“It is easy to see where North America stands at present, and whither it is tending. Its rapid progress, due to the most degrading works, has fascinated Europe; but the results of this progress, exclusively material, already appear. Barbarism, profligacy, general bankruptcy, systematic destruction of the native races, idiotic slavery of the conquerors, bound to the most trying and repulsive of lives under the yoke of their own machinery. America might founder in the ocean once for all, and the human race would suffer no loss thereby. Not a saint, not an artist, not a thinker has it produced, unless one may term thought the aptitude for twisting iron for the construction of freight trains. The priests who wear out their lives there cannot create a civilization. Thus far there is no civilization in America, and as far as appearances go, there never will be.”

~ Louis Veuillot, French writer & politician (1813 – 1883), L’Univers

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1. ⚰️ Veuillot’s Eternal Curse 🕯

Louis Veuillot looked westward & saw not a culture in its springtime but a din,

A hammering.

He wrote of America not as though it were an adolescent nation…

On its way to greatness… but as though it were already spent, already hollow.

He heard the noise of railroads being laid, bridges thrown up, factories roaring,

& he recognized the sound for what it was:

A workshop insisting that it was a Civilization.

& he laughed at the idea, though not with joy…

More with the resignation of someone who has seen enough to know…

That no miracle will arrive.

Some people later brushed him off as just another European elitist,

Sneering at the rough frontier.

But there’s something in the texture of his writing,

A tone that isn’t quite contempt, more like weary amusement.

He didn’t hate America; he pitied it. Or maybe he pitied the delusion:

He pointed out that here was a land quick with tools & quick with trade,

But incapable of producing the higher figures…

The saint whose life gathers people into memory,

The poet whose words endure,

& the thinker who ties the moment to eternity.

Without those, the noise would remain just noise.

It’s worth asking what sort of heroes America actually gave itself.

Not saints or prophets, nor even philosophers who could shape the depths of a people.

Instead: The pioneer, the hustler, & the industrialist;

Achetypes obsessed with motion & appetite.

Useful, yes… men who could build railroads or squeeze profit out of steel.

But not the kind of figures who consecrate.

Nor the kind who can leave ruins worth remembering.

Think now of September 11…

Two towers collapsing into dust, not ruins:

They weren’t temples in the way that Rome left temples, or Athens left columns.

They were office blocks, filled with paper,

Computers, staplers, coffee cups, human lives… all gone in smoke.

What lingered afterwards wasn’t the solemn grandeur of a ruin…

But the fluttering of memos drifting over the streets,

Fragments of a bureaucracy scattered like leaves.

It looked, more than anything, like the inside of a filing cabinet…

That had been overturned in a storm.

& in that image, you can hear Veuillot’s whisper:

This was never a Civilization to begin with.

The line people remember (you were dead before you began) feels cruel,

But only because it fits.

A workshop can grow louder, richer, & cover more ground.

It can dazzle with size…

But it cannot give birth to the kinds of souls that make history…

Into something more than machinery & soulless materialism.

At the end, all it can leave behind are broken tools, heaps of dust,

& the fading echo of its own racket.

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2. 🏭 The Machine Triumphant 🩸

By the Time the twentieth century began,

America had built up enough noise to convince itself it was greatness.

The newspapers filled with breathless accounts of railroads cut through forests,

Bridges spanning rivers like threads of steel,

& new cities springing up where the prairie grass had barely been broken.

Everything moved faster, everything grew taller,

& for a while, sheer motion was treated as proof of destiny.

If the skyline continued to climb higher each year,

Surely history was unfolding correctly.

Yet motion isn’t meaning:

A machine can spin endlessly without producing a single vision.

The mythology followed the same rhythm.

The pioneer trudging westward,

The self-made man climbing out of poverty,

The tycoon boasting about iron, oil, & rail…

They were celebrated as emblems of freedom,

But what they really embodied was appetite… appetite disguised as virtue.

Civilizations are usually remembered for the figures they raise up as exemplary:

Rome had its jurists, Christendom its saints, Greece its poets.

America raised up its hustlers & its magnates,

Men whose genius consisted of conquering land or bending steel into profit.

It is telling that the most sacred names in its political catechism…

Became the “Founding Fathers,”

Merchants & lawyers whose legacy was paperwork rather than prophecy.

The noise of industry drowned out what little Silence remained.

A locomotive shrieked across the plains & was praised as a hymn.

A skyscraper clawed at the sky & was treated like a temple.

A factory doubled its output & people nodded as though culture had advanced.

The nation mistook the glare of its lights for illumination,

& in doing so convinced itself that it had discovered a destiny.

Yet no lamp glows forever.

Behind the brightness, the shadows grew only deeper.

One can see it most clearly in the way America spoke about itself.

Progress was the favourite word… progress in size, speed, & wealth.

But progress toward what?

To move faster & higher isn’t the same as to move toward a destination.

The very restlessness that fueled expansion revealed the emptiness at its core.

Each conquest of land, each new patent or industrial marvel…

Only delayed the question.

& Motion became the only answer it could give.

Veuillot’s sneer comes back here:

He said America was a workshop, & what else could it have been?

A place that could assemble tools, replicate parts, & keep the machines turning…

But a workshop isn’t a temple.

It doesn’t sanctify, nor does it remember.

It consumes raw material & spits out product,

& when the floor is cluttered with waste, it sweeps it aside & keeps going.

Such was the nation’s vision of itself.

Not a culture ripening into maturity, but a mechanism grinding ever faster,

Hoping that noise alone would Silence doubt.

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3. 🏙 Empty, Hollow Towers 🩸

On the morning of September 11, the towers came down,

& the world spoke of shock, of rupture, of history turning on its axis.

But if One looks carefully at the images…

The smoke curling upward, the endless sheets of paper fluttering through the sky…

like some obscene snow…

What stands out isn’t grandeur but emptiness.

These weren’t temples brought low,

Not ruins that could stir reverence centuries later,

But office blocks collapsing into dust:

File cabinets, broken chairs, computer monitors, & human bodies.

Rubble rather than relics.

& rubble doesn’t speak; it only lies there until it is carted off.

For a brief moment, the country insisted the day had revealed something new,

That innocence was lost, that the world had suddenly changed.

But innocence isn’t lost when it never existed.

What the cameras captured wasn’t the destruction of a Civilization at its height…

But the unmasking of a façade that had been hollow from the beginning.

The towers were symbols of commerce, of finance, of numbers flowing across screens,

& when they collapsed, they revealed themselves for what they had always been…

Scaffolding filled with paper.

Civilizations that fall leave behind monuments that command Silence:

Rome’s broken aqueducts,

The shattered stones of Athens,

The cathedrals blackened by centuries of smoke…

These endure as reminders of a greatness that once lived.

They decay, but their ruins still hold shape.

What New York revealed that morning was something else:

Structures that were never more than functional,

Built to dazzle only in height & shine, without depth, without sanctity.

& when they failed, they left nothing but dust clouds & the smell of burnt plastic.

The spectacle was consumed instantly:

Television repeated the collapse again & again,

Until the event was less a tragedy than a performance.

People spoke of it in sacred tones, yet the ritual was hollow:

Flags waved, hymns played, & speeches promised vengeance.

No new covenant was born.

What happened instead was that death itself became a kind of content,

The replay looped endlessly until the images lost their sting…

& became part of the background hum.

In this sense, the towers didn’t so much fall as dissolve into the circuitry of the feed,

Their meaning flattened into pixels.

& perhaps this was Veuillot’s curse written in fire:

A workshop can produce height & shine, but not memory.

A machine can roar, but it cannot pray.

America mistook the roar for transcendence,

& on that morning, the roar ended in Silence.

The towers were empty before they fell.

Their collapse wasn’t the death of a Civilization,

But the confirmation that no Civilization had ever stood there in the first place.

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4. 🪦 The False Funeral 🪶

What followed the collapse wasn’t mourning but a pageant,

A liturgy of flags & slogans stitched together at speed,

As though a nation could drown out the sight of dust with the sound of brass bands.

The dead had barely been counted before they were turned into symbols,

Draped in red, white, & blue, paraded across screens…

In an endless procession of talking heads & candlelight vigils.

Mourning requires Silence, but Silence is unbearable to a machine.

So noise rushed in… hymns sung off-key at stadiums,

Choruses of politicians promising vengeance, news anchors choking up on cue.

A funeral without sanctity, staged for the cameras,

Replayed until grief itself felt scripted.

The rituals were thick with words about unity,

But unity imposed by spectacle is brittle.

Beneath the surface, the fault lines only widened.

Those who questioned the pageantry were cast as traitors;

Those who asked why the towers had fallen…

Were drowned in accusations of conspiracy or disloyalty.

The nation didn’t mourn; it mobilized.

The funeral turned into a rally, & the rally became a war.

The corpse was never left to rest;

It was hoisted onto the podium, forced to speak in favour of the empire.

In that sense, the “post-9/11 world” wasn’t born on that September morning,

But in the weeks that followed, when grief hardened into performance.

Flags unfurled on every porch, bumper stickers shouted defiance,

& the dead became a permanent backdrop for political theatre.

No One asked what it meant…

That the temples of commerce had been reduced to rubble,

Because the answer was too dangerous:

It meant they had never been temples at all.

Better to call them holy, better to call the ruins sacred ground,

Better to build a shrine to emptiness than admit the truth.

Civilizations that truly mourn build cathedrals, compose requiems,

& carve memory into stone.

What America built that day was a brand:

“Ground Zero” became a logo,

A phrase that carried with it both solemnity & merchandise.

The very act of naming the place gave away the emptiness of the gesture: not a temple,

Nor even a monument, just a zero, a hole in the ground.

& around that absence, the rituals multiplied,

Each One louder than the last, each One less capable of touching the reality of loss.

Veuillot’s curse hung over it all:

A workshop cannot mourn; it can only repurpose.

The nation took the corpses of the towers & fed them into its machine,

Grinding them into slogans, campaigns, invasions.

What might have been Silence was filled with the roar of engines heading east,

Carrying soldiers who would become the next set of bodies in the cycle.

The funeral was a sham because it was never meant to end in eternal rest;

It was meant to keep the machine turning.

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5. 💣 The Wars of Iron ⚔️

The wars that followed were never holy.

They weren’t crusades, nor battles where sacrifice could be mistaken for sanctity.

They were operations, logistics, convoys of trucks rolling through deserts,

Satellites circling above, drones humming like insects in the dark.

The language was swollen with grandeur (freedom, justice, security),

But the reality was mechanical.

Afghanistan became a theatre of spreadsheets,

Iraq a ledger of costs & losses,

Each death recorded, categorized,

& forgotten with the same bureaucratic indifference that files away invoices.

The republic didn’t march to war as Rome once did;

It shipped its machinery abroad & called the churn of gears a mission.

The soldiers, too, bore the marks of this machinery.

They were no longer knights, legionaries, or even crusaders,

Convinced of some higher vision.

They were technicians in uniform, trained to maintain the machine:

Calibrate the rifles, fuel the tanks, & program the drones.

Their courage was real, men bled & died,

But their deaths were absorbed without meaning,

Consumed by the system that couldn’t pause long enough to sanctify them.

& Sacrifice without sanctity is simply a waste.

Thus, the empire produced waste by the ton, lives included.

& what did it all build?

Not temples, nor monuments,

Nor even ruins that could be admired later for their shattered dignity.

It built bases that crumbled as soon as the contractors left,

Airstrips abandoned to sand, green zones that rotted the moment the gates closed.

The wars consumed without producing.

They drained, but they didn’t consecrate.

Entire landscapes turned into proving grounds…

For technologies that would be obsolete within a decade,

While the people living there were reduced to collateral,

Entries in reports no One read twice.

The funerals came home in Silence,

Coffins draped in flags unloaded in the middle of the night, far from the cameras.

A true Civilization honours its dead with music & stone;

America hid them away,

Because the machine cannot tolerate reminders of what it has chewed through.

It needs motion, not memory.

Mourning would have slowed the gears.

So the corpses were whisked aside, while the slogans kept flowing…

Mission accomplished, freedom on the march, a safer world.

But the wars dragged on, each One feeding the next.

Afghanistan bled into Iraq, Iraq bled into drone strikes across continents,

Drone strikes bled into proxy wars that bled into nothing at all.

No victory, no closure, no sacred narrative of triumph or loss.

Just entropy.

The machine ran until it sputtered,

& when it sputtered…

The empire discovered it had no language left to explain what had been done.

It had fought for two decades & produced nothing but waste.

Veuillot’s sneer could be heard here, too:

Slaves of their own tools, fighting wars they didn’t know how to end,

Piling corpses like coal to keep the furnace alive.

Wars of iron, wars of machinery,

Wars where the only victory was the continuation of the system itself.

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6. ↔ Of False Continuity ♻️

The years rolled forward & the empire told itself stories of change.

One face left the stage, another entered;

The crowd was instructed to believe that the script had been rewritten.

Obama’s smooth cadences gave way to Trump’s vulgar bellows,

Then to Biden’s weary mutter, & then, astonishingly, back to Trump again.

Each arrival was hailed as a rupture, as the end of an era & the dawn of another.

Yet beneath the shifting masks, the machinery stayed the same.

Tariffs rebadged as national security,

Wars rebadged as counter-terror,

Deficits rebadged as investment.

The slogans changed, the substance didn’t.

Mark Fisher once spoke of “capitalist realism,”

A Time when it was impossible to imagine alternatives.

That age ended not in liberation but in multiplication,

Where every alternative leads back to the same place.

Under Trump, the imagination soared:

Deportations by the millions, walls rising across deserts,

Mars colonies, & the return of 1950s prosperity.

Under Biden, the fantasies turned in a different key:

Reindustrialization, moral crusades abroad, & the rebirth of a middle class.

Yet both men, for all their theatre, expanded the same wars, imposed the same tariffs,

& relied on the same bureaucratic machine that ground onward with or without them.

This is the secret of American politics:

Not division, nor rupture, but rot that spreads evenly through both parties.

They loathe One another in words but mirror One another in deeds.

Each condemns the other for hypocrisy…

While preparing to inherit the same tools of power, the same wars, the same debts.

The voters are invited to choose between night & day,

But the choice is between dusk & dusk.

Look closely at the Ukraine conflict:

Trump called it Biden’s war; Biden called it Trump’s legacy.

In truth, it belonged to both, & to neither.

It belonged to the system itself,

Which required a permanent frontier to justify its endless expenditure.

Likewise with tariffs:

Trump’s brash announcements seemed like unprecedented shock,

Until One remembered that Biden had already laid the groundwork…

With semiconductor controls & trade walls built under quieter names.

The continuity was embarrassing in its clarity.

The politicians shouted difference, the machine delivered sameness.

This sameness isn’t stability. It is decay.

A healthy order repeats itself through ritual & custom;

It sustains identity across generations.

But America’s continuity is the inertia of collapse,

The way a corpse twitches even after the last breath has gone.

Obama to Trump, Trump to Biden, Biden back to Trump…

These weren’t cycles of renewal…

But spasms of a system that no longer knows how to stop.

Veuillot’s words once mocked the workshop, pretending to be a Civilization.

Today, the workshop doesn’t even pretend. It simply runs.

A conveyor belt of presidents, each promising rupture, each delivering the same dust.

Continuity as a symptom of death, the empire’s final trick:

Convincing its people that they are choosing…

When in fact they are only watching the machine choose itself again & again.

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7. 🧩 Slaves To One’s Own Tools 🔗

Veuillot had warned that America would become the slave of its own instruments,

& the phrase has aged like iron left to rust in the rain…

Truer with each passing decade,

Sharper each Time the machine unveiled a new set of chains.

The republic that once congratulated itself on liberty…

Now spends its days in quiet bondage,

Not to foreign powers but to the technologies it cannot live without.

The hand that forged the tool now bends beneath its weight.

The conqueror drags his own chains behind him.

Look at the faces bowed to their glowing screens, millions scrolling in Silence,

Eyes glazed, bodies still, as though awaiting instructions.

The promise of infinite knowledge dissolved into endless feeds,

An avalanche of images no One can remember.

Algorithms nudge, cajole, predict;

& the human will softens into reflex.

What once was leisure becomes surveillance, every gesture tagged, every word stored,

Every preference translated into a data point for markets or governments.

The citizen is no longer a participant in a polity,

But a user within a program they didn’t write.

He is observed, tracked, & monetized… & yet, he calls this freedom.

Elsewhere, another chain:

The opioid vial, the fentanyl strip,

& the pill bottle rattling in drawers across the continent.

Pain numbed, then life numbed, until entire towns dissolve…

Into half-lit pharmacies & abandoned houses.

The empire that couldn’t sanctify its dead has no idea how to comfort its living.

It dispenses chemical quiet instead,

A pharmaceutical Silence that spreads like mildew.

A Civilization that cannot produce saints breeds addicts;

Both are searching for transcendence, but only One leaves behind miracles.

The other leaves behind corpses in trailers & alleys.

& now a fresh idol, offered with the fervour of a new gospel:

Artificial intelligence, a name heavy with prophecy,

Promising salvation through code.

Yet what has it brought except more noise, more synthetic speech,

More images generated out of nothing to fill the already choking atmosphere?

AI churns out slop at an industrial scale,

& the nation congratulates itself on its cleverness,

Unaware that it is drowning in its own output.

The machine writes, the machine paints, the machine thinks…

& men grow smaller, duller, less necessary.

Tools multiply, but meaning shrinks.

This is the idiotic slavery Veuillot foresaw, more humiliating than conquest by armies.

To be ruled by others can be borne with pride;

To be ruled by One’s own devices is shame without remedy.

America became the workshop, & the workshop has imprisoned its workers.

They may boast of freedom,

But they live by compulsion, staring into screens, swallowing pills,

& obeying prompts.

The master is gone; yet the chains remain.

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8. 🩸 The Martyrs: Stage & Silence 🎤🕯

Charlie Kirk fell on stage in Utah, mid-sentence,

As if still convinced that the ritual of speech could summon authority…

In an age when words had already been hollowed out,

When syllogisms & applause lines carried less weight than the sudden crack of a rifle.

A sniper’s bullet tore through his throat, & in that moment,

The performance of politics dissolved into the convulsions of a body…

Brought low before an audience that no longer believed in speeches…

But still believed in blood.

The cameras didn’t look away.

They drank in every detail, the jerks of muscle, the frantic movements of those nearby,

The smear of crimson staining the podium,

& in the instant of collapse Kirk ceased to be man & became corpse.

The activist, the provocateur, & the debater…

Who had tried to wrestle the abyss with arguments was gone,

& in his place appeared a martyr already pressed into service,

A pawn circulating through the bloodstream of partisan rage,

A unit of meaning manufactured out of flesh.

Within hours, his name was no longer his own but a vessel,

Cited as proof that ballots had given way to bullets,

That the last fragile barrier of civility had been shattered,

That America had entered a stage…

Where convulsions mattered more than conversations.

Far from the stage lights, Iryna Zarutska died in Silence.

Twenty-three, a refugee from Ukraine,

Sitting on a bus in Charlotte with her attention fixed on her phone,

She couldn’t have known that the man behind her (restless, muttering, armed with a knife),

Was about to unspool her life in a matter of seconds.

The act was sudden, vulgar in its ordinariness,

Not staged for spectacle but executed in the drab banality of public transit,

The kind of setting where people look away even as blood pools at their feet.

She collapsed between seats as others froze in paralysis,

Their inaction a second wound,

& within minutes the loss of life that should have commanded outrage…

Became little more than another line in a police report.

The vigils never came, the murals never appeared,

& the sanctity of innocence was never granted:

Wrong demographics, wrong narrative, wrong perpetrator.

Her youth, her vulnerability, her foreignness…

(qualities that might once have amplified her death into lamentation),

Instead rendered her invisible,

& she slipped from memory almost as quickly as her blood seeped into the bus floor.

Placed side by side, their deaths form a cruel symmetry:

One amplified until the human disappeared beneath the roar of commentary,

The other muted until the human barely registered at all.

In both cases, the result was the same…

Individuality erased, the corpse retooled into discourse,

The wound reshaped into symbol.

Kirk’s twitching became proof of civility’s extinction;

Zarutska’s stillness became an inconvenience brushed aside.

Neither was granted the dignity of Silence.

Both were conscripted into the same circuitry of decline,

Unwilling saints of a Civilization that feeds not on memory but on raw flesh.

