World War Or Techno Utopia
Hoping For The Best,
I will enter a silent meditation retreat tomorrow, until next Sunday, so this blog will be dormant, and I’ll have some catching up to do afterwards.
Today the global economic restructuring to a world of less-stuff continues, and AI may help by relieving a lot of managers of their responsibilities this year.
We will all live lives of luxury and plenty, predicts Elon Musk, who must know better, but can’t say.
Wars are the usual way to manage these systemic economic transitions, and wars are being nurtered and brought up to speed, but not yet with total commitment, as CBDCs run by AI and complete management of all social media and information flows by AI might do the trick by keeping people isolated and controlled for the long, progressive population reduction.
This is a work in progress in uncharted waters, so we can see things happening, but not know what might happen next.
Donald Trump is still attracting attention, serving his Zionist masters with carrots and sticks, while trying to fall short of losing 1/3 of the US fleet to Iranian missiles before midterm elections. He’s trying to outpace the Red Queen as the pace of frantic change accellerates.
Each of us should look to meeting our own needs and those of family as we proceed into a period of global war, not yet certain what its form will be, but that our civilian needs will tend to come last.
Thanks for this, Eleni: Our unelected overlord: How Jared Kushner turned the White House into Israel’s backroom deal den Trump did not walk into the White House alone. He stormed in with a promise to “drain the swamp,” but trailing in his shadow was Jared Kushner, carrying a tangled web of private financial networks, offshore holdings, and foreign capital so deeply embedded it functioned like a quiet engine at the heart of the presidency. Years later, FBI documents released alongside the Epstein files crystallised the danger, with a Confidential Human Source (CHS) alleging that Trump had been compromised by Israel, and that Kushner was the true centre of gravity, orchestrating both the Trump Organisation and the White House from within... ..Viewed closely, a pattern emerges, pointing to a presidency where private capital, foreign networks, and personal access converge to shape outcomes that consistently serve Israeli interests, and not Americans. The decisions emanating from the Trump 2:0 administration appear to be dictated from within rather than guided by democratic oversight... ..Before Jared Kushner ever stepped inside the West Wing, his family’s business was deeply enmeshed in a web of international capital and offshore entities. Kushner Companies, the real estate firm founded by his father, Charles Kushner, was burdened with debt following aggressive expansion into Manhattan in the late 2000s and early 2010s. To stay solvent, the business increasingly turned to unusual, opaque sources of capital.
Documents and reporting reveal that Israeli‑linked capital flowed into Kushner‑controlled deals through vehicles like Gaia Investments Corp, headquartered outside of Tel Aviv, Israel, and its U.S. affiliates, such as 65 Bay LLC (+ venture with KABR), originally known as GAIA JC LLC, and whose names would later appear in federal ethics disclosures in ways that triggered concerns about transparency. These investment vehicles were nominally distinct, but were tied through corporate filings and insider networks to Raz Steinmetz, a member of one of Israel’s wealthiest families, “The Steinmetzes”, whose global interests span diamonds, mining, real estate, and infrastructure. The Kushner Companies seem to have conducted a public “scrubbing” of their connections to Steinmetz. In late 2014, the Gaia name and logo vanished from the list of partners on the Kushner website, where it had been featured since early 2013... ..When Jared Kushner assumed senior advisory roles in the White House, overseeing Middle East policy, diplomacy, and national security advice, he brought with him not only his ideology but a network of corporate and financial dependencies that would remain active, albeit obscured, during his tenure.
Jared became senior advisor to Trump in 2017 and held the position until Trump left office in 2021. He was the primary Trump administration participant for the Middle East Peace Process, authoring the Trump peace plan and facilitating the talks that led to the signing of the Abraham Accords and other normalisation agreements between Israel and various Arab states in 2020. He founded Affinity Partners, a private equity firm that derives most of its funds from the Saudi government’s sovereign wealth fund. In 2025, Kushner returned to an informal advisory role in the second Trump administration, serving, along with Steve Witkoff, as a key intermediary in diplomatic negotiations regarding the Israel-Hamas war and the war in Ukraine.
Nowadays, in the dim underbelly of global power plays, Jared Kushner’s shadow stretches long, weaving a tangled web around Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace”, a cabal of insiders poised to carve up Gaza’s ruins...
..The deepest failure here is not legal; it is democratic. Americans did not vote for a presidency conducted through family backchannels and international capital circuits. They did not consent to an arrangement in which an adviser’s private financial exposure intersected with public power in ways that shaped foreign policies, geopolitical outcomes, and economic trajectories. Sovereignty is not merely a slogan. It is about who gets to define interests, set agendas, and negotiate outcomes without public oversight. When an adviser’s financial dependencies span borders, involve shell entities and opaque partnerships, and when regulatory protections are overridden politically, the line between personal benefit and public duty becomes indistinct.
