Category Archives: Security

History, Poetry, Security

Citrini AI Bear Porn is a Lesson in Helplessness

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A financial research piece called “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” went viral last week. Written as a fictional memo from the future, it describes AI destroying the white-collar economy in two years flat: 38% market crash, 10.2% unemployment, mortgage crisis, Occupy Silicon Valley. Six thousand likes. Fifteen hundred restacks. People are genuinely frightened.

The piece opens with this:

This isn’t bear porn or AI doomer fan-fiction. The sole intent of this piece is modeling a scenario that’s been relatively underexplored.

What a time to be alive and study disinformation.

The Preface is the Payload

Disinformation research has a name for this. The negation frame. When you say “I’m not saying the president is a criminal,” you’ve just put “president” and “criminal” in the same sentence and activated the association. The disclaimer doesn’t neutralize the content. It delivers the content while inoculating the speaker against accountability for having delivered it.

“This isn’t bear porn” is bear porn with a permission slip. “This is a scenario, not a prediction” is a prediction with a liability shield. The authors are financial researchers, not amateurs. They understand that four thousand words of precision-formatted panic — complete with fake Bloomberg headlines, specific ticker symbols, and a fictional 38% drawdown — land in the nervous system long before the reader processes the caveat.

This is the lesson disinformation doctrine learned from War of the Worlds and never forgot.

What War of the Worlds Actually Taught

Martin Seligman found in 1967 that dogs subjected to inescapable shocks eventually stopped trying to escape even when the door was open. He called it learned helplessness, the condition where a subject has been trained to believe that no action they take will change the outcome, so they stop acting. Orson Welles had demonstrated the broadcast version of the same trick much earlier.

On October 30, 1938, Welles broadcast a radio drama about a Martian invasion, formatted as a series of news bulletins. The format was the weapon. Listeners who tuned in after the opening disclaimer heard what sounded like real reporters describing real events.

Intelligence services studied Welles carefully. What they learned: you don’t need to lie. You need to perform authority in a format the audience already trusts, deliver an emotional payload, and attach a disclaimer that provides deniability. The content can be speculative or fictional. The format does the work.

“The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” is formatted as a CitriniResearch Macro Memo dated June 30th, 2028. It uses Bloomberg headline formatting with ticker symbols. It cites percentages to two decimal places. It references named companies, named products, named financial instruments. Every convention says: this is real financial analysis. The single line that says otherwise is buried in a preface most readers will barely remember by paragraph four.

The Irresistible Denial

Three negation frames in two sentences:

This isn’t bear porn or AI doomer fan-fiction. The sole intent of this piece is modeling a scenario that’s been relatively underexplored.

Each negation introduces exactly the concept it claims to reject. And “underexplored” positions the authors as brave truth-tellers rather than people producing the most viral AI panic content on Substack.

Then near the end:

We are certain some of these scenarios won’t materialize.

Which parts? They don’t say. Because specifying would break the spell. The vagueness of the hedge preserves the totality of the fear.

The Machine With No Operator

The format trick enables a more dangerous move: erasing human agency from every decision in the scenario.

The piece describes a “negative feedback loop” as though it were a thermodynamic process with no intervention point. But every link in that chain is a decision made by a person with a name and a title:

  • A board votes to cut 15% of headcount rather than retrain, redeploy, or reduce shareholder returns.
  • A procurement manager cancels a vendor contract for an untested internal build.
  • A CEO funnels all cost savings into compute rather than worker transition.
  • A bank continues underwriting against income assumptions it knows are impaired.
  • A regulator declines to update employment protections.
  • A legislator blocks transition support.
  • A lab ships capability without deployment guardrails.

The piece names none of these people. Instead: “The companies most threatened by AI became AI’s most aggressive adopters.” Companies don’t adopt anything. Executives adopt things, boards approve them, shareholders reward them. Each decision has a fiduciary duty attached and a legal framework governing it.

Then the alibi:

What else were they supposed to do? Sit still and die slower?

That converts choices into a hostage situation. It says these executives had no agency. This is the competent complicity defense — the same logic used after the 2008 mortgage crisis and the Boeing 737 MAX. Capable professionals executing decisions they knew would cause harm, pointing to competitive pressure as exoneration. “What else were they supposed to do?” isn’t analysis. It’s an alibi.

Who Benefits from Helplessness

War of the Worlds didn’t just scare people. It made them feel helpless against a force they couldn’t negotiate with, couldn’t vote out, couldn’t hold accountable. The Martians weren’t making decisions. They were an event happening to humanity.