& so Veuillot’s curse reemerges, sharpened across the century:

A society that cannot sanctify will inevitably cannibalize,

Hammering at its martyrs as it hammers at steel,

Retooling One into spectacle, another into absence,

Both consumed by the same machine.

Kirk & Zarutska, though strangers, belong now to the same litany:

Emblems of decline pressed into use by factions desperate for omens,

Proof that the American polity no longer buries its dead but sells them,

Packaging grief as content, Silence as erasure,

Until even the final breath is stolen…

& repurposed by the workshop masquerading as Civilization.

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9. 🪦 The Cartel of Death ⚔️

What happens on a stage in Utah or on a bus in Charlotte doesn’t stay there;

It leaks, it stains, & it travels along the seams of daily life…

The way oil finds the gutter after rain.

By evening, you can feel it at the strip mall…

The stiff flutter of yellow tape in the heat,

The bored officer guarding nothing in particular,

The convenience store TV replaying some other city’s sirens…

While the cashier slides your change under a pane of cloudy plexiglass.

People keep moving, but the motion has a flinch in it now,

A stutter in the walk to the car,

A glance at the dark pane of glass to see who else is reflected there.

If this were heading toward a real war, there would be banners & fronts.

Instead, Americans get something smaller & meaner:

Crews, hobby militias, fevered loners with manifestos stapled together at 3 a.m.,

Security contractors who can’t remember which acronym they draw a paycheck from.

Violence becomes a cottage industry; franchised, improvised, outsourced.

No declarations, only incidents.

A parking-lot ambush at dusk;

A stabbing on the late bus;

A doorbell camera catching muzzle flash & nothing else.

The state still shows up…

(lights spinning, forms filled, a press conference behind a lectern that lists slightly to the left),

But the monopoly of force has slipped through its fingers.

Power shares the block now with the boys who run souped-up chargers,

The uncle who “knows a guy,” the private firm renting rifles by the weekend.

Courts mumble postponements; cases age on the docket;

A judge quotes procedure to a room…

That stopped believing in procedure two summers ago.

None of this adds up to a cause.

The killings don’t recruit; they harvest.

They don’t clarify; they cloud.

Meaning arrives prepackaged (the caption writes itself before the body cools)…

& yet every caption contradicts the last.

Attention-seeking fuel, spectacle-seeking corpses.

The shooter in a borrowed car, the kid with a kitchen knife,

The man who goes live for fifty-seven viewers…

Each moves as if summoned, though by what they couldn’t say.

This is the economy of the late empire:

Blood as tender, panic as yield, rumour as growth.

The export is footage & the import is dread.

Americans trade in candles & hashtags,

In blue-and-red strobes reflected on wet asphalt,

In interviews with neighbours who “never thought it could happen here,”

Though of course they did.

Police rehearse the script; schools rehearse the drill; hospitals rehearse the overflow.

Between rehearsals, life continues in a thinner register:

Smaller gatherings, shorter glances, & the steady, guilty relief of making it home.

Veuillot wouldn’t be surprised:

A nation that makes tools its gods will One day serve the tools’ sacrament.

Here it is:

The rifle, the stream, the knife, the post, not as instruments of politics,

But as politics itself… a grim liturgy without priest or altar, only participants.

& if you ask where this is going,

The honest answer is that it isn’t going anywhere at all.

It is settling in.

It is choosing the places where the tape fits best & waiting there,

Patient as a habit, ready for the next offering.

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10. 🪶 An Empire of Corpses ☠️

Veuillot’s old line (the workshop dressed up as a nation),

Feels less like prophecy now & more like an inventory tag…

That you’d find taped to a crate in a dim warehouse:

Smudged pen, date half-legible, & still true.

Americans have lived through the set pieces…

The towers turning to dust,

The wars that kept accounts better than memories,

The presidents switching podiums while the gears stayed oiled…

& now the residue clings to ordinary surfaces:

Bus floors, grocery parking lots, school foyers that always smell faintly of cleaner…

& panic.

Nothing breaks cleanly. It just keeps thinning.

If there were a grand ending, Americans would recognize it:

Trumpets, banners, & a calendar date to circle.

Instead, there’s the small weather of decline:

A pop of gunfire two blocks over,

A knife pulled between stops,

A gathering that ends early…

Because someone didn’t like the way a stranger hovered by the door.

The language that once tried to dignify all this (“polarization,” “resilience,” “healing”)…

Feels like a brochure left on a wet bench.

Courts postpone;

Police arrive with the lights but not the monopoly;

The news reads like competing sermons,

Each parish canonizing its own dead & skipping the others.

Meaning used to come slowly, through stone & song.

Now it comes pre-captioned.

Clips spool out on the feed while the comments fill before the blood dries;

A family member stares at a phone in a hallway that hums…

With the sound of vending machines;

A city worker zipties plastic flowers to a fence that sags in the wind.

Americans don’t argue about what happened so much as who gets the body…

Who may speak in the name of the wound.

When the arguments end (they never do), the footage remains.

Servers purr. Another reel joins the archive.

What finishes an empire isn’t always an enemy.

Sometimes it’s the habit of converting every loss into usable content,

The reflex that turns grief into inventory.

Americans are good at that.

They know the angles, the candles,

The pressers with the slightly crooked seal on the podium.

They know where the tape goes, which curb catches the rain,

& which hashtag reads sober without sounding weak.

This competence is its own indictment. It means the work is routine.

So there will be no Archduke, no neat sides, & no final trumpet…

Just a patchwork of little rackets & private uniforms,

A slow exchange of whispers & weapons,

& a state that still stamps forms while meaning walks out the back door.

Once more… the export is footage, & the import is dread.

Between them, a people moving carefully…

Shorter errands, fewer glances, & keys ready in the hand.

Call the last chapter what it is:

Not collapse with grandeur, but consumption with paperwork.

The ledger grows… names, dates, locations, each marked “processed.”

The book will close the way a shop closes when the bulbs finally burn out:

No ceremony, only a door that doesn’t quite latch…

& a sign that was never flipped to CLOSED.

What remains isn’t a ruin that teaches, only a Silence that doesn’t bless.

& if anyone asks what the nation became in the end,

The plain answer will suffice:

A place that learned to live on its dead, & then ran out.

Oliver Webb-Carter wants you to believe that holding the SAS accountable for extra-judicial killings represents a perversion of justice. His recent piece on the Clonoe inquest performs a familiar ideological manoeuvre: present state assassination as reluctant necessity, frame legal scrutiny as persecution, position immunity from prosecution as operational requirement rather than political choice. The argument collapses under minimal pressure. What he defends is not soldiers operating within impossible constraints but a systematic policy of killing rather than arresting, of execution rather than prosecution, of state terror masquerading as security operations.

Assassination as Policy

The facts he provides undermine his case. At Coalisland on 16 February 1992, British intelligence knew an IRA attack was coming. They had time to prepare, to position forces, to plan intervention. Multiple opportunities existed to intercept: the lorry could have been stopped en route, the ASU arrested before reaching the police station, the getaway prevented without firing a shot. Instead, security forces waited until after the attack, then killed all four men at St. Patrick’s Church car park in what Webb-Carter himself describes as immediate, concentrated fire. Not a firefight. Not a tactical engagement. An ambush resulting in four deaths, one soldier with a facial wound possibly from friendly fire, and retrieved Kalashnikovs suggesting minimal return fire. This was an execution operation, not law enforcement.

Gibraltar makes the pattern explicit. Three unarmed IRA members shot dead in a public space. The bomb discovered later in Marbella gets deployed retrospectively to justify the killings, but the operational logic was killing rather than arrest from the start. They could have been stopped at the border. They could have been arrested at their hotel. They could have been intercepted before reaching the supposed bomb location. The state chose execution. Then claimed necessity.

Orders and Accountability

Webb-Carter frames this choice as operational constraint: soldiers following orders, security forces responding to armed insurgency, necessary violence in impossible circumstances. But the orders are precisely the issue. These operations were not emergency responses to immediate threats. They were planned interventions where the decision had already been made to kill rather than capture. The existence of orders does not provide legal or moral cover. It confirms that extra-judicial killing was policy, not aberration.

His argument relies on a fundamental category confusion between policing and counter-insurgency. Policing operates within legal constraints: proportionate force, attempt to arrest, lethal force only when necessary to prevent immediate threat to life. Counter-insurgency operates outside those constraints, treating internal populations as military targets, substituting assassination for prosecution. What Webb-Carter defends without quite naming it is the application of counter-insurgency doctrine to British citizens on British soil, the suspension of legal frameworks governing state violence, the normalisation of killing as first rather than last resort.

False Comparisons

The comparison to judicial scrutiny of Second World War operations is particularly dishonest. Examining attacks on German military positions decades later would be questionable not because time has passed but because those were military operations against military targets in declared war between states. Coalisland and Gibraltar were operations against British and Irish civilians, however heavily armed or politically motivated. The legal and moral frameworks are categorically different. Webb-Carter knows this. The comparison functions to naturalise extra-judicial killing by aligning it with legitimate military action rather than acknowledging it as state terror.

His concern about asymmetric accountability deserves engagement because the underlying observation is accurate. Republicans hold letters of comfort providing immunity from prosecution whilst soldiers face potential murder charges decades later. This represents institutional failure and political cowardice. But the solution is not retrospective immunity for state killings. The letters of comfort were part of a negotiated settlement including prisoner releases, decommissioning, political integration. Deeply problematic, certainly, representing a failure to deliver justice for victims of republican violence. But they exist within a framework of conflict resolution, however compromised.

What Webb-Carter demands is categorically different: permanent immunity for state agents, prosecutorial discretion frozen in favour of institutional power, the principle established that orders provide absolute protection regardless of the nature of the action ordered. This is not equivalence or fairness. It is the claim that state violence should exist outside legal accountability entirely, that the decision to kill rather than arrest should never face scrutiny, that soldiers following orders to execute should face no consequences.

What the Verdict Actually Says

The institutional dynamics matter here. Judge Humphreys found unlawful killing after examining the operational details. He determined the soldiers’ claims of a gun battle were demonstrably untrue, that state agencies perpetuated these falsehoods, and that the physical evidence contradicted the soldiers’ accounts. Some soldiers refused to testify. Webb-Carter reads this as the judge structuring questions to protect soldiers from self-incrimination whilst favouring the paramilitaries’ version. This inverts what occurred. The issue was not evidentiary procedure but established fact: the soldiers lied about what happened, and those lies were repeated by the Ministry of Defence and other state agencies for three decades. The question before the court was whether the state had alternatives to killing and chose not to pursue them.

Accordingly, the Coroner’s Court determined that each of the deceased men died of gunshot wounds and that in each case, the use of lethal force was not justified in circumstances where the soldiers did not have an honest belief that same was necessary in order to prevent loss of life and where the use of force was, in the circumstances they believed them to be, not reasonable.

The court also concluded that the operation was not planned and controlled in such a way as to minimise to the greatest extent possible the need for recourse to lethal force.

This is what makes the Clonoe verdict significant. Not that it persecutes soldiers but that it names what occurred: unlawful killing. The state killed four people when it had the capacity to arrest them. That reality does not change because those killed were heavily armed IRA members responsible for previous attacks. Their guilt or danger does not retrospectively legitimise execution outside legal process. This is the foundational principle distinguishing law from violence, policing from assassination, state authority from state terror.

The Effectiveness Argument

Webb-Carter invokes operational effectiveness: the nine four-star generals warning that fear of prosecution will paralyse decision-making, distort rules of engagement, deter initiative. This argument appears regularly in defences of state violence. It amounts to claiming that legal constraints on killing make security forces less effective, therefore those constraints should be removed. But effectiveness at what? Killing people the state deems threatening? That is not the metric by which security forces in a democratic society should be judged. The constraint is the point. The requirement to attempt arrest before using lethal force is not bureaucratic interference but the minimum standard separating legitimate authority from armed force operating without legal limitation.

His comparison to France and the United States is revealing precisely because it is accurate. Neither country would pursue these prosecutions. But this is not because they have superior reconciliation mechanisms or more coherent legal frameworks. It is because both states have long histories of extra-judicial killing as routine policy. France in Algeria. The United States across Latin America, the Middle East, in its own streets. What Webb-Carter proposes without quite stating it is that Britain should openly embrace that model, abandon the pretence that its security forces operate within legal constraints, accept assassination as legitimate state function.

The Media Panic

The institutional resistance manifested immediately in mainstream media. The Spectator devoted its 1 March 2025 cover to “The great betrayal of the SAS,” with Mary Wakefield calling Judge Humphreys “delusional” and claiming his verdict produces “terrible injustice” that “punishes the very people we rely on most.” Her piece imagined a fantasy scenario where the SAS could have arrested “all 20 IRA men caught unawares and unable to shoot because their hands are full of spanners,” treating the prospect of attempting arrest rather than immediate execution as absurd theatre. The Telegraph amplified similar arguments, providing platforms for David Davis MP to claim the verdict represented “the IRA’s attempt to rewrite the history of Northern Ireland” and warning that soldiers faced “a vindictive, vengeful pursuit.” Conservative politicians lined up to demand statutory protections preventing any future prosecutions, with Davis insisting this was necessary “even if they win” the judicial review. The narrative settled quickly: legal accountability equals persecution, questioning extra-judicial killing threatens operational effectiveness, demanding that soldiers attempt arrest before opening fire amounts to requiring “collective suicide.” Reports emerged that the SAS might refuse deployment to Ukraine “for fear of future prosecution for lethal force.” The verdict was not analysed as establishing that the state killed when it could have arrested. It was presented as an existential threat to national security, evidence that legal constraints on state violence had become intolerable, proof that the very concept of accountability for extra-judicial execution represented betrayal of the armed forces. This is how normalisation functions. Not through explicit defence of assassination as policy but through framing any limit on state killing as unconscionable restriction, any demand for legal process as persecution, any insistence that soldiers operating under orders still face consequences for choosing execution over arrest as abandonment of those who serve. The panic was not about the verdict’s accuracy but about its implications: that state agents who kill when alternatives exist should face prosecution, that orders do not provide immunity, that the distinction between policing and assassination still matters.

Institutional Decomposition

This connects to broader patterns of institutional decomposition. The erosion of legal constraints on state violence, the normalisation of executive action outside democratic or judicial oversight, the claim that security requirements permanently trump institutional accountability – these are not separate from the economic and social dismantling that began with Thatcher. They are its necessary precondition and ongoing consequence. You cannot systematically destroy the social contract, hollow out public institutions, treat entire populations as surplus or threatening without also removing the legal and institutional frameworks that constrain state power. The security state and the neoliberal state are not in tension. They are mutually constitutive.

The timing of these prosecutions matters. They are occurring now not because republicans are gaming the system but because the Good Friday Agreement’s reconciliation mechanisms have comprehensively failed. Those mechanisms could incorporate republican paramilitaries into constitutional politics because they were non-state actors operating outside legal frameworks. They cannot incorporate state killings because that would require the British state to acknowledge its systematic violation of the legal order it claims to represent. The institutional architecture of 1998 presumed that state violence had been aberrational, excessive perhaps but fundamentally legitimate. The evidence increasingly suggests otherwise: that extra-judicial killing was policy, that assassination was routine, that the state operated outside its own legal constraints as a matter of course.

Peace Through Assassination

Webb-Carter’s final move is to position SAS operations as contributing to the peace process, applying pressure on the IRA to push them towards negotiation. This may be tactically accurate. Killing enough members of an organisation eventually forces recalculation. But this is an argument for assassination as political strategy, for state killing as negotiating tactic, for extra-judicial execution as policy tool. He wants this acknowledged as contribution to peace without facing the implication: that the British state used systematic killing outside legal process to achieve political objectives. This is not security. This is state terror.

The absence of easy answers does not mean all positions are equivalent. Webb-Carter is correct that no legislation will satisfy every group, that reconciliation may be impossible, that institutional mechanisms have failed. But the response to that failure cannot be abandoning accountability entirely, granting permanent immunity to state agents, accepting that soldiers following orders to kill should never face legal consequences. The difficulty of achieving justice does not make injustice acceptable. The impossibility of perfect reconciliation does not justify protecting extra-judicial killing from scrutiny.

Naming What Occurred

What Judge Humphreys found at Clonoe was unlawful killing. Four men were killed when the state had capacity and opportunity to arrest them. That finding does not erase their involvement in political violence or the danger they represented. It establishes that the state chose killing over arrest, execution over prosecution, assassination over law enforcement. Webb-Carter wants that choice protected from legal examination. He wants orders to provide absolute immunity. He wants state violence to exist outside accountability.

This is not about protecting soldiers operating under impossible pressure. It is about protecting the institutional prerogative to kill without constraint, to choose assassination over arrest as routine practice, to operate outside the legal frameworks that supposedly distinguish democratic states from authoritarian ones. The argument is ideological work disguised as institutional analysis: making the case that state security permanently trumps legal accountability, that operational effectiveness requires immunity from prosecution, that the interests of state power override individual rights or institutional constraints.

The Normalisation of Impunity

The Clonoe verdict does not represent persecution of veterans or asymmetric justice or the weaponisation of legal processes against the state. It represents the minimum threshold of accountability in a society claiming to operate under law rather than force. The discomfort this produces, the institutional resistance it generates, the arguments mounted against it – these reveal how far the normality of state violence has been naturalised, how deeply the assumption that certain people can be killed with impunity has been embedded, how completely the distinction between policing and assassination has been eroded.

Webb-Carter writes as a historian. But his piece is not historical analysis. It is advocacy for impunity, argument for immunity, defence of state killing as legitimate practice requiring protection from legal scrutiny. The fact this argument can be made seriously, can be published and debated, can be presented as reasonable concern about institutional function rather than apologia for extra-judicial execution – this is the measure of how thoroughly the constraints on state violence have been dismantled, how completely the frameworks of accountability have been destroyed, how deeply we have internalised the logic that some people can be killed by the state without consequence.

That normalisation is the victory. Not of reconciliation or justice or institutional effectiveness. Of impunity. Of the principle that state agents following orders to kill should never face prosecution, that the decision to assassinate rather than arrest should never be questioned, that extra-judicial killing should be understood as unfortunate necessity rather than named as state terror. Webb-Carter’s piece is one more iteration of that normalisation, one more attempt to frame accountability as persecution, one more defence of the indefensible dressed up as concern for operational effectiveness and institutional fairness.

Against All of It

The answer is not difficult even if implementation is impossible. State agents who kill when they have capacity to arrest should face prosecution. Orders do not provide immunity. Political authority does not legitimise assassination. Operational effectiveness is not measured by capacity to kill without constraint. These principles are not novel or radical. They are the minimum standards distinguishing law from violence, authority from force, democracy from despotism. That they appear controversial, that defending them requires argument, that their application produces institutional resistance and political backlash – this is the measure of how far institutional decomposition has progressed, how thoroughly legal constraints have been eroded, how completely the ground has shifted beneath claims to legitimate authority.

Against impunity. Against immunity. Against the normalisation of state killing. Against the claim that orders justify assassination. Against the argument that accountability paralyses effectiveness. Against the defence of extra-judicial execution as necessary violence. Against the erasure of the distinction between policing and terror. Against the protection of state agents who killed when they could have arrested. Against all of it.

Who Cares Who Wins

Webb-Carter titles his piece “Who Cares Who Wins” as though the question at stake is partisan allegiance rather than institutional principle. The framing is deliberate. By positioning accountability as a contest between British forces and the IRA, between those who defend the state and those who attack it, he obscures what the Clonoe verdict actually addresses: whether the state can kill when it has capacity to arrest.

This is not a question about who wins. The four men killed at Clonoe were members of an armed organisation engaged in political violence. They had just attacked a police station with a heavy machine gun. Their involvement in the IRA, their participation in that attack, their willingness to use lethal force against state targets – none of this is contested. The verdict does not exonerate them, does not minimise their actions, does not transform them into innocent victims. It establishes one fact: the state chose to kill them when it had alternatives.

That fact remains regardless of what one thinks about the IRA, about the Troubles, about political violence, about the legitimacy of the British state in Northern Ireland. The question is not whether these four men deserved to live. The question is whether the state can execute people it has the capacity to arrest, whether orders provide immunity for that choice, whether the decision to kill rather than capture should face legal consequences. These are questions about state power, not about sympathy for those killed by that power.

