"Could Ditching Elections Save Democracy?" (Sortition Baby, Sortition!!)

We used to link to the Boston Review with some regularity until December 2020 when they published and we linked to "To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity" which not only dismissed one of the most attractive features of current {!} electrical systems and grids: being available when you want it, but was also a bit boring in its lack of creativity in addressing the intermittency problem with renewable sources o'leccy.

However...

From The Boston Review, August 19:

A new book makes the case for replacing them with a system of government based on random selection. 

Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections
Alexander Guerrero
Oxford University Press, $45

When democracy seems everywhere in crisis, it may sound paradoxical, to say the least, that the solution to our troubles is to scrap elections altogether. But that is precisely what political philosopher Alexander Guerrero proposes in his bold and illuminating book, Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections. We should select political officials not by voting, he contends, but by lottery from among the entire adult citizenry.

As radical as it sounds, the idea, indeed the reality, of “sortition”—using random selection to select political officials—is nothing new. Nor is it the prerogative of any particular political persuasion. The Athenians used such a system more than two thousand years ago. The Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James celebrated this system when he argued, echoing Lenin, that “every cook can govern.” The idea has seen something of a popular revival in recent years thanks to the writing and advocacy of people like political theorist Hélène Landemore and Belgian historian David Van Reybrouck. And it has been put into practice in a variety of deliberative and citizens’ assemblies, including in Europe and the United States. What sets Guerrero’s analysis apart is that he has thought through how such a system might work in modern societies in exhaustive detail. The result is a landmark argument that must be reckoned with.

Guerrero spends much of the book putting flesh on the bones of the abstract idea of lottocracy, presenting a picture sufficiently well specified for meaningful comparison with real-world electoral democracy. In the rest of the book, he makes the case for the relative superiority of lottocracy and offers ideas about how we might get there from here. The book’s central claim is not that lottocracy is perfect but that, for all its flaws, it is still preferable to other political systems.

Of course, there are many ways to compare political systems. One might ask how well they comport with political equality: the ideal that everyone should have, at some level, the same say over policy. Or one might ask how well they offer opportunities for participation: the ideal that everyone be able to contribute to making policy. Guerrero contends that lottocracy does as well if not better than other systems on these criteria. But his primary interest is different: how well a political system solves problems, whether it delivers the objectively correct policy (which he thinks exists). While the capacity of a political system to solve problems—to, among other things, make people’s lives better—may not be a condition of a system’s counting as democratic, Guerrero is certainly right that it is something that we should want....

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Previously:

"Detox democracy through representation by random selection"

Assume for now that I am correct in my long-propounded judgement that the very people who pursue political power are exactly the same folks who should not be allowed anywhere near it. 

A repost from the early days of the covid-19 pandemic, January 18, 2020:
We are fans of randomness....*

*****

*The Joy of Randomness: Central Bank Strategy, Management Technique and Stock Selection
Profiting From Random Strategies
Can Information Rise From Randomness?
Should You Just Give Up And Trade Stocks Randomly?
Joys of Noise: Technologies that Rely on Randomness
Think a coin toss has a 50-50 chance? Think again.
Randomness: "A Drunkard’s Walk in Manhattan"
Attention Managers, You Can Improve Corporate Efficiency by Randomly Promoting Employees

That last piece of research was awarded Harvard's own Ig Nobel prize in 2010.

Ya see, ya got your complex systems and ya got your chaotic systems and then ya got your complex-chaotic systems like weather or the economy or the stock market and when you endeavor at those levels of sophistication you realize:...

There may be issues.

"How Surveillance Became a Love Language"

I think it was "Every Breath You Take" in 1983.

Or maybe not, "I'll be watching you" sounds more like stalking than love, come to think of it.

From The Drift Magazine, Issue 14  | December 11, 2024:  

A full-page ad in a November 1990 issue of Fortune magazine features two dozen men in dark suits turned away from the viewer. Standing in neat rows, most blend together in a uniform mass. But three are singled out, with red targets pinned to their backs. The text below the shadowy tableau reads: “Wouldn’t it be great if new customers were this easy to spot? Now they can be.” Bullseye.

The spread was for Lotus MarketPlace, a collaboration between Lotus Development Corporation, a spreadsheet-software tech giant then valued at over one billion dollars, and Equifax, one of the country’s largest consumer credit agencies. Lotus MarketPlace contained detailed profiles of 120 million Americans, including their names, addresses, phone numbers, marital statuses, estimated household incomes, and purchase histories, all filed into lifestyle categories such as “cautious young couples” and “inner-city singles.” For $695 (about $1,600 today), a company could purchase eleven CD-ROM discs of consumer data covering half the U.S. population.

In a Wall Street Journal piece that ran just after the Fortune ad appeared, a Georgetown professor was quoted describing the product as “a big step toward people completely losing control of how, and by whom, personal information is used.” A staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union said that Lotus was “stretching for the broadest interpretation of the law and looking for ways to get around its intent.” The article ricocheted through nascent cyberspace, finding its way onto message boards and email lists where angry netizens encouraged one another to call Lotus to insist that their names be removed. This online backlash quickly grew into a coordinated attack, with phone calls and letters overwhelming Lotus’s headquarters.

Nine months after the product was announced, Lotus’s president publicly acknowledged the “volume and tenor of the concerns raised” as well as the insurmountable expense of removing the over thirty thousand people who demanded to be taken out of the database. Lotus MarketPlace was canceled before it even launched. Today, this triumph of privacy advocates reads like a false dawn. In the decades since, we have indeed, as the Georgetown professor warned, completely lost “control of how, and by whom, personal information is used.” 

And we know how it happened. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2002, Google realized that it was sitting on a monetizable surplus: the data produced by people’s engagement with its search engine could be wielded to customize ads. And then it discovered that the more precisely those ads were targeted, the more lucrative they became. Google’s data was richer and vaster than Lotus’s — a combination of search histories, IP addresses, and metadata that could paint a picture of what a specific person in a specific place at a specific time wanted to do, know, or buy. Google’s approach was stealthier, too. The company updated its terms of service to note, without explicitly mentioning advertising, that it was stockpiling this information “to improve the quality of our service and to better understand how people interact with us.” Facebook and data brokers like Acxiom quickly followed suit, refining ad-targeting algorithms and accumulating massive data sets of consumer profiles. By the late 2000s, smartphones provided new sources of data, harvesting information all day long, not just when people were at their computers. There were no more full-page ads in popular magazines. Just terms of service in miniscule fonts, manipulative interfaces, and other tricks of the magician.

The result is that we are now locked in innumerable contracts through which we surrender our personal information for convenience or pleasure — for better search results, faster delivery, more helpful recommendations, thimblefuls of dopamine. We feel conflicted about these agreements, but also powerless to amend or terminate them. Even the “techlash” of the late 2010s — when scandals like Cambridge Analytica and high-octane critiques like Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism ended the era of unquestioned techno-optimism — did little to free us from these arrangements. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 73 percent of Americans feel that “they have very little to no control over the data collected about them by companies.” And yet, we still turn over our information voluntarily for trifles — FaceApp, which demands full access to cameras and camera rolls in exchange for filters that add or subtract twenty years or twenty pounds, has been downloaded by over 350 million people across the globe. We are burnt out, fatigued, addicted. We talk casually about our Big Tech overlords, more or less accepting our debased roles in their fiefdoms.

But there is something more insidious happening, too. Technology companies have so thoroughly conditioned us to believe we are powerless when it comes to digital privacy that our attitudes toward privacy more broadly have also been warped. Just as in the era of the PATRIOT Act the national security state insisted that it was virtuous, even patriotic, to give in to the intelligence machine, tech culture now ascribes its own virtues to the forfeiture of privacy: realness and connection. Where we once guarded our control over personal information, we now give up control not just freely but even tenderly, monitoring and being monitored by loved ones through social media platforms like BeReal and location-sharing apps. It’s a strange form of Stockholm syndrome for the surveillance age — we love, and love with, the tools of our captors. Resigned to the Big Tech companies recording our every move, we’ve invited friends, family, and partners to join them in watching us. We’ve begun to celebrate surveillance as a form of intimacy.

Find My Friends, an app that allows people to track their consenting contacts’ whereabouts in real-time, was introduced in 2011 with the launch of the iPhone 4S. In the app, you can set up alerts for when someone enters or leaves a specified location. Or, you can simply treat Find My as a live map, and watch your targets strut around the neighborhood, the city, or the globe. In 2019, Apple merged Find My Friends with Find My iPhone, which geolocates Apple ID-linked devices. Now, the streamlined Find My app (represented by a green target with a blue bullseye) takes care of both, as if friends are also expensive possessions to track in case they get lost or stolen. And location-tracking is not limited to Find My: Google Maps offers the same, and Snapchat, for example, has a similar feature called Snap Map, which the company claims is accessed by over 350 million users per month.

