Author Archives: circleof13

Inside the $4 Billion Industry Built on America’s School Shooting Epidemic

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There are, as the documentary shows, bulletproof desks that can double as shields, blackout shutters to block visibility into classrooms, and video game simulations that test how teachers respond to a fake threat of a school shooter. The school safety industry has become an estimated $4 billion juggernaut, aided in part by a $1 billion infusion from Congress in 2022 to support mental health services and infrastructure upgrades, instead of meaningful gun reform.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/11/thoughts-prayers-hbo-school-shooting/

MASS BLACKOUT: WE’RE PULLING THE PLUG ON CORPORATE CONTROL THIS HOLIDAY SEASON, WE SHUT DOWN THE SYSTEM

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// SYSTEM ERROR: CONNECTION TO CAPITALISM LOST

This is a coordinated economic shutdown—a collective refusal to participate in a system that profits off our pain, exploits our labor, and buys our politicians.

NO SPENDING. NO WORK. NO SURRENDER.

The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed—for the wealthy.

The Mass Blackout is a nationwide economic action, coordinated across aligned organizations, calling Americans to:

Stop online or in-store shopping (except for small businesses)

Stop work

Stop streaming, cancel subscriptions, no digital purchases

Remove the regime

If you must spend: support small, local businesses only. Pay in cash.

We’re not targeting small businesses or communities—we’re targeting the corporate systems that profit from injustice, fuel authoritarianism, and crush worker power.

https://www.themassblackout.com/

The Evolution of the Militarized Data Broker

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“…A Brief History of Weaponized Financial Intelligence

Long before the USSR spooked the United States into formalizing ARPA due to fears of militarized satellite applications post-Sputnik launch, data brokers have played a significant role in warfare and specifically the markets surrounding military conflict. One well-known yet early example occurred during the Napoleonic wars in the 19th century, when the banking stalwart Rothschild family used carrier pigeons and horseback couriers to gain an information settlement edge related to battle outcomes, while speedily communicating with their traders back in London. These animal-driven technological exploits allowed Rothschild-affiliated brokers to place well-informed bets on the outcome of France’s warmongering to position themselves on the winning sides of large currency and commodity bets. This similar but modernized technique would later be employed by figures like commodity trader (and Mossad asset) Marc Rich in the 1980s, who used satellite phones and optical imagery techniques to track and relay oil tanker flows between nations, giving his trades an asymmetric advantage when dealing within the active petrodollar system. Similarly, Louis Bacon’s Moore Capital achieved 86% gains in its first year largely due to correctly anticipating Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait due to astute intelligence sharing from military sources, and correctly going long on oil prices while shorting stocks.
[…]
In 2003, a year after PayPal was sold to eBay, Thiel approached Alex Karp, a fellow alumnus of Stanford with a new venture concept: “Why not use Igor to track terrorist networks through their financial transactions?” Thiel took funds from the PayPal sale to seed the company, and after a few years of pitching investors, the newly-formed Palantir received an estimated $2 million investment from the CIA’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir’s co-founders consulted with John Poindexter during his tenure as head of DARPA’s then-embattled Total Information Awareness in efforts to privatize the controversial surveillance program. In 2020, Intelligencer spoke with a former intelligence official who was involved in the investment who claimed the CIA had hoped that “tapping the tech expertise of Silicon Valley” would allow it to “integrate widely disparate sources of data regardless of format.”

As of 2013, Palantir’s client list included “the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Centre for Disease Control, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point and the IRS” with around “50% of its business” coming from public sector contracts. Palantir is closely connected to the U.S. government, but its financial spin-off, Palantir Metropolis, is focused on providing “analytical tools” for “hedge funds, banks and financial services firms” to outsmart each other. As The Guardian reports: “Palantir does not just provide the Pentagon with a machine for global surveillance and the data-efficient fighting of war, it runs Wall Street, too.”