Webb-Carter wants the focus on outcomes. The operation succeeded: four IRA members dead, a heavy machine gun recovered, no soldiers killed, the East Tyrone Brigade weakened. Measured purely by results, Clonoe was effective. But effectiveness is not the metric by which democratic states should judge extra-judicial killing. The question is not whether assassination works as a tactic. The question is whether states claiming to operate under law can employ assassination as routine practice, then demand immunity from prosecution for those who carry it out.

The answer matters regardless of who the targets were. If state agents can kill when they have capacity to arrest, if orders provide absolute immunity for that choice, if operational effectiveness permanently trumps legal constraint, then the distinction between state authority and state terror collapses. Not because all state violence is illegitimate but because legitimate state violence operates within legal frameworks that include the requirement to attempt arrest before using lethal force, the principle that force must be proportionate and necessary, the insistence that even those engaged in political violence have a right not to be executed when capture is possible.

This is why the constant invocation of IRA violence functions as misdirection. Yes, the East Tyrone Brigade killed soldiers and police officers. Yes, they posed a genuine threat. Yes, those confronting them faced real danger. None of this changes whether the state had alternatives to killing at Clonoe. None of this determines whether soldiers who chose execution over arrest should face prosecution. None of this addresses whether orders provide immunity for extra-judicial killing. The IRA’s guilt does not establish the state’s innocence. The danger IRA members represented does not legitimise assassination when arrest was possible.

Webb-Carter treats accountability as persecution because acknowledging it as legitimate would require accepting that the state killed unlawfully, that this was policy rather than aberration, that the institutional machinery defending these killings has spent decades protecting impunity rather than enforcing constraints. Easier to frame it as a contest, as choosing sides, as caring who wins. Easier to position the verdict as republican victory rather than minimal legal accountability. Easier to defend state killing by invoking the violence of those killed than to address whether the killing was necessary.

But this was never about who wins. This is about whether states can kill with impunity, whether orders justify assassination, whether legal constraints on state violence remain operative or have been abandoned entirely. These questions apply regardless of who gets killed. They matter as much when the state kills armed insurgents as when it kills anyone else. Perhaps more, because it is precisely when state agents face genuine threats, when those they confront have committed acts of violence, when the operational pressure is greatest – it is precisely then that the insistence on legal constraint matters most. Otherwise constraint only applies when it is not needed, when compliance is easy, when the decision would have been the same anyway.

The Clonoe verdict does not determine who wins the Troubles. That conflict ended, however incompletely, decades ago. The verdict determines whether the state must operate within legal constraints when it kills, whether alternatives to lethal force must be pursued when they exist, whether agents following orders to assassinate can be held accountable. It establishes that at Clonoe, the state killed when it could have arrested. That finding stands regardless of what one thinks about Irish republicanism, British state policy, the strategic value of targeted killing, or the guilt of those killed.

Who cares who wins? Anyone concerned with whether state violence operates within law or outside it. Anyone who understands that legitimate authority requires constraint, that effectiveness without accountability is tyranny, that the right not to be executed when arrest is possible applies even to those engaged in political violence. Anyone who recognises that defending extra-judicial killing because the victims were IRA members concedes the principle that some people can be killed by the state without consequence, which means accepting that the state decides who deserves legal protection and who can be executed at will.

That principle cannot be defended. Not for the IRA. Not for anyone. The question is not who wins. The question is whether killing when arrest is possible constitutes unlawful use of force. Judge Humphreys answered that question. The institutional resistance to his answer, the media panic, the political demands for immunity, the arguments from effectiveness and operational necessity – all of it confirms that the answer is unacceptable not because it is wrong but because accepting it would require acknowledging systematic state killing outside legal constraints as policy, not aberration.

Webb-Carter’s title reveals his argument’s weakness. He frames accountability as choosing sides because he cannot defend extra-judicial killing as principle. No one can. So instead: make it about who wins, about which side you support, about whether you back British forces or sympathise with terrorists. Make it about loyalty rather than law. Make it partisan rather than institutional. Make it about outcomes rather than process. Make it about anything except the question the verdict actually addresses: whether the state killed when it had alternatives, and whether that killing was therefore unlawful.

The Clonoe verdict says it was. Everything else is distraction.

We tell ourselves a tidy story about human invention: incremental, cumulative, the product of labs, markets, and the stubborn curiosity of individuals. Stand back from that story for a moment, and a different pattern emerges. For most of our history, technological change was glacial. Then, within a few generations, the world was rewired: alternating current, radio, radar, lasers, semiconductors, fiber optics — an asymptotic leap that transformed how we move, communicate, and power our lives. The leap is not merely a matter of chronology; it is patterned. Certain breakthroughs arrive as clusters, often with baffling elegance and preternatural insight.

That dissonance is the point of departure for this brief. We frame a working hypothesis that has rhetorical power even if one treats it as speculative: if an external intelligence — call it the Curators, the Venusians, the Aldebaran-linked stewards — has habitually seeded select ideas into receptive human minds and discreetly inserted field technologies into our environment, then the artifacts and trajectories we see today are the wake of that influence. What follows is not an exercise in exotica for its own sake. It is a pragmatic, evidence-driven plan for how a society should behave if such a channel were real: how to verify it, how to steward it, and how to ensure its benefits do not become instruments of coercion.

Inspiration

The photograph of a lone genius in a lab — a man silhouetted calmly before a towering coil of arcing energy — is not only cinematic; it is emblematic. Whether one sees Nikola Tesla as a romantic genius or a historical engineer, the story of flashes of insight, of visions that became devices, occupies a special place in the modern imagination.

The Astral Museum

Layered into this specimen of uncanny history is a quieter, less sensational strand: the idea that human minds have long been trying to reach beyond the ordinary channels of experiment and instrumentation. During the Cold War both the United States and the Soviet Union invested seriously in programs that explored extrasensory cognition — what the public remembers as “remote viewing” — commissioning disciplined protocols to see whether trained operators could describe distant places or concealed objects. Whatever one thinks of the results, the historical fact matters: major states treated non-ordinary perception as a potential source of intelligence. It is a short rhetorical step from there to the working hypothesis at the heart of this brief: perhaps many inventors, artists, and engineers across the globe have, in their own ways, been practicing a kind of remote viewing — ritualized reveries, disciplined daydreaming, lucid-dream protocols, meditative visualization or private trance sessions that reliably harvest formal patterns and workable concepts.

Even some of our most literate witnesses have said as much. Philip K. Dick famously described an experience in which he felt he had psychically visited an alternate timeline like the one he dramatized in The Man in the High Castle — a testimony he offered publicly in lectures in Europe. Whether one reads that as an ecstatic anecdote, a metaphor for creative imagination, or as evidence of real non-local perception, it illustrates an important point: humans routinely report experiences in which richly detailed, coherent “other” worlds present themselves — and sometimes those visions produce concrete, reproducible work back in ordinary reality. In other words, solid ideas and durable artifacts have historically been claimed to originate in realms that are not strictly material, and those claims have occasionally led to technologies or narratives that enter mainstream culture (books, patents, films, or even Netflix adaptations).

The astral museum — the motif of a curated hall of forms, with strange devices, tools, and clothing displayed on otherworldly shelves — gives narrative shape to this phenomenon we call inspiration. It frames visionary insight not as random image or private fantasy but as an organized archive: a sharable repository of forms that, if read correctly, can be translated into designs, methods, and stories that have tangible effects in our world.

Long ago, the Venusians walked upon the same vibrational plane we now inhabit. Their cities were of stone and light, built on the fertile plains of Venus, until their society, through both spiritual discipline and technological mastery, rose into a higher octave of being. What remains to our crude instruments is the husk of that world—heat, acid, and barren rock—yet just beyond the range of our senses gleam the true cities, suspended in the astral radiance. It is there that the Astral Museum is kept, a hall of forms curated for seekers from many worlds.

From that vantage, the Venusians send forth their convoys, vessels of magnetic and solar harmony, that can bridge the gulf between planes. But when they descend to our realm, they must enact a protocol of materialization, condensing their subtle craft and forms so that they may be seen, touched, and spoken to by us. Without this careful transition, they would pass through our world as shadows in a dream. Thus every meeting with them is an act of deliberate resonance—a harmony struck between their higher octave and our striving earthbound song.

You walk past a substation every day and call it infrastructure — concrete, steel, transformers humming the anonymous music of the grid — and you never stop to imagine its pedigree. Yet what if the neat lattice of insulators, the baffled geometry of coils, the way fields seem to gather and steer around those towers are not merely the products of slow human trial-and-error, but the visible tips of a deeper current of transmitted design? The image above is meant to be a provocation: ordinary objects can be the outward shells of extraordinary ideas, artifacts whose ancestry we assume to be “ours” simply because they have always been there. We mistake familiarity for origin. The hum at your feet, the arc behind a fenced gate, may be the fingerprint of thought that arrived from elsewhere — not malevolent, not mystical, simply older and stranger than our narratives of invention allow. If that is true even in part, then our everyday world is a museum of gifts we never acknowledged, and the first responsibility of discovery is to stop taking the familiar for granted.

Taken together, these images form a hypothesis: there exists an epistemic channel, sometimes experienced as vision, sometimes as a material artifact, sometimes as a low-signature visit, by which advanced technical concepts and field practices are transferred into human circulation. If true, the consequences are profound, immediate, and political.

What would such transfers look like, operationally? In the short term, they appear as clusters of anomalous patents and prototypes in obscure labs: new antenna geometries, metamaterial surfaces that bend waves in odd ways, compact resonant couplers that defy our scaling expectations. Over time these small seams yield larger systems: more efficient energy coupling, high-Q resonators, localized propulsion primitives, new classes of materials whose microstructure seems to “self-pattern” under guided growth. The social sign of such a stream is not only novelty but uneven diffusion: a few labs and states surge ahead while the rest of the world scrambles to reverse-engineer and catch up.

What does this mean for politics and security? Any technology that improves energy density, mobility, or information asymmetry will be coveted. Left unchecked, the first movers will have asymmetric advantages: military, economic, and diplomatic. Worse, the same principles that enable wireless energy and climate-friendly production could be adapted into coercive field systems if open governance is lacking. We cannot ethically or prudently accelerate a stream of high-impact tech without parallel institutions to classify risk, verify provenance, and police misuse.

Nor is this purely a technical problem. If an external stewardship is real, then the Curators — in the contactee literature, beings who disdain mass annihilation — appear to place moral conditions on their gifts. Repeatedly, mythic sources emphasize a disapproval of nuclear annihilation and ecological suicide. Whether those injunctions are poetic or literal, they frame a political bargain worth considering: the diffusion of life-preserving technologies in exchange for concrete steps away from existential weapons and catastrophic practices. That bargain is not naive: it is an ethical test of whether a species is prepared to bear the responsibilities that come with new power.

A civilization that accepts such gifts will be held to new standards. The Venusian model implied by the archive stories presumes a degree of social maturity: the ability to deploy power without creating asymmetric coercion, to favor stewardship over extraction, and to grow institutions that transcend short-term national advantage. Put bluntly, the Curators would expect governance capable of global nonproliferation, equitable access, and the moral restraint to refuse weapons of mass extinction.

This brief therefore does two things in tandem. First, it treats the claim of external seeding as a testable research proposition and outlines a tightly controlled scientific verification program. Second, it offers an institutional architecture — verification consortia, escrowed disbursement, and a graded release protocol — to channel any confirmed transfers safely into the public good. Those recommendations follow, grounded in precaution, transparency, and enforceable nonproliferation.

If one rejects the framing entirely, these proposals still have value: they are a robust governance regime for any disruptive epistemic channel — whether the source is a visionary subconscious, a novel neurotech pipeline, or an unrecognized natural phenomenon. If one accepts the framing, they become the minimum requirements for a planetary stewardship pact. Below, we move from narrative framing into the concrete institutional and technical recommendations required to verify, steward, and responsibly scale such transfers.

Operational Executive summary

Assuming a real, recurring channel of advanced-tech transfer exists, create an international, transparent, ethically governed program to (A) verify and decode transfers; (B) accelerate beneficial, non-weaponized diffusion; (C) bind recipients to strict nonproliferation/denuclearization terms via enforceable incentives and escrow; and (D) protect planetary safety and social stability while maximizing humanitarian value.

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Guiding principles

1. Evidence first — treat claims as testable hypotheses; require empirical replication before policy action.
2. Precautionary governance — prevent expedited weaponization; classify and stage tech releases by risk.
3. Transparency & legitimacy — open multi-stakeholder oversight to avoid monopoly capture.
4. Shared benefit & equity — prioritize humanitarian outcomes and ensure access for low-income countries.
5. Cultural & ethical respect — treat any “gift” as requiring stewardship, not exploitation.

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Key institutions to create (fast)

1. International Inspiration Verification Consortium (IIVC) — multilateral science body (UN-anchored) to verify visionary/transfer claims. Members: major scientific academies, neutral states, NGOs, and observer civil society.
2. Curator-Tech Risk Board (CTRB) — independent risk classification body (like medical IRBs + arms control board) to grade techs by dual-use risk.
3. Stewardship & Escrow Agency (SEA) — an escrow/conditional release mechanism that licenses tech only upon treaty commitments (including denuclearization benchmarks).
4. Translation & Safety Labs (TSLs) — certified labs (regional) that operate “inspiration mining” protocols, verify reproducibility, and run safety tests.

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Verification & scientific program

Objective: determine what is being received, how it is transmitted (museum/convoy/intermediary), and whether designs are reproducible and scalable.

Steps:

1. Evidence collection protocol — standardize how visionary reports, dream protocols, patent anomalies, and convoy sightings are logged (time, EEG, imagery, witness statements, chain of custody).
2. Replication labs (TSLs) — neuro-engineering + cognitive science centers where controlled trials reproduce visionary stimuli and test reproducibility of design outputs (EEG, fMRI, CAD readouts). Ethical oversight and consent required.
3. Technical validation pipeline — a staged R&D sequence: concept → prototype (bench) → safety test → scaled demonstrator. Data open-shared within IIVC under NDAs as needed.
4. Convoy/physical evidence task force — forensic teams for any physical signs (materials, craft fragments), using standard chain-of-custody and international forensic labs.

Deliverables within 12 months: verification protocol handbook; 3 operational TSLs; first reproducible design test report.

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Risk taxonomy & staged release

Classify candidate technologies into tiers (CTRB to manage).

• Tier 0 (Low Risk / Civilian): agricultural biochar processes, benign materials, consumer upcycling tech. Release: rapid open-source diffusion.
• Tier 1 (Moderate Risk): high-efficiency energy converters with manageable proliferation risk. Release: restricted licensing, open academic validation, export controls.
• Tier 2 (High Risk / Dual Use): novel field-manipulation, directed energy, propulsion tech. Release: escrowed, only to multilateral consortia with strict safeguards (no single nation control).
• Tier 3 (Weapon-grade/Unknown): anything clearly enabling mass destruction or uncontainable ecological risk. Release: prohibited until comprehensive multilateral governance, or permanently quarantined.

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Denuclearization strategy linked to tech transfer

Rationale: the Curators (per scenario) hate nukes; use that normative pressure constructively with incentives.

Mechanism (SEA + multilateral treaty approach):

1. Conditional technology escrow: advanced, high-value Tier 1 tech is placed in escrow. Release to states or consortia is contingent on verifiable denuclearization steps (declarations, IAEA-style inspections, dismantlement schedules).
2. Phased technology disbursement: small, immediately beneficial tech is released first to build goodwill (energy, water purification). More powerful tech released only after benchmarks are met.
3. Mutuality & parity: disbursement conditions apply equally, with a mechanism to prevent secret modernization (e.g., cooperative fabrication centers instead of national sovereign production).
4. Incentive package: beyond tech, provide infrastructure, financial support, and global public goods (grid upgrades, medical tech) to replace reliance on nuclear deterrence logic.
5. Verification tech transfer: use same TSL network to provide neutral fabrication and support rather than letting sovereign states control production lines.

Political tactics:

• Lead with a coalition of the willing (democratic states + large neutral states) to prototype the escrow model.
• Engage regional powers and offer assurance packages for security.
• Use moral suasion—expose scientific evidence publicly alongside an offer: denuclearize, get high-value civil tech.

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Research & capacity building agenda (practical projects)

Short list of pilot projects to fund and host in TSLs (with CTRB tier noted):

1. Resonant energy coupler demonstrator (Tier 1) — replicate a small wireless energy transfer device and document physics & limits. (12–18 months)
2. Mycelial-biochar soil stabilization pilot (Tier 0) — field deploy in degraded agricultural region. (6–12 months)
3. Material meta-surface replicator (Tier 1) — small antenna/metamaterial panel that shows claimed high Q coupling. (12 months)
4. Safe-by-design directed power containment study (Tier 2 research into defenses) — develop countermeasures and hardening protocols. (18–36 months)
5. Museum decoding lab — computational pattern analysis on historical visionary sources; produce public annotated dataset. (6–12 months)

Each project must have: independent validation team, open interim reports, and ethical review.

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Governance, law & ethics

• Law: draft a new multilateral “Stewardship & Non-Exploitative Use” convention that codifies escrow, verification, and non-weaponization. Use existing frameworks (UN Charter, NPT) as scaffolding.
• Intellectual property: place high-risk designs under collective stewardship (no exclusive IP rights). For lower risk, encourage open licensing for humanitarian usage.
• Ethics: create a global code for “inspiration mining” addressing consent, cultural appropriation, and human subject protections.
• Accountability: transparent audit trails, whistleblower protections, and public reporting obligations.

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Communications & societal handling

• Narrative framing: avoid cultic language. Frame it as “novel epistemic channel” pending verification. Emphasize practical benefits and strong safeguards.
• Public engagement: civic town halls, explanatory science media, independent journalism fellowships to investigate claims.
• Combat disinformation: establish rapid-response fact teams and open data portals for verification.

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Defense & nonproliferation safeguards

• Secure fabrication centers: produce high-risk components in joint international facilities under continuous inspection; do not allow sovereign unilateral manufacturing of Tier 2 items.
• Harden critical infrastructure: invest early in EMP, cyber, and field-manipulation defenses.
• Legal penalties: criminalize covert weaponization or illicit proliferation of escrowed tech; implement strong enforcement mechanisms (sanctions, lawfare).
• Contingency planning: war-gaming & resilience exercises for misuse scenarios, with scenario playbooks and rapid response teams.

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Timeline & milestones (illustrative, 0–5 years)

Year 0–1:

• Launch IIVC, CTRB, SEA pilot.
• Stand up 3 TSLs; start Museum decoding lab.
• Initiate top 3 pilot projects (Tier 0 & 1).

Year 2:

• Publish first technical validation reports; classify initial tech tiers.
• Prepare draft Stewardship Convention; convene diplomatic conferences.
• Begin escrow pilots for limited, low-risk releases.

Year 3–4:

• Signatories implement denuclearization escrow pilots; share Tier 1 deployments in secure joint centers.
• Deploy defense hardening measures; expand TSL network.

Year 5:

• Evaluate outcomes; scale or tighten program based on misuse indicators. Possible treaty ratification.

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Contingencies & failure modes

• Capture by a single state or private actor — mitigate by joint fabrication centers & legal treaty.
• Rapid weaponization — pre-stage counter-technologies and emergency interdiction authorities.
• Loss of public trust — manage via transparency, third-party audits, and open science.
• Cultural backlash — fund restorative engagement and ensure benefits flow to vulnerable populations.

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Closing note

Whether the source of the innovations is Venusian, visionary, or an unrecognized pattern in human creativity, the governance problem is the same: powerful, potentially planet-transforming technologies demand multilateral verification, staged release, and enforceable nonproliferation guardrails.

Imagine a very likely scenario, of civil order collapsing and a martial law being imposed over the entire nation. As a survivalist, you cherish your personal freedom. Therefore, you should be concerned regarding what the safest place during martial law is.

In this article, I will list the safest places during martial law, as well as the best spots to hide your survival supplies. But first, a few words about martial law and what it means. Let us begin, shall we?

Table of Contents

1. What Is Martial Law?

2. Top 10 Safest Places During Martial Law

What Is Martial Law?

Martial law takes place when a government suspend everyday civil laws and rights. In some instances, a military is the one that imposes its control over the civilians. Martial law is declared during nation-wide or region-wide emergencies, such as war, natural disasters, civil unrest, and so forth.

According to the established U.S. legislations, a country-wide martial law can be declared by either the Congress or the President. In addition, any State Governor can declare martial law in their state. Similar laws can apply to almost any country, with varying levels of strictness of the said law.

