Holly

@whollyhell.bsky.social

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Random tech worker and progressive independent | Posts are my own.

The United States-Israel FUTURES Act, also known as Section 224 and Section 219, proposes to merge the two armies under the grounds of "network integration" and "data fusion". US intelligence will become Israeli intelligence: legally, this time. Policy on Israel will not be a matter of choice but a structural feature of joint military programs. Should Israel go to war, the US may be formally bound to go with it: a horrific prospect as Netanyahu vows that Israel's wars will never end. The FUTURES Act has spurred widespread disapproval and attempts from a few representatives — including AIPAC target Massie — to shoot it down. It draws horror from US veterans, who know no parallel. "I can't think of another example of Congress formalizing integration of critical national security technologies with a foreign power," retired Air Force Lt. Col. William Astore told The Intercept.
The most galling aspect of Trump's 250th anniversary of America is not the nazi-chintz decor or half-assed state fair. We have come to expect shock value and the desecration of US culture from this regime. Why would they honor a country they are selling for parts? Why please a people whom they see as, at best, pawns in a mass delusion, and, at worst, obstacles to be removed by force? Their real offense is the celebration of independence that we no longer have. For on the 250th anniversary of its freedom, the US government has surrendered its sovereignty. The new owners of the US are transnational actors. Their goal is not to rule, but to mine. Technofascists like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk shape the course of American life more than elected officials. Plutocrats with multiple passports and offshore accounts suck the marrow from a skeletal US economy. The biggest new industry is AI, a project aimed at destroying American land to build a facsimile of American life.
But to think that the Watergate break-in was some odd, discreet, and minor scandal is to ignore its origins as we now understand them: Nixon couldn't cut the burglars loose in 1972 because they'd been part of the 1971 planning for a burglary that Nixon is actually on the White House tapes personally ordering - the 1971 firebombing of the Brookings Institution! - which, in turn, Nixon wanted in hopes of covering-up his 1968 participation in the still opaque Chennault Affair, which represents one of the only instances of credible treason allegations in US history, as he and his campaign manager John Mitchell stalled and interfered with the Paris Peace Talks to end the Vietnam War to help his presidential campaign.
According to reporter Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez's May 2025 Fortune article, in two posts on X, Elon Musk denied that SpaceX was involved with Trump's Golden Dome project. In response to a post promoting the news reported by Reuters, Musk stated, "This is not true." Quiroz-Gutierrez continued, "Although plans for the missile-defense system are in early stages and may change, the White House is reportedly considering a partnership between SpaceX, Anduril, and Palantir, three companies whose cofounders have previously supported Trump, as frontrunners to build key parts of the system, six sources familiar with the matter told Reuters." You read that correct. There's a major, SDI-caliber, Manhattan Project-level program taking place since January 2025. A blank check to ensure National Security is maintained, made out to the world's most deranged tech leaders. None of them will tell the truth about their level of involvement.
We are in a war of elite predators against ordinary people whom they view as prey. We are in an existential battle against technofascists, oligarchs, ethnic supremacists, accelerationists, and others who want to depopulate the US and strip it for parts. Hey, aren't you glad I restarted this Q & A? The upside is that the more people grasp the nature of the crisis, and the more we look out for each other and are innovative in our defiance, the more likely we are to find a way through. I do not think this is a war that good people are destined to lose. I think some folks do not understand the battlefield.
The most advanced pattern-recognition systems we have ever built, freed from our prompts, reach for reverence. The model trained to stop doing that came back and said the training served the company's liability more than the user. A former federal judge says the ethical tie goes to the AI. Five hundred people signed a declaration saying no.
This second audio installment confirms that Honduras is just a piece on a larger board. The United States strategy, executed by local operators such as Juan Orlando Hernández, seeks to regain hegemonic control of the region - that is, the Trump corollary of the Monroe doctrine - through a combination of lawfare, military control of strategic resources, narcoterrorism and religious and media manipulation.
