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.
Panama 1990
Venezuela 2026
1988 indictment, Dec 1989 invasion
2020 indictment, NO invasion until Jan 2026
Nullified election to restore
NO democratic process, foreign military administration
Panama declared war on US
NO threat from Venezuela
US Marine killed at checkpoint
NO threat to US personnel
Months of sanctions, diplomacy exhausted
NO alternatives demonstrated
Elected president (Endara) sworn in
NO legitimate government allowed
“Restore democracy, protect canal”
NO democracy, “run the country, extract the oil”
US withdraws after transition
NO end, occupation announced
Invasion of Panama was condemned as illegal because it violated international law. But it used several obvious procedural markers of legitimacy: triggering events, 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:
Takes 496 real historical crises as training data.
Generates “plausible” blends of fact and fiction by design.
Segments output by psychological persona type.
Treats confabulation as a core feature.
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.
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.
One does not typically expect to find oneself arguing with a film’s color palette for Nazis. Yet here we are. A new Italian film isn’t making just a palette mistake, however, it’s systematically reconstructing fascism as its exact opposite.
Silvio Soldini’s Le assaggiatrici (2025) is based on Rosella Postorino’s bestselling 2018 Italian novel by the same name about Hitler’s food tasters at the Wolfsschanze. In German it’s titled Die Vorkosterinnen.
The book cover features a seductive red butterfly that obscures an Aryan model, as imposed red lipstick defines her identity. The red of Nazi ideology appears to be consuming her, in a book about forced consumption or death.
It has arrived to generally favourable notices. The performances are creditable. The tension is effectively sustained. The director has stated, in interviews with Deutsche Welle and elsewhere, that he prioritises “emotional truth” over historical precision, which seems like a defensible artistic position, and one that accounts for certain liberties taken with the source material.
What it does not account for is the film’s extraordinary disinformation decision to wash the entire Nazi apparatus in petrol (teal).
Chromatic History of National Socialism
Adolf Hitler was many things. Indifferent to visual propaganda definitely was not among them.
His very particular selection of red, white, and black for the visual identity of a Nazi was not accidental. Hitler addressed the question directly in Mein Kampf, explaining that Imperial German red was deliberately chosen for psychological impact. He wanted its association with revolution, its capacity to command attention, its physiological effect on the blood and nerves. The Nuremberg rallies were intentionally seas of red. The swastika banner was designed, by Hitler’s own account, to be impossible to ignore.
This was, one must acknowledge, a propaganda achievement from the lessons of WWI (e.g. Woodrow Wilson’s belief in spectacle as a weapon, leading to Edward Bernay’s publication of a propaganda bible). The Nazis understood from the last war, if not many before them, that militant power and rapid disruption comes not merely through argument but through aesthetic experience. The red was aggressive, confident, seductive. It promised antithesis, rupture, transformation. It stirred.
Historians have documented this extensively, leaving zero doubt. The visual architecture of fascism was Albert Speer’s Cathedral of Light, Leni Riefenstahl’s geometric masses of uniformed bodies, and most of all the omnipresent crimson banners.
1939 Nazi red banners contrasted sharply and covered everything, like the MAGA hat today. Source: Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The threat of burgundy covering Europe was not incidental to National Socialism but constitutive of it.
The Fiction of a Teal Reich
In Soldini’s film, none of this exists.
The SS uniforms, which on set were presumably some variant of field grey, have been color-graded into a cold greenish blue. This is what Europeans might call petrol, or an American teal. The train carriages are teal. The Wolfsschanze shadows are teal. The very air of occupied Poland appears to have been filtered through Caribbean seawater.
Americans thinking of azure blue vacations of peace and tranquility will be shocked to find this movie painting SS officers in the wrong palette.
Meanwhile, the women who are the victims, unwilling food tasters conscripted into service under threat of death, are dressed almost uniformly in burgundy and brown.
Warm tones. The color family of the swastika banner is applied to the victims, as if to invoke and rehydrate the Hitler propaganda of young beautiful Aryan women in danger. Even the protagonist’s name is Rose!
The shallow symbolic intention seems transparent: teal is meant to convey cold machinery of death versus flushed cheeks of red as a warm human vulnerability. Petroleum versus blood. It is the sort of color theory one encounters in undergraduate film studies seminars, and it is executed competently enough.
The difficulty is that it ends up ironically being fascist propaganda because it is precisely backwards.
Hitler Was an Inversion Artist
Consider what the audience is being taught.
