Ex-Mossad head Yossi Cohen boasted during a recent podcast that Israel has “boobytrapped” and “manipulated” equipment like that used in their pager attack in Lebanon in “all countries that you can imagine.”
He said he “invented” the “manipulated equipment method” in 2002 to 2004 and had already used it in the “Second Lebanon War” back in 2006.
WATCH:
Cohen’s comments were made on the Oct 16 episode of the Zionist propaganda podcast The Brink.
I said after the pager and walkie talkie attacks on Lebanon that “any goods connected to Israel must now be assumed to be rigged with explosives until proven otherwise.”
For a country that’s so obsessed with getting laws passed in America and throughout the West to ban engaging with BDS, the decision to rig consumer goods with explosives and then boast about having boobytrapped and manipulated equipment throughout the world is truly remarkable.
“Looking ahead, Taiwan will continue to increase military investment,” Ching-te said. “This includes building capacity in the indigenous defense industry and procuring necessary weapons and technology from other countries to bolster overall combat capacities. We hope that AIPAC will lend Taiwan even greater support and assistance in this matter.”
Taiwan never gave a satisfying answer as to what Gold Apollo’s role was in that shady deal, and looking back now you have to wonder if they were in on it.
The Lachman fire that burned 8 acres in the Palisades on New Years Day was contained and on Jan. 2nd. Firefighters warned their battalion chief that “the ground was still smoldering and rocks remained hot to the touch” at the site. But their battalion chief, identified as Mario Garcia, ordered them to roll up their hoses and pull out of the area on Jan. 2 rather than stay and make sure there were no hidden embers that could spark a new fire. The first fire remained burning underground until the strong winds of Jan. 7 rekindled it and ignited the devastating Palisades fire.
LA Fire Department Interim Chief Ronnie Villanova said that the area had been ‘cold trailed’ twice meaning that the firemen used their hands to feel for heat, dug out hot spots, and chopped a line around the perimeter of the fire to ensure it was contained. However, officials failed to provide records that would have corroborated this story.
Although the Los Angeles Fire Department equips firefighters with thermal imaging cameras and also employs drones with similar infrared imaging, officials decided against using them.
Jimmy Dore pointed out that the 113-million gallon reservoir that hadn’t been repaired sat empty for two years and contributed to the fire that resulted in 12 deaths and massive property damage.
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A new report in the Los Angeles Times indicates that firefighters were ordered to abandon the smoldering underground fire that later became the devastating Palisades Fire, something the crews on the ground thought was a “bad idea.”
According to text messages reviewed by the Times, firefighters told their battalion chief that “the ground was still smoldering and rocks remained hot to the touch” at the site of the Lachman Fire, which burned on New Year’s Day before being contained.
Despite that warning, “their battalion chief ordered them to roll up their hoses and pull out of the area on Jan. 2 — the day after the 8-acre blaze was declared contained — rather than stay and make sure there were no hidden embers that could spark a new fire,” the Times reports.
That first fire, which prosecutors say was started by an Uber driver, remained burning underground until the strong winds of Jan. 7 rekindled it.
That blaze grew into the Palisades Fire, which killed 12 people and devastated the Pacific Palisades.
Mayor Karen Bass and current and former Los Angeles Fire Department officials declined or did not return the Times’ requests for comment, but officials have said that they thought the Lachman Fire had been extinguished.
Plenty of rank-and-file firefighters, however, disagreed with that assessment and made their displeasure known in the texts reviewed by the Times.
“In one text message, a firefighter who was at the scene on Jan. 2 wrote that the battalion chief had been told it was a ‘bad idea’ to leave the burn scar unprotected because of the visible signs of smoldering terrain,” the Times reports. “’And the rest is history,’” the firefighter wrote in recent weeks.”
This interview is well worth watching for several reasons, but the most important one is that it’s a classic two-dimensional example of opinion engineering. The outer dimension, which is in plain view, is interesting and mildly controversial but of no serious news value or long-term consequence. It serves mostly as bait that covers the hook. The inner dimension is where the action is but it can be seen only through the x-ray lens of analysis and is of great consequence for the survival of freedom in America.
The outer dimension involves whether the opinions of Nick Fuentes, the controversial guest being interviewed, are acceptable or unacceptable for public debate – the deciding factor being whether or not they are anti-Semitic. The hidden dimension involves whether an “America-First” policy in government is virtuous or treasonous.
It may seem that America First is obviously virtuous for Americans because it is the essence of patriotism. But what is the correct definition of patriotism? Some will say that it is an attitude expressed by the saying: “My country, right or wrong,” which means support of one’s government regardless of its actions. By this definition, the German civilians who supported the Nazi regime were virtuous patriots. My personal view is that opposition to corruption in government is the highest obligation of patriotism, so please note carefully that when Fuentes calls for martial law in the name of America first, he is advocating the cancelation of basic freedoms for us as well as the rioters, a condition that possibly could remain indefinitely. Also notice that his first solution to shutting down the mob is military force, not rounding up the leaders and funders of the organizations that deliver the violence. Take away their leaders, their paychecks and their buses, and the big show will cease. That course of action is not considered in this interview.
