Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Texas Senate Race Features Fictions About Talarico vs. Plentiful Paxton Scandals

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On October 14, 2026

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The Texas GOP used to be really, really good at ruining Democratic candidates. Today’s GOP? Not so much.

This year’s Texas Senate race continues to astonish and amaze.

The Democrats have nominated State Representative James Talarico, a slightly less smarmy, not-gay Pete Buttigieg-type who has managed to offend virtually no one despite battling and beating the noxious Jasmine Crockett in a racially charged primary.

For their part, the Republicans nominated the once-impeached, often-indicted Attorney General Ken Paxton after a $130 million primary.

You have to give Texas Republicans some credit; almost 1.3 million of them voted against Paxton in the first round of the primary. Unfortunately for the GOP, only a little more than 500K of them showed up for the runoff, and Paxton’s hardcore MAGA supporters came out in force, nearly matching their opening round numbers, crushing the incumbent US Senator 63.8% to 36.2%.

Even with Paxton’s extremely checkered past featuring everything from accusations of stock fraud to multiple sex scandals and a tabloid-friendly “Biblical divorce,” Paxton might have cruised to victory had it not been for Donald Trump’s war of choice against Iran and the ensuing rise in gasoline prices around Labor Day.

Or maybe it was the $40M in ads Talarico and his allies ran between the May runoff and the GOP’s September convention vs less than $27 million by Paxton-aligned groups. Not long after, a desperate GOP poured over $122 million into ads in September, but that doesn’t seem to have mattered much.

Perhaps it’s because the modern Texas GOP doesn’t know what it’s doing.

For comparison, let’s review the résumé of one Karl Rove. Though commonly derided as a RINO (Republican In Name Only) today, Rove was the most feared and most successful political operative of his era.

Not only did he propel the utterly mediocre George W. Bush to two Texas gubernatorial terms and two terms as POTUS, but Rove also ratfucked an entire generation of Texas Democrats.

Karl Rove, King of the Ratfuckers

Rove systematically targeted the most talented young Democrats — with a special eye for Hispanics — and took them out with career-ruining capers that ensured the once-dominant party would go down and stay down for decades.

Here’s a quick and dirty run-through of his résumé:

I was directly involved in the 60 Minutes caper, having helped break the story that Ben Barnes, the Vietnam-era Speaker of the Texas House and later Lt. Governor, had admitted to helping George W. Bush get into the Texas National Guard. We thought that the 60 Minutes story would be a critical blow against Bush in his re-election campaign, and instead the story somehow became a tale of a forged version of a real document that right-wing bloggers instantly caught, supposedly by catching an on-screen glance that revealed a font face that didn’t exist at the time of the document’s creation.

60 Minutes thought it had carefully vetted the story and established that the document was true, but they never thought to check and see if the copy of the document they had was a forgery. Turns out that Bush’s people had had extensive access to his National Guard records in the 1990s and presumably left many such Easter eggs behind.

Point being, the guy was dangerous and a master of narrative manipulation who would stop at nothing to win elections and destroy his political opponents.

Now let’s compare and contrast with today’s GOP.

The Talarico Ohio Hospitalization Farce

The TL;DR version: James Talarico caught the flu and was off the campaign trail for 9 days. While he was away, a cast of online nitwits spawned a rumor out of whole cloth that he was in an Ohio mental hospital, and multiple big-time right-wingers, including Laura Loomer, Stephen Miller, the Paxton campaign, Elon Musk, and Paxton himself, amplified the tale.

This account did some interesting forensics on how the calumny spread online:

The masterminds are getting some richly deserved attention:

Jacqueline Sweet has some juicy allegations about Nick Sortor. Transphobic journalist Jesse Singal has quite a bit of dirt on the woman on the lower right who goes by @TickleTexts

The caper is being linked directly to the Paxton campaign.

Karl Rove, they ain’t.

But the kerfuffle seems to have unleashed a whole torrent of no good, very bad press about Paxton, all of which has the nasty trait of being fact-based.

Paxton’s Remarkable News Cycle

I’m just going to bullet point the headlines, because the dude is drowning in scandal:

He’s also closely tied to his peers at the top of the GOP ticket:

All I can say is, if Texas voters send this rancid scumbag to the US Senate, we deserve what we get.

