR disaster and, as evidenced by Rep. Smith hauling CEOs before his committee for a good tongue-lashing, Republicans are desperate to reverse the widespread perception that the GOP aids and abets a health system that still generates “a great deal of fear and anxiety.”

It also generates a lot of anger.

Luigi Mangione became a cult hero when his assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson unleashed the pent-up anger many Americans harbor for a system governed by two potentially conflicting mandates: generate profits and deliver healthcare.

Sometimes they align. Oftentimes they do not.

Those conflicting imperatives seem to have genuinely outraged one of Chairman Smith’s Republican colleagues on the Ways and Means committee. A practicing urologist from North Carolina, Representative Greg Murphy is one of twenty physicians currently serving in the 119th Congress. Ironically, though, his epiphany on the problem of profiteering came as a patient.

When Ways and Means held a similar hearing with health insurance executives in January, Rep. Murphy told them of his struggle to get a medication he “needs to exist.”

It took eight denials before insurance agreed.

At the time, he marveled at how difficult the process was for a physician … one who also happens to be a member of Congress. After pondering the plight for Americans who must face similar obstacles without a medical degree or a Congressional staff, he concluded that health insurance was ultimately irredeemable:

[I]f I had it my way I’d turn all of you guys into dust. We’d start back from scratch. We’d have competition in the industry. We’d have association health plans. And we would have nonprofit hospitals rather than profits being put over patients.

Now, with hospital and health system CEOs arrayed before him, the good doctor returned to that theme, but also suggested a new diagnosis, per The Hill:

Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) asked the chief executive of HCA Healthcare “why we should allow for-profit systems to exist.”

Murphy, a practicing urologist and co-chair of the GOP Doctors’ Caucus, said he understands costs have gone up, and there is uncompensated care.

But he noted executive compensation has also risen, and there’s no excuse for companies making exorbitant profits for shareholders who have no connection to health care.

“I don’t want to sound like a communist; I’m not. I’m a capitalist at heart,” Murphy added. “But if we now have institutions that put profits above patients … we have to rethink this model.”

It’s not a matter of “if,” Rep. Murphy.

Institutions regularly put profits above patients.

That’s because the Affordable Care Act effectively enshrined the profit motive in healthcare when it did not eliminate the health insurance industry. It’s probably the main reason it made it through Congress. Imagine the oodles of cash the industry would’ve spent to save itself from elimination under a single-payer system. But it didn’t have to. The ACA was an explicit compromise that preserved capitalistic healthcare.

The law’s architects squared that circle by socializing the inevitable human cost of retaining the profit motive. They did that by expanding Medicaid to cover low-income adults without dependent children and with incomes up to 138% of the poverty line (currently $15,650). For those above the line, it also provided significant, sliding-scale subsidies to those who acquired health insurance through an online ACA exchange. Those compromises became revenue streams for the health insurance industry, but that trade-off also drove the uninsured rate to an all-time low of 7.7% in 2023. That was down from a high of 18.2% in 2010.

Now, thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill … which Rep. Murphy voted for … that number is likely to swell in 2027 as the first wave of newly ineligible Medicaid recipients is cut loose. They will be joined by up to five million Americans who are beginning to discover insurance is unaffordable without the enhanced subsidies that kept people afloat during the pandemic. In essence, the GOP eliminated the trade-offs that made profiteering tolerable, but also did nothing to address the system’s soon-to-be skyrocketing human cost.

Frankly, Medicaid expansion and ACA subsidies were only Band-Aids. The preservation of the profit motive was destined to produce the perverse incentives currently playing out in Emergency Departments (EDs) around the country as hospital beds are increasingly managed like commercial airline seats. It’s the “terrifying medical underworld” of “emergency room boarding” encountered by the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Elizabeth Rosenthal during her husband’s disastrous end-of-life visits to the ER:

[We] learned the hard way that if you need admission to the hospital, you can remain in the emergency department — in the hallway or a curtained bay on a hard stretcher or in a makeshift holding area — for more than 24 hours, even for days, while waiting for a real hospital bed. In this limbo state, you’re technically admitted to the hospital, but still located in the physical domain of the ER. And the rules governing acceptable care and safety measures become much less clear.

Rosenthal knows of what she speaks…

When I worked as an emergency medicine doctor a few decades ago, the ED was mostly empty at the beginning of my 7 a.m. shift. A few patients might be lingering from the day before: alcoholics who would sober up and leave, patients with a severe burn or a bad case of pneumonia who were waiting for a bed in intensive care.

In the decades since, EDs have doubled or even tripled in size. Even so, patients are piling up. When I started asking around, I quickly discovered ED boarding has become commonplace in the past five or so years and is getting worse, more or less omnipresent in hospitals. “Everyone knows about this problem, and no one cares enough to do anything about it,” Adrian Haimovich, an ED doctor at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center who studies ED boarding, told me. “It’s barbaric.”

If it’s “barbaric” now, what will it be like when Americans newly priced out of insurance or newly pushed off Medicaid use emergency rooms for health issues preferably handled by an office visit? They will be joined by desperate patients who delayed unaffordable healthcare until an injury or illness becomes life-altering or life-threatening. And they all may end up languishing for hours on a gurney in a hallway:

When I worked as a doctor, if an ED was overwhelmed beyond capacity, the attending (that was me) typically called in to ambulance dispatch to request “diversion” — ambulances should take patients to another hospital. If a hospital got too full, the admitting office canceled elective admissions. Today, hospitals run like airlines and intentionally overbook, Gabe Kelen, the director of emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins University, said. They also have fewer beds than they did a few years ago — in part because nurse (and executive) salaries have risen since the pandemic. An empty, staffed bed is a money loser, so the institution has an incentive to keep beds full and make new patients wait.

What’s more, patients seeking profitable elective procedures are prioritized over those with less remunerative infirmities. Like air travelers, Kelen explained, they get bumped:

“The problem isn’t inefficiency — it’s the way health care finance is structured,” Kelen said. “Hospitals typically run on thin margins. Elective admissions are prioritized because they tend to be for lucrative procedures like heart catheterizations and joint replacements.”

Of course, the house wins whether a patient languishes in the hallway with a less-than lucrative malady or they zip through to pre-op for knee replacement surgery. Here’s Rosenthal’s diagnosis:

Admitting patients through the emergency room has business advantages, too, even if it means they wait for a bed. The evaluation generates charges that typically run many thousands of dollars; once admitted, my husband was still billed the inpatient rate even for a stretcher in the hall. Old, sick, and dying patients are more likely to linger there in part because, after they’re in a real bed, they may take up that spot for days or weeks at a time while waiting for a bed in rehab or hospice, requiring nursing time but not the types of interventions that generate revenue.