Nick Fuentes has much to say with which we can agree, but please notice that his call to action is brute force and violence – exactly what our enemies want to happen. Unfortunately, Tucker Carlson never asks him to elaborate on his statement that he was a big fan of Stalin. I guess he just didn’t recognize the inner dimension of this message. ~~ GEG
A Flock camera captures a vehicle’s make, model and license plate that police officers can view on computers. The city of Stanwood has paused use of Flock cameras while lawsuits over public records issues are sorted out. (Flock provided photo)
Stanwood pauses Flock cameras amid public records lawsuits
A public records request for Flock camera footage has raised questions about what data is exempt under state law.
EVERETT — The city of Stanwood has paused use of its Flock cameras in light of questions over whether footage is subject to public records requests under state law.
The Stanwood City Council approved its $92,000 contract with Flock Safety in November 2024. In February, the city installed 14 automatic license plate reading cameras. The cameras were operating for about four months before the city turned them off in May, City Administrator Shawn Smith said.
In April, an individual requested all Flock camera footage in Stanwood within a one-hour window on March 30. In light of the request, the city decided in June to seek a court judgment that Flock footage either is not public record or is exempt from the public records act for privacy reasons.
Stanwood is seeking the judgment along with the city of Sedro-Woolley, which also received a records request for Flock footage from the same individual, Jose Rodriguez. The cities filed the complaint in Skagit County Superior Court.
In response, Rodriguez filed a lawsuit against Stanwood in Snohomish County Superior Court, alleging the city is violating the Public Records Act by not providing the footage.
“No exemption to the PRA requirements apply in this case and public policy favors timely disclosure, and in no way hinders disclosure, of the records requested,” the complaint read.
All Flock camera footage is stored in the Flock Safety cloud system, Stanwood and Sedro-Woolley attorneys wrote in their complaint. Cities only have access to data the officers search for, the complaint read. Stanwood and Sedro-Woolley argue that Flock footage is only public record once a public agency extracts and downloads the data. The Public Records Act states that public records include information “prepared, owned, used, or retained” by an agency.
“Requiring public agencies to generate a new search in the Flock cloud system for the sole purpose of accessing and downloading data requested under the PRA, data which the agency had not previously accessed, would require the agency to create new public records not in existence at the time of the request,” the complaint read.
If a judge decides the footage is public record, the cities argue it should still be exempt from requests under the Public Records Act. The law exempts certain intelligence information that could jeopardize the effectiveness of law enforcement or a person’s right to privacy if released.
“If the data becomes public record, that would allow nefarious actors to carry out their act,” Stanwood resident Tim Schmitt said in a July interview. “So imagine tracking your ex-spouse or a person you broke up with under difficulty, it would allow all sorts of malicious mischief against innocent individuals.”
Schmitt is a member of the Stanwood City Council and said his opinions do not reflect those of the council or the city.
State law does not explicitly exempt automated license plate reader data from public records. It does have explicit exemptions for red-light camera data. In July, Stanwood City Attorney wrote a letter to State Sen. Ron Muzzall, R-Oak Harbor, asking him to sponsor or support legislation to create a specific exemption for automated license plate reader data in the Public Records Act.
Schmitt was the sole vote against the Flock contract in November 2024. Part of the reason for his vote, he said, was uncertainty over public records laws.
“I had this doubt in the back of my mind,” he said.
Schmitt also raised concerns that the contract was too expensive, especially compared to other cities, he said. For example, Mount Vernon has six Flock cameras for a population of about 35,000 and a land area of about 12 square miles. Stanwood has 14 cameras for a population of about 8,000 and a land area of about 3 square miles.
While the cameras are turned off, Stanwood is not currently making payments to Flock Safety, Smith said.
In Stanwood, Flock cameras have helped identify a shoplifter that stole $1,000 from small businesses, apprehend a suspect in a shooting in a neighboring jurisdiction and locate an elderly person with dementia within 10 minutes, the complaint read.
The litigation comes as cities across the state and country continue to sign contracts with Flock Safety. According to the company, the cameras are operating in more than 5,000 communities nationwide. Most cities in Snohomish County have implemented Flock cameras within the past year.
At a Sept.4 meeting, Mountlake Terrace City Council member William Paige Jr. expressed regret for voting for the contract in June. Last month, Flock CEO Garrett Langley wrote in an Aug. 25 statement it had pilot programs with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and Homeland Security Investigations. The program was intended to help combat human trafficking and fentanyl distribution, Langley said. The company has since paused the program, he said.
“We clearly communicated poorly,” Langley said. “We also didn’t create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users. I appreciate the sensitivities surrounding local and federal cooperation on law enforcement matters, and I understand that in order to allow communities to align with their laws and societal values, these definitions and product features are critical.”
At the Sept. 4 meeting, Paige said he doesn’t trust Flock Safety and no longer wants to do business with the company.
“We all heard concerns that day — and before and after that day — from the community about making sure Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection would not have access to our data,” Paige said. “We had a Flock representative right here listening to those concerns. And yet, at that same time, Flock already had a contract that allowed those federal agencies to access data. They never shared that with us.”
Immediately after October 7, a little know company shipped over 100 reconnaissance drones to Israel for use in its siege of Gaza. Having been battle-tested on Palestinian civilians, the UAVs are now being used to surveil protesters across the US.
AI-powered quadcopter drones used by the IDF to commit genocide in Gaza are flying over American cities, surveilling protestors and automatically uploading millions of images to an evidence database.
The drones are made by a company called Skydio which in the last few years has gone from relative obscurity to quietly become a multi-billion dollar company and the largest drone manufacturer in the US.
