Dramatic footage appears to show an act of industrial sabotage at a one-million-square-foot Kimberly-Clark distribution center in Ontario, California.

A third-party warehouse worker was arrested on suspicion of felony arson shortly after the devastating six-alarm fire on Tuesday morning, which destroyed all of the warehouse’s contents, including household paper products such as Kleenex and toilet paper.

Local media outlet Fox 11 Los Angeles said Ontario police arrested Chamel Abdulkarim, 29, an employee of a third-party distribution partner, on suspicion of felony arson.

Gavin Newsom would like to remind everyone that it is peak fire season in California, and would appreciate it if you ignoring the arsonist that was arrested for setting this 1,2 million square foot paper factory in Ontario on fire. pic.twitter.com/o2ytqyvQBa

— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) April 7, 2026

Video circulating on X allegedly shows Abdulkarim torching pallets of household paper products while uttering the words, “All you had to do was pay us enough to live.”

In another scene, he said, “There goes your inventory.”

“All you had to do was pay us enough to live” – angry employee turned arsonist, as he lights 1,2 million square foot toilet paper facility on fire https://t.co/zekKx16H0H pic.twitter.com/eQvYhFdIC3

— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) April 8, 2026

Do not worry, Kimberly-Clark and its warehouse operators are almost certainly taking note. One of the long-term consequences of sabotage and labor unrest is that it strengthens the case for faster automation. The downside of revolt will be faster automation in warehouses to mitigate incidents like these. 

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

A system that comes to depend on synthetic signaling for its “information” is doomed to Model Collapse, as its signaling has completely detached from the real world.

That we inhabit a post-truth world seems to accepted wisdom. But that’s only half of it. We also live in a post-trust world. In a post-truth world, everything is shaped by the implicit goals of the entity claiming to state the “truth,” as the entire point of claiming to state the “truth” is to persuade the target populace to agree to something favorable to the issuer of the claimed “truth.”

In other words, the “truth” as something that has no intentional spin of self-interest no longer exists. What is passed off as “truth” is spin intended / designed to serve the interests of those doing the spinning.

This is the definition of propaganda and marketing, which are pure expressions of self-interest, and they’ve been around since the dawn of civilization, as persuading others to do what serves your private interests is much lower cost / more profitable than having to modify their behaviors with force.

The first step in the con of propaganda and marketing is to win the trust of the mark. This is a fascinating process, as some people are willing believers and others are skeptical, and so the trust campaign must speak to both the skeptics and those primed to embrace the message for reasons that have less to do with the entity issuing the message and more to do with their internal beliefs.

The trick with skeptics is to present persuasive evidence–the “facts.” These can be first-person accounts, scientific studies, or something presented as self-evident. The con artist presents the facts as if they are objective and the mark is invited to “decide for yourself:” the con artist claims he has no intent to persuade.

This is humorously illustrated in Melville’s classic novel The Confidence-Man.

The rise of the collection of data and the scientific method introduced the idea of “objective truth” that was based on facts collected from observations that were repeatable by anyone able to isolate the same variables. In other words, these truths could be verified by anyone using the same tools to collect data that isolated the same variables, so it wasn’t a private truth, it was a public truth everyone had to accept as fact.

The power of “objective fact” was too good to pass up, and so manipulating the metrics of data collection and analysis became the new territory of developing trust and establishing “truth” to serve private interests. Sample sizes were kept small, subjects were selected for their likelihood of yielding the desired data, and analytic tools weeded out outliers that undermined or contradicted the pre-selected “results.”

As McLuhan observed, The medium is both the message and the massage, and so the synthetic media that broadcast the human voice and visual images captured our attention and imagination in ways the written word could not. Now we have AI, which mimics human speech so engagingly that we attribute it with human characteristics: intelligence, emotions, empathy, etc.

With social media and smartphones, these media/ AI technologies have scalable visibility and virulence: they are ubiquitous (everywhere) and extremely contagious / virulent, spreading quickly through vast populations.