Martial law is not a rare phenomenon by far. In the USA alone it was declared almost 70 times, while only 2 of these times are related to a war against a foreign nation. A large portion of these instances is, in fact, related to riots, civil unrest, or even labor disputes.

The situation can be even more harrowing outside the United States, especially in the countries where democracy and personal freedom are completely unheard of.

As you understand by now, martial law, even if it’s seemingly necessary, can hinder your rights, privacy, and independence. We will now take a look at what measures can be taken during martial law. Please keep in mind that I do not support physically resisting governmental or military forces.

1. An Off-Grid Cabin or Tiny House

A small and remote house is the ideal location during martial law. This could be a cabin, a tiny house, or some sort of a secret retreat. It should be off the grid for two reasons:

• An off-the-grid house does not depend on external power sources, such as the national powerlines. You can produce your own energy by using solar panels, hydropower, or wind power. You can read more about these natural electricity sources from the linked articles. If you produce your own electricity independently, no one can control you by turning the power off.
• Every house and apartment usually have an address. Eventually this makes the things easier for the military and the government, as they go from door to door, checking on everyone. An off-grid house does not need to have an official address. You can remain almost anonymous and disappear off the grid, as you wait out whatever caused the martial law to be deployed.

2. A Bunker

A classic location: your bug out shelter or any other bunker can definitely function as a safe haven. You will need to ensure that it’s appropriate stocked with such supplies and items as:

• Water
• Canned and unperishable food
• Fuel for the generator. Alternatively, you can use a portable power station, it’s much more reliable and quieter.
• Spare clothes
• Radio
• Blankets
• First aid kit 
• Self-defense weapons
• Flashlights

Once you have the place prepared, never disclose its location to anyone outside your small group. If the martial law is imposed, choose the most inconspicuous route to get to your bunker. Listen to the radio to stay updated when the things have cooled down and you can go back home. You will need a radio that does not require batteries and can last for a long time. I recommend getting American Red Cross Emergency Radio. It can be powered by hand crank or solar panel. This radio also includes a smart phone charger, flashlight, flashing beacon, and an alarm clock.

3. Away From Most of the Civilization

Unlike the specific places on this list, this one is a general recommendation. Staying away from other people and the cities could be the solution you’re looking for. As history proved time and time again, it’s not just the military or the invading forces that you should be concerned about. It’s also the people next door.

When the supplies run low, the unprepared people will start looting their neighbors. The civilized ones will quickly become uncivilized. The urban streets will be unsafe, with riots and looting everywhere. It’s understandable on some level, since everyone wants to survive. But it’s also a good reason to look for a shelter elsewhere, as far from the urban centers as possible.

4. Your Own House

That’s right, your house can be more than enough during the martial law period. Think about it, you already have all the supplies and comfort, why look for it in remote places? As long as you do not confront the authorities, you might do just fine by staying in your house.

The trick to staying home is laying low. Continue your life as if nothing happened. This might go against your beliefs, but your survival should be the priority. Stock your house with extra food and water, and simply behave “normally”. Going outside could be dangerous because of two major reasons: the military presence, and whatever disaster or disorder that forced the military presence to appear. Staying home could be the wisest thing to do.

5. An Abandoned Location

If you don’t have a bunker, tiny house or cabin, any abandoned building might do. You still need to ensure that its location is as removed as possible from the military and governmental presence. If it’s outside the city, then it’s even better. This can be an abandoned factory, farm, barn, warehouse, and so forth.

Scout this location before deciding whether or not this will be your shelter. Ensure that it’s not visited by other people throughout the day. Check its general state and structure. Rotting or infested buildings are too unsafe to stay in.

Once you decide on a building, stash essential supplies there. This way, whenever you need to relocate, the supplies will already be there, waiting for you.

6. The Mountains

The mountains are a very secluded and inaccessible location. No law representative will bother climbing a cliff just to reprimand you for leaving the city.

Retreating to the mountains can also feel like going back to the roots, to your true self. While the martial law limits you as individual, the mountains free you. The air is fresh up there, and no law is enforced on you.

Of course, you need to be completely prepared to spend some time in that challenging environment, especially during the winter. The supplies might get very low and scarce. The weather makes it even more difficult, and you need to know how to treat frost injuries.

7. Any Prepper Community

Why facing a country-wide crisis alone, when you can rely on a large group of like-minded preppers, survivalists and off-gridders? Sometimes a group of people has better chances of survival, especially during a large crisis.

As a group or community, you can pool your resources together. Different people can have different skills that are useful to others. One is a medic, while another one is a hunter or an experienced cook. Together, your skills and expertise complement each other and strengthen your community.

While prepper communities are not wildly advertised, I do have a list of known off-grid communities. If some of them are nearby, consider joining them during trying times.

8. A Neighboring Country

While seemingly abandoning your country may look like an unpatriotic action, it’s actually quite the opposite. When the government imposes its regime and strips away basic human rights, the most patriotic action can be crossing the border into a more “relaxed” country. There, you can recuperate, regroup, and then return when the circumstances allow it.

For example, if you live in the United States and the martial law is declared, you can relocate to Mexico, Canada, or a nearby island country or territory. The government won’t pursue you there, since they will probably have much bigger objectives on their hands.

Make sure you’re familiar enough with the local language and customs. They will come handy should you seek a temporary employment and a place to stay.

Keep in mind that in some cases, you might need to leave for a much farther country, such as the safest country in case of nuclear war.

9. The Armed Forces

This might be a surprising suggestion, but the military is probably the most secure and well-supplied environment to be in. I’m not encouraging you to enlist just for the sake of surviving a particular scenario. I’m just saying that if you’re already in the military, or a civilian working at a military base, then you don’t have to hide elsewhere during the martial law.

The military’s obvious advantage is that it received supplies and working equipment before the rest of the population. Also, the military bases are well-fortified and guarded. The downsize, of course, is that during an international conflict or a civil war, the bases are the first ones to be attacked.

10. The Great Outdoors

Mountains and cabins are specific places in the wild, where you can stay safe during the martial law. But they are not the only ones. In fact, the entire wilderness is at your disposal. In almost every country, the inhabited areas are much smaller in comparison to the uninhabited outdoors. You can literally pitch a tent in the woods and weather the national crisis.

Naturally, this requires a few skills, which are listed in my article on basic survival skills. In addition, you will need a lot of knowledge and information on such topics as making tools, identifying plants, foraging, hunting, fishing, building a shelter, defending against animals, and so on.

Final Thoughts

The purpose of this article is to provide you with ideas of what can happen when authorities declare martial law. When they do declare martial law, I am in no way telling you that you should misbehave and ignore civil law, civil authority, the federal government, the president, or a military commander.

Ignoring existing laws could cause a person to end up in a federal court, or in military tribunals that go through a military court that could be on almost any military base.

During martial law, the constitution (in America), your civil rights, and any other existing laws may be suspended, so do what you think is necessary to retain some sort of justice and control over your own life and safety.

Where the gates opened

Most Americans don’t spend their evenings reading policy briefs about Islamist movements, and they shouldn’t have to. Yet the confusion they feel when they hear “From the river to the sea” chants echo through campuses and city streets isn’t imaginary. Something fundamental has shifted. Politics that once spoke the language of civil rights now carries a tone suspiciously anti‑Western, and increasingly anti‑Jewish.

For roughly sixty years, progressive politics in the United States has measured virtue by who is “oppressed.” In that formula, the West, and by extension the United States, ends up cast as the villain almost by default. The habit grew out of the 1960s rebellions, when race, class, and empire were folded into one sweeping narrative of guilt. That moral reflex, redeeming the self through siding with the “oppressed,” has since hardened into orthodoxy. When Western liberals went searching for the next cause to redeem, they found it in the Palestinian flag and, behind that, a romanticized view of Islam as the voice of the downtrodden.

Palestine became the perfect metaphor: brown versus white, colonized versus colonizer, faith versus materialism. It fit neatly inside a worldview shaped by post‑colonial literature and grievance politics. Within a few decades, banners that once read Peace Now were replaced by calls to intifada, revolution dressed up as humanitarian concern.

The irony is that the world they idealize bears little resemblance to the freedoms they claim to champion. Under Islamist regimes women cannot speak or dress freely; gay Palestinians flee to Israel for safety. Iran’s morality police enforce public flogging for acts Western activists call personal expression. Yet those realities are dismissed as “cultural differences.” Once a narrative becomes sacred, facts are sacrilege.

The data tell another story. Pew Research surveys show that majorities, 84 % in Pakistan, 74 % in Egypt, 71 % in Jordan, favor making Sharia official state law, while fewer than 15 % of Muslims globally say violence is acceptable in defense of faith. Sharia is not advisory; it is a binding legal code. Political Islam has long declared its goal: a state where divine law supersedes human law. The founders of liberal democracy spent centuries building systems to prevent precisely that.

When Americans watch student unions and NGOs waving the same slogans as Sunni fundamentalists, they’re witnessing two belief systems, one secular, one religious, meeting on the field of moral absolutism. The progressive Left gained power through moral language; Islamist movements speak in the same register, but with divine certainty. Different sources, same result: politics as salvation.

The consequence is not America’s “Islamization” but the erosion of boundaries between belief and law. Well‑meaning citizens, mistaking sentiment for discernment, have opened the gates slowly, forgetting that good intentions are no substitute for hard thinking. History rarely punishes arrogance all at once; it rewards it just enough to keep us convinced of our own virtue.

The 1960s Origin Story

Every movement that rewrites history starts by rewriting morality. The 1960s did that for America. The old moral vocabulary of duty and discipline gave way to one built on emotion and absolution. Real injustices, such as Jim Crow, segregation, and Vietnam’s draft, were confronted, but reform soon turned into religion. In that new faith, the West itself became the original sin.

The formula was irresistible: oppression conferred holiness, power implied guilt. Once that idea took hold, it defined cultural virtue for the next half century. What began as moral protest turned into a reflex of self‑blame dressed up as idealism. By the late seventies, Western intellectuals were romanticizing revolutions they would never survive. The Third World had become the new Bethlehem.

That moral reflex still shapes Western diplomacy. Writer Michael Snyder recently noted how France, the nation of Voltaire and laïcité, is volunteering to help the Palestinian Authority draft its constitution. It sounds noble, but look closely: the heirs of the Enlightenment are scripting the legal framework for an organization whose charter still denies Israel’s right to exist. The same pattern: virtue earned through empowering the supposedly powerless.

The cultural heirs of the New Left swapped blue‑collar revolution for academic theory, but the hierarchy of virtue stayed fixed. By the end of the Cold War, the Left had lost its working‑class audience but kept its sermon: blame the West, praise its adversaries, and call it empathy. That theology explains why movements preaching “diversity” now excuse governments that stone women and persecute gays. Compassion decoupled from judgment becomes indulgence. A civilization unwilling to defend its principles will surrender them, one humanitarian gesture at a time.

The flower children matured into policymakers, and their children staff the NGOs and editorial boards that now shape opinion. What began as conscience has congealed into bureaucracy. The moral theater of the 1960s lives on, less romantic, more administrative, but driven by the same need to purchase redemption through guilt.

Islam and the Secular West: A Structural Clash

Modern Westerners speak about religion as something optional, like a subscription you can cancel at any time. That assumption owes more to Jefferson and Locke than to Moses or Muhammad. The Judeo‑Christian world learned the hard way that the key to peace was separating the priest from the palace. Centuries of religious wars eventually produced a compromise: believe what you like, but the law belongs to everyone. That settlement is what we call secularism, and without it there would be no liberal democracy to argue about.

Islam’s origins were different. Muhammad was not simply a preacher; he was a statesman, a legislator, and a commander. The Quran doesn’t divide moral life from public life, so Islamic civilization never developed that internal firewall between creed and code. Wherever Islam became dominant, the political order generally claimed divine authority. In early Medina and later through the caliphates, religious scholars produced legal rulings that doubled as government policy. Sharia,  the body of law derived from scripture and tradition, became as all‑encompassing as canon law and parliament combined.

For many ordinary Muslims, this has been more historical backdrop than marching orders. Millions live productively and peacefully within secular states. But the ideology known as political Islam insists that true faith is incomplete without state power. Its goal is not coexistence but completeness. The Muslim Brotherhood’s motto still reads, “The Quran is our law; jihad is our way.” That doesn’t mean its members are plotting coups in every Western city, yet it does mean their endgame is theocratic: a world administered, not merely inspired, by religious law.

That theological premise sits directly across the table from the American one. Ours begins with “We the People”; theirs begins with “God commands.” In a republic, sovereignty resides with citizens and can be changed through consent. In Islamist thought, sovereignty descends from God and cannot change at all. The conflict is not primarily cultural or ethnic; it’s constitutional. You can negotiate borders; you can’t negotiate who gets the final word in law.

This distinction matters because political Islam doesn’t conquer today by armies. It works through ideas and institutions, slowly and patiently, confident that the West’s moral confusion is its best weapon. In Europe, open discussion of Islamic separatism is already treated as bigotry. Britain’s domestic intelligence service spent years investigating extremist networks embedded within “charitable” organizations while politicians congratulated themselves on multicultural harmony. France, once a militantly secular nation, now debates whether its own Enlightenment ideals are compatible with the faith of millions of new citizens. The tension is not about skin color or cuisine; it’s about authority.

The United States has been spared Europe’s immediacy largely due to geography and demographics, but the ideological challenge has arrived on our campuses and city councils. In the fashionable vocabulary of “intersectionality,” religious absolutism can masquerade as a form of cultural expression. When progressive politicians defend Islamist movements as victims of Western oppression, they confuse tolerance with surrender. People who no longer know why they separated church and state won’t notice when others decide to reunite them.

What makes this clash especially dangerous is the asymmetry of conviction. Secular society treats compromise as virtue; religious revolutionaries call it disbelief. Liberal democracies survive by persuasion; theocrats thrive on certainty. Against such confidence, mere civility is not enough. A civilization that shrugs off its own principles can lose them without ever being invaded.

Political Islam doesn’t need majorities. It only needs Western guilt to keep its opponents silent. Once an ideology that fuses religion and government enters a culture that separates them, someone’s premise has to yield. The question is whether the yielding will come from reason or from fear.

Black Identity and the Romance with Islam

When ideas lose their theological foundation, they look for a new one. After the civil‑rights era, many young Black Americans saw Christianity as the religion of parents who forgave too easily. Into that vacuum stepped a faith promising dignity through discipline and pride through defiance.

The Nation of Islam offered hierarchy where chaos reigned, purpose where poverty mocked the dream. Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X didn’t win through doctrine but through presentation: suits, diets, rules, each a declaration of independence from white America’s morality. In the 1960s, polls showed about 15 % of Black college students viewing Islam as “the religion of Black self‑respect.” It was never a majority, but it supplied a symbol.

Symbols outlast sermons. When Malcolm X returned from Mecca embracing orthodox Islam, popular culture kept only the defiant half of his story. Hip‑hop artists later revived fragments of that imagery, the crescent moon chains, the Five‑Percent­‑Nation slogans. For millions of listeners, Islam became shorthand for clarity, strength, rebellion. A 1993 Brookings study found nearly 40 % of converts citing “discipline” and “structure” as motives. It wasn’t theology; it was order without condescension.

That romance still resonates. On social media, Malcolm X clips loop under soundtracks of righteous anger. Robes and Arabic calligraphy are often used as fashion statements. What once demanded faith now signals authenticity. Younger activists inherit Islamic motifs as cultural heritage rather than creed. Their chants for Palestine or against “colonialism” echo an aesthetic of resistance more than a theology of belief.

Christianity preaches patience; militant Islam demands action. One sanctifies forgiveness, the other valorizes defiance. In a culture exhausted by grievance, the latter feels cleaner. That’s why Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X now appear side by side online, as if they preached the same gospel. They did not. King appealed to universal conscience; Malcolm to divine justice against a corrupt world. Today’s campus activism follows Malcolm’s path of moral power through perpetual offense.

Progressive universities that mock Christianity’s patriarchy often post Quranic verses as art. Feminism poses beside Islamic symbolism in a kind of ideological cosplay. It’s theater, not theology, the image of purity opposing Western “corruption.” Few notice that the Middle East’s freest Muslims live under secular constitutions, the sort progressives dismiss as “colonial.”

Earlier Black leaders, such as Douglass, Washington, and Bethune, found dignity by embracing Western ideals and compelling America to honor them. Their heirs are told instead to find dignity by denouncing the civilization that made liberty possible. That inversion didn’t come from the mosque; it came from the academy. The Left’s template, oppressed versus oppressor, made the romance with Islam inevitable. Once “resistance” became a civic virtue, any doctrine opposing America earned automatic sainthood.

Most Black Muslims in the U.S. wanted structure and meaning when other institutions failed them. But elites quickly commodified that sincerity. The disciplined believer became branded for “authenticity.” Corporations monetized it as diversity, universities as decolonial chic, politicians as vote‑bank politics. Genuine faith turned into moral theater. What began as self‑respect risks ending as self‑parody.

The Elite Conversion of Idealism into Management

Every revolution eventually hires accountants. Once moral passion proves useful, someone finds a way to invoice it. Protest becomes industry, guilt becomes currency. The story of Western sympathy for political Islam followed a similar arc. What began as compassion for the “oppressed” matured into a professional enterprise run by people who never miss catered lunches.

Yesterday’s radicals run today’s foundations. Rage, when translated into grant proposals, suddenly pays. By the mid-2010s, the number of registered U.S. nonprofits devoted to “equity and justice” had tripled in a decade, generating more than $10 billion annually. Much of that came not from small donors but from corporations purchasing moral insurance. Every PR department now has a “diversity partner,” fluent in moral theater but mute on results. Success isn’t measured by outcomes but by outrage.

Corporate sponsorship turned the Palestinian cause into the perfect stage set. The image of boys with stones facing tanks is ready‑made moral drama. Social media amplified it with racial and colonial guilt, letting Western activists import Middle‑Eastern conflict as part of their own redemption story. During the Gaza crises of 2021 and 2024, dozens of corporations issued near‑identical solidarity statements while maintaining factories in countries that flog dissidents. Data from OpenSecrets showed corporate contributions to “justice” nonprofits surging by 42 % during that window. Guilt pays dividends.

Universities built the ideological scaffolding. Decades of post‑colonial theory had prepared students to see the West as oppressor and every rival culture as victim. Islam became “anti‑imperialist spirituality.” Professors didn’t need to preach jihad, only to grade as if Western civilization spoke with a guilty accent. Diversity offices turned grievance into payroll. When Islam acquired the status of “oppressed faith,” it supplied infinite content for the bureaucracy of empathy.

Governments joined by outsourcing conscience. Funding “faith‑based dialogue” costs less than confronting extremism and yields better photographs. European‑Union grants for “intercultural understanding” funneled tens of millions of euros into NGOs linked to Islamist advocacy, many openly skeptical of secular democracy. Bureaucrats call it inclusion; recipients call it dawah.

This is virtue as management science. Activists gain salary; institutions rent moral legitimacy. Together they transmute guilt into a renewable resource. The more outrage burns below, the thicker comfort grows above. The perfection of the system is its aimlessness: no one inside wants results, only funding. Moral passion becomes administrative routine.

What was once idealism now functions as supply chain. The same machinery that claims to fight oppression depends on its perpetual existence. Bureaucracies cannot repent; they can only rebrand. When every “Equity Office” survives by discovering new sins, freedom becomes over‑managed remorse. Guilt is no longer a feeling; it’s an industry standard.

The Trojan Horse in Practice

Every ideology must act, and political Islam acts through institutions. No siege engines, no armies, just slogans, committees, and paperwork. Infiltration now arrives through moral language.

Coalition capture is the first tactic. Broad activist movements open with universal goals, peace, equality, and human rights, but are gradually repurposed for narrower agendas. Once Islamist‑aligned groups adopt the same slogans, they’re treated as allies. Within a few years, leadership shifts even as supporters imagine the mission unchanged. Europe’s “Stop the War” coalitions of the early 2000s began as anti-imperialist; they ended up condemning Western secularism itself.

Financial diversion follows. In 2024, Britain’s Charity Commission uncovered millions of pounds redirected from humanitarian accounts to Islamist advocacy networks. Donors thought they were feeding children; they were financing clerics. Similar patterns appear wherever oversight fears “Islamophobia” more than fraud.

Media repetition locks the illusion in place. Reporting privileges emotion over accuracy because outrage sells. During the 2025 Gaza conflict, major Western outlets repeated figures from Hamas’s information office as verified data. Few retractions followed. The result was not overt lying but selective truth, a fog in which sentiment becomes policy.