The extent of Skydio drone usage across the US, and the extent to which their usage has grown in just a few years, is extraordinary. The company has contracts with more than 800 law enforcement and security agencies across the country, up from 320 in March last year, and their drones are being launched hundreds of times a day to monitor people in towns and cities across the country.
Skydio has extensive links with Israel. In the first weeks of the genocide the California-based company sent more than one hundred drones to the IDF with promises of more to come. How many more were delivered since that admission is unknown. Skydio has an office in Israel and partners with DefenceSync, a local military drone contractor operating as the middle man between drone manufacturers and the IDF. Skydio has also raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Israeli-American venture capitalists and from venture capital funds with extensive investments in Israel, including from Marc Andreessen’s firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z.
And now these drones, tested in genocide and refined on Palestinians, are swarming American cities.
According to my research, almost every large American city has signed a contract with Skydio in the last 18 months, including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, Cleveland and Jacksonville. Skydio drones were recently used by city police departments to gather information at the ‘No Kings’ protests and were also used by Yale to spy on the anti-genocide protest camp set up by students at the university last year.
The AI system behind Skydio drones is powered by Nvidia chips and enables their operation without a human user. The drones have thermal imaging cameras and can operate in places where GPS doesn’t work, so-called ‘GPS-denied environments.’ They also reconstruct buildings and other infrastructure in 3D and can fly at more than 30 miles per hour.
The New York police were early adopters of Skydio drones and are particularly enthusiastic users. A spokesman recently told a drone news website that the NYPD launched more than 20,000 drone flights in less than a year, which would mean drones are being launched around the city 55 times per day. A city report last year said the NYPD at that time was operating 41 Skydio drones. A recent Federal Aviation Authority rule change, however, means that number will undoubtedly have increased and more generally underpins the massive expansion in the use of Skydio drones.
Prior to March this year, FAA rules meant that drones could only be used by US security forces if the operator kept the drone in sight. They also couldn’t be used over crowded city streets. An FAA waiver issued that month opened the floodgates, allowing police and security agencies to operate drones beyond a visual line of sight and over large crowds of people. Skydio called the waiver ground-breaking. It was. The change has ushered in a Skydio drone buying spree by US police and security forces, with many now employing what is called a ‘Drone As First Responder’ program. Without the need to see the drone, and with drones free to cruise over city streets, the police are increasingly sending drones before humans to call outs and for broader investigative purposes. Cincinnati for example says that by the end of this year 90% of all call outs will be serviced first by a Skydio drone.
This extensive level of coverage is enabled by Skydio’s docking platform hardware. These launch pads are placed in locations around a city enabling drones to be remote charged, launched and landed many miles away from police HQs. After launch, all the information gathered by these flights is both saved to an internal SD card and automatically uploaded to special software configured for law enforcement. This software is made by Axon, a major financial backer of Skydio and the controversial maker of Tasers and ‘less-lethal weapons’ used by police departments in the US and across the west. The software, Axon Evidence, enables, in the words of an Axon press release, ‘the automatic uploads of photos and video footage from drones into a digital evidence management system.’
Axon’s equipment is also central to Israel’s infrastructure of apartheid, with the company providing body cameras and Tasers to Israeli police forces and prison guards who routinely torture Palestinians. Axon, which participated in a $220 million Series E round of funding in Skydio, is just one of the many entities backing Skydio who serve a Zionist agenda.
Skydio’s first investor in 2015 was Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) which provided $3 million of seed capital to the three-man team behind the drone maker. They have since invested tens of millions across numerous funding rounds. The founders of a16z, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, are both notorious Zionists. The firm was the most active venture capital investor in Israel in 2024 and this summer Andreessen and Horowitz visited Israel to meet with tech companies founded by ex-IDF and Unit 8200 war criminals.
Other Skydio investors include Next 47, which has an office in Israel headed by Moshe Zilberstein who worked in the IDF’s computer spy center Mamram, and Hercules Capital whose managing director Ella-Tamar Adnahan is an Israeli-American described by Israeli media as “Israel’s go-to tech banker in the US.”
The saturation of US police departments with drone technology so closely connected to Israel, technology used to carry out war crimes is a frightening, if not unsurprising, development. Skydio drones will be central to the rapidly advancing proto-fascism in the US and the crack down on Antifa and other so-called ‘domestic terrorists’ by the Trump administration. In this context, the bigger surprise is that the rapid expansion of Israel-linked surveillance drone technology across America has so far gone largely under the radar.
Skydio should also make it on to the agenda of Zohran Mamdani. Recently criticized for saying “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” Skydio is just another example that shows he’s right. If he has the courage of his convictions, he could do worse than use his powers as mayor to shut down the NYPD’s Skydio deal.
Skydio is also a large supplier to the Department of Defence, recently signing a contract to provide the US Army with reconnaissance drones. As a significant supplier to both military and civilian security forces, it raises questions about what information is or will be shared between the US military and domestic security agencies via the Skydio-Axon digital evidence management system.
Skydio shows once again how Gaza is the laboratory for weapons makers, the place where new surveillance and apartheid technologies are tested, before being refined and used in the West. And next year Skydio is rolling out new indoor drones. We can only speculate as to what extent these new drones were informed by the ‘learnings’ accrued via genocide.