A viewer encountering this film, especially the younger viewer for whom the Second World War is ancient history, absorbs the following visual grammar: Fascism is cold. Fascism is teal and grey and clinical. Fascism looks like a hospital corridor, or a Baltic winter, or an industrial refrigeration unit.
Die Vorkosterinnen depicts Nazi uniforms and machinery only in hues of teal. The SA literally were called “Brownshirts” when they seized power and destroyed democracy along with black-clad SS. An earth grey (erdgrau) shift was later during war.
False.
This is not what fascism looked like. It rose, in fact, as the exact opposite.
Source: “Hitler and the Germans” exhibit at the German Historical Museum, Berlin.
Fascism in Germany was always meant by Hitler to be red hot. It was his vision of Imperial red, white and black for stirring reactions and emotive attachment. It was torchlight and drums and the intoxication of abrupt mass belonging and sudden purpose. It was institutional drug and drink abuse to dispense rapid highs.
The Nazis did not present themselves as slow and precise, bureaucrats of byzantine rules. That was how they aspired to operate, but not how they recruited or actually functioned. They presented themselves as easy vitality, as rapid revolution, as blood and fire and national resurrection.
They were the cheap promise and marketing of Red Bull, Monster drink, 5 hour energy shot, not bowls of slow cooked hearty soup and vegetables with cream. “Fanta” was the Nazi division of Coca Cola, marketed like a Genozid Fantasie in a bottle.
Fanta was created by Coca-Cola to profit from Nazi Germany, avoiding sanctions. It was industrial food byproducts (apple waste, milk waste), marketed as a health drink using a word short for “fantasy”, because it was all about swallowing lies.
The women, meanwhile, would not have dressed in coordinated burgundy. They were rural conscripts and Berlin refugees. They wore what they had. But even setting aside questions of costume accuracy, there is something perverse about rendering victims in the color palette of the perpetrator’s own propaganda. Notably the women also are portrayed as the smoking, drinking and promiscuous ones, while the Nazis are falsely described as teetotalers.
This reversal is painful to see, as Nazis are played in the film as completely inverted to what makes Nazism so dangerous.
“Emotional Truth” and Its Discontents
Director Soldini has explained that historical precision matters less to him than achieving an emotional resonance. One sympathises with the artistic impulse to generate ticket sales. The film is definitely not a documentary, and accuracy is a burden that can produce its own distortions that don’t translate well to audience growth.
But “emotional truth” is not a free pass to rehydrate Nazism. If your emotional symbolism teaches audiences to look for the wrong visual signatures, if it trains them to associate fascism with cold clinical teal rather than seductive aggressive red, then your emotional truth is propagating a functional falsehood that is dangerous.
This disinformation risk matters far more today than it might have in 1995 or 2005. We are presently surrounded by political movements that borrow freely from the fascist playbook whilst their critics struggle to name what they are seeing. A large part of that struggle is visual.
People have been taught, through decades of erroneously toxic films like this one, that fascism is ugly, grey uniforms and clinical efficiency and cold industrial murder. It was not.
They have not been taught that it looks like rallies of red hats and the intoxication of belonging to something larger than oneself.
Every member of Huntington Beach City Council pose for a photo wearing red “Make Huntington Beach Great Again” hats at a swearing-in ceremony on 3 Dec 2024.
They have not been taught to recognize the aesthetic of hot, rapid seduction and “day one” promises of disruption.
Hollywood Teal
One must also note that Soldini is operating within a system. The teal-and-orange color grade has become so pervasive in contemporary cinema that it functions as a kind of default reference.
He pulled the visual equivalent of scoring every emotional beat with swelling orchestra strings. Teal is what films lean on for tension, ignoring the fact that many people dream of holidays in a typical Caribbean blue scene like a Corona ad.
This creates a particular problem for historical cinema. When every thriller, every dystopia, every prestige drama reaches for the same cool teal palette to signal “this is danger,” the color loses its actual meaning.
It becomes mere convention.
And when that convention is misleadingly applied to the Third Reich, it overwrites the actual chromatic signature of the period with a contemporary aesthetic that signifies nothing more than “this film is a color-by-number for cinematic bad things.”
The Nazis were not teal.
But teal is the reduced palette of what serious films dip into, so the Nazis get rehydrated as such. And viewers start embracing Nazism again while thinking the cool, calm drab good guys are the enemy (as targeted by hot-headed attention seeking rage lords).
White nationalist Nick Fuentes has said repeatedly the racist MAGA is the racist America First and that is exactly what he wants.