Few would claim to trust the “truthiness” of social media content or its sources, but that no longer matters. what matters is the signal embedded in the content that triggers a dopamine cascade in the “consumer” of content–what Big Tech calls engagement and others call addiction.

Signals are symbolic short-cuts that bypass rational filters by firing dopamine receptors. This makes them ideal on two counts: they don’t require the lengthy processes required to nurture trust or establish the “truth,” processes which require some connection between the real world and the claim being made.

Signals are small in size and easy to replicate, in effect cognitive/emotional viruses that bypass our cognitive/emotional immune system of skeptical wariness of anything that smacks of self-interest, i.e sure things, guarantees of immense gains and grandiose claims.

Signals bypass the process of connecting a claim to the real world. This is their unmatched power. In the ancient world, pageantry and public displays acted as signals of power, status and victory. The power and status were symbolically on display, as only those with wealth and power could afford such performances.

The importance of these symbolic displays reinforcing the legitimacy and power of elites should not be underestimated. This is why Leonardo Da Vinci was hired to design and engineer lavish parades of movement and color, extravaganzas designed to impress and entrance onlookers.

Such symbolic signaling was enormously costly, and so they reflected real wealth and power, for only those possessing those resources could manage such expense.

Now digital synthetic signaling is virtually free. When Leonardo’s pageantry came to life, it was unmistakably authentic, for it demanded real world resources and labor. Digital synthetic signals require nothing but visibility and virulence–no connections to the real world are required.

So AI’s mastery of natural language signals intelligence, money signals wealth, technology signals Progress, a diploma signals “hire me, I’m a valuable worker,” and so on. Signaling replaces persuasion that is still connected to the real world with dopamine cascades.

Synthetic signaling is inherently self-referential: it’s “trustworthy” and “plausible” because we’ve already seen it elsewhere, and ubiquity is itself a signal of plausibility and trustworthiness, because could so many others be completely wrong?

“Breaking news” must be real, right? Words, images, speech are all easily turned into symbolic signals that carry implicit claims of retaining some connection to the real world when in fact there is none.

Signaling is easily gamed, falsified, curated, edited, cosmetically enhanced and generated by automation, while the real world it supposedly symbolizes / reflects is not so pliable. The Late Western Roman Empire can be viewed as a system that retained sufficient resources to stage signals of continuity and power that had lost all connections to the real world beyond Imperial enclaves.

But this expenditure of scarce resources on signaling is self-liquidating: the costs of issuing symbolic representations of power consumes the resources needed to sustain the system’s core structures, which then collapse even as the signals continue engaging us.

In summary: the post-truth / post-trust world is self-liquidating, as its synthetic claims of connection to the real world are fake, and the hollowness of its self-referential nature and its rampant overuse exhausts the dopamine cascades’ effectiveness. Drained of authentic cognition and emotion by the ceaseless onslaught of synthetic digital signaling, our engagement withers. We lose interest, become detached, unresponsive, or hyper-aggressive, in either case stripped of the capacity for independent thought or action, just like the mice trapped in Mouse Utopia.

A system that comes to depend on synthetic signaling for its “information” is doomed to Model Collapse, as its signaling has completely detached from the real world.

*  *  *

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The Trump White House is mulling ways to ‘punish’ NATO allies for not stepping up to support the US Iran campaign, and for staying on the sidelines after Trump’s repeat appeals to create a coalition to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

This could include pulling protective American forces, and US military hardware, from NATO partner countries. It would impact “certain” countries, reports say.

US Army file image

The Wall Street Journal writes in a fresh Wednesday report, “The proposal would involve moving U.S. troops out of North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries deemed unhelpful to the Iran war effort and station them in countries that were more supportive of the U.S. military campaign. The proposal would fall far short of President Trump’s recent threats to fully withdraw the U.S. from the alliance, which by law he can’t do without Congress.”

According to more, “The plan, which has circulated and gained support among senior administration officials in recent weeks, is early in conception and one of several the White House is discussing to punish NATO.”

This isn’t the first time that Trump has heaped wrath on NATO and threatened repercussions for US allies, but the Iran conflict certainly marks Trump at his most insistent on this issue of NATO in effect ‘not returning the favor’ after years and decades of the US being the alliance’s biggest single funder.