Palantir CEO’s Wild Statements + How Your Tax Dollars Built Palantir’s Global Surveillance Empire
This video opens with Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, making provocative comments like “in the end, the rights you give up will be used against you.” Millions of Americans have files in government databases, their movements, purchases, and communications are connected by software from a company called Palantir. The worst part is that we helped fund Palantir. The tech company has current and past contracts with the FBI, DHS, IRS, CDC, SEC, and the Pentagon. They process data for police departments in multiple countries and health care networks. Palantir is in the banks processing your transactions.Karp wrote a letter that stated, “We have chosen sides and we know that our partners value our commitment. We stand by them when it is convenient and when it is not.” He is saying that they will support the government agencies regardless of what these agencies choose to do without moral boundaries, no questions asked. This is a company explicitly saying they’ll enable any government action, seemingly no matter how authoritarian, as long as the check clears.
Palantir builds war technology.
When the US government teams up with Palantir, the company is paid with US taxpayer money, but Palantir owns the software, and then the US government pays a licensing fee. Palantir also profits by selling it to other countries.
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Karp openly states their mission to become the US government’s central operating system, all while fear-mongering and using war rhetoric. The same software tracking you at a protest is also identifying targets on the battlefield. He said, “Palantir is here to disrupt and make our institutions we partner with the very best in the world and when it’s necessary to scare our enemies and on occasion kill them.”
In 2002, the US government created Total Information Awareness to track every aspect of Americans. It was defunded by Congress in 2003. That same year, Palantir’s Gotham was created, and is almost identical to Total Information Awareness; the CIA helped fund the company.
Karp’s statements in the video become even more Machiavellian and he said that he welcomed disruption: “There’ll be ups and downs. There’s a revolution. Some people can get their heads cut off. We’re expecting to see really unexpected things and to win. And we’re planning to do that and we’re pretty optimistic about the US environment. Conflict and unrest is profitable…” He added, that Palantir is building “products for a world that is violent, disjointed, irrational.” Peace and prosperity threatens his business model. There is an incentive to find enemies everywhere.
Karp speaks about collapse, crisis, existential threat in a permanent emergency at investor meetings. Palantir engineers are embedded in every government agency that uses their software that only the engineers understand, making the agencies reliant on Palantir engineers.
The Privacy Act of 1974 was specifically designed to prevent cross agency data sharing. But through the private contractor loophole, aka Palantir, and an executive order, those protections are effectively circumvented. The US Army consolidated 75 contracts into one contract worth $10 billion that went to Palantir. There is little oversight of Palantir.
And as we saw with COVID, there will be plenty of willing “mental health practitioners” to drug the population, encourage gender switching or anything else they are paid to push on their unfortunate patients.
Do you think the WHO staff has been trimmed down sufficiently yet?
More than 1 billion people are living with mental health disorders, according to new data released by the World Health Organization (WHO), with conditions such as anxiety and depression inflicting immense human and economic tolls. While many countries have bolstered their mental health policies and programmes, greater investment and action are needed globally to scale up services to protect and promote people’s mental health.
Mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression are highly prevalent in all countries and communities, affecting people of all ages and income levels. They represent the second biggest reason for long-term disability, contributing to loss of healthy life. They drive up health-care costs for affected people and families while inflicting substantial economic losses on a global scale.
“Transforming mental health services is one of the most pressing public health challenges,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “Investing in mental health means investing in people, communities, and economies – an investment no country can afford to neglect. Every government and every leader has a responsibility to act with urgency and to ensure that mental health care is treated not as a privilege, but as a basic right for all.”
Key data from World mental health today
The report shows that while prevalence of mental health disorders can vary by sex, women are disproportionately impacted overall. Anxiety and depressive disorders are the most common types of mental health disorders among both men and women.
Suicide remains a devastating outcome, claiming an estimated 727 000 lives in 2021 alone. It is a leading cause of death among young people across all countries and socioeconomic contexts. Despite global efforts, progress in reducing suicide mortality is too low to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of a one-third reduction in suicide rates by 2030. On the current trajectory, only a 12% reduction will be achieved by that deadline.
The economic impact of mental health disorders is staggering. While health-care costs are substantial, the indirect costs– particularly in lost productivity– are far greater. Depression and anxiety alone cost the global economy an estimated US$ 1 trillion each year.
These findings underscore the urgent need for sustained investment, stronger prioritization, and multi-sectoral collaboration to expand access to mental health care, reduce stigma, and tackle the root causes of mental health conditions.
Key findings from the 2024 Mental Health Atlas
Since 2020, countries have been making significant strides in strengthening their mental health policies and planning. Many have updated their policies, adopted rights-based approaches, and enhanced preparedness for mental health and psychosocial support during health emergencies.
However, this momentum has not translated into legal reform. Fewer countries have adopted or enforced rights-based mental health legislation, and only 45% of countries evaluated laws in full compliance with international human rights standards.
The report reveals a concerning stagnation in mental health investment. Median government spending on mental health remains at just 2% of total health budgets – unchanged since 2017. Disparities between countries are stark; while high-income countries spend up to US$ 65 per person on mental health, low-income countries spend as little as US$ 0.04. The global median number of mental health workers stands at 13 per 100 000 people, with extreme shortages in low- and middle-income countries.
Reform and development of mental health services is progressing slowly. Fewer than 10% of countries have fully transitioned to community-based care models, with most countries still in the early stages of transition. Inpatient care continues to rely heavily on psychiatric hospitals, with nearly half of admissions occurring involuntarily and over 20% lasting longer than a year.