Polling Shows Something Very Unusual

But the latest ReconMR/Siena poll has one particularly encouraging bit of news. It shows Talarico up 48% to 44% for Paxton, with Talarico down a point since September. But the cross-tabs showed something very interesting:

Dem: Talarico 92-2
Republicans: Paxton 87-7
Indies: Talarico 60-30

White: Paxton 49-45
Black: Talarico 67-19
Hispanic: Talarico 50-41

Austin region: Talarico 74-21
DFW: Talarico 49-41
Houston: Talarico 46-44
Rural: Paxton 55-37
San Antonio/South: Talarico 56-39

As former Texas Tribune editor Evan Smith pointed out, no Democrat running statewide has cracked 25% among rural voters in six straight elections.

The Endgame of Surveillance And Autonomous Robots Approaches

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On October 13, 2026

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Back in the late 2010s I covered the onrushing surveillance state heavily. Having said most of what I wanted to say, I let it lie for the time being. But now it’s almost here. The NYTimes has a decent article on what Uganda is doing (and if a third world nation can do it…) Of course the article blames it mostly on China.

Ugandans have discovered that, increasingly, there is nowhere to hide. Civic life here is defined by thickening webs of state surveillance built with foreign help. Chinese cameras and facial-recognition software monitor the streets; Russian radio frequency chips implanted in license plates have been tracking cars in real time; Israeli software plunders the private contents of phones. Technology has created an intrusive eye that never blinks — a stealthy weapon for dictators keen to stifle speech and thought.

But worse than that is this:

Leaked internal documents revealed Toka’s technology can reportedly locate cameras, remotely access them, watch live feeds and even alter live or previously recorded footage while concealing evidence the system was compromised.

YES, THEY CAN ALTER LIVE OR PREVIOUSLY RECORDED FOOTAGE WHILE CONCEALING EVIDENCE THE SYSTEM WAS COMPROMISED.

Hmm I wonder where that ability could come in handy? The stated purpose for altering footage? “Masking of on-site activities” during “covert operations.”

Yeah, right. I mean, I’m sure it’ll be used for that, but more sinisterly it will be used to alter footage to frame people. Given how often police lie on the stand and fake evidence you know this will happen. Imagery is going to have to be discounted in trials, and we’ll have to go back to witnesses, but you know that won’t happen soon, this is just too convenient for any cops or intelligence organizations. You don’t even have to use a honey trap, you can just change the footage.

Many surveillance devices now don’t just watch, they listen. They often have thermal imaging, face and gait recognition. It’s harder and harder to avoid them identifying you. Even without chips, America’s flock cameras monitor all car travel by scanning license plates.

Then there’s the phones most people carry everywhere. They’re mobile listening and tracking devices and it’s trivial to take over the camera as well. I tend not to carry a phone with me most of the time, but it’s becoming more and more difficult to navigate life without a phone these days. Indeed, in China, it’s essentially impossible and I expect it won’t be more than a few years before it’s true in most of the West.

So governments and any big corp that cares enough will know exactly where you go, and where you’ve been. They can alter footage to embarrass you or frame you for a crime. They can fairly easily listen in to what you say, even when you’re not using the phone.

Then we have autonomous armed robots. The armed robot dogs are already here, same with armed flying drones. The great problem for elites is always the issue of enforcer reliability. This is why Saudi Arabia is getting its ass kicked on the ground, because they deliberately crippled their troops to reduce the possibility of a coup.

Now, add in AI, which elites hope will allow them to replace technical workers: the problem with using all this tech is that you still have the enforcer issue: but if the autonomous robots can be maintained and built by AI, well, that problem is lessened. (Some people will still be necessary, but far less.)

This enables a full panopticon on daily life, especially for people who use “smart” home devices, which are notorious for the data they send home. They’ll know who you are, what you’re doing, who you associate with, how much money you have, what you spend it on, etc, etc… Then they’ve got their robots to take you out, or they can frame you by altering the video that they have of you to show you committing a crime.

It’s silly to think they won’t take advantage of this to lock societies down and attempt a full authoritarian state where rebellion is impossible.