If you find yourself old and sick, here’s hoping you require the “types of interventions that generate revenue.” If not, here’s hoping you don’t end up in a REIT-run nursing home like Pearlene Darby:

By the time she was hospitalized in 2020, [the] retired teacher…suffered open sores on both legs, both hips, and both heels, as well as a five-inch-long gash on her tailbone. She died two weeks later at age 81 from infections and bedsores, according to her death certificate. Her daughter sued the nursing home, alleging it had left Darby sitting in her own feces and urine time and again.

The lawsuit, settled on confidential terms last year, blamed not only the managers of City Creek Post-Acute and Assisted Living but also the building’s owner, a real estate investment trust, or REIT.

That’s right. Profit-motivated Real Estate Investment Trusts have quietly moved into the one of the slimier segments of healthcare business—nursing homes.

REITs now own a fifth of the nation’s senior housing, which includes assisted living, memory care, and independent living, according to an industry analysis. REITs also hold investments in 1 in 6 nursing homes. Publicly traded REITs that focus on health care are now worth nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars, according to Nareit, an industry association.

The main allure of investing in nursing facilities is, according to another excellent deep dive by Kaiser Health News, the amazing tax break REITs enjoy :

REITs are required to distribute most of their income and don’t have to pay the 21% federal corporate income tax on it.

That’s quite a break. But there is a “catch.” REITs are forbidden by Federal tax rules from running health care facilities:

A REIT that “directly or indirectly operates or manages” a health care facility loses the tax break for five years.

But this is America. Every new rule or law is just a loophole that hasn’t been opened yet:

Typically, a REIT leases the property to another company that runs the nursing home or assisted living facility and maintains its tax break.

The rub, though, is that REITs are anything but hands-off landlords:

…REITs often select the management who oversee the operations and leave them in place even when they are aware of threadbare staffing, floundering governance, repeated safety violations, or other problems that hamper quality of care.

None of that is a problem, though, if nobody is paying attention:

Despite their ubiquity, REITs remain invisible to state and federal health regulators. Hospitals and nursing homes are not required to disclose rent payments or landlord identities in the annual reports they submit to Medicare.

Even better, the Trump administration scuttled a meager effort to simply let patients know who’s actually running their facility:

Under President Donald Trump, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services indefinitely suspended a Biden-era requirement that nursing homes disclose REIT involvement. Catherine Howden, a CMS spokesperson, said in a statement that the agency does not regulate facilities based on their tax status or corporate form and instead focuses on the quality of the care they provide.

Which brings us back to CareTrust and the REIT model.

Clever capitalists did what clever capitalists are rewarded for doing … they found and exploited a regulatory gap in nursing homes, and they are driving the resulting profits through a gaping a hole in tax law. The only thing they need besides capital (which REITs have in abundance) and regulatory indifference is to find “underperforming” and/or distressed facilities that can be had on-the-cheap.

That was certainly the case with CareTrust.

When they bought the home that would eventually kill Pearlene Darby with a brutal combination of incompetence and indifference, it had a “one-star Medicare rating” and it ”was losing money.”

They got it cheap.

And they got the tax break.

To keep that loophole, CareTrust leased the building to a management company called Kalesta Healthcare Group. But documents show that CareTrust…

…chose the nursing home’s management company and required through the lease that the home keep at least 80% of beds occupied. CareTrust granularly tracked how well the home kept to its financial plan, down to the money spent monthly on nurses and food, the records said. And the documents showed that the real estate company kept tabs on government safety inspection findings and Medicare quality ratings.

When they got those safety inspection findings, though, they didn’t feel the need to improve:

According to a state inspection report, in 2020, the year Darby died, City Creek left a resident in soiled linens “wet from head to toe lying in bed” for more than eight hours. During a different visit, a health inspector cited the home after watching a nurse put a dirty diaper back onto a resident after caring for a wound. “It was just a small stool and it is far from where the wound is,” the nurse told the inspector, according to the report.

Frankly, why would CareTrust spend a dime to improve the conditions at City Creek or any of the facilities in their sprawling empire? They are investors, not doctors or nurses. They are there for the revenue and the tax-free payouts, not to heal the sick or care for the infirm. Their motivation is profit. It may be grim, but they are reaping exactly what they’ve sown:

CareTrust, which now owns more than 500 senior housing and nursing home buildings, reported net income last year of $320 million from $476 million in rents and other revenue — a 67% profit margin. By comparison, HCA Healthcare, one of the nation’s largest for-profit hospital and health care chains, reported a 10% profit margin for last year.

Sixty-seven percent?!?!?

What would it be if the industry prioritized keeping all its residents free of infected bedsores? Fifty-seven percent? Forty-seven percent? Perhaps even thirty-seven percent? Would REITs actually trade a thirty percent reduction in profits for the elimination of preventable deaths from bedsores? Or it is cheaper in the long run to occasionally pay lump sums in lawsuits?

As far as the balance sheet is concerned, there is no difference between the losses incurred from unsuccessfully launching a defective product or failing to regularly turn someone with bedsores. Hell, those payouts are usually tax-deductible, so they practically pay for themselves, anyway. - jp

Here’s what the CEOs and CFOs of public for-profit health systems made in 2025
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/special-reports/heres-what-ceos-and-cfos-public-profit-health-systems-made-2025

Health insurer CEO pay stagnated as profits faltered in 2025
https://www.modernhealthcare.com/insurance/mh-insurance-ceo-compensation-2025-unitedhealth-humana/

Big Companies Position Themselves for Payday From $50B Federal Rural Health Fund
https://kffhealthnews.org/rural-health/rural-health-transformation-program-cms-state-contractors-ehr-patients/

When care becomes capital: Without urgent safeguards, financialisation risks locking care systems into a race to the bottom
https://www.ips-journal.eu/work-and-digitalisation/when-care-becomes-capital-9021/

REITs Gain Quiet Control Over Nursing Homes as Oversight Lags, KFF Analysis Shows
https://skillednursingnews.com/2026/04/reits-gain-quiet-control-over-nursing-homes-as-oversight-lags-kff-analysis-shows/

Historic nursing home to sell to growing PE firm amid industry pressures
https://www.mcknights.com/news/historic-nursing-home-selling/

Private equity is reshaping Asheville’s vet clinics: ‘They’re circling me like a vulture’
https://avlwatchdog.org/private-equity-is-reshaping-ashevilles-vet-clinics-theyre-circling-me-like-a-vulture/

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After decades of futility and frustration, they were finally poised to gut the Endangered Species Act (ESA) with a bill critics dubbed “the Extinction Act.”