Integration of mental health into primary care is advancing, with 71% of countries meeting at least three of five WHO criteria. However, data gaps remain; only 22 countries provided sufficient data to estimate service coverage for psychosis. In low-income countries fewer than 10% of affected individuals receive care, compared to over 50% in higher-income nations – highlighting an urgent need to expand access and strengthen service delivery.
Encouragingly, most countries report having functional mental health promotion initiatives such as early childhood development, school-based mental health and suicide prevention programmes. Over 80% of countries now offer mental health and psychosocial support as part of emergency responses, up from 39% in 2020. Outpatient mental health services and telehealth are becoming more available, though access remains uneven.
Global call to scale up action on mental health
While there have been some encouraging developments, the latest data shows that countries remain far off track to achieve the targets set in WHO’s Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan.
WHO calls on governments and global partners to urgently intensify efforts toward systemic transformation of mental health systems worldwide. This includes:
equitable financing of mental health services;
legal and policy reform to uphold human rights;
sustained investment in the mental health workforce; and
expansion of community-based, person-centered care.
Note for editors
The World mental health today publication is a timely update to the data chapter of the 2022 World Mental Health Report: Transforming Mental Health for All. As mental health transformation continues to be needed worldwide, this latest release brings together the most up-to-date global data on the prevalence, burden, and economic cost of mental health conditions.
The Mental Health Atlas survey assesses the state of mental health services and systems across the world. This latest edition compiles findings from 144 countries and provides the most comprehensive representation of the world’s response to the challenge of mental ill-health through implementation of mental health policies, legislation, financing, human resources, availability and utilization of services and data collection systems. This latest edition includes new sections on tele mental health and mental health and psychosocial support preparedness and response in emergencies, which reflect the changing landscape of mental health and associated data gaps or information needs.
There has been a noticeable shift in narrative over what is going on in Washington, DC. I say Technocracy. Others used to say Communism, socialism or fascism. Now it’s being called Communitarianism.
The uptake on this word to mask Technocracy is stunning. It’s unprecedented. It might be that you are getting a taste of “The Science of Social Engineering”, Technocracy’s favorite definition of them themselves from the 1930s.
When Technocrats want to shield their technocratic polices, they intentionally do so in the language of Communitarianism.
Example #1: Smart Cities
Technocratic Policy: Urban planners, relying on data analytics and technical expertise, design “Smart City” infrastructure—deploying sensors, AI, and algorithms to manage traffic, resources, and public services. Core decisions, like placement of surveillance, adoption of digital IDs, or algorithmic resource allocation, are made by unelected and unaccountable technical experts and private sector consultants with little direct citizen input.
Communitarian Framing: Policymakers frequently describe these initiatives as advancing “inclusive urban communities,” “empowering local groups,” and “building public trust through collective digital transformation.” The emphasis is on “community-driven sustainability,” “shared public spaces,” and “strengthening community ties”—even as the actual governance, surveillance, and decision-making remain centralized in expert hands.
Example #2: Public Health Policy
Technocratic Policy: National public health agencies, guided by epidemiologists and technocratic advisory boards, roll out mandatory vaccination campaigns and digital health credentials. The implementation relies on technical modeling, centralized data management, and scientific expertise, often minimizing open deliberation or individualized consent.
Communitarian Framing: The rollout is explained using phrases such as “protecting our communities,” “collective responsibility for health,” and “building resilient neighborhoods together.” Authorities stress “we’re all in this together,” “community solidarity,” and “shared sacrifice for collective safety”—presenting programs as communal responses to crisis when the driving mechanism is expert rule and data-driven mandates.
In both examples, the language of communitarianism (“collective good,” “community empowerment,” “shared values”) is leveraged as public messaging, even as the substance of the policies is totally technocratic, with centralized, expert-directed authority.
So What Is Communitarianism?
If you ever read Walden Two by B.F. Skinner, you know everything about communitarianism that you need to know. (The story ended horribly.)
Communitarianism is a political and social philosophy that places primary emphasis on the importance of community, the common good, and social relationships in shaping individual identity, values, and moral judgments. It asserts that people’s identities are molded by their social environment and community ties rather than by strict individualism. Forget about individuality, your personhood, even your soul. Communitarianism sees community as an end in itself.
Right-Think Takes Care of Free Speech
Technocratic elites or their supporters deliberately frame current governance realities as “communitarian” in order to deflect criticism, obscure their own authority, or create ideological cover for technocratic rule.
You should know from my years of critical analysis of Technocracy that Technocrats don’t give a whoop about consensus, the common good or social cohesion. They are throwing up a smokescreen to confuse you, and are using AI to do it with “right think”: that is, DARPA’s idea of Theory of Mind.
Theory of Mind AI refers to systems that can infer human intentions, emotions, and likely responses by analyzing behavior and context. DARPA’s program aims to simulate, predict, and influence decision-making by modeling individual and collective psychologies—originally intended for national security and adversary prediction, but already applied to civilian contexts.
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For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, systems based on these principles were used for real-time sentiment analysis and targeted messaging to adjust public attitudes, encourage compliance, and foster community-oriented behaviors. This created feedback loops, guiding both policy and public reaction by tweaking narratives and interventions for maximum “collective good”—core communitarian ideals.
By the way, Palantir (Peter Thiel, co-founder) is a master of these tactics on the battlefield and in civilian life.
Conclusion
Technocracy is NOT Communitarianism.
If you have this word embedded in your vocabulary to explain what is going on in Washington, DC, your mind has been hacked. Ditch the word “Communitarianism.”
