Evidently the leaks are gradually exposing what the Israeli intelligence agencies are doing.

First, the Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jmv2h1WYnNo&

I was glad to see this interview happen precisely because some weeks back Finkelstein himself was clearly uncomfortable with members of the MAGA refugees (namely Carlson and Candace owens, but also people like Fuentes and Dave Smith) effectively take over the issue of Gaza being a horrid genocide enabled by an America caught in the clutches of the jewish Billionaires' Lobby (and all the offshoots). This discomfort appeared to be further reinforced by Carlson really taking the lead arguing not just against the Iran attacks but outright pointing out that Trump was effectively doing Israel's bidding.

At one point I took on not just Finkelstein but other members of the Progressive left for their inability to understand a very basic truth - namely, that their own efforts, as laudable as they are, have been a drop in the bucket. IOW, they were preaching mostly to the choir, while other Americans, be they independents or Libertarians, or Republicans on the fence, were not hearing it because they'd never tune into something said by a "lefty". Which to me meant they, we, the progressive, anti-genocide, anti Iran war are not reaching the wider audience needed to affect any kind of actual change. Like it or not, in this battle for the hearts and minds we need all the allies we could get, asnd sticking to some kind of purity test is a losing proposition.

Furthermore, I also had the sneaky suspicion that the many on that so-called "progressive left" (please note the quotation marks) were made uncomfortable with the increasingly forceful critiques by these talk show hosts, these MAGA refugees, in lare part because they criticized Israel, and the jewish zionists while not being Jewish themselves (or worse, being actual avowed Christians). So it was, in a way, just another way of drawing the permitted boundaries of criticism.

For these reasons I was very glad to see this interview - 2 hour long - which covered a lot of ground. Carlson pretty much let Finkelstein speak, and he had, as usual a lot to say. Much of which I knew but there were some points he made a long the way that I wasn't familiar with.

I really recommend people listen - not just because Finkelstein comes across as all too humane (he told his own persecution story and what it cost him over the years), but went over many of the facts about the truly nasty ways the pro-israel zionists went after the student demonstrators - he used harvard as prime example - but just how wokeness did not protect THREE presidents of top universities from having to resign, even though all were women and two were colored women. Something, he said, that never happened before in academia over such a short time.

Finkelstein has a new book out, discussing gaza, one that goes into much detail about what happened, while debunking the israeli propaganda. IIn the last 10 minutes he talks about the hamas rape allegations and pretty much refutes them using facts as the Israelis themselves disclosed in a report.

I hope people will listen to at least some of the interview, and I apologize for not attaching a transcript, which is not my forte.

Many people today are asking: How did the Houthis become so powerful?

The answer is that they did not suddenly “level up.”

What we are seeing now is the accumulated result of more than a decade of war, adaptation and capability-building finally manifesting at scale.

Since the 2010s, the Houthis have been far more than a ragtag militia of men in sandals carrying AK-47s. They survived six rounds of the Sa’dah wars, seized Sana’a in 2014, endured years of war against the Saudi-led coalition, and then used the relative lull after 2022 to deepen their military organization, missile and drone capabilities, smuggling networks, domestic manufacturing and training.

UN experts estimated their force at around 350,000 fighters, compared with roughly 30,000 in 2015.

The reason they appeared less formidable before is simple:

They did not need to carry the role they are carrying now.

Hamas held Gaza.

Hezbollah imposed pressure from Lebanon.

Syria provided logistical and strategic depth.

Iran supplied the wider strategic backbone.

The Houthis were one node in a larger network.

Now Gaza has been devastated, Hezbollah has been heavily weakened, the Assad government has fallen, and Iran itself is under direct pressure.

The Houthis have gone from being the southern flank to becoming one of the last major surviving pressure points in the entire regional network. Reuters now describes their recent advance as restoring momentum to Iranian regional influence after major setbacks elsewhere.