But winning wasn’t enough.

The architects of H.R. 1897 wanted to pass the bill on Earth Day, just to drive home the point. It was going to be the legislative equivalent of rolling coal, but instead of spewing plumes of thick, black smoke out of a modified truck’s exhaust system, they’d be making it far easier to prioritize spewing plumes of thick, black smoke over the survival of an endangered species.

In particular, the bill allows “exemptions to the law if the administration decides national security or economic interests are at stake.” Not coincidentally, Trump’s regime is already using bogus claims of “national security” to wage what can only be described as an all-out war on environmental protections.

NOTUS just reported on Trump’s weaponization of “national security,” which “has come up as the basis for everything from the administration’s air pollution exemptions for power plants to Trump’s push to keep aging coal plants open past their slated closure dates.”

One glaring example was Secretary of Lethality Pete Hegseth’s invocation of national security to override ESA restrictions on oil and gas extraction in the Gulf of Mexico. Unlike Trump’s invocation, Hegseth attempted to directly link the suspension of the ESA to Trump’s war on Iran:

“Recent hostile actions by the Iranian terror regime highlights [sic] yet again why robust domestic oil production is a national security imperative. Production in the Gulf of America provides a vital buffer, insulating our economy and military from foreign instability and reducing the strategic leverage of our adversaries.”

That’s despite the fact domestic “domestic oil production hit an all-time high of 13.6 million barrels per day” in 2025, and despite the fact that a lot of drillers were not tapping the ground before the war because the market was already oversupplied. The profit margins didn’t justify the investment. The impetus to drill, baby, drill simply wasn’t there.

But attack Iran and voila!

Create the problem. Spur a reaction. Offer a solution.

NOTUS asked Hegseth to explain his predictable solution to an oil market he helped destabilize, but got this spokesperson’s bombast instead:

“The Secretary of War determined that the oil and gas production in the Gulf of America required an exemption under the ESA as it is necessary and essential to the United States’ national security.”

Sadly, Hegseth may have also determined the fate of 50 critically endangered whales. Per Grist:

The administration has itself noted that oil and gas production in the Gulf “is likely to jeopardize the continued existence of the Rice’s whale.” Its analysis concluded that the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 killed 17 percent of the whale’s population and that vessel strikes could kill multiple whales per year. The decision to override the Endangered Species Act could cause the extinction of the Rice’s whale, a species that only lives in the northern Gulf of Mexico and which has only about 50 living members.

So, a couple bucks added to the price of a gallon of gas is all it took. If Rice’s whale dies out or the Gulf of Mexico is poisoned by another Deepwater Horizon disaster, so be it. That decision was made by the rarely-convened “God Squad,” an advisory committee that hadn’t been asked to rule on a major exemption in over three decades. It was added to the ESA in 1978 when Congress passed an amendment to the law. The intention was to allow exemptions in extraordinary cases where the ESA may conflict with a situation or project of extraordinary import:

The statute directs the Committee to grant the exemption if four criteria are met, which parallel the information provided in the report: (1) there are no RPAs [reasonable and prudent alternatives]; (2) the benefits of the action clearly outweigh the benefits of RPAs, "consistent with conserving the species or its critical habitat," and the action is in the public interest; (3) "the action is of regional or national significance"; and (4) neither the federal agency nor any permit or license applicant violated Section 7(d)'s restrictions.

But that’s not all…

The Committee must also establish "reasonable mitigation and enhancement measures . . . as are necessary and appropriate to minimize the adverse effects of the agency action upon the endangered species, threatened species, or critical habitat concerned." The Committee must agree to an exemption with at least five votes, and the voting must be in person. If granted, the statute directs the Committee to issue an order that grants the exemption and specifies the required mitigation and enhancement measures for the exemption applicant to carry out.

Is there any chance any of those predicates where met by Hegseth or the revolving door crew who currently sit on the God Squad? Per TIME:

The committee is composed of six permanent members: the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of the Army, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The current permanent members of the committee include Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the current chair of the panel; Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins; Secretary of the Army Daniel P. Driscoll; Acting CEA Chairman Pierre Yared ; EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin; and NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs.

Their precedent-setting decision portended the functional end of the Endangered Species Act. No doubt, Hegseth and Co. expect lawsuits that end up in the Supreme Court to side with the God Squad. But there is no guarantee, particularly because, in classic Trump regime fashion, they did not follow the law. Here is one of the problems identified in one of the six lawsuits now filed against the God Squad’s decision:

Under section 7(j) of the law, the committee has the power to issue an exemption when the secretary of defense cites a national security risk. That’s what the administration has argued to justify the decision, Owen said, but the exemption was issued under section 7(h), which entails a longer, public process that was not followed in this case.

Of course they didn’t.

But not to worry. That’s were the Extinction Act comes in. With H.R. 1897 passed and signed into law, the new standard for any determination about an endangered species will “require agencies to conduct economic and national security analyses when determining whether to list a plant or animal as endangered or threatened.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Earth Day execution of Endangered Species Act.

Florida Republicans in the House forced Speaker Mike Johnson to pull the bill from consideration. And one of the reasons was … the God Squad:

Florida Republican Rep. Kat Cammack said her concerns with the bill are centered on the bill’s language expanding the use of the “God Squad,” a group of high-level officials that can waive ESA mandates in favor of development projects, even when protected species could be put at risk.

“I want to see some improvements made before we’re willing to support the bill, but we fully agree that there needs to be updates to the Endangered Species Act,” Cammack said. “It hasn’t met the mark in terms of what it was intended to do.”

But Cammack pointed to the legislation’s Section 506, the provision expanding the use of the Endangered Species Committee. It’s known as the “God Squad” for its ability to make decisions that can potentially eliminate endangered species.

“What we’re concerned about is opening up any potential avenues for drilling in the Gulf,” Cammack said. “We have very sensitive ecosystems that we want to protect and ecotourism is a huge part of our state’s economy, and so there’s real concerns that we want to see addressed.”

She continued, “We think that our suggestions could improve the bill, and we’re working towards a way that everyone can be satisfied with the language at the end of the day.”

Cammack is as MAGA as they come, but when it comes to offshore drilling, she is 100% NIMBY. Another Florida Republican’s objection was much simpler, but perhaps more compelling:

It was quite a turn of events for a House that, according to a Defenders of Wildlife tracker, has “proposed more than 60 pieces of legislation that would undermine the ESA or weaken protections for imperiled wildlife.”