Facebook, not unlike Palantir, was one of the vehicles used to privatize controversial U.S. military surveillance projects after 9/11, having also been birthed out of one of the MDDS partners, Harvard University. PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel became Facebook’s first significant investor at the behest of file-sharing pioneer Sean Parker, whose first contact with the CIA took place at age 16. What Facebook became after the involvement of Thiel and Parker bore such an uncanny resemblance to another shuttered DARPA project of the same era, known as LifeLog, that LifeLog’s architect and project manager at DARPA has even noted the direct parallels. One of these parallels, though left unmentioned by former DARPA project managers, is the fact that Facebook launched the very same day that LifeLog was shut down. Facebook’s long-standing ties to the military and intelligence communities go far beyond its origins, including revelations about its collaboration with spy agencies as part of the Snowden leaks and its role in influence operations – some have even directly involved Google and Palantir…”

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2025/01/investigative-reports/the-evolution-of-the-militarized-data-broker/

Meet the Man Whose Philosophy Has Influenced Peter Thiel and the Technocrats

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A Brief History of Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas
From 2007 to 2014, Yarvin outlined his views of Dark Enlightenment on his blog Unqualified Reservations. Specifically, Yarvin has argued that American Democracy has failed and should be replaced by a monarchy with similarities to corporate governance structures. He has called for a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.”

https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/influences-modern-technocrat/

Explainer: Will Swiss supermarkets be inundated with cheap, hormone-filled beef after US tariff deal?

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To obtain the reduced 15% tariff rate, Swiss companies had to promise to invest $200 billion in the US by the end of 2028. Switzerland also had to agree to reduce import tariffs on American industrial goods.

The Alpine nation’s highly protected agricultural sector was not spared either. Tariffs on American fish and other seafood will be reduced under the new arrangement. This is not such a big concession as this sector is not a sensitive one for the landlocked country that imported 825 tonnes of fish and seafood from the US in 2024.

However, meat, deemed a sensitive sector by the Swiss Farmers’ Union, is on the dealmaking table. According to the MoU, Switzerland will grant the US duty-free access for certain meat products. This concession will only apply to a fixed quota every year to ensue Switzerland is not flooded with American meat. American farmers will be allowed to export 500 tonnes of beef (nearly double 2024 imports of 261 tonnes), 1,000 tonnes of bison meat and 1,500 tonnes of poultry to Switzerland duty free.
[…]
It is estimated that anywhere between two-thirds to 90% of American beef cattle raised conventionally are given hormone implants or fed growth regulators at the feedlot. Such meat can be sold in Switzerland provided testing in Switzerland does not reveal any residue of hormones.

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/agribusiness/explainer-will-swiss-supermarkets-be-inundated-with-cheap-hormone-filled-beef-after-new-tariff-deal-with-us/90393929

Davos assured Trump ‘woke’ topics were off the agenda

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Senior US officials asked Davos management to tone down or avoid discussions on areas including female empowerment and diversity, the green transition, climate change and international development finance as a condition of his participation, two of the people said.

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/foreign-affairs/davos-assured-trump-woke-topics-were-off-the-agenda/90414204

Google On Christmas Island: Data Centres And Imminent Militarisation

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Interest in Google’s relationship with the Australian government was also piqued this month by promised activity on Christmas Island, located 350 kilometres (220 miles) south of Indonesia. The Indian Ocean outpost of exquisite environmental beauty has often been sinister in its secrecy. Unwanted refugees and asylum seekers have periodically found themselves as detainees on the island, victims of Australia’s sadistic approach to undocumented naval arrivals. In August 2016, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre claimed that the Christmas Island Detention Centre had all the brutal features of “a high security military camp where control is based on fear and punishment and the extensive internal use of extrajudicial punishment by force and isolation is evident.”

The goal of the Silicon Valley behemoth lies elsewhere. Occasioned by the signing of a cloud deal with Australia’s Department of Defence earlier in July, the company promises to build what Reuters describes as “a large artificial intelligence data centre” on the island. Advanced talks are being held on leasing land near the island’s airport that will be used for the site. This will include an arrangement with a local mining company to deal with any necessary energy needs for the 7-megawatt facility, which will be powered on diesel and renewable energy.

