Our Gordian Knot
Climate change. Racism. Dwindling resources. Greenwashing. Techno feudalism. Fascism.
Alexander the Great was the King of Macedon from October 336 to June 323 BC. Tutored by Aristotle until he was 16, he went on to become an undefeated military commander who created one of the largest empires in history. His tactics are still studied today. One of the places he laid siege to on his path to becoming Pharaoh of Egypt was Gaza. Yes, the Gaza suffering genocide of at the hands of a certain dying empire run for corporate profit today. The names are both familiar and surprising — Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, IBM, Microsoft, BlackRock, Vanguard, BP and Chevron among them, and tech giants including Alphabet (Google’s parent) and Amazon. These are predictable players. Airbnb took me by surprise, aiding illegal settlements by listing properties and hotel rooms in Israeli-occupied territory, but certainly not Peter Thiel’s Palantir, whose AI technology powering lethal autonomous weapons has made killing in Gaza far more efficient. Palantir doesn’t build weapons; it builds dashboards that tell weapons where to go.
The military commander of Gaza, Batis, refused to surrender. The results according to Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus were 10,000 Gazan casualties. Men were put to the sword, and women and children were sold into slavery. Batis was dragged alive behind a chariot, likely by a rope forced between his ankle bone and Achilles tendon until he died. Such ancient stories inform us of what the beasts who walk among us today are capable of as Trump builds immigrant concentration camps. Be warned: immigrants are just the wedge device. Soon, dissent of any color won’t be tolerated. Writers like myself will be silenced, and truth locked away one by one.
Palantir has been awarded a federal contract to assemble predictive AI powered databases on every American, linking what used to be compartmentalized data, requiring human scrutiny, for a system where all-in-one dossiers of the most private details of our lives are available with a keystroke. Predictive is the key word here. Medical records, taxes, employment history, voting records, union memberships, donations to causes, arrests — let’s say for protesting fossil fueled climate change — or objections to the policies of a certain malevolent king will be accessible in one handy file and flagged in milliseconds by AI predicting you to be a problem. You will be reduced to an algorithm and flagged if you’re not goose-stepping to the state.
Thiel’s worldview, combines libertarianism, nationalism, interest in cryptocurrency, funding immigration hardliners, and support for seasteading — floating autonomous ocean cities exempt from government regulations or taxes. He funded J.D. Vance’s rapid political rise with $15 million for Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign, a record amount, who in another life compared Donald Trump to Adolph Hitler. How money changes opinions. In 2009, Thiel wrote that the extension of the vote to women in the 1920s “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ an oxymoron” in an online journal article from the ultra-right wing Cato Institute.
Well, y’all women were just made from a rib, right? Margaret Atwood nailed it. Let’s Make Women Property Again.
This chilling article (a recommended read) details Palantir’s history founded with CIA money in 2003. The company has grown in scope and ambition, and has been amply rewarded. Under the Trump administration, Thiel’s company has garnered $1.9 billion in military contracts.
Legend suggests Alexander the Great solved an impossible knot tied to an ox cart by cutting it with his sword rather than going to the trouble of untangling it. The story can be considered a metaphor for the use of brute force. We are led by brutes now who wish to crush truth and safety in favor of never sated corporate profit, made from the unsustainable, extinction level rape of the Earth, and increased suffering and deaths for the other eight billion of us.
Draconian cuts to science, healthcare, and previously inadequate environmental protections, and the end of federal assistance for horrifying and economically shattering climate disasters like the killer flood we’re watching in central Texas are proof we are led by sociopaths devoid of human compassion, so removed from reality by their wealth, they can’t see it. Billionaires should not exist. Nor can the role of ignorance be discounted; far-right conspiracists are again taking to social media claiming the US government controls the weather.
People’s minds have become detention centers. It’s not just physically locking up brown people without charges or due process. It’s mental. Heads can be made prisons, too. Sociopath Rupert Murdock gets the top prize.
FEMA money is being used to fund the marketably named detention center Alligator Alcatraz. Let’s call Alligator Alcatraz what it is, a concentration camp. Pocked cosplay Barbie, puppy shooter, and horrifyingly Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claims the money is coming out of a dedicated fund. Bullshit. That’s $450 million rendered unavailable for Texas, the next hurricane or the 80,000 acre Madre fire raging in California. Cuts to the National Weather Service (part of NOAA, slated for complete demolition) likely created unnecessary deaths in Texas. Deaths that included little girls at summer camp.
Of course, I don’t want to sell the administration completely short. They ARE making preparations for the future after all. That’s why The Big Hideous Bill provides $170.7 to $175 billion for courageously masked “federal agents” in the righteous abduction of citizens without charges or due process. Go America, go. This includes a 64-year-old Iranian grandmother, a woman 47 years an American citizen, THROWN INTO A CAR BY MINDLESS APES BEFORE HER FAMILY WOKE UP. Her crime? Rearranging the gardening shed. It includes Kilmar Abrego García, miraculously returned home against all odds, a working immigrant with NO CRIMINAL RECORD, illegally flown to notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, where he was beaten, tortured and starved. Oh yeah, we’re making Guantanomo Bay great again, too.