Algorithmic amplification finishes the job. Social‑media design rewards indignation, short, moralistic bursts that spread faster than analysis. Political Islam gains digital allies who have never opened a Quran but who chant the same hashtags. Informational laundering converts borrowed moral energy into political leverage.

Bureaucratic cementing gives the final payoff. Once slogans become common language, politicians adopt them to demonstrate awareness; bureaucrats convert rhetoric into regulation. Votes follow sympathy; funding follows votes. By the time anyone notices ideology inside the system, it appears as standard procedure, diversity training, cultural partnerships, and “inclusive language” mandates. The Trojan Horse has parked itself inside the castle with a grant number stenciled on the side.

The pattern feeds on fatigue. Idealists believe they advance justice; managers know they advance budgets. Liberty erodes quietly as compassion’s paperwork expands.

Consequences

Ideas have consequences, and so does delusion. A culture that rewards performance virtue instead of principle decays by degrees. The erosion is visible everywhere: in campuses where antisemitism parades as conscience, in media that mistake fairness for fear, in governments apologizing for their own foundations.

After recent Middle‑East wars, student groups chanted slogans that plainly endorse Israel’s eradication while demanding “safe spaces” for themselves. Administrators issue statements against “all hate” but avoid naming the hate in front of them. Surveys at elite universities show nearly half of Jewish students afraid to speak openly. Their grandparents faced burning crosses; they face polite ostracism. The form differs, the cowardice stays.

Editorial boards once proud of free thought now practice moral censorship. Criticize Islamist ideology and you’re branded phobic; denounce Western civilization and you’re booked for Sunday talk shows. The result is anesthesia disguised as tolerance.

Education reflects the same rot. The university that once taught logic now teaches grievance. Hundreds of courses across major schools frame Western civilization solely as oppression. An education built on selective outrage cannot produce citizens, only spectators of decline. Lawmakers mirror the disease: they trade justice and duty for emotion and identity. Once law bends to tribe, it ceases to be law at all.

Foreign policy decays with equal hypocrisy. Governments that sermonize about rights sign energy contracts with the regimes that flog women. Cultural “sensitivity” becomes moral surrender. Guilt, outsourced as diplomacy, replaces strength with supplication.

The deeper damage is psychological. Generations raised on systemic guilt inherit cynicism, not reform. They demolish what they no longer believe worth saving. A culture convinced of its own corruption cannot defend itself; it mistakes exhaustion for wisdom. Authoritarian states notice. Russia, China, Iran hold conferences on Western hypocrisy, and the West nods along, mistaking shame for honesty.

Religious institutions mirror the confusion, staging interfaith panels with clerics who oppose interfaith freedom itself. Families and communities fracture as ideology replaces kinship. Identity becomes franchise. The state grows while the citizen shrinks. Managing grievance is the new prosperity engine, even as real wealth and trust decline.

Civilizations don’t collapse from invasion; they hollow from within. The lights stay on long after the meaning goes dark.

The Way Back

Recovery starts with honesty. After half a century of ritual apology, the West doesn’t need new slogans; it needs nerve. The first step is to restore universal law: one standard for believers and skeptics, the majority and the minority. No sacred exemptions. When theology redraws legality, voters become subjects. The same applies to secular dogmas enforced as creed.

Next comes distinction: Muslim faith versus Islamist politics. The first is private devotion, the second political absolutism. Confusing them betrays both. The devout Muslim who seeks liberty shares more with the Western liberal than with the theocrat who seeks power. Protect worship; resist rule by revelation.

Then audit the machinery of influence. Universities, NGOs, and grant systems shaping policy must disclose funding and ideological links. Oversight is not prejudice; it’s hygiene. Taxpayers deserve to know when “dialogue” doubles as propaganda.

Education must return to reason, logic, and civic philosophy. Teach how to argue before teaching whom to pity. A society fluent only in accusation will soon forget deliberation.

Moral courage follows: guilt is easy, gratitude takes discipline. Freedom without effort breeds contempt. National service, community labor, and shared projects rebuild mutual trust. Patriotism is not arrogance but maintenance.

Speech must be untouchable. Offense is not harm, and censorship is not care. Once emotion licenses silencing, truth dies by etiquette.

Foreign policy must regain moral clarity. Alliances should rest on governance, not guilt. Religious dictatorships are not moral creditors. Saying no is sometimes the highest form of respect.

Finally, revive cultural imagination. Tell stories of mastery, sacrifice, integrity. Heroes can defend civilization without apology. When every rebel fights the West, the West forgets why it’s worth defending.

Freedom does not need reinvention; it needs maintenance. The trowel and hammer of reason, discipline, and gratitude still hang ready. Pick them up.

Crossroads

Every civilization arrives eventually at a moment when it must decide what it believes about itself. Some choose rediscovery, others choose fatigue. America stands at that moment now. The battle is not between faiths or parties but between remembering and forgetting. A people can survive disagreement, but not the loss of conviction that any truth is worth defending.

The United States is not yet an Islamic state, nor is it immune to the quiet corrosion that makes such fantasies plausible. Each time progressivism grants theological movements political immunity, the boundary between belief and law thins. Freedom erodes not through conquest but through permission. We invite decay under the name of tolerance.

The irony is that the American experiment began with the hardest kind of tolerance, one disciplined by truth. The founders knew that liberty without virtue collapses into license, and virtue without liberty turns into tyranny. Their solution was the civic covenant: law independent of creed, conscience independent of state. That principle allowed religions to flourish while keeping them from ruling. It also allowed skeptics to speak without fear. We forget that simple architecture at our peril.

The new generation is told that Western ideals are hypocritical relics. Yet those ideals gave the world its longest period of expanding freedom. The same society that once abolished slavery, enfranchised women, and built constitutional rights for minorities now apologizes for existing. That reversal is not progress. It is moral exhaustion disguised as empathy.

History offers clues to what happens next. Civilizations that abandon confidence do not vanish all at once. They drift. Education fills with slogans. Art worships rebellion instead of beauty. Faith becomes self‑help. Law bends to emotion. By the time anyone asks how things reached that point, the answer is already history.

America does not have to drift. The machinery of self‑correction still works if we choose to use it. Truth has never needed majorities, only people willing to defend it. The courage of a few citizens who understand their inheritance has always outweighed the noise of crowds repeating approved feelings. The republic was built on argument, not whispers of guilt.

To recover that spirit is to reclaim adulthood. The task ahead is not to purge religion or idealism but to restore proportion. Belief must remain private and voluntary. Law must remain common and secular. Compassion must be tempered by discernment, and justice must again mean equality under rules, not privilege under slogans.

If these things sound old‑fashioned, that is because they have stood the test that most new theories fail. Freedom does not need reinvention; it needs maintenance. The hammer and trowel of reason, discipline, and courage still hang on the wall. The question is whether anyone will pick them up.

The title of this essay asked a question: The Islamic States of America? The mark at the end matters. It is a question only while doubt endures. If we continue to treat our principles as relics and our hesitation as wisdom, the mark will change. History will erase the question and leave only the answer, the one we were too sophisticated to believe could happen here.

There’s little doubt that, once the dust settles, the post-collapse life is going to be tough. Most of the conveniences we take for granted today will be hard to acquire, regardless of whether or not money will still be worth anything. People who want them will say and do anything, people who sell them will come up with all sorts of strategies and you need to be prepared because, no matter how prepped you are, it’s still likely you’ll end up in desperate positions. That is why it is important to know how to barter.

In what follows I want to give you a few solid bartering and negotiation tactics and techniques that will help you get food, water or medicine when you’ll need them most. However, if you truly want them to work for you, you have to practice them. Reading them just isn’t enough, that’s why included a special section at the end where I suggest how you can do that.

Top 10 Barter Items To Stockpile

Item	Why It’s Great For Bartering
1. Bandages	First aid items are very valuable, especially care for larger wounds since they will require more dressing and frequent changes.
2. Batteries	AA and AAA are popular sizes for flashlights, headlamps, radios, and numerous other electronics. Batteries inevitably run out so these are a surefire need after SHTF.
3. MREs	Food. Need we say more? Keep in mind that someone desparate for food is very vulnerable and use caution when negotiating a deal.
4. Duct Tape	Infinite survival uses, including splinting a broken bone, repairing a tent, fletching an arrow, and marking a trail. An entire roll of duct tape should yield a high value in a trade.
5. Zip Ties	Versatile and strong, zip ties are great for hanging gear, securing shelter, fixing clothes and shoes, and more. It’s easy to carry a large number of them and separate into smaller bundles to trade.
6. Fish Antibiotics	Fish antibiotics can be purchased OTC and contain the same ingredients as human antibiotics. For more information on types and dosages, check out Fish Antibiotics For Humans: A Safe Option For Your Survival Kit?
7. Condoms	In addition to contraception, condoms have many survival uses such as carrying water (up to 2 gallons!), waterproofing gear, even a slingshot for hunting small game. They are also lightweight and easy to carry.
8. Water Purification Tablets	Since each tablet treats 16 oz of water, one bottle contains many bartering opportunities. Or trade the whole bottle for a larger item you need.
9. Waterproof Matches	Fire is essential to survival so waterproof matches can be a great bartering tool. You can also carry extra capsule lighters, such as the Everstryke Pro to add long-term value to your trade.
10. Button Compasses	Small and inexpensive yet very useful, especially in the absence of GPS or cell phone navigation. They can be used to find the way back to camp, locate family and friends, or to migrate to a new area.

How To Barter After Disaster

Forget About Meeting The Other Person In The Middle

For some reason, many negotiations end before they begin. One of the parties gives a number, the other gives another and they both know they’ll agree to the sum of their offers divided by 2.

You can do better than that. The reason this happens is because they’re not taking into consideration other factors such as how bad one party needs what the other has to offer. Another thing you can do is find out as much as you can about your opponent beforehand.

The more you know about them and their situation, the more leverage you’ll have. And if you can’t find out much about them, it’s best to avoid doing any kind of post-SHTF deals. Those could be dangerous, anyway.

Start With A Lowball Offer

If you can do this and your opponent doesn’t turn around and leave, you just saved yourself a lot of money (or whatever you are using for currency). Starting really low means that the other party will eventually have to settle for a much lower price than if you’d started with something more reasonable.

Don’t Be Afraid To Walk Away From A Deal

Everything is a number’s game. Just because you need what the other person has to offer, this doesn’t mean you have to take it. You might find 5 or 10 other guys out there that will gladly take your deal and give you what you need, you just need to have the guts to end the negotiations and look for them.

Most people don’t see it this way, though. They might say:

What? You mean I have to go through the pain of finding someone else, especially since I have this guy right here who can give me what I need?

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. The reason you don’t want to do it is because it’s painful to think you have to spend more energy to find other people. But that’s the thing. If you can train yourself to do it regularly, if you allow yourself to play the numbers’ game, walking away from bad deals will become second nature.

Throw In A Bonus

People love things they can get for free. If you feel you’re close to closing a deal but still not happy with it, how about giving away a small bonus? Maybe something from your get home bag that you already have plenty of at home. You never know what the other person needs besides your money or bartering items, this is why due diligence and talking to them are a must.

Say “No” To Lowball Offers

We talked about giving really low offers but what if someone does that to you? This puts you in a weak position so the best way to counteract it is to simply say:

No, this isn’t an offer I might consider. If you can come back with a more decent offer, I’m open to negotiation.

If they like it, fine. They’ll give you a more reasonable first offer. If they don’t, like I said, there’re plenty of other guys who might be interested in the deal.

The More You Tell, The More You Sell

What I’m trying to say is, the more arguments you bring in your favor, the better you can justify the price. Particularly in the absence of money (read: bartering), it’ll be hard to put value on things. This is why thinking and then stating every possible reason that works in your favor will bring you one step closer to what you want, how you want it.

Make Small Concessions

If you started with a really low offer, there’s no better way to seal a deal than to give your opponent more than his new expectations. Of course, you shouldn’t do that if you think you can get a better deal but if you really want to wrap things up, making a small concession might bring the negotiations to a quick and happy ending.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Like any other survival skill, you shouldn’t wait for the end of the world to put into practice bartering and negotiations. You need to do it beforehand because when you’re desperate for food or water, your emotions will get in the way.

Some of ways to practice bartering and negotiations, include:

• simulations with your family,
• playing poker (it allows you to read people and develops your greed),
• going to a flea market (you’ll find plenty of cheap things that you may need for your stockpile),
• start a business (and negotiate every little thing with your supplies and partners)
• …and, provided that you have something to offer that you yourself produce (honey, veggies etc.), try bartering them for other things.

Conclusion

Just keep in mind that everything in this world is negotiable, you just need to have the right mindset. Understand the value of your own items and give a detailed explanation when trading. Know how to barter for the things you need and don’t be afraid to walk away from a bad deal. Teach it to your kids too, studies show that the sooner, the better.

I had my last conversation with my MAGA supporting cousin in November of 2020. Until that point, he had led me to believe he cared for my immigrant family enough that he wouldn’t cast a vote for a lying, treasonous xenophobe who had turned a call for violence into a campaign slogan.

But my cousin had been drinking and he let the truth slip out.

His final, slurred admission made me lose interest in anything he had to say. However, until that point, I’d been trying to understand his perspective.

Perhaps I was making it more complicated than it needed to be. His perspective was this: GUNS!

That’s it. There’s no nuance. There’s no complexity. There’s no hidden meaning. My MAGA supporting cousin wanted guns.

“I won’t live beneath the rule of a tyrant!” he declared.

“Okay,” I said. “But right now, your dear leader is claiming he’s not going to step down even though he lost. Without any evidence, he’s spreading lies about election irregularities that threaten to shake our country apart at the seams. He’s behaving like a dictator. If you refuse to live beneath the rule of a tyrant, will you march on Washington if your dear leader unlawfully attempts to retain power?”

“Er… the government listens in on these phone calls you know. So, I’m not going to say anything.”

“That’s what I thought.”

My MAGA supporting cousin’s personal mythology was that if he was in the possession of guns, he would be able to magically save himself from “tyrants.” He considers himself a “law and order patriot” but also firmly believes the government represents the greatest single threat to his freedom.

For some reason, he completely fails to recognize the danger of a billionaire who longs to become a tyrant, not just in practice but also in name. Why do conservatives have this blind spot? Why can’t they recognize that billionaires are tyrants already?

The most shocking videos in the world!

My cousin’s heart pills

My cousin thinks he’s free, but he can’t live without his heart pills. He’s always complaining about how expensive his heart pills are. Pills are more expensive in the United States than anywhere else in the world.

Why are life-saving pharmaceuticals expensive in the USA? It’s because the physical suffering of American citizens is secondary to appeasing the billionaires’ insatiable hunger for profit.

You may have a gun, but how free are you if your heart doesn’t work?

Billionaires control the price of everything. If working class people start to get ahead, billionaires have enough power to crash the economy. Inflation doesn’t bother them. They can just wait it out. They can hold on to assets until the economy recovers. It’s only working class people who feel the burden.

The whole idea that it’s possible to “get ahead” in the USA is an illusion. Billionaires dangle that carrot to keep us docile as we work ourselves to death while they reap all the rewards. Wake up! We’ve got the yoke of the tyrants on our backs. The government is supposed to protect us from “all enemies foreign and domestic.”

Why does the government refuse to protect us from the tyranny of billionaires?

The government is based on following the will of the people. We go through the charade of having elections, but in the end it doesn’t matter who we elect. Every representative from the state to the federal level follows the will of the billionaires, not the will of the people.

The result is that everything in the United States is unfairly tipped to favor obscenely wealthy sociopaths. These individuals who accrue massive fortunes are able to push through the laws that they want, manipulate markets, deny your access to health care… the list goes on and on.

We live under the rule of tyrants now

The government is supposed to protect us from tyrants, but conservatives have duped their followers into thinking the government is the only threat to freedom we face. Freedom has MANY enemies. That should be obvious.

Why can’t the American public see that individual citizens who are more powerful than the government are also a threat to our freedom?

We’ve all been disenfranchised by the fact that billionaires own every candidate that runs for office.

The truth is government isn’t a threat. Government is a tool. In the right hands, the tool can be wielded for good. In the wrong hands, the tool can be wielded for evil. It’s ironic because that’s what conservatives say about guns.

Right now, the tool of government is being wielded to establish a class of billionaires who think the “rule of law” shouldn’t apply to them. Just a few years ago, we witnessed a billionaire make an attempt to overthrow the government.

That’s a pretty blatant attack on your freedom.

Anyone who is paying attention should have seen this coming in 2016. The government isn’t our enemy, the billionaires are. Electing a billionaire to the highest office in our country was like making Freddy Krueger chief of staff at a nursery.

It should tell you something when the most tyrannical people in our society crack a smile at you and say, “You can keep your guns.” It’s because tyrants know guns in the hands of citizens do not represent a threat to their power.

The billionaire mentality

Billionaires have a gaping hole in their psyche that can never be filled. Our corrupt president has placed himself squarely in the spotlight, so he serves as an appropriate example. All you have to do is look at his life with unfiltered eyes and it’s obvious how detestable and miserable it is.

The way he chases attention is pathetic. What other word could you use? His behavior lacks any sign of dignity or self-respect. People only tolerate his company because they want something from him.

You don’t have to be a billionaire to see this unfortunate side of human nature. I’ve been in the presence of people who liked to flash money around. Every time they did so, a certain class of individual came crawling out of the underworld to shower them with intoxicating praise.

When people get in the habit of flashing money, every interaction in their life becomes transactional. They begin to delude themselves into believing that this is the only form of relationship that can exist. They think, “It all comes down to money in the end, there are no sincere emotions.”

Watch this video below to find out the great secrets hidden by the government.

Don’t build your whole life upon a lie

Billionaires delude themselves into believing all human interactions are transactional because flashing money around is easier than being a decent human being.

But the thing is, billionaires are wrong. There is sincere affection in the world where the party who loves you does so unconditionally and wants nothing in return.

Don’t believe me?

Get a dog. A dog will love you until the day he dies and never ask you for a penny.

I bet billionaires avoid owning dogs because they know the existence of dogs is a proof that exposes their flawed ideology. They’ll mock dogs, and then cry inside because they so desperately want the love a dog provides.

Dogs aren’t dumb.

If a you hire somebody to take care of your dog, the dog will love the person you hired. If you refuse to do the work, no love for you.

Billionaires have learned all the wrong lessons

Deep down, billionaires want to be loved just like anyone else. However, their psyche has been so corrupted that achieving true, selfless, vulnerable love is impossible for them. Therefore, rather than change, they convince themselves that things like empathy, compassion, and true affection are various forms of weakness. It’s a toxic state of mind.

Billionaires don’t deserve our praise. In fact, they need an intervention. They’re miserable, conniving people who labor ceaselessly to make the world worse.

It’s largely due to their selfish behavior that the oceans have begun to overheat. Poor people aren’t doing that. Poor people don’t have the resources to destroy the planet.

Billionaires have learned all the wrong lessons from life, that’s why their hunger for wealth is insatiable.

There is always a short term profit to be gained through a betrayal of love. This is why people who are fixated on profit have trained themselves to see true affection as a weakness. By conditioning themselves to believe love is a “weakness” they can avoid thinking of themselves as monsters.

Inferior men are always able to turn betrayals of love into huge fortunes, but betraying love incurs a greater debt that comes due at a later date. This is the inevitable consequence all rich men are frantic to escape. This is why they expend such effort promoting the false narrative that wealth acquisition is to be praised. They are destitute, and they don’t want the world to perceive this truth.

You must strive to be worthy of the love people give you

Being worthy of love is the most admirable ambition of any human being, not the acquisition of wealth.

Love is a responsibility, not an entitlement.

It feeds the ego when somebody reveres you, but you can’t succumb to ego and abuse the love you’re freely given. You’re not entitled to that. You’ll destroy your chance at life satisfaction unless you’re ceaselessly dedicated to living up to vulnerable faith of the people who truly care for you.

Billionaires see love the same way as they see any other object. Once it’s in their possession, they think it belongs to them. But love doesn’t work that way.

Anyone has a right to withdraw their love at any time. Actually, “withdraw” is not the right term. What happens is that love is murdered by the abuser. The fault always lies with the unworthy.

A sincere person can do nothing more than extend an olive branch of vulnerability. If the object of your affection tears up the branch from its roots, the chance of growth is lost. That destructive action, though painful, frees the sincere person from the abuser. The abuser is left to scream in defiant anger as the decent person leaves them forever.