“America First” ceased to function as a safeguard. It became rhetoric cloaking alignment — relational, structural, and invisible to the ordinary voter. The pattern we observe, of capital moving through opaque channels into private gain while shaping foreign policy, demands scrutiny, not speculation. Democracy does not fail only when ballots are stolen; it fails when consent is manufactured under premises the public never knew they were endorsing.
If foreign alignment now travels through family ties, private equity, and offshore networks, the urgent question is not whether influence exists. It is whether democratic institutions still possess the tools, transparency, and will to recognise and constrain it
https://www.sott.net/article/504631-Our-unelected-overlord-How-Jared-Kushner-turned-the-White-House-into-Israels-backroom-deal-den
Escape Key looks at a couple of centuries of recent history: Agents for the Rothschilds In 2016, the publisher De Gruyter released an essay by Rainer Liedtke titled Agents for the Rothschilds: A Nineteenth-Century Information Network.
Drawing on the Rothschild Archive London—correspondence from over one hundred business agentsworking for the various Rothschild houses — Liedtke documented a recruitment and intelligence operation that spanned the European continent and reached into Latin America for most of the nineteenth century.
The paper describes a system in which agents were placed in locations where the Rothschild banks did not maintain a permanent presence.These agents carried out business transactions, gathered political and economic intelligence, and forwarded information that enabled the family to make decisions ahead of competitors and, frequently, ahead of even governments.
Liedtke notes that what we now would consider insider trading ‘was commonplace in nineteenth-century finance and part of the salary package of employees of financial institutions’. The agents were not merely tolerated in this practice —they were compensated through it.
The recruitment criteria tell their own story. Trust was paramount, and two principal routes existed for earning it: being a relation of the family, or having worked within one of the houses for a considerable period. Marriage was the preferred option, and these marriages ensured that important business locations were ‘covered in the long run by trustworthy representatives’.
Liedtke is explicit about one boundary:
… such men never gained access to the decision-making circle of the family but instead maintained their own business interests separately, albeit profiting significantly from contacts to the Rothschild network.
The agents were operationally essential, but they remained permanently outside the core. Only born Rothschilds were fully trusted.The ‘quintessential criterion’ forwhether a Rothschild bank existed in a given city was whether a Rothschild was willing to move there.
He also documents a deliberate policy of heterogeneity. Despite being Jewish, the Rothschilds employed non-Jewish agents as a matter of strategy. A homogeneous network, Liedtke explains, would be ‘self-referential’ — limited to the social circles its members already moved in...
..Liedtke records a shift over time in what the principals expected. In the early decades, the network’s value lay in raw market data — commodity prices, exchange rates, shipping movements. After the telegraph commoditised this kind of information in the mid-nineteenth century, the agents’ importance shifted towards strategic political assessment: who was likely to form a government, which minister could be cultivated, what policy was being contemplatedbefore it was announced...
..Fritz Stern’s Gold and Iron (1977) provides the most detailed case study of the template in action.Gerson von Bleichröder — whose family bank functioned as a ‘branch office in Berlin of the Rothschild banking house’ — became Bismarck’s personal financial agent, managed his portfolio, bribed officials on his behalf, financed wars while bypassing parliamentary opposition, and served as intermediary between European finance and the Prussian state. Bleichröder’s ‘remarkable and long-running relationship with the Rothschilds made his services doubly worthwhile to both Bismarck and Germany’.
Yet Bleichröder was never admitted to the inner circle of power. After Bismarck’s death, he ‘dropped out of German historiography like a stone in water’...
..The humiliation of the 1871 terms drove France’s demands at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which opened on the 18th of January — the anniversary of Wilhelm I’s proclamation at Versailles in 1871. Clemenceau sought explicit revenge. The resulting reparations of 132 billion gold marks wrecked the German economy, and it was those reparations that created the institutional justification for the Bank for International Settlements, established in 1930 to administer the payment schedule.
The BIS (Bank for International Settlements), however, was modelled on more than the reparations problem. At the Brussels International Monetary Conference of 1892, Julius Wolf, a professor at the University of Breslau, had submitted a project for internationally issued, gold-backed clearing certificates administered by a joint institution in a neutral country— in effect, a globalisation of the clearing house architecture.
At the same conference, Alfred de Rothschild, a former Director of the Bank of England, presented his own paper advocating the London Bankers’ Clearing House as a system approaching ‘perfection’ and arguing against a physical coinage solution in favour of paper certificates representing quantities of metal...