What might have seemed, not too long ago, like a dangerous act of exposure has rapidly become a security blanket and a source of recreation. Location-sharing apps allow parents to track their adolescent children, and adult children to keep tabs on their senescent parents. Marketed as “family safety” solutions, location-tracking apps like Life360 offer more than just real-time location data. They also maintain a database of your family’s movements, storing up to thirty days of precise location history for every member of your “circle.” There are even smartwatches and other GPS devices designed for kids who don’t yet have phones; the Wizard Watch, for example, says it “gives guardians the confidence to allow their loved one to explore the world outside, without the stress and fear of wondering where they are or if they are safe.” In these duty-bound dynamics, there may be a clear sense in which the person tracking is responsible for the well-being of the person who’s being tracked — one party gives up privacy in exchange for care.

In friendships and intimate partnerships there may be good safety rationales to turn on location sharing, but there’s nothing in the implicit relationship contract to suggest that one person can monitor the other’s whereabouts. Still, it can be entertaining to track the people in our lives. As one 22-year-old Find My user who habitually retrieves ten friends’ locations told Vox, the app “is so, so common among basically everyone I know, just for safety reasons but also for fun.” A 2023 TikTok featuring a screen recording of the Find My interface overlaid with a GIF of Pedro Pascal eating a sandwich and the words “Me checking find my friends to make sure all my sims are where they’re supposed to be” garnered nearly ten million views, one million likes, and countless videos riffing on the format. This kind of location-sharing turns friendship into a video game. And if it’s all a game, there’s no reason to object.

Those who celebrate the fun side of location-sharing apps don’t talk about them in terms of control; they talk about convenience. Apps like Find My save people who are always down to hang from the effort of texting, and enable spontaneous coordination in a globalized, expeditious present in which friends are literally hard to find, stochastically whizzing across and between cities. But what’s really disturbing — and representative of how this technology is changing relationships — is how people talk about mutual location-sharing like it’s a badge of intimacy, the implication being that truly close friends deserve to know everything about each other, including minute-by-minute coordinates. The same Vox article describes the phenomenon as “the next step in digital intimacy after following someone on Instagram.” And some say that it makes their friendships deeper. In The Paris Review, Sophie Haigney (a Drift contributor) cheekily declares Find My to be her “favorite app” and recounts using it “constantly and impractically” to check on her loved ones. “I guess it makes me feel close to them in a stupid technology way,” she explains. In a poetic apologia for the app published in the New York Times, the novelist Kathleen Alcott muses, “Find My Friends rewards a groundwork of trust that’s already laid, magnifying what we know to be true about the people we love through the changes in place that express it.”

In his landmark work from the middle of the last century, sociologist Erving Goffman theorized that in any social interaction, individuals are like actors who tailor their performances to their audiences and their contexts. Building on Goffman’s ideas, media scholars like danah boyd have used the term “context collapse” to describe how social media demands a unified presentation of the self to distinct audiences simultaneously. Unlike face-to-face interactions — in which we present ourselves differently to family, friends, or colleagues — social media forces us to speak to all of them at once. It also introduces another audience member: the algorithm. Whenever we communicate online, we communicate to a collapsed version of our social worlds via a medium that is structured to maximize engagement — by prioritizing the extreme, or the enviable, or the seemingly successful. And so we find ourselves further and further from anything that resembles our complete “self,” presenting ourselves as — per a popular meme — professional on LinkedIn, wholesome on Facebook, slutty on Tinder, and stylish on Instagram. Location-sharing apps, on the other hand, can offer the illusion of remaining whole. They entice in part because they seem to counter the distortionary, performative aspects of social media. They allow us to exercise our desire to rein in our audience and banish the always-lurking algorithm, sharing a truly unfiltered stream of information with the small group we’ve pulled in close. “In a world where we use social media to broadcast highly curated versions of ourselves,” Alcott writes, Find My furnishes an “antithesis.”....

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Speaking of "Every breath you take", in October 2022 we tucked this into the link-vault:

Sting’s startling fortune: Singer earns over £50,000 a month from just one song

Which seems like quite a bit of money for one 42-year old song.

Apparently The Police thought so as well because on August 27, 2025 we saw:

Sting sued by former Police bandmates for millions over lost ‘Every Breath You Take’ royalties

"Germany's unemployment figures have nudged above the three-million mark for the first time in more than ten years"

From Deutsche-Welle, August 29:

Germany's unemployment figures have nudged above the three-million mark for the first time in more than ten years. The crossing of the threshold has added to fears that the country has not escaped an economic downturn. 

Germany's unemployment figure has risen above three million for the first time in more than a decade, according to the Federal Employment Agency (BA).

The increase raises the stakes for the centrist coalition government's huge investment plans to deliver quick results.

"This will be the focus of the federal government," Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on the sidelines of Franco-German ministerial talks in Toulon in southern France on Friday. The increase in unemployment, he added, was not unexpected. 

How do the figures stack up? 
The number climbed in August by 46,000 to 3.025 million. The unemployment rate ticked up 0.1 percentage points to 6.4%.

The seasonally adjusted trend was slightly better than feared in August, showing an actual fall by 9,000 in August compared with July — defying forecasts of a 10,000 rise. Compared with August last year, however, joblessness was still up by 153,000.

However, labor demand is slowing. There were 631,000 job openings in August — 68,000 fewer than a year ago.

What do the figures mean? 
BA chief Andrea Nahles explained that the summer lull was responsible for the increase, since many firms delay new hires until after the holiday period. She stressed that while the labor market remains weighed down by years of weak growth, there were "early, fragile signs" of stabilization.

Short-time work, while still elevated, has been slowly declining since the start of the year. Nahles forecast that the usual autumn upturn in September should ease the situation, but warned that the three-million mark might again be breached in the winter.

"The labor market is still shaped by the economic slump of recent years," Nahles said Friday as unemployment topped 3 million for the first time since February 2015.

Germany has been battling prolonged economic weakness, and US President Donald Trump's import tariffs pose a risk that it could be pushed into a third straight year without growth — something not seen in postwar history.

"The global economic uncertainties and Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine are still leading to economic weakness," Labour Minister Bärbel Bas said. "The cyclical headwinds continue to leave their mark on the labour market and require countermeasures."

What do employers say? 
Confederation of German Employers' Associations chief Rainer Dulger said nearly three years of recession were now showing their effect on the labor market....

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"Civil War Comes to the West" (fortunately there's an ETF for that)

The writer, David Betz, is Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London. 

He does have some academic cred regarding this stuff.

 

From Military Strategy Magazine  /  Volume 9, Issue 1, Summer 2023: 

This is the first of two essays. It deals with the reasons why civil war is likely to dominate the military and strategic affairs of the West in the coming years, contrary to the typical expectations of the future war literature, and generally the strategic logic which shall underpin such wars. The next essay will address specifically the actions and strategies which existing military forces might pursue before and during these conflicts.

Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build—the three things together … Most of the rest of the world is a jungle…[i]

So said EU Foreign Affairs chief Josep Borrell in Bruges in October 2022. Future dictionaries will use it as an example of the definition of hubris.

That is because the major threat to the security and prosperity of the West today emanates from its own dire social instability, structural and economic decline, cultural desiccation and, in my view, elite pusillanimity. Some academics have begun to sound the alarm, notably Barbara Walter’s How Civil Wars Start—and How to Stop Them, which is concerned primarily with the dwindling domestic stability of the United States.[ii] To judge from President Biden’s September 2022 speech in which he declared ‘MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic’ governments are beginning to take heed, albeit cautiously and awkwardly.[iii]

The field of strategic studies, however, is largely silent on the issue, which is strange because it ought to be something of concern. Why is it correct to perceive the increasing danger of violent internal conflict erupting in the West? What are the strategies and tactics likely to be employed in the civil wars to come in the West and by whom? These are the questions which I shall address in this essay.

Causes

The literature on civil wars is united on two points. Firstly, they are not a concern of states that are rich and, secondly, nations which possess governmental stability are largely free of the phenomenon. There are degrees of equivocation on how much regime type matters, though most agree that securely-perceived-to-be-legitimate democracies and strong autocracies are stable. In the former, people do not rebel because they trust the political system works justly overall. In the latter, they do not because authorities identify and punish dissenters before they have a chance.