This has always been the endgame of the new communications, AI, and robotics techs, as I wrote well over ten years ago and it’s far worse than 1984, because in that novel they couldn’t store the information, someone had to be watching the camera feed. Likewise as age verification (to protect the kiddies, honest) becomes ubiquitous, getting information the state or oligarchs don’t want you to have will become harder and harder. Ban the sites they don’t like, forbid workarounds, keep track of everything you do and overcome the information problem. In the old days a group like the Stasi might know a great deal, but they couldn’t analyze every individual: AI makes that possible and firms are already working on pre-crime tech to predict who’s a radical or otherwise a danger to the state or those who profit from it. The first step, of course, will be de-banking, which doesn’t even need a court to find you guilty of anything.

Know everything, predict what people will do, make sure that they get only the information you want and if necessary, deal with dissidents with autonomous robots who are (they hope) utterly reliable.

It’s what authoritarians have always wanted, and it’s almost here.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

 

Hypocrisy, Ansar-Allah, and the Military Revolution

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On October 12, 2026

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There have been a lot of condemnations of Ansar-Allah for hitting airports in Saudi Arabia. (They have hit every major airport except those in Mecca and Medina, multiple times and civilians have been killed.) I think a reminder is in order.

First, that this new war started when the Sauds hit Sana’a airport, but also:

The Saudi-Emirati coalition conducted more than 227 airstrikes on Sana’a Airport between March 26, 2015, and February 2022. (The airstrikes are documented in the United Nations)

2015: 67 airstrikes

2016: 62 airstrikes

2017: 7 airstrikes

2018: 47 airstrikes

2019: 7 airstrikes

2020: 15 airstrikes

2021: 12 airstrikes

2022: 10 airstrikes

Hundreds of thousands of Yemeni were killed by the Saudi/US blockade of food. The Sauds regularly hit hospitals, weddings, funerals — all the usual. They might as well be Israelis.

So I don’t want to hear crocodile tears now. The airports that are being hit are, unlike Sana’a during the siege, military targets. The Houthis have no airforce.

In addition to airports Ansar-Allah has been hitting refineries, pipelines and other oil infrastructure, essentially at will. The Sauds CANNOT protect their infrastructure. It is impossible.

This is a military revolution. Defense against missiles and drones is very hard, even Russia can’t stop constant attacks on their oil infrastructure, and they still have a decent stock of interceptor missiles. The Sauds are basically out, because America’s stocks are terminally low and Saudi Arabia is low on the priority list for what few there are (Israel gets first pick, then America.)

But even when there are lots of interceptors, drones and missiles are hard to stop, and the new offensive weapons are easier to make and cheaper than the defensive ones. This is especially the case for drones, but is also true for many missiles. In such a case, the strategy is to just to run the defenders out of missiles or overwhelm their launchers with huge strikes.

Over 10 years ago I wrote that drones would be a weapon the weak. This is half true, but it’s true enough, and it’s now been proved over the board.

Understand clearly that this IS a revolution in military affairs, and that it means that any nation which is serious and decent sized can create a missile and drone deterrent that is very hard to stop. If they have a lot of mountainous terrain, even better, but Ukraine is almost entire flat land.

Right now the US is still able to bully Latin American countries, but its clear that it’s lost the ability project power significantly bey0nd the Americas. The Iranians have picked up strikes against tankers, and it’s clear that the previous slow pace was a decision, and the decision has changed.

During the initial part of the war they effectively destroyed all US bases in the Middle East, including radars. It would take tens of billions to rebuild them, but since they can’t be defended (the US had plenty of interceptors at the time) that’s pointless. Odds are that most of the permanent US military presence in the Middle East will never return.

It is impossible to overstate just how much the calculus of force has changed: the US can no longer simply sit aircraft carriers off any prepared country’s coast and bomb the hell out of them.

Likewise this makes building up troops for ground operations very difficult. Think about trying to invade Iran. Where would you stage the troops that Iran can’t hit even as you’re trying to bring them in? There will be no major invasion of Iran, because it’s straight up impossible. In the Gulf War the Americans spent months building up forces nearby, that can’t happen any more.