..The function the BIS was designed to perform— clearing sovereign obligations between states, intermediating capital flows across borders —had previously been performed by multinational merchant banks, the Rothschilds foremost among them. Bleichröder processing reparation payments on the German side while Alphonse de Rothschild raised the bonds on the French side was the BIS function carried out by private agents.
When the institution was constituted in 1930, its founding governance reflected this lineage. The entire American share subscription went not to the Federal Reserve but to a consortium of private banks led by JP Morgan... An internal Federal Reserve Bank of New York memo from 1929 warned that the bankers’ plan ‘suggests too great of power conferred on private stockholders’ and that private ownership ‘introduces the pressure of profits as opposed to the motive of public service’. The US government did not ratify Federal Reserve board membership until 1994; private shareholders were not bought out until 2001–2005, and only after an arbitration fight...
..The agent network did not disappear, but its function changed. Where the nineteenth-century agents had managed the family’s direct business, the twentieth-century successors would manage the institutional architecture that replaced it — operating not within the Rothschild banks but within the sovereign and multilateral bodies that now performed the Rothschild banks’ historical role at a vastly larger scale.
The family’s reach extended into state intelligence as well.
Victor Rothschild served in MI5 during the Second World War, and his London flat functioned as a gathering point for fellow members of the Cambridge Apostles — a secretive Cambridge society whose membership in the early 1930s, according to MI5’s own files, was ‘nearly all’ communist. Several of those who frequented the flat, including Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, were later exposed as Soviet agents.
Woolf and Keynes were also Apostles— as documented in declassified MI5 records and published accounts by former intelligence officers...
..Niall Ferguson’s two-volume The House of Rothschild (1998–1999), written with unprecedented access to the family archives, documents the broader pattern: a transnational business partnership ‘preserved over five generations through family loyalty, written agreements, and intrafamily marriage’. Between 1824 and 1877, fifteen of twenty-one Rothschild marriages were between direct descendants.
Adam Kuper — who analysed Ferguson’s archive material in a 2001 paper for Social Anthropology — arrived at a similar figure: more than 70 percent of marriages in this period were with a father’s brother’s daughter or father’s brother’s son’s daughter, arranged specifically to sustain the partnership between branches. Kuper concluded that the Rothschilds were likely ‘the only banking family who had such an explicit strategy of endogamy’...
..Thus, across four independent academic studies the method is clear: agents placed where the family requires presence but does not wish to reside, recruited through marriage or long service, compensated through access rather than salary, deliberately heterogeneous, publicly visible and socially prestigious by association, but permanently excluded from the family’s decision-making core.
What these sources collectively describe is a private intelligence operation — one that enabled the family to act ahead of competitors and governments for the better part of a century.
Simplicius, Reports Claim US Readying ‘Long-Term’ Attrition Op Against Iran This news comes as Trump sends a second aircraft carrier to the region. Recall that during Desert Storm and the 2003 Iraq War, the US had six carrier strike groups (CSGs) operating in the region... ..In a new interview, Colonel Daniel Davis claims that Larry Johnson’s naval sources told him that a serious “classified problem” has already stopped the USS George HW Bush from being able to transit the Atlantic, causing it to be replaced by the Gerald R Ford at the last minute... ..More concerning is the fact that Trump has allegedly been weighing sending “commando teams”—or, in other words, ground troops—into Iran,presumably to attempt another snatch-and-grab-style raid as seen in Venezuela... ..The options U.S. President Donald Trump has been weighing include military action targeting Iran’s nuclear program and ability to launch ballistic missiles, with U.S. officials saying he is also considering options that would include sending American commandos to go after certain Iranian military targets. - NYT
If you’re still wondering, what exactly would be the objective of such an operation? Well, Trump himself doesn’t seem to know. In a must-watch video, a reporter finally tasked him with the central question: what’s the purpose of striking Iran if the US had already allegedly taken out its nuclear program in the “Operation Midnight Hammer” strikes on Fordow? ... ..As per his usual M.O. Trump has no principled answers—he sticks to his tactic of playing both sides, wanting his cake and eating it too. He seeks our belief in his ‘miraculously’ executed Fordow strikes, yet at the same time wants us to accept the inanely contradictory notion that Iran still needs to be further bombed to reduce its nuclear potential.
In reality, we all know what the strikes would really be all about: simply creating chaos to destabilize the Iranian government, foment more unrest, and attempt to create a ‘critical mass’-like situation of social panic that can be further exploited by co-conspirators like Israel.