I’m getting “long in the tooth” explaining Technocracy to people, yet I must and will continue until the job is done. Truly, many are starting to wake up, but reaching critical mass won’t be possible until about 5 percent of the population sees the threat. It’s a long way off.
So I was noodling around, testing the latest crop of frontier AI models, and decided to post some questions. Here they with the articles that I just posted this afternoon.
“Peter Thiel mentored Curtis Yarvin at the beginning of his career, invested in his company, and later referred to him as his “house philosopher.” Did Thiel use Yarvin to create a political strategy to support the takeover of Technocracy in the current administration?”
“Elon Musk and Peter Thiel were co-founders of PayPal and have evolved as leaders of Silicon Valley. What was the extent of their coordination at DOGE, which Musk ran, and appointed several from Thiel’s Palantir?”
With every passing day, new aspects of technocracy are being revealed, and I feel like I am drinking from a fire hose. Normally, I spare Technocracy News readers by only posting one article each day, forcing me to triage from 5 to 10 or more good stories.
“If you want long-term success in business, relationships and life, you have to get better at accepting uncomfortable truths as fast as possible. When you refuse to accept an uncomfortable truth, you’re choosing to accept an uncomfortable future.”
~ Steven Bartlett, The Diary of a CEO
By Catherine Austin Fitts
Plunder is an ancient story. The promise of plunder brought Attila and the Huns over the Alps to raid the Roman Empire in northern Italy. It inspired the conquistadors of Spain to hunt for silver in Mexico and South America, where they wiped out the Aztec and Incan Empires. Protected by court intrigue and secrecy, pirates have teamed up for centuries with royalty whose reign depended on rich spoils to pay back their bank loans. When the leaders of the British Empire could not maintain a trade surplus, they flooded the Chinese with opium, conquering with addiction and gunboats what could not be secured with manufacturing and diplomacy.
The founding of the Bank of Amsterdam, the Bank of Sweden, and the Bank of England in the 1600s launched the beginning of the economic paradigm I call the “central banking-warfare model”—but we could just as easily call the dominant economic model the “central banking-plunder model.” Plunder in its many forms has been essential to the rich accumulation of capital that helped to build the Western world. You can grow wealth, or you can take it—and in many cases, taking it is the preferred method. Alibaba founder Jack Ma once said, “When trade stops, war starts.”
The long history of Western plunder inspired the formation of the intergovernmental organization known as BRICS (whose current membership includes founding members Brazil, Russia, India, and China in 2009, followed by South Africa in 2010, and Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates in 2024-2025)1 and the BRICS nations’ ongoing efforts to achieve financial and military independence. More recent history helps explain Russia’s fierce resistance to NATO encroachment—the Russian people have not forgotten the “Rape of Russia”2 after the Soviet Union collapsed. As Samuel Huntington observed in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations:
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
As technological innovation grows, so do the applications of plunder—along with its profitability. As David A. Hughes explained in our recent Omniwar report,3 “Omniwar” involves “the weaponization of everything.” Thus, instead of killing their prey physically in open combat, plunderers now can simply empty victims’ bank accounts while distracting them with propaganda and pornography. Plunder leaves students, who spend years getting an education that is not relevant to generating an income, with enormous student loan debt that they cannot retire. Frauds like the Madoff Ponzi scheme4 steal a mother’s savings, and when she commits suicide, her children’s inheritance can scarcely cover funeral expenses, much less finance their education and future. Plunder also encompasses the politically engineered health, food, and education policies that poison children. Moreover, the poisoning has a profitable postscript: the medical establishment claims that the children are sick (instead of poisoned),5 and parents liquidate their savings to try to heal their children in a manner that generates significant revenues for medical enterprises and pharmaceutical businesses.6
A key reason why the Solari team focuses on financial freedom7 is out of a desire to protect ourselves and our subscribers from being plundered. Because so much of the art of plunder involves management and manipulation of the financial system and the train tracks of transactions, we place great emphasis on having a good map of the world in which we live and understanding how to recognize the difference between “official reality” and reality. That is why the second of the six pillars of our Building Wealth curriculum8 is “Navigation Tools.”9 With the ability to develop and maintain a good map of reality, you can navigate. You can invest your time and resources to serve your purpose and achieve your goals, rather than find yourself plundered by someone trying to take the wealth—both the living and financial equity—that you have worked so hard to accumulate.
At Solari, our intention is not to depress you by dwelling on the unpleasant topic of plunder, but rather to help you build a strong immune system against being plundered. Ideally, you should also build networks and communities that help members do the same. Now is the time to do so, because technological innovation is powering the plunder game in new and challenging ways.
The 21st-Century Panopticon
We are in the midst of a quantum leap in the technology of surveillance and control. Let’s start with the metaphor of the “panopticon”—reintroduced in recent years by Ian Davis, Whitney Webb, and Mark Goodwin in their writings for Unlimited Hangout. English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham originated the term panopticon in the 18th century, Wikipedia explains, to convey the idea of “a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control…. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single prison officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.”10 Davis, Webb, and Goodwin use “panopticon” to describe U.S. and Israeli surveillance, assassination, and warfare systems—including those supported by Palantir—as well as the public distributed ledger systems, including blockchain, being used to shift the financial system into a control grid.