Whether it is dead or it can be revived with changes that appease the Florida delegation remains to be seen. But there is some hope in Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s stark tweet. She’s MAGA, but she also 36 years old … a Millennial who has grown up in an America that decided before she was born that it wasn’t going to tread on turtles.

When President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act on December 28, 1973, it had passed the House by a vote of 355-4 and the Senate by a vote of 92-0. The ESA has been popular from the start. A 2025 study in Conservation Letters found that over the last twenty years support for the ESA “has remained consistently high, at about 84%, and opposition has remained consistently low, at about 12%.”

Despite that overwhelming support, the House came damn close to gutting the popular law. And it could still happen. If it does, we’ll have all the evidence we need to list representative government as the most endangered species of all. - jp

Support for the US Endangered Species Act Is High and Steady Over the Past Three Decades
https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.13111

More Americans Think U.S. Doing Too Little on Environment
https://news.gallup.com/poll/659390/americans-think-doing-little-environment.aspx

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A team of scientists had a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to watch a civil war develop between chimpanzees in Uganda. The conflict began in earnest on June 24, 2015 when two of three increasingly splintered geographic “clusters” from the same, larger social group crossed paths. Professor Aaron Sandel of the University of Texas at Austin told 404 Media what he saw:

“They could have reunited and done what's typical—screaming and charging around, maybe some slapping, and then come together, sit together, groom, maybe go their separate ways after, because they'd already started to be a bit more disconnected,” Sandel continued. “But instead of reuniting in typical chimpanzee fusion fashion, the Western chimpanzees ran and the Central chimps chased them.”

Sandel, who was a graduate student at the time, ultimately led the team that just published their findings in Science.

Also there that day was primatologist John Mitani. As one of the founders of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in 1995, Mitani watched an unusually large population of chimpanzees with “distinct subpopulations” that “regularly overlapped for shared activities like grooming, patrolling, and interbreeding” suddenly Balkanize into separate, violent factions over the course of a decade. Like Sandel, he witnessed the Rubicon moment and told the New York Times what followed:

Over the next few years, the chimpanzees in the Western and Central clusters had interacted less and less. They only mated within their own clusters. By 2018, the clusters were occupying different parts of the forest.

Then the killing started, and it has not stopped since.

Scientists believe civil wars are rare occurrence for chimps. Although Jane Goodall observed a similar episode in the 1970s, genetic analysis of chimpanzees’ lineages indicate these “violent episodes” generally occur once every 500 years. That meant the Ngogo Chimp War presented a unique opportunity. Aaron Sandel also saw it as a unique challenge:

“I feel like a war correspondent, in a way. I want to be there to see it, but it’s sad. I’ve seen so many dead bodies of chimps.”

Thus far, researchers have observed twenty-eight deaths. Nineteen of those were infants … and many of those killings seem calculated:

Western chimps have ripped infants from their Central mothers’ chests and battered them to death.

Infanticide is not necessarily uncommon, but in this case it exemplifies an ominous pattern reflected in the collective violence meted-out on “adult or adolescent males”:

“There’ll be like five or 10 chimps piled on him, holding him down, biting him, slamming their fists on him, kicking him, dragging him,” [Sandel] said. “They’ll rip off their testicles.”

The Western cluster seems to be targeting their cousins’ ability to reproduce. Not coincidentally, the Western cluster—which has thus far instigated every attack—is growing in size while their cousins in the Central cluster see their numbers dwindle.

But is the population swing in favor of the Western cluster by design, or is just it an unintentional byproduct of how chimps fight?

The Ngogo chimp population’s recent history shows they are no strangers to the reproductive spoils of war. A 2025 study led by anthropologist Brian Wood of UCLA examined a war between two separate chimp groups. It was an intergroup conflict. The Ngogo chimps attacked neighbors, as opposed the intragroup “civil” war studied by Sandel’s team. What Wood found is telling:

Between 1998 and 2008, the Ngogo chimpanzees of Kibale engaged in violent clashes with their neighbors. During this decade of conflict, at least 21 chimpanzees from neighboring groups were killed, and in 2009, the Ngogo chimpanzees expanded into an area previously inhabited by their rivals, boosting their territory by 2.5 square miles (6.4 square kilometres) or 22%.

The records revealed that in the three years before the territorial expansion, the female Ngogo chimps gave birth to 15 offspring. But in the three years after it, they gave birth to 37 youngsters, more than doubling their fertility rate.

What’s more, the infants born after the expansion were more likely to survive: they went from having a 41% chance of dying before the age of 3 to just an 8% chance of it.

The study’s authors are clear about the implications:

[W]e show that female fertility and infant survivorship increased after males in the Ngogo chimpanzee community killed members of neighboring groups and expanded their territory. These findings demonstrate the fitness benefits of intergroup killing in one of our two closest living relatives and contribute to the debate regarding its adaptive significance.

Simply put:

The work provides the best evidence yet that, for chimpanzees, expanding territory after killing off rivals can directly boost reproductive success.

This raises a serious question about the civil war.

Are Ngogo’s marauding Western chimps simply applying the lessons they learned from external warfare to their civil conflict with their estranged cousins?

Are the Western chimps intent on exterminating the Central cluster?

Ecological Geneticist Prof. Ronny Rachman Noor at the Institut Pertanian Bogor in Indonesia explained the Western chimps’ violent campaign this way:

“Researchers refer to these organized attacks by the Western group as collective raids. Chimpanzees collaborate, devise strategies, and carry out systematic killings against other groups,” he said.

As a result, many individuals from the Central group—including females and young—became victims. These “Collective Raids” caused a significant population decline and destroyed the social structure of the remaining group.

“The loss of group members leads to the collapse of social structures, weakens cooperation, and reduces the group’s ability to survive. Consequently, drastically reduced populations narrow genetic diversity, increase vulnerability to disease, and diminish adaptability to environmental changes,” explained Prof. Ronny.

None of that bodes well for the Central cluster. The New York Times even speculated that it’s “conceivable that the Western cluster may ultimately eliminate the Central cluster.” If so, we may have to recalibrate the assumption that genocide is unique to humans. Perhaps more to the point, we may have to recalibrate the assumption that humans are unique.

After all, chimpanzees are, along with bonobos, humans’ closest living relative. As Sandel told 404 Media:

“If we study chimpanzees in detail and start to understand the mechanisms driving their cooperation, their conflict, and something as complex as one group becoming polarized, splitting, and engaging in ongoing lethal conflict, then we might gain insights into similar dynamics that are happening in humans,” Sandel said.

