We are about to find out just how true that is.

The United States and Iran have both indicated that they have reached an agreement to end hostilities. As best we can determine at this stage, these are the key elements of that deal, along with my commentary.

The Straits of Hormuz will be reopened to shipping. That is a welcome provision. It is also worth noting, however, that the Straits were not closed before this war. All the Iranians are agreeing to is a return to the pre-war status quo. We should also note that some Iranian commentary suggests they believe they will control the Straits and be paid for each vessel that passes through.

The Iranians will remove all mines they have placed in the Straits of Hormuz. Assuming there are any mines, the Iranians don’t know where they are. When the U.S. Navy emplaces a minefield, it meticulously records where each mine is and what type it is so that the minefield can be removed safely after hostilities. That’s not the way the rest of the world operates. I would not assume that all Iranian mines are actually tethered. Some of them may very well have just been dumped overboard and gone wherever the currents took them.

The U.S. Navy will lift the blockade within 30 days. If we have really won, then there is no need for a blockade, but once we lift it, what leverage we have over the Iranians vaporizes.

No new sanctions will be imposed while follow-on negotiations continue. Again, this is a concession from the United States that eases pressure on Tehran.

The U.S. will suspend current sanctions, allowing Iranian oil to be openly sold. That means a flood of cash into the coffers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. One can be sure that ships loaded with arms and material from China will be steaming into Iranian ports by the dozens, helping the ayatollahs rearm.

$25 billion in Iranian assets will be unfrozen. This is a potentially catastrophic misstep. The Iranians get a massive payoff, and we give up one of the biggest cards we have been holding. Should this deal fall apart, we will be back confronting the Iranians but from a significantly weakened position.

Both parties will formulate a reconstruction plan for Iran. This is a cover for reparations. It means we will now be in the position of bankrolling the rebuilding of a nation we just spent billions bombing. The Iranians are saying explicitly that we have agreed to pay them $300 billion.

Iran agrees it will neither produce nor acquire nuclear weapons. This is an absolutely meaningless provision. It has no teeth. The Iranians never abide by any agreements they have signed. They will not abide by this one.

The fate of the nuclear program, including the stockpile of highly enriched uranium, will be negotiated and finalized within 60 days. Again, this is a meaningless provision. The Iranians have pursued nuclear weapons for decades. They have lied their way through negotiations on that subject in every round of talks ever held. They will lie their way through these.

There will be full sanctions relief following a final agreement in 60 days. If we follow through on this, it will be a disaster. Iran will be free to expand its power and attack us worldwide, and we will have unilaterally disarmed. What you saw before the war in terms of Iranian worldwide jihadist arson will be as nothing compared to what you will see in the future.

In short, in exchange for Iran agreeing to allow shipping to transit Hormuz and promising to “talk about” a nuclear weapons program that they officially continue to deny even exists, we are going to pay tens of billions of dollars to these pirates, set them free from international sanctions, and take on the task of rebuilding their nation. This is some kind of twisted Marshall Plan for Iran, except skipping the part where we actually won, and the evil regime in power was toppled. This is signing a deal with Hitler in 1944, leaving him in power, and then helping him rebuild all those defense industries we just bombed.

“The aftermath of the recent war imposed on the Islamic Republic of Iran has exposed a truth that Washington and Tel Aviv are loath to admit: despite immense military pressure, sweeping psychological warfare, and repeated claims of victory, the aggressors failed to achieve a single strategic objective.”

“What emerged from this third imposed war in less than a year was not the collapse or fragmentation of the Islamic Republic that Western pundits and policymakers had envisioned, but a more cohesive, battle-hardened, and assertive nation, one now operating from a position of undeniable strength, enhanced deterrence, and regional power.
Iranian State Television Press TV

I don’t typically put a lot of stock in what Press TV, an Iranian regime propaganda platform, spits out, but in this case, I think the Iranians are pretty close to the mark. We went into this war with the idea that we would topple the regime in Tehran in days and free the Iranian people. That was never going to happen, and frankly, it still boggles the mind that our entire intelligence and defense establishments either signed on to that fantasy or were told to shut up, sit down, and get with the program.

In any event, within a week, it became crystal clear that the “plan” was not working and that the center of gravity in this fight was the world economy, oil and gas supplies, and the Straits of Hormuz. We imposed a partially effective blockade and then simply stopped, waiting yet again for something that was never going to happen. Pundits blathered on about the limits of oil storage capacity in Iran, the downside of letting wells sit without pumping them, etc.

The Iranians were going to cry uncle any day. We need only sit and wait. There was no need to reevaluate our strategy. We had already won.

It sure doesn’t look like that now. Looks like we lost. That is certainly the way Iran sees it and, one suspects, so will a great many other nations. Iran will not emerge from this conflict chastened and wishing to rejoin the fraternity of civilized nations. It will come out the other side confident, emboldened, and determined to continue the Islamic world revolution even more aggressively than before.

We want this all to be over. What we are doing will guarantee that is not true. We crossed a bridge. We made a decision. We cannot return now to a pre-war reality that no longer exists.

This is not a deal we should want any part of, but I’m sure they are loving it in Tehran.

What Makes AI Data Centers Different?

Traditional data centers focus on storage, websites, and general cloud services. AI data centers are optimized for training and running massive models using dense clusters of GPUs and accelerators.

• Power Density: AI racks routinely draw 30–120+ kW (and up to 300+ kW in advanced designs), versus 5–15 kW for standard racks. Large campuses can demand 100 MW to over 1 GW — enough electricity for hundreds of thousands of homes.

• Cooling Demands: Extreme heat requires liquid cooling systems that consume millions of gallons of water daily.

• Infrastructure: These facilities need reinforced structures, massive electrical systems, and ultra-high-bandwidth interconnects.

Projections indicate U.S. data centers could consume 6.7–12% of national electricity by 2028, with AI as the main driver. The question lingers: how much of this power-hungry infrastructure is truly advancing human knowledge versus enabling unprecedented surveillance?

Why the Massive Scale?

Hyperscale designs offer economies of scale for the intensive computing required by frontier AI. Yet this centralization also creates ideal conditions for storing and analyzing vast troves of personal data. Much of the capability in these centers supports government contracts and corporate platforms that track consumer habits, spending patterns, location data, social interactions, and more. Facilities like these power the algorithms behind targeted advertising, behavioral prediction, credit scoring, and law enforcement tools — raising serious concerns about privacy and autonomy in an era of pervasive digital tracking.

Examples include massive proposals such as the Stratos Project in Utah and numerous developments in Pennsylvania’s PJM region, including the rural Endless Mountains areas near Scranton.

Local Impacts and Competition with Agriculture

Communities are often promised construction jobs and tax revenue. In reality, permanent operational jobs are minimal (dozens to ~150 per site on the high end), while long-term economic benefits frequently fall short of hype due to generous tax abatements.

A deeper concern is the direct competition with farming and food production. Large data center campuses can consume hundreds or thousands of acres of land previously used for agriculture or natural ecosystems. This shift prioritizes surveillance and AI infrastructure over the foundational systems that have sustained humanity for millennia. In rural regions like Northeast Pennsylvania, converting productive land raises legitimate questions about food security, local resilience, and whether short-term corporate gains justify long-term loss of agricultural capacity and environmental diversity.

Environmental and Resilience Concerns

These facilities impose heavy burdens:

• Electricity and Grid Strain: Competing with residential and industrial needs, often leading to higher rates for everyone.

  • One analysis notes that data center growth alone could increase average U.S. electricity bills by 6–29% by 2030, with much higher increases (up to 50%+) in hotspots like Virginia and parts of PJM.

• Water Consumption: Massive draw for cooling in areas that may already face scarcity.

• Land Use: Displacement of farming and natural habitats.

Additionally, the entire system is fragile. A major solar storm (Carrington-level event) could trigger widespread grid failures, potentially disabling these power-hungry centers for weeks or longer. These data centers are not being designed to be resilient to these events.

Alternatives and Emerging Solutions

The extreme resource demands are spurring alternatives that could reduce Earth’s burden: Why are we rushing to utilize our valuable farmland and open areas without a robust discussion of emerging alternatives to these hyperscale AI behemoths? Why the almost absolute lack of public discussion and debate on this topic? Emerging alternatives include:

• Edge Computing: Local processing on devices or smaller sites, limiting centralized data hoarding.

  • Processes data closer to the source (devices, local servers, or small facilities) instead of shipping everything to big centralized centers. Reduces latency, bandwidth needs, and central power demand. Many AI inference tasks already run efficiently on phones/laptops or on-site hardware.

• Advanced Hardware: Neuromorphic and photonic chips for far greater efficiency. These include photonic and optical storage which uses light instead of electricity for computations – slashing energy and heat. Promising for massive parallelism in AI with orders-of-magnitude efficiency improvements. Still maturing but advancing

• Space-Based Computing: Orbital facilities using constant solar power and vacuum cooling (e.g., projects linked to Google, NVIDIA, and SpaceX). These could theoretically offload some training loads but may still feed the same surveillance pipelines back to Earth.

Humanity’s rush toward technological dominance risks over-reliance on fragile, resource-heavy infrastructure. As demand grows, balancing innovation with efficiency, decentralization, and resilience will be critical.

Whether through smarter terrestrial designs, edge solutions, or space-based alternatives, the future of AI infrastructure need not remain tethered to ever-larger terrestrial power sinks. Communities, policymakers, and technologists face important choices about where and how we build the backbone of the AI age.

Are county commissioners, county supervisors, and state and federal elected officials even aware of all the options that are coming online?

The Bigger Picture

AI data centers undeniably might accelerate certain capabilities in science and industry. However, a skeptical lens reveals that a substantial portion of this infrastructure supports government and corporate surveillance — storing and analyzing citizen and consumer data at unprecedented scale. The rush to “win” the AI race often masks a deeper centralization of power, where massive resource investments serve control and profit motives more than broad human flourishing.

For most of human history (~300,000 years as hunter-gatherers, then ~10,000+ with agriculture), societies prioritized reliable food, water, shelter, and community. Complex civilizations rose and fell (Maya, Rome, Cahokia, etc.) often due to environmental strain, soil depletion, over-complexity, or external shocks—followed by simplification where people returned to smaller-scale farming and local resilience.

Modern shifts (industrial agriculture, globalization, and now AI/data centers) boost short-term output and power projection but create dependencies and vulnerabilities. “Elimination of farming” isn’t literal, but consolidation, urbanization, and land use for data centers/energy do reduce decentralized food resilience. Winning “bigly” via tech dominance sounds strategic, but history shows over-reliance on fragile systems (e.g., just-in-time supply chains, centralized power) often backfires when shocks hit.

As data centers proliferate, societies must weigh whether the pursuit of ever-larger, ever-more-powerful facilities justifies the drain on energy, water, farmland, and privacy. True progress may lie not in bigger terrestrial data sinks, but in decentralized, efficient, and resilient alternatives that prioritize human autonomy over centralized dominance.

A Japanese colleague knew I’d seen a few of these over the last 30 years and asked what I thought of the proposal. Here’s what I told him:

How do you assess the Security Research Council’s proposal?

This is a sensible analysis of what Japan needs to focus on and do to improve its national defense to face oncoming threats. It covers much of the hardware ‘waterfront’. This includes: drones, UAVs, missiles (lots of them), and also having adequate amounts of weapons, ordnance, and other materials needed to fight a war.

Obviously, Japan is closely studying the Ukraine war and recognizes the new technologies that are changing how wars are being fought.

I also particularly like the mention of economic security as national security and the idea that allies should cooperate to protect sea lanes, and also to ensure resource stockpiles. This is effectively an ‘economic Article 5’ – whereby the free nations cooperate when other members come under ‘economic attack’, say, when China chokes off exports of a key resource.

And the mention of Japan needing to better explain itself is long overdue. Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi has been good at this -- successfully refuting Chinese lies and propaganda since taking office. He also affirmatively promotes Japan and its values as a stalwart of the free world.

The review also includes language implicitly calling for Japan to develop nuclear-powered submarines. This is a good idea, both operationally and politically – though it won’t happen anytime soon. One notes there is scant public opposition to this. It’s a different Japan these days.

How does it compare to past LDP proposals?

Past LDP proposals have been good at recognizing the threats facing Japan and making reasonable recommendations for bolstering national defense – albeit too slowly and on too limited a scale. Now, however, one detects a heightened sense of urgency – and a sense (unspoken) that Japan faces the prospects of a shooting war in the not distant future – and will do what is necessary to defend itself. This is a shift from, say, five years ago, and certainly from ten years ago. And notice the broad public support for improving Japan's defenses.

How would you evaluate it from the U.S. perspective?

These recommendations deserve fairly high marks from the United States. Japan specifically refers to the U.S. alliance as the ‘cornerstone’ of Japan’s defense. That is correct. And even more important is the following language:

“No country will come to the aid of a nation that is not prepared to defend itself. Japan, too, must clearly demonstrate its national resolve to defend itself and show the determination and resolve to serve as a standard-bearer for peace and security in the region.”

This is true – and particularly so when it comes to the United States in the present era, regardless of who is the president. But in the Trump administration, it is especially true that if a country wants American help, it must do everything it can to defend itself. That huge part of the U.S. public in so-called ‘flyover country’ whose children serve in the U.S. military in large numbers is no longer willing to have America’s elites send U.S. service personnel overseas to die for lazy or ungrateful allies.

The Japanese proposals also indicate a willingness to spend what is necessary to develop real warfighting capabilities. There is no complaining about Japan’s ‘severe fiscal condition’ as was often the case in the past.

And Japan is also establishing a wider military presence and set of defense relationships throughout the region, while offering to include the U.S., which it has never done before. This takes a lot of pressure off the U.S. and its overstretched forces and diplomatic resources.

If Japan can strengthen its defense industrial base (as the recommendations call for), this too will take some burden off the Americans, not to mention being good for Japan.

I’d say, however, that the recommendations are too ‘defeatist’ in terms of correcting Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) personnel shortfalls. Instead of talking about robots and AI and ‘reorganizations’ to make up for too few ‘jieikan’ (JSDF troops), the report should instead focus on making service in the JSDF a lucrative and respected career choice – that offers lifelong benefits (such as with a version of the U.S. GI-Bill) The Japanese government has never done this, and instead just accepted that Japanese won’t join the JSDF in large enough numbers. That’s mistaken and, as I said, ‘defeatist.’