In 1975, French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) described a panopticon as follows:
“The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen…. The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity.”11
As governments and militaries around the world use satellite constellations, telecommunications, digital technology, and invisible weaponry to build a planetary panopticon, the U.S. administration and its allies are demonstrating the unique features of this new model. For example, on June 13, 2025, financed by the United States, Israel launched its war on Iran by assassinating 11 of Iran’s top military leaders and nuclear scientists. Some were reportedly targeted at home, resulting in the death of their families and neighbors. Describing the events, Ron Unz wrote, “I cannot recall any previous case in which a major country had ever had so large a fraction of its top military, political, and scientific leadership eliminated in that sort of illegal sneak attack.”12
In short, war has been converted to a high-powered manhunt with assassination as the end point. This is possible because, according to technology entrepreneur and economist Dr. Pippa Malmgren, U.S. and Israeli systems now can track all 92 million Iranians and identify each of them by their unique biometrics:
“The key to understanding all this is that Iran is now a digital Panopticon prison, now that the US and Israel, and probably some other regional allies of these two, can detect a person’s location, communications, conversations, and state of mind at any time, anywhere. The Iranian leadership is effectively already in a digital prison. A person can now be tracked based on their walking gait, unique heartbeat, voice, the network of people in their circle, and their own behavioral patterns. There is no place to hide in a digital Panopticon prison.”13
Moreover, as The Economist commented last year with respect to the legality of assassinations in Gaza, it is possible no military officer can be found guilty of an international war crime because it is software that is now choosing the targets. As we discussed in our interview and report on AI with Whitney Webb,14 AI has been positioned to assume responsibility and take the blame. This is why, in my introduction to the AI report, I warned, “the people who are using AI as a scapegoat are dangerous.”15
Anyone, Anywhere
It was immediately obvious that the Iranian assassinations had planetary implications. If software can identify each person in Iran, then, as long as Starlink or other U.S. satellite constellations are operating overhead, those who control the panopticon can identify pretty much anyone, anywhere. Whether with drones, invisible weaponry, or missiles, parties who are remote and unaccountable can influence targets’ thoughts and health or end their life—all on a highly economic basis.
In two important Solari Report interviews, “Control & Freedom Happen One Person at a Time”16 and “The Economy of the Energy Body,”17 Ulrike Granögger and I described how an automated and cost-effective control system has been built that is customized for each unique human. Thus, it did not surprise me when, following the deaths of the Iranian leaders and their families and neighbors, most European leaders fell right in line with increasing their country’s NATO contributions to 5% and agreeing to new tariff conditions. Add to this the financial controls of the sanction systems, or the Epstein-type files that surveillance and kickbacks create, and you start to see how the overriding of global treaties and laws and the extraction of tariffs from countries as well as corporations is working, as the control grid assembles and integrates into a global panopticon.
Although each one of us can be surveilled, tracked, and eliminated, the system doing the observation and pulling the trigger is invisible. No one is accountable. In fact, this opaqueness is an essential feature of control. In his 1984 classic, The Evolution of Cooperation, political scientist Robert Axelrod demonstrated in economic gaming scenarios the general population’s willingness to shun dirty players. This type of shunning is a powerful strategy that can advantage the players who cooperate and are willing to enforce against those who engage in dirty tactics. It only works, however, when the general population can see who’s who. In other words, transparency is essential to identify the dirty players.
Unfortunately, the panopticon has taken secrecy to a whole new level. It is no accident that alongside the descent of Western civilization into the panopticon, we have witnessed the growing success of media propaganda in making sure dirty players either remain invisible or (as an equally effective strategy) are portrayed as successful, rich, famous, and worthy of admiration.
Israel has played a significant leadership role in building the technology that powers the emerging planetary panopticon, and nothing demonstrates the plunder that these technological systems enable better than the genocide currently underway in Gaza. Antony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World is an excellent source on the history of the prototyping of control technologies in Palestine.18
Israel’s crypto community has also played a leading role in developing and prototyping the distributed ledger technology essential to building financial transaction control systems. However, the systems—and the AI and databases that make the control grid go—are extremely energy-intensive. Building and operating the necessary data centers requires land, energy, and water. Now that the panopticon systems have matured, the Palestinian population is no longer useful, whereas their resources are seen as a valuable component of a profitable control grid infrastructure. Israel has, therefore, increasingly laid claim to Palestinians’ offshore oil and gas, land, and aquifers, while attempting to move the population out of Palestine, but—despite systematic destruction of Palestinians’ civilian, farming, and transportation infrastructure—the transfer of Palestinians to Egypt and neighboring countries has not succeeded. Consequently, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is now exterminating the population through bombings, sniper assassinations, and mass famine. Some reports indicate that the Palestinian population has dropped from 2.2 million—including 1.1 million children—to 1.6 million. Given the effort to force mass famine, a rapid die-off appears imminent.
Nothing has visually communicated plunder’s powerful potential better then a short AI-generated video retweeted by the U.S. President celebrating a redeveloped Gaza Riviera.19 Video scenes show a Trump golden statue and resort, and Elon Musk (let’s not forget his role as leader of the Starlink satellite network) enjoying a bowl of hummus while Trump and Netanyahu sip cocktails by a swimming pool. This video followed the publication of Netanyahu’s vision for Gaza, “Gaza 2035,”20 which in turn led to reports indicating that various neighboring Arab states have been cut in on the potential development deals. This public visioning process appears to have been used to syndicate potential plunder profits and build political constituencies for escalating the genocide. Gaza is a method,21 and we dare not forget it.