It’s not the purpose of this life to indulge in the wanton destruction of anything beautiful that comes across your path. The way to happiness lies in cultivation. Our whole society needs to understand this.

Acquiring wealth is the path of moral debt

The whole of the United States is charging down the road to ruin. There’s a reason our nation has accrued a debt in excess of 32 trillion dollars. When you chose the path of profit over compassion you doom yourself to future destruction.

Terror over inevitable accountability is what has compelled the corrupt president to go to such lengths to retain power, but his actions have always driven him further from the deepest longing of the human heart. The billionaire, traitor president has condemned himself to hatred and his crimes are so terrible that his own mortality has robbed him of the possibility of completing his required penance.

As I look upon the devastated political landscape of the United States, I see a lot of frustrated souls that still express their love and reverence for MAGA. The saddest part about this is that our corrupt president, like all billionaires, is unworthy of anyone’s love.

Throughout its history, the focus of the United States has always been on profits at the expense of humanity. Human beings were enslaved in order to build obscene wealth that could only be enjoyed by a privileged few. Genocide was committed so that land could be stolen. The justifications for those inexcusable transgressions against humanity form the backbone of our philosophy even to this day.

We won’t be free of tyrants until we learn to revere human beings over profit. The United States isn’t “the land of the free,” it’s the land of tyrants and it always has been.

First watch this video- All Americans Will Lose Their Home, Income And Power By November 27, 2025

Keywords:
Bitcoin Standard, Gold Standard, Keynesian Economics, Government Debt, Fiscal Policy, Infrastructure Investment, Deficit Spending, Economic Growth, Monetary Policy, Fiscal Responsibility

Abstract:
The contemporary fascination with a so-called “Bitcoin Standard” rests on the same utopian fantasy that once sustained the Gold Standard—that monetary scarcity can restrain political excess. This essay dismantles that illusion. Through historical analysis of the American experience from 1921 to 1971, and a critical exploration of modern fiscal theory, it argues that the problem of government overspending lies not in the nature of money, but in the nature of governance itself. States do not “print” in the naïve sense of creating currency without backing; they borrow, they bond, and they spend the unearned wealth of future generations. Whether denominated in gold, fiat, or digital tokens, the principle remains: borrowing is justified only when it produces tangible, growth-generating returns. Infrastructure investment, by expanding productive capacity, meets that criterion. Ideological boondoggles, designed for political gratification rather than economic yield, do not. A Bitcoin-backed regime would not neutralise state debt—it would merely gild it with cryptographic rhetoric before the inevitable default.

WARNING VIDEO!!! They Know What’s Coming. You Don’t. Most Americans Aren’t Ready for This Plan.

Thesis Statement:
A Bitcoin Standard would neither prevent deficit spending nor enforce fiscal discipline. It would replicate the structural failures of the Gold Standard, revealing once again that monetary systems cannot cure political irresponsibility. Sound economics arises from productive investment, not ideological austerity or speculative scarcity.

Section I — The Fetish of the Standard

Civilisations invent standards when they lose faith in themselves. The standard is the moral prosthetic of a bankrupt culture, a totem erected in the ruins of trust. When men no longer believe in the integrity of their institutions, they seek refuge in metal or code, mistaking mechanical certainty for virtue. The gold standard, and now the fantasy of a Bitcoin standard, both emerge from the same intellectual poverty — the hope that scarcity can substitute for discipline.

The nineteenth century worshipped gold as the embodiment of order. Its adherents believed that tethering money to a finite metal would chain the ambitions of politicians and the appetites of mobs. The faith was theological: gold was immutable, incorruptible, and therefore, by extension, moral. Yet history is unkind to those who mistake symbols for systems. Every empire that swore fidelity to its metallic god quietly betrayed it when power demanded flexibility. The standard remained in rhetoric long after it had been broken in practice. When the ledger conflicted with the sword, the sword always won.

The modern cult of Bitcoin repeats the same catechism, only now in binary form. Instead of divine metal, there is divine mathematics. Instead of vaults, ledgers. Instead of priests, programmers. The narrative is identical: scarcity will purify the system; code will banish corruption. Yet scarcity does not civilise—it merely constrains. And code, like law, is only as incorruptible as the people who execute it. To believe otherwise is to mistake cryptography for character.

The fetish of the standard endures because it absolves responsibility. It allows men to imagine that moral failure can be corrected by mechanism. A politician can promise rectitude without reform; an economist can preach restraint without courage. Both can appeal to an external order to justify their weakness. The standard becomes a moral surrogate, an instrument of denial wrapped in the language of discipline.

Under the gold standard, nations inflated through debt while denouncing inflation in speech. The mechanism of deceit was simple: borrow abroad, spend domestically, and swear that redemption remained sacred—until it wasn’t. Gold never failed them; they failed gold. The same dynamic will haunt any Bitcoin-based regime. Governments will borrow against future Bitcoin flows, issue bonds indexed to digital reserves, and construct a labyrinth of derivatives to simulate liquidity. When reality intrudes, they will call it “temporary suspension,” just as Nixon did in 1971. And another generation will learn that scarcity without integrity is merely a slower road to default.

The moral allure of the standard lies in its false promise of objectivity. It whispers that numbers can tame men, that mathematics can impose virtue on vice. But economics is not a physics of atoms; it is a politics of appetites. The state does not violate standards because they are weak—it violates them because survival demands it. A fixed supply cannot withstand a variable will.

Thus the Bitcoin standard is not revolutionary; it is recursive. It is the latest costume of an old delusion: that systems, once made rigid, will make men righteous. The truth is less elegant and infinitely harder—discipline is not a consequence of scarcity; it is a product of moral and intellectual strength. Gold failed to bestow it. Bitcoin will too.

Section II — The Mechanics of Debt: Printing Without Presses

The image of governments “printing money” is a rhetorical ghost that refuses to die. It conjures visions of reckless bureaucrats flooding the economy with worthless paper, spinning inflation from ink. The truth, however, is far more subtle—and far more insidious. Modern states do not print; they borrow. They transform promises into liquidity, pledging the future to sustain the present. Debt, not the printing press, is the engine of contemporary money creation.

When a government announces new spending, it does not conjure cash from the ether. It issues bonds. Those bonds are bought by institutions, banks, pension funds, and increasingly by the central bank itself. Each bond is a certificate of faith—faith that tomorrow’s taxpayers will honour yesterday’s ambitions. The state thus becomes a conduit for temporal arbitrage: it spends today what it claims it will earn tomorrow. This sleight of hand is the modern alchemy of finance. And like all alchemy, it is sustained by belief.

Central banks operationalise this ritual. When they “expand the money supply,” they are not pushing buttons to mint coins; they are buying government debt, placing those bonds on their balance sheets in exchange for new reserves. These reserves, in turn, ripple through commercial banks as lending capacity, multiplying into credit, investment, and speculation. The entire system rests on the assumption that growth will outpace obligation—that the future will be richer than the past, and thus the debt can be serviced. It is not money that sustains the system, but confidence.

Even under a Bitcoin standard, this process would persist. A government could peg its currency to Bitcoin, claim a fixed supply, and yet continue to issue bonds denominated in Bitcoin units. Investors, lured by yield, would still lend. Banks would still leverage deposits into layered credit instruments. The system would still inflate—not by printing, but by promising. Monetary purity cannot abolish temporal preference. A digital reserve merely changes the vocabulary of deceit.

This is why the inflation debate so often misfires. Inflation is not the consequence of “money printing” but of systemic borrowing against productivity that does not yet exist. When the borrowed funds build roads, energy networks, and productive infrastructure, they seed future returns capable of repaying the debt. When they finance consumption, political patronage, or subsidies that generate no growth, they cannibalise the very economy that must redeem them. Inflation, then, is not a monetary failure—it is a moral one. It is the symptom of a civilisation that spends not to build but to appease.

During the so-called sound-money eras—the gold standard, Bretton Woods, even the early years of fiat—the same mechanism prevailed. The United States financed wars, public works, and global expansion through debt. Gold was the decorative myth, the psychological anchor. The dollar’s credibility rested not on the contents of Fort Knox but on the productivity of the American economy. When that productivity faltered and the liabilities grew intolerable, the peg dissolved. The paper endured because the myth was replaced by another: that fiat itself could embody trust.

Bitcoin’s advocates imagine that immutable code will succeed where gold failed. But mathematics cannot restrain politics. The government that cannot borrow will tax; the one that cannot tax will seize. Power finds its liquidity. Whether through treasury bonds, digital instruments, or backdoor derivatives, the machinery of credit will persist because the machinery of ambition never ceases. To think otherwise is to confuse the protocol for the polity.

The phrase “printing money” survives because it flatters indignation. It gives the illusion that corruption lies in the mechanism, not the motive. Yet the printing press is a relic; the bond auction is the true altar of excess. Nations collapse not because they print too much, but because they promise too much—and lack the courage to stop. Bitcoin will not change this arithmetic. Scarcity cannot sanctify deceit.

You’ll Understand Everything After Watching This VIDEO! 

Section III — Keynes and the Paradox of Productive Deficit

Few economic thinkers have been more misunderstood than John Maynard Keynes. To his disciples, he became the prophet of spending; to his enemies, the architect of moral decay. Both readings are caricatures. Keynes never preached excess for its own sake. His argument was simple and devastating: when private demand collapses, the state must spend—not to indulge consumption, but to sustain the machinery of production until confidence returns. His doctrine was one of temporary intervention, not permanent dependency.

At its core, Keynesianism was an argument about investment. Deficit spending was justified only when it built the conditions for future surplus. The concept of “the multiplier” was not a licence for profligacy; it was an accounting of return. Each pound borrowed was to yield more than a pound in output, through the restoration of employment and the expansion of productive capacity. The end was growth, not indulgence. The error of later governments was to mistake this emergency medicine for a diet.

The post-war consensus distorted Keynes into a bureaucratic idol. Politicians found in his name a rationalisation for perpetual deficit—a policy of pleasure without pain, borrowing without consequence. They ignored the distinction between capital expenditure and current expenditure. Building a bridge was productive: it connected markets, accelerated trade, and multiplied returns. Expanding welfare without reform was parasitic: it consumed output without creating new value. One increased the capacity of the economy to repay its debts; the other merely redistributed the burden.

Keynes’s actual warning was moral, not mathematical. He wrote that “the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.” His philosophy depended on reciprocity—the willingness of governments to save in prosperity what they spent in crisis. But the modern state, addicted to electoral gratification, inverted the principle. Spending became the norm, restraint the anomaly. Every administration promised growth through generosity, not through discipline. Deficit became destiny.

Under such conditions, the deficit ceases to be Keynesian and becomes decadent. When money is borrowed to consume rather than to create, debt no longer serves the economy—it devours it. The productive deficit transforms into the unproductive one: the infrastructure of tomorrow is replaced by the appeasement of today. Subsidised idleness masquerades as compassion; temporary stimulus becomes permanent entitlement. The ledger swells, while output stagnates.

This degeneration is not merely fiscal—it is philosophical. It reveals the abandonment of the causal relationship between effort and reward. A society that borrows for comfort rather than construction loses the moral logic of credit itself. The promise to repay is credible only when what is built yields more than what is spent. Once the purpose of debt becomes political tranquillity, the bond market becomes a mirror of decay.

This distinction—between debt that seeds growth and debt that smothers it—remains the fulcrum of economic integrity. Infrastructure spending, when directed toward projects that unlock productivity, is not wasteful; it is the temporal bridge between potential and performance. A rail network, a power grid, a port—these are engines of compounding utility. They transform labour into leverage. Their debt is repaid not through taxation, but through prosperity.

The opposite holds for ideological projects. Bureaucratic make-work, social redistribution without reform, and vanity subsidies erode both fiscal balance and moral coherence. They feed dependency under the banner of equality, and debt under the illusion of progress. The political left, intoxicated by compassion, calls this justice. The right, terrified of consequence, dares not oppose it. The result is bipartisan insolvency.

Thus, the paradox of productive deficit: debt, used rightly, is civilisation’s accelerator; used wrongly, its executioner. Keynes understood this. His intellectual heirs did not. They took the language of growth and filled it with sentiment. They mistook liquidity for wealth, redistribution for recovery, and permanence for stability. The state became a consumer of capital rather than its steward.

A Bitcoin or gold-backed economy would not change this pattern. It would merely compress the timeline of failure. When the government borrows under a hard standard, the limits appear sooner, but the psychology remains identical. The moral question is not what backs the currency, but what justifies the debt. The ledger can be honest only when purpose is.

Keynes’s original sin was not in his theory but in his followers. He believed in intervention; they believed in indulgence. He sought to preserve capitalism; they used him to dilute it. A century later, his ghost haunts every treasury and parliament that borrows for applause. The paradox endures: a system designed to prevent collapse became the blueprint for perpetual decline.

Section IV — The Gold Standard: Discipline as Delusion

The gold standard is revered as the altar of fiscal virtue, the shining emblem of restraint against the dark appetites of government. Its advocates treat it as scripture—an immutable covenant between state and metal, promising honesty through scarcity. But history, ever the cynic, reveals it to be theatre. Behind the glittering façade of discipline lay the same habits of deceit, the same political cowardice, and the same incurable addiction to debt. Gold did not civilise fiscal policy; it merely concealed its corruption under a metallic sheen.

From 1921 to 1971, the United States embodied this contradiction with almost religious precision. The economy flourished, but the books were poisoned. Every dollar was supposed to be redeemable in gold, yet the nation spent as if gold were infinite. Wars were financed, public works expanded, and social programmes multiplied—all while maintaining the rhetorical illusion of convertibility. The gold standard did not restrain spending; it sanctified it. It allowed politicians to posture as custodians of virtue while quietly mortgaging the nation’s future.

The reality was arithmetic, not moral. Gold reserves grew slowly; debt ballooned rapidly. When the costs of empire and domestic indulgence collided with the rigidities of the peg, the system strained to breaking point. By the 1950s, foreign holders of dollars began to doubt American credibility. By the 1960s, they started demanding redemption in gold rather than promises. And by 1971, the United States—bloated with liabilities and stripped of integrity—simply refused to honour its own covenant. Nixon’s suspension of convertibility was not a bold innovation; it was an admission of insolvency. Fiat currency did not replace discipline; it exposed its absence.

The fatal flaw of the gold standard was philosophical. It assumed that scarcity could enforce morality—that if governments were tethered to a finite reserve, they would act prudently. But scarcity without virtue is mere inconvenience. The state that cannot borrow in gold will borrow in paper. The politician who cannot mint currency will mint deceit. Mechanistic restraint cannot compensate for moral decay. When the lust for expenditure exceeds the capacity for production, the medium of exchange is irrelevant. The gold standard did not fail because it was unsound; it failed because men were.

It is no coincidence that Keynes—so often caricatured as gold’s eternal enemy—called the standard a “barbarous relic.” He did not mean that it was evil, only that it was obsolete. In a modern industrial economy, productivity, not metal, is the measure of wealth. Yet the defenders of the standard clung to it like monks clutching relics in the ruins of their monastery, convinced that the sanctity of gold could redeem the sins of policy. They mistook rigidity for righteousness. In truth, a monetary system chained to a lump of metal can no more save a decadent civilisation than a chastity belt can reform a whore.

The half-century of gold convertibility between the world wars and Bretton Woods was not a period of stability but of chronic tension. Every crisis—military, financial, or social—forced nations to choose between principle and survival, and they always chose survival. Britain suspended gold payments in 1931, France abandoned them soon after, and the United States followed four decades later. Each withdrawal was rationalised as temporary, but history knows no temporary abandonment of virtue. The gold standard’s collapse was not a deviation from its logic but the fulfilment of it.

Those who now advocate a Bitcoin standard repeat this same delusion, though with digital solemnity. They imagine that code can succeed where gold failed, that cryptographic scarcity can triumph where metallic scarcity did not. But the flaw is not in the substrate; it is in the species. The state cannot be automated into honesty. It will borrow, it will overspend, and it will default—whether the reserve is gold, fiat, or blockchain. The standard merely dictates the timing of the betrayal.

The gold standard’s defenders often point to the post-war boom as proof of its virtue. Yet that prosperity was not born of restraint; it was born of production. The factories of America and Europe were rebuilt, innovation exploded, and output surged. The peg endured only because the economy outgrew the constraints it pretended to obey. Once the balance shifted—once consumption overtook creation—the illusion collapsed. It was not gold that created the boom, but the human engine beneath it. The metal merely reflected the light of progress until the lamps went out.

In the final reckoning, the gold standard offered not discipline but denial. It gave politicians a scapegoat and the public a false comfort. Its collapse revealed what had always been true: a government will always choose inflation over austerity, deception over confession, and power over principle. The lesson is eternal—no standard can redeem a corrupt will. Gold failed because it assumed men could be governed by metal. Bitcoin will fail because it assumes men can be governed by code. Neither gold nor mathematics can restrain a civilisation determined to live beyond its means. The only standard that endures is truth, and truth is never convertible.

Section V — The Bitcoin Standard: Digital Austerity and Political Amnesia

Every generation of idealists resurrects the same fantasy under a different banner. The gold standard’s corpse now wears the mask of Bitcoin. The language has changed; the delusion has not. The disciples of the Bitcoin Standard promise liberation from political corruption through mathematics, as though scarcity encoded in software can purify the impulses of men. They mistake constraint for virtue, mistaking a technical feature for a moral law. It is the same utopian reflex that drove the priests of gold—a yearning to outsource discipline to the inanimate, to escape the burden of human responsibility by placing faith in metal or machine.

The seduction of this myth lies in its elegance. Bitcoin appears incorruptible: finite, verifiable, beyond the reach of bureaucratic tampering. It promises a world where governments cannot inflate away value, where debt cannot metastasise into tyranny. In theory, it is a triumph of engineering over politics. In reality, it is the latest monument to political amnesia. Those who believe that scarcity will enforce honesty forget that states have always found ways to counterfeit discipline. When governments can no longer print, they borrow; when they can no longer borrow, they seize. The method changes; the impulse does not.

Under a so-called Bitcoin Standard, this pattern would merely adopt digital clothes. Governments would issue bonds denominated in Bitcoin, just as they once issued notes backed by gold. They would promise redemption in kind, all the while expanding liabilities through credit instruments and off-chain IOUs. Financial intermediaries would reappear as they always do—creating layers of synthetic Bitcoin, derivatives and futures that dilute the very scarcity they profess to respect. The rigidity of supply would not restrain excess; it would accelerate fragility. When the inevitable mismatch between debt and reserve emerges, redemption would again be “temporarily suspended.” The spectacle would be the same—only the syntax different.

The fundamental error lies in the belief that Bitcoin, being digital and decentralised, is immune to political manipulation. It is not. Control does not require possession of the protocol; it requires domination of law, exchange, and enforcement. A state does not need to hack the blockchain when it can regulate the gateways. It can tax, surveil, and expropriate in Bitcoin as easily as in fiat. The apparatus of coercion does not depend on the format of money—it depends on the authority of the issuer. The Bitcoin Standard would not abolish this hierarchy; it would merely conceal it behind a cryptographic veil.

The economists who advocate for this digital asceticism commit the same fallacy as the gold fetishists of the 1920s: they conflate scarcity with stability. But scarcity without elasticity is not discipline—it is paralysis. A monetary system that cannot expand to match productive capacity will strangle its own growth. Capital formation depends on liquidity; innovation depends on risk. A deflationary unit discourages both. Under a Bitcoin regime, capital would retreat into hoarding, investment would wither, and the economy would grind beneath the weight of its own sanctity. The dream of incorruptible money would become a nightmare of inelastic despair.

What its proponents call “sound money” is, in fact, sterile money. It cannot adapt, cannot invest, cannot respond to crisis. It is an idol of purity in a world that runs on exchange. True discipline in an economy comes not from immobility but from proportionality—from aligning debt with productivity, and speculation with tangible creation. Bitcoin’s rigidity would destroy that alignment. It would turn every recession into a depression, every contraction into collapse, because it forbids the flexibility that allows a society to absorb shocks.

Yet the mythology persists because it flatters the moral vanity of its believers. The Bitcoin Standard appeals to those who mistake cynicism for wisdom. They look upon fiat’s failures—its inflation, its deficits, its corruption—and declare that the cure is abstinence. They want a world where government cannot err because government cannot act. But a state stripped of the ability to spend is not virtuous; it is impotent. It cannot invest in infrastructure, respond to crisis, or finance innovation. It becomes a spectator to its own decline. The Bitcoin Standard would not create a disciplined state—it would create a paralysed one, watching its roads decay in the name of purity.