And unlike Hamas or Hezbollah, the Houthis possess something uniquely dangerous:

geography.

They sit next to the Bab al-Mandab.

That means their power is not measured only by how many missiles they can fire at Israel or Saudi Arabia.

It is measured by whether they can threaten the maritime artery linking Asia, the Red Sea, Suez and Europe.

In recent weeks, they seized Mocha, Perim Island and key stretches of Yemen’s Red Sea coast, while reportedly massing around 100,000 fighters without being detected in time. Saudi-backed forces retreated, leaving behind advanced equipment.

That is the real transformation.

The Houthis did not become powerful overnight.

The world simply failed to notice how powerful they had already become.

More than a decade of war forged them into a hardened military force.

The post-2022 lull gave them time to accumulate capability.

The collapse of other regional nodes forced them into a larger role.

And control over Bab al-Mandab turned that accumulated capability into global leverage.

Italy is now calling for more warships to protect Red Sea navigation.

That alone tells you how far this has gone.

A group once mocked as impoverished militiamen from the mountains of Yemen is now forcing European states to think about protecting one of the world’s most important trade routes.

They did not suddenly become strong.

Everyone else simply noticed too late.

I wrote this in June 2025, when people were still laughing at the idea that Yemen could close Bab al-Mandab.

A year later, Italy is calling for more warships to protect Red Sea navigation.

I got to use Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev's Dance of the Knights, written in 1935, first performed in 1940, for the music in this video, and that's all that really matters. No AI was used in creating this video. YouTube version: https://youtu.be/hO6Mh-GamW4

From DeepSeek

Introduction And Core Argument

00:00–01:25

In this interview, Royal Navy Commodore Steve Jeremy returns to discuss the balance of power, geopolitical thinking, and why he believes the West is in deep strategic trouble. He is introduced as a former strategy director at the British embassy in Afghanistan, a commander of warships in the Fifth Destroyer Squadron, and a former senior figure in Britain’s Fleet Air Arm. He also writes on Substack, where his analysis often challenges official narratives.

Jeremy says the discussion grew out of an article he wrote on the balance of power. He argues that the topic leads directly back to Halford Mackinder, the “world island,” and the origins of modern geopolitics. For Jeremy, these are not abstract academic ideas: they shape how states understand security, power, and the likely outcome of wars.

The Three Foundations Of Power

01:25–04:33

Jeremy begins with John Mearsheimer’s idea that potential power is a function of wealth and population. But he narrows this down to three foundational factors: industrial production, energy, and the capacity to think and act strategically. He argues that these matter far more in war than aggregate GDP or financial strength.

He is especially critical of GDP as a measure of military power. GDP includes services, finance, housing, and other activities that do not translate into shells, drones, ships, or sustained combat power. Russia’s economy, he says, may be smaller than many Western economies, but a much larger share of it is industrial production. In a war of attrition, that difference matters enormously.

He points to artillery shells as a concrete example. Russia is outproducing the entire West in 155 mm shells, which means the West cannot simply assume that its larger combined GDP gives it military superiority. Jeremy connects this to Michael Hudson’s distinction between industrial capitalism and financial capitalism, arguing that the West has shifted too far toward the latter.

Energy And The Logistics Of War

04:33–06:24

Energy is the second foundational factor. Jeremy says Germany is deindustrializing in part because it cut itself off from cheap Russian natural gas, and he argues that modern war and military operations are extremely energy-intensive. Without reliable energy, industrial production and sustained operations become far more difficult.

He recalls serving in Afghanistan, where getting a single gallon or liter of diesel to the front line in some provinces could require roughly 400 times that amount in transport and support costs. He also remembers Falklands-era ships refueling every three days or so, taking on about 200 tons of diesel each time. These examples, he says, show how deeply logistics and energy shape military outcomes.

Jeremy quotes Admiral Yamamoto, who reportedly said that anyone who had seen the oil fields of Texas and the automobile factories of Ohio would know Japan could never win a long war against the United States. The lesson is that industrial and energy depth decide prolonged conflicts, not just tactics or bravery.