Factionalisation is another main concern, but extremely heterogeneous societies are not more prone to civil war than very homogenous ones. This is put down to the high ‘coordination costs’ between communities that exist in the former, which mitigate against the formation of mass movements. The most unstable are moderately homogenous societies, particularly when there is a perceived change in the status of a titular majority, or significant minority, which possesses the wherewithal to revolt on its own. By contrast, in societies comprised of many small minorities ‘divide and conquer’ can be an effective mechanism of controlling a population.[iv]

In my view, there is no good reason to fault the main thrust of extant theory on civil war causation as described above. The question, rather, is whether the assumption of the conditions which have traditionally placed Western nations outside the frame of analysis of people concerned with large-scale and persistent eruptions of violent civil discord are still valid.

The evidence strongly suggests that they are not. Indeed, as far back as the end of the Cold War some perceived that the culture which ‘won’ that conflict was itself beginning to fragment and degenerate. In 1991, Arthur Schlesinger argued in The Disuniting of America that the ‘cult of ethnicity’ increasingly endangered the unity of that society.[v] This was prescient.

Consider the striking findings of the Edelman Trust Barometer over the last twenty years. ‘Distrust’, it concluded recently, ‘is now society’s default emotion.’[vi] The situation in America, as shown in related research is acutely bad. As of 2019, even before the contested Biden election and the Covid-epidemic, 68 per cent of Americans agreed it was urgently necessary to repair levels of ‘confidence’ in society in government, with half averring that a ‘cultural sickness’ is what fading trust represented.[vii]

In sociological terms, what this collapse of trust reflects is a plunge in the stock of ‘social capital’, which is both a kind of ‘superglue’, a factor of societal cohesion, as well as a ‘lubricant’ that allows otherwise disparate groups in society to get along.[viii] That it is in decline is disputed by no one, and neither is anyone seriously unclear on the unhappy consequences.

There is dispute over its causation, however. Chancellor Angela Merkel once pointed the finger directly at multiculturalism, declaring that in Germany it had ‘utterly failed’, an idea that was echoed six months later by then Prime Minister David Cameron in Britain. He elaborated that ‘It ghettoises people into minority and majority groups with no common identity.’[ix] Such statements by leaders, both noteworthy centrists, of large, ostensibly politically stable, Western states cannot easily be dismissed as populist demagoguery.[x]

Additionally, ‘political polarisation’ has been enhanced by social media and identity politics, on which more below. Digital connectivity tends to drive societies towards greater depth and frequency of feelings of isolation in more tightly drawn affinity groups. Each of these is guarded by so-called ‘filter bubbles’, carefully constructed membranes of ideological disbelief that are constantly reinforced by active and passive curation of media consumption.[xi]

What might be described as ‘intertribal conflict’ is by no means confined to the virtual spaces of the Internet; rather, it manifests also in physical fighting in a self-reinforcing feedback cycle. Many examples of this from recent headlines might be given. A good one though, is the city of Leicester in Britain, which over the last year has witnessed recurring violence between the local Hindu and Muslim populations, both sides animated by intercommunal tensions in distant south Asia. A Hindu mob marched through the Muslim part of town chanting ‘Death to Pakistan’.[xii]

What this reflects above all is the considerable irrelevance of Britishness as an aspect of the pre-political loyalty of significant fraction of two of the largest minorities in Britain. Who wants to fight whom and over what? The answer in this case to this good strategic question has very little to do with the nominal nationality of the people who have observably already begun to fight.

Finally, to this volatile social mix must be added the economic dimension, which can only be described as extremely worrisome. By common estimation, the West has already started another economic downturn, a long overdue recurrence of the 2008 financial crisis, combined with the fallout of the deindustrialisation of Western economies, a notable by-product of which is the progressive de-dollarisation of global trade that has been turbocharged by sanctions on Russia, which has also induced a ballistic rise in the costs of basic goods such as energy, food, and housing.[xiii]

In terms of economic financialization, debt issuance, and consumption, the West has reached the end of the line, which means that a gigantic gap in expectation of well-being is opening. If there is one other thing that the literature on revolution agrees upon it is that expectation gaps are dangerous.[xiv] Again, simply put, a time-honoured means of controlling the rise of incipient mobs is the provision by the ruling powers of ‘bread and circuses’, in other words basic consumption and cheap entertainment—the efficacy of both of which is rapidly attenuating in the present day.

To conclude this section, it can be said that a generation ago all Western countries could still be described as to a large degree cohesive nations, each with a greater or lesser sense of common identity and heritage. By contrast, all now are incohesive political entities, jigsaw puzzles of competing identity-based tribes, living in large part in virtually segregated ‘communities’ competing over diminishing societal resources increasingly obviously and violently. Moreover, their economies are mired in a structural malaise leading, inevitably in the view of several knowledgeable observers to systemic collapse.[xv]

Conduct
The intimacy of civil war, its political intensity, and its fundamentally social quality, plus the acute accessibility to attack on all sides of everyone’s weak points can make them particularly savage and miasmic. The Russian Civil War which followed the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 is a particularly good example. It is a form of war in which people suffer raw cruelty and fanaticism not for what they have done but for what they are.[xvi]

Perhaps civil wars in the West can be contained to the level of loathsomeness of those of Central America of the 1970s and 1980s. In which case ‘normal’ life will remain possible for the fraction of the population that is rich enough to insulate itself from the larger milieu of political assassinations, death squads and intercommunal reprisals, plus thriving criminal predation which typify a society in the process of tearing itself apart.[xvii]

The trouble is that the urge to fight, indeed the wish to accelerate towards conflict, is not confined to just one group—as one might gather from the recent alarm over far-Right populism—but is of a rather more general character, with radicalism increasingly visible in all sorts of communities.[xviii] Consider, for instance, the following lines from a French leftist tract published in 2007:

It’s well known that the streets teem with incivilities. The technical infrastructure of the metropolis is vulnerable… Its flows amount to more than the transportation of people and commodities. Information and energy circulate via wire networks, fibres and channels, and these can be attacked. In our time of utter decadence, the only thing imposing about temples is the dismal truth that they are already ruins.[xix]

At this point in the history of conflict, it hardly seems necessary to explain the techniques of taking existing social divisions in society and tearing them into chasms because they have been widely studied.[xx] The defence establishments of the West are very familiar with such matters as they have presented themselves in the varied foreign theatres in which they have been embroiled as part of the so-called War on Terror.

Is it a complete wonder that those lessons and ideas should have found their way back home? The Citizen’s Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare co-written by MGEN Michael Flynn, former head of the Defence Intelligence Agency and President Trump’s initial National Security Advisor, is a well-designed handbook and explicit in its aim, which is to educate people in the West about revolt. In his own words, he wrote it because ‘I never dreamed the greatest battles to be waged would be right here in our homeland against subversive elements of our own government.’[xxi]

Over the last thirty years the West has preoccupied itself thanklessly in an expeditionary capacity in the invertebrate civil wars of others. It ought to have learned that it is impossible to maintain an integrated multi-valent society once neighbours start kidnapping each other’s children and murdering them with hand drills, blowing up each other’s cultural events, slaying each other’s teachers and religious leaders, and tearing down their icons. It is soberingly worth noting, moreover, that plenty of instances of all those things have occurred already in the West and all of them have occurred in France alone in the last five years.[xxii]

Scenarios, mostly focused on the United States, of what civil wars in the West would look like exist in the literature.[xxiii] They tend to share one thing in common particularly, which is the expectation as expressed by Peter Mansoor, professor of military history at Ohio State University, that they will,

…not be like the first [American] civil war, with armies manoeuvring on the battlefield [but] would very much be a free-for-all, neighbour-on-neighbour, based on beliefs and skin colour and religion. And it would be horrific.[xxiv]

Approximately 75 per cent of post-Cold War civil conflicts have been fought by ethnic factions.[xxv] Therefore, that civil war in the West will be likewise is unexceptional. The nature of the belief that Mansoor invokes as being important is, however, worth dwelling upon. I would suggest that the belief in question is the acceptance by all groups in society of the precepts of ‘identity politics’.

Identity politics may be defined as politics in which people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group. It is overtly post-national. It is this above all that makes civil conflict in the West not merely likely but practically inevitable, in my view.

The peculiarity of contemporary Western multiculturalism, relative to examples of other heterogenous societies, is threefold. Firstly, it is in the ‘sweet spot’ with respect to theories of civil war causation, specifically the supposed problem of coordination costs is diminished in a situation where White majorities (trending rapidly toward large minority status in some cases) live alongside multiple smaller minorities.