The Citrini piece does the same with AI. The feedback loop has no off switch because no human hand is on any switch. This is the atmosphere specific actors need:

  • Compute owners need inevitability because it makes regulation seem pointless.
  • Lab executives need it because unstoppable forces absolve them of deployment decisions.
  • Deregulation politicians need it because you don’t regulate an earthquake — you build shelters after.
  • AI-sector financial analysts need it because “AI destroys the economy” means “AI is the most important thing in the world,” which is the thesis their publication depends on.

The piece describes protesters blockading Anthropic and OpenAI, then frames them as a symptom of social breakdown rather than people responding rationally to identifiable decisions by identifiable executives. The format performs concern. The structure delivers inevitability. That isn’t analysis. It’s marketing with a furrowed brow.

The Panic About the Panic

Final parallel. The mass panic of 1938 was largely a myth. Most listeners understood it was fiction. But newspapers ran the panic story for weeks because they had a competitive interest in discrediting radio as a news medium. The real story wasn’t gullible listeners. It was an industry using manufactured fear to protect its position.

Same structure now. The piece goes viral. People get scared. The fear becomes the news. And the people positioned to benefit — compute investors, lab executives, AI-sector analysts — gain leverage from an atmosphere where displacement feels like destiny rather than a series of decisions they are actively making.

The question was never whether AI will destroy the white-collar economy in two years. The capabilities aren’t there — a Mag7 engineer in the piece’s own comments says as much. The question is whether identifiable people making identifiable decisions will be held accountable for the displacement they choose to cause, or whether they’ll hide behind a narrative formatted to look like expertise, disclaimed to look like a thought exercise, and designed to make you feel like there’s nothing you can do.

The machine isn’t in charge. The people building it, shipping it, and profiting from it are making choices. They’d prefer you believe otherwise.

Orson Welles, at least, had the decency to be making art. As Bertolt Brecht put it in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui:

Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.

Energy, Sailing, Security

Flexible Wings Reduce Energy Drain for UAV

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A team from Southampton, Edinburgh, Tokyo, and Delft just published a paper in npj Robotics demonstrating a soft underwater wing that senses its own deformation and uses that signal to reject flow disturbances autonomously.

The wing uses a liquid-metal capacitive e-skin. Six EGaIn electrodes in silicone produce nine capacitance signals to estimate its camber in real time. When a sudden gust hits, the wing’s flexibility causes a characteristic shape oscillation. The controller detects that signature and hydraulically morphs the wing to compensate.

The result is an 87% reduction in unwanted lift impulse compared to a rigid wing, using nothing more than a proportional controller and threshold-based detection.

What matters here is the design philosophy. The softness is the sensing mechanism. Deformation under fluid load becomes the primary signal for disturbance detection, the same way fish fin rays and bird feather mechanoreceptors work. The passive compliance of the material handles baseline gust mitigation on its own (three times better than rigid), and active camber control mops up the residual bias. They call it hybrid passive-active disturbance rejection, and it performs roughly twice as well as a barn owl’s gust-rejection maneuver, with the caveat that cross-domain comparisons are imprecise.

The implications for personal submarines and long-range UAVs are immediate. Underwater vehicles burn enormous energy on thruster-based station-keeping in currents — compliant control surfaces that passively absorb disturbances while actively trimming residual error could extend operational range significantly.

The e-skin is body-shape agnostic, meaning it can wrap around different fin geometries without redesigning the sensor architecture. The current limitation is actuator speed (1.7-second rise time on hydraulic), which the team’s follow-on ICRA 2026 work addresses with a formal disturbance observer.

The real story here is when you let the structure do the sensing instead of bolting instruments onto rigid frames, you get embodied intelligence that scales naturally with the problem it’s trying to solve.

Energy, History, Security

Defamation as Dispossession: Big Oil Uses Courts to Censure Nation and Greenpeace

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A North Dakota judge just finalized erasure of Native American rights with an absurd $345 million judgment. It claims to be against Greenpeace for, among other things, defamation of Energy Transfer during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. The defamation finding is bullshit. It rests on two very political and narrow claims the jury decided: that the pipeline crossed Standing Rock Sioux tribal land, and that DAPL personnel desecrated sacred burial grounds.

Read that again.

The defamation verdict requires the court to rule that Indigenous people’s own claims about their land and sacred sites are not just disputed but demonstrably false because the billionaire white men of Big Oil say so.

