Dumber and dumber.

Texas A&M brought a robot to a culture war to scan syllabi for “gender ideology.” Their censorship AI flagged Plato’s Symposium, a 2,400-year-old dialogue where the phrase “platonic love” comes from.

The administrators wouldn’t overrule their dumb robot. They told the professor to censor the classics and delete Plato or be reassigned to teaching MAGA hat tricks.

This is the whole story.

Texas spent years building a political brand around defending the classics of “Western civilization” against woke academics who don’t teach the classics anymore.

Then they built an enforcement robot to kill liberalism. The robot instead killed Plato because the robot can’t tell the difference between woke training and the foundational text of Western philosophy.

Neither can they.

That’s the deepest cut here. The “classical education” thing was all hat and never any cattle. Cultural signaling for people who never read books. Hillsdale markets their Great Books programs. The Texas Public Policy Foundation runs “Western Civilization Summits.” The political network meant to save the classics built the robot that red-flagged the Symposium, just because Aristophanes’ speech from thousands of years ago mentioned a third gender.

They are not hypocrites, because that requires knowing what you claim to value. These are cargo cultists. Their cowboy affectations, the “defend Western civ” rhetoric, the Great Books branding… all of it just big empty hats.

Tribal markers, without commitments.

The rattlesnake just ate itself.

The American government is spraying disinformation about Panama history in order to cover current crimes in Venezuela.

Some reporters foolishly repeat this disinformation and invert the actual sequence and legitimacy markers. Here’s an example from Politico:

The closest recent analogue for the Maduro prosecution is the trial of former Panamanian President Manuel Noriega, who was seized by U.S. troops in 1990.

No, no and no.

Invasion of Panama was condemned as illegal because it violated international law. But it used several obvious procedural markers of legitimacy: triggering events (American killed at a checkpoint), an elected president to install, stated limited objectives, actual withdrawal. Panama also lacked congressional authorization since Bush acted unilaterally. These are grains of truth being used to build the propaganda comparing it to Venezuela. The differences matter far more than the similarities. Congress subsequently acquiesced to Panama partly because of those legitimacy markers.

Venezuela has none.

Or to be more precise, Venezuela’s claimed justifications are all contradictions and self-destruct on contact: “law enforcement” meant a “War Department” bombs military bases, “not an invasion” is followed by “we now run the country to ‘rebuild’ the oil.” What’s the plan? The closest actual precedent is Hitler’s 1938 Lebensraum. The story can’t survive a single press conference because there is no coherent legal theory—only force.

“TAKE THE OIL,” [self-proclaimed Nazi] Fuentes posted on social-media app Telegram on Saturday. “THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE IS OURS.”

Venezuela uses the outcome of Panama (courts accepted Noriega’s prosecution after Delta Force failed to assassinate him) to justify skipping everything that gave Panama even its thin legitimacy. The reasoning becomes that courts won’t review how illegal custody was obtained, therefore any indictment at the end justifies any means of military action, even 1938 Nazi doctrine.

That’s not precedent, that’s laundering state crimes into military dictatorship. American media are taking the grain of truth (courts deferred) and stripping the context (why they deferred) to authorize something structurally opposite.

Opposite.

Think about what it means when opposites are presented by a government as the same. Inversion of meaning is definitional to fascist rhetoric.

The official etymology of “snow globe” from a 2024 arXiv paper about AI war games is “a simulated snowstorm contained in a glass orb, and by analogy this work is a simulated crisis self-contained in software”.

We introduce “Snow Globe,” an LLM-powered multi-agent system for playing qualitative wargames. With Snow Globe, every stage of a text-based qualitative wargame from scenario preparation to post-game analysis can be optionally carried out by AI, humans, or a combination thereof.

But let’s be honest, “snow job” is the better name, as vintage intelligence community slang for exactly what the arXiv paper is actually talking about: overwhelm a target with plausible-sounding material until they stop interrogating the premises.

The globe as the scope is comprehensive, it’s planetary. We are talking here about a paper describing a global disinformation machine that:

1. Takes 496 real historical crises as training data.
2. Generates “plausible” blends of fact and fiction by design.
3. Segments output by psychological persona type.
4. Treats confabulation as a core feature.
5. Runs thousands of automated iterations to optimize framing.

News flash (pun intended obviously), this does NOT describe an analyst training tool. It is a very fancy historiography fabrication engine. A mythology machine. An intelligence waffle iron.

It produces believable sounding precedents on demand, like historical analogies that feel authoritative but are computationally optimized to move specific audience segments toward predetermined conclusions.