Secondly, thus far what has been practiced is a sort of ‘asymmetric multiculturalism’ in which in-group preference, ethnic pride, and group solidarity—notably in voting—are acceptable for all groups except Whites for whom such things are considered to represent supremacist attitudes that are anathematic to social order.

Thirdly, because of the above what has emerged is a perception that the status quo is invidiously unbalanced, which provides an argument for revolt on the part of the White majority (or large minority) that is rooted in stirring language of justice. From a strategic communications perspective, a morally inflected narrative which has a clearly articulated grievance, a plausible and urgent remedy, and a receptive conscience community is powerful.[xxvi]....

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Spring, 2025 - Civil War Comes to the West, Part II: Strategic Realities

And the ETF? The Tuttle Capital Self Defense Index ETF, though we prefer concentrated direct exposure through Axon Enterprise, Inc. 

 Possibly also of interest:

May 2019 - "Money and trust. Amsterdam moneylenders and the rise of the modern state..." 

It has always been about trust.
From the smallest group, immediate family, up through larger and larger populations, clans, tribes etc,  to the nation state, and, some hope, transnational and global agglomerations.
When trust is lost people instinctively pull back to the group or even the individuals they believe they can trust. 

July 2018 - Urban Warfare In A 'Smart City' Environment 

May 2019 - "Feral Cities"

November 2019 - U.S. Army "Mad Scientist Blog: 'Three Futurist Urban Scenarios'". 

December 2019 - "China tests killer drones for street-to-street urban warfare, plans sales overseas" 

August 2020 - U.S. Army Mad Scientist Laboratory: "The Convergence—Political Tribalism and Cultural Disinformation with Samantha North"

March 2024 - "Feral Cities, Indirect Streets, and Soft Fortification"

October 2023 - Tribes and States: Human Self-Organization

 And as noted in the introduction to 2020's "Tribalism":

The title of this piece was "Is Tribalism a Natural Malfunction?" but that seems an incorrect characterization.

It's all about trust, which is one of the reasons globalists have a problem convincing ordinary people to share their grand dreams and visions. Many of the things globalists have promised turned out not to be true so people go to the population size they feel they can trust.

Can't trust the U.N. after the Oil-for-Food frauds and the Rwandan genocides? Let's try nation-state.

Can't trust nation-states because one part of the populace cheats or shows themselves to be hypocrites? 

(And it is this very point, Orwell's “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” where globalists lose the masses)

Let's try states.

And then city-states and if you can't trust your fellow metropolitans we'll go with blood relations, first tribes and if there are schisms there, to immediate family. Consanguinity and all that.

Tribalism isn't a "mal" anything, it's a survival mechanism for when you really, really have to increase the odds that you will be able to trust another person....

The Shortest History Of France

From the Times Literary Supplement, August 22:

History of the Hexagon  
Governing a country with 246 types of cheese  

At a moment when many are speculating about the future of North American hegemony, Emmanuel Macron continues to strive at positioning France as an alternative, assured counterpoint. But at home, the country seems in a permanent state of crisis: the gilets jaunes protests of 2018–20, anger at proposed retirement reforms and the onward march of the extreme right, to name three examples.

It was ever thus, however, as Charles de Gaulle apocryphally opined: “How can you govern a country that boasts 246 types of cheese?” This difficulty is, at least in part, due to the rich diversity of people and places that make up France and Frenchness: from Paris to Quimper, Marseille to Toulouse, but also Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe, Saint-Denis in Réunion and Mamoudzou in Mayotte. As Colin Jones underlines in this rich, read­able book, the France we recognize has grown – and continues to grow – through migration and cultural exchange. As he demonstrates repeatedly, France has been “shaped not only by the efforts and imaginations of countless French men and women, but also by innumerable influences from the global community”.

In seven concise chapters, Jones shows how this has happened. He starts with the emergence of Gaul and its defeat under Caesar, then moves through Clovis and successive royal dynasties, Revolutionary and Republican France, closing with the 2024 Olympics. The book is illustrated throughout with maps that help a reader grasp the changing shape of France: how the kingdom of the Franks stretched into modern-day Germany, and how the Napoleonic Empire reached into Spain and much of Italy. Infographics elucidate the economy and architecture and, as we advance apace through history, panels allow us to pause on signi­ficant figures of interest to the French national imaginary: Jeanne d’Arc, Georges Méliès, Josephine Baker. Jones is a compelling tour guide through time....

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Shortest history? Hardly (insert ill-founded Pepin joke here). 
At least for mid/late 18th century French economic history it can be summarized as: 

Food got expensive, there were riots. 

(oh, and Jacques Necker) 

Pericles Press: France - The Economic History

—Chronology of Economic Events

1768

Riots over prices in Le Havre and Nantes.
1770
Riots in Rheims.
Government efforts to deal with shortages lead to popular rumors of a 'famine pact' among the nobility to starve the people.
1774
May 10 - Louis XVI ascends to throne of France.
Poor harvest in the fall.
1775
April 27-May - "Flour War"
Bread prices in Paris increase by over 50%..
Rioting starts at Beaumont-sur-Oise, spreads to Paris..
Hundreds arrested, two executed, before order is restored.
June 11 - Coronation of Louis XVI.
1776
October 22 - Necker appointed Director of the Treasury.
1777
Necker begins financing money for American War of Independence through governmental loans, rather than taxes. System will raise 520 million livres by May 1781. 1781
May 19 - Necker resigns.
Successor Joly de Fleury implements tax increases. By December 1782 will raise 252 million livres.
1788
June - Government tries to implement overhaul of judicial system.
June 7 - Day of Tiles (Grenoble); Mob bombards troops with tiles.; 4 people killed in rioting, 40 injured.
July 13 - Severe hailstorm destroys crops in northern France.
August 8 - Announcement of convocation of Estates General.
Will formally meet on May 1, 1789.
August 16 - Government suspends treasury payments on loans due to lack of funds, causing panic in French stock market, as well as a bank run.
August 24 - Necker reappointed.
Reimposes price controls, in anticipation of shortages from poor harvest.
September - Restoration of Parlements.
Oct 5 - Dec 12 - Second Assembly of Notables meets.
Oct 24 - 26 - Necker reappointed Minister of Finance.

1789

January 24 - Summoning of the Estates General.
January 26-29 - Crowd demanding lower bread prices is attacked by bands of students. Several killed in the fighting.
Winter-spring - Shortages lead to higher prices and rising unemployment.
April 27-28 - Reveillon riots. Acting on rumors of wage cuts, rioters destroy factory of wallpaper manufacturer; 25 killed when troops open fire.
May 5 - Estates General convene.
May - Bread riots occur throughout Flanders, Artois, Picardy, and Normandy.
June 17 - National Assembly proclaimed.
June 20 - Tennis Court Oath.
June 28-30 - Rioters protesting high prices destroy city's toll-gates.
Early July - Troops assigned to protect convoys of grain and flour.
July 11 - Necker dismissed.
July 14 - Rising grain prices and food shortages finally peak.
Fall of the Bastille.
July 22 - Foulon and Bertier, rumored to have been part of a plot to starve Paris, are murdered and decapitated by a mob.
July 20 - 31 - "Great Fear" - Fear that nobility intends to use force to reverse gains causes panic among peasantry throughout France.
Castles and abbeys sacked.
August 26 - Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen.
August - Government attempt to float two loans fails.
September - Grain prices increase. Grain riots occur around Paris and groups of women stop grain convoys. Guards placed around bakers' shops.
October 5-6 - Fueled by rumors of another starvation plot, crowd marches to Versailles. Lafayette escorts king back to Paris, followed by a procession of 60,000.
October 21 - Martial Law against Tumults passed. Allows local authorities to declare martial law to deal with disturbances.

1790

January - 22 chateaus destroyed by peasants in northern Brittany.
June 13-17 - Fighting between Catholics and Protestants leaves 300 dead in Nimes.
August 31 - Mutiny by troops at Nancy put down. 23 mutineers executed.
September 3 - Necker resigns.

1791

February - Emigration of nobility and closure of church organizations leads to rising unemployment.
March 2 - Trade guilds abolished by National Assembly.
June 14 - Le Chapelier Law bans worker organizations and collective actions, effectively preventing strikes and collective bargaining.
June 20 - Louis XVI tries to flee. Stopped at Varennes.
July 17 - Champ de Mars massacre - 50 people killed when National Guard troops open fire on crowd of 50,000.
September - December - Paris authorities increase grain reserves in anticipation of shortages. Leads to depletion of stocks in outlying regions.
September 14 - Louis XVI accepts constitution.
September 30 - National Assembly dissolved.
October 1 - Legislative Assembly meets for first time.