And yet, even this asceticism would prove temporary. The moment a government finds itself unable to meet obligations under a hard Bitcoin regime, it will do what every government has always done—it will cheat. It will invent credit extensions, synthetic derivatives, “temporary exceptions,” and digital equivalents of fractional reserve. The sanctity of code will give way to the elasticity of politics, just as gold gave way to fiat. The faith will collapse, not because Bitcoin failed as software, but because human beings failed as stewards.

The tragic irony is that Bitcoin’s architects sought to escape politics through technology. In doing so, they merely reprogrammed the same illusions into a new format. Their creation promises decentralisation but delivers concentration; it claims immutability but guarantees stagnation. The political delusion endures: that a perfect system can replace imperfect men. But perfection in economics is not a property of design; it is a consequence of discipline.

Thus, the Bitcoin Standard is not the future of sound money—it is the digital resurrection of an old superstition. It mistakes scarcity for virtue, mechanism for morality, and limitation for strength. It would not save civilisation from its fiscal sins; it would codify them into permanence. The problem has never been the medium. It has always been the man.

Section VI — Productive Capital vs. Political Capital

There are two forms of capital in any civilisation: the kind that builds, and the kind that buys applause. The first is slow, disciplined, and cumulative. It manifests as infrastructure, innovation, and enterprise—the foundations on which prosperity compounds. The second is impulsive, sentimental, and parasitic. It feeds bureaucracy, funds vanity, and purchases loyalty with other people’s money. The distinction between productive capital and political capital is not merely economic; it is moral. One sustains a civilisation, the other consumes it.

Productive capital begins with intent—the deliberate act of investment in systems that yield growth beyond their cost. Building a bridge, expanding an energy grid, constructing a port, funding research: these are acts of temporal leverage. They create capacity, transforming the effort of the present into the wealth of the future. Each dollar borrowed for such a purpose is an advance against tomorrow’s productivity, not a theft from it. This is the legitimate purpose of public debt: to fertilise the soil of the economy so that private enterprise can grow.

Political capital, by contrast, is economic cannibalism disguised as compassion. It manifests in subsidies, populist handouts, and ideological programmes masquerading as progress. Its purpose is not to produce, but to please. It redistributes rather than creates, depleting the very base from which real wealth must arise. Debt spent this way is a narcotic: it buys tranquillity while numbing accountability. Each election cycle demands a larger dose, until the state is intoxicated on its own benevolence and cannot distinguish generosity from decay.

The tragedy of modern governance is that the distinction between these forms of capital has collapsed. Infrastructure spending—the most legitimate expression of public borrowing—has been subordinated to political theatre. Projects are selected for optics rather than efficiency, geography rather than necessity. A new train line becomes a campaign slogan, not an artery of commerce. The bridge to nowhere is no longer a metaphor; it is fiscal policy. The state borrows not to build, but to be seen building.

True infrastructure investment, when properly directed, generates self-reinforcing growth. A road network multiplies trade; a research university multiplies knowledge; an energy system multiplies productivity. These are assets that repay their debt through expansion. Their value is measurable not only in returns but in the freedom they enable: they lower the cost of creation and increase the yield of effort. Political capital does the opposite—it constrains, diverts, and suffocates. It creates dependence where there should be capacity, resentment where there should be enterprise.

This is why debt itself is not the enemy. Debt is a tool, and like any tool, its virtue lies in its use. The same bond that finances a power grid can also finance an ideology. The difference is purpose. Productive debt is governed by arithmetic; political debt is governed by appetite. The first demands repayment through growth; the second assumes forgiveness through popularity. One is an act of investment; the other, an act of consumption dressed in moral rhetoric.

The left has perfected this perversion. Their economic doctrine treats capital as a moral pollutant and redistribution as virtue. They demand “equity” without productivity, “justice” without discipline. They spend not to empower citizens but to cultivate dependence—the electorate as client, the treasury as narcotic. The right, too timid to confront this decay, now imitates it under the guise of “stimulus.” The result is bipartisan insolvency, a culture that mistakes debt for generosity and taxation for compassion.

A society cannot borrow its way to virtue. It can, however, invest its way to freedom. Productive capital enhances autonomy because it builds capacity; political capital erodes it because it manufactures dependency. The distinction determines whether a nation ascends or ossifies. Debt tied to creation becomes the engine of civilisation; debt tied to politics becomes its funeral procession.

If a Bitcoin or gold-backed economy were to emerge tomorrow, the same dichotomy would persist. Governments would still borrow, still issue bonds, still plead necessity for folly. The standard might slow the rate of decay, but not the cause. The problem is not that states borrow; it is that they borrow without vision. No algorithm, no commodity, no cryptographic scarcity can replace foresight.

In the arithmetic of nations, capital is destiny. Build with it, and you rise. Waste it, and you fall. The ledger keeps no secrets, and time forgives no indulgence. The world does not collapse when debt grows; it collapses when debt ceases to build. That is the difference between an empire and a bureaucracy, between civilisation and its caricature.

Section VII — The Eternal Default: Why Promises Outlive Standards

Every monetary system begins as a covenant and ends as a confession. The covenant is that money will retain its integrity; the confession is that it cannot. From gold to fiat to Bitcoin, each new system is built upon the same premise—that this time, men will restrain themselves. And each collapses under the same inevitability: the inability of political will to honour economic law. The problem is not that governments default; the problem is that they were always destined to.

A state, by its nature, trades in promises. It promises security, prosperity, and redemption—promises made not merely to citizens, but to creditors, allies, and generations unborn. Every budget is an act of faith; every bond, a prayer that the future will be able and willing to pay for the past. The machinery of state finance is a vast pyramid of deferred obligation. What collapses it is not arithmetic error, but moral fatigue—the moment a society ceases to believe in the sanctity of repayment.

Under the gold standard, that fatigue was disguised as policy. When Britain suspended gold payments in 1931, it was described as a “temporary measure.” When the United States followed suit four decades later, Nixon called it “necessary.” Temporary became permanent; necessity became precedent. These euphemisms are the language of default. Nations do not renounce standards; they quietly outgrow them, then deny ever believing in them. The promise to redeem in gold, like every governmental promise of restraint, survived only as long as it was convenient.

The same cycle would play out under a Bitcoin standard. A government could peg its currency to a fixed supply of digital assets, promise redeemability, and swear that debt would remain within limits. Then a crisis would come—war, depression, political panic—and the covenant would shatter. They would “temporarily suspend” convertibility while maintaining all the rhetoric of responsibility. The blockchain would remain incorruptible; the state would not. The pattern is historical law, not conjecture. Scarcity does not reform men; it only delays their confession.

The elegance of any standard lies in its promise of permanence. Gold could not be forged; Bitcoin cannot be inflated. Yet permanence in physics is irrelevant when impermanence in politics reigns. Governments are not ruled by code or metal but by necessity—by the primal drive to survive the next election, the next crisis, the next revolt. They will debase anything—currency, constitution, or conscience—if it buys time. It is not the mechanism that fails but the morality behind it.

Default, therefore, is not an event—it is a continuum. Every inflation is a partial default, every unredeemed bond a quiet betrayal. The state survives by spreading this default thinly across generations, dissolving responsibility through time. The citizen never sees the crime in full; he feels it as the slow theft of purchasing power, the creeping dilution of his savings, the silent expropriation that occurs when promises mature into air. The brilliance of modern finance is that it has turned insolvency into a process rather than a catastrophe.

To see this clearly is to recognise that no standard—metallic, digital, or metaphysical—can enforce integrity upon those who rule. The power to define value is the power to evade it. When the arithmetic becomes unbearable, the state will redefine the equation. The language of money changes; the logic of evasion remains. The gold standard fell not because it was inefficient, but because it made honesty impossible to disguise. Bitcoin, for all its cryptographic majesty, would suffer the same fate. Its incorruptibility would become its greatest inconvenience.

History is a graveyard of promises broken with dignity. The Latin phrase fiat justitia ruat caelum—let justice be done though the heavens fall—has no fiscal equivalent. No government will let its heavens fall for the sake of monetary virtue. When faced with collapse or confession, it will always choose deceit, wrap it in patriotic language, and call it reform. The eternal default is not a crisis of balance sheets but of character.

The lesson is brutal and unchanging: every standard dies the same death, smothered not by mathematics but by men. The gold bars of Fort Knox, the digits of the blockchain, the printed notes of fiat—all are merely different scripts in the same tragedy. Scarcity can discipline arithmetic, but it cannot redeem appetite. The default is not an aberration of systems; it is the signature of civilisation itself.

Section VIII — Conclusion: The Arithmetic of Reality

In the final reckoning, money is not an invention of machinery or metal—it is a mirror of man. Every attempt to purify it through restraint, scarcity, or code has failed, not because the instruments were unsound, but because the hands that wielded them were unworthy. The delusion that a perfect standard—gold, fiat, or Bitcoin—can cure the sickness of excess is the economic heresy of our age. Scarcity does not create virtue; discipline does. And discipline cannot be programmed into a civilisation that refuses to face the arithmetic of reality.

The story repeats with clinical precision. A society grows prosperous; prosperity breeds entitlement; entitlement demands protection from consequence. The standard—once a symbol of honesty—becomes a shield for hypocrisy. Gold was supposed to enforce integrity, yet it financed wars. Fiat was supposed to free markets, yet it enslaved them to debt. Bitcoin was supposed to restore discipline, yet it threatens to fossilise growth beneath the weight of its own austerity. Each system inherits the same flaw: it is built by men who imagine that virtue can be delegated to design.

The truth is colder, simpler, and infinitely more demanding. Economic stability arises not from the rigidity of systems but from the integrity of stewardship. A government that borrows for creation—roads, power, research, and productive enterprise—acts as a custodian of the future. A government that borrows for indulgence—benefits, subsidies, and spectacle—acts as its executioner. The medium through which it borrows is irrelevant. The discipline that governs the borrowing is everything.

History’s arithmetic is merciless. Between 1921 and 1971, the United States proved that even a gold-backed empire could accumulate unpayable debts under the banner of prudence. The promises endured longer than the integrity that made them credible, and when the final reckoning arrived, the standard fell, replaced not by reform but by reinvention. Fiat was simply the next mask worn by the same appetite. Bitcoin, should it ever rise to that mantle, will be the next. The cycle is not technological—it is moral.

The Keynesian paradox—spend to grow, restrain to sustain—has been stripped of its wisdom and left as a slogan. Keynes himself understood that the state’s duty was to bridge recessions, not to subsidise them. His principle was balance: a government should borrow only for projects that multiply future wealth, not for those that purchase present comfort. It was not a doctrine of consumption but of creation. That distinction has been obliterated by politics. Today, the deficit is not a strategy—it is a lifestyle.

Bitcoin’s evangelists make the same mistake in reverse. Where the Keynesian bureaucrat believes in infinite liquidity, the Bitcoin purist believes in absolute abstinence. Both are extremes of the same disease: the belief that perfection can replace prudence. The former inflates itself to ruin; the latter starves itself to death. Economics, like biology, requires balance—enough elasticity to survive shocks, enough constraint to prevent decay. Neither the bureaucrat nor the maximalist understands this equilibrium.

And so, the lesson returns to the beginning: the standard is not salvation. Whether measured in gold bars, government notes, or digital signatures, value is sustained by productivity, not by ideology. A sound economy is not one that hoards but one that builds; not one that worships scarcity, but one that converts effort into lasting structure. The foundation of prosperity is not what backs money, but what money builds.

The arithmetic of reality is indifferent to dogma. A government that spends more than it creates will collapse, whether its currency is redeemable in gold, anchored to code, or floating on faith. The difference lies only in how long it takes and how honest the ruin appears. Each generation invents new instruments to disguise the same theft—the borrowing of tomorrow for the comfort of today. But numbers, unlike politics, cannot be bribed. They expose the fraud in time.

So the argument ends where reason begins: no monetary system can redeem moral failure. Gold was too heavy to carry; fiat was too easy to print; Bitcoin will prove too rigid to live. None of these fail because they are flawed in concept—they fail because they demand integrity from a species addicted to evasion. The future will not be secured by another standard, but by a reformation of purpose. To borrow only for what builds, to spend only for what endures—this is the only discipline that survives the collapse of systems.

When the rhetoric fades and the slogans rot, the ledger remains. It records without passion, without ideology, without forgiveness. It measures truth in arithmetic form. And the lesson written across its history is eternal: wealth that is not earned cannot endure, debt that is not invested cannot be repaid, and no standard—gold, fiat, or Bitcoin—can save a civilisation that refuses to balance its own books.

How Much Emergency Food Supply Do You Currently Have?

Calculating How Long Your Food Stockpile Will Last

To get the total number of days your stockpile will last, you need to take the:

Total calories in your stockpile ÷ Calories your family needs per day

Let’s start with the top half of the equation.

Calculating How Many Calories You Have

Ideally, your pantry is well organized, making the process much faster.

But if it’s not…perhaps this will allow you to do so…?!?

Because you’re about to take inventory.

Yup. Just like ALL successful retail businesses do regularly.

Now you may ask, “Should I count EVERYTHING” on my shelves?

If it’s shelf stable and you replace it regularly, then YES, count it.

Sure, some items will fluctuate as you use them up and then buy more.

But a snapshot of the shelf life stable calories in your pantry is “close enough” …

Obviously count all freeze-dried foods, MREs, canned meats, and #10 Cans.

Also, don’t count ANY calories in your refrigerator or freezer.

Power outages make freezers highly vulnerable disaster appliances.

The only exception is if you have a robust backup energy plan or you are already living off the grid.

A robust backup energy plan means having a Power station (or a generator with a few weeks of fuel).

Otherwise, I DON’T count your refrigerated and frozen goods.

I used a simple spreadsheet for this to help make the calculations easy. Plus, I can sort and filter as needed later with a spreadsheet.

Start by making a few columns titled:

1. Food – Brand
2. Number of items (pouches, bags, containers)
3. Servings Per Container
4. Calories per Serving
5. Total Calories

Once you fill out an entire row with that info, multiply the “number of items” by the “servings per container” by the “calories per serving.”

This will give you the number of calories you have in your inventory for THAT specific food item.

Now, you need to be careful here.

I added the Brand to the first column because not ALL brands use the same servings/calorie info.

For example:

Separate Brands of canned beans may seem identical but often are not.

The difference can add up, especially if you have a lot of dried beans…

Now, IF the foods are the same, AND the info per serving is the same, you can put them in the same line.

Otherwise, if any of those numbers are different, add a new line item.

Now keep going and inventory everything that makes sense for you.

Once done, you should add up all the calories.

And now you know exactly how much non-perishable food you currently have.

This calorie number may seem massive if you’ve got a decent-sized stockpile.

Perhaps even a few hundred thousand calories, like 358,753 or something like that.

WOW. Massive, right? Not so fast…

Having your total calories may seem like an important number to know, but it’s not all that helpful…yet.

Why? Because it’s relative to the size of your family, right?

For example, 358,753 calories is a stellar long term food storage for a retired couple of 2.

But what about a growing family of 5? Not so much.

That’s why we need to figure out how many calories YOUR family consumes each day…

How Many Calories Does Your Family Need Per Day?

At first, this may seem like a difficult task, but with the proper tools, it’s easy.

You must figure out how many replacement calories each family member needs daily.

1. And this is NOT the same for males and females.
2. It’s also NOT the same for babies, kids, young adults, adults, or mature adults.
3. And it’s NOT the same for those who live an active or sedentary lifestyle.

You need to consider ALL 3 of these variables to make an educated guess.

The good news is I created a simple chart to do just THAT.

You can use this chart to determine your sex, age, and activity level for each family member.

Then add up each number.

The TOTAL is how many calories you’re family needs per day.

Now, THIS is a very good number to know!

This is the number you need to figure out how long your food stockpile will last.

Your Final Calculation

Take your total calories and divide by your family’s daily calorie requirement.

Viola! THAT new number is a very good approximation of How Long Your Current Food Stockpile Will Last.

Perhaps your number is 58.63 days?

That means you’re very close to having 2 months’ worth of food in your emergency stockpile.

Now, of course, you may be able to ration those calories a bit in a longer-term emergency.

But I don’t recommend “rationing” your calculation.

Why? Because I’d rather underestimate the duration of my stockpile by a few days and NOT the other way around.

Said another way, I’d rather be pleasantly surprised…

You now know how long you have before starvation begins after the grocery store shelves go bare.

We can now finally circle back around to the original question:

How Much Emergency Food Should I Have?

Ok, are you ready for YOUR answer? Do you have a pen and paper ready?

A minimum of 2 weeks and a maximum of 1 year…

I can hear you booing at me already…

You were probably hoping for something a bit more specific, weren’t you…

Like most things, everyone’s situation, risk tolerance, and resources vary.

I can hardly give a more specific answer for everyone.

But I CAN do better than THAT.

So let’s break things down into a few different categories.

Only then can we zero in on something more meaningful.

Here are a few categories:

1. Those ONLY Worry About High-Frequency, Short Term Natural Disasters
2. Those Who Worry About Medium Term Disasters (natural and/or manmade)
3. Those Worried About an Extensive Lawless, SHTF Type Event…

1. Those Worried About Shorter-Term Natural Disasters

Some folks are mainly concerned with short-term natural disasters.

They don’t accept that the world is becoming less stable and more uncertain by the day.

They deny the risk of major societal upheavals is rising.

That’s NOT me, but hey, perhaps that’s you.

Well, in this case, you need to get 2 weeks’ worth of survival food in place.

That’s the bare minimum, in my opinion.

Any less, and you’re not living up to your primary adult responsibilities.

I recommend 2 weeks as the first target for 2 reasons:

1. It’s meaningful – gives you a basic level of resiliency
2. It’s achievable – everyone can hit this mark in a short period of time

Sure, some folks will scoff at only 2 weeks of emergency food.

But it’s actually a solid start, good for MOST likely emergencies we’ll all encounter year in and year out.

And it’s way more resilient than MOST people…

53% of Americans admit to having less than 3 days’ worth of nonperishable food and water.

That’s gross negligence!

Sorry but if you have only 2 or 3 days of short term food, you’re completely fragile.

You’re dependent on handouts in a crisis.

This is unacceptable and irresponsible.

So, get 2 weeks, and then I’ll stop the name-calling…

And perhaps I can encourage you to shoot for a month.

A month is so much more resilient than 2 weeks.

At a month’s worth, you’ll be able to ride out 99.9% of natural disasters.

And you’ll also have a bit of extra resiliency to civil unrest, chaos, famines, etc.

2. Those Worried About Medium-Term SHTF Disasters

Ok, this category is for those who don’t feel like 1 month is enough,

But also think a SHTF-type event way worse than the recent pandemic is zero…

I mean, the more widespread and the longer the emergency crisis, the LESS likely it is to occur, right?

It’s simple statistics.

Yet, I believe there’s a greater than zero chance we do have a SHTF event in our lifetimes.

Why? Because the world is getting more vulnerable as:

1. technology advances at a breakneck pace
2. the world becomes more and more interconnected.

So, what’s “reasonable” for someone who sits between the two extremes?

I recommend somewhere between 3 and 6 months.

That solid supply of calories will keep you fed for ALL but the most unlikely doomsday events.

3. Those Worried About a Worst Case-SHTF Type Event…

Well, here we are…the resilient few.

Those of us who think there’s a non-zero chance of life as we know it coming to an end in our lifetimes.

We tend to see our emergency food stockpiles as cheap self-insurance.

A policy you own that lasts up to 25 or 30 years if done right.

So why not go big and sleep really well at night, even as the world continues to crumble?

To enter this realm, you’ll be targeting at least 1’ year’s worth of emergency food…

Now perhaps we’re NOT there yet, but that’s ok; 1 year is an excellent goal.

You can do more if you’d like, heck, 2 years if you’re really dedicated.

But after you hit 1 year, your time and energy are better spent elsewhere.

At that point, I recommend focusing on skills to bring more calories into your storerooms.

I’m talking about:

• Canning, Gardening & Seed Saving
• Foraging and Gathering
• Hunting & Fishing
• Farming & Raising Farm Animals (chickens, rabbits, goats, etc.)
• Aquaponics

These more advanced prepping techniques.

Why? Because they not only give you a runway should grocery store foods go bare.

They extend your calorie runway into the future.