The good news is that this could be one of Trump’s threatening ruses with the purpose of leveraging Iran into negotiations concessions. As of this writing, there are new reports thatIran is willing to play ball to an extent, and could be willing to open up certain cooperative oil and gas development projects inside Iran to US companies... ..Though unsourced, one pro-Iranian account claimed:
Iran will open certain economic sectors to US companies as part of an upcoming deal
The Deputy Foreign Minister has stated that Iranian oil and gas fields and mining investments will be open to US companies
Tehran also plans to purchase more than 100 passenger airplanes
Total economic activity could exceed $500 billion...
..This deal-making appeared to be supported by recent statements by top DC energy consultant Bob Mcnally who was virtually salivating in a recent speech over the potential of the US anarcho-extortion vulture capitalism bandwagon alighting in Iran, whose oil and gas fields he believes hold far more plunder potential than those of Venezuela... ..His colonialist-colored speechcircumscribes the new American doctrine and paradigm-in-one, which Rubio likewise elaborated on during the Munich Security Conference.Rubio’s speechmade new waves due to what appeared to be a call for the US-European ‘civilization’ to take back the reins of global dominion... ..What Rubio appears to be doing is shoe-horning the West’s cultural decline due to globalism and its spawn of mass-migration into some kind of new ideological call-to-action meant to justify the US’s erratic abrogation of MAGA’s promises and to continue the neocon plunder of the Global South... ..As Prof. Joe Siracusa told Sputnik:
While theWhite House started off declaring its intentions to “avoid long-term conflicts,”its“shift from being risk-averse to highly unpredictable suggests a more dangerous and erratic direction for global stability,”Siracusa said, noting thatRubio’s job is to now try “to rationalize a worldview that does not truly exist.” Another way of simplifying it: the Trump administration campaigned on being non-interventionist and ‘America-first’, but then something happened. That something seems clear: Trump had a “talking to” by Miriam Adelson on behalf of Israel, and here we are. Now, Trump’s gophers like Rubio are forced to whip-up sloppy post hoc rationalizations to make it sound like this new “doctrine” was the plan all along; it wasn’t. Trump was merely “turned” by Israel... ..He cannot come up with a valid reason because one doesn’t exist: he’s simply following orders. “Iran must be destroyed, tell your cattle citizens whatever you must—we don’t care what reasons you make up. Just make it sound somewhat convincing.” ... ..This all as the US seized another two tankers—Veronica III and Aquila II—all the way in the Indian ocean, reportedly again related to Venezuelan oil. It’s clear that the Western order is plotting to escalate its piracy as a last resort to shut down the Global South’s economic life lines because there is no other way for the West to compete... China, Russia, and Iran will slowly be pushed into closer naval alliances to safeguard global economic arteries... ..Now, the latest word is that Israel may go it alone against Iran, and that Trump has given them his ‘greenlight’.This obviously leaves Iran in a bind becauseeven if the US were not to directly strike Iran itself, it will certainly aid Israel in the capacities of refueling, armaments, anti-air defense to block Iranian retaliations, etc. Thatgives Iran a clear incentive to attack US assetsanyway as a deterrence measure, to degrade the overall capabilities of the ‘coalition’ launching the hostile strikes.
This would essentially be Israel’s trick to lure the US into open conflict: simply attack Iran unilaterally, and when the American vassal is forced to assist, it is brought directly into the conflict against its will... We now wait to see if Trump’s appetite for risk leads him to truly open up “Pandora’s box”once and for all,giving Iran no choice but to go all out, or whether diplomacy prevails. Buteven if a compromise is reached, Israel holds the wildcard, and a desperate Netanyahu could attack Iran unilaterally, igniting another conflagrationacross the region.
Moon of Alabama, U.S. Calls For New Colonial Era
In a speech held at the Munich Security Conference Secretary of State Marco Rubio called for a renewal of the colonial age ... “This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you.”
Arnaud Bertrand summarizes:
The man literally laments the outcome of WW2 because it marked the end of the era during which “the West had been expanding”, a “path” he “hopes [the US and Europe] walk together again.”
And just to ensure you’re clear about what he means: he wants to restore the building of “vast empires extending across the globe” and blames “anti-colonial uprisings” for what they did to “the great Western empires.”
He also says that “we cannot continue” to allow “abstractions of international law” get in the way of US interests.
Basically the man is openly saying that the whole post-colonial order was a mistake and he’s calling on Europe to share the spoils of building a new one.
Some of the dimwits in the room did applaud that revisionist nonsense.