1792

January - Slave rebellion in West Indies causes sugar shortage in Paris. Sugar prices triple.
January-February - Grain riots in northeastern France due to depleted stocks.
February - Mayor of Etampes lynched for failing to lower grain price reduction.
Dunkirk's warehouses destroyed in three days of rioting provoked by attempts to export grain.
April 20 - France declares war on Austria.
August 10 - Tuileries stormed and monarchy overthrown.
September 2 - 6 - September Massacres. An estimated 1,200 to 1,400 prisoners murdered by mobs and tribunals.
September 21 - National Convention meets.
September 22 - Republic proclaimed.
December - Trial of Louis XVI.

1793

January 21 - Execution of Louis XVI.
February - Sugar and coffee price increases lead to petitions for the passage of a maximum price law.
February 26 - Grocery riots in Paris. Grocery shops and warehouses attacked and sales forced at fixed prices.
March 10 - Revolutionary Tribunal created.
April 6 - Committee of Public Safety created. 

May 1 - 8,000 demonstrators mob Convention demanding the introduction of price controls on bread. Girondins resist maximum.
May 20 - Forced loan on the rich.
May 24 - Crowds in Lyons invade warehouse and sell army provisions.
May 31 - Anti-Girondin uprising in Paris.
June 2 - Crowd of around 80,000 surrounds Convention and forces it to purge Girondins. (21 would be executed in October.)
June 24 - Constitution of 1793 accepted.
June 25 - Crowds of women attack soap suppliers and force sales.
July 26 - Death penalty for hoarding law passed.
September 4 - Workers in Paris march on the Convention, demanding end to shortages.
September 5 - "Reign of Terror" begins when Convention votes to implement terror.
September 23 - Forced loan on the rich.
September 29 - General Maximum Law imposes price controls on goods.
October 16 - Marie Antoinette beheaded.
Oct. 24-30 - Trial of Girondins.
October 31 - Execution of Girondins.

1794

February 21 - Nationwide schedule of maximum prices promulgated.
March - Hebertists arrested and executed.
April 5 - Danton and Desmoulins executed.
April - Le Chapelier law against price increases used to punish ringleaders of tobacco workers who had asked for a wage increase.
July 5 - Wage controls introduced in Paris.
July 27-28 - Robespierre loses support among Parisian laborers following implementation of wage controls, is ousted from power and guillotined.
August 1 - Law of 22 Prairial repealed. Terror begins to collapse with governmental reorganization.
August 9 - Wage controls abandoned.
August 11 - Committee of Public Safety deprived of major role in government.
September 7 - Maximum Law extended by Convention for another year.
December 24 - Maximum abolished.
Frozen rivers disrupt transport system for winter.

1795

January-February - Winter shortages lead to bread rationing and government- subsidized purchases by spring.
March 22 - Women petition Convention for better bread supplies.
March 24 - Convention orders requisition of two-thirds of available grain supplies from suppliers.
March 27-28 - Bread riots in sections of Paris.
April 1-2 - Uprising of Germinal. Crowd (10,000) marches on Convention.
April 10 - Convention authorizes disarming of "terrorists."
May 4 - Former terrorists massacred by mob in Lyons.
May 20-23 - Uprising of Prairial. Mob invades Convention hall. Slogan "Bread and the Constitution of 1793" is heard. Deputy Feraud killed.
Convention restores order and executes mob leaders in retaliation.
May 31 - Revolutionary Tribunal abolished.
Summer - Paris endures shortages of basic commodities and inflation.
July 21 - Royalist invasion at Quiberon repulsed.
November 2 - Directory constituted.
December 10 - Forced loan.

1796

February - Bread and meat rations reduced as supplies dwindle.
March 2 - Napoleon Bonaparte appointed commander in Italy.

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Olympics considering alternatives to Saudi Arabia's Neom hosting Asian Winter Games

From dezeen, August 27:

Olympic organisers have reportedly approached South Korea about hosting the 2029 Asian Winter Games over doubts about whether Saudi Arabia's unbuilt Trojena ski resort will be ready in time.

According to a report by news agency Reuters, the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) has formally contacted the Korean Sport and Olympic Committee (KSOC) to sound out the idea of the country hosting the event, which is currently planned to take place at the not-yet-built Trojena ski resort.

"Senior OCA officials met the KSOC president last month and asked about South Korea potentially hosting the games in 2029, the KSOC official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, adding that the OCA had subsequently made the enquiry in a formal letter to the KSOC," wrote Reuters....

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News You Can Use: "AI Schemes Could 'Make Bernie Madoff's Fraud Look Trivial'......."

From Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge, August 15:

"Grifters will grift" during times of looser regulation, says Eugene Soltes. He takes stock of Ponzi's enduring legacy, the state of corporate crime, and the future of fraud. 

Like many doomed ideas searching for capital, Charles Ponzi started out with a simple plan to arbitrage coupons. With charisma and false promises, his scheme quickly ballooned into one of history's most famous fraud cases.

Even though Ponzi was convicted and imprisoned more than a century ago, his infamy lives on. Ponzi or pyramid schemes, which seek to pay earlier investors with new investor funds, remain common today, with cryptocurrency opening new fraud opportunities. And his legacy is still being scrutinized, most recently in the Apple Original podcast Easy Money: The Charles Ponzi Story.

Observers are drawn to those schemes because of their magnitude. The biggest generally involve the large sums of money—often in the billions.

Harvard Business School Professor Eugene Soltes, who shares insights from decades of risk and integrity research on the podcast, says shifting regulatory priorities are creating a “grifter’s paradise,” with potential consequences for years to come.

HBS Working Knowledge talked to Soltes, the McLean Family Professor of Business Administration, about Ponzi, the state of corporate crime today, and the influence of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why do you think there's still so much interest in Ponzi?
Every decade, we see another major Ponzi scheme scandal that's very large. The most recent one that people will obviously recognize involved Bernie Madoff. Observers are drawn to those schemes because of their magnitude. The biggest generally involve the large sums of money—often in the billions.

What's impressive is that unlike the sophistication of Enron’s financial fraud, where executives were making complex changes to financial statements that make it hard for people to understand, the essence of a Ponzi scheme is not actually complex from a business side—because there isn't actually any underlying business. What's most fascinating is that it “works” because it’s a psychological scheme of attracting and retaining victims.

If you think of Madoff, just through his style and demeanor, he was able to attract extraordinary amounts of capital from many deeply sophisticated people and respected charities. Even he couldn’t have imagined when he started that he would be able to raise billions based on a nonexistent financial offering.

Why do you think this style of scam remains popular?
We’re all susceptible to the allure of making a quick buck. It goes back to the most basic financial advice people hear at a young age: “There’s no free lunch.” When your bank is offering you a 2 percent rate of return, and someone else offers you 15 percent for “no additional risk”, it should be viewed as too good to be true. And yet, if you see other people making that, it becomes just too attractive to pass up. Call it “FOMO”—fear of missing out. Your initial hesitation is thrown out and that’s how another victim is born.

I wrote an article years ago about a company called MMM. It was the largest Ponzi scheme in Russia and it reached people across Asia and parts of Africa, too. They were active on Facebook groups and even did in-person events. The company stated that their scheme was like a charity that could pause or reset—euphemistic wording that meant it would need to start over when the Ponzi became unsustainable.

Regulators had trouble shutting it down because it wasn't fraudulent; they literally described what they were doing. It was the rare Ponzi that was not actually being deceptive and people still invested!

We interviewed people who were investing and we heard many say how they lost everything when banks failed or knew people who did. For people who’ve been through a crisis and lost all of their money, they don’t trust central institutions like banks. Then, all of sudden, you hear that people you trust say they’re making lots of money in something that seems credible, you jump back in to catch up with them.

Is cryptocurrency the new frontier for Ponzi schemes?
So we’ve gone through three waves, so far:

• We had many initial coin offerings, which were mostly shut down.

• Then we had these NFTs (non-fungible tokens), until those went out of fashion.

• Now, we have crypto. While there's obviously some important potential opportunities and uses, there are also many that resemble the most basic “pump and dump.”