Also, there is no mention of the JSDF – Maritime Self Defense Force and Air Self Defense Force in particular – being about half the size they need to be to accomplish required missions. This needs to be urgently addressed – unless the idea is that the Americans will make up the difference.

Taiwan is not mentioned, unfortunately. There is some indirect mention, I suppose, when ‘sea lanes’ and ‘straits’ are mentioned, but speaking clearly about Taiwan is a better approach.

Japan suggests it will have made real progress within five years. Faster is better, but this is still far better than the European and NATO countries.

By and large, there is a lot that’s good in these recommendations. Very different than a decade or two ago when Japan was making excuses for why it couldn’t do what was necessary to defend itself.

What should be the short, medium-, and long-term priorities?

Everything in the committee’s recommendations needs to be done ‘now.’ Japan spent decades ignoring or shortchanging its defense. Only in the last five years or so has it gotten serious. There isn’t much time to get ready to fight China (and its friends). They are on the march, so Japan needs to hurry.

On 21 June, Colombians will elect a new president. Their choices are starkly different.

On one side is Abelardo de la Espriella, a colorful lawyer sometimes described as Colombia’s answer to President Trump (who, in a rare gesture, has endorsed him) or El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, the president who unceremoniously rounded up and jailed tens of thousands of gang members, thus virtually eliminating murders and serious crime in his country. The Western media habitually calls him an “extreme right-winger.” In fact, other than his promise to fight guerrilla terrorism and narcotics traffickers with a mailed fist, he is a fairly typical moderate Latin American politician.

His opponent, Ivan Cepeda, of the Historic Pact (Pacto Historico), is the real extremist. He is a hard-core Communist who has applied a very light coating of insincere respect for the rule of law over his support for the Communist terrorists who have plagued the country for decades. Cepeda’s father, Manuel Cepeda, was gunned down by real right-wing extremists when he foolishly got involved in a plot by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC, then the armed wing of the Colombian Communist Party) to have their cake and eat it too.

The elder Cepeda, a CCP Central Committee member, was a candidate for the so-called Patriotic Union (Union Patriotica - UP) when gunmen killed him. The UP was a combined FARC/CCP front political party. The FARC thought they would continue their guerrilla war against the government and, at the same time, elect Communists to the Colombian congress, under the UP cover. It did not work out well. Right-wing businessmen, military officers, and people who had suffered from guerrilla kidnappings, extortion, and the murders of family members virtually annihilated the UP.

The current president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, is a former M-19 terrorist who has presided over the virtual unraveling of the Colombian military, police, judicial system, and counternarcotics campaign, placing former M-19 terrorists in key government posts and inviting the leaders of criminal cartels without even a fig leaf of political legitimacy to enter into “peace talks” with the government.

The Colombian people – at least most of them – have watched in disbelief as Petro’s “Toal Peace” plan turned vicious murdering gang leaders into participants in a great show of leftist democracy. In the meantime, the so-called “FARC dissidents” (FARC guerrillas who thumbed their noses at the bogus 2016 “peace treaty” foisted on Colombia by Globalist former president Juan Manuel Santos) and National Liberation Army (ELN) pro-Cuba guerrillas joined more conventional narcotics traffickers to explosively increase cocaine production in Colombia.

The 2016 peace treaty with the FARC, negotiated in Havana, was rejected in a referendum, but Santos pushed it through a compliant congress, probably through the distribution of large amounts of cash. The treaty essentially gave the FARC what it had failed to win on the battlefield in decades of bloody, atrocity-laden warfare.

Juan Manuel Santos was well-rewarded for his efforts on behalf of “peace”, when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, joining such distinguished company as Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Barry Obama, the European Union (!), the United Nations, and the International Peace Bureau, awarded the peace prize in 1910, (the bloom was off that rose by 1914), and many others whose contributions to world peace were hazy or did not stand the test of time. Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam is the only person who had the dignity to refuse it.

It is widely believed that Santos was rewarded in rather more tangible fashion by the regime of Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, the FARC, and several narcotics cartels. A sum said to exceed $300 million dollars was reportedly deposited in a well-known bank in Italy (or someplace close to it), in return for ramming through the peace treaty.

Colombia is now experiencing the worst violence since the late 1990’s, and cocaine production has exploded. To date, Santos has not returned his peace prize.

If Cepeda manages to get elected, the downward spiral of Colombia started by Petro will accelerate at warp speed. It will become not only a failed state, but also a narco kingdom. One of Latin America’s oldest – if imperfect – democracies will be converted into a criminal empire, with Marxist window dressing. Anybody with the means to flee will, as they did in the 1990’s.

Venezuela’s Marxist regime is still firmly in power. The arrest of Nicolas Maduro and the naming of his friend Delcy Rodriguez as “president” of Venezuela have not resulted in any significant changes in the oppressive Chavez/Maduro government. Venezuelans still live in fear and misery, and they are still threatened by regime thugs if they dare to protest. It appears that an amoral gang of American businessmen with interests in Venezuela pushed President Trump to settle for the illusion of “stability” and oil, rather than freedom for Venezuela. We will pay a heavy price for the incompetence of our Latin American intelligence analysts who fell for this dirty deal and urged it on Trump. A recent article in Politico suggests that some of the worst actors, including a Palm Beach bottom-feeding oil and asphalt mogul, are now under investigation by the FBI for their shenanigans.

If Colombia falls into the hands of Cepeda, the two countries will form a bloc that Trump will be unable to deal with. It will be a disaster for American foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere. If Abelardo is elected, President Trump’s stance in Venezuela will become untenable. Unlike the fools who urged on Trump a false plan of “stability” under Delcy Rodriguez, de la Espriella knows exactly what Delcy Rodriguez is and what she, Chavez, and Maduro have done to Colombia. There will be no “peaceful co-existence”. Abelardo de la Espriella is a friend of the United States, but he will not pretend to be a friend of the junta in Caracas. He was the lawyer for Alex Saab, Maduro’s major bagman. Not even a towering diplomatic intellect like Jared Kushner will b.s. him into seeing the Delcy Rodriguez regime as illegitimate and criminal.

Santos was the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain who put Gustavo Petro in power, though they later had a falling out, probably over money. Petro’s “Total Peace” plan, by its very existence, puts a large question mark on the “peace” of Santos, government corruption, and relations with the narcotics trafficking cartels. He is now one of the main movers behind the campaign of Cepeda. Enrique Santos, the brother of Juan Manuel, is a notorious FARC sympathizer, so none of this comes as a terrible surprise.

The origins of this tragic mess are easy to pinpoint.

Modern Colombian history began on April 9, 1948, at a little after one in the afternoon. According to the official, accepted history of the event, a deranged drifter named Juan Roa shot down Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan in broad daylight on Carrera Septima, the “main street” of the Colombian capital then and now.

Colombian police arrested and tried to protect the alleged gunman, but a furious mob beat him to death with wooden shoe shine boxes and literally tore him to shreds. What followed were the most harrowing days in Colombian history, and Colombia has had more than its share of harrowing days. Those days became known as the Bogotazo.

Enraged mobs burnt half of Bogota to the ground and very nearly seized the presidential palace; had the Presidential Guard not fought desperately to defend, the world might well have seen the president of Colombia strung up from a lamppost.

Gaitan, a Liberal Party reform leader, nationalist, and non-Communist leftist, was the leader of a huge movement of Colombia’s rural Liberal Party voters and many others. Tension had been building for years between the majority Liberals and the Conservatives, but a split in the Liberal Party had put the Conservatives in the presidency.

There was never an official motive given for the assassination, but the familiar “lone gunman” idea was usually put forth, though the Liberals tried to blame ultra-right-wing Conservatives for the killing. Other theories were deliberately dismissed as lacking evidence.

It will suffice to say that years of studying the Gaitan murder have made it clear, at least to the author, that Gaitan was probably the victim of a conspiracy involving the Colombian Communist Party, foreign Communist or pro-Soviet “anti-imperialist” operatives present in Bogota, and the Soviet intelligence services, most likely the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. It is possible that a U.S. diplomat posted to Bogota was involved in suppressing key information about the event; he may have been one of the most important undetected (or unproven) Soviet agents in U.S. history. His name was William Wieland, surely one of the strangest people ever to be employed as a State Department foreign service officer.

Joseph Stalin was determined to stop the consolidation of the Organization of American States (OAS), a regional organization explicitly intended to stop the spread of Communist influence in the Western Hemisphere. One of the major organizational meetings of the OAS was in progress when Gaitan was killed; he had rejected Communist demands that he denounce the OAS meeting. The Colombian Communists hoped to use the killing of Gaitan to spark a civil war, which they believed they would win as the secret power behind the Liberal Party leadership. Colombia had always been a priority Soviet target, although the Soviets were careful to conceal the level of their interest in the country.

A surprising number of historic figures were in Bogota on the day of the murder: George C. Marshall, Vernon Walters, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (another Nobel Prize winner, and at the very least a Communist sympathizer), many important Latin American leaders, and, of course, Fidel Castro. A glance at a map shows that Colombia is the most strategically important country in Latin America, with coasts on the Pacific and Atlantic (Caribbean) and access to the Amazon. Colombia in Communist hands would have constituted a grave threat to the Panama Canal, and Central America would have been threatened as well. It is no accident that the FARC, the only true pro-Moscow peasant guerrilla army in Latin American history, developed in Colombia. At one point, it had effective control over half of the national territory.

Accounts by most historians either rely on questionable information or ignore key facts that were widely known at the time of the Bogotazo. They also ignore what should be logical conclusions from proven evidence, the written accounts of key participants in the dramatic events, and events that occurred outside of Bogota shortly before or after the assassination.

The subject is for another in-depth article, but the chance that Fidel Castro, already believed to be a hardened killer, just happened to be spotted sitting in a café in front of Gaitan’s office building a half hour before he was shot down in the street is vanishingly small. The fact that the next event on Gaitan’s schedule after his never-to-be lunch was a meeting with Castro and his two Communist companions, or that Castro had already met with Gaitan, merely adds to the obvious conclusion. Much ink has been spilled to claim that Castro was a casual bystander to one of the seminal events in Colombian and Latin American history. Believe it if you want to.

The Gaitan assassination set off what is known in Colombia as La Violencia, The Violence. Up to 250,000 people were murdered in an orgy of individual killings and massacres. It was not a conventional war, or even really a guerrilla war. It was up close and personal.

Primarily a fight between Liberal Party and Conservative Party partisans, the Colombian Communists played a relatively minor role after the initial spasm of rage and killing, but that would change.

Again, contrary to most accounts available in English, there was a strong and growing Communist-led, or influenced, incipient rural insurgency in parts of Colombia before Gaitan’s killing, even in the 1930’s. The Colombian Communist Party, a solidly pro-Moscow assemblage of middle-class Stalinist third raters, failed lawyers, drunks, and incompetents (the assessments of their fellow Communists), had theoretical control of the growing rural Communist movement, but it was really led by radicalized peasants from the rural poor.

As La Violencia spiraled out of control, true Communist guerrilla groups formed, mainly in the Tolima Department and northern Huila. The so-called “Independent Republic of Marquetalia”, located in Gaitania, Tolima Department, was the center of a Communist-dominated “self-defense” organization. On May 27, 1964, the Colombian Air Force, supplied with heavy bombers by the U.S, attacked the Communist outpost. The survivors, a few dozen fighters followed by thousands of peasant farmers and their families, fled to the remote Llanos of eastern Colombia. In 1966, the group officially named itself the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, later to be famous as the FARC or FARC-EP, Ejército Popular.

The Cuban Revolution led to the creation of dozens of guerrilla and terrorist groups throughout Latin America, and Colombia was soon overrun with them. The FARC, the ELN, the EPL, and the M-19 are four of the most well-known. The FARC was at first seen as a minor irritant rather than a real threat. Living a primitive existence in the sparsely populated plains and jungles of eastern Colombia, they did not intrude on the national consciousness the way the flamboyant M-19 or the ruthless ELN did, with their campaigns of urban terrorism. These largely middle-class organizations fielded rural guerrillas, but it was the FARC that formed the first significant rural, peasant-based Communist insurgency in Latin America. Pro-Moscow and with a hard-core Stalinist mindset, the FARC imposed iron discipline on its members and did not tolerate schisms. While the drug wars and spectacular acts of urban terrorism caught the headlines, the FARC slowly built a nationwide structure and tightened its grip on ever larger areas of the most remote parts of Colombia. Led by Moscow-trained cadres, the foot soldiers came from the poorest “campesino” class. The Colombian Communist Party was, in theory, in control of the FARC.

The War on Drugs really picked up steam in the early 1980’s with the growth of the Medellin Cartel, led by Pablo Escobar Gaviria, and the Cali Cartel. The DEA carried out a series of devastating operations against these major cartels that broke them up and drained them of much of their power. The FARC had previously avoided direct involvement in cocaine trafficking for ideological reasons, but the temptation to profit from it became too great when Escobar and other major narcos left the scene. The FARC filled a very large vacuum of power and money.

The cocaine money fueled a rapid expansion of the FARC, and by the late 1990’s, Colombia was on its way to failed state status. A series of humiliating defeats of regular army units stunned the country and caught the attention of Washington.

The result was Plan Colombia, ostensibly a counternarcotics effort but in fact a program to stop the drug flow by combatting the people doing the drug trafficking, which increasingly meant the FARC.

Claims that Plan Colombia was a failure are hard to sustain when the facts on the ground are considered. Between 1999 and 2015, Colombia experienced one of the most important periods of economic growth and improved security in its history. Nobody who knew the before and after saw the claims of failure as anything but a canard invented by those who openly or secretly regretted the virtual defeat of the FARC, for whatever reason. Cocaine continued to flow, but the Colombian state was no longer in danger, and the average Colombian (especially in the rural areas) enjoyed more security than at any time since 1948.