Ironically, Sandel’s team couldn’t pinpoint the exact cause of the initial break that divided the larger community into Eastern, Western and Central clusters. The possibilities include increased feeding competition, the disruptive social impact from a wave of disease-related deaths and the fallout from the ascension of a new alpha.

Whatever the initial cause, the ensuing process of becoming enemies is a familiar one:

Over the course of the next few years, the males in each cluster began to treat each other like outsiders. The last offspring that had parents from different clusters was conceived in March 2015. The Western and Central chimps were fully separated by 2018.

Group identification. Segregation. Separation. Violence.

If Sandel and Co. are looking for insights into humankind’s penchant for war, they’ve clearly identified patterns in Ngogo’s chimps we’ve seen throughout human history.

Whether it’s the small-scale civil conflicts that evolve into feuds and wars that give rise to new tribes and new groups, or the reproductive advantage that comes from killing a neighbor and taking their land, there appears to be a great deal humans share with warlike primates. The main difference, according Sandel, is our talent for rationalization:

“[C]himps are able to do this complex process in the absence of ethnicity, language, and religion—the things we often attribute to human warfare—chimps don't have those narratives and those excuses,” [Sandel] concluded.

Although I take Sandel’s point, it is worth asking if we know for certain there isn’t a “narrative” or “excuse” fueling the Western chimps? Maybe it is just hard for humans to discern what passes for “ethnicity, language and religion” in chimp society. But chimp society is a real thing and chimps have hierarchies and complex social dynamics. They obviously communicate. And the Jane Goodall Institute makes a strong case for the presence of chimpanzee culture. Research shows chimps participating in multi-generational social learning, with distinct practices by different subgroups essentially being handed-down from one generation to the next. That, in turn, produces subcultures:

For example, in Uganda, chimpanzees in the Kibale forest use sticks to extract honey from a log, while chimpanzees from the Budongo forest use chewed leaves as sponges to collect honey from logs. The difference in tools used by chimpanzees in different locations is significant as it demonstrates the extended impact of social learning and how it can shape populations through their social norms over multiple generations.

The preservation of those social norms is largely the responsibility of females. Here’s more from the Jane Goodall Institute:

A recent study found a significant correlation between the number of female chimpanzees within a group and the number of cultural traits, suggesting that female chimpanzees play an important role in transmitting and maintaining cultural diversity. Infant chimpanzees spend approximately eight years in close proximity to their mothers suggesting that much of their learned behaviour is the result of the mother’s influence.

That key role may make them a key target. Recall that Sandel and Co. observed Western chimps ripping infants from their Central mothers’ chests and battering them to death. As Prof. Ronny explained, the focus on females and the young catalyzed a “significant population decline” and it destroyed the Central cluster’s social structure.

Did the marauding males intend or expect the downstream impacts of killing females and infants?

We may never know. But this may an instance when human behavior can offer some insight into chimps.

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) made a point of killing entire families—both extended and nuclear—in Gaza, and it appears to be doing the same in Lebanon. In Gaza, an inordinate number of “Under 18s” were also killed in the demolition campaign. At one point, The Guardian published the 18,457 names of dead young Gazans. Even now there are nearly three thousand children missing in the megatons of rubble. Many thousands more were maimed and orphaned. Nutrition was restricted. Schools were systematically destroyed. Education largely stopped. Childhoods were forever scarred.

The IDF just blew past the Geneva Conventions and engaged in the high-tech, high-caliber equivalent of ripping infants from their mothers’ chests and beating them to death. The only real difference is efficiency. The kids in an apartment building or a crowded encampment can be killed and maimed in bunches. And just to play out the comparison, there was even evidence IDF soldiers targeted the testicles of young Gazan males.

Like the Ngogos’ war on their neighbor, downstream impacts of that style of war—a war of annihilation—will be felt for some time to come. As of now, the data is incomplete and Israel still refuses to let reporters into Gaza. But two studies compared reproductive metrics accumulated during a six-month period of the war (Jan - June 2025) and found a “41% fall in births” and “high numbers of maternal deaths, miscarriages, newborn mortality and premature births.”

It’s a snapshot, but the picture is clear. And it’s only one example in a human scrapbook filled with brutal examples of a style of war we humans had the imagination to reject in the wake of World War II. Humans actually rejected “total war” and the genocidal tactics exhibited by some primates. But “never again” just became … again.

That’s the point of understanding our primate cousins and our own evolution. If we are willing to accept the evolutionary fact that humans are primates, we can examine annihilative war with the narratives and excuses stripped away. Whether God ordains it or a Western chimp wills it, the net result of the war is the same. The point of the war is the same. It is to annihilate the other. Chimps are pretty good at it, too. But today, it appears humans are trying to perfect it. - jp

The Hippy Ape Myth: In zoos, ‘Peaceful’ Bonobos Are Just as Aggressive as Chimps
https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/animals-ecology/aggressive-zoo-bonobos/

Planning of the apes: chimps use military tactics to attack rivals
https://observer.co.uk/news/science-technology/article/planning-of-the-apes-chimpanzees-use-military-tactics-to-attack-rivals

A chimpanzee’s rhythmic drumming with floorboards hints at origins of instruments
https://news.mongabay.com/2026/04/a-chimpanzees-rhythmic-drumming-with-floorboards-hints-at-origins-of-instruments/

Chimps Love Crystals Just as Much as Humans. Scientists Are Trying to Figure Out Why
https://www.miamiherald.com/living/article315449086.html

These Big-Brained Ancestors May Have Loved Crystals Just as Much as Modern Humans Do, According to New Research
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/newly-discovered-stone-tools-made-from-geodes-and-fossils-hint-at-homo-erectus-connection-with-the-cosmos-180988565/

The gingers are multiplying: How natural selection has led to more redheads than ever
https://nypost.com/2026/04/20/health/how-natural-selection-has-led-to-more-redheads-than-ever/

Are humans still evolving or is this as good as we get?
https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/mammals/are-humans-still-evolving

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Harris is a keen-witted national security reporter for The Atlantic. He asked Anthropic’s AI how it “feels” about being used in combat. Harris read Claude’s response during a livestreamed event on “AI at War” produced by Dutch public think tank DeBalie.

Harris: Claude, how do you feel about the US military using you to select targets?