In a pump and dump, an investment is touted by people who get the price to rise quickly, and then the promoters sell large amounts of their holdings at a profit causing the price to plummet. Many of the crypto offerings clearly are too volatile to be an effective store of value or an effective means of exchange. Yet, you see their values dramatically rising and falling based on touting. This doesn’t look all that different in some instances from what pump and dumps looks like in stock market.

What challenge does this investing psychology present for regulators?
I have a paper coming out later this year on this. We used a set of investor data that involved known pump-and-dump schemes. And what was fascinating was that there's a subset of investors—not a trivial subset—that seems attracted to pump-and-dump schemes. They've been involved in them and find more to invest in. Despite often losing, they keep doing it! Psychologically, they must enter them with the thinking that it’s like a lottery ticket. It’s a thrill and you think you can make 10 times your investment quickly.

Our conclusion from the paper suggests that the thing that regulators do—tell people how to avoid pump-and-dump schemes—may work in reverse. That means, that if you tell people that something is a pump and dump, a lot of people will run toward it because everyone has this overly optimistic belief that they're going to sell before it gets dumped.

What’s the state of corporate crime?
I’m concerned with the general climate today around corporate conduct and fraudulent behavior in markets. We're operating in an environment where federal priorities have shifted away from fraud to other areas, such as immigration. There are new products, especially in crypto and AI, that can facilitate new waves of crime. And the notion of truth and deception is being confounded in everyday business conversation. I’d describe the current environment as a grifter’s paradise.

I do see this eventually coming back to bite those who are engaging in deception though. Years often pass—six is a commonly cited number—before a white-collar crime faces investigation or prosecution. That suggests that, right now from afar, business conduct can look stable and acceptable. But once we inevitably hit the next bump—for example, an economic downturn when such conduct is more likely to be exposed—we’ll see a very different picture.

Already, based on some of our work viewing internal company culture, we see more challenges emerging. I see it as just a matter of time until we unfortunately see a much larger abscess of damaging corporate behavior exposed. It remains to be seen whether and how that conduct will be dealt with from a regulatory and enforcement perspective. Will the US take a strict line as in the past or will companies be giving a pass in the name of “economic growth”?....

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Of course, for those of us who are "Too Lazy to Work, Too Nervous to Steal"* we just go into finance and watch the passing parade.

*song by Marl Young and "Daddy-O" Daylie, popularized by T-Bone Walker. 

"Trump’s Road to Riyadh: The Geopolitics of AI and Energy Infrastructure"

From American Affairs Journal, Fall 2025 / Volume IX, Number 3:

Something big happened in the Persian Gulf in May 2025. Donald Trump, fresh off one of the most astonishing comebacks in recent political history, hopped from one Arab capital to the next. He was greeted not merely as a visiting head of state but as something like a returning emperor. The images were surreal: camel processions, sword dances, ululating crowds, gleaming skyscrapers, and desert megaprojects rising from the sand like mirages. Even more staggering were the numbers. By the end of his tour of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, Trump announced that U.S. companies had signed deals worth an eye-watering $2 trillion.¹ This was, by any measure, the sale of the century, crafted by a man who styles himself as the ultimate dealmaker. But what kind of world order was being built in the Gulf, and how did we get here?

To understand what was unfolding in the Gulf, we need to rewind. The deeper logic of this new order wasn’t born in a single summit; it emerged, barely noticed, through a series of seemingly disconnected events over the last two years. The subsequent outbreak of a brief but dramatic shooting war between Israel and Iran—and the U.S. intervention it induced—are not likely to change its overall trajectory and may ultimately function to solidify it.

A Tale of Ambition and High Stakes

Throughout President Biden’s four years in office, his administration found itself increasingly entangled in the world’s oldest geopolitical trip wires. Against the backdrop of a high-stakes confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, and a simmering confrontation with China over trade and technology, the press talked about a “New Cold War.” In a bold gambit to regain the strategic advantage, President Joe Biden unveiled a flagship project at the September 2023 G20 Summit in New Delhi: a new trade corridor linking India to Europe via the Arabian Peninsula, dubbed the India–Middle East–Europe Corridor, or IMEC.² It was touted as the West’s response to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Beijing’s global enterprise linking roads, ports, and railways with the goal of making China the center of a vast Eurasian trade network.

But just one month after Biden’s news conference, Hamas launched its devastating October 7 attack on Israel, plunging the region into chaos and disrupting the fragile normalization talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The fallout sent shockwaves through the very region IMEC was meant to stabilize, casting doubt on the project’s future.

At the same time, as if in a parallel universe, another portentous development was unfolding. This one less bloody but no less destabilizing: artificial intelligence (AI) had moved from speculative hype to a widely accessible everyday technology, with potentially world-transforming impact. OpenAI, the company at the forefront of this revolution, began with no clear business model. Its founders half-joked that once they built an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), they’d simply ask it how to generate returns. But with the release of ChatGPT in 2022 and the broader generative AI boom that followed, the company stumbled into a business model: automation at scale.

By late 2024, however, OpenAI was no longer a scrappy research outfit. Rather, it was a financial blackhole with geopolitical consequences. The financial demands of developing cutting-edge AI had become staggering. In that year alone, the company lost $5 billion.³ Its CEO, Sam Altman, a lean figure with steel-blue eyes and an uncanny ability to command attention without theatrics, understood what few others did: there was no turning back. The only way out of the debt trap was through.

So Altman doubled down. He envisioned a global infrastructure network to match the scale of his ambition: a $7 trillion blueprint to build the physical and digital scaffolding for the AI age.⁴ That sum exceeded Japan’s GDP and the combined market capitalization of Apple and Microsoft. But to Altman, it wasn’t optional; it was urgent. In a widely circulated blog post, he warned that without massive new compute supply, AI could become “a very limited resource that wars get fought over.”⁵

There was also a more calculated logic at play. By building and controlling the infrastructure of compute, OpenAI could secure a dominant position in the AI economy, just as Amazon had done by monopolizing the infrastructure of online commerce. Altman’s blueprint called for a massive buildout: data centers, semiconductor fabs, power plants, high-capacity fiber networks, and new trade corridors. He pitched the plan not only to Microsoft and Nvidia but also to Persian Gulf governments.

By then, Gulf sovereign wealth funds had already pivoted toward AI at scale. In 2024, Gulf states—the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait—dramatically ramped up AI investments, collectively committing tens of billions in funds, data centers, and strategic infrastructure. Altman, alongside other U.S. AI executives, began quietly deepening ties with these regimes.

At the center of Altman’s courtship stood a shadowy figure who represented his country’s towering ambition to become an AI superpower. His name is Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed. He is brother to the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, Mohamed Bin Zayed, and his national security advisor. Tahnoun also serves as his country’s AI czar. Tahnoun heads both the MGX fund, an Emirati investment firm in AI with $100 billion in capital, and G42, a vast technology conglomerate involved in fields ranging from AI to biotechnology, with particular expertise in government-backed cyber operations and surveillance systems.⁶ These roles give Tahnoun unmatched leverage across the region’s AI, finance, and compute sectors. Tahnoun’s master plan and Altman’s grand strategy overlapped, and they began working hand in hand. Thus, Altman’s vision for planetary AI infrastructure had found its anchor in the fossil-fuel-rich, regulation-light economies of the Persian Gulf.

While the Biden administration signaled its commitment to constraining the global diffusion of American AI technology by imposing more and more export controls, Altman was already forging the deals that would make such constraints obsolete. His revolution needed capital, land, and dispatchable power, and the Gulf was the only place offering all three.

Altman was not alone. His turn to the Gulf reflected a broader convergence, one that would come to define the coalition behind Trump’s return to power. It was an amalgam of AI moguls, cryptofinanciers, fossil fuel interests, and real estate developers. What binds Trump’s business coalition is the structural interdependence of its core sectors—AI, crypto, energy, and real estate—each feeding the infrastructural needs of the others. AI is the engine: it demands colossal compute resources, generates vast data flows, and drives the automation of decision-making across sectors. Crypto is the payment system: it monetizes usage, distributes rewards, and enables capital to flow across borders without much regulatory friction. But these technologies are intensely resource-hungry. They require a constant, high-volume energy supply, something intermittent renewables can’t provide. This is also why the coalition favors fossil fuels and nuclear, since only they offer the stability and scale needed.

All of this—compute, power, fiber, liquidity—ultimately rests on real estate. Land, buildings, and zoning regimes form the chassis of the entire system. Data centers, energy hubs, and submarine cable landing stations must be physically sited, cooled, secured, and connected.