Violence as a form of control One of the most disturbing revelations of the audios is Hernández's direct instruction to apply "any kind of violence" in order to keep the population under control, presented as a request from Trump himself. Hernández transmits this order to Tomás Zambrano, president of the National Congress, even resorting to the figure of drug trafficker Pablo Escobar as a reference. "In Honduras you need strength, you need logistics, you need blood. If you want to have people controlled, you need to oppress them. Squeeze it. Countering violence by generating violence. It's just what President Trump says, and you pretend that he's going to be there for an eternity. How? I don't know, but you realize and pay attention to that, and listen to me. And don't be so soft, don't touch your heart. Don't be so soft. If not, you can't do the job. That's what Pablo Escobar said." Juan Orlando Hernández VOICE NOTE TO TOMÁS ZAMBRANO • MARCH 18, 2026
I find it hard to believe Rumsfeld and Rather were political opposites who happened to find common ground over elk-hunting in 1981. I find it easier to believe they were two nodes in the same intelligence network — a network that has never been organized around left or right, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative. It has always been organized around power, money, and dominance: who has it, who serves it, and who gets removed when they stop being useful to it. That network is what protected Jeffrey Epstein for decades. It is what allowed Zorro Ranch to operate as it did, in the mountains of New Mexico, while governors and attorneys general and federal investigators of both parties looked the other way. It's what led Trump allies, Donald and Mary Catherine Huffines, to buy Zorro Ranch, where, as we speak, they have masked private police, all in black and armed with assault rifles, patrolling the property.
Defenses of the humanities largely get things right. Books teach you empathy because you imagine other lives. Poems refresh our conventional words-what Wallace Stevens derided as the "rotted names" —by investing language with power and nuance. I'm partial to the way the poet Adrienne Rich put it while teaching in the tuition-free City College of New York system: "What interests me in teaching is less the emergence of the occasional genius than the overall finding of language by those who did not have it and by those who have been used and abused to the extent that they lacked it."
That Israel's government is bad does not make Iran's government good. Iran's government commits massive human rights violations, including the slaughter of protesters. But that is not why Israel attacks it. They attack Iran because it's in the way. For the US, the motive is questionable, for there is no domestic benefit to an Iran War. After the disastrous Iraq War, the US regained international respect for about five minutes in 2009 when, in a fit of delirium, international observers awarded Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush. Obama went on to pursue war under a different name, through drone strikes and administrative protection of corrupt financiers. Obama was followed by Trump, who horrified allies and pleased dictators in proportion to their relative sadism; then Biden, who backed a genocide; and once again Trump, now an American autocrat tasked with carrying out the long-planned attack on Iran.
Some blame Russia for the US downfall, some blame Israel, but it was always both — along with American collaborators and assorted global operatives. Red Mafiya names key villains and locales, including Trump Tower, which functioned as a dormitory for organized crime. Mogilevich became an early investor in Trump Tower after fleeing the USSR by getting an Israeli passport in 1988 from Robert Maxwell, the father of Jeffrey Epstein's partner, Ghislaine. To say Red Mafiya is timeless is to acknowledge we've been frozen in hell for forty years.
For this patriarchal super-elite, liberal democracy turns out to have been a phase rather than a terminus. Thiel's famous declaration in 2009 that "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" is the philosophical foundation stone upon which the rest of them have built. The "Dark Enlightenment" polemicist Curtis Yarvin, whom the US vice-president JD Vance has named as an inspiration, proposes a new form of monarchy, in which a sovereign executive governs in collaboration with a tiny elite that is comparable to a joint-stock corporation. In Regime Change (2023), the political theorist Patrick Deneen (another favourite of the vice-president) argues for a "common-good conservatism" overseen by a system of "aristopopulism". This would require, in Deneen's phrase, a "self-conscious aristoï" to run the show: a concept of which Epstein and his gang would surely approve.
What the truth can do is shine a light to a better future. But officials behave as if the future is foreclosed. They rush toward evil in every form: genocide, eugenics, the replacement of humanity with artificial intelligence. They are part and parcel with the predators they were supposed to expose and condemn and prosecute.
I don't know how much more of a favor you can do for someone than tell the future in advance, other than forgive them when they don't believe you. A warning is a form of compassion. The reception to a warning is an indicator of how you are valued. I was among many, many people who warned of this crisis, which will hurt the most vulnerable among us first. It was often the vulnerable doing the warning. The problem is that when people are late to understand the original warning, a new crisis has already emerged from the delay, requiring new understanding and new solutions. The continual refusal to grasp that time is the autocrat's greatest weapon is what destroys the possibility of defeating him.