The scale of the project, let alone its broader significance, is not something the company or government wonks wish others to know about.
[…]
Google’s ties with the military tendrils of several nations continues the ongoing penetration of Big Tech companies into the industrial complex. The circle between military Research and Development pioneered by government agencies and their partnering with private contractors is complete. Indeed, digital-military-industrial complexes are now battling in steady rivalry (the two most prominent being China and the United States). “This is contributing to the blurring of state-corporation boundaries even more than what was observed during the second half of the twentieth century with the rise of transnational corporations,” write Andrea Coveri, Claudia Cozza and Dario Guarsacio in Intereconomics.

https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2511/S00028/google-on-christmas-island-data-centres-and-imminent-militarisation.htm

Is the U.S. Becoming a Captured State? A Comparative Perspective

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In the United States, systems of federal accountability and control are being steadily dismantled, including the loss of civil service protections and of long-held notions of government professionalism and checks on executive action. The extensive use of the pardon power, the gutting and politicization of parts of the Department of Justice and other enforcement agencies, along with the Supreme Court’s grant of broad immunity to the president, all provide impunity for powerful actors. At the same time, the president, his family, and close friends appear to be benefiting financially during his time in office, raising serious conflict of interest or undue influence concerns.

Many of these events seem to fall into a definition of state capture: large-scale corruption that distorts both the formulation and implementation of laws, norms, decrees, rules and regulations; provides impunity for powerful actors; and leads eventually to a reconfiguration of the state to serve certain powerful interests.

Much has been written on the United States’ democratic backsliding, illiberal regimes, and competitive authoritarianism, including comparisons with other countries. Yet far less attention has been paid to the related phenomenon of state capture: how leaders weaponize bureaucratic, law enforcement, and regulatory institutions to disable guardrails, evade accountability, enrich themselves and their allies, and reconfigure state institutions to perpetuate themselves in power and use the state for private gain.

This analysis examines the experiences of South Africa, El Salvador, Sri Lanka and Guatemala to illustrate how state capture took root in those countries and the lasting damage that unchecked corruption and self-dealing have inflicted on their institutions. Specifically, it looks to three aspects of state capture in those countries: the weakening of accountability and oversight mechanisms, the entrenching of impunity for the powerful, and the instrumentalizing of political power for personal and party gain.

https://www.justsecurity.org/124560/us-captured-state-comparative/

Roll-back of digital rights prepared in secrecy

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Today, the Commission published its proposal for ‘simplification’ of digital rules, a package intended to deregulate digital laws to support businesses. The deregulation of the EU’s digital rulebook comes at a time when the tech industry is spending a record-breaking €151 million on EU lobbying. Most prominent is an attack on data privacy rules (GDPR) to support the development of artificial intelligence.

Corporate Europe Observatory published a new piece of research documenting how Big Tech has influenced the digital omnibus.

Key findings include:

Key demands from Big Tech firms and their affiliated lobby associations to water down the AI Act and weaken data protection made it into the Commission’s proposals;

Big Tech weaponised the Trump administration to attack the EU’s digital rulebook;

The Commission has opened the doors to business lobby groups in highly secretive meetings. Crucial steps in the preparation of the digital omnibus were five so-called Reality Checks, meetings heavily dominated by industry. Out of 138 invitees, 114 were business representatives. Only 9 civil society organisation representatives were invited.

Corporate Europe Observatory has retrieved a document which shows that the Commission has decided to exempt ‘Reality Checks’ from transparency measures that apply to other meetings with “interest representatives”.

https://corporateeurope.org/en/2025/11/roll-back-digital-rights-prepared-secrecy

Jeffrey Epstein used Rothschild banking empire to finance Israeli cyberweapons industry

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Following Barak’s retirement from office in 2013, he recruited Pavel Gurvich, a former operative of Israel’s secretive Unit 81, to identify promising cyber ventures.

Barak relied on Gurvich for guidance on investments in offensive cyber tools, including Tor network surveillance, NSO-style cellphone hacking software, and router exploitation technologies.

Gurvich supplied detailed maps of undersea transatlantic cables and network access points, illustrating the global reach of potential operations.

Epstein then facilitated connections between Barak, Gurvich, and the Rothschild dynasty, offering logistical support, guidance on tax and investment structures, and strategic advice.

Epstein’s involvement included a $25 million contract in October 2015 between his Southern Trust Company and Barak’s spyware-linked startup Reporty Homeland Security (now Carbyne).

The agreement covered “risk analysis and the application and use of certain algorithms.”

He also organized private meetings and dinners to foster collaboration, including a January 2014 gathering in Paris with Barak, the Rothschilds, and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Emails suggest Epstein coached Barak on managing the Rothschild relationship, advising him to provide “time, attention, stable, recurring, predictable” engagement to earn trust.

https://alethonews.com/2025/11/19/jeffrey-epstein-used-rothschild-banking-empire-to-finance-israeli-cyberweapons-industry/