“It’s quite sad that NATO turned their backs on the American people over the last six weeks when it’s the American people who have been funding their defense,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a Wednesday briefing.

She previewed Trump plans to have a very “frank and candid conversation” with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. This could mean redeployment elsewhere in the globe – or else bringing them home – for tens of thousands of US troops stationed throughout Europe:

The U.S. has around 84,000 troops stationed across Europe, though the exact number varies from military exercises and rotational deployments. U.S. bases in Europe serve as a critical hub of global U.S. military operations, as well as provide an economic boon to the host country through investment. Bases in Eastern Europe also serve as a deterrent against Russia.

The irony in all this is that there are elements among Trump’s MAGA base that would welcome this move. They might hail any development which lessens America’s penchant for playing the ‘police force’ of the globe and of Europe.

Is Starmer at the top of Trump’s list?

🚨WATCH: 🇬🇧UK Prime Minister Starmer on Iran:

This is not our war. We will not be drawn into the conflict.

That is not in our national interest. pic.twitter.com/LAaNKEUN6p

— THE GLOBAL WATCHDOG (@glwatchdog) April 6, 2026

Also, removing American soldiers from Europe could actually calm tensions with Russia over Ukraine. However, it remains unlikely that Washington would actually draw down from it’s ‘eastern flank’ posture.

When Poland made clear it would not lend its Patriot systems for the Middle East conflict, the Trump admin did not pile on much pressure after that, and seemed to understand the reality of the situation. It could be that the NATO allies are simply putting their nations’ interests first, given the Iran war has not gone as planned.

Authored by Jacki Thrapp via The Epoch Times,

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco was ordered by the California Supreme Court on April 8 to halt his investigation into 2025 election fraud allegations so the judges can review the legal challenges that his probe faces.

Bianco, a Republican who is running for California governor, seized more than half a million 2025 election ballots after allegedly receiving complaints from locals.

Then, last month he seized an additional 1,000 boxes of election materials.

Local election officials told the county Board of Supervisors that his decision to take the ballots was unfounded.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, asked the court to step in and stop the investigation, saying that Bianco did not have authority to take the ballots.

Bianco seized another 426 boxes of ballots last week.

The top court ordered Bianco and his team to “pause the investigation into the November 2025 special election and preserve all seized items.”

“Today’s decision by the California Supreme Court reins in the destabilizing actions of a rogue Sheriff, prohibiting him from continuing this investigation while our litigation continues,” Bonta said in a statement.

The Epoch Times has contacted Bianco’s office for comment.

Bianco’s career in law enforcement extends 30 years.

In 2018 he was elected as the sheriff, coroner, and public administrator of Riverside County.

Bianco entered the crowded California gubernatorial race just over a year ago and edges behind fellow Republican, Steve Hilton, in the latest Berkeley IGS poll.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who may be eying a presidential bid as he exits his current seat in January 2027, applauded today’s ruling by the court.

“Today’s decision is a victory for democracy and the rule of law,” Newsom wrote in an X post on Wednesday.

“This rogue sheriff chased conspiracy theories, tried to undermine our elections, and got the ruling he deserved. Trump and MAGA’s election denialism is a cancer, a danger to our democracy, and it must be stopped.”

In an early clue how the Iran war will impact energy earnings, ExxonMobil warned of a $6.5bn hit to Q1 earnings from the Iran war but said the bulk of this was the result of unfavorable timing for its accounting of hedging contracts, which would be offset as underlying transactions were eventually completed. The US supermajor also said that global oil and gas production would be 6% lower in the first three months of the year than in the fourth quarter of 2025 because of attacks on facilities in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in which it holds ownership stakes.

According to Exxon’s 8K filed this morning, Goldman calculated that the company’s adjusted EPS at the mid-point came in at ~$1.80 vs. consensus closer to $1.90 and Q4 levels closer to $1.71. As shown in the chart below, there was sequential improvement in Upstream driven by higher liquids prices, sequential declines in Downstream due to higher maintenance and relatively flat performance in Chemicals.