That’s 1800s disinformation at work in 2026.

Erasure Mechanism

The Standing Rock Sioux’s position that the pipeline crosses their land is grounded in the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, which established boundaries the federal government subsequently ignored.

Whether the pipeline “crosses tribal land” depends on a legal framework you recognize. Do you believe in the treaty that the United States signed, or in the illegal seizures that followed?

The burial ground claim reflects what tribal members themselves reported about construction disturbance to sacred sites — reports that prompted challenges to the Army Corps of Engineers’ own environmental review as inadequate.

Greenpeace didn’t fabricate these claims. They amplified what Indigenous people were saying about their own land, their own treaties, their own sacred places. To find those statements “demonstrably false,” the jury had to accept Energy Transfer’s legal framework as the only valid one — ruling the tribe’s understanding of their territory out of existence as a prerequisite for the verdict.

The people whose dispossession created the underlying dispute got erased twice: first from their land, then from the factual record.

Oil Fumbled and Dropped the Ball to Win the Match

Energy Transfer quietly withdrew all defamation claims related to Greenpeace’s water and climate statements before trial. The core environmental and public health arguments that motivated the entire protest — the reason thousands of people showed up — were too defensible to take before a jury. What remained were narrower claims about treaty boundaries and burial grounds, reframed as simple factual falsehoods rather than the contested historical and legal disputes they actually are.

Energy Transfer’s former CEO Kelcy Warren fought to avoid deposition entirely, and the company argued that pipeline safety documents were “patently irrelevant” once they dropped the water and climate claims. Strip away the substance of the dispute, leave only the claims you can win by denying Indigenous legal standing, and call it defamation.

$50 Million Charge for a UN Report

The judgment includes tens of millions of dollars against Greenpeace International for co-signing a letter with over 500 other organizations that echoed findings from United Nations reports. The UN recognized the Indigenous position. Hundreds of organizations recognized it. A jury in Morton County, North Dakota — where the pipeline is critical infrastructure — said it was all false anyway.

Greenpeace International’s entire involvement in the on-the-ground protests amounted to six employees visiting the camps. Their real offense was lending institutional credibility to Indigenous claims that Energy Transfer needed erased.

SLAPP Architecture

North Dakota has no anti-SLAPP statute. There was no procedural mechanism to challenge the reframing of contested historical claims as defamation before it reached a jury. Energy Transfer’s first attempt was a federal RICO lawsuit — the statute designed to prosecute organized crime — which a federal judge dismissed in 2019, stating the evidence fell “far short.” So they refiled in state court with state law claims, in a jurisdiction where the pipeline moves 40% of North Dakota’s oil production.

That structure is textbook aggression: use a legal system that lacks procedural safeguards, in a venue with maximum structural bias, to convert political speech into tortious conduct. Greenpeace has countersued in the Netherlands under the EU’s anti-SLAPP Directive — the first test of that law — because the American system provided no defense against the strategy.

The Actual Verdict

Defamation doctrine distinguishes between statements of fact and expressions of opinion or rhetorical hyperbole. Protest speech has historically received strong protection precisely because reasonable listeners understand it as advocacy, not factual reporting. This verdict collapses that distinction entirely.

But the deeper problem isn’t doctrinal. It’s that the entire defamation finding is constructed on a foundation of Indigenous erasure. You can only call “this pipeline crosses tribal land” a false statement of fact if you’ve already decided that tribal land claims don’t exist. The 1851 treaty doesn’t count. The tribe’s understanding of their own territory doesn’t count. The UN’s recognition doesn’t count. Only Energy Transfer’s title, derived from the very dispossession being protested, counts.

Defamation law became the instrument for completing what the pipeline started.

The land was taken.

Now the right just to admit the truth and say it was taken has been priced by an American court at $345 million.

Security

The Four Horsemen of Iran Strikes: Annexation, Crusade, Rapture, and Oil

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On February 28, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran. Explosions across Tehran. Airspace closed. Cell signals cut. Israel declared a state of emergency and called it a “preemptive strike.” Two U.S. officials told NBC the strikes are “significant” and “not small.”

Nobody can say what the objective is. That’s because the people running this war have three different objectives, and none of them are the one being stated publicly.