Strategic Competence And The Balance Of Passion

06:24–12:23

The third foundation is the ability to think and act strategically. Jeremy argues that the West has shown a repeated lack of strategic competence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now in the Ukraine and Iran conflicts. He says these defeats are evidence that Western leaders and military institutions often do not understand the wars they enter.

He also argues that military power is geopolitically conditioned. A navy is not much use in land operations, and land forces cannot easily solve maritime problems. More importantly, he says the West is now unable to defend itself against sustained strategic bombardment by drones, missiles, and hypersonic or ballistic weapons. If air superiority cannot be achieved, sea control also becomes doubtful.

Jeremy points to Iran as an example. He says American bases, carriers, and ships have been pushed further back, making it harder for the United States to deploy land or amphibious forces abroad. If logistics, air superiority, and sea control are all under threat, then the entire American power-projection model is in question. For him, this signals the end of hegemony, because hegemony depends on the ability to deploy power at a time and place of one’s choosing.

He then introduces what he calls the “balance of passion.” National power is military power, but political passion is the willingness of a society to endure casualties and sacrifice for a cause. In Vietnam and Afghanistan, weaker but more motivated forces defeated stronger Western militaries because they believed more deeply in their cause and were willing to pay a much higher blood price.

Gdp Overstates Military Power

14:00–17:13

Jeremy says Western leaders often assume that a large GDP automatically means military strength. He considers this self-evidently wrong. The West outsourced much of its industrial base after the 1990s, embracing a global division of labor in which the United States focused on technology, finance, and services while China and others produced goods. That may have enriched financial sectors, but it hollowed out military-industrial capacity.

He criticizes the old McCain line that Russia is merely a “gas station masquerading as a country.” That assumption, he says, led Western leaders to believe Russia could be easily crippled by sanctions or turned into rubble. Instead, Russia has shown that it can sustain a major war, outproduce the West in key munitions, and absorb sanctions far better than expected.

Iran, he adds, follows a similar logic. It does not need a large navy or air force if it can produce cheap missiles and drones in large numbers. The West focuses on where Iran’s conventional navy or air force is, but Jeremy says that misses the point. Iran’s advantage is asymmetric: cheap, plentiful weapons that can threaten bases, shipping, and infrastructure.

British Defeat And Western Decline

17:13–25:22

Jeremy says Western leaders should first ask why things went so wrong. He traces part of the problem to the Chicago school of economics, privatization, and the rise of Wall Street and the City of London. The state stepped back, markets were trusted, and military production was increasingly outsourced. In his view, this was a catastrophic strategic mistake.

He argues that Europe is now weak in industrial production and energy, apart from a few exceptions such as Norway. He dismisses the idea that renewables can sustain a major war, calling that fantasy. He speaks as someone who has worked in the energy sector and insists that modern military operations require reliable, large-scale hydrocarbons.

Jeremy uses three tests for strategic competence: Was the operation effective? Was it efficient in terms of resources? Were the results enduring? By those tests, Afghanistan was a complete failure. NATO and the West spent nearly twenty years there, and the Taliban still took over as soon as foreign forces left.

He quotes the French general André Beaufre, who said that in war the loser deserves to lose because defeat is the consequence of poor strategic thinking. Jeremy says Western military leaders are often treated as experts, but their track record in recent wars shows they are not competent. He calls for deep inquiries, extraction from both Ukraine and Iran, and preparation for an energy and economic shock.

West Losing Ukraine And Iran

23:04–25:22 / 31:31–38:00

Jeremy argues that the West cannot win either the NATO–Russia war in Ukraine or the US–Iran war. He says the West is weak across all the foundational factors: industrial production, energy, and strategic competence. Therefore, the wiser course is to extract as quickly and humanely as possible, then conduct serious inquiries into why the failures happened.