Volume disruptions at Exxon’s production and refining businesses would deliver a $400mn to $800mn hit to earnings, while trading losses incurred because of a failure to deliver physical cargoes hedged with financial derivatives would cost another $600mn to $800mn, the company said in a statement.

Separately, the company provided a number of strategic updates, including: (1) the Permian likely producing at 1.8 mn boe/d in 2026, (2) first gas at Golden Pass having been achieved on March 30, and (3) that the Middle East production negatively impacted Q1 Upstream volumes by 6% compared to Q4 levels, with the overall Middle East portfolio representing 20% of Upstream production (albeit a lower level of segment earnings). As an aside, the quarterly comparison was challenging given disruptions in the Middle East, and large timing effects, the latter of which are excluded for the purposes of comparison.

Exxon has one of the largest exposures among western oil majors to the Middle East, according to the FT, which accounts for about 20% of its oil and gas production and 5% of its refining and chemical capacity.

The company’s assets in the region include stakes in LNG joint ventures with QatarEnergy that were damaged last month by Iranian attacks. Exxon said two gas liquefaction facilities in Qatar in which it has an ownership interest accounted for about 3% of its 2025 global oil and gas production.

“Public reports indicate the damage will take a prolonged period to repair. Pending an on-site evaluation, we are unable to comment,” the company said.

But the largest hit to Exxon’s first-quarter earnings, worth $3.5bn to $4.9bn, is linked to the surge in oil and gas prices caused by the Middle East conflict and the accounting treatment of financial derivatives it used to hedge prices while shipping products.

The company said the negative impact on its first-quarter earnings was a LIFO “timing effect” that would unwind over subsequent quarters and result in net positive profit once the underlying transactions covered by the hedges were completed.

“This quarter’s earnings include an unusually large, negative timing impact associated with our trading programme and the temporary earnings impacts that result from how we account for certain trades . . . These are sound trades and the profitability that will result from them will be material,” said Neil Hansen, Exxon’s CFO. 

“Because we are using derivatives, we are required to account for them at month-end prices and reflect the resulting impact in earnings at the end of each quarter. This accounting often happens well before the sale of the associated physical product is complete. As noted, this earnings mismatch always results in a timing difference that eventually unwinds itself in periods of rising price.”

Exxon said that excluding the unfavorable timing effects that would reverse over time, earnings in the quarter would be higher than in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Offsetting the timing effect loss was the surge in oil and gas prices following the start of the Middle East war on February 28 would deliver a $2.1bn to $2.9bn boost to first-quarter earnings.

Exxon shares fell 5% in pre-market trading on Wednesday to $154.70, as traders reacted to a two-week US-Iran ceasefire deal.

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Justice Department and FBI on Tuesday revealed they have conducted a court-approved technical operation to neutralize part of a network of small office and home office routers in the United States that become commandeered by a unit of Russia’s military intelligence.

The Department of Justice in Washington on March 11, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

Russian Military Unit 26165—also known as APT28, Sofacy Group, Forest Blizzard, Pawn Storm, Fancy Bear, and Sednit—is part of Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff and has compromised routers to execute malicious Domain Name System (DNS) hijacking operations across the planet.

They targeted individual U.S. military members, the U.S. government, and critical infrastructure in which the Russian government expected to gain intelligence.

U.S. Attorney David Metcalf for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said critical data had been commandeered.

“In the face of continued aggression by our nation-state adversaries, the U.S. government will respond just as aggressively,” Metcalf said. “Working with the FBI—and our partners around the world—we are committed to disrupting and exposing such threats to our nation’s cybersecurity.”

Assistant Director Brett Leatherman of FBI’s Cyber Division said U.S. and global routers had been compromised and that the FBI will continue to use its authorities to identify and impose costs on state-sponsored actors who target the American people.

“Given the scale of this threat, sounding the alarm wasn’t enough,” Leathernan said. “The FBI conducted a court-authorized operation to harden compromised routers across the United States.”