The Money

Miriam Adelson gave Trump $100 million for the 2024 campaign — more than Elon Musk. Her late husband Sheldon publicly called for nuking Iran at Yeshiva University in 2013: detonate a bomb in the desert, then tell Tehran the next one lands on them. Miriam continued the family’s political investment without changing the thesis. She reportedly conditioned her support on Trump recognizing Israeli annexation of the West Bank — ending any prospect of a Palestinian state permanently. Her spokesperson denied the quid pro quo. Her longtime confidant Rabbi Shmuley Boteach confirmed she opposes any Palestinian state.

At a White House Hanukkah reception in December 2025, Adelson told Trump she’d spoken with Alan Dershowitz about “four more years” and offered him “another $250 million” to run for a third term. As Haaretz reported:

[Adelson] really wants from Trump’s second term is an Israeli annexation of the West Bank and a U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty in all the regions of the land.

The Adelsons have sent approximately $600 million in political contributions to support Trump’s three presidential campaigns and Republican races since 2015. That’s not a donation. That’s a controlling stake.

The Theology

The Secretary of Defense has “Deus Vult” tattooed on his arm — “God wills it,” the battle cry of the First Crusade. He has a Jerusalem Cross on his chest. He wrote a book called American Crusade. He belongs to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a Christian Reconstructionist denomination whose goal, as religious studies professor Julie Ingersoll describes it, is “to reestablish biblical law as the standard for society.”

In 2018, speaking at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Hegseth said:

There’s no reason why the miracle of the re-establishment of the Temple on the Temple Mount is not possible.

Building a third Jewish temple on the Temple Mount requires destroying Al-Aqsa Mosque — Islam’s third-holiest site. As scholar Matthew Taylor noted,

That is grounds for an interreligious World War III.

Hegseth told the Israeli audience to take advantage of Trump being in office because there were “true believers” in Washington who would back them. He used the biblical names “Judea and Samaria” for the West Bank, endorsing Israeli settlement and annexation as preconditions for messianic events. Facts on the ground, he said, “truly matter.”

This is the man running the Pentagon as bombs fall on Tehran.

The Prophecy

For many in Trump’s evangelical base, war with Iran is not a policy failure or a strategic risk. It is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel with its claimed 30 million members, told Fox News that Trump was uniquely suited to pursue a “biblically mandated policy of cutting down Israel’s enemies.” Mike Evans, founder of Friends of Zion, cited Genesis 12:

I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you.

Mike Huckabee, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, texted Trump before the June 2025 strikes:

God saved you in Butler, Pennsylvania, to be the most consequential president in a century, and perhaps ever.

He compared Trump to Truman in 1945 — the president who dropped nuclear bombs on Japan. He told Trump to listen to God’s voice and said he would “hear from heaven.”

Trump posted the text publicly, then ended his address after the June strikes by thanking God first and the military second.

The dispensationalist theology driving this is straightforward: the repatriation of Jews to Israel and their subsequent conversion to Christianity are pivotal signs that the end times are at hand. Netanyahu’s vision of greater Israel supplies the glide path to Final Judgment. Iran, identified with the biblical Persia in Ezekiel’s prophecy, must be defeated for the sequence to advance. As evangelical author Greg Laurie wrote after last year’s strikes, “This is biblical foreshadowing.”

Israel named its June 2025 operation “Rising Lion” from Numbers 23:24:

The people shall rise as a great lion… he shall not lie down until he eats of the prey, and drinks the blood of the slain.

Netanyahu placed a handwritten note at the Western Wall quoting the verse before ordering the strikes.

Diana Butler Bass, a religious historian who grew up in this tradition, wrote after the June strikes:

I absolutely know that Trump’s evangelical and Pentecostal supporters — the core of MAGA — are cheering. Bombing Iran secures Trump’s status as God’s man, the one sent to fulfill the prophetic promises that lead to the return of Jesus.

These people are not on the fringe. They are the base. They are in the Pentagon, the embassy in Jerusalem, and the White House. And they believe this morning’s explosions in Tehran are God’s work.

The Self-Renewing Justification

In June 2025, Trump announced that U.S. strikes had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity. By January 2026, satellite imagery showed reconstruction at Natanz and Isfahan. By February, Trump told Congress that Iran was “starting it all over again.” The IAEA disputed the original claim.

So the same targets get hit again under the same justification. If you already obliterated the nuclear program and it came back, then strikes don’t solve the stated problem. They create a recurring revenue model for military operations. The justification regenerates itself because the objective was never achievable by the means employed.