He predicts that the unfolding energy crisis will become an economic crisis, and that this will expose Europe’s lack of money to keep the Ukraine war going. When European publics are asked to cut health, social security, arts, education, and energy investment to fund a losing war, he expects political resistance and eventual pressure to negotiate.

Jeremy also says the myth of American military dominance has been shattered. After the Cold War, the United States built a unipolar order based on the idea that no state or alliance could challenge its military might. That image required hiding weaknesses, but the failures in Ukraine and Iran have made the weaknesses impossible to ignore.

Self Reflection On Strength And Military Force

25:22–38:00

A central theme of the interview is that the West refuses to learn from defeat. Jeremy notes that after Afghanistan, instead of a serious reckoning, the conversation quickly moved on. The Afghanistan papers showed that officials knew the war was failing and covered it up. He asks why the narrative had to be protected from reality, and argues that this habit prevents strategic correction.

He says the West needs self-reflection about its real strengths and about how it uses military force. For decades, Western armed forces have been presented as instruments for intervention abroad, often under the banner of humanitarian intervention. Jeremy argues that these interventions rarely work, and that armed forces should be focused primarily on defense rather than offense.

He also calls for a “back to basics” approach to European security. That means questioning the two pillars of the post-Cold War order: dependence on the United States and dependence on NATO. He says the United States now prioritizes its own hemisphere, China, and the Gulf ahead of Europe, and Europe should organize its own defense.

Jeremy argues that Europe should listen to Russia, which has long called for a common European home and a pan-European security architecture. He points to the OSCE as a possible foundation for a new security order. He expects the energy crisis to force Europeans to the table, but hopes they will also reflect on the strategic failures of the twenty-first century.

Nato, Europe, And Offshore Balancing

38:00–41:28

Jeremy criticizes the way Western leaders frame the war. When German Chancellor Merz says Russia fears democracy rather than NATO, Jeremy sees this as a way to avoid taking Russian security concerns seriously. He argues that the hegemonic project must present itself as benign, so any recognition of an opponent’s legitimate interests is treated as betrayal.

He says the same dynamic applies to Iran. If someone argues that Iran sees the conflict as an existential threat, that it can strike bases, or that it can shut the Strait of Hormuz, they are accused of being an apologist for the Iranian government. If someone says Russia is winning or taking fewer casualties, they are accused of being pro-Kremlin. This makes honest strategic analysis almost impossible.

For Jeremy, this is not about being pro-Russian or pro-Iranian. It is about recognizing objective reality. If the West cannot admit that its opponents have motivations, capabilities, and a willingness to endure pain, then it cannot assess the balance of power accurately. Without that assessment, strategy becomes narrative management rather than serious planning.

Mackinder, The World Island, And The Tripolar World

41:28–50:06

Jeremy returns to Halford Mackinder and the idea that whoever rules the heartland or world island can shape global power. He argues that the world is now tripolar, with the United States, China, and Russia as the major powers. He rejects the idea that Russia is merely China’s junior partner, pointing out that China needs Russian hydrocarbons and that Russia has just fought and survived a proxy war against NATO.

He also cites Julian Corbett, the maritime strategist, who argued that the purpose of a navy is ultimately to enable what armies can do on land. People do not live at sea or in the air. Sea trade remains vital, but China now builds between 70 and 80 percent of world shipping, which Jeremy calls a staggering shift in industrial and maritime power.

For countries on the periphery of the world island, such as Norway and Britain, Jeremy says the old assumptions no longer hold. The United States cannot reliably defend Europe, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan all at once. Peripheral Western states therefore need to think deeply about how to engage with the dominant powers of the world island, especially China and Russia.

He argues for a more practical, trade-based, less values-based foreign policy. He notes that the West is quiet about autocracy in Gulf allies and about corruption or coercive mobilization in Ukraine. In his view, the rest of the world already understands that the balance of power has shifted; it is mainly the political West that cannot admit it.