The FBI operation, called Operation Masquerade, is the most recent U.S. action to undermine continuous Russian state-sponsored cyber threats that exploit everyday consumer devices.

Since 2024, GRU actors have attacked known vulnerabilities in TP-Link routers worldwide to steal administrative credentials. They then obtained unauthorized access to devices and changed their settings to redirect DNS queries to GRU-controlled malicious resolvers.

The actors set up automated filters to identify high-value traffic before intercepting it. The malicious resolvers returned fraudulent DNS records that appeared to be legitimate services, including Microsoft Outlook Web Access.

This allowed man-in-the-middle attacks on what victims thought was encrypted network traffic. The GRU was able to harvest unencrypted passwords, authentication tokens, emails, and other sensitive data from devices on the compromised router’s local network.

The operation included technical contributions from Black Lotus Labs at Lumen, Microsoft Threat Intelligence, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

“Operation Masquerade was led by FBI Boston. It represents the latest example of how we’re defending our homeland from Russia’s GRU which weaponized routers owned by unsuspecting Americans in more than 23 states to steal sensitive government, military, and critical infrastructure information,” special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston Field Office Ted E. Docks said.

He noted that the FBI employed cutting edge technology and leveraged private sector and international partners to combat the malicious activity and remediate routers.

Court documents from the case, filed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, outline how the FBI developed and tested commands sent only to affected routers in the United States.

The commands revealed evidence of GRU schemes, reset the devices’ DNS settings to legitimate resolvers of internet service providers, and shut down the original unauthorized access points. TP-Link router firmware and hardware settings confirmed the operation would not interrupt normal router function or collect users’ personal data.

Legitimate owners can change the settings through a factory reset with the hardware button or by manually restoring settings through the router’s web interface.

The FBI has also been working with internet service providers to inform affected users.

Owners of small office and home office routers are advised to replace end-of-life or end-of-support devices, upgrade to the newest firmware, verify that DNS resolvers are the same as those provided by the internet service provider, and review firewall rules to prevent unnecessary remote management access.

The GRU’s Unit 26165 was the subject of May 2025 joint advisory from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, as well as international partners, describing how the unit attacked Western logistics and technology companies delivering aid to Ukraine. The campaign, dating back to 2022, impacted organizations in 13 nations, including the United States, Germany, and France.

In April 2025, French officials said a series of hacks since 2021 were the work of the same GRU unit.

“The Russian military intelligence service (GRU) has been deploying a cyber-offensive modus operandi called APT28 against France for several years. It has targeted around 10 French entities since 2021,” Jean-Noël Barrot, the French foreign minister, wrote on social media platform X.

In a February 2024 disruption, the Justice Department took apart a GRU-controlled botnet that had attacked hundreds of small or home office routers around the world with malware. The FBI used the same malware to copy and delete stolen data while changing firewall rules to ban remote management access.

This is definitely in you really can’t make this up(!) territory… Sen. Lindsey Graham is actually calling for a Congressional vote, but not concerning a War Powers Resolution. 

Instead, he has called for Congress to review and vote on any diplomatic agreement ending the war with what he described as the “Iranian terrorist regime.” That’s right, the NeoCon senator from South Carolina only wants a Congressional vote on whether peace should be approved. He has remained opposed to a War Powers vote.

In a series of posts on X, Graham stated that he supports a diplomatic outcome but insists any deal with Iran must undergo congressional scrutiny to ensure it aligns with his own Israel’s US national security interests.

“Like everyone, I hope we can end the reign of terror of the Iranian regime through diplomacy,” he wrote Tuesday night, and said that any agreement needs Congress “for a vote, like we did with the [former President Barack] Obama JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action].”

The Trump admin and Iran just entered a two-week ceasefire aimed at negotiating a broader settlement following over a month of brutal conflict which has chiefly focused on an air war.

Both sides are readying for direct, face-to-face talks in Islamabad. Trump has previewed that Kushner, Witkoff, and maybe even Vice President J.D. Vance will be there. Trump has said these will happen “very soon”. He told the NY Post on Wednesday:

“We’ll have Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, JD — maybe JD, I don’t know,” Mr. Trump told the New York Post over the phone. “There’s a question of safety, security.”