Bertrand cautiones:
What’s the thinking here? That Trump’s America – “America first” – would suddenly become magnanimous and share with Europe just out of sentiment? That’s not how imperialism works: the whole premise of it is that the strong dominate the weak.
When an imperial power is speaking to you of sentiments, of how much they like you and how they want to partner with you – the much weaker party – that’s cause for worry, not applause. https://www.moonofalabama.org/2026/02/u-s-calls-for-new-colonial-era.html
Danish PM says more Greenland talks due after meeting US’s Marco Rubio https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/14/danish-pm-says-more-greenland-talks-due-after-meeting-uss-marco-rubio
U.S. Air Force Keeps Small B-2 Stealth Bomber Fleet at Abnormally High Readiness Levels For Strikes Against Iran https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/usaf-b2-stealth-high-readiness-strikes-iran#google_vignette
Iran’s top general warns Trump new war would be ‘lesson’ - Next round of US-Iran nuclear talks is scheduled for Tuesday in Geneva. https://www.trtworld.com/article/a494eeceb1a9
Amid Saber-Rattling, Iran Touts Economic Benefits To West If Nuclear Deal Reached https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/amid-saber-rattling-iran-touts-economic-benefits-west-if-nuclear-deal-reached
Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Says Ball Is in US Court To Reach a Deal - Another Iranian official said a deal with the US could include economic cooperation https://news.antiwar.com/2026/02/15/irans-deputy-foreign-minister-says-ball-is-in-us-court-to-reach-a-deal/
NO1 Daily digest: 2026-02-16 Iran war preparations at fever pitch. IRGC launched “Smart Control Exercise of the Strait of Hormuz” with live firing warnings. US has deployed 1/3 of its entire Navy near Iran including 2 carrier strike groups, 15 destroyers, ~600+ Tomahawk missiles. 163+ cargo flights from US to Middle East bases since Jan 15. F-35s and KC-135 tankers deploying from RAF Lakenheath today through France. Russia delivering Mi-28 attack helicopters to Iran in consecutive Il-76 cargo flights. Iran FM Araghchi heading to Geneva for IAEA talks Monday, US talks Tuesday. Iran says “submission before threats” not on the table. Trump told Netanyahu he’d support Israeli strikes on Iran’s missile program if no deal.
“We treat the Goyim like dogs, we don’t let them sleep” says Israeli minister Ben Gvir as he throws a grenade into a room of Palestinian hostages.
Israeli soldier admits to killing and rape in Gaza during livestream with US YouTuber In a live TikTok session with American YouTuber Jeff Davidson, the soldier said, “We don’t just kill, we also rape,” referring to actions carried out by Israeli forces against Palestinian children and women in Gaza.
In the livestream conversation, which took place during the war in Gaza but was only released recently, Davidson initially questioned the soldier about his identity and military affiliation. The man stated that he was a member of the Israeli army and broadcasting from within Gaza. https://english.palinfo.com/news/2026/02/15/357913/
No details disclosed: Israeli army closes dozens of cases involving killing of Palestinians inside torture camps
Tel Aviv delayed revealing news of the closed cases as it would open up soldiers to charges of war crimes in international courts https://thecradle.co/articles-id/35952
Israeli government approves proposal to register West Bank lands as ‘state property’ for 1st time since 1967
Proposal submitted by far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Justice Minister Yariv Levin, and Defense Minister Israel Katz https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israeli-government-approves-proposal-to-register-west-bank-lands-as-state-property-for-1st-time-since-1967/3830654
Israel’s West Bank annexation moves raise security alarm in Jordan
Amman fears a ‘soft transfer’ of Palestinians from the occupied territory, with experts warning it could trigger a ‘regional earthquake’ https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/why-jordan-fears-soft-transfer-west-bank-after-israeli-annexation-steps
Türkiye condemns Israel’s land registration move in West Bank
Ankara says Israel has no sovereignty over occupied Palestinian territories, calling decision ‘null and void’ https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/turkiye-condemns-israels-land-registration-move-in-west-bank/3830810
Israeli Attacks Kill at Least 12 Palestinians in Gaza
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, since the ‘ceasefire’ deal was signed, the IDF has killed 601 Palestinians in Gaza https://news.antiwar.com/2026/02/15/israeli-attacks-kill-at-least-12-palestinians-in-gaza/
Israel continues to block Gaza technocrats from entering strip as killings continue unabated
The High Representative of Trump’s Board of Peace claims the committee appointed to administer Gaza cannot begin its work until Israel’s ceasefire violations end https://thecradle.co/articles-id/35968
Indonesia readies up to 8,000 troops in first firm commitment to Gaza peacekeeping force https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-trump-prabowo-gaza-israel-peacekeeping-22185f61dd39e6f0c04f22bb541944da
The British Museum removes the name “Palestine” from its maps following pressure from pro-Israel groups https://english.palinfo.com/news/2026/02/15/357934/
Apple buys Israeli ‘pre-speech’ tech firm implicated in Gaza genocide The world’s second-largest tech company just acquired a military-linked Israeli startup that uses “facial skin micromovements” to anticipate what users will say before they speak. https://thegrayzone.com/2026/02/15/apple-buys-israeli-pre-speech-firm/
White House pressures Utah lawmaker to kill AI transparency bill https://endtimeheadlines.org/2026/02/white-house-pressures-utah-lawmaker-to-kill-ai-transparency-bill/
Dario Amodei just said the thing no one in tech wants to accept as true. The story everyone clings to about permanent human-AI partnership? It’s fiction. Comforting fiction we tell ourselves while the actual future takes shape around us. Amodei: “The ‘Centaur’ window could be very short.” Developer demand is exploding right now. Salaries competitive. Companies desperate for anyone who can harness AI effectively. Every visible metric suggesting the jobs adapted and survived. Every metric is wrong. This isn’t adaptation. This is the last breath before drowning.