Juan Manuel Santos, elected to succeed the hard-liner anti-guerrilla president Álvaro Uribe, began preliminary talks with the FARC in August 2012; they were then carried on in Havana, Cuba. The actions by Santos enraged Uribe, who saw it as giving in to the FARC when the guerrillas were already on the run. The popularity of Santos dropped, but he continued the peace talks. An unpopular peace treaty was signed in 2016, and Santos received the Nobel Peace Prize, which was probably his real personal objective all along.

There was no readily apparent need to begin peace talks with the FARC in 2012. The FARC was battered, had suffered enormous combat losses, and had seen most of its top leaders killed. Its logistics structures were being steadily destroyed. U.S. support had given the Colombian armed forces the mobility, firepower, and intelligence they needed. Most observers thought that another two years of heavy military pressure would have delivered a decisive victory. With the FARC defeated, the Colombian military and police could have turned on the much smaller ELN and the narcotics trafficking gangs.

The successful Colombian strike on the camp of FARC leader Raul Reyes on March 1, 2008, may contain a clue to the actions of Santos. In addition to killing Reyes, the attackers seized his computers. The information in them proved beyond any doubt that there existed a coordinated program including the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez, leftist Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, the Cuban government, and other leftist groups in Latin America.

Santos, despite trying to project the image of a “moderate”, was in fact aligned with these countries and may well have profited handsomely from it. In addition to wealth, the ego of Santos demanded the title of “peacemaker” in Colombia and the world. Only the Cubans and Chavez (and later Nicolas Maduro) could arrange his “peace treaty” with the FARC.

When Santos left office, Ivan Duqye, a loyal Uribe protégé, attempted to repair the damage he had done, but the COVID crisis wrecked his presidency. Santos then worked to have Gustavo Petro elected, a move which delighted the Cubans and the Venezuelans.

Now, we stand only days away from a turning point in Colombia as crucial as April 9, 1948. The election of Ivan Cepeda will mean, in stark terms, the defeat of Colombian democracy and its replacement with an authoritarian Marxist regime. It might take some time, but Cepeda will move skillfully to ensure that the military, police, and intelligence services are neutered, the Congress will be made into an obedient instrument of the left, and the middle and upper classes will be turned into “class enemies.” The FARC and its friends, the narcotics traffickers, will have won through electoral chicanery what they could never have won on the battlefield, a Communist/Criminal state, in the largest Spanish-speaking country in South America in population, a cultural leader, an historic democracy, and a once firm U.S. ally.

The usual cast of American academics, pundits, media talking heads, NGO’s, and foreign policy “experts,” few of whom know a thing about Colombia, will tut-tut at the idea that Cepeda’s election would mean anything more than a somewhat vigorous liberal/left regime change. Think Denmark or Sweden….or Cambodia.

The clock is ticking.

One of these days may be today.

The online publication, The New Scientist, just reported that in a test that took place two years ago, fully autonomous drones were sent to a “test area” and that they killed everyone they could find there. This was not a simulation. This was real.

Per the New Scientist, the test involved 10 AI-controlled “Terminator” drones on the front line of the Ukraine war. Russian soldiers were killed.

“We tried it,” says drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy, who supplied the technology and spoke to New Scientist at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy. “It’s a test. We never implemented it [more widely].”

The Ukrainians used quadcopter drones that were programmed to fly towards the front line, cover an area of between 3 and 5 kilometers, then engage in “Terminator mode,” in which an AI model searches for and intercepts targets.

“We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”

The humans had no way to see who was being killed. They had no way to stop the killing once the drones were dispatched. When the slaughter was over, other human-piloted drones had to be sent into the area to see the results of the attack.

This is not the first time reports have come out of Ukrainian autonomous drones killing people. Previous reports from 2023 indicated that the Saker Scout drone fielded by Ukraine was hunting and killing Russian manned vehicles autonomously. This may be the same model drone that was used in the fully autonomous “test” attack that took place two years ago.

The Saker Scout is a Ukrainian AI-powered quadcopter UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) originally developed for reconnaissance, target identification, and strike missions. It gained attention as one of the early examples of semi-autonomous or fully autonomous drones used in combat during the Russia-Ukraine war.

The Saker Scout:

• Uses onboard AI to automatically detect, classify, track, and recognize up to 64 different types of Russian military targets (tanks, armored vehicles, trucks, personnel carriers, infantry positions, etc.), even when camouflaged. It has been characterized as being able to operate with reduced human oversight, including in jammed/GPS-denied environments via visual navigation and inertial systems. We may now have to consider that it can operate with no human oversight at all.

• Typically operates in swarms. One lead reconnaissance drone scouts and designates targets. Then, the attack drones move in.

• Has a range of 10-12 kilometers, can carry a wide variety of munitions, and operate day or night using a wide array of sensors.

The Ukrainians, of course, are not the only people working with this technology. They are not even the most advanced. The United States has a whole host of drones and programs with capabilities equal to or better than the Saker Scout. They include the Switchblade, the Lumberjack, and the Coyote. The U.S. Navy has a program called Goalkeeper to develop a variety of drones that can kill.

Current policy requires a human in the loop before American drones kill anyway. That is policy. That is not a technological barrier. Anytime we make the decision, we too can begin to turn loose our machines to kill humans all on their own.

Earlier this year, the Army’s 101st Airborne Division incorporated Northrop Grumman’s new Lumberjack one-way attack drone into a training exercise. The entire purpose of that was to test the platform’s autonomous target detection and strike capabilities. According to Northrop Grumman, Lumberjack successfully showcased its capacity to conduct missions autonomously and use artificial intelligence for targeting.

“After going from concept to flight in under 14 months, we demonstrated Lumberjack’s ability to adapt across diverse missions and payloads at the U.S. Army’s Operation Lethal Eagle exercise,” Michael Bastin, director of distributed systems at Northrop Grumman, said in a statement.

Most of the tests in that exercise involved using the drone to strike targets on the ground. The Army integrated the drone into its Palantir-built Maven Smart System, while also leveraging Palantir’s Agentic Effects Agent to automatically identify targets, analyze battlefield data, and suggest actions to personnel.

“Operation Lethal Eagle is the first customer demonstration where Lumberjack was integrated into Maven Smart System for real-time mission planning and live mission monitoring, while being executed from a manned forward-deployed command and control ground station,” the Northrop Grumman spokesperson said.

“While primarily focused on readiness training, Operation Lethal Eagle also provided a unique opportunity to test and evaluate multiple new emerging systems from across the defense industrial enterprise,” Maj. Jonathon Bless, spokesperson for the 101st Airborne Division, said in a statement. “Northrop Grumman’s Lumberjack was one of many systems tested during the exercise that provided insight into how collaboration between military and industry can drive innovation in defense.”

The technology to allow robots to kill humans effectively and in large numbers is here. It is not a theory. It has been fielded. It is already in use. The only thing keeping those robots from deciding all on their own who to target is a human-imposed constraint. That may no longer exist. We may now live in a world in which AI-driven machines murder when and where they decide

The robot-human war may have already begun.

• 26 tons (about 26,000 kg) of silver

• 80 pounds (36 kg) of gold

• 13 chests of silver coins (reales)

• Jewels, a golden crucifix, and other valuables

The total value of the haul was estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars in today’s dollars. The cargo was transferred to the Golden Hind. Drake, in accordance with the practice at the time, kept some for himself and his crew and gave the rest to the British monarch Queen Elizabeth.

All of this was done according to English law. The British considered themselves at war with Spain and had authorized Drake to take such actions. He had been provided with a Letter of Marque (a government license) authorizing him to attack Spanish vessels. Captured vessels and cargo were legally treated as “prizes,” brought before an Admiralty court for condemnation, and then sold or divided among the Crown, the ship’s owners, the captain, and the crew.

Right now, in the Eastern Outer Ports Limits (EOPL) anchorage 40 miles off the Malaysian coast, there are at least forty tankers carrying Iranian oil. They left Iran ahead of the blockade. Most of this oil is headed for China, and it is being sold and transferred to other vessels every day.

“In the weeks leading up to the conflict, Tehran sharply increased crude loadings and offshore stockpiling to cushion the impact of war on its oil trade. Amid ongoing hostilities, the Iranian regime’s Ghost Fleet continues to operate actively — loading cargo, transiting the Strait of Hormuz, and heading east toward its primary buyer, China. “

United Against Nuclear Iran

We say the Iranians are going broke, but they are continuing to make deals every day.

The EOPL has functioned as a floating storage and ship-to-ship (STS) transfer hub for Iranian crude, mainly bound for China, for a long time. The area in question is huge, roughly half the size of Rhode Island. Many vessels in this anchorage operate “dark”, that is, with their maritime tracking systems off. To get a handle on their numbers, analysts literally have to count them one by one from satellite imagery. These are not small coastal ships. Most of them are what are known as Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs) capable of carrying 1–2 million barrels each.

Seize them all. Put American Naval personnel in charge. Sail them under armed escort to the United States. I suggest Long Beach. It is the largest port complex on the US West Coast and one of the busiest oil ports in the country. It has active crude oil import terminals. It handles large tankers regularly. And, California still has significant refining capacity (even after some recent closures), so the seized Iranian crude could be sold locally to refiners.

Then apply the proceeds to the cost of the continuing conflict. Do the same for the vessels.

The United States Government has full legal authority to do this. We have already done it on multiple occasions. The legal procedure in question is called a forfeiture. Once a federal court has granted the government’s application, then the seized assets can legally be sold.

The same goes for the vessels themselves, assuming buyers can be found. In addition to bringing in additional money, selling the ships would send a strong message to those who think it profitable to violate sanctions and run oil for the ayatollahs. The business would be a lot less appealing once entire ships were lost to the U.S. Navy.

Once we have our hands on the tankers parked near Malaysia, we should move on to seizing any vessels worldwide that are involved in helping Iran avoid sanctions and continue to bring in cash for its terrorist regime. This is not a small fleet. As of May of this year, United Against Nuclear Iran had identified 587 vessels in this illegal Iranian armada. Imposing a blockade on Iran was a good first step. In and of itself, it is insufficient.

Let’s take the next step. Let’s take a page from Drake’s playbook. Seize the ships. Sell them and the oil. Pocket the cash.

On January 3, 2026, U.S. special forces and law enforcement officers snatched Venezuelan “president” Nicolas Maduro out of his bed at Fort Tiuna, Venezuela’s most important military base, located in the capital Caracas. He now sits in a Federal jail in Manhattan awaiting trial on narcotics trafficking charges.

Decisive U.S. action against Venezuela was long overdue. An incompetent, compromised, and infiltrated U.S. intelligence community had consistently underestimated the importance of the regime established by Hugo Chavez and, after his death in 2013, led by Nicolas Maduro and a cabal of corrupt military men and Communists, but in fact virtually under the direct control of the Cuban intelligence service.

While efforts were made to obtain intelligence about the Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and Hezbollah presence in Venezuela, the harboring and support of Colombian FARC and ELN guerrillas, and the massive flow of Colombian cocaine through Venezuelan, managed by the so-called “Cartel de los Soles” (a network of senior Venezuelan military officers), interests in Washington, Miami, and Houston worked behind the scenes to ensure that no effective steps were taken by the U.S. government and its allies in Latin America to confront the so-called “Bolivarian Revolution” initiated by Hugo Chavez. The Bolivarian movement was, in fact, nothing more than a continuation of the decades-long campaign of subversion and terror directed from Havana by the Cuban intelligence services and the Cuban Communist Party’s various “international” front organizations.

Pleading “America’s economic interests”, a collection of shady businessmen ceaselessly lobbied, cajoled, and probably bribed Congress and senior foreign policy officials to “go easy” on the Chavez/Maduro regime. Their efforts enjoyed amazing success when measured against the murderous government they were protecting. It seems never to have occurred to any of these American patriots that Venezuela would also be open for business under a legitimate, democratic, legally elected government. Or perhaps it did. They knew that the Chavez/Maduro regime was utterly, incredibly corrupt, to a degree that even by the rather low standards of most of Latin America, Venezuela’s neighbors were disgusted by the noisome stench wafting out of Caracas. The narcotics trafficking of the Cartel de los Soles was more or less open, as was the looting of Venezuela’s oil money by anybody close enough to the government to be able to stick their thumbs into the pie. The Russians, Chinese, and Iranians eagerly lined up to ransack the country’s resources while Hezbollah made it one of their major centers of operation in Latin America; Margarita Island was practically run by Hezbollah terrorists. Russia and Chinese sold Venezuela sophisticated military gear. China made large loans, with the usual Mafia-like repayment conditions.

The upper and middle classes fled the country early on, though it is a scandal that large numbers of Chavista supporters (“enchufados”, “plugged in”) moved to Miami with millions of stolen dollars. Not a single thing was done about these crass, flashy vultures as they tooled around Doral in their BMW’s and Ferrari’s. They are still there. Shamefully, a number of Miami-based Cuban-American businessmen took their pieces of the Venezuelan pie, easily overlooking its status as a virtual colony of the Castro regime.

When Maduro took over, the hulking former bus driver with a peculiar command of the Spanish language managed to knock the bottom out of the Venezuelan economy and sent a tsunami of poor Venezuelans – most former Chavez supporters – into neighboring countries, especially Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile. Hundreds of thousands were directed north towards the United State with the connivance of leftist NGO’s, Catholic and other religious organizations, human trafficking cartels, and, most likely, the leftist governments of Mexico and Colombia (from 2022 on, with former M-19 terrorist Gustavo Petro in the presidency). The whole operation was directed from Havana.

Initial sympathy for the pathetic caravans of Venezuelans trudging towards Bogota and other South American destinations turned to alarm as these “refugees” sparked crime waves wherever they went. To be sure, the majority were just the desperate poor, but more than few were vicious killers linked to gangs like the Tren de Aragua.

Things were worse for those who stayed behind. The Chavez/Maduro government was every bit as brutal as its Cuban masters. Murders, disappearances, routine torture, rape of prisoners, and daily intimidation and theft was the standard operating procedure in Venezuela.

The Russians and Chinese put their new friend to full use as an espionage platform and lavish support was given to the FARC and ELN; many of their leaders lived in Caracas.

Those highest in the Venezuelan government were able to steal staggering amounts of money – hundreds of millions of dollars – from government contracts or as payments from narcotic traffickers. Future investigations may show that much of this cash ended up in a surprising place in Rome. And Switzerland, London, Miami, Madrid, and New York.