Let me explain how this works in real life.

The nails-on-chalkboard contradictions about President Truman being spread all over the world right now serve as proof of concept. Within small targeted communities, targeted lies stick like peanut butter. The Trump operation spreads the following contradicting narratives all at the same time:

• MAGA frame: “Department of War is a title that restores founding strength, by reversing Truman for being too weak and woke”
• Constitutional conservative frame: “Truman was strong and brave, he did Korea without Congress, and the big man established precedent”
• Interventionist hawk frame: “We’re back to winning, like before the weak-kneed Truman messed it all up”
• Legal skeptic frame: “America in Panama 1989 was perfectly normal”

Yeah, what a mess. Internally, each frame is meant to be coherent, despite contradicting other frames. Collectively, it makes zero sense. It’s a “power” transfer model that bypasses the cognitive defenses of isolated communities.

The “snow job globe” performs computationally generated targeting of weighted personas from a crisis database. But I guarantee you that the algorithm cherry-picking Reagan invading Panama is not good at historical analysis. It’s a tell, like when an algorithm draws human hands with eight fingers.

Panama? Really? Let me be clear here, because I know this historiography is going to grow legs.

Panama was never an arrest operation. Delta Force were sent to kill Noriega ASAP, right after a dramatic prison breach. It was a full invasion of nearly 30,000 troops causing over 500 Panamanian deaths and widespread destruction from bombing. The guy who ordered the invasion, President Bush, ran the CIA when it had Noriega on their payroll ($200,000/yr) throughout the 1970s. The US indictment of Noriega was after their own operation of him, as he became politically inconvenient (e.g. refused to aid Contras). It was violent regime change (UN 44/240) that ended with a kangaroo court. The CIA used a show trial to cover themselves.

The Snow Globe algorithm is pattern-matching on the cover stories, not real history or the actual operations.

I see a retrieval system mining a crisis database, popping out what it incorrectly thinks is “likeliest” analogy for “regime change via arrest warrant.” Imagine an analyst typing police act… and the algorithm says “did you mean Panama?” It’s like the autocorrect concept has been pushed all the way into automation of autocratic aggression. What could go wrong?

The “open source” release is to legitimize this rushed AI methodology before anyone notices what has been deployed operationally. It’s the same pattern we saw with the torture memos. Publish the methodology in legitimate venues first. Then when the operation surfaces, the defense is “established practice.” Peer-reviewed literature shows up as bad stuff too-late-to-stop-now.

The OLC memos came out through official channels, got cited as “legal guidance,” and by the time anyone traced the circularity (DOJ asks DOJ if DOJ actions are legal, DOJ says yes), the practices were institutionalized. Snow Globe goes to same laundromat: IQT builds it, CIA tests it, Studies in Intelligence publishes it, and now the methodology has institutional provenance. Challenge it and you’re challenging “peer-reviewed research.”

Fabricated historical analogies clearly already leak into White House fact sheets (they can’t seem to get Truman right, let alone Roosevelt), and now all the laundered and targeted snow job machine work can plausibly be called “research outputs.”

Relevant Timeline:

• April 2024: arXiv paper drops, GitHub goes public. Academic legitimization.
• April 2025: CIA-IQT joint war game. Operational testing.
• September 2025: “Department of War” rebrand. Symbolic infrastructure deployed.
• December 2025: Studies in Intelligence publication. Institutional canonization.
• January 2026: Venezuela. Live fire.

We are looking at nine months from intelligence waffle iron “research collaboration” to airstrikes justified by contradictory historical framing targeting different constituencies.

The machine takes raw crisis data and stamps out shaped narratives from the same batter, using different molds for different consumers.

Their “persona” system clearly skips right past understanding psychology; it’s about setting up a topographical grid for carpet bombing. Pacifist, Aggressor, Tactician, Strategist aren’t analytical lenses. They’re targeting categories with an architecture that treats confabulation as the product, not the bug.

Snow Globe fabricates, then it iterates to improve fabrications. The paper says it can run “multiple iterations of fully automated games to anticipate possible outcomes.” That’s A/B testing at speed. The system is meant to rapidly learn what sticks to which audience, then optimize and information bomb the hell out of them.

Every LLM developer was being taught hallucination is bad, yet this system flips the entire script into weaponizing hallucination as if it’s magic agitation juice. The explicit statement that blending facts with fiction is “actually a benefit” isn’t a research finding. It’s a capability specification for snowing people around the globe.