Silver, rare-earths, diesel and clean water are already in shortage. Is he missing something? Elon Musk just said what no economist will: the entire system is about to break and nothing can stop it.
AI and robotics aren’t generating growth. They’re destroying the scarcity framework economics depends on. Musk: “It will hit us like a supersonic tsunami.” Production compounds exponentially. Money supply grows linearly. Productivity sustaining permanent double-digit expansion. Numbers that sound impossible becoming baseline. Not evolution. Replacement. Musk: “Prices collapse hard.” Not decline. Implosion. AI strips out labor costs, eliminates production errors, removes every inefficiency keeping goods expensive. Manufacturing anything approaches zero marginal cost while quality accelerates. Governments will react on instinct. Print money. Inject stimulus. Playbook designed for scarcity economies colliding with abundance they have no framework to understand. Musk: “GDP metrics are already meaningless.” Every economic model assumes constrained labor, limited output, gradual improvement. AI doesn’t work within those boundaries. It deletes them as variables. Production explodes. Central banks flood liquidity. Prices collapse regardless because physical abundance scales faster than any monetary intervention can match.
Surplus Energy Economics fundamentally disagrees with Elon. The end of growth There are times when the most important facts, though straightforward in principle, are simply too big, or too unpalatable, for general recognition.
This is one of those times. The Big Fact informing all of the sub-narratives of our age is that the global economy has stopped growing, and is starting to shrink.
We should swiftly dismiss all official or orthodox statistical claims to the contrary. GDP isn’t a measure of material value created in the economy, but of the transactional exchange of money in the system. Money routinely changes hands without value being added, and never more so than when most of the money in question has been conjured out of thin air as credit.
In reality, no form of money has any intrinsic worth. Obviously enough, we can’t eat fiat currencies, power our cars with cryptos, or sow our fields with precious metals. Rather, money is token, not substance – it commands value only as an exercisable claim on those physical products and services for which it can be exchanged... ..The authors of The Limits to Growth, published back in 1972, used the then-new technique of system dynamics to see this coming, and even gave us a pretty good steer on its probable timing.
None of this is palatable, of course, to a world so obsessed with “growth” that it disregards the obvious truth of Kenneth Boulding’s observation that only “a madman or an economist” could believe in the promise of infinite, exponential economic growth on a finite planet.
Over the past twenty years, material economic prosperity has increased by 25%, but huge rises in the stock of monetary claims have enabled statisticians to assert that the flow of economic activity measured as “real GDP” has more or less doubled (+96%, 2004-2024)... ..Since the real costs of energy-intensive necessities are rising, just as top-line prosperity inflects into contraction, the supposed “cost of living crisis” isn’t a temporary “crisis” but the emergence of a wholly predictable trend. This goes a long way towards an explanation of worsening internal political and social instability.
Washington, meanwhile, has awakened, belatedly, to the reality and consequences of material resource finality, an understanding that, we can reasonably infer, has long been grasped in Beijing and Moscow.
The breakdown of international trade – and its balkanisation into trading blocs and exclusion zones – becomes readily explicable if we once recognise the ultimate finality of the material, the impotence of the monetary and the technological, and the resultant intensification of competition for scarce and dwindling resources. https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2026/02/13/319-the-end-of-growth/
Andrew Korybko on the strategy to peel India away from Russia, China and Iran: India Might Soon Replace Russian Oil With Venezuelan At Scale After All
Simplicius, Munich Security Conference Evangelizes European War The Brussels nomenklatura and its attendant apparatchiks and media flacks are pushing war hysteria. The purpose of this is to make the Ukrainian conflict feel existential to Europeans to jawbone them into parting with their dwindling eurobucks for the sake of bleeding Russia as much as possible.