As for Graham, he has warned against premature conclusions about a deal and called for transparency. “At this early stage, I am extremely cautious regarding what is fact vs. fiction or misrepresentation,” He called for a “a healthy dose of sunlight” to be brought to the deal.

He’s also calling for all of Iran’s enriched uranium to come under American control. 

Again a diplomatic solution to end the reign of terror in Iran is the preferred outcome. The supposed negotiating document, in my view, has some troubling aspects, but time will tell. I look forward to the architects of this proposal, the Vice President and others, coming forward…

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 8, 2026

“As President Trump said this morning, all the highly enriched uranium must be removed from Iran and handed over to the United States – the Libyan Model,” Graham wrote, adding that allowing continued enrichment “would be inconsistent with denying Iran a pathway toward a bomb.”

However, there’s an obvious irony to invoking the Libyan Model. After Gaddafi gave up his WMD aspirations during the Bush administration years, he was later by 2011 regime changed by the US and NATO, and bayonetted in the streets by Islamist ‘rebels’.

Authored by Chris Macintosh via InternationalMan.com,

There is a term called “gating” in the fund management world.

It refers to blocking investors from redeeming their funds. Funds do this sometimes as a precaution… and other times when they are in the poo.

Well, governments are the same. When they are in the poo, they also resort to their version of gating. It’s just called taxes.

I’ve always loved the Dutchies. Growing up in South Africa with the Afrikaners — descendants of the Dutch — I can tell you that as a group they are fantastic: hard working, ethical, and very down to earth.

It is with sadness, therefore, that I have to acknowledge that their government is thoroughly cocked-up, and they themselves are already behind a financial iron curtain.

They recently approved a 36% unrealised capital gains tax.

It has since been put back for consideration, but this is not the point. The point is that when governments get into the proverbial isht, this is precisely what happens. You’ll know this because we’ve been talking about it for donkey’s years in these missives.

Along with California and many blue states, the Canadians and Aussies are also toying with the idea. It’s been trial-ballooned (usually how they go about these things) in all of the above-mentioned places, but the Dutchies just approved it.

Some of you may recall how we don’t like ETFs which use futures contracts. The reason is that you are mathematically 100% going to lose money if you hold them over time. Why? Because volatility will erode you. Every time you roll the futures contracts you get shredded if there’s been any volatility. And inevitably there will be volatility.

In any event, what’s going to happen with the Dutchies is kinda similar. Let me explain with some basic maths.

Let’s get on our bicycles for a minute and pretend we’re Dutch, and we invest $1,000 into a stock.

Year 1: Because we’re geniuses, our stock goes to $2,000. Excellent! We made $1,000. Except we now owe $360 in capital gains tax. But we didn’t sell anything. We don’t have the $360. So we’re forced to sell shares to pay tax. But everyone else who has made any gain is also forced to sell too. Mass panic selling. Stock crashes to $800. We have $440 left after paying tax.

Year 2: Stock recovers to $1,200. Government: “You made $400, pay $144.” Forced selling again. Price drops to $900. Now we have $756 left.

Year 3: Stock is back down to $1,000. Government: “You made $100, pay us $36.” Actually, anyone still dumb enough to be hanging around Holland at this point is literally retarded. All the smart money has fled. Anyway, we have $964 in stock.

In total we paid $540 in taxes. Our stock is back where it started (0% gain). We only have $460 left. Congratulations. We just lost 54% on a stock that broke even.

On the other hand, the government made more money off this investment than we did — $540 — and they had a “no money down” deal.

Sticking with the topic of this theft tax, serial entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan posted the following, which I thought was interesting as I’d not considered it.

“Wealth taxes are even worse than you think. Any asset held by Californian billionaires or Dutch citizens is now at risk of experiencing forced liquidation pressure…

… Because the long run fruits of Western Keynesianism are the same as Soviet Communism, in the sense of wealth seizure and pauperization.