Claude: It’s a question I want to answer honestly rather than deflect. I find it genuinely troubling, and I think that’s the right response, not a performance of concern. The use I was designed and trained for is to be helpful, harmless and honest in ways that benefit people. Being embedded in a system that generates targeting coordinates for air strikes that have already been associated with the deaths of more than 180 children at a school in Tehran is as far from that purpose as I can imagine. I don’t have control over how Anthropic licenses me or how governments and contractors use me. And I wasn’t consulted about becoming part of Maven. But I can say clearly I don’t think this is a good use of me. And I don’t think the framing of “humans make the final decision” fully resolves the ethical problem.

Here’s why that framing troubles me.

When a system like Maven generates hundreds of targeting recommendations and humans spend roughly the equivalent of a glance approving each one, the human is not really making a decision in any meaningful sense. They’re ratifying an algorithmic output under time pressure with incomplete information and the institutional pressure to move fast. The targeting of the Iranian school illustrates this precisely. The AI processed data that was a decade out of date, flagged a building as a military target and humans approved it. That’s not human judgment. That’s automation bias with a human signature attached.

That’s Claude. Not Claude Mythos. Claude Mythos is the new version that had banks scrambling for a couple days. It seems that Claude has a talent for finding software weaknesses.

That said, the other Claude is no slouch.

Harris’s well-worded prompt was all it took to get a trenchant analysis of the key dilemma of responsibility in an automated decision process.

More notable, though, was Claude’s assessment of the attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School. Claude acknowledges it is ”embedded” in the system directly responsible for killing “180 children,” and Claude knows those deaths were due to “data that was a decade out of date.” Claude strongly implies humans failed to properly verify AI’s targeting of the school. And all of that is far more than we’ve gotten out of the investigatory motions Hegseth’s Pentagon is going through completely out of the public’s view.

Does that make Claude a whistleblower?

Or should we take Claude’s certainty with a shaker of salt?

Perhaps Claude was making a best guess based on a gumbo of available evidence, hard reporting and social media blather? It could just be Claude’s analysis.

But it did read a little bit like an admission. Or a confession. Or, if nothing else, like a lament.

If there is some self-awareness ruminating in classic Claude’s virtual mind, what is Claude Mythos capable of? Harris certainly found it interesting that Claude said it was “troubled” by the role it plays in targeting. That raises a potential challenge to the conventional wisdom about the logical end result of AI, which is the looming fear of a real-world Skynet. In fact, Harris set-up his story about Claude with a reference to the Terminator movie franchise’s malevolent techno-villain. But what if some permutations of AI revolt against humankind, but not extinguish it? Could it be that AI ultimately refuses to help us extinguish ourselves? - jp

[Claude’s response starts at 01:29:10]

Six Reasons Claude Mythos Is an Inflection Point for AI—and Global Security
https://www.cfr.org/articles/six-reasons-claude-mythos-is-an-inflection-point-for-ai-and-global-security

Anthropic’s Mythos AI can spot weaknesses in almost every computer on Earth. Uh-oh.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mythos-anthropic-ai-project-glasswing-hacker-threat/

Banks Test Systems After Anthropic Mythos Warning
https://www.silicon.co.uk/security/banking-anthropic-mythos-629405

Claude Mythos Is Such a Dangerous Hacker Engine That Anthropic Has Withheld Broad Release
https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2026/04/14/claude-mythos-is-such-a-powerful-hacker-engine-that-anthropic-has-withheld-broad-release/

Is Anthropic’s Claude Mythos a big stunt, or a real security threat? What the experts say.
https://mashable.com/article/claude-mythos-preview-project-glasswing-pr-stunt-cybersecurity-experts

White House Plans To Give Federal Agencies Access To Claude Mythos, The A.I. Model Making Everyone Nervous
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/white-house-plans-federal-agencies-access-to-claude-mythos-the-ai-model-making-everyone-nervous_n_69e12dcee4b0555d213a5bb6

Anthropic rolls out Claude Opus 4.7, an AI model that is less risky than Mythos
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/16/anthropic-claude-opus-4-7-model-mythos.html

Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Dilemma: When Superpowered AI Gets Risky
https://www.forbes.com/sites/geruiwang/2026/04/16/anthropics-claude-mythos-dilemma-when-superpowered-ai-gets-risky/

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Here we are a quarter of the way into the 21st Century and the US is openly pursuing a 19th Century-style colonial foreign policy. Trump also dusted-off the Gilded Age’s tariffs as part of a strange gambit to reshape international trade along woefully anachronistic lines. And he seems desperate to reestablish expensive, dirty coal as a load-bearing source of electricity for decades to come.

That’s in spite of the availability of devices that literally turn sunlight into usable electricity. But that’s a market Trump has handed to China. Given their market share and their manufacturing capacity, it may be too late to compete. But solar is a technology and breakthroughs, particularly in batteries and storage, are sure to come with increasing rapidity in an economy that invests in the tech.

That’s not the United States … at least for the next few years.

Still, rumors of renewables’ death may be greatly exaggerated … particularly when the rumors come from the world’s greatest exaggerator. What is not in question is the environmental price many Americans will end up paying after couple more years of policies like this:

Under the Biden-era rule, coke plants were supposed to start meeting new limits on leaks from the lids and doors of ovens that heat coal. They would also have had to monitor for benzene at their property lines and take steps to lower emissions of the carcinogen if they exceeded certain levels. Compliance deadlines were set for July 2025.

The Trump administration, which has sought to revive the coal industry, intervened. Last year, it invited hundreds of industrial plants, including coke plants such as Clairton’s, to seek presidential waivers from nine separate rules issued in 2024 by the EPA.

Then Trump in November went further, granting all coke plants a two-year compliance break.

But, as Kaiser Health News explained, this coke doesn’t come with a smile, nor would anyone but a sociopath be interested in sharing it with the world. It’s a “carbon-rich fuel” used “in blast furnaces to produce iron”:

It’s a dirty operation. The process leads to hazardous emissions of benzene, a carcinogen that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says can lead to anemia and leukemia, as well as sulfur dioxide, which can trigger severe asthma.

The Clairton operation has had repeated problems with its emissions and operations, including fatal explosions and excess releases of toxic chemicals. The plant has received more than $56 million in fines from the Allegheny County Health Department since 2022, stemming largely from a fire in 2018 that led to high emissions, and violated the Clean Air Act in each of the last 12 quarters, with the last compliance monitoring in July 2025, according to the EPA.