It’s not like this could be foreseen for 30 years... ‘No Prospect’ Of European Governments Preventing Civil War, Warns British Army Colonel Retired Colonel Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, has issued a stark warning about the trajectory of social cohesion in Europe and Britain...
..Kemp, who also served in counter-insurgency operations in Northern Ireland and held intelligence roles in Westminster and the Cabinet Office, emphasized the lack of political will to address what he termed the “Islamification” of the UK. “No government, the government now or any prospective government of the UK, has the guts to stop it,” he said. “If they want to take strong action to prevent the Islamification of the UK, it’s going to mean big trouble for them. They don’t want trouble, they look four years ahead, they will kick the can down the road to someone else.”
This political shortsightedness, according to Kemp, is fueling the risk of “civil war in Europe.” He described a potential scenario resembling Northern Ireland but on a far more intense scale, where “you have the indigenous British and some of the immigrant population and the British government all on three different sides fighting against each other.” https://www.zerohedge.com/political/no-prospect-european-governments-preventing-civil-war-warns-british-army-colonel
Germany, France Hold Secret Talks On Continental Nuclear Shield In Pivot From US https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/germany-france-hold-secret-talks-continental-nuclear-shield-pivot-us
Zelensky’s escape hatch: An emergency election could be his only option - The Ukrainian leader is apparently gauging support for a vote that he swore he’d never hold https://web.archive.org/web/20260213005050/https://www.rt.com/russia/632373-zelensky-election-referendum-plan/
In Latest Blow To Free Speech, German Courts Could Issue “Speaking Ban” Against Top AfD Politician German courts are currently deliberating whether leading Alternative for Germany (AfD) politician Björn Höcke could be hit with a “speaking ban” during a campaign event in the city of Lindenberg im Allgäu. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/latest-blow-free-speech-german-courts-could-issue-speaking-ban-against-top-afd-politician
U.S. House Judiciary Committee confirm that the EU interfered in 8 European elections. Slovakia (2023) The Netherlands (2023&2025) France (2024) Romania (2024) Moldova (2024 Ireland (2024&2025) These people talk about democracy 24/7.
Maybe an ECB digital currency could be invented... EU Bankers Call for Visa and Mastercard Alternatives According to ECB data cited by the Financial Times, American firms Visa and Mastercard now account for nearly two-thirds of all card transactions in the eurozone, while 13 EU countries have no national card schemes. Now, EU officials have issued a warning that an alternative medium must be deployed to counter US interference. As cash usage continues to decline, EU officials are suddenly alarmed that payment systems could be “weaponized” during a geopolitical conflict. https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/europes-current-economy/eu-bankers-calls-for-visa-and-mastercard-alternatives/
Big Business Has Pam Bondi Fire Trump’s Antitrust Chief
Trump Antitrust chief Gail Slater was mostly a failure, though kept some antitrust cases alive. Despite attempts to mollify corporate lobbyists, Pam Bondi fired her anyway. What happens now?
Ellison Scalp? DOJ Antitrust Head Departs, Possibly Fired Gail Slater was in charge of the antitrust division and a hawk on the mergers and acquisitions of Big Tech and Big Corporate media. As head of the DOJ Antitrust Division, Slater’s view on competition was against the interests of the major Big Tech billionaires and corporate media conglomerates who intersect with them.
Slater was in a position to influence the Warner Brothers-Discovery’s deal to sell the Warner Bros. studio and HBO to Netflix, which Paramount (David Ellison) is trying to stop.
If you have followed the influence of Larry Ellison (Oracle, TikTok) and his son David Ellison (Paramount, CBS) in/around the Trump administration as it relates to Elon Musk (a beneficiary of Ellison), then the timing of Gail Slater’s removal doesn’t look good at all.