We Train Eyes to See the Train
One of the most annoying aspects of the film (SPOILER ALERT) is the director abruptly kills the Jew for trying to board the train of freedom. Of course in history the Nazi trains actually symbolize concentration camps, where anyone boarding faced almost certain death. Yet here’s a film that shows the inversion with trains as the freedom trail for the idealized Aryan woman working for Hitler, while the Jew was denied the ride.
The inspiration for the love story between Rosa and [SS leader] Ziegler stems from Woelk’s statement that an officer put her on a train to Berlin in 1944 to save her from the advancing Red Army, the armed forces of the Soviet Union. She later learned that all the other food tasters had been shot by Soviet soldiers.
That’s Nazi propaganda pulled forward, pure and unadulterated.
The love story in the film frames the SS leader as kind hearted savior, as he is shooting a Jew in the back so she couldn’t be liberated by approaching Allied soldiers, yet “saving” the Aryan girl by gifting her a rare spot on a Nazi train.
The film covers the protagonist’s hands in the blood of the Jewish woman murdered by her SS lover, blood she stares at on the train, perhaps to emphasize how the Swastika was believed to be a symbol of being lucky at birth. She lived to be 91 thanks to the SS, who made sure that a Jewish woman didn’t get a spot on that train, just a bullet in the back.
And just to be clear, Judenhilfe (hiding or even befriending a Jew) was a capital crime for years, eliminating all doubt by killing anyone who doubted. An Aryan woman caught running beside the Jewish woman she was helping and defending would not have been spared when a SS officer opened fire. In the worsening Nazism logic over time, and thus especially by 1945, it would be like a policeman shooting the passenger in a criminal getaway car and then offering the driver a can of gas.
There is a reason disinformation historians care about such visual culture. Political movements are recognised, and hidden, partly through their weaponization of aesthetics. The person who knows that fascism comes wrapped in red flags of instant vitality and promises of national greatness is better equipped to identify it than the person who has been taught to feel disgust for cool grey of law and order, to hate calm bureaucrats in clinical blue corridors.
Soldini’s film, whatever its other merits, trains eyes to see the exact wrong thing. The good guy palette in reality is flipped to evil, audiences are pushed to embrace the palette of Hitler’s violent hate.
Logical inversion (Murderous SS as loving saviors)
Soldini color-corrects and codifies fascism into something unrecognisable, antithetical. In doing so, it makes the real thing far harder to recognize correctly today when it flashes itself all around us, signaling as it always has.
The Spanish edition’s cover designer understood something Soldini didn’t. The RED APPLE is the focal point as the danger, the temptation, the poison risk. It sits against cool grey tones. The red is what threatens. The grey is the safety and institutional backdrop.
For forty years, gamers have treated Bowser’s name origin as if an unsolved mystery.
The official line from Nintendo is that it’s “unconfirmed.” Wikipedia likes to rest on “multiple competing theories.” The gaming press periodically revisits the question, shrugs, and moves on.
They’ve all been looking in the wrong direction.
Instead, in plain sight, the name has been confirmed not by Nintendo but by the people who actively avoided the name.
Hating on Korea
Mario’s nemesis in Japanese has always been called Kuppa, named by Shigeru Miyamoto after gukbap, a Korean rice soup dish. Miyamoto reportedly also considered naming him after yukhoe (raw beef) and bibimbap. The man liked references to Korean food as villainous.
When Super Mario Bros. was localized for the American market in 1985, someone at Nintendo of America decided that slights directed at Korea like “Kuppa” wouldn’t work for Americans. They needed another name for a villain, the fire-breathing turtle-dragon.
They chose “Bowser.”
Apparently, nobody wrote down why. Nobody filed a memo we can cite. The decision was made by a small team. Nintendo of America had roughly 35 employees at the time, no formal localization department, and was operating out of Redmond, Washington while frantically trying to launch the NES into a market still traumatized by the 1983 video game crash.
The Obvious Pop Villain
In 1985, if you were an American in your twenties working in entertainment-adjacent industries, there was a very specific cultural reference sitting in your mental inventory for “tough guy with a funny name.”
Bowzer.
Jon “Bowzer” Bauman was the breakout star of Sha Na Na, the nostalgia doo-wop group that had been inescapable in American pop culture:
Woodstock, 1969 (immortalized in the documentary)
The movie Grease, 1978 (massive hit)
The Sha Na Na TV variety show, 1977-1981 (syndicated for years after)
Bowzer’s whole act was a villain persona with the muscle shirt, the slicked-back hair, the theatrical sneer. The comedy he created was in the contrast: an intimidating figure performing sincere 1950s love ballads. The tough guy who sings love songs. The cruel kindness jokes, like saying he was told by his manager he’s not very nice, so he’s trying to prove him wrong by asking everyone to send get well cards to his hospital room.