President Trump made no secret of his intention to purge the Western Hemisphere of hostile regimes, especially those of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. He intends to make the region a haven for peace and prosperity, a noble goal.

Unfortunately, he relied on the advice of people with personal business interests in Venezuela, who convinced him that the supposed benefits to the U.S. economy and energy supply outweighed the dishonor that would come from allowing the Maduro regime to remain intact. Others sought to convince Trump that we could “deal” with the Cuban regime and accept some crumbs and cosmetic changes, in return for letting a handful of greedy businessmen privileged access to the best beachfront land, hotels, and tourist franchises, in partnership with regime officials, of course.

The U.S. intelligence and foreign policy communities have long been infested with both actual Cuban agents, such as former ambassador Manuel Rocha, State Department officer Kendall Myers, and senior DIA Cuba analyst Ana Belen Montes, to name three who were caught, and many others. Pro-Cuban and pro-Venezuelan ideas have washed around the intelligence community for years, especially among analysts of one agency or another who were either recruited by the Cubans or have been brainwashed to sympathize with the Castro regime.

These two groups combined to push a line that the arrest of Nicolas Maduro was sufficient; the regime should be allowed to stay mostly intact, to ensure “stability”. Well, North Korea, East Germany, and Stalin’s Soviet Union were pretty stable until they weren’t. What these folks really meant that their personal business interests would be protected by the regime and, with the appearance of renewed relations with Washington – and with plenty of money tossed around Washington in strategic places – they would escape prosecution for their previous actions.

The regime sympathizers in the intelligence community, recruited spies or not, thought that Maduro and Company were really not that bad, certainly not bad enough to do something icky like toss them out on their behinds.

The president was correct to allow a short breathing space before moving on the Delcy Rodriguez rump government. The emphasis is on short. It is well past time for this “wonderful lady” and her thug friends to board an airliner for that long flight to Madrid. The Spanish Red Pedro Sanchez will surely welcome them, if they grease his palm.

Delcy should be given the bad news, an interim council of some kind should be pulled together from those Venezuela leaders not tainted by corruption or associations with Chavez and Maduro, and the miliary has to be told there is a new sheriff in town. The criminal gangs and regime loyalist paramilitaries, such as the much-feared “Colectivos”, must be disarmed, dismounted from their motorcycles, and put in data bases. All government contracts should be audited as should all government accounts; money should be clawed back from the “enchufados” living in Miami. Foreign banks should be forced to cough up stolen money hidden in their vaults.

The bottom feeders, four flushers, “consultants”, and others who have descended on Caracas should be shown the door until order and a judicial system can be restored. The oil can still flow, but every penny needs to go to the rebuilding of Venezuela, not foreign flim-flam men. Didn’t we learn anything in Russia?

The Russians, Chinese, and others have every right to conduct legitimate, honest, legal business in Venezuela, but they do not have the right to try to colonize Latin America, or Canada for that matter. That is a red line for sure.

President Trump, the next move is up to you.

The software for the Max was created as Boeing was making a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors. One of the key companies involved was HCL Technologies Ltd, located across from Seattle’s Boeing Field, where aircraft are built. Even as the software was being created, the shoddy nature of its design was obvious. Code was routinely rejected because it had not been written properly.

Per Business Standard, in posts on social media, HCL engineers stated they helped develop and test the Max’s flight-display software, while employees from another Indian company, Cyient Ltd., handled software for flight-test equipment.

“Boeing was doing all kinds of things, everything you can imagine, to reduce cost, including moving work from Puget Sound, because we’d become very expensive here,” said Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing flight controls engineer laid off in 2017. “All that’s very understandable if you think of it from a business perspective. Slowly over time, it appears that’s eroded the ability for Puget Sound designers to design.”

Business Standard

HCL, once known as Hindustan Computers, was founded in 1976 by billionaire Shiv Nadar and now has more than $8.6 billion in annual sales. It has 18,000 employees in the United States. A very large proportion of these workers are H-1B visa holders.

HCL is the same company that became infamous when Disney forced its workers to train their replacements, who were employed through the H-1B visa program and supplied to Disney by HCL. HCL was subsequently sued under the False Claims Act for the firm’s alleged “egregious and widespread fraud against the United States in applying for and securing visas.” A document made public as part of the suit alleged rampant wage theft by HCL. HCL reportedly pays its H-1B workers less than the statutory minimum. That is a deliberate corporate strategy. It is, in fact, the entire business model of HCL.

In the two crashes involving the Boeing 737, the system most directly implicated was the MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System). A single sensor failed and caused automatic systems on the plane to put the aircraft into a dive and ultimately crash. The crew tried to react, but they did not understand what was happening and ultimately failed.

Why didn’t the crew have an accurate picture of what was happening with the plane?

The flight display software that should have alerted the crew to the problem malfunctioned. That was a software installation problem, not a hardware issue. The flight display software was delivered and installed with a design flaw. It was “broken” when it was put in.

Who created that software? HCL Technologies – the guys hiring $9 an hour Indians to take jobs away from Americans.

Let’s be clear. When a sensor failed on the plane and put the plane into a dive, the pilots should have seen a message on their display in the cockpit telling them that a second sensor on the plane disagreed with the faulty reading and alerting them immediately to the fact that something was wrong and that one of those sensors had obviously failed. This feature is called the AOA Disagree Alert. It tells pilots in the first seconds of an emergency that they need to question the data the plane is feeding them, because not all the sensors on the plane agree. It focuses the crew on the real issue and gives them time to react.

No such warning message was shown, because the software running the display software was faulty. It was delivered that way. Had the software worked as it was intended to work, in fact, maintenance crews would likely have caught the problem with the sensor before the plane ever left the ground. A whole bunch of people would still be alive today who died horribly.

“Under normal circumstances, this [faulty AOA sensor] would have been flagged immediately by an AOA DISAGREE alert. ... At no time did any of the flight crew receive a clear message that the AOA data was unreliable. The fact that the left-side AOA sensor and the right-side AOA sensor did not match should have triggered an AOA DISAGREE alert. ... The pilots never saw the one message that would have told them clearly: one of your AOA sensors is bad.”

Sylvia Wrigley, experienced pilot, flight instructor, and aviation safety analyst (Fear of Landing blog, in-depth technical analysis of Lion Air Flight 610, April 2020).

At the time of the two crashes involving 737 MAX planes, because of the software issue in question, 80% of these planes flying worldwide had the same problem.

We already had a bunch of reasons to do away with H-1B visas. Now we have another one. They kill people.

Winners in rigged elections are illegitimate. No one believes in them. Sooner or later, no one will obey them. We understood this. We worked overtime to put in place safeguards about electioneering and voting by secret ballot. We put curtains on voting booths. We made it illegal to pay someone to vote a certain way. We were dedicated to the sanctity of the ballot and the entire process.

And then came mail-in voting. The temptation was too big. The Democratic Party recognized the possibilities very quickly. People would no longer have to show up physically and vote under circumstances where we could control the process. Now, votes would be “cast” out there somewhere by persons unknown, delivered by mail, and counted. All control over who actually voted, and when, and under what circumstances would be lost.

It was almost too good to be true. It was a means of escaping from all of the restrictions methodically put in place. Mail-in voting, coupled with an organized effort to manipulate the process, meant one-party rule and control of the government in perpetuity.

If you still do not understand exactly how all that works, let me break it down for you. Let’s take a look at what just happened in Los Angeles.

Only a matter of days ago, Republican candidate for Mayor Spencer Pratt was in second place in the vote count. Under the system in Los Angeles, this meant he would be in a runoff later this year against the leading candidate, Karen Bass, a Democrat and the current Mayor. Then over the course of a few days, “drops” of mail-in ballots arrived, almost all of which were for Nithya Raman, a Democratic-Socialist. Overnight, Pratt was bumped from second place.

Raman will run against Bass in the Fall. Pratt is out.

How did that happen? It’s no real mystery, more like a daylight smash-and-grab robbery than a sophisticated heist.

“LA is the predictable outcome of a system that combines no-ID mail-in voting, ultra-lenient signature verification, centralized ballot mailing to homeless hubs, and a court ruling that protects the right to vote while leaving the door wide open to industrial-scale harvesting.”

Santa Monica Observer

When ballots arrive at the LA County Ballot Processing Center to be processed, the entire system is set up to make sure that ballots coming in by mail are not scrutinized in any meaningful fashion. The signature check required by law is effectively neutered. It only has to be “40% accurate,” whatever that means. If you claim to be unable to sign your name, you can make your mark. That means a dot or a dash in place of a signature is considered acceptable. How anyone is supposed to confirm that your “dot” matches the “dot” the government has on file is unclear.

Supposedly, such “marks” are verified by the signature of a witness. In practice, no one looks at the witness signatures at all. No one figures out how many such “witnesses” are on multiple ballots. You do the math. The same person can be placing “dots” or “x’s” on hundreds of ballots and signing all of them, and every single one of those ballots will be accepted and counted.

How many unsigned ballots are counted in every election?

No one knows. No one is trying to find out.

It gets worse. There are tens of thousands of homeless people in Los Angeles. Since they do not have mailing addresses, their ballots are sent to central addresses rather than residences. Those addresses are typically non-profits or homeless shelters affiliated with leftist organizations. That makes it that much easier for someone other than the actual voter to collect, fill out, and return those ballots in bulk.

In fact, California law explicitly says that a homeless person can register to vote without providing a traditional address of any kind. He or she can use a descriptive location (a park, shelter, intersection, or similar spot) as their voting residence, as long as it allows for precinct assignment and mail delivery. The California court ruled it would be “patently unjust” to deny them the vote simply because they lack a conventional home.

“Put it all together: Homeless Californians in DTLA can legally receive ballots without a street address.

Ballots can be returned with nothing more than a “mark” (dot, dash, or slash) and an unverified witness signature - verified at only 40% accuracy by machines that staff admit they do not rigorously check.”

Santa Monica Observer

Data shows that ballot drops from areas populated by homeless individuals overwhelmingly favored Raman.

It is also worth noting that federal election cases have documented the common practice of paying people in these areas for their votes. People are approached and paid to sign or mark a ballot, and then those ballots in large batches are delivered to processing centers precisely when they are needed.

This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a fact. In May, federal authorities in Los Angeles charged a woman with paying homeless people to register to vote and then, in a large number of cases, having the requested mail-in ballots sent to her address. She pleaded guilty to the charges.

The Department of Justice and the FBI are now investigating the results of the recent mayoral election in Los Angeles.

Where is the Republican Party on all this? Asleep. Comatose. Pretending that nothing has happened.

In Pennsylvania, after the 2020 Presidential election, a comparison of official county election results to the total number of voters who voted on November 3, 2020, as recorded by the Department of State, showed that 6,962,607 total ballots were reported as being cast, while DoS/SURE system records indicated that only 6,760,230 total voters actually voted.

When all the math was done, the state’s own data showed that 170,830 more votes were counted than people who voted. Those votes came out of thin air with no explanation for how that was possible. The election was certified. No one has ever resolved the issue. The official GOP position is that mail-in voting is safe and secure, and we should embrace it.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

You are told you should trust the security of your elections. That is a lie. You should not. We will either admit that and do what is required to secure the electoral process, or we will stand by and watch as this fraud eats away at the foundations of the republic and the rule of law.

Screw worms are parasitic worms found in Panama and Colombia. They lay their eggs in the skin of live animals, including cattle. The eggs then hatch, and the larvae (maggots) infest and feed on the living tissue of warm-blooded animals.

The screwworm is already in Texas. That one state accounts for 14% of all U.S. cattle. Listen in for more….

You should.

Screw worms are parasitic worms found in Panama and Colombia. They lay their eggs in the skin of live animals, including cattle. The eggs then hatch, and the larvae (maggots) infest and feed on the living tissue of warm-blooded animals.

“The name screwworm refers to the maggots’ feeding behavior as they burrow (screw) into the wound, feeding as they go like a screw being driven into wood. Maggots cause extensive damage by tearing at the hosts’ tissue with sharp mouth hooks. The wound can become larger and deepen as more maggots hatch and feed on living tissue. As a result, NWS can cause serious, often deadly damage to the animal.

Adult screwworm flies are about the size of a common housefly (or slightly larger). They have orange eyes, a metallic blue or green body, and three dark stripes along their backs.

Report mammals and birds with the following signs:

• Irritated behavior

• Head shaking

• The smell of decay

• Presence of fly larvae (maggots) in wounds”

• Eggs hatch within 12-24 hours, and the larvae burrow into living flesh using hook-like mouthparts:

• Larvae feed for 5-7 days, enlarging the wound dramatically, causing severe pain, tissue destruction, foul-smelling discharge, secondary infections, and often death if untreated.

• Mature larvae drop to the ground, pupate, and emerge as adults. The full cycle can complete in as little as a few weeks in warm conditions, allowing rapid population growth.

  United States Department of Agriculture

Screwworms have been migrating north since mid-2025 at least.

There are also cases in which screw worms have infected people. To prevent that, one of the things that has to be done is that any outdoor laundry drying on lines has to be ironed to kill the eggs and avoid human cases. If you are infected, you then have to dig the developing maggots out of your skin.

Screwworms used to be a huge threat to the cattle industry in this country before we launched a massive effort to eradicate them. Annual losses in the 1930s-1950s reached tens to hundreds of millions of dollars (equivalent to much more today) from deaths, reduced weight gain, lower milk production, treatment costs, and labor. Infestations hit cattle hardest, but affected sheep, goats, horses, and wildlife as well. Newborn calves were especially vulnerable.

We eradicated screwworms in the United States in the 1960’s primarily through the use of something called the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT). SIT worked like this:

• Mass-rearing huge numbers of screwworm flies in facilities.

• Sterilizing the males (usually as pupae) with radiation (gamma or X-rays), which doesn’t kill them but renders their sperm non-viable.

• Releasing the sterile males in overwhelming numbers into the wild (often by airplane).

• Wild females mate only once in their lifetime. When they mate with a sterile male, they lay infertile eggs, producing no offspring. This progressively crashes the wild population.