Gail Slater came into the administration as a part of the JD Vance network (Peter Thiel, Palantir, etc.), and it looks like that same Vance network stood aside and watched Larry Ellison leverage his position to see her removed. https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2026/02/12/ellison-scalp-doj-antitrust-head-departs-possibly-fired/
The Las Vegas real estate market has languished in recent years. California Exodus Takes a Huge Leap Forward as Citizens Flock to Las Vegas to Avoid New Tax Hike https://www.westernjournal.com/california-exodus-takes-huge-leap-forward-citizens-flock-las-vegas-avoid-new-tax-hike/
Make electricity from cheap fuel and sell the more expensive fuels. Trump Orders Pentagon to Buy Coal. It’s an Energy Emergency President Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to purchase more coal-based electricity, drawing the U.S. military into his campaign to subsidize a heavily polluting fossil fuel that is struggling to compete in the marketplace. Trump announced the move at a White House event Wednesday where he also said his administration would spend taxpayer money to upgrade coal plants in four states. https://mishtalk.com/economics/trump-orders-pentagon-to-buy-coal-its-an-energy-emergency/
Meryl Nass MD, Rand Paul does have a bill that would get rid of the vaccine liability shield But there is only one cosponsor so far and no bill text yet
Dr. Nass, The proposed Farm Bill has been released today. Here is the important information about the pesticide protection provision (PPP) and what you can do! More on the rest of the bill later It says that no state or locality (no subdivision of a state) can impose “any requirement relating to the sale, distribution, labeling, application, or use of any pesticide or device that is subject to regulation” by the EPA Administrator.
The EPA Administrator currently is Lee Zeldin. I thought he was a Secretary, but he is not. He is the Administrator. In this bill, the buck stops at his feet.
The bill also says that FIFRA, the law that specifies how pesticides are regulated, “shall be applied to require uniformity of pesticide labeling nationally…” No state, subdivision of a state, or a court can, directly or indirectly, hold any entity liable for requirements that differ from the EPA label requirements.
Let me remind everyone that the term pesticide here refers to tens of thousands of chemicals and chemical mixtures that are registered by EPA, and whose manufacturers pay EPA yearly for this registration. These include fungicides, insecticides, rodenticides, virucides, herbicides and other pesticides. Antibiotics (bactericides) are included in some of the mixtures.
These products are regulated as single agents, a.k.a. active ingredients, and are not studied by the EPA as final formulations of (mostly) mixtures. This alone ought to negate the value of EPA review and registration.
Meryl Nass MD, Pesticide Protection Provision: Beating back the pesticide industry’s false narratives Since even the Members (R) were fed a bill of goods when the liability shield was being considered by the Appropriations cttee, we must anticipate and demolish the myths they will create about this.
Marian Laderoute Ph.D. explains that shedding of mRNA lipid nanoparticles can lead to their transfection of un-”vaccinated” persons and intergration into their DNA. New Early Data Implies Shedding by the Pfizer-BioNTech GENE Therapy Product May Promote Integration of Spike mRNA/cDNA Sequences Higher Risk Than What is Currently Thought for Genetic Modification of the Host Regardless of Vaccine Status
80% of transgender in teens will sort it out by age 26 without intrvention: UK’s Insane New Trans Guidance Says School Kids As Young As Four Can ‘Change Gender’ https://www.zerohedge.com/political/uks-insane-new-trans-guidance-says-school-kids-young-four-can-change-gender
High-Dose Vitamin C Cuts Death Risk from Stage IV Pancreatic Cancer by 54% and Doubles Survival Time
A randomized controlled trial found that adding 75g IV vitamin C to chemotherapy doubled median survival compared with chemotherapy alone — in one of the deadliest cancers known.
Engaging Human Health (pictured grandparenting today in San Antonio)
How about 'neither nor' but targeted strikes against the adversary. And not cream pies this time.
I am afraid that that is a better choice. "Put up your sword" was then. This is now.
'Professionalism' worked for the other team when they removed the key obstacle to their current seeming success. I refer of course to Lenin's call after realizing that nothing could be achieved otherwise.
Look up 'Church on the Blood' in St Petersburg, built after the 'removal' of Alexander the Second of Russia by the people in the remaining European palaces and, pardon my swearing, 'Parliaments' of today. At the time, he was the last bulwark against global Satanism prevailing but withering today. Try to look mainly at pictures because the little a and big lies told about that place since it was built to mark the place of the fatal wound are commensurate to the significance of that particular regicide to human history.
The site exudes power. It was built literally on the place where he died after a second bomb was thrown when he had exited his damaged carriage to help the innocent wounded.
Gird up thy loins!
"Albert Pike had promised his Masonic allies in Europe that they would have three world wars to consolidate the world power of the Canaanites. We have now seen two of those world wars, and, as promised, the first world war was to set up a Communist regime, the second world war was to raise it to the status of a world power, and the third world war is planned to destroy both Communism and Christianity in a great orgy of annihilation. This coming war is intended to be the final death knell of the people of Shem; after its conclusion the Canaanites will reign unchallenged throughout the world."
Eustace Mullins
The Curse of Canaan