Understanding the Panopticon Threat
As control becomes more centralized and automated in the planetary panopticon, fewer human hierarchies are needed to maintain control. For example, why continue to spend billions on soft-power bureaucracies such as those fielded and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)? Who needs thousands of federal civil service workers to implement and enforce complex federal regulations? All of this can be done much more economically by controlling people’s money with programmable stablecoins, credit cards, and bank accounts. While many people cheered the firing of well-paid bureaucrats and nongovernmental organization (NGO) personnel, they seem not to appreciate the fact that the automated replacements will be far worse. I would much prefer to try to reason with a government bureaucrat than with an AI software bot that has no contact or support function and may have the power to cut off my bank account or electricity or send in a drone.
We face several challenges in understanding the panopticon. The first is understanding the point of view of the people who are building it. I just finished reading The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West by Palantir CEO Alexander Karp and his general counsel, Nicholas W. Zamiska. Karp and Zamiska make the case that the West must maintain a superior capability in national security if it is to protect our way of life. This may sound like common sense, but the argument breaks down when you understand the relationship between Palantir’s U.S. government contracts and the U.S. build-out of a financial transaction control grid.
Look at Palantir’s role in building the Lavender system for the Israeli military—an AI targeting system used to direct Israel’s bombing in Gaza.22 Palantir is helping to build the planetary panopticon, paid for with our tax dollars but operating on behalf of a transnational crime syndicate. There is a difference between national security and digital concentration camps. There is a difference between national security and genocide with plunder. The line of who is protected and who is plundered is far more fluid than Karp and Zamiska describe. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro said in a July speech to the Hague Group:
“Gaza is simply an experiment of the mega-rich trying to show all the peoples of the world how they will respond to a rebellion of humanity. They plan to bomb us all.”23
The builders of the panopticon have sent a message: You are being watched and, at any time, you may be killed. This has nothing to do with national security—this is about the engineering of a coup d’état in the Western world. When the chief operating officer of Palantir claims that Palantir’s goal is to be the operating system of the U.S. government, he is stating that they intend the end of U.S. government sovereignty.
A second challenge is that plunder in the panopticon is facilitated with invisible weaponry that we do not understand. Do we think the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 was natural? Nope. Do we think the fires in Northern California in 2017 or in Lahaina in 2023 were natural? Nope. Do we think Hurricane Helene and the floods in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina in 2024 were natural? Nope. That said, how do we know who is responsible? How do we see them? How do we figure out how they did it? How do we hold them accountable? That is the nature of the panopticon—we are seen, but they are unseen. And it is hard to pull the plug on or shut down the unseen.
A third challenge is the extent to which the financial panopticon diminishes market price discovery and financial disclosure. Private equity and credit are moving far more businesses out of the public market and into privately controlled hands. The federal government’s long-standing refusal to comply with federal audit and disclosure laws or to account for over $21 trillion of undocumentable adjustments—and the adoption of FASAB Statement 56 in combination with the existing national security and classification laws—have rendered large parts of the financial disclosure in the U.S. government as well as the U.S. stock and bond markets essentially meaningless.24
While these challenges are significant, they are also inspiring a backlash by those who understand that such assaults on fundamental productivity threaten to shrink the pie for one and all. If we can face the panopticon and understand that no one is as smart as all of us, we can work together to unleash the global hearts and minds of millions so that people come to see who is doing this and how their technology works.
In 2023, Peter Gabriel wrote a song along those lines called “Panopticom.” Wikipedia describes the song as follows:
“The song’s title references the panopticon, a prison structure designed by Jeremy Bentham that enabled prison guards to observe the actions of all of [sic] prisoners without being detected. Gabriel’s concept of the panopticom was to invert this model by enabling ‘ordinary people’ to observe the actions of authority figures. The ‘com’ in the panopticom refers to the ability for people to ‘communicate both to the globe and what’s going on in the globe. It’s turning surveillance on its head.’”25
In the air
The smoke cloud takes its form
All the phones
Take pictures while it’s warm
Panopticom, let’s find out what’s going on
Panopticom, let’s see where clues are leading
Panopticom, won’t you show us what’s going on?
Panopticom, show how much is real
And we pour the medicine down
While we watch the world around us
We got witness on the ground
Takin’ in the evidence
And we reach across the globe
Got all the information flowing
You face the motherload
Tentacles around you, around you
From above
And deep below the ground
It was in Berlin
That all the evidence was found
Look from the street
And we look down from the skies
See through the barriers
We can see through all those lies
Panopticom, let’s find out what’s going on
Panopticom, let’s see where clues are leading
Panopticom, won’t you show us what’s going on?
Panopticom, show how much is real
Again, plunder is an ancient story. On the other hand, the effort to understand and map it and create systems to prevent it at scale by millions of people collaborating openly throughout the world is a very new story. This is the story in which the Solari team wishes to play a part. With this report dedicated to unpacking plunder, we invite you to build and protect your own wealth and to join us, in cooperation with others, in shifting the state of play entirely.
Ex-Mossad head Yossi Cohen boasted during a recent podcast that Israel has “boobytrapped” and “manipulated” equipment like that used in their pager attack in Lebanon in “all countries that you can imagine.”
A Flock camera captures a vehicle’s make, model and license plate that police officers can view on computers. The city of Stanwood has paused use of Flock cameras while lawsuits over public records issues are sorted out. (Flock provided photo)