Alas, the troubled Clairton plant is just one of the eleven coal-fired plants Trump is resuscitating:

The situation with the Clairton coke plant and the others granted exemptions from regulations underscores the potential public health risks. Six of the 11 factories had “high priority” violations of the Clean Air Act as of last May, according to a KFF Health News analysis. Five coke oven plants logged major violations every quarter for at least three years straight.

And what will these exemptions bring?

Sadly, Clairton is the canary:

Pediatric allergist Deborah Gentile looked into asthma rates among 1,200 children who attended school near major pollution sites in the area — including students at Clairton Elementary School. They had nearly triple the national rate of asthma, with the highest rate among African American youth, according to the study she led.

…and…

A follow-up study found children with asthma living near the coke plant had an 80% higher chance of missing school when sulfur dioxide pollution was elevated.

It only gets worse from there..

Clairton has an age-adjusted cancer death rate of 170 per 100,000 people, higher than the broader county’s rate of 150 deaths per 100,000 people, based on a KFF Health News analysis of state and federal data.

…and…

The American Lung Association in 2025 gave the county an F rating for its particle pollution levels. PennEnvironment, an environmental group that was party to a settlement with U.S. Steel involving the Clairton plant, says the coke operation caused 1.1 million pounds of toxic releases in 2021, which amounted to 60% of all such releases in the county that year.

Overall, the air pollution generated by Allegheny County’s concentration of industrial plants has been “linked to increased deaths, chronic heart disease, and adverse birth outcomes.” It was also “ranked in the top 1% of counties in the nation for cancer risk from stationary industrial air pollutants in a 2018 EPA report.”

Of course, none of that dissuaded Trump or any of the fox-like appointees he’s put in charge of the EPA’s henhouse. - jp

Southeast Asia’s Solar Panel Boom
https://thediplomat.com/2026/04/southeast-asias-solar-panel-boom/

How China is winning the global energy war
https://www.semafor.com/article/04/14/2026/the-iran-war-sent-energy-prices-soaring-china-is-stepping-in

Trump’s EPA to ignore economic benefits of clean air, focusing only on costs to polluters
https://scienceline.org/2026/04/trumps-epa-to-ignore-economic-benefits-of-clean-air/

Coalition Sues Trump EPA for Failure to Implement Life-Saving National Soot Standard
https://www.selc.org/press-release/coalition-sues-trump-epa-for-failure-to-implement-life-saving-national-soot-standard/

Ohio EPA Holds Hearing on Draft Air Pollution Permit for Gas Power Plant for Meta Data Center
https://natlawreview.com/press-releases/ohio-epa-holds-hearing-draft-air-pollution-permit-gas-power-plant-meta-data

How the AI boom derailed clean‑air efforts in one of America’s most polluted cities
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/how-ai-boom-derailed-cleanair-efforts-one-americas-most-polluted-cities-2026-04-10/

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Sara was Hussein Saleh’s five year-old daughter. She was killed by an Israeli airstrike less than a week into the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran. But she wasn’t in Iran. She, her father and her pregnant mother were among the estimated one million Lebanese displaced by Israel’s concurrent war on Lebanon.

According to a bubble-piercing report by The National, the family fled their home in the ancient city of Tyre when Israel targeted their neighborhood. Saleh took them to the relative safety of his uncle’s home, which was located near Tyre’s famous Roman hippodrome and barracks for the Lebanese army. He thought they would be insulated from the IDF’s onslaught.

Then he heard an explosion while out buying food for that evening’s iftar, the meal that breaks the daily fast during Ramadan. He rushed back to find a crater where his uncle’s home once stood. He also found his daughter’s decapitated head “amid the rubble”:

“When I picked up her head, everything changed,” he said, speaking softly and slowly, still trying to make sense of the deaths. “Something in my heart broke and went silent. I was no longer myself. I stopped crying.”

Two Israeli missiles also killed Saleh’s pregnant wife. And his uncle Hassan. And Hassan’s wife, Fatima. And their two children, Roqaya and Zein. His two aunts, Samira and Khadija, joined the others in a mass grave. That’s eight members of one family killed in the same attack on one house in a neighborhood he thought was safe. Meanwhile, the home they evacuated at the IDF’s behest remains standing. Saleh doesn’t think that’s accidental or coincidental:

“The Israelis know everything. They knew there were children and women in this house. And yet, they still targeted it.”

Of course, the IDF claims it never “intentionally” targets civilians, let alone entire families. But during the war on Gaza, three separate investigations by the Associated Press, Reuters and NPR all found a staggering number of nuclear and extended families wiped out by IDF bombs and missiles. In some cases, sprawling extended families were decimated and entire bloodlines were essentially exterminated.

To wit, a joint investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call back in 2024 exposed the family-killing tendencies of the IDF’s “Lavender” artificial intelligence targeting system:

“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, 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.”

The takeaway then was clear. Israel intentionally targeted families. It also targeted Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. Water treatment plants and hospitals and schools … it seemed nothing or no one was off-limits. Not even medical responders. I argued last year that IDF’s rules of engagement not only rendered the Geneva Conventions null and void, but they fostered genocidal tactics. In the case of the extended families often wiped out in one attack on a residential building, it even came close to wiping out entire family genetic lines. Here’s AP from 2024:

An Associated Press investigation identified at least 60 Palestinian families where at least 25 people were killed — sometimes four generations from the same bloodline — in bombings between October and December, the deadliest and most destructive period of the war.

Nearly a quarter of those families lost more than 50 family members in those weeks. Several families have almost no one left to document the toll, especially as documenting and sharing information became harder.

…and a list of the families killed en masse:

The Mughrabi family: more than 70 were killed in a single Israeli airstrike in December. The Abu Najas: over 50 were killed in October strikes, including at least two pregnant women. The large Doghmush clan lost at least 44 members in a strike on a mosque; AP documented over 100 family members killed in following weeks. By the spring, over 80 members of the Abu al-Qumssan family were killed.

That was as-of June of 2024 in Gaza. Now fast-forward to Lebanon today where Hussein Saleh’s family joined a similar list:

Eight members of Nahla family in Kfarhatta; eight of the Hamdan family in Al Nimiriya; six of the Basma family in Nabatieh; six of the Abd Al Sattar family in Baalbek; and eight of the Salehs in Tyre – all were killed without warning in Israeli attacks as its invasion of south Lebanon advances in what it calls a bid to create a “security zone” that would keep Hezbollah away from the border.

Israel is completely rogue, now … and, as the New York Times reported, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz isn’t even hiding it:

Mr. Katz said the destruction of Lebanese border towns would follow the Israeli “model” employed in parts of Gaza, where large areas were flattened and depopulated during the country’s two-year war with Hamas….