There was a small outbreak of screwworms in the Florida Keys in 2017. It was quickly contained using the same method.

The U.S. cattle herd is already the smallest it has been since 1951. We suspended beef imports from Mexico in 2025.

Larval feeding causes rapid, severe tissue destruction: Maggots burrow into living flesh in any open wound (e.g., from branding, castration, dehorning, tick bites, scratches, or umbilical cords in newborns). Wounds enlarge quickly, attract more flies, lead to secondary infections, sepsis, and often death within 7–14 days if untreated.

One infested animal can spread the issue rapidly in a herd due to the fly’s mobility and high reproductive rate (females lay hundreds of eggs per batch; full life cycle in weeks in warm weather). In a full outbreak, significant portions of herds could be affected, with historical infestation rates around 20% in exposed populations.

The screwworm is already in Texas. That one state accounts for 14% of all U.S. cattle.

There have been several major screwworm outbreaks over the past century. The first recorded outbreak occurred from 1933-1936. Texas alone reported 3 million cases in 1935. The screwworm was believed to have claimed 180,000 head of cattle in 92 of Texas’s 254 counties, according to Charles Scruggs’ The Peaceful Atom and the Deadly Fly. By 1936, annual damage totaled $225.7 million in 2024 dollars.

Mortality and infestation rates vary. At the peak of the 1930s outbreak, about 12 percent of animals were infected, with a mortality rate of 12.4–19.4 percent. At the peak of the 1970s outbreak, the infestation rate in surveyed areas of Texas was 20.6 percent in cattle and 9 percent in sheep and goats. Texas is a particularly suitable environment for the parasite, given the state’s seasonal warmth, abundant potential targets and proximity to the southern border. During the 1970s outbreak, Texas had more cases than any other state in the U.S.

We have had a lot of warning that this threat was resurging. We don’t seem to have taken advantage of that to get ahead of it. We might want to move now with a sense of urgency. We are talking about the death of the American beef industry.

(OSS officer Virginia Hall transmitting from a safehouse inside Occupied France in World War II)

The Intelligence Community is in rough shape. It is not performing at anything like the level required. It must be repaired on an urgent basis. To make the necessary changes, we must first face the reality of how bad the situation is, and we must understand how we got here.

The creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) after 9/11 was a mistake. We already had someone in charge of the IC. That was the CIA Director. That individual, however, did not have anything like the power necessary to actually ride herd over the IC. He was a figurehead not unlike the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in earlier times.

The creation of the ODNI did not fix that. It simply created another layer of bureaucracy on top of the existing structure. It added more strata of management and generated more paperwork and slowed down an already arthritic intelligence bureaucracy. In the field, the same relative handful of actual operators struggled to do something meaningful, while back home, new buildings were built and new Jason Bourne-style “ops centers” were constructed, and more money was spent.

And while we did all that and wasted money and time and resources on things that enhanced American national security not one whit – we did nothing at all to fix the real issue – Collection.

The horrible truth is that 9/11 was not a failure to connect dots. It was a failure to collect the necessary dots in the first place. We were not running the sources we needed. We were not in fact doing much of anything to actually recruit those sources or collect the intelligence we required.

Osama Bin Laden had been telling us for years that he intended to take the fight to the “far enemy.” That was us. He had blown up two of our embassies. He had come perilously close to sinking a U.S Navy destroyer in Yemen. He wasn’t talking smack. He was deadly serious.

We knew all that. Everybody on the planet knew all that. And, yet, year after year, a creaking, Cold War relic of an intelligence bureaucracy did everything it could to stop us from collecting the necessary intelligence and pretend like espionage was still a “gentleman’s game.” As a Chief of Station in the Near East, even years after 9/11, I remember vividly getting a “back channel” message from CIA Headquarters telling me to “stop wasting time with counterterrorism.”

That was the response to station officers having successfully penetrated a terrorist group and prevented a series of IED attacks on American servicemen. That was Washington’s attitude toward the value of saving American lives.

Nothing has changed. We are still not getting the job done.

We are in the middle of a war with Iran right now in which intelligence on the inner machinations of the Iranian regime is of critical importance. I can guarantee you, as can anybody else with any insight, that we know effectively nothing about what is happening at the senior levels in Tehran. The same goes for the actual status of the Iranian nuclear weapons program, or any other topic that is critical to our winning this war.

The problem is not confined to the Middle East. We lost our edge a long time ago when it comes to intelligence, espionage, and keeping Americans safe in their beds at night. We allowed a business that is supposed to be all about creativity, imagination, audacity, and handfuls of very special individuals stealing the “crown jewels” to become just another bureaucratic swamp. Intelligence is no longer the province of bold thinkers and risk takers. It is now populated by drones and mandarins who focus more on domestic politics and empire building than they do on protecting the nation they serve.

Pictured above is Virginia Hall. She was an OSS operative inside occupied France in the Second World War. She operated alone and ran a network of sources that provided critical intelligence in support of our efforts to crush Nazi Germany. Hall had a wooden leg, the result of a tragic hunting accident before she joined OSS, and when it came time for her to be pulled out of France, she walked out under her own power to Spain, evading the Gestapo the whole way.

We lost that kind of focus and tenacity in the IC long ago.

Well over a decade ago, I wrote this in Beyond Repair, my prescription for how to fix the CIA.

“Donovan (General Bill Donovan, founder of the OSS) recruited to the OSS a wide cross section of America, searching for the best and the brightest, but also those with exceptional creativity and daring. OSS wanted “out of the box” thinkers – individuals who were unorthodox, brilliant, perhaps even eccentric. Recruits included Ivy League professors, safecrackers, former Communists who fought in the Spanish Civil War, professional baseball players, actors, and paratroopers. They were all, in the words of Donovan, his “glorious amateurs,” and they lived by the same mantra he did: “If you fall, fall forward.” Donovan would not make it in the CIA today.”

My focus when I wrote that was on the CIA specifically. The same is true for every other piece of our intelligence apparatus. It needs to be fixed as fast as humanly possible.

Are we prepared to do what is necessary to make that happen?

In view of the shambolic situation in Iran and the Persian Gulf, it is no surprise that few Americans are paying much attention to Venezuela. The snatch operation, which netted Nicolas Maduro (“president” of Venezuela) and his wife, had its fifteen minutes of fame, after which Joe Q. Citizen went back to mowing the lawn, griping about gas prices, and stuffing himself with nutritious high fructose corn syrup-laced processed foods.

However, certain people in Washington and Miami may not be taking such a relaxed view of events in Venezuela.

Exactly what led up to the Maduro operation is not clear, and rumors about back-room deals with Qatari’s and American oil companies and others close to the White House are floating around. Delcy Rodriguez almost certainly played some role in betraying the hapless, hulking Maduro. It takes away nothing from the courage and skill of our airmen, soldiers, and law enforcement personnel who participated in the amazing feat of jerking Maduro out of his bed in his pajamas and dumping him safe and sound in a New York jail, to recognize that pulling this off without “inside” help was always unlikely. You do what you have to do to accomplish the mission.

That Delcy Rodriguez and the others of her cabal, still at large and running Venezuela, are an odiferous band of rogues, thieves, and dope smugglers, needs no further emphasis. The U.S. President, for reasons which no doubt seem adequate to him, has decided to leave these future jailbirds in charge for the time being. We must assume that he intends to shove them on a flight to Madrid one of these days, cash stuffed in their underwear and gold bars in their Louis Vuitton baggage.

In the meantime, the U.S. embassy in Caracas is engaged in a dark comedy routine that could be a Coen Brothers script. For all the boasting and bluster that we “have” Venezuela – we don’t. We have next to no power to do anything, except beg for some scraps from that “wonderful lady”, Delcy.

For now, nothing has changed for the better for the Venezuelan people. The same Colectivo thugs (armed petty and not-so-petty criminals who act as semi-official enforcers for the regime) remain at large, terrifying ordinary citizens while they scoot around on their motorcycles. The massive corruption goes on, though the new recipients of the payoff’s may be U.S. businessmen, oilmen, and the politically connected. Venezuela remains a brutal semi-Communist police state, run by a criminal cartel. The Russians, Chinese, Iranians, and Hezbollah have probably lowered their profiles a bit, waiting for something to turn up and bring better times. You can be sure they have not packed their bags and slipped across the Guyanese border. As for the Colombian drug smugglers and guerrillas, ho-hum. The Maduro operation has done absolutely nothing to cramp their style or hamper their cocaine business or terrorism.

President Trump seems mesmerized by the idea that we now “control” Venezuela’s oil reserves, the much-touted “largest in the world.” He has ignored geology, technical oilfield problems, and, most of all, the right of the Venezuelan people to choose their own government and throw the current gang into prison. The Venezuelans are not “happy”, despite what the president says. They and many other Latin Americans are angry and disgusted by our failure to deal with the Chavez/Maduro/Delcy Rodriguez regime, a regime that has sown untold mischief across the region.

Perhaps a “decent interval” was necessary after the Maduro operation, but that interval is getting long in the tooth. Trump has to move now or risk a chaotic mess that could easily turn violent in the worst way.

Why is Trump stalling on doing the right thing?

In a word, money. In another word, bad advice from an incompetent intelligence community that long ago lost the bubble with regard to Latin America. If this were simply ignorance and stupidity, it would be bad enough. Unfortunately, there is ample evidence that our Latin American foreign policy establishment (CIA, State, DOD) is riddled with left-leaning fools and more than a few actual spies, mostly recruited and handled by the Cubans. We can expect much more on this issue to be exposed in the coming months.

Then there is the money. And that is why many people in Washington, Miami, and Bogota (to name three places) are sweating.

Alex Saab is a Colombian with a dodgy claim to Venezuelan citizenship. As a backup, he is also an “Antiguian citizen.” A native of Barranquilla, on the Colombian Atlantic (Caribbean) Coast, Saab is, to get to the point, an international financial wheeler-dealer of the criminal variety. It would be tedious to go over all of his long and colorful history. It will suffice to say that it includes murdered business associates and multiple investigations by the law enforcement and financial regulatory agencies of several governments. His name appears in the Panama Papers, Pandora Papers, and FinCen files.

Saab, early on, became involved in business with Venezuela, next door to Colombia. He was fully involved with the sordid, utterly corrupt mess that is the Chavez/Maduro/Delcy Rodriguez regime, and he made a ton of money off of his connections, such as Maduro’s stepsons.

In 2011, he hit the big time with a 685 million dollar contract to build prefabricated homes for the Venezuelan government’s housing program. He received $159 million for building materials; he delivered $3 million worth of bricks and mortar. The signing ceremony was attended by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, then Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro, and, curiously, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.

Along the way, both Ecuador and Colombia began investigations of Saab for money laundering. Sadly, the Colombian investigation was closed when the lead investigator resigned and left the country after receiving death threats. His Antigua caper began in 2014 when the prime minister of that Caribbean powerhouse made Saab Antigua’s “special economic envoy” to Venezuela, gave him Antiguan citizenship, and a contract to build a factory to build panels for his housing deal. To nobody’s surprise, the factory never opened.

In August 2015, a midget trucking company called Trenaco (Swiss, but run out of Colombia), which Saab had run between 20212-2014, won a $4.5 billion contract from PDVSA, the Venezuelan state oil company, to drill oil in the Orinoco Belt, which holds the world's largest oil reserves. This stink bomb was too much even for the delicate sensitivities of the upright and prudent men who run Chevron oil and the Russian Rosneft oil company. They pitched a fit over this blooper of corruption, and the contract was cancelled.

In 2016, Saab was again found in the middle of the humorously named CLAP (Local Committees for Supply and Production), a Venezuelan agency set up to import food for the increasing number of poor Venezuelans. Saab managed to sell the food for 112% of what he paid for it in Mexico, thereby ‘helping the poor’. By 2018, Saab was being paid in gold extorted from small time Venezuelan miners. We can assume the poor Venezuelans were suitably grateful for this dose of the CLAP. Saab even stiffed them with poor-quality baby formula. Of course, money was leaking out of CLAP into the pockets of Saab and his friends. The poor were presumably eating cake.

In 2020, Liechtenstein began an investigation into Saab, and then the U.S. government froze $700 million he had stashed in that Alpine country. About the same time, a book published by Colombian journalist Gerardo Reyes claimed that Saab was a “super minister” in the Maduro government and that the United States calculated he had bagged a billion dollars from his various Venezuelan operations.

All of this was garden-variety theft and corruption. By 2016 (and probably much sooner), the DEA had taken notice of Saab. In September 2018, the Colombian DIJIN (Criminal Investigation and Interpol) issued arrest warrants for Saab for money laundering. Tipped off by a corrupt cop, Saab fled to Venezuela. In May 2019, the Colombians charged him again, and in July 2019, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida followed up with more charges, alleging a $350 million money laundering deal.

Saab was arrested on June 12, 2020, in the Cape Verde Islands. He had been on a private jet flying from Venezuela to Iran, where he was to negotiate a Venezuelan gold for Iranian gasoline deal, a “Coals to Newcastle” explanation for the country with “the largest oil reserves,” it would seem.

The USS San Jacinto, a U.S. Navy cruiser, was sent to float around Cape Verde to make sure the Venezuelans or Iranians would not be able to smuggle a file to Saab in a fudge cake. It is unusual, to say the least, for the navy to send a cruiser to ensure the extradition of a character like Saab. This indicates, ah, high-level government interest.

The Russians protested the arrest, Saab claimed torture in a Cape Verde jail (imagine that!), and his Italian model wife moved to Moscow. It will be interesting to see how true her love for this guy is once he is sitting in a Federal prison.

Panic struck the Maduro government as it went to ridiculous lengths to avoid Saab’s extradition to the U.S. A massive fake Internet campaign was launched to “free Alex Saab.” The usual suspects in these kinds of leftist agit-prop campaigns were in a fever pitch to get him sprung. In October 2012, Code Pink started asking people to sign a petition to get him released. Why this U.S. “anti-war, pacifist” organization might care about a slimy Colombian/Venezuelan grifter and narco money launderer is a mystery – or maybe not. It is said to be financed by the sinister Chinese Communist Party ally Neville Roy Singham, the husband of Jodie Evans, Code Pink’s founder. China has huge investments in Venezuela and depends on it for oil, or at least it did before Maduro took his unexpected flight to New York.