Jon “Bowzer” Bauman
The spelling difference is notable. Localization teams routinely adjust spellings to avoid trademark issues or to make names feel more “natural” in the target language. Bowzer becomes Bowser.
The Negative Proof
Here’s where it gets interesting.
In 1993, Hollywood produced the infamous live-action Super Mario Bros. movie. Dennis Hopper played the villain. But in the film, he’s called “President Koopa” and never Bowser.
Why?
In an interview, screenwriter Parker Bennett explained the decision. They didn’t use “Bowser” because, and this is the key clue, it immediately brought to mind “the ’50s Sha Na Na guy.”
Boom.
This wasn’t research. This wasn’t something they had to look up. The association was reflexive. Instant. Obvious.
The filmmakers in 1993 knew exactly where the name came from. It was so obvious to them that they actively avoided it, worried the comedic association would undermine their (inexplicably serious) film.
Bowser no longer was cool, no longer was pop. A generation had passed.
If it was obvious to Hollywood screenwriters in 1993, it was obvious to Nintendo of America in 1985. The difference is that in 1985, someone saw the connection as a feature rather than a bug. A tough villain name with existing cultural resonance? Perfect. Ship it.
The Dismissal
I see some historians dismissed the Sha Na Na theory partly because “the trend of naming Mario characters after musicians hadn’t started yet.” This is terrible reasoning.
Conventions don’t emerge from nowhere. They start with individual decisions that later become patterns.
We know exactly how Nintendo of America’s localization worked in this era because we have documented cases from just a few years later. When Super Mario Bros. 3 was localized in 1990, a product analyst named Dayvv Brooks was tasked with naming Bowser’s seven children, the Koopalings.
Brooks, a former Tower Records employee and DJ, immediately reached for musicians:
Ludwig von Koopa (Beethoven)
Roy Koopa (Roy Orbison)
Wendy O. Koopa (Wendy O. Williams)
Iggy Koopa (Iggy Pop)
Lemmy Koopa (Lemmy Kilmister)
Morton Koopa Jr. (Morton Downey Jr.)
We only know this because someone tracked Brooks down in 2015 and asked him. He didn’t file a memo in 1990. There was no documentation. The knowledge existed only in his memory until a journalist finally thought to ask the right question.
Brooks wasn’t at Nintendo in 1985. But the method he used of reaching for pop culture references that “just fit”, clearly was part of how NoA approached localization. The Koopalings weren’t an innovation. They were a continuation.
Who Are You Going to Call?
The leading candidate is Howard Phillips.
Phillips was NoA’s fifth employee, starting in 1981 as a warehouse manager. By 1985, he had evolved into the company’s key liaison between Japanese developers and the American market. His job was explicitly to advise on what would resonate with US audiences — including, according to documented sources, advising on “the renaming of characters.”
Phillips was born in 1958. In 1985, he was 27 years old — exactly the demographic for whom Sha Na Na’s Bowzer would have been a vivid cultural reference. He was also, by all accounts, deeply immersed in pop culture and an avid consumer of entertainment media.
Has anyone ever directly asked Howard Phillips: “Did you name Bowser? Were you thinking of Sha Na Na?”
Phillips is still active. He does interviews about Nintendo history. He’s been asked about the NES launch, about Nintendo Power, about his role in rejecting the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 as too difficult for American audiences. He’s been asked about almost everything.
So? Bowser?
The Bowser is Bowzer
Here’s the most beautiful part.
Over forty years, Bowser evolved from a one-dimensional fire-breathing villain into the comedy shtick of a 1970s Bowzer:
The bumbling dad who genuinely loves kids
The hopeless romantic pining for his girl
The adversary who holds grudging respect
The antagonist whose menace is increasingly played for comedy
And in 2023, the apotheosis: Jack Black voicing Bowser in the Super Mario Bros. movie, sitting at a piano, singing a power ballad called “Peaches” about his unrequited love.
Jack Black as Bowser
It’s as Bowzer as Bowser can get.
The tough guy who sings love songs.
Whether or not anyone at Nintendo in 1985 consciously intended the reference, the character arc rhymes perfectly with its namesake. Bowser became Bowzer. The archetype was encoded in the name from the beginning.
If anyone reading this has contact with Howard Phillips, please ask:
“Did you name Bowser after Sha Na Na?”
The answer might finally close a forty-year-old case that was never actually mysterious. We just forgot to ask the right people the right question, to stop believing it is unknowable.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