This is the Russia-Syria template. Russia framed its Syria intervention as counter-ISIS but functionally destroyed the opposition and preserved Assad. Russia bombed during Geneva peace talks — repeatedly — using negotiations as timing cover, not as an alternative to force.

Same architecture here. Geneva talks making “significant progress” according to Oman’s mediator. Technical discussions scheduled for Vienna next week. Strikes launched anyway. The talks were the clock, not the path.

The Restraint Cycle Is Broken

Last June, Iran gave the U.S. advance warning before retaliating at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. A choreographed off-ramp. This time, Iran has signaled it will fight “in a much less constrained manner than before.” Iran’s UN ambassador declared “all bases, facilities and assets of the hostile force in the region” are legitimate targets.

Iran’s shorter-range missile arsenal was largely untouched by last year’s strikes. U.S. bases in Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain are closer and easier to hit than Israel. The two carrier strike groups in the Gulf provide what one analyst called a “target-rich environment.” The massive buildup designed to project power also concentrates vulnerability.

No Authorization

Congress was scheduled to vote on war powers resolutions next week. Those votes are now retroactive to a war already started. As NPR’s David Sanger noted, Trump didn’t even mention congressional authorization in his State of the Union. A preventive war — striking to prevent a future capability rather than responding to an imminent threat — has generally been considered illegal under the rules of just war. But legality requires someone to enforce it.

The administration itself can’t agree on what it wants. JD Vance thinks he sounds smart when he self contradicts:

We’re not at war with Iran, we’re at war with Iran…’s nuclear programme.

Trump posted:

If the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!

Thune says regime change is the only worthwhile objective. Tillis wants another bombing raid. Hegseth wants to rebuild the temple. Huckabee wants the Second Coming.

The Quiet Beneficiary

In January, I wrote that Trump’s Iran threats functioned as coercive arbitrage — creating supply instability to push oil companies toward Venezuelan investment. Iran covers 4% of global oil demand. Venezuela covers 1%. Destabilize the 4% to unlock the 1%. The Strait of Hormuz carries 25% of global oil. Disruption pushes prices toward $120/barrel, transforming Venezuela’s massive infrastructure investment from marginal to essential.

That mechanism doesn’t disappear with actual strikes. It accelerates. Every bomb on Iranian infrastructure is an argument for Western Hemisphere energy investment that no sales pitch could make. And once oil companies commit billions to an unstable regime, they become dependent on continued U.S. military presence to protect those assets. The trap closes.

Trump said yesterday he isn’t concerned that strikes would raise oil prices. “I am concerned about people’s lives.” This from the man who told Iran’s protesters to “keep protesting” while his administration was killing people in ICE operations at home.

A War Without an End

A war without a defined objective is a war that never has to justify stopping. “Remove Iran’s nuclear threat” is infinitely elastic. You can’t prove a negative. You can destroy facilities and they rebuild. The objective exists to authorize force, not to constrain it.

But the deeper problem is that the actual objectives of Adelson’s annexation, Hegseth’s temple, Hagee’s prophecy, the oil arbitrage are not objectives that can be stated, debated, or voted on.

They operate beneath the nuclear justification like an engine beneath a hood. The stated reason and the actual reason have fully decoupled.

And there is the oldest reason of all. The DOJ spent months surgically withholding FBI documents showing what Trump did to a 13-year-old girl at Mar-a-Lago. The files came out anyway. A war buries what a cover-up couldn’t. Barry Levinson made this film in 1998 and called it Wag the Dog — a president fabricates a war to distract from a sex scandal involving a minor. That was satire. This is Saturday.

The United States is only isolated in this war. As Al Jazeera’s analysis noted, unlike Bush in 2003, Trump has no coalition. The UK refused to let the U.S. use its air bases. Only Israel is fully on board — because for Netanyahu, American firepower serves Israeli territorial ambitions, and for the evangelical base, Israeli territorial ambitions serve the prophecy.

Iran has spent 40 years preparing for exactly this fight. The terrain favors defense. The force ratios required for regime change dwarf anything currently deployed. The Strait of Hormuz gives Iran escalation options that could crater the global economy overnight.

Trump has started a war he can’t define, against a country he can’t occupy, with objectives he can’t articulate, on authorization he doesn’t have, all by design.

The people who actually want this modern day holy war want things that can’t be said out loud: annexation, crusade, rapture, and oil. The last time America went to war in the Middle East on false premises, it took twenty years and two trillion dollars to leave with nothing.

Iran is three times the size, three times the population, and has been preparing while waiting.