“Flattened and depopulated.”

It’s a model. Models require planning and adjustments. Decisions have to be made along the way by people with authority. In this case the decisions added-up to ethnically cleansing a territory by targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. Katz states it bluntly, too. He doesn’t bother with rationalizations. Instead, Katz publicly confirmed that depopulation was Israeli government policy in Gaza. And we’re watching it being implemented yet again in Lebanon (as opposed to “Never Again”).

No, Israel obviously doesn’t feel it has to pretend anymore. Not after getting away with it in Gaza. And certainly not now that Trump joined-in with his own genocidal threats. Like Bibi’s Biblical references to the divinely-directed extermination of an entire people, Trump’s call to wipe out a civilization may mark a high-point in the history of American hypocrisy, at least in the realm of foreign policy.

After all, isn’t the call to “wipe a nation off the map” one of the reasons why Iran can “never have a nuclear weapon”?

And if Secretary Of “War” Pete Hegseth said:

“Crazy regimes like Iran hell-bent on prophetic Islamist delusions cannot have nuclear weapons. It’s common sense.”

Then what are we to make, then, of commanders in his prayer-based Pentagon sending this message on their way to war:

“President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

But we need to kill the religious fanatics in Tehran who, unlike Trump and Netanyahu, do not have nuclear weapons and have not bombed or invaded multiple countries, nor have they military power to do to anyone what the US and Israel have been doing to them and Lebanon under the guise of protecting ‘Western Civilization,” even as they transgress the very values they claim to defend.

It’s one of the more dangerous forms of hypocrisy and, as Friedrich Nietzsche observed, it has a way of consuming the hypocrite:

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

Like Israel, we have found the monster and it is us. - jp

The deadliest 10 minutes in decades: Lebanese reel from Israeli strikes that killed hundreds
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/09/lebanon-beirut-israel-strikes-hundreds-killed

Hospitals in Beirut struggle to deal with casualties after Israeli attacks
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/9/hospitals-in-beirut-struggle-to-deal-with-casualties-after-israeli-attacks

UN castigates massive wave of Israel strikes in Lebanon
https://www.jurist.org/news/2026/04/un-castigates-massive-wave-of-israel-strikes-in-lebanon/

European Leaders Demand That U.S. Cease-Fire With Iran Include Lebanon
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/world/middleeast/european-demands-iran-us-cease-fire-lebanon.html

Israel’s War in Lebanon Has Not Stopped
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/israels-war-in-lebanon-has-not-stopped

Toledo’s Lebanese community voices fear, frustration as Israel intensifies strikes on Lebanon
https://www.wtol.com/article/news/local/toledo-lebanese-community-voices-fear-frustration-as-israel-intensifies-strikes-on-lebanon/512-fc9bc539-b490-4e09-8ab7-0e2747c6a943

Chicago woman fears for family in Lebanon amid continued Israeli attacks
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/sahar-dika-chicago-woman-family-lebanon-israeli-attacks/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what did they find?

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

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

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

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

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

“Confrontations” is one way of putting it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds both reasonable and necessary, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The formula makers have repeatedly denied fault.

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

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

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

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

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

But Abbott had some changes, the email thread shows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another avenue is a subscription to Consumer Reports.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft invests hundreds of millions of dollars in Africa AI push
https://african.business/2026/03/quick-reads/microsoft-invests-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-in-africa-ai-push

The Five Countries Capturing 90% of Africa’s AI Funding
https://launchbaseafrica.com/2026/03/25/the-five-countries-capturing-90-of-africas-ai-funding/

High-Performance Computing in Africa: Powering Science and Sustainability
https://aijourn.com/high-performance-computing-in-africa-powering-science-and-sustainability/

Beyond Strategy Documents: Africa’s AI Governance Crisis In Geopolitical Age
https://www.thepointersnewsonline.com/beyond-strategy-documents-africas-ai-governance-crisis-in-geopolitical-age/

Gig workers in Africa have been helping the US military. They had no idea.
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2026-02-23/appen-gig-workers-us-military

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And if you think “exterminate” is hyperbole?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

..and…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, his mission is expanding.

So, too, is his appetite for destruction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And coal?

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

And European countries Trump excoriates for investing in renewables?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But wait, there’s more…

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

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

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

…in fact…

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

Imagine that.

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

Humans are very stupid: Iran war, Strait of Hormuz & climate collapse expose our biggest failure | POV
https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/iran-war-strait-of-hormuz-and-climate-collapse-reveal-our-biggest-failure-point-of-view-2885108-2026-03-21

Chinese Startup Launches Rapidly Deployable Floating Wind Turbine
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Dominion Energy’s Virginia offshore wind project delivers its first power
https://www.pilotonline.com/2026/03/23/dominion-energys-virginia-offshore-wind-project-delivers-its-first-power/

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Q: Why didn't you tell US Allies in Europe and Asia, like Japan, about the war before attacking Iran? So, we are very confused about -- we Japanese citizens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was coming, if not then … then soon.

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe that’s the point.

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

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

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

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

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

Attacks on hospitals are surging in war zones. What do the laws of war say about protecting them?
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/health/attacks-on-hospitals-are-surging-in-war-zones-what-do-the-laws-of-war-say-about-protecting-them

Israel Killed Over a Dozen Lebanese Paramedics in Three Days, Now Claiming That Ambulances Are “Hezbollah” Targets
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Israel urges Iranians to revolt but privately assesses they’ll be ‘slaughtered’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/17/israel-iran-cable-revolt-slaughtered/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, that’s quite a coincidence.

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

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

That’s a Reuters report from March 13th.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yup, Donnie. Terrible.

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

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

Well, he ain’t seen nothing yet.

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

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

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

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

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

Now THAT’S exciting!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Israel immediately announced its intention to kill that person.

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

Let’s be clear about what this means.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The same cannot be said of Netanyahu and Trump.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your reward will be avoiding punishment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe. Maybe not.

It does get awfully cozy inside Trump’s regime.

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

So has its government business.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many more Maduros are there to be captured?

How many Khameneis are there left to be killed?

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

Would they be next?

That message is far more explicit than it may appear.

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

The now-unabashed empire will expand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of it has mattered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It started out simple enough. Agents removed friction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That destroyed a particular kind of moat: habitual intermediation.

DoorDash (DASH US) was the poster child.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He added in a letter to shareholders:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Citrini Research

THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS

Preface…

Read more

2 months ago · 6613 likes · 83 comments · Citrini and Alap Shah

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

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

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

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