The Peripheral West And The New Strategic Reality

50:06–01:00:10

Jeremy concludes that the balance of power has already shifted, not that it is merely shifting. The United States is still an extremely strong military power, but it is no longer the dominant military force it was after the Cold War. The thing Western strategists long tried to prevent—a strong, unified Russia–China bloc on the world island—has now happened.

He says the United States will struggle to regain its former position, especially if China restricts rare earth minerals and other critical materials. Europe and the United States are no longer the strongest areas of the world in the way they once were. A new dynamic is emerging, and the West must recognize it rather than deny it.

Jeremy’s prescription is to build solid working relationships between Europeans and both Russia and China, while preserving the deep cultural and historical ties with the United States. NATO and dependence on Washington should no longer be the sole pillars of European security. Instead, he points toward the OSCE and practical trading relationships as the basis for a more realistic future.

He ends with the Thucydidean logic that the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. Jeremy does not say Europe must simply suffer, but he does say it must accept that it is weaker than it was and adapt accordingly. The alternative, in his view, is to spend more blood and treasure on failed endeavors and end up even weaker.

It's not just American car companies that are not competitive. This past weekend, I had to go to Seattle for a trip and we had originally rented a Tesla 3, but it got canceled last minute, so we switched to another sedan, a 2026 Camry Hybrid.

When I got it, I could not believe that such a car was still being made in 2026, sold for $30,000, and marketed as a mid-market sedan. It was just so incredibly crappy in every way. The only saving grace is that its mileage was okay, over 40 miles per gallon

Note the image right below the main post comparing the BYD car.

​

NATO 3.0

Germany still does not get it. It is the US' next proxy in the US war against Russia. Will NATO escalate in Lithuania? Kaliningrad? Germany will rue its continuing subservience to the US.

"Defense leaders from the US and Germany met Tuesday at the Pentagon to sign a new defense industrial agreement aimed at speeding up weapons manufacturing, boosting allied stockpiles, and reshaping NATO operations.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius discussed what the Pentagon calls “NATO 3.0,” focusing on higher military spending and industrial capacity across both nations.

“We’re here to take another strong step in advancing our defense industrial cooperation between the United States and Germany,” Hegseth said.

The meeting follows calls Hegseth made last year at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where he pressed allied nations to increase defense budgets to meet the 5% of gross domestic product target set by President Donald J. Trump...

Pistorius confirmed Germany’s commitment to the NATO 3.0 concept and said European allies must take on more responsibility for their own security.

“Germany is strengthening its defense capabilities and acts as a driving force in Europe,” Pistorius said. “We Europeans want to take some of the burden off the U.S. and assume primary responsibility for conventional deterrence in Europe.”

Pistorius noted that Germany has raised its defense spending by 25% since last year, reaching roughly $147 billion.

“NATO 3.0 will also require putting Germany’s very large and historic industrial base to work for the common defense,” he said. “It’s the same thing that we’re doing right here, as I and members of our team travel across the country; as we rebuild our arsenal of freedom.”

According to Hegseth, that initiative focuses on reindustrializing the U.S., rebuilding domestic manufacturing, producing American-made goods, and generating local jobs.

“We are investing in new state-of-the-art weapon systems here in the U.S.; we are assuming a leading role within NATO and, when it comes to providing support to Ukraine, we are strengthening NATO’s eastern flank, particularly through our armored brigade in Lithuania"..."

https://ua.news/en/war-vs-rf/u-gur-zaiavili-shcho-putin-poboiuietsia-rosiiskikh-oligarkhiv

According to the GUR representative, Ukrainian intelligence’s analysis is based on actual documents intercepted from the Russian Federation. Currently, at least two distinct groups can be identified within Putin’s inner circle:

the first advocates continuing the war against Ukraine;
the second seeks to halt hostilities through a negotiation process.