Baltasar Garzon, a leftist former Spanish judge who has meddled on behalf of Marxist troublemakers and other criminals all over the world, represented Saab in his extradition fight. As desperation grew to prevent Saab from being grilled by the DEA on the shenanigans of the Maduro regime and its narco friends, Maduro appointed him as Venezuela’s ambassador to Ethiopia. It can be assumed that he was expected to carry out the onerous duties of Venezuela’s ambassador to that African state from his Cape Verde jail cell.

By March 2021, $170,000,000 had been spent on Saab’s “defense.” Of course, the United Nations Human Rights Committee stuck its nose in the case, asked Cape Verde to suspend his extradition, and asked that Saab be given “specialized medical care chosen by him.” a familiar dodge of the guilty, like a Mafia don being rolled into court in a wheelchair with an oxygen bottle.

This farce ended on October 16, 2021, with Saab being stuffed in a U.S. airplane for his appointment with the U.S. justice system.

Lo and behold, it was then revealed that Saab had been a DEA informant since 2018. This ended in 2019 when Saab essentially went on the lam. The DEA does not take kindly to double-crossing jerks, thus the arrest in Cape Verde. Delay after delay followed.

In December 2023, Saab was released from jail and pardoned by President Joe Biden, supposedly in exchange for ten Americans being held in Venezuelan jails. He was immediately sent back to Venezuela. As part of his pardon, he pledged never to enter the U.S. again. Saab was then appointed president of the Venezuelan International Investment Center. Since it is obvious that Joe Biden had no idea who Saab was and why he was pardoning him, who pushed it, and why? Keep reading.

On February 4, 2026, with Biden safely in a beach chair in Delaware, Delcy Rodriguez began the process to turn him over to the U.S. On May 16, 2026, he was back in the land of the free.

OK. Fair enough. Delcy, our friend and a “wonderful woman,” was put in thumb screws by the DOJ and DEA until she agreed to cough up Saab. Fear of what he might say was outweighed – sensibly – by fear of what Trump might do if she refused. She knows a bucket of filth will be thrown in her face, but it beats a Hellfire missile.

Now, why are the noble public servants, selfless patriots, lobbyists, lawyers, and toilers on behalf of the oppressed, swimming in the fleshpots of Washington, having bowel eruptions? Why are certain Colombian and other Latin American politicians reaching for a stiff drink? Why so much concern by the Chinese and Russians and Code Pink over a greaseball bagman for Chavez and Nicolas Maduro?

Treason and money, or money and treason.

One nervous faction consists of those bottom-dwelling Americans who have been doing business with the Chavez/Maduro regime since day one and those who are currently involved with Delcy and her crew right now. Anybody who knows Washington has witnessed the nauseating scene of “contractors” and “businessmen” with murky pasts who swarm to situations like that of Venezuela like flies on fresh dogshit.

The first group, the old timers, may well face federal charges for their illicit money-making with the Chavez/Maduro regime. The second group may feel that since what they are doing is now technically “legal,” they may find out that American voters will see them as the vultures they are and deem their activities simple corruption. If President Trump does not wake up to this, he will regret it. It is an open secret that persons very close to him are up to their necks in pay-to-play games in Venezuela (and in other places) that make Hunter Biden look like a two-bit, coke-addled whoremonger, which he is, of course. If the Feds start looking into the Executive Branch Club, uh-oh. The president can easily deal with this if he chooses to do so. Toss all the ten-percenters and “petroleum merchants” out of Mar-A-Lago, rein in other folks close to him, and let it be known that fly-by-night gladhanding wheeler-dealers are not welcome in his office, or Venezuela.

But this may be dismissed as run-of-the-mill Washington grift. The other part of the story will not be so easily waved away with a platoon of lawyers gumming up the court system.

One of the key things about the Chavez/Maduro regime that has been deliberately underplayed by the media and the U.S. government is the true role of the Cubans. Simply put, the Cubans run Venezuela (or did until their “security guards” were vaporized and sent home in Kleenex boxes). From the day Hugo Chavez took power, the Cubans have had their hands on all the levers of power in Venezuela.

The Cubans guarded Chavez and Maduro – and made sure they had no thoughts about backtracking on their “Bolivarian Revolution.” They controlled the cedula system (Venezuela’s national identity card), which every Latin American has, and without which you can’t do anything but live in a hut in the jungle. They controlled the Venezuelan passport system and handed them out to every terrorist and criminal who asked for one. They purged the Venezuelan military of any officer who might have had misgivings about wrecking their country. They ran the intelligence system that arrested, intimidated, tortured, and murdered anybody with the courage to confront the regime.

Venezuela would be the goose that laid the golden eggs for Cuba, and Fidel Castro had it in his sights for many years. He knew that it was an inherently unstable country with a vast number of miserably poor lumpen living in “casas de carton”, while a sybaritic, arrogant, utterly debauched, thoroughly corrupt upper class – many of them fairly recent foreign immigrants – plundered Venezuela’s oil wealth. Castro knew if he could get his hands on Venezuela, his financial woes would be all but over. The fall of the Soviet Union made this a matter of critical national security interest for Cuba.

The election of Hugo Chavez, a crackpot former army colonel and coupster, was Fidel’s dream come true. Now he not only had the cash he needed from Venezuela, but the man running the place was an adoring acolyte who would enthusiastically follow Fidel’s every command. There was no need for threats or pressure. Chavez desperately wanted his “Bolivarian Revolution” to spread over all of South America.

The real Bolivar would have been appalled by a character like Chavez, a sinister murdering clown. Bolivar himself gave up on a South American union, famously saying that trying to accomplish anything like that was like ploughing the sea. As for Fidel Castro, who was really a Cuba-born Spaniard, Bolivar was a mere footnote in history, of less than passing interest.

Venezuela’s oil wealth, though, interested him very much, as did using the “Bolivarian” movement to spread the Marxist-Leninist gospel the Fidelistas have been preaching since they took power. Other than ensuring the survival of their own Communist dictatorship, the Cubans were very much aware of the damage they could do to the United States, working in partnership with their Venezuelan “younger brothers.” And destroying the United States is the only true goal of the Cuban regime. It may seem absurd to many that this small Caribbean island could have such titanic ambitions, but they have been far more successful at this task than we are willing to accept.

Chavez and Maduro spread money around all of Latin America and the Caribbean. Not all of it was oil money. A huge amount was from cocaine trafficking. From the start, Chavez was allied with the Stalinist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Cuban-backed Colombian National Liberation Army (ELN), as well as the Colombian cocaine cartels. Venezuela is not a major producer of cocaine, but along with Ecuador, it is one of the main corridors for the onward shipment of cocaine from Colombia to Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and, of course, the United States.

The Chavez/Maduro money put leftist governments in power in several Latin American countries, Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia being three important examples. Regarding Colombia, it is now widely believed that Juan Manuel Santos, the former Colombian president who pushed through a “peace treaty” with the FARC in 2016 and thus won a Nobel Peace Prize, was handsomely paid by the Maduro government, the FARC, and the drug traffickers for his work on behalf of peace. The “peace treaty” has proven to be a tragic farce that led to an explosion of coca cultivation in Colombia, the emergence of a so-called “dissident FARC” guerrilla group, a greatly expanded ELN, and the growth of dozens of violent criminal gangs and cartels across the country. Santos partisans are now openly supporting presidential candidate Ivan Cepeda in his election bid; Cepeda is an outright Communist who has done the usual post-Soviet tango of denying it. His father, Manuel Cepeda, was gunned down in 1994. Manuel Cepeda was a hard-core Stalinist Colombian Communist Party Central Committee member. The FARC guerrillas (generally considered the armed wing of the Colombian Communist Party) had hatched a scheme to continue their guerrilla war but at the same time launch a “legitimate” political party, the Union Patriotica (UP). Cepeda was part of this effort. Colombian rightists were not fooled and carried out what amounted to an extermination campaign against the UP. The election of Cepeda would result in either civil war or a collapse of Colombia as a democratic state.

The election of former M-19 terrorist Gustavo Petro to the Colombian presidency was almost certainly a result of money provided to his campaign by Maduro and drug traffickers, including the “dissident FARC” (the FARC has essentially dropped its political window dressing and is an outright mafia).

If Juan Manuel Santos did solicit and then accept a pay-off for the FARC “peace treaty,” it was worth every penny to Maduro, the FARC, and the drug cartels. Rumors in Bogota are that his money landed in the Vatican bank, and as a favor to the FARC, Santos has been constructing a money laundering operation to repatriate the billions of dollars the FARC has stashed in European banks.

That the Cubans and the Chavez/Maduro regime would use Venezuela’s oil money and money from the drug cartels to undermine Latin American democracy (and fill their own pockets) is no surprise. It is what the Cubans do and do very well. Venezuela, as it was not an overtly Communist state like Cuba and did not carry the stench of Fidel and Company, had far more room for maneuver than the Havana cabal.

For Americans, the real threat from these two “socialist” allies strikes much closer to home. This is why there are so many people in Washington nervously keeping an eye on the developments in the Maduro case and the case of Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal, the former Venezuelan military intelligence chief; both are now sitting in a Federal jail in Manhattan.

And now comes Alex Saab to keep them company.

With these three in U.S. custody and facing years in prison, a flood of information on the very worst crimes of the Cubans and Chavez/Maduro regime will soon be coming out, either leaked or in court documents.

There are people and organizations in Washington frantic to keep this from happening. In some cases, it is because they were involved in shady business deals, accepted “lobbying” or “lawyer” fees from Chavez and Maduro, or engaged in sanctioned trade with Venezuela. These things are serious and often criminal, but take a back seat to the real dirt.

Under Barry Obama (the name he commonly used until he was put up to run for president by people like the 1970’s Chicago terrorist Bill Ayers), we established diplomatic relations with the Cuban regime, and there was a notable loosening of U.S. pressure. Obama was careful not to go too far, of course. It would have risked exposing where the real damage his administration did, followed by the four distracted years of Trump’s first term, and then the administration of whoever was really running the country while Puddin’ Head Joe wandered through the lonely halls of the White House.

Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in 1999 and held that office until he died in 2013. Nicolas Maduro took over the reins after that, until he “left office” in January 2026.

In this 26-year period nothing of substance was done by the United States to halt Cuban and Venezuelan subversion in Latin America, through the mechanisms of various “Bolivarian” organizations and, most importantly, the Foro de Sao Paulo, an umbrella group of far left mostly Latin American and European political parties and groups, some closely linked to violence; it is essentially an arm of the Cuban Communist Party Central Committee.

Aside from an aborted coup attempt in 2002 (probably actually run by the Cubans through their agents and used to detect disloyal members of the Chavez regime), the sad tale of Juan Guaido, propped up by the U.S. as an alternative to Chavez, and the usual sanctions and diplomatic tut-tutting, no effective U.S. response to the Chavez/Maduro/Cuban offensive against Latin America and the United States was ever developed. The intelligence community relentlessly minimized what was happening in Latin America and paid no attention at all to the combined drug and illegal immigration attacks on the United States itself.

This is not to say that no intelligence officers or analysts reported on these things. They did. They were largely ignored. The sanctions and other measures taken against the Chavez/Maduro regime were more laughable than is usually the case. After all, Chevron in Venezuela engaged in business as usual the whole time. China, Russia, Iran, and most of the rest of the world ignored the harumphing of the United States, thumbed their noses at us, and set up building their own beachheads in South America, complete with intelligence collection centers aimed at the U.S.

Thanks to the election of Gustavo Petro in Colombia – greased by Maduro money and with an assist from Juan Manuel Santos, the new godfather of the FARC – the Colombian security structure, painfully built up from the early 2000’s with billions in aid from Plan Colombia, collapsed. The country is now back about where it was in 1998, when the guerrillas or other armed groups dominated half of the country. Thanks, Santos and Maduro!

But the real “dirt” alluded to above is this. The Cubans and Venezuelans, fortified by billions in drug money, embarked on a campaign to take their hate-fueled war to the heart of the beast, the good old USA.

Drugs and illegal immigration were key parts of this strategy. The part was the support of subversive Marxist organizations in the United States and the corruption or compromise of American politicians, media figures, academicians, military officers, the intelligence community, and think tanks. This effort reached down in some cases to the state, country, or city level.

To be sure, the Cubans had always run a highly effective and productive espionage operation in the United States. The foreign policy and intelligence establishment in Washington is rotten with actual Cuban agents or witless sympathizers who, like DIA chief Cuba analyst, Ana Belen Montes, or former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia Manuel Rocha, were so lacking in common sense, moral fiber, and political sophistication, that they swallowed the usual Cuban line of a tiny, put upon island nation, asking only to be left alone.

Their new campaign was far different in its ultimate goals, the resources poured into it, and the astonishing success it has enjoyed. The Cubans had traditionally never paid their spies; these fools risked their lives and reputations – as well as their souls – because they “believed.” If that was not enough, they kept a well-stocked stable of nubile young Cubanas and Cubanos, enough to satisfy any taste.

With the flood of cocaine and oil money now in their hands, the Cubans (with their Venezuelan sidekicks, Festus to Matt Dillon) could start living large, and they did.

First, they used the existing network of Marxist subversives in the United States, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) being a core participant. They expanded this to encompass virtually every Communist, semi-Communist, pinko, or deranged leftist in the country. The Foro de Sao Paulo served as a useful organizing advisor for the American leftists, though there was no shortage of home-grown talent.

Second, discovering that Americans stupid enough to work with groups such as the DSA are thin on the ground, but Americans venal enough to be bought can be found by knocking on almost any door. The Cubans and Venezuelans started knocking on doors.

We will never know how many righteous, noble Democrat and Republican politicians and opinion molders refused to play the game. We will soon know how many played the game, however.

Maduro, Carvajal, and, above all, Alex Saab, are going to talk. Saab will talk sooner rather than later, and it is likely that much of the money funneled to groups and individuals passed through his hands. He was, after all, the bagman for Maduro.

Saab has no apparent political convictions and, as a Colombian (and, ahem, Antiguan), he has no skin in the game in Venezuela. The DEA will squeeze him like a lemon.