Now Iran and Russia and China and Ansar-Allah were early adopters of this technology, and there are still lots of countries which have no significant drone or missile forces, but only complete incompetents haven’t noticed how effective they are, and you can be sure the technology will spread. If Ansar-Allah, in the most impoverished country in the world, can build drones and missiles (with some Iranian help) and if Iran, the most sanctioned country in the world could do so, there are few countries which couldn’t do the same if they really wanted to, and there are plenty of helpers available for them: China, Russia, Iran, even Ansar-Allah.

So this military revolution will spread, and as it does, the ability of the US to project power will be radically reduced. Further, in time, the tech for long-range missiles capable of striking the US will be developed and spread, and the US will no longer be able to go to war and think “but they can’t hit the homeland.”

All of this will come to be. It cannot be stopped, only slowed. And with Chinese sanctions on the US and Japan crippling their war industries, plus the US’s pathetic financialized military-industrial complex being ridiculously expensive and slow to manufacture anything, the US will not even be able to keep up.

Plus, a lot of countries are target poor. The US and its allies aren’t. One of the reasons Ansar-Allah is going hog wild hitting Saudi infrastructure is that after over a decade of being bombed to hell there isn’t much for them to lose. Their missiles hit targets which matter, while the Sauds mostly are reduced to terror bombing, which won’t stop the Houthis any more than it did the North Vietnamese.

The world is changing, things are happening, and the world order is changing completely.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 11, 2026

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On October 11, 2026

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 11, 2026
by Tony Wikrent

 

War on voting

If Trump Steals an Election, Here’s What to Do – Nonviolent rebellion has proven again and again to be the most effective way of ousting even a determined autocrat.

Neil Abrams, October 7, 2026 [The New Republic]

… The institutionalists who once stymied Trump’s authoritarian ambitions are long gone. In their place are MAGA flunkies committed to doing the president’s bidding. With their help, he could conceivably defy any resistance from Congress and the Supreme Court.

Leading experts agree that the U.S. has transitioned to authoritarianism during Trump’s second term. The days when constitutional checks and balances were enough to keep a rogue president in line are over. What’s more, defeating a Republican at the ballot box no longer guarantees that he will accept defeat.

Still, Trump is not some omnipotent demigod casting thunderbolts at will upon his hapless subjects. No dictator can rule without the people’s consent. Withdraw that consent, and he is just another guy with a spray tan and a chancy comb-over.

Nonviolent rebellion—the strategic use of protests, strikes, and similar methods—has paralyzed authoritarian regimes and forced despots from power the world over. It can work in America too….

If the conventional political process is not sufficient to restore democracy, nonviolent rebellion remains the most effective tool. To counter GOP election theft, Americans might have to mount a rebellion of their own. The good news is that our fellow citizens have already produced one such movement during Trump’s second term.

When jackbooted federal thugs began forcing Minnesotans into unmarked vans, Minneapolitans responded. First, they got organized. Activist groups trained citizens in specific resistance tactics. They also established support networks for immigrant families who had been forced into hiding….

 

Random Stories. Or Are They?

Joyce Vance, Oct 09, 2026 [Civil Discourse ]

Trump is calling in the election-denier faithful to meet with him in advance of the midterm elections. We know this in part because people like Ed Martin have said so. He announced that Tina Peters, the Colorado elections clerk who went to prison for election crimes and was recently pardoned, met with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss election integrity and “the plans” for the upcoming midterm elections.

According to a local Colorado reporter, Peters’ attorney said the plan involved “seizing ballots nationwide” and a “strategy for a potential civil war,” although there’s no word on whether those topics were actually discussed and what the President’s views on them are….

 

Tina Peters Has Trump’s Ear on the Midterms

John Light, 10.07.26 [Talking Points Memo]

President Donald Trump is, apparently, being advised on the midterms by former Colorado elections clerk Tina Peters. The two met Monday at the White House.

Peters was convicted in 2024 of a series of state crimes related to a plot to undermine the results of the 2020 election. Colorado’s Democratic governor then commuted her sentence earlier this year amid a pressure campaign by Trump.

After the meeting on Monday, former DOJ official and longtime conservative gadfly Ed Martin helpfully blabbed about what the two discussed, enthusing to the MAGA news outlet Real America’s Voice he was “going to break some news.”