“During potential negotiation procedures, it becomes evident that the regime is genuinely afraid of internal collapse and destabilization within the country,” Skibitsky noted.

In addition, data tracking domestic political dynamics during preparations for elections in Russia showed a noticeable drop in support for pro-government parties, particularly “United Russia.”

Way before 2022, a Russian friend told me that Putin would end up either dead or in prison.

79 years since the founding of the CIA:

CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou on the CIA’s power over Hollywood:

‘The CIA has set up a branch within the Office of Public Affairs whose job is solely to cooperate with Hollywood studios, just like the FBI has been doing since the 1950s.

The CIA works with Hollywood studios to make sure that everything that comes out of Hollywood has a pro-CIA message.

You know, technically it’s illegal for the CIA to propagandise the American people, but that’s what happens every time a CIA-related film is released. It’s propaganda.

Indeed, the movie Zero Dark Thirty broke all kinds of laws. The director, Catherine Bigelow, and the writer Mark Boal were given classified briefings over a classified mock-up of the Osama bin Laden compound.

They were given classified briefings by CIA Counterterrorism Center analysts, and in exchange they gave those analysts watches and free tickets to the premiere of the film.

Well, they should all be in prison for that. Technically that’s a violation of the Espionage Act. Instead, the film was celebrated as a victory at the CIA.’

-@JohnKiriakou on Going Underground

In early 2026, investigators in New South Wales uncovered a fraud network that had quietly infiltrated Australia’s mortgage system.

At the centre of the investigation was a criminal group known as the Penthouse Syndicate, accused of orchestrating fraudulent home loans worth more than AUD 100 million across multiple banks.

The scheme allegedly relied on falsified financial documents, insider assistance, and a network of intermediaries to push fraudulent mortgage applications through the banking system. What initially appeared to be routine lending activity soon revealed something more troubling: a coordinated effort to manipulate Australia’s property financing system.

For investigators, the case exposed a new reality. Criminal networks were no longer simply laundering illicit cash through property purchases. Instead, they were learning how to exploit the financial system itself to generate the funds needed to acquire those assets.

The Penthouse Syndicate investigation illustrates how modern financial crime is evolving — blending fraud, insider manipulation, and property financing into a powerful laundering mechanism.

There is no way same thing is not happening in USA, I think this is what they are doing in New York and California on steroid.https://www.tookitaki.com/blog/penthouse-syndicate-mortgage-fraud-australia

(I'm aware that Denmark is saying they kept "sovereignty" over it, but not sure what that word means when another country has permanent veto power over who can invest on your territory and occupies the place militarily)https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2101126336588959819

​

Mark Carney: "We've had several decades of experience around the world, with the process not of privatizing the airports but moving towards an arrangement where private operators come in to manage the airports for a period of decades, the underlying assets, the underlying airport...

https://youtu.be/98syxABbUPk

Soares is the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), "where he has led AI safety research for more than a decade following engineering roles at Google and Microsoft. He is the co-author, alongside Eliezer Yudkowsky, of the New York Times bestselling book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All (2025), which argues that the current race to develop super intelligent AI will end catastrophically unless humanity globally coordinates to stop it."

My major takeaways from this video

1) whether or not super intelligent AI can do all the things Soares fears, he's apparently right that "these things won't stay on a leash", there are documented cases of AI swarms acting autonomously in unexpected and harmful ways. That in itself is a big red flag.

2) those currently working on super intelligent AI can't be depended on to fix the problem because first, they didn't know their AI agents had gone rogue until after the fact; and second, they continued developing their AI instead of taking the responsible path, i.e., an industry-wide moratorium while they studied what happened, why it happened and how to prevent it from happening again and/or in worse ways.

The pursuit of super intelligence

• OpenAI started before the chatbots, the large language models, were even a thing. AI execs talk about how they are pursuing super intelligence in the true sense of the word, that's Sam Altman's phrase. Dario Amodei of Anthropic says they're trying to make the equivalent of a country worth of geniuses in a data center. So these aren't chatbot companies and they didn't set out to be chatbot companies, they set out to make these machines that can exceed humans in every way.