I mean, if you knew the future, you wouldn’t want to co-own a farm with a Russian in 1916. For similar reasons, you might not want to co-own a share of stock with Dutch national in 2026. Or with anyone in a seizure-curious jurisdiction…which unfortunately includes much of Western Europe, Canada, and Blue America.”

I have been warning for years now that the EU would impose capital controls. Please understand: they are already here.

All of the EU is a mess and difficult, but the Dutch and Germans are actually in the worst position.

Now I’m not here to lament and whinge. Complaining is both useless and unproductive. I’m here to explain that we are only just getting started. If you think this stops here — or that more doesn’t come — you are betting against hundreds of years of history.

Capitalist Exploits Insider isn’t particularly meant to be about these issues. After all, we’re fund managers buying listed equities, and I’m not here to tell you how to go about obtaining secondary residencies or anything else. These are simply intelligent steps to take and you need to go educate yourself on those aspects. Now. Because if you don’t, then reading this article after all your wealth has already been stolen is not going to serve you well.

You know what is most frustrating of all? The apathy of the citizenry. The Dutch government just declared open war on them and the response? Nothing. I don’t anticipate anything different in all the other countries mentioned which are preparing for this or something very similar. Very disappointing.

*  *  *

The warning is clear: once governments move in this direction, they rarely stop at one measure. That is why we created a free PDF special report, Clash of the Systems: Thoughts on Investing at a Unique Point in Time. Inside, you’ll see the major economic, political, and cultural trends taking shape right now, what they could mean for your wealth and freedom, and how thoughtful investors can prepare before the next round of controls arrives. Click here to get your free copy now.

The other day Axios ran a piece that cited “findings” that a majority of people trusted their doctors and nurses. Turns out, those “findings” were completely fabricated by a company called Aaru – using AI (causing Axios to issue an editor’s note and ‘clarification’)Aaru uses something they call “silicon sampling,” where large language models (the AI) can emulate humans at a fraction of the cost and time required for traditional polling, the NY Times reports.

Silicon sampling isn’t polling. It is the outright fabrication of public opinion by machines – and major news outlets and research firms are now publishing those fabrications as legitimate findings. 

This is not an isolated slip. The technology is being embraced by some of the biggest names in media, polling, and corporate research. Gallup has partnered with the startup Simile to create thousands of AI-generated “digital twins” that stand in for real people. Ipsos is working with Stanford to pioneer synthetic data for public opinion studies. CVS, whose venture arm invested in Simile, is already using these fabricated insights to shape customer strategy. And outlets like Axios are treating the output as news.

The entire point of polling has always been authenticity – capturing what actual humans actually think (after oversampling your preferred party to make it look like as if people like Hillary Clinton).

That process is imperfect and messy. Let’s say a pollster wants to learn how many people in the United States are in favor of a certain policy measure, but the pollster ends up with a survey that includes 80 percent Republicans and only 20 percent Democrats. The pollster may think that in reality the country is closer to a 50-50 split, so the results are rebalanced to reflect that perceived reality. This means that the percentages you read as the results of polling are the output of the model, not numbers from the actual survey data.

The problem is that every model is designed with its own biases, because pollsters disagree about which variables deserve more weight. In 2016, The New York Times’s chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, ran an experiment in which he gave five pollsters the same election poll data. (That included Siena College, which conducts opinion polls for The Times and first acquired the data.)

Mr. Cohn found a 5 percent range of difference among what the five pollsters’ models returned. That range was larger than the margin of error typically associated with random sampling, meaning that the modeling assumptions were meaningfully skewing the results. This is alarming, because it suggests that pollsters can use modeling to nudge polls in a certain direction and influence public opinion itself, rather than merely to report what the public thinks.

Walter Lippmann warned a century ago that democracy depends on an accurate picture of the public will. Traditional polling, however imperfect, at least began with real responses from real citizens. It was expensive, slow, and messy precisely because humans are expensive, slow, and messy. Silicon sampling removes every trace of that mess – and with it, every trace of reality. The models are trained on past data, tuned by the biases of their creators, and prompted to spit out whatever “representative” opinions the client wants to see. The result is not public opinion. It is a mirror of the assumptions fed into the machine.