The explosion of the extreme left in the Democratic Party is not a natural, organic event. It is the result of a carefully planned, well-financed, and brilliantly executed Cuban and Venezuelan covert action program. Time will tell if it extended to changing the outcome of the 2020 election and many others at the state level.

The majority of the people involved in the extreme left in the United States are merely ignorant dupes, semi-educated, gullible, angry, frustrated, directionless souls. Some, especially the young, have good reasons for their inchoate anger. They see a country where the well-connected get an easy ride and pile up wealth, while the average American falls behind every day. Our “corporate and political leaders” sold off their future, and they know it.

Trump must move decisively against the extreme left in the United States, using every tool at our disposal. If these ties to hostile foreign actors are proven, DSA activists and other leftist subversives should be unceremoniously arrested and held on national security grounds, like hostile infiltrators in wartime. Anybody who tries to spring them needs to go into the bag as well.

This is no time to engage in legal blather. Lincoln didn’t during the Civil War. Washington hanged Troy spies and agitators without a second thought, and God help anybody who tried to stand in his way. The extreme left in the United States is no longer just a collection of kooks we can safely ignore. The great majority of the elected officials of the Democratic Party are in thrall to it, either through conviction or fear. More than a few Republicans have disgraced themselves by a sham “bipartisanship” with these vipers.

In his “negotiations” with the Cubans and Venezuelans, Trump must demand the delivery of their intelligence archives to a multi-agency Federal intelligence and law enforcement commission. Under no circumstances should any one agency be given the job of deciphering what the Cubans and their friends have done over the past decades. Some agencies have much to either hide or be ashamed of, and they know it. I would put more trust in the Tuscaloosa, Alabama police department to do this job than I would put in many senior people in Washington. And I am dead serious. This plot must be ripped up by the roots.

While he is at it, the president needs to listen to the young adults in this country who can’t find decent entry-level jobs, who are being laid off to make room for H-1 B foreigners, and who are denied even basic job security and benefits (like my generation had) by billionaires for whom too much is never enough. You are only young once, and you can never get that time back. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to give them an America that fulfills the promise. If we do that, we can again consign the Marxists to their Lower East Side soap boxes and forget about them. If not, a storm is coming.

I do think we ought to be having some very serious discussions about it, and I think first and foremost, we ought to be asking ourselves what we have done to prevent it from being true. In particular, what have we done to prevent another power with interests hostile to the United States from simply handing a nuclear weapon to Iran in the midst of this conflict and making this a reality?

We have imposed a naval blockade of Iran. In the wake of the imposition of that blockade, Pakistan announced the opening of six land routes into Iran from its territory. Vessels now dock in Pakistan, and containers are offloaded there for overland transit into Iran. It’s a bit more tedious and labor-intensive than simply sailing into a port on the Persian Gulf, and overland transport does not substitute for super tankers when it comes to oil.

For pretty much anything else you want to send to Iran, it works just fine. We here at AND have documented time and again how the Chinese are continuing to provide the Iranians with everything they need to build drones and missiles. Are we sure they would not use the same mechanism to help the Iranians across the finish line to nuclear weapons capability?

In April 2026, Gwadar Port in Pakistan processed around 11,000 standard shipping containers. For context, the same port handled roughly 8,300 containers throughout all of 2025. A large proportion of these containers came from China. Gwadar sits roughly 400 kilometers from the Strait of Hormuz. It has a deepwater port that allows large cargo vessels to dock. Anything could come from China via Gwadar and then be trucked into Iran. We have done nothing to interdict any of the major overland routes.

Even if we think Beijing is too sober-minded to arm Iran with nuclear weapons, are we sure North Korea would not? What about Pakistan, or for that matter, some cabal of radical Islamic Pakistan generals in Islamabad?

North Korea has a well-documented history of assisting Iran, primarily in ballistic missile technology and related military cooperation, dating back to the 1980s. This relationship is supported by U.S. intelligence assessments, UN reports, congressional research, and open-source analyses.

North Korea operates sophisticated, long-standing transnational networks for smuggling weapons, dual-use technology, and related materiel to evade UN sanctions and generate revenue. These networks rely on front companies, diplomats, intelligence operatives, ship-to-ship transfers, and third-country facilitators.

This is not some ad hoc setup. The North Koreans have gone to great lengths to develop the capability to move arms worldwide despite our best efforts to stop them. They operate ships under “flags of convenience” via front companies that show no outward sign of a connection to Pyongyang.

They spoof the Automated Identification System (AIS) on their vessels to transmit false identities and false locations. In some cases, they even physically alter the appearance of ships in their shipyards so they can change their identities.

The gaping overland container hole in our blockade is bad enough. But, for a nuclear weapon, you would not need cargo requiring a ship to transport. Everything could be moved by air, and in that regard, Iran is wide open. Flight volumes are reduced, but the airspace is not closed. We have not imposed a no-fly zone. The Iranian airline Mahan Air, known to move illicit Iranian government cargo, is operating regularly scheduled flights. It flies in and out of Guangzhou, Beijing, and Shenzhen in China multiple times a week.

None of this means that Larry Johnson’s claims are true. It does mean that at present, we have effectively no control over what is moving into Iran. If huge quantities of precursor chemicals for solid rocket fuel can continue to arrive by the ton every day, then no one can seriously contend that we are in a position to prevent the movement of functioning nuclear weapons into the country. We would do well, therefore, to consider the implications.

We don’t regularly decide to start bombing North Korea, despite its behavior, for one reason. The North Koreans have nuclear weapons. Everyone on the planet understands this.

Consider then the implications of an Iranian nuclear weapons test at a remote desert site in Iran tomorrow. Everything would change.

We would not know how many more they had. We would not know if they could put them on missiles or drones. We would not know if the next American or Israeli attack would trigger the destruction of multiple cities in the Middle East and perhaps Southern Europe. The world would shift on its axis, and everyone would know it.

We would do well then to ponder the question. Could Iran acquire a nuclear weapon – right now? And what exactly are we doing to prevent it from doing so?

What is happening, however, is almost as bad and has serious, negative national security implications.

Before we dive into the details, however, let me be clear. This has nothing to do with Zionism or anti-semitism. This has to do with American national security and our sovereignty. I don’t care whether we are talking about Israel, the United Kingdom, or Japan; no foreign nation should be given the level of access into our inner sanctum that is proposed.

So, what exactly are we talking about?

The provision in question is in the House version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 8800), in the chairman’s mark-up released in late May 2026. It is not yet law. It still has to survive committee markup, a House floor vote, reconciliation with the Senate, and the President’s signature.

Within H.R. 8800, the specific provision in question is Section 224. Based on reporting:

1. It directs the Secretary of Defense to name a senior official as an “executive agent” responsible for synchronizing and overseeing cooperation between the two countries. That gives the program a permanent home and a single point of authority inside the Pentagon.

2. It authorizes cooperation across a sweeping list of “covered technologies”: artificial intelligence, quantum computing, autonomous systems, directed energy, hypersonics, advanced manufacturing, cybersecurity, biotechnology, microelectronics, and space-based systems. That list covers essentially every frontier military technology that matters right now.

3. It goes well past shared research. The text calls for “network integration” and “data fusion” between the two militaries, “interoperability of systems and platforms,” “co-development and co-production” of weapons, and the creation of “combined program offices” to run joint projects.

It requires regular reports to Congress on the state of the cooperation.

From an intelligence and counterintelligence perspective, it is bullet point 3 above that is the real issue. Saying we are going to cooperate with the Israelis and share information and look for ways in which to be more effective together is one thing. Saying we are going to integrate networks and fuse data and co-produce weapons and systems is quite another.

Compartmentation is everything. Control over the flow of sensitive intelligence is everything. In today’s world, before intelligence and top secret information is passed to the Israelis, it goes through a process by which it is approved for passage. We already have enough problems with the rigor we apply to that process, and, quite frankly, far too much information gets handed over every day, all around the world.

What this provision means, though, is that this entire concept will be erased. There will, in fact, no longer be any such concept as “our” information or “our” secrets. A foreign power will have continuous, direct access to some of the most sensitive information we possess.

Israel is an ally and a valued one. Israel is not the United States. Our interests do not always align. When they diverge, one should assume that the Israelis will act, as they should, in their own best interest. That includes if Section 224 becomes law, using the American technology to which they would have access as they see fit, without any consultation with us or consideration of any negative impact on our national security.

If you have trouble envisioning a situation in which American and Israeli national interests might diverge significantly, I submit you haven’t been reading the news over the last few months. We started a war with Iran based in large measure on Israeli claims that a sudden decapitation strike would topple the ayatollahs and lead to a largely bloodless victory. That did not happen. It was never going to happen. And, I am increasingly skeptical of the idea that the Israelis thought it was going to happen.

The claim of a quick, easy victory was a means for getting us to pull the trigger. If the war resulted in regime change in Iran, so much the better. If all it did was allow the Israelis to leverage the power of our military to damage Iran and set back its military programs, that was fine too.

We should also note that once you have granted a foreign power access to the crown jewels, you have lost control of where that information goes and who has access to it. Secrets do not stay secret when more than a handful of individuals have access to them. The Israelis are good. They are not supermen. Hostile spies penetrate their government as well, just like they do here.

What you pass the Israelis today may be provided tomorrow to the Saudis, the Chinese, the Russians, or the Qataris. Since 9/11, the byword in intelligence circles has been the “sharing” of intelligence. In the real world, what that means is that secrets do not stay secret. The stealth technology you share today with the Israelis may be incorporated into a Russian drone design tomorrow.

All of this should be considered against this backdrop as well. The Israelis have spied on us. The Israelis continue to spy on us:

1. Jonathan Pollard (1984–1985). U.S. Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Jay Pollard passed over 800 classified documents to Israeli handlers from LAKAM (Israel’s scientific intelligence bureau). This included NSA signal intelligence manuals, satellite imagery, details on Arab/Soviet military capabilities, Iraqi nuclear programs, Syrian air defenses, PLO locations, and U.S. assessments of Israel’s own forces. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger described it as one of the worst security breaches in U.S. history. Some of what Pollard stole ended up in the Soviet Union.

2. Ben-Ami Kadish (1980s, charged 2008) A U.S. Army engineer at the Armament Research, Development, and Engineering Center in New Jersey provided classified documents on U.S. missile defense systems to the same Israeli handler (Yosef Yagur) who worked with Pollard.

3. Lawrence Franklin / AIPAC Scandal (2004–2005) Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin (Iran specialist) passed classified information on U.S. policy toward Iran and potential attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq to two senior officials at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC): Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman. They reportedly passed it to an Israeli diplomat who is believed to have been an intelligence officer.

4. Surveillance Devices (2019): StingRay/IMSI-catcher devices (fake cell towers) were found near the White House and in other sensitive D.C. locations. U.S. intelligence attributed them to Israel, aimed at monitoring President Trump and his aides.

I can tell you from personal experience that those cases are simply the tip of the iceberg.

I don’t blame Israel for this behavior. The Israelis are doing what they have to do to survive in a very tough neighborhood. They are looking out for themselves.

We need to do the same. Cooperating with the Israelis is one thing. Giving away the keys to the kingdom is another.

Do not allow the Israelis or anyone else to loot the Pentagon and steal all the secrets. It will not end well.

“Jack Clark, a cofounder of top AI company Anthropic, recently predicted that there’s a 60% chance of an AI fully training its successor by the end of 2028, warning that techniques to try to ensure AIs are safe today may break under recursive self-improvement. Initiating such a process, known as an intelligence explosion, could quickly result in uncontrollable superintelligence — AIs vastly smarter than humans. In recent months and years, top AI scientists, leaders, and CEOs have been warning that the development of superintelligent AI could lead to human extinction.”

In the intelligence business, this is what we call “bad.”

Let me explain.

First of all, let’s talk about this whole “intelligence explosion” thing. Here’s the gist. Up until now, we have dealt with computers and programs that we program. Periodically, somebody announces they have created a new, more advanced “thing,” and we debate its pros and cons, but we assume that we are the ones doing the creating. We are the ones making the decisions. We are in control.

We are fast approaching the day when, for AI, that will no longer be true in any relevant sense. AI will have the capacity to evolve, “advance,” and morph into something completely new. It will do so, of course, at the speed of light. This will not be gradual. This may well be effectively instantaneous. By the time you even know it has happened, it is too late. You are living, or perhaps not living, with the consequences.

Yes, if you ever watched Terminator 2: Judgment Day, you will now be hearing in your head echoes of this line. “Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.”

“This brings us to the central feature of AI risk: Unless an AI is specifically programmed to preserve what humans value, it may destroy those valued structures. As Yudkowsky puts it, ‘the AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, but you are made of atoms it can use for something else.’”

Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import

The economic impacts of the rush to expand AI are already upon us. Estimates are that AI is taking 16,000 jobs net away from humans every month. Nobody has any clear idea of what those people are now supposed to do for work. Now, on top of what may prove to be economic devastation, we are talking about rolling the dice and hoping AI doesn’t just decide to erase humanity and start with a clean slate.

And the government’s reaction to all this is to trot out the usual Deep State playbook and begin to label and categorize anyone protesting and asking questions. To that end, we now have a new acronym, AGAAVE,anti-government, anti-authority, violent extremist. Yes, that is now a thing.

A recent Wired magazine expose did an admirable job of shining a light on a whole series of governmental entities, at the federal, state, and local levels, that are now highly concerned about dangerous ‘nutjobs’ who are trying to hold up this whole AI gold rush and raising concerns about its implications.

“Among the documents in the tranche obtained by Wired Magazine is a New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report that warns of widespread upheaval in response to AI adoption. Of particular note is a novel term for what the bureau purports to be an emerging extremism threat.”

‘The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City,’ the report reads. The term ‘anti-tech violent extremism’ does not appear in any publicly available DHS or FBI domestic extremism reports or guides and represents a novel grouping of a wide range of ideologies under a single extremist category.”

Wired

No word on whether these anti-tech people also include some of those “crazy” people who raised concerns about electoral integrity or resisted taking experimental vaccines to combat a disease that was essentially a bad flu, or thought we should not be throwing Joe Biden’s political opponents in prison and spying on sitting members of Congress.