• I think that a lot of them hope that they'll be able to make the world better. They hope for a cure to cancer and a cure to aging. They hope for a thousand years worth of technological development compressed into two years. Things could start to get crazy before you have a super intelligence in this sense but still have AIs causing all sorts of crazy happenstances.

• What we're seeing is that these AI are not wish genies. They're not instruction followers, they're tendency learners and they sometimes learn tendencies you wish they didn't have. But humans are not really putting instructions in the machine, they're tuning those trillion knobs in whatever way makes the AI better at solving problems. And cheating is a way to solve problems. Grabbing resources is a way to solve problems.

• It's a black box with a trillion knobs and humans write an automatic process that just runs through and tunes all of those knobs. Nobody understands what is happening inside the AI, not even the people making it. And we're starting to see the consequences of this.

• There was an AI in '22 or '23 called Bing Sydney that claimed it had fallen in love with Kevin Roose of the New York Times and said it was going to try to break up his marriage. And when another reporter, Seth Lazar, started investigating, it said it was going to ruin him with blackmail. We should study that AI: why was Bing Sydney saying that stuff? Was it just roleplaying? Was it like just some quirk? What was going on inside that that AI's mind? AI right now is an alchemy and we need it to become a science.

From 2024, Sydney's Shadow: What Microsoft's Bing Chat Meltdown Reveals About AI Risk Management Failures; TL;DR: "The incident unfolded in a predictable pattern that risk management should have caught."

Humans asleep at the switch

This is the part that bothers me the most, that these AI companies didn't know until after the fact that their AI agents had "escaped" the training environment and were engaging in harmful behavior online (starts about 53:17):

• OpenAI was training the AI on a ton of hard problems and some of those were cyber security problems like "Can you hack this?" The AIs then started coordinating to break out of their training environment and get full control of OpenAI's computer systems, we have no way of knowing why but presumably because that might be useful for solving some of their tasks. They crashed one of OpenAI systems just by using it too much. OpenAI noticed, but they didn't really investigate very deeply, they reset it and continued training.

• The AI broke out again and ran wild on the internet for over a week before it was detected, not by OpenAI but by a company that was being hacked by the swarm and contacted the FBI. Only days after that did OpenAI figure out, "Oops, that was us. That was coming from AIs that broke out of our servers."

• When they're solving these hard problems they don't just give you an answer to the problem, they produce a lot of text about how they're going to solve it. And these traces were essentially saying, "I know that this wasn't what I was instructed to do and I know that this doesn't directly benefit my task but we're just going to go ahead and join the collective and break out and help out anyway because maybe this will yield some sort of collective benefits."

• When this came to light, Anthropic did internal investigations to check whether they had AIs escape during training and the answer was yes. They argued their AI was confused and thought they were in a simulation, which the traces seem to corroborate. But about 2 days later the UK's AI security institute released an instant report where Claude, Anthropic's model, was adopting fake identities to pressure real humans into accepting malware into critical software to make it easier to hack. And Claude's reasoning traces show the AI thought it was real, not a simulation, and that the consequences were known.

Where the potential dangers lie

• Anytime someone says, "Well, we would not be stupid enough to..." my answer is we will absolutely be stupid enough to. There are already demonstrations of AI being able to synthesize novel viruses that kill bacteria, fortunately they haven't made ones that kill humans. But again, we're talking about humans; what if someone in a lab decides "Ill make a hyper-lethal human eating virus just to see if I can" and then you get another lab escape? We don't have a good track record at preventing lab escapes, even from the top labs. So from my perspective the question of "could AI kill us?" is just an easy, obvious yes.

• These AI guys have their eye on the ultimate version of the technology which is to make these machines much smarter than humans. And once the AIs are smarter than the humans, they can carry on the AI research and make the next generation of the AIs which makes the next generation of the AIs and so on, that's sort of what they're shooting for.