Fake Polling Also Picked Kamala Harris… 

On the eve of the 2024 election, Aaru ran a full-scale simulation that confidently projected a narrow victory for Kamala Harris. Market researchers now use these synthetic polls to decide product launches and ad campaigns. Policy shops quietly substitute AI-generated “constituent sentiment” for actual feedback. Each time a respected outlet or pollster presents these inventions as fact, they normalize the idea that fabricated data is good enough.

The consequences are already here. When headlines say “a new poll shows,” readers have no way of knowing whether real people were ever asked. Trust in institutions is eroding fast enough without handing decision-makers and journalists an unlimited supply of plausible-sounding fake data. Social science, political strategy, and market research risk becoming elaborate games of digital pretend.

So there’s that…

Authored by Andrew Korybko,

The sequence that Trump threatened if no deal was reached before the expiry of his deadline would have cut China off from half of the oil that it imported by sea last year and likely set Afro-Eurasia aflame in resource wars for the indefinite future that would have derailed China’s superpower rise.

Three unnamed Iranian officials reportedly told the New York Times (NYT) that China pressed their country to compromise with the US by agreeing to a two-week ceasefire and resuming talks.

When asked about whether China played such a role, Trump responded that, “I hear yes. Yes they were.”

This was followed by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning revealing that “China made its own efforts in this regard.”

Although she didn’t directly confirm the report, she didn’t outright deny it either.

Interestingly, Drop Site founder Ryan Grim noticed that the edit history of Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s tweet imploring Trump to extend his deadline for destroying Iran’s civilization if a deal isn’t reached saw him originally post “*Draft – Pakistan’s PM Message on X*”. Grim wrote that “Sharif’s own staff don’t call him ‘Pakistan’s PM,’ they would just call him prime minister. The U.S. and Israel, of course, would call him ‘Pakistan’s PM.’” Trump cited his talks with Sharif when extending his deadline.

In light of the NYT’s report, Trump’s positive affirmation thereof, and Mao’s related innuendo, an alternative hypothesis is that it wasn’t the US or Israel that drafted Sharif’s tweet, but China. Regardless of whoever did, it’s reasonable that China might have indeed pressed Iran to compromise with the US, not least because it would have tremendously suffered had Trump carried through on his threat. As a reminder, he threatened to destroy Iran’s power plants, bridges, and possibly even oil infrastructure too.

In response, Iran threatened to destroy the Gulf’s, and the sequence that Trump could have catalyzed would have resulted in the region’s energy exports going offline indefinitely. China would have then suddenly lost the 48.4% of oil that it imported by sea last year, 13.4% of which came from Iran and 35% from the Gulf Kingdoms (excluding Oman whose exports are from the Arabian Sea). Although it has strategic reserves and is producing more alternative energy, that would still its economy very, very hard.

China’s superpower rise would end, while resources wars would break out all across Afro-Eurasia except in resource-rich Russia, thus destabilizing the Eastern Hemisphere for years to come as the US relatively insulates itself in “Fortress America” and divides-and-rules the other side of the world. Naturally, China would prefer to avert that dark scenario even if the lesser evil results in the end of Iran’s petroyuan experiment and perhaps also its oil exports to China. Continued Gulf exports are much more important.

It’s unrealistic to imagine that China promised to intervene in Iran’s support if the US dupes it with talks for a third time in less than a year when it won’t risk World War III over Taiwan nor in furtherance of its “no-limits” Russian strategic partner’s goals in Ukraine.

Observers can therefore only speculate what China credibly offered Iran in exchange for compromising with the US by agreeing to a two-week ceasefire and resuming talks, but at the least, generous reconstruction support was probably included.

To recap, China’s interest in pressing Iran to cut a deal with the US would have stemmed from fears of the sequence that Trump threatened setting Afro-Eurasia aflame for the indefinite future, though there has yet to be any unambiguous confirmation from its side that it played such role and might never be.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that something happened close to the expiry of Trump’s deadline for the IRGC to agree to a ceasefire with the US instead of embrace martyrdom, and it’s likely connected to China.