“There is local control,” Martin said of U.S. elections. “However, the laws that govern the system, like safety and national security, are federal laws. So Tina Peters, famous Colorado clerk, was in the Oval Office today just two hours ago talking about this question. The president’s taking it seriously.”

Martin claimed that voting machines are compromised by foreign governments (a familiar, baseless allegation), and suggested that Peters and the president were discussing what he could do about it.

“If the Congress won’t pass the Save America Act, and they won’t, the president’s going to have to do what he’s going to do,” Martin said. “And it’s not a local issue when it’s national security, and it’s clearly national security. So we’ll see how it plays out. But again, four weeks from today, we have an election that has to be safe, has to be secure.”

 

Election Denier’s Lawyer Reveals Trump’s Chilling Midterm Plan – Notorious election fraudster Tina Peters recently met with the president to discuss the midterm elections.

Hafiz Rashid, October 8, 2026 [The New Republic]

 

Docs Reveal New Details About Dramatic Admin Efforts to Substantiate the Non-Citizen Voting Myth

Khaya Himmelman, 10.08.26 [Talking Points Memo]

We got new details this week about exactly what the administration has been up to thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Over the past year, ICE has reviewed millions of records and investigated hundreds of nonprofits suspected of helping noncitizens register to vote, according to internal records that were obtained by the nonprofit Democracy Forward. “The information revealed in the documents should concern all Americans and is further evidence of an alarming attempt by the executive branch to undermine our elections,” Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement.

The records note that these investigations were, in part, meant “to identify specific organizations that may be predatory in nature, particularly those suspected of illegal registration and voter encouragement.”….

 

Military Mobilizes for Upcoming Elections

Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 10-06-2026]

… “Foreign malign influence” is the U.S. government’s official euphemism for censoring tweets, Facebook posts, TikTok videos and myriad other online speech thought to imperil Americans’ ability to think correctly. This is part of what the military will be doing with growing intensity as election day nears….

Both major parties, whatever their disagreements, share a consensus view that Americans’ beliefs and even voting decisions are not their own, but rather the result of shadowy foreign influence campaigns. So much so, in fact, that Congress has codified in law a definition of “foreign malign influence” that of course focuses on “public opinion within the United States.”

Even if there’s the best of intentions, the government using “public opinion” and “malign” in the same sentence is dangerous….

 

Republicans’ New Plan to Save the Senate: Start a Race War in Minnesota

John Light, 10.09.26 [Talking Points Memo]

As polls show Republicans doing poorly in safely red states, the party is looking toward blue states in which its candidates might have a chance. One such state is Minnesota, where Senate candidate Michele Tafoya (R), a former sideline reporter for Sunday Night Football, is polling well. And so I can only guess it is with the election in mind that President Trump is trying to stir up some racial tension, going so far as to encouraging Minnesotans to “fight back” against their Somali immigrant neighbors.

The state has been “taken over by Somali Immigrants” he wrote on Truth Social yesterday. “There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back.”

He want on to attack Governor Tim Walz (D) as “an incompetent thief who doesn’t want to get involved” before concluding “The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back!”

The attacks rest on the same panic about fraud investigations in the state that prompted last winter’s federal invasion of Minneapolis, leaving two American citizens dead. Republicans have returned to those talking points after an 18-year-old American citizen born to Somali immigrant parents was arrested earlier this week after allegedly plotting an attack on the Mall of America with an assault rifle, inspired by ISIS. It’s unclear how realistic his plan was. Tafoya, the Republican Senate candidate, has leaned hard on the details of that arrest, while also describing voter concerns about “crime” and supposed “Somali gangs.”

Elsewhere, Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), who represents a red seat northwest of Minneapolis, offered the idea that his constituents were facing “enemy combatants.”

“This is another one that you’re going to hear at the ballot box,” he said on Fox Business. “Democrats […] are not talking about it, they are not offering solutions, and they are not holding these fraudsters or these criminal gangsters — which I would argue are enemy combatants, more than anything — they’re not holding them accountable.”….

 

Meet the second-year lawyer defending Trump’s plans to seize ballots” [American Doom].