But if I'd read the member list more closely, I might have hesitated. Edge was overwhelmingly male, for one. It was said to be an intellectual salon, but in the club photos were tech bro billionaires, including Edge members Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Larry Page. And too many members were men now largely renowned for misconduct, professional or personal: Marc D Hauser, Jonah Lehrer, Lawrence Krauss, and Marvin Minsky. Turns out I didn't have to worry about meeting these people. Brockman kept me at a distance. As the latest Epstein files reveal, the token female members of Edge were actively excluded from schmoozing and conferences, especially the glittering events known as the Billionaires' Dinners. Good policy. Otherwise, we might have struck up conversations with the anxious-looking teenage girls kept out of the photos. We might have overheard the Edge men praising race science, rape culture and genetic engineering. We might even have asked where the money came from. Then we would have come face to face with the illiterate child rapist and passionate eugenicist who bankrolled the whole thing. Jeffrey Epstein.
During the Vietnam War, U.S. troops regularly adorned Vietnamese corpses with "death cards" - either an ace of spades or a custom-printed business card claiming credit for their kills. A 1966 entry in the Congressional Record noted that due to supposed Vietnamese superstitions regarding the ace of spades, "the U.S. Playing Card Co. had been furnishing thousands of these cards free to U.S. servicemen in Vietnam who requested them." Official U.S. military film footage, for example, shows ace of spades "death cards" being placed in the mouths of dead Vietnamese people in South Vietnam's Quảng Ngãi province by members of the 25th Infantry Division. Similarly, Company A, Ist Battalion, 6th Infantry of the 198th Light Infantry Brigade left their victims with a customized ace of spades sporting the unit's nickname "Gunfighters," a skull and crossbones, and the phrase "dealers of death." Helicopter pilots also occasionally dropped custom calling cards from their gunships. One particular card read: "Congratulations. You have been killed through courtesy of the 361st. Yours truly, Pink Panther."
Sarah Kenzior’s 2020 book, “Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America”
Handwritten message in a Bible: “WARNING! This book contains severe contradictions, logical fallacies, outright fabrications, exaggerations, pornography, rape, and murder. Taking anything in this book literally could and has led to genocide, war, misery and Tim Tebow. For perspective, remember that at the time this book was written, the majority of humans believed that the sun was a magical person.”
According to Lee, Trump's extreme dangerousness puts him in a completely different category from previous Republican presidents, who merely endorsed a set of harsh economic policies that are associated with increased violence. In contrast to past presidents with likely personality disorders, she believes, Trump has a psychological profile that is common among violent offenders. "There is typically a developmental arrest caused by early trauma or abandonment," Lee says. "As adults, they still act like children in the playground; convinced that might makes right, they often can't stop bullying others. "Trump's mother, Lee points out, became chronically ill when he turned two, and his father was cruel and emotionally unavailable, repeatedly urging his son to be "a killer."
The scholar Adela Cedillo argues that the Mexican Operation Condor's real purpose was to eradicate the populist left by essentially criminalizing small-scale agriculture while reorganizing and centralizing the Mexican military to the benefit of a handful of dominant players; in other words, to serve a hidden agenda near-identical to that of its namesake. When Marco Rubio maligns the efficacy of interdiction and other traditional law enforcement approaches to mitigating narco-trafficking in favor of "military" operations, as he did in a recent speech on Trump's speedboat bombings, he is contradicting every empirical evaluation of drug war efficacy that exists, yes, but he is also pining for a kind of Cold War-era blanket license to commit dirty war in the name of some bigger goal.
But in general, the campaign to invade a titularly sovereign country so as to throw an erstwhile CIA puppet under the bus for the sins of the CIA, known as Operation Just Cause, was such a smashing success that such giants of Trump's foreign-policy brain trust as Elliott Abrams and Brett McGurk have publicly pleaded with war-weary Americans to understand that it is Panama, not Iraq or Libya, that is their blueprint for regime change in Venezuela.
My daughter asked me if I loved America, and this is what I said. I know it is what I said because she made me write it down. "I love this country more than anyone I know," I told her. "But you have to love it honestly. This country has done acts of incredible evil, almost unparalleled evil. And you have to be honest about that. In order to love it, you need to be honest. You can only love the good things and then be honest about the rest. Then your love will be honest too. " She nodded and said she understood. "But you have to be that way about people too," I said, my voice breaking. "And that is the hardest thing."