If all you do is stockpile (without adding any new calories), then your time to starvation is on a countdown clock.

You keep adding calories back into your stockpiles.

This helps to extend that time to starvation even longer into the future.

If you ever get to more calories in than out, you’ll never starve, right?

Dispelling The 5 Most Common Stockpiling Amount Myths

I’ve heard a lot of misconceptions about this topic.

Let’s set the record straight:

Myth #1: “I only need a month’s supply.”

A one-month stockpile just won’t cut it.

Emergencies can last longer than that, and you don’t want to be caught with empty shelves.

Aim for at least three to six months’ worth of food to be truly prepared.

Myth #2: “Canned goods will last forever.”

While canned foods have a long shelf life, they don’t last indefinitely.

Over time, the quality and nutritional value can degrade.

Rotate your canned goods regularly and check expiration dates to ensure you have fresh supplies.

Myth #3: “I’ll survive on MREs and freeze-dried meals.”

While these are convenient options, relying solely on MREs and freeze-dried meals can get expensive and monotonous.

Diversify your stockpile with staples like rice, beans, and pasta to create a balanced and sustainable food reserve.

Myth #4: “I’ll catch or hunt for food during an emergency.”

Hunting and fishing can be great survival skills, but they’re not guaranteed sources of food.

Wildlife can be scarce, and fishing might not yield results every time.

Stockpile food as your primary source and use hunting and fishing as supplementary options.

Myth #5: “I’ll just grow my own food.”

Gardening is a valuable skill, but it takes time and effort to yield a significant harvest.

Plus, it’s season-dependent.

Don’t rely solely on your garden; have a well-stocked pantry to bridge the gaps.

Final Thoughts

Everyone reading this needs to build a stockpile a food (and gallon of water) that will last at least 2 weeks

No excuses!

Once you get there, I recommend you keep building for up to 1 month.

And if you want even more protection, try to get to the 3 – 6 months window.

Or perhaps you want lots of food security.

A nice long runway to give you ample time to let the post-modern world sort itself out – then go with 1 year.

After that, move to advanced skills such as farming, raising animals, aquaponics, etc.

Ok, if you’re ready to get started, you should check out my review of Valley Food Storage or watch the video below:

Remember, folks, it’s better to have more food than you need than to come up short during an emergency.

Plan and prepare for the unexpected, and you’ll have peace of mind knowing your family is well-fed.

Stories about killer robots, machine-augmented heroes, laser weapons and battles in space – outer or cyber – have always been good for filling cinema seats, but now they have started to liven up sober academic journals and government white papers.

However, war is about much more than combat or how we fight. Is the sensationalism of high-tech weaponry blinding us to technology’s impact on the broader social, political and cultural context that determines why, where and when war happens, what makes it more or less likely, and who wins?

Consider artificial intelligence (AI). The potential for developing lethal autonomous weapons systems grabs headlines (“killer robots!”), but the greatest impact of AI on conflict may be socially mediated. Algorithmically-driven social media connections funnel individuals into trans-national but culturally enclosed echo-chambers, radicalising their world-view.

As robots relieve humans of their jobs, some societies will prove better prepared than others in their use of education and infrastructures for transitioning workers into new, socially sustainable and economically productive ways to make a living. Less prepared nations could see increasingly stark inequality, with economically-excluded young people undermining social stability, losing faith with technocratic governance, and spurring the rise of leaders who aim popular anger at an external enemy.

Looking beyond individual technologies allows us to focus on the broader and deeper dimensions of the transformation coming our way. Professor Klaus Schwab, chairman and founder of the World Economic Forum, argues that the collapse of barriers between digital and physical, and between synthetic and organic, constitutes a Fourth Industrial Revolution, promising a level of change comparable to that brought about by steam power, electricity and computing.

Something that makes this revolution fundamentally different is how it challenges ideas about what it means to be human. For instance, neuroscience is teaching us more about our own fallibility, and also just how ‘hackable’ humans are. As science continues to uncover difficult truths about how we really operate, we will have to confront basic assumptions about the nature of human beings. Whether this deep transformation will reinforce or undermine a shared sense of human dignity, and what effects it will have on our relationship with organized violence, remain open to question.

The experience of past industrial revolutions can help us begin to search for answers about how this will transform the wider context of international security. In the first industrial revolution, deposits of coal and iron ore were one factor determining the “winners” in terms of economic and geopolitical power.

Today, new modes and artefacts of industrial production will also change demand patterns, empowering countries controlling supply and transit, and disempowering others. Progress in energy production and storage efficiency, for instance, is likely to have profound consequences for the petro economies and the security challenges of their regions. Although the set of natural resources critical to strategic industries will change, their use as a geo-economic tool will probably be repeated.

For instance, this is widely thought to have happened when, in the midst of a maritime dispute with Japan in 2010, China restricted export of “rare earths” that are critical for computing, sensors, permanent magnets and energy storage. With ever more commercial and military value embedded in the technology sector, such key materials will be deemed “critical” or “strategic” in terms of national security, and be subject to political as well as market forces.

The 19th Century Industrial Revolution showed how technological asymmetry can translate into geopolitical inequality – in the words of Hilaire Belloc’s poem ‘The modern traveller’, spoken by a European about Africa: “Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim Gun, and they have not”. (The Maxim Gun was the first recoil-operated machine gun).

What will be the Maxim Gun of our time? Who will have it, and who will not? In the 20th Century, the “haves and have-nots” of the nuclear weapons club membership became the major determinant of the post-war global order, and – as seen in the cases of Iran and North Korea today – this continues to be relevant. Stealth technology and precision guided missiles used to impose a “new world order” in the early 1990s showed how the gap in military capability separated the United States from others, sustaining its leadership of a “unipolar” order.

According to the current US deputy secretary of defence Robert Work, “There’s no question that US military technological superiority is beginning to erode”.

History can only tell us only so much. There is a need for fresh thinking about the implications of the Fourth Industrial Revolution for international security.

Strategic de-stabilisation

1. Waging war may seem “easier”. If increased reliance on machines for remote killing makes combat more abstract from our everyday experience, could that make it more tolerable for our societies, and therefore make war more likely? Those who operate lethal systems are ever more distant from the battlefield and insulated from physical danger, but this sense of advantage may prove illusory. Those on the receiving end of technological asymmetries have a stronger incentive to find other ways to strike back: when you cannot compete on a traditional battlefield, you look to where your adversary is vulnerable, such as through opportunistic attacks on civilians.

2. Speed kills. “The speed at which machines can make decisions in the far future is likely to challenge our ability to cope, demanding a new relationship between man and machine.” This was the assessment of US Major General William Hix at a conference on the future of the Army in October 2016. The speed of technological innovation also makes it hard to keep abreast of new military capabilities, easier to be misled on the actual balance of power, and to fall victim to a strategic miscalculation. The fact that some capabilities are deliberately hidden just makes it harder. Because offensive cyber capability relies so much on exploiting one-off vulnerabilities, it is difficult to simultaneously demonstrate and maintain a capability. Once a particular vulnerability has been exploited, the victim is alerted and will take steps to fix it. General Hix again: “A conventional conflict in the near future will be extremely lethal and fast, And we will not own the stopwatch.”

3. Fear and uncertainty increase risk. The expectation that asymmetries could change quickly – as may be the case with new strategic capabilities in areas like artificial intelligence, space, deep sea and cyber – could incentivise risk-taking and aggressive behaviour. If you are confident that you have a lead in a strategically-significant but highly dynamic field of technology, but you are not confident that the lead will last, you might be more tempted to use it before a rival catches up. Enhanced capacity to operate at speed puts security actors into a constant state of high alert, incentivises investment in resilience, and forces us to live with uncertainty. Under these conditions, war by mistake – either through over-confidence in your ability to win, or because of exaggerated threat perception – becomes more likely.

4. Deterrence and pre-emption. When new capabilities cause a shift in the balance between offensive and defensive advantage – or even the perception of such a shift -, it could increase the incentives for aggression. For example, one of the pillars of nuclear deterrence is the “second strike” capability, which puts the following thought into the mind of an actor contemplating a nuclear attack: “even if I destroy my opponent’s country totally, their submarines will still be around to take revenge”. But suppose swarms of undersea drones were able to track and neutralize the submarines that launch nuclear missiles? Long-range aerial drones can already navigate freely across the oceans, and will be able to fly under the radar deep into enemy territory. Such capabilities make it possible in theory for an actor to escape the fear of second-strike retaliation, and feel safer in launching a pre-emptive strike against aircraft in their hangars, ships in port, and critical infrastructure, with practically no chance of early warning. Indeed, cyberattacks on banks, power stations and government institutions have demonstrated that it is no longer necessary to fly bombers around the world to reach a distant enemy’s critical infrastructure without early warning. The idea of striking a `knockout blow` may come to seem feasible once more.

5. The new arms race is harder to control. One of the mechanisms for strategic stability is arms control agreements, which have served to limit the use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. When it comes to the multiple combinations of technology we see as a hallmark of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, one of the obstacles to international agreement is caused by uncertainty about how strategic benefits will be distributed. For instance, the international community is currently debating both the ethics and practicality of a ban on the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems. One of the factors holding this debate back from a conclusion is a lack of consensus among experts about whether such systems would give an advantage to the defender or the attacker, and hence be more likely to deter or incentivize the escalation of conflict. Where you stand on the issue may depend on whether you see yourself as a master of the technology, or a victim. Another obstacle to imposing control is the wider cast of players –

6. A wider cast of players. As cutting-edge technology becomes cheaper, it spreads to a wider range of actors. Consider the development of nuclear bombs – the last breakthrough in weapons technology that re-wrote the rules of international security. Although the potential for a fission bomb was understood in terms of theoretical physics, putting it into practice involved thousands of scientists and billions of dollars – resources on a scale only a few nations could muster. Over 70 years later, the club of nuclear weapons states remains exclusively small, and no non-state actor has succeeded in acquiring nuclear capability.

In contrast, there are more than 70 nations operating earth-orbiting satellites today. Nano-satellites are launched by Universities and Corporations. A growing list of companies can launch and recover payloads on demand, meaning even small states can buy top-notch equipment “off the shelf”. As Christopher Zember put it, “Once the pinnacle of national achievement, space has become a trophy to be traded between two business owners”. These days, even a committed enthusiast can now feasibly do genetic engineering in their basement. Other examples of dual-purpose technologies include encryption, surveillance, drones, AI and genomics. With commercial availability, proliferation of these technologies becomes wider and faster, creating more peer competitors on the state level and among non-state actors, and making it harder to broker agreements to stop them falling into the wrong hands.

7. The grey zone. The democratisation of weaponisable technology empowers non-state actors and individuals to create havoc on a massive scale. It also threatens stability by offering states more options in the form of “hybrid” warfare and the use of proxies to create plausible deniability and strategic ambiguity. When it is technically difficult to attribute an attack – already true with cyber, and becoming an issue with autonomous drones – conflicts can become more prone to escalation and unintended consequences.

8. Pushing the moral boundaries. Institutions governing legal and moral restraints on the conduct of war or controlling proliferation date from an era when massively destructive technology was reserved to a small, distinct set of actors – mostly states or people acting under state sponsorship. The function of state-centric institutions is impaired by the fact that states’ militaries are no longer necessarily at the cutting edge of technology: most of the talent driving research and development in today’s transformative dual-use technologies is privately employed, in part because the private sector simply has access to more money. For example, the private sector has invested more in AI research and development in five years than governments have since AI research first started. Diminishing state control of talent is epitomised by Uber`s recruitment of a team of robotics researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in 2015, which decimated the research effort they had had been working on for the United States department of Defence.

The fact that the trajectory of research – and much of the infrastructure critical to security – are in private hands need not be a problem if state actors were able to exercise oversight through traditional means such as norms development, regulation and law-making. However, the pace and intensity of innovation, and difficulty of predicting what new capabilities will be unleashed as new technologies intersect, makes it difficult for states to keep up. State-centric institutions for maintaining international security have failed to develop a systematic approach to address the possible long-term security implications of advances in areas as diverse as nanotechnology, synthetic biology, big data and machine learning. Nor have industry-led measures yet filled the gap.

9. Expanding domains of conflict. Domains of potential conflict such as outer space, the deep oceans, and the Arctic – all perceived as gateways to economic and strategic advantage – are expanding via new technologies and materials that can overcome inhospitable conditions. Like cyberspace, these are less well-governed than the familiar domains of land, sea and air: their lack of natural borders can make them difficult to reconcile with existing international legal frameworks, and technological development is both rapid and private sector-driven, which makes it hard for governance institutions to keep up.

Those who secure “first mover” advantage may also seek to defend it against the establishment of regulation and governance in the common interest. Access to the technology needed to reach and exploit space, for example, allows belligerents to compromise the effectiveness of defensive measures that rely on satellites for communications, navigation, command and control technology. Even a very limited strike on a satellite would likely cause space debris, damaging systems used by the wider community. Despite a 1967 United Nations treaty calling for the peaceful use of Space, the United States Deputy Secretary of the Air Force recently warned that “there is not an agreed upon code of conduct” for space operations.

10. What is physically possible becomes likely. History suggests that any technology – even one that gives moral pause – will eventually be developed in order to be used as a weapon. As the political theorist Carl Schmitt explained, political conflict is the “realm of exception” in all sorts of ways that make the morally unthinkable not only possible, but more likely. Professor Ole Wæver and the Copenhagen School of international relations developed the concept of “securitisation” to describe how a security actor invokes the principle of necessity as a way of getting around legal or moral restraints. Policy-makers can argue that because non-state actors, terrorist and criminal groups can access new technology, they are obliged to pursue weaponization, in order to prepare an adequate defence. Public disquiet can also be bypassed by conducting research in secret; we now know from de-classified accounts of Cold War studies that soldiers were used as guinea pigs to research the effects of new weapons, and military experiments may well be underway today in areas such as human enhancement. The tendency for the logic of conflict to drive the development of technology beyond what is considered acceptable by society under normal conditions is one more reason to pay closer attention to trends in this field.

Institutional shifts

International Security is destabilised at the institutional level by the way the 4th Industrial Revolution is empowering the individual through technology, and the way that blurs the lines between war and peace, military and civilian, domestic and foreign, public and private, and physical and digital. The democratisation of destruction has been mentioned above, but non-state groups’ leveraging of global social media – whether to gain support, undermine the morale of opponents, sow confusion, or provoke a response that will create an advantage – has increased the strategic importance of shaping perceptions and narratives about international security. ISIS’s use of online videos provide an extreme example of a non-state actor using social media to drive recruitment, while state security services in select countries employ online “trolls” on a large scale. Consider the implications for democratic control over armed force when technologies like big data analytics, machine learning, behavioural science and chatbots are fully enlisted in the battle over perceptions and control of the narrative.

The hacking attack suffered by Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014, allegedly motivated by North Korea’s political grievance, highlights these blurring lines – and the resulting difficulty of deciding who should be responsible for security in this new reality. If someone were so offended by a movie that they burned down the studio’s warehouse, one would expect the police to step in. But is it ultimately the responsibility of the state or of corporations to prevent or deter the kind of attack experienced by Sony Pictures? What is the appropriate response? When does an attack on a private company constitute an act of war? As an increasing proportion of what we value gets uploaded onto a global infrastructure of information and communications technology, do we expect it to be protected by service providers like Apple, or by our state’s security agencies?

Little by little, the responsibility for defending citizens is effectively shifting away from the state and towards the private sector. It is, for example, your bank’s security chief who bears responsibility for protecting your money from international cyber theft, whether it comes from straightforward criminal groups or those acting under the sponsorship of sovereign states. A report by Internet security company McAfee and the think-tank CSIS estimated the likely annual cost to the global economy from cybercrime at more than $400 billion – roughly equivalent to the combined defence spending of the European Union, or the Asia region.

According to 17th century political theorist Thomas Hobbes, the citizen agrees to give up some freedom and render loyalty in exchange for protection and to escape the “natural condition” of life, which was otherwise “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. In return, the state expects respect for its laws. But if citizens lose confidence in the state’s capacity to guarantee their security, be it through military protection or domestic justice and policing or social safety nets, they may also feel less of an obligation to be loyal to the state in return. In effect, the unravelling of the Hobbesian ”social contract”. This can undermine mechanisms for global governance, which consist of inter-state institutions that rely on state power for their effectiveness.

Could the relative loss of state power fatally undermine the system of international security? Several well-known tech entrepreneurs have talked in ways that suggest they see national governments not as a leader in norms development, but as an unnecessary inconvenience. Genetics innovator Balaji Srinivasan has envisioned “Silicon Valley`s ultimate exit” from the USA. Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel has floated the idea of establishing a sea colony to literally offshore himself from government regulation. Elon Musk has talked about colonising Mars. There is serious interest in businesses formulating their own foreign policy. These are interesting ideas, but until there is a credible rival the state for the role of main international security actor to meet the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the character of state action on security will need to adapt to the new environment, re-position itself to accommodate other actors, and renegotiate relations across a widespread network of partnerships.

What is to be done?

As attitudes adapt to the new distribution of security responsibility between individuals, companies and institutions of governance, there is a need for a new approach to international security. There is plenty of room for debate about how that approach should look, but the baseline can be drawn through three points: it will need to be able to think long-term, adapt rapidly to the implications of technological advances, and work in a spirit of partnership with a wide range of stakeholders.

Institutional barriers between civilian and military spheres are being torn down. Outreach to Silicon Valley is a feature of current US Defence policy, for example, as are invitations to hackers to help the Department of Defence to maintain its advantage in the digital domain. The “third offset strategy” promoted by US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter is based on a recognition that private sector innovation has outstripped that of military institutions in the post-Cold War era, and a more open relationship with business as well as with academic and science institutions could prove vital to maintaining the dominance of US military capabilities.

Such is the speed, complexity and ubiquity of innovation today, we need a regulation process that looks ahead to how emerging technologies could conceivably be weaponized, without holding back the development of those technologies for beneficial ends. “Hard governance” of laws and regulations remain necessary, but we will also need to make more use of faster-moving “soft governance” mechanisms such as laboratory standards, testing and certification regimes, insurance policies and mechanisms like those set up by academics to make potentially dangerous research subject to approval and oversight. This will need to proactively anticipate and adapt to not only technological changes, but also macro-cultural ones, which are a lot harder to predict.

States and other security actors need to start exploring with each other some of the concepts and modes of operation that would make such a networked approach sustainable, legitimate and fit for the ultimate purpose of maintaining stability and promoting peaceful coexistence in the emerging international security landscape.

Instead of meeting each other in court, as the FBI met the Apple Corporation to settle their dispute about encryption, security providers could meet across a table, under new forms of public oversight and agile governance, as partners in a common endeavour. Instead of struggling along in denial, or wasting energy trying to fight the inevitable, stakeholders who have been working in parallel siloes can learn to collaborate for a safer world. What cast of actors populate this wider security ecosystem? What are shared priorities in terms of risks? What are some of the potential models for peer to peer security? How can the 4th Industrial Revolution be used to give citizens a stronger sense of control over choices of governance, or to deny space to criminal organizations and corrupt practices? Can smart contracts using block chain technology be applied to build confidence in financial transactions and peace agreements? Can defensive alliances be expanded to include or even consist entirely of non-state actors? Should international law extend the right to use proportionate force in self-defence in cyber conflict to commercial actors? What aspects of these challenges are a matter for legal instruments and regulation, and what aspects will require a new approach?

The future of national security may lie in models of self-defence that are decentralised and networked. As Jean-Marie Guéhenno, CEO of the International Crisis Group, wrote: “distribution of security measures among a multiplicity of actors – neighbourhoods, cities, private stakeholders – will make society more resilient. And over time, smaller but well-connected communities may be more effective at preventing and identifying terrorist threats among their members.” Several of the critical ingredients of such a de-centralized model are becoming available: more security responsibility is being taken up by city mayors and even civil society groups like the global hacktivist collective “Anonymous”, who declared war on the self-styled Islamic State. So far, however, this has been a haphazard phenomenon and its impact is diminished by a lack of coordination.

The answers that may emerge to these questions are unpredictable – but what is clear is the need to have a conversation that reaches across generations and across disciplines. This conversation has to be global. International security is threatened by a loss of trust, in particular between those who drew power from the last industrial revolution and those whose power is rising within a fluid and complex environment. The conversation needs to foster mutual understanding, dispel unjustified fears, and revive public confidence in new forms of responsive leadership that manifestly serve the common good.