And now we will ALL be in a Palantir file, algorithms being analyzed for potentially dissident behavior as a mafia government calls the shots.
While the one percent get their tax cuts of a few hundred thousand dollars a year, money they will barely notice, millions will lose health coverage. The ICE budget alone of this $3.3 to $4 trillion insolvency maker (estimates vary) exceeds the combined budgets of the top sixteen militaries in the world, providing more funding than the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, US Marshals Service, and Bureau of Prisons combined. It also halts any fight against climate change.
Let me be clear, and sorry this is tough to hear, but The Big Beautiful Bill is part of a wider plan of human extermination at scale. The intent is obvious, and the callous disregard for human life well-demonstrated by DOGE’s axing of USAID (a paltry 0.3 percent of the US budget, about $21.7 billion). Remember those F-35 operating costs? The result? An estimated 14 million avoidable deaths by 2030, 4.5 million of which are children under age 5.
160 are unaccounted for and over 100 are dead from the Texas flood including 27 little girls, people’s babies at a summer camp. Greg Abbott, who hides razor wire in rivers in an attempt to snare and drown migrants, human beings fleeing poverty increasingly driven by climate change driven by American overconsumption and the failed model of capitalism which has made the entire planet ill, offered prayer in a useless press conference. I am sick of vacuous fake Christian empathy. Abbott is no Christian. He is a self-serving devil. We need intelligent, ethical leadership, and decisions made based on proven science.
The undercutting of healthcare, environmental protections, and shifting of climate disaster recovery to the state level is an evil plan, not a coincidence of poor policy. Sure, the Fox News knuckle draggers deny climate change is real, but you can bet most of the psycho billionaire mafia knows it’s real. However, they know nothing about living. They are the walking dead, and you and me being dead is the expedient solution to their “problems.” They know oil is running short. They know the planet is burning up. They know beachfront property is falling into the oceans even as they plan a Gaza Riviera built on the burnt remains of Palestinian people. Their wealth and control are proof of superiority in their soulless heads, and inherent right to have more. They’re not stupid. They’re evil. Heaven and Hell are on Earth. It’s all what we make it, not in some book that claims an entire beautiful, thinking woman was made from a rib.
And BTW, fuck Mike Johnson. Nobody who pushes a bill of death can claim to be Christian or right in the eyes of God, whoever your God is.
I have a friend who sat out the last election over the horrors of Gaza. Biden funded that shit to the max, proclaiming himself a Zionist as he hugged an ICJ war criminal. He reluctantly got behind the Green New Deal, while continuing to support oil drilling. The dead Green New Deal was bullshit anyhow for reasons I have explained in other articles.
The truth is, the only difference between this administration or a Democratic Party led one is the speed of collapse. This one’s foot is on the gas pedal. Fight, revolt, or die. This country was founded on a tax revolt. Do you feel represented? “No taxation without representation,” remember? Don’t pay for our children’s death. Boycott and strike. This is a time for courage. The psychos aren’t just stealing our money, they’re destroying life. ALL life.
Another awesome post, Geoff. History, analogy, analysis of the present, its ghoulish and insane perpetrators, their deeply twisted visions and mindsets, the cynical use of outdated religious ideas to justify the coming genocides, the runaway technology behind it and, finally, your reference to the tragedy in Texas enabled by the unforgivable cuts to meteorological services in the US that will lead to much worse to come...you're going from strength to strength recently. Deep respect!
I fear the Guardian reporting around Rainmaker and their apparently deliberate creation of the Texas floods both legitimises and publicises the conspiracy theory. It doesn't make people less likely to believe in it, but more.
The more we point out climate change (or the more it points itself out) the more they think it's part of a plot to control them. Many people in the conspiracy are actual shills for fossil fuel and animal ag and are not only ready with their counter-arguments but have $trillions of propaganda behind them.
The triumph of the OTT 'covid' measures was that the backlash got Trump reelected on an anti-government, anti-woke ticket so that he could started slashing both budgets and regulations that hindered the profits of industry. Some of the conspiracy theorists are waking up (or pretending to); they can see that it ain't a great thing when even without floods lower income, mostly black neighbourhoods, start getting sewage in their water.
But the opposition to Palantir et al and the surveillance state is effectively divided, roughly 'right' and 'left', by believe in emissions (and lack of sequestration) caused climate change. Well done them.
Protest ain't gonna cut it. Even the genocide in Gaza, which the vast majority of the public in the West and the Global Majority want to end and regularly show up in huge numbers to protest, is going to just continue until all Palestinians are dead or dispersed. The only hope is to collectively defund giant industry with our buying choices. But as we have seen; they've let fossil fuels and animal ag off the hook with a large portion of the public.
Besides, the fascist society won't last long! In 25-30 years the crops start failing en masse, the migrants start getting shot at the border, society breaks down and the rich retreat to their bunkers.
I think another species one day will look back and write and our crazy history of how we killed ourselves! And that's OK. No need to be precious about the human species.