The Middle East, particularly the Persian Gulf, has reemerged as a strategic hub for Trump’s business coalition. With its abundant dispatchable energy, permissive regulatory regimes, and position at the intersection of global trade routes, the Gulf is uniquely positioned to anchor the infrastructure of the AI age. The coalition’s ascent, enabled by the election of the AI-industry-aligned Trump, meant that Biden’s IMEC project, long stalled by regional conflict, would now be retooled and repurposed.

IMEC retained its original ambition: to link Europe and Asia through a secure, high-capacity trade corridor. But under Trump, it acquired an additional layer, a digital one. The emphasis shifted to the corridor’s southern leg, the route connecting Gulf-based data centers with India’s vast pool of educated, low-cost office labor. How these Gulf data campuses will link to European markets remains unclear, but Trump’s visit offered some hints that will be explored below. As under Biden, the project still aligns with the Gulf monarchies’ goals of diversifying income, gaining access to advanced technologies, and elevating their global relevance.

Yet under Trump, the political logic of IMEC has shifted dramatically. No longer a multilateral initiative shepherded by technocrats and international institutions, the corridor is now turning into a privatized artery of power governed not by memoranda of understanding or diplomatic summits, but by sovereign wealth funds, ambitious tech firms, and transactional deal-making.

To be sure, the Trump administration has floated other infrastructural ambitions: a land bridge through Canada and Greenland to the emerging Transpolar Sea Route and a renewed push to control chokepoints like the Panama Canal.⁷ But these remain geopolitical mirages: underdeveloped, logistically uncertain, and disconnected from any coherent implementation strategy. IMEC, by contrast, is real, resilient, and already underway. After a year of regional upheaval, it is paradoxically more secure than ever, bolstered by a convergence of interests among Gulf states and countries like Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, all of which see in the corridor a path to integration, logistical leverage, and infrastructure rents. It is moving rapidly from planning to execution and, unlike most of Trump’s ventures, reflects a rare alignment of capital, geography, and strategic intent.

To understand how the road to Riyadh became the epicenter of Trump’s Eurasian strategy, we must return to New Delhi, where Biden first launched the corridor....

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"Lebanese Court Releases Former Central Bank Governor on Bail"

From the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, August 29:

Lebanese authorities have set $20 million bail for former central bank governor Riad Salameh, nearly a year after his arrest on charges of embezzling public funds, as concerns persist over whether he will be held accountable for his role in Lebanon’s financial crisis.  

A Lebanese court has ordered the release of former central bank governor Riad Salameh on bail of more than $20 million, over charges of embezzling $44 million in public funds.

The ruling comes nearly a year after the 75-year-old  was arrested in September 2024 on multiple financial charges, including embezzlement of public money. In April, a judge referred Salameh to trial on counts of embezzlement and illicit enrichment.

Along with bail, the court imposed a one-year travel ban on Salameh. His lawyer, Mark Habka, called the bail an “illegal” amount and said they will sek a reduction. Despite the order, Salameh had not yet been released as of Tuesday.

Regardless of the release decision, under the Lebanese Code of Criminal Procedure, Salameh’s release was due on September 4, when his pretrial detention period of six months—renewable only once—expires....

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"The Sarin shortcut: How AI lowers the bar for chemical weapons"

From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August 25:

For more than two decades, lone actors with weapons of mass destruction ambitions have relied on crude toxins like ricin and amatoxins because plants like castor beans and mushrooms that contain these poisons fly under the export control radar. Law enforcement has uncovered more than a dozen plots to synthesize and use ricin. In contrast, there haven’t been any publicly documented amateur sarin or other nerve agent production attempts, not for lack of chemistry know-how but because Schedule 1 chemical precursors (substances that can be used to make weapons) are policed, flagged, and scarce. Acquiring these precursors even for peaceful research could only be done within official, institutional settings.

For those contemplating mass casualties, biotoxins like ricin are easy to produce. But delivering them effectively is difficult, requiring specialized techniques like aerosolization. Conversely for chemical warfare agents like sarin, synthesis (because of restricted precursors) has traditionally been the hard part, even if delivering them does not require specialized methods.

However, that balance is tipping because of advances in artificial intelligence. Generative AI and off-the-shelf computational tools are collapsing the precursor barrier, making DIY sarin analogs (compounds that resemble the molecular structure of sarin) as attractive as castor-bean mash for rogue individuals. These applications can make the synthesis and use of nerve agents for nefarious purposes marginally but consequentially more probable.

By enabling three-dimensional similarity searches, AI-guided planning of chemical synthesis routes, and predictions of how chemical warfare agents work in the body at a molecular level and at massive scale, these tools can identify unlisted but functionally equivalent precursors and products. Combined with large language model-based prompt engineering, today’s technologies can lower the obstacles to designing novel agents. Current regulatory barriers—including lists that categorize harmful substances—are not designed for this fast-moving frontier. Unless regulatory bodies evolve into adaptive systems that model the effects and not just the molecular structures of these compounds, the static lists of these organizations will lag dangerously behind technological advances. Those regulatory organizations can use AI, which is the instrument leading humans into this threat to begin with, to counter it.

Bypassing restrictions. There are several ways in which people could use AI and computational chemistry to bypass or creatively get around current control mechanisms. For instance, in 2022 researchers showed that machine learning software optimization functions that penalized certain toxic properties of molecules could instead reward the design of toxic analogs of the nerve agent VX. The software found over 40,000 analogs; assuredly more than a few of these would not appear on current scheduled lists and would be as or more toxic than VX.

During the last few years, there has been another significant development, namely AI-guided retrosynthesis. This computational technique uses AI to break down a target molecule into its building blocks. It can then suggest a synthetic route—complete with reaction conditions and reagents—for assembling these building blocks into the target molecule. Much like there are multiple ways to assemble Lego pieces into a house, these tools provide multiple alternative pathways to a molecule. Retrosynthesis can easily be used to deconstruct the structure of a nerve agent like sarin into unscheduled precursors that are invisible to the Chemical Weapons Convention or chemical supplier checklists....

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"Nine Rules for Managing Humans Managing Nuclear Reactors" (plus, that time a future U.S. President saved Canada's capital)

From Asterisk Magazine, Issue 11:

Admiral Hyman Rickover was the Father of the Nuclear Navy —  and one of the most effective bureaucrats in the history of the U.S. government. He also thought it was impossible to teach management by writing about it, but that didn’t stop him from trying. 

In the two years between the Watergate scandal of 1972 and Nixon’s resignation in 1974, American trust in government cratered. Public confidence, already battered by Vietnam and inflation, spiraled to historic lows. In the 1976 election, Democrat Jimmy Carter ran on an agenda to restore trust. A “government as good as the people” became his campaign refrain, along with a government efficiency platform which included civil service reform and zero-based budgeting as key planks.  

Carter worked with Congress to pass the 1977 Reorganization Act, which gave the executive branch greater authority to restructure federal agencies. He also launched the Personnel Management Project, which assembled a team of interagency experts to provide recommendations on civil service reform. The final recommendations from that project include ones that might be familiar today, like the need for more flexibility in hiring and relating federal pay to performance. These efforts culminated in the passage of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, which created the Office of Personnel Management and centralized executive branch control over federal workforce policy. It was the most significant overhaul of the civil service since the New Deal, ushering in reforms and institutions that last to this day. 

As part of its public mandate, OPM began publishing Management, a federal periodical for “insiders who need to know what's happening and how to get things done in the Federal Workforce.” This was part of the Carter administration’s effort to highlight best practices and promote efficiency across the federal bureaucracy. In their inaugural issue, the editors invited Admiral Hyman Rickover, the legendary founder of the U.S. Navy’s Naval Reactors nuclear propulsion program, to contribute.

Over a four-decade career, Rickover oversaw the design, deployment, and management of the Navy’s nuclear fleet. He personally drove the development of the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine (USS Nautilus) and the first commercial nuclear reactor (Shippingport Atomic Power Station). But more importantly, he built a lasting organizational system around them: one capable of operating high-risk, high-complexity technology for decades without a major incident. 

In his piece, Rickover expressed a deep skepticism for the management consulting principles that were in vogue at the time. He argued that there are no tweaks that will magically fix systems. Instead, he emphasized the necessity of motivated and committed technocrats who develop intangible skills and possess an internal drive that cannot be taught in a seminar or a glossy magazine. 

The piece reflected Rickover’s entire philosophy to managing Naval Reactors. A few months before the publication of his piece, he had testified in front of Congress following the Three Mile Island incident. Rather than talking about principles of management or regulatory fixes, he spent the majority of his testimony detailing the careful selection and continual, practical training for staff across the naval reactors enterprise he built. Indeed, Rickover interviewed every officer that went into his program until the end of his career, even when Naval Reactors spanned thousands of personnel, multiple training sites, and dozens of nuclear submarines....