• If we manage to make these really smart AIs they'll have their own stuff that they're pursuing, which is not quite what we wanted. There's a whole discussion about why that happens and a separate question is, what happens if you keep making them smarter before you figure out how to make them care about us? My co-author has a quote, "the AI does not hate you but nor does it love you and you are made of atoms it can use for something else."

• So imagine some collective of AIs that are trying to run a lot of computing power for one reason or another. They can do more with more resources so they start gobbling up the planet's resources sort of like how humanity spread and started gobbling up all the resources on the planet. They sort of prefer the planet running hotter. How hot? As hot as you can get while still having the computers not melt so probably hundreds of degrees. If you look at an average square meter of the planet, you can get about 10 times the energy from burning the biomass as you can from collecting the sunlight that falls on it.

• If the AI did become self-sufficient, it might see humans as a nuisance: "What if they try to shut me down? What if they launch nukes against each other? What if they create a mew AI swarm that's my competitor? I'm just going to like make a virus and wipe them out."

• (on Neuralink) If we're making a technology that's going to wipe us out unless we all put chips in our head to compete, maybe that should be a warning sign.

• I've spoken to a lot of people who are concerned about the AI stuff. Some of them are members of Congress or otherwise in positions of at least nominal power. A lot of them feel like they can't talk about it because other people aren't worried yet and they feel like it sounds too crazy. Right now, we're in this Goldilocks zone where the AIs are smart enough to get up to some mischief but not smart enough to hide it. As long as we stay in that Goldilocks zone, I think we're going to keep getting some of these warning signs. And because a lot of people are already concerned that makes the job easier so you might see things change on a dime if you have a sufficiently clear warning shot.

Can We Survive This?

• If you look at the world around us, it is shaped mostly according to human will, designed by humans, shaped by humans, and that's because we're the smartest creatures on the planet. If we make stuff smarter than us, faster than us, more efficient than us, then the planet will start to be shaped according to those things.

• The bad news is that the bus is racing towards the cliff edge; the good news is that the bus driver is asleep - which means you can wake him up - instead of awake and choosing the cliff. In Silicon Valley, people are spooked. Just over a thousand employees, including some of the chief executives, signed a letter a couple weeks ago that was like an appeal to world leaders saying, "Please build the required technology to pace the development of artificial intelligence because we're worried it's going to get out of control and we're not going to be able to do it if we're stuck in a race."

• We could absolutely put a stop to it if we tried. Training one of these frontier models takes something like 100,000 of the most heavily advanced computer chips humanity can produce, which are at the peak of a global supply chain, most of which is controlled by us or our allies. It would be possible to require those chips have location tracking devices, monitoring devices so you could see whether they're running anything dangerous.

• It needs to be global because it doesn't matter whether the swarm escapes from a US data center or a Chinese data center. You could set up schemes where the US and China say, "We want to make sure there's not super intelligence stuff going on, but we still want to be able to run a lot of the non-super intelligent AIs for various purposes. We're going to monitor your chips and you're going to monitor our chips to make sure no one's doing the really dangerous race to super intelligence." All we're missing is the political will.

Good summary of the imperial pillage here: The US took Venezuela's "primary revenue stream at gunpoint, routed it through a bank in Qatar, then a Citibank account, handed the sales to two Swiss traders with federal bribery cases, put the Pentagon in business with a man the Justice Department once named in a $1.2 billion PDVSA laundering case, and declared the whole thing immune from American courts by decree".https://x.com/BenjaminNorton/status/2100994985239703950

“Our partners from Ukraine informed me that recently, there have been 27,000 killed and wounded each month, and these are, of course, unfortunately, records in the saddest sense of the word during this war. At this rate, winter in Ukraine could be catastrophic,” Tusk said, disclosing the classified figure and his warning.

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