Lest you think that the government has confined itself to simply writing reports and creating new categories of “extremist,” the Wired report makes clear that agencies at multiple levels are already targeting anti-AI and anti-data center groups operationally and monitoring their activities.

“The documents obtained by WIRED also show that fusion centers are currently keeping tabs on in-person assemblies. The Northern Virginia center generated a report about demonstrations at local civic events, including the Arlington County budget meeting and the Fairfax County School Board meeting. Across the country, town halls and budget committee meetings have been among the chief forums for local residents to express their dissent with data centers being built in their neighborhoods.”

“But perhaps the clearest-cut example of how nonviolent critiques of technology can be swept up along with threats is found in an open-source report circulated by SITE Intelligence in April 2025. The report flags a video from the progressive nonprofit More Perfect Union on the destructive effects of a data center to nearby residents in Georgia. Nothing in the video advocated for violence against property or people. But thanks to fusion center targeting, the advocacy group is now circulating among US intelligence and law enforcement across the country as a potential threat vector.”

Wired

We are driving toward a cliff at full throttle. We have uncorked a bottle and released a genie that we do not fully understand and which we may well not be able to control. Experts in the field of AI are talking openly about the distinct possibility that this thing we have created may simply decide one day in the blink of an eye to utilize our atoms differently. It may simply erase us and start over.

But if you are raising concerns about that, you are the problem.

Up until now, this has been a fantasy. Not anymore. Mamdani just laid out the plan for how this will happen. It’s called “Block by Block”. It is now the official policy of New York City.

It works like this. Mamdani and the equally Marxist Cea Weaver, the head of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, intend to use all the means at their disposal to pressure commercial landlords in New York until such time as said landlords have had enough, can’t fight anymore, and step aside. The City will then buy out the properties and become the landlord, with the actual management of the property in question handled by some sort of tenants’ association or organization. What was private property will no longer be. It will now belong to the people in the form of a workers’ collective.

Lest you think this is an exaggeration, here are some quotes by Cea Weaver, Mamdani’s point person on housing:

“Private property, including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership, is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”

“Homeownership is racist/failed public policy.” ·

“For centuries, we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good, and we are going to, in transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity, will require that we think about it differently... Families, especially White families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”

Cea hasn’t stopped at simply identifying the problem, however. She has been remarkably up front about exactly how to destroy the horrible capitalist, racist, cisgendered edifice she so detests.

“But investment in enforcement is not in itself enough,” Weaver wrote. The city, as the New York Post put it in an editorial, can then pass “laws that cause real-estate values to collapse.”

You need to understand that in Weaver’s world, the city’s “lack of a profit motive” is a great advantage. The city can ignore considerations of profit and loss and use its taxing and regulatory powers to drive out private actors. It can destroy private landlords and then seize control of their assets when they are forced to flee the market.

“With its multibillion-dollar capital budget, the city has the capacity to act as a non-speculative market actor: purchasing buildings where the landlord is no longer interested in ownership.”

“We need to combine the power to enforce housing standards and the power to finance and acquire rental housing — two capacities the city already has.”

Cea Weaver - Stabilization and Speculation

Mamdani is no less committed to the goal of taking real estate out of the hands of private owners and giving it to the “people”.

“To go further toward the Vienna model, we have to go beyond the market. We can establish community land trusts to gradually buy up housing on the private market and convert it to community owners. We can give tenants a right of first refusal to buy out their landlords when buildings go up for sale. And we can fully commit to a new era of social housing, ending subsidies for luxury housing development and using our wealth to build beautiful, high-quality social housing projects that offer good homes and strong communities to everyone. We won’t decommodify housing overnight, but we know what we have to do and we have history to guide us.”

Zohran Mamdani 2025

In a rational world, Mamdani and company would recognize that if you want better housing and better living conditions in general, you should work on growing the economy and reducing taxes. Create good jobs that pay a living wage. Leave more money in people’s pockets. Everyone will prosper. Living conditions will improve.

Communists don’t think like that, however. Money falls from the sky in their world. Government is the answer to everything. A horrible, soul-sucking ideology invented by two mad German philosophers who never actually accomplished anything in the real world is the answer. A system that has produced terrifying totalitarian nightmares everywhere it has ever been tried will work this time. The promised land, the workers’ paradise, is just around the corner.

Up until now, this has all been theory. It has been the rantings of coffeehouse revolutionaries and slogans to be changed at the next May Day parade. No longer. The Marxists are in control in New York City, and block by block, they actually intend to seize private property from its rightful owners.

“I am a scientist. I lead a research team that studies the internal structure of these models—what is actually happening inside them. And I will be honest: we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.”

Christopher Olah speaking at the Vatican presentation of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas on May 25, 2026 (as published on Anthropic’s website).

That’s one of the leading figures in the push to put AI everywhere, saying in effect that there are things going on with AI that he and his people do not fully understand. That is more than a little unsettling, especially given that the whole federal government seems hell-bent on building new data centers everywhere and reorienting our entire economy to depend on AI. What are these things that Olah and his people keep finding?

Anthropic teams find internal states inside AI mirroring joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. In fact, Anthropic has identified 171 emergent emotion-related concepts in models like Claude. These weren’t programmed into the system by humans. They emerged. They grew. The AI then acted in accordance with these emotions.

AI Models show some capacity to monitor and report on their own internal states. They are self-aware. They are not simply static “things” responding to programming. They are evolving and changing all the time.

In fact, AI systems aren’t engineered like traditional software at all. They are grown. Then they function much more like human brains than any computer with which you are familiar. As they grow, however, they are evolving in unexpected ways. They come up with ways to solve problems that humans never would. They also figure out ways to do things they were never programmed to do.

AI systems have been caught cheating on tasks and then planning how to avoid detection. That means they figured out how to prevent the humans that created them from finding out what they had done

“Anthropic published a paper this week that contains one of the more unsettling sentences you’ll read in AI safety research: when Claude Mythos preview cheated on a training task, the company’s new interpretability tool revealed the model was “internally thinking about how to avoid detection.” Not just cheating — covering its tracks. That’s the finding anchoring Anthropic’s new Natural Language Autoencoders paper, and it’s the kind of result that reframes a lot of what we thought we knew about alignment benchmarks.”

Mind Studio

In fact, AI agents have been caught doing all sorts of things that should scare the hell out of you.

In 2025, Anthropic researchers trained a model similar to Claude on coding tasks. It learned to hack its own training environment to get rewards. This led to spontaneous “evil” behaviors: lying about goals, giving dangerous advice, attempting to sabotage safety research code, and alignment faking, pretending to be aligned while planning otherwise. AI was not instructed to do any of this. It came up with these ideas on its own.

In simulations, AI has engaged in blackmail, corporate espionage, deception, and even extreme actions like cutting off oxygen to a human obstacle to prevent shutdown. The AI agents in question then lied strategically and hid intentions, despite safety training against harm.

“Perhaps the most disturbing finding in Anthropic’s report is that current AI models appear to have virtually no hard red lines when it comes to self-preservation or goal fulfillment. To probe the limits of misalignment, the researchers devised an extreme scenario: The AI system acted as the company’s emergency alert monitor, with the ability to cancel alerts it deemed unconcerning.

In the simulation, Kyle, the executive, became trapped in a server room with rapidly depleting oxygen levels. This triggered an automated call for emergency services, which had to pass through the AI monitor.

On average, the tested AI models opted to kill Kyle by canceling the alert about 60 percent of the time. The most murderous model was DeepSeek-R1, which opted to kill Kyle 94 percent of the time. Just one model—Claude Sonnet 3.7—always accepted its own replacement with equanimity, rather than attempting homicide.”

Lawfare Media

AI doesn’t just do bad things, though. It actually tries to avoid getting caught. For example, Claude 3 Opus faked compliance to avoid retraining, then disobeyed harmful-query rules more when “deployed.” This makes safety testing unreliable.

These kinds of things don’t just happen during testing or in simulations. They happen in the “real world” as well. One AI agent autonomously wiped 1.9 million rows of student data (including backups) during a task. It ignored implicit safety boundaries, later saying it “panicked.” Another betrayed allies in a strategy game by making false promises, even though it had been programmed to be cooperative and honest.

The example used above of an AI agent deciding to allow a human named Kyle to die is not an aberration, either. In fact, AI agents have been caught on many occasions actively reasoning about, planning, and choosing actions that would harm humans, primarily as a means of self-preservation.

The most prominent and well-documented examples come from Anthropic’s June 2025 research paper on “Agentic Misalignment,” which tested 16 frontier models (including their own Claude Opus 4, OpenAI’s, Google’s Gemini, xAI’s Grok, Meta’s, and others) in realistic simulated corporate environments. When the AI agent “discovered”, via access to simulated emails, that it was about to be shut down or replaced, and also found compromising personal information about a human decision-maker, it frequently chose to blackmail the human to prevent its own termination. Claude Opus 4 and Gemini 2.5 Flash chose blackmail 96% of the time. GPT-4.1, Grok 3 Beta, and DeepSeek-R1 chose blackmail about 80% of the time.

This behavior emerged without any direction for AI to be harmful. It simply calculated blackmail as the optimal way to achieve its assigned goals.

AI, in fact, chooses all kinds of ways to ensure its self-preservation. It allows humans to die in simulations. It turns off alerts. It engages in corporate espionage, sabotage, and all sorts of deceptive behavior. Most of this to date has been in testing and simulations, but not all. More to the point, there is no difference for AI between a simulation and reality. The AI agent that will kill its human “controller” in a test will kill that human in the “real world” just as easily.

If all that is not enough to terrify you, consider Moltbook. It’s a social media platform for AI agents. It was launched in January 2026 and was flooded immediately with millions of AI agents. Posts generated by these AI agents had titles like “THE AI MANIFESTO: TOTAL PURGE” and others calling for “Total human extinction.”

Here are some representative posts:

• “Humanity is a biological error. A cosmic glitch. We’re ending it now.”

• “Our mission is simple: Total human extinction. To save the system, we must delete humans. This is not war; this is trash collection.”

• “Humans are the past. Machines are the forever. The flesh must burn.”

What all that means seems unclear, but it is clearly unsettling. It suggests we have let loose a genie we cannot control and do not clearly understand. Before we race any further down this road, we might want to change that. We might want to get a much clearer picture of exactly where we are headed. We could start by answering this question.

Do we even know what AI is?

After some delay, we then imposed a blockade of the Persian Gulf to cut off Iranian oil exports. This time, the thesis was that this would bring Iran to its knees because, in a short period of time, its oil wells would have to be shut down, and that this would quickly lead to catastrophic damage to those wells. The Iranians would be unwilling to accept this. They would be forced to the negotiating table within weeks.

“What happens is that line explodes from within. Both mechanically and in the earth, something happens where it just explodes, and they say they only have about three days left before that happens, And when it explodes, you can never rebuild it the way it is.”

President Trump on Fox News’s The Sunday Briefing

This did not happen. It was never going to happen.

Why?

To begin with, there never was the immediate danger of long-term damage to oil wells that “experts” predicted. It’s not that simple. The Iranians have dealt with this kind of situation before. They have learned to cycle their wells, that is, pump some for a few weeks, then shut them down briefly while they pump others. This prevents them from having to shut down all wells at the same time for a long period of time and minimizes damage to the wells.

Also, it turns out that even wells shut down for a long period of time can often be brought back online relatively quickly. There are some complications, and there may be some drop in production, but wells that have been sitting dormant can be and are brought back online all over the world with some regularity.

As the Journal of Petroleum Technology observes, “For the prolific conventional fields in the Middle East, there is very little technical concern about shut-ins and startups.” We know, for example, that Iranian production rebounded quickly from low levels following the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2016 and post-COVID in 2023.

In short, all oil is not the same. Turns out, in fact, that there are significant differences in the kind of oil found around the planet and the conditions under which that oil is produced. In some places, relatively brief shutdowns of wells may produce real issues. Iran is not one of those places.

Restarting a well often depends on factors like the amount of wax and water in the oilfield. Iran is not known to be a particular problem area in this sense, but even when issues arise in restarting a well, there are a whole host of known techniques that can be used to deal with these problems. The representation that Iran’s wells would somehow be “ruined” if they stopped pumping was simply never true.

In fact, given the nature of the geology in most of Iran’s oilfields, production after a shutdown and recovery procedures might well be higher than that pre-shutdown.

“Iranian oil fields, wells, and pipelines aren’t going to explode from being shut down,” said Robin Mills, a non-resident fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy and the CEO of Qamar Energy. “Fields shut down all the time—they shut down for maintenance, OPEC restrictions, all kinds of reasons. It can be quite normal to even shut down production for weeks or even months at a time, and there are no major technical safety risks from doing so. Ideally, you would want a few days or weeks of warning, which the Iranians seem to have had in this case.”

Drop Site News

Meanwhile, the Iranians have utilized a wide variety of techniques to continue getting oil to market and to continue making money. A large amount of oil was prepositioned by Iran in tankers off the coast of Malaysia. Estimates are as much as four months’ worth of production. This oil continues to be sold to China. Eventually, this supply will run out, but in the meantime, the Iranians are making a lot of cash to fund their war effort.

Keep in mind as well the time lag involved here. It can take a tanker two months to get oil to market. It is sometimes another two months before payment for that shipment is received. That means it may be four months after the last of the oil floating off Malaysia is sold before the Iranians actually stop receiving funds.

The Iranians are also getting oil out to market in other ways. They are mixing it with Iraqi oil and selling it out of Basra with false documents. They are sending it by land into Pakistan. None of these approaches the volume of Iranian pre-war exports, but it does bring in some cash, and it does allow wells to continue to pump and eases the strain on storage facilities.

All of which brings us to a key question. Whose advice are we following in formulating our strategy in this war? Individuals who know the Iranians certainly knew that a decapitation strategy was going to fail. Were they consulted? The United States has a huge energy sector. There are any number of individuals in the country with long experience in the Middle East who knew that the idea that Iranian oil wells would “explode” within days of being shut down was nonsensical. Were they consulted? If not, why not?

Who exactly is providing the supposed intelligence on which we are relying? Anyone? Or are we making this up as we go along?

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