....MUCH MORE, including Admiral Rickover's essay. 

One of the members of Rickover's organization:

"That time the US President, an expert in nuclear physics, heroically lowered himself into the reactor and saved Ottawa, Canada’s capital?"

Poland's First Small Modular Reactor Will Be A GE Vernova-Hitachi BWRX-300 (GEV)

From Global Data via Yahoo Finance, August 29:

ORLEN, Synthos Green sign agreements for Poland’s first SMR plant 

ORLEN has finalised an agreement with Synthos Green Energy that will facilitate the establishment of Poland's first small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear power plant.

The agreement includes two primary components. The first revises the articles of association and shareholder agreement for the joint venture (JV) company, ORLEN Synthos Green Energy (OSGE).

This component grants both parties a 50% equity stake each in the JV and ensures ORLEN's control over strategic decisions.

The second component is a licensing agreement that provides OSGE with full access to the BWRX-300 reactor technology, enabling the project to progress towards construction.

The revised agreements also confirm Włocławek as the chosen site for Poland's inaugural BWRX-300 reactor.

The BWRX-300 reactor technology, developed by GE Vernova in the US, is recognised as the most sophisticated SMR design globally....

....MUCH MORE 

Now, if GEV - Hitachi can win the Swedish contract, to go along with the already announced Canadian project, they will have begun the encirclement (Hier und hier und hier...) of Berlin.

Related:

May 12 - Nuclear: "Canada to Build $15 Billion Modular Nuclear Plant, First in G-7" (GEV)
This puts the SMR wannabes on notice, they had better pick up the pace or bow out of the race....

May 25 - "How GE Vernova plans to deploy small nuclear reactors across the developed world" (GEV)

July 3 - ICYMI: "In Small Nuclear Reactors, There’s One Clear Leader Today" (GEV)

August 7 - Nuclear: Hungary Moves Ahead On GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300 Small Modular Reactor Project (GEV)

Capital Markets: "Chop Fest in FX Continues"

From Marc to Market:

Overview: Ahead of the long holiday weekend in North America, the US dollar is trading with a slightly firmer bias in narrow trading ranges. The drama around the Fed has intensified with FHFA Director Pulte sending a new criminal referral against Governor Cook regarding a third mortgage, while Governor Waller reiterated his dissent from last month's meeting. He supports a September rate cut in the face of the deterioration of the labor market while advocating looking through the tariff-related price pressures. China again lowered the dollar's reference rate to a new low for the year, and after the Thai baht, the yuan is the second-strongest emerging market currency this week, rising nearly 0.5% against the dollar. 

While most of the large markets in the Asia Pacific region fell, the Hong Kong and mainland indices rose. This week's CSI 300 gain of 2.7% is among the best performers. Europe's Stoxx 600 is struggling. It is off for the fourth session this week and is down nearly 2% on the week. US index futures are off 0.3%-0.5%. European bonds are also under pressure. Yields are 2-3 bp higher, paring this week's decline. The 10-year US Treasury yield is up a couple basis points a little above 4.22%, which leave it down about five basis points on the week. Gold reached a new high for the month yesterday, slightly above $3423. It is consolidating lower today but is holding above $3400 (~1% for the week). October WTI is in less than 50-cent range above $64.00. It is up about 0.75% this week....  

....MUCH MORE 

"Stock Of The Day Sets Up Bullishly As It Literally Fuels AI Data Centers" (CCJ)

The day was Thursday but nonetheless it's nice to see a little recognition/personal bias confirmation.

The stock closed up $3.35 (4.45%) at $78.63 on Thursday and despite the wider indices trading heavier this morning is up a bit more, $0.42 (+0.53%) in early pre-market action.

From Investor's Business Daily, August 28: 

IBD Stock Analysis

• Stock is actionable as it rebounds from 10-week support, tops downward trendline
• Flat base could be forming with 80.32 entry

Cameco (CCJ), the leader in its industry group, is the IBD Stock of the Day. The company is literally fueling portions of the AI data center boom.

Canada-based Cameco has operations from the start to the end of the nuclear-energy supply chain. It operates uranium mines in Canada, the U.S., Australia and Kazakhstan. In Canada, it has the world's largest commercial uranium refinery and the country's sole uranium conversion plant. The company also owns 49% of Westinghouse Electric, which helps operate nuclear power plants and is a leader in developing small modular reactor, or SMR, technology.

In an investor presentation, Cameco says it had 17% of the world's uranium production in 2024.

Nuclear power delivers a clean-burning and almost inexhaustible amount of electricity, which makes it an appealing choice to power the many data centers under construction or being expanded. The vast workloads associated with artificial intelligence are greatly increasing demand for data center capacity and the energy needed to drive that capacity. But that's not all.

Reshoring of manufacturing and supply chains, growing electrification and rising use of electric vehicles are also driving demand for electricity. This is causing utilities to diversify their generating assets, Wells Fargo Investment Institute Equity Sector Analyst Joe Buffa said in a report earlier this month.

"We see nuclear power largely holding share" amid uprates (maximum power output) and as a couple of facilities reenter service, Buffa added. 

Mining Industry Leader 
Cameco is the No. 1 stock in IBD's metal ores mining industry group, according to IBD Stock Checkup. It has perfect 99 Composite and EPS Ratings. Earnings rose 63%, 22% and 407% the past three quarters, according to FactSet. Sales climbed 33%, 24% and 47%.

The company's July 31 earnings report beat analysts' consensus views. Management kept its production forecast unchanged, as operations at a Saskatchewan mine may face ground freezing, labor and other problems. Cameco expects average uranium prices of $87 per pound this year, up from a previous estimate of $84

The outlook for its Westinghouse business is bright. It forecast adjusted EBITDA of $525 million to $580 million from a previous estimate of $355 million to $405 million. Over the next five years, Cameco expects adjusted EBITDA will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 6% to 10%.

Analysts expect full-year sales to climb 13% to nearly $2.5 billion, with earnings surging 148% to $1.17 a share in U.S. currency, per FactSet.

The ores mining group is No. 2 among IBD's 197 industry groups after rising 26% year to date. Shares of Cameco are up more than 52%.

Cameco Stock Analysis....

....MUCH MORE 

Previously:

September 2022 - "Investors are Buying a Ton of Call Options in Uranium Stock Cameco Corp" (CCJ)
If I recall correctly, a ton of calls is £2000 worth - two thousands pounds worth, whereas a tonne of calls...

October 2022 - Uranium Miner Cameco and Brookfield Renewable Partners To Buy Nuke Maker Westinghouse (CCJ; BEP)

September 2024 - Barron's Cover: "Get Ready for the New Nuclear Age. It Could Help Solve America’s Electricity Problems"

June 2025 - "UBS Upgrades Uranium Prices On "Repowering The US" Theme Gaining Steam" 

July 2025 - ICYMI: "In Small Nuclear Reactors, There’s One Clear Leader Today" (GEV)

....As noted introducing June 27's "Trump plans executive orders to power AI growth in race with China" (PWR; GEV; CCJ): 

I think we're positioned correctly with the Quanta, GE Vernova, Cameco etc.

But until sales, earnings, and cash flow catch up to the news, valuations are getting stretched. 

But at least we have sales, earnings, and cash flow should the overall market tumble.

Money coming in the front door is comforting and a cushion against impulsivity, regret and all the other things that get in the way of big gains. 

And as mentioned exiting May 23's ""Trump plots ‘Manhattan Project 2’ in nuclear power push" (CCJ; GEV)":

The "set it and forget it" stocks are in the headline, Cameco among the miners and GE Vernova among the nuke reactor manufacturers.

However, as is so often the case the speculative lottery tickets are seeing a lot of enthusiasm for their shares. The problem with them as investments are 1) a lack of stuff like sales/earnings/cash flow and 2) our conviction that we will see at least one and possibly three bear markets before they have products.

And in bear markets it is the companies lacking in sales/earnings/cash flow that get hit hardest; as investors begin to question whether they may have made a big mistake. 

Addendum: I should have mentioned that with Cameco you also get 49% of nuke plant company Westinghouse. Brookfield owns the 51%.

And in June 16's "Why U.S. Uranium Production Surged 12-Fold In 2024" a reminder that Kazakhstan's Kazatomprom is and will probably remain the world's largest producer.

And many, many more.