[American Doom, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20261006]

“On Sept. 20, the Justice Department responded to allegations contained in a Democratic National Committee lawsuit that the agency was planning to seize ballots in November. The DOJ then said it would need until just a few days before Election Day to respond.” More: “In paragraph after paragraph, the DOJ argued that all of that background material — Trump wishing he had seized voting machines, endless threats to arrest election officials, the removal of the DOJ guidelines for active elections — was “impertinent” to the FOIA requests demanding information about ballot seizure plans. That’s certainly one interpretation. Another is that all of that background is entirely pertinent to the issue of whether records regarding ballot seizure plans exist, and whether the DOJ has to release them under FOIA. The response was simply remarkable, I thought. Who wrote it? I wondered.”

 

ICE probed hundreds of voter registration groups across the U.S.

[Democracy Docket, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2026]

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Open Thread

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On October 10, 2026

8 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Information Overlord: It’s Ari Emanuel’s World and We Just Watch Skydance In It

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On October 9, 2026

9 Comments

Nat Wilson Turner Information Overlord: Flames Up = Phones Out = No Sense of Urgency

What I Released This Week

From me as Nate Wilcox at the Let It Roll Podcast

From me as Nate Wilcox — The MMA Draw & the Mad Squabbles Show

UFC Boss Brags About Backstabbing Vince McMahon — The Mad Squabbles Show (YouTube), 7 Oct.

What I’ve Been Reading and Watching

AI Bubble

  • A.I. Groups Are Spending Millions to Influence the Midterms — New York Times. “A New York Times analysis of federal campaign finance data shows that the political groups aligned with the two leading A.I. developers, OpenAI and Anthropic, have quietly but decisively intervened in key 2026 races, spending on campaign advertising and outreach to voters to the tune of $55.7 million.
    “So far, the spending has been concentrated almost entirely in the primaries. The two groups have spent $52.6 million on safe seats — those that are unlikely to change party hands but that often feature intense intraparty contests. The big A.I. players have also spent more heavily for Democrats than Republicans. They have boosted candidates who align with their agendas, helped defeat those they see as hostile to it and ingratiated themselves with front-runners who are likely to be in positions of power in the next Congress to make decisions critical to their bottom lines.
    “But with voters quickly souring on their industry — including demanding that lawmakers do more to regulate A.I. and halt or mitigate the proliferation of data centers — they have taken pains to obscure their involvement. With few exceptions, they have intervened without ever explicitly mentioning A.I. or data centers in the TV and digital ads they have purchased.”
  • The Empty Brain — Aeon. Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer.
  • Timnit Gebru Believes There Is No ‘Existential Threat’ From AI — Wired. One of AI’s fiercest critics believes the doom talk is about founders making money, not saving humanity.
  • Are Big Tech bonds crowding out the US Treasury? — Financial Times.

  • The AI Cloud Oligopoly — Michael Burry. “I have recently considered that the tech giants, but for Apple, are spending as if their lives depended on it when their lives clearly do not.
    “Monopolies almost by definition need not spend wildly as if their lives depended on it.
    “This deserved no small further contemplation, although rather quickly it dawned on me that they expect this just to be another monopoly rent they collect, that they collectively have the expectation the government will tolerate their oligopoly on AI.
    “Nay, will tolerate and fear it.
    “So the evil gambit is to create and to allow this AI to grow on their machines, where they will threaten to control both economic and political forces greater than humanity has ever seen, overwhelming any politician’s, or politicians’, might.
    “Why are OpenAI and Anthropic and Oracle also spending so much? Surely they are not monopolies?!?
    “No, but they intend to be part of the oligopoly. None can imagine breaking the dominance of a Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Meta within each silo.
    “However, there is clearly an opportunity to join in that dominance under cover of a new paradigm. The power and riches expected by these companies are evidently so great that even Larry Ellison was seduced to bet his company on it.
    “This brings new meaning to technocracy, and whether such is what we face. What is really scary is that other than the grab for market power, all this spending does not have a defined goal or economic end-point. As such, the consequences are likely unknowable to all. Yet they do it anyway.
    “The governments most interested in this technology seem to be the autocratic ones and the United States. A good set-up for a lot of drama, if not terror.”

Ellison Empire

  • Looking at the Ugly Side of the Paramount-Skydance Merger…And How I’d Fix It — The Entertainment Strategy Guy. “More than one person sent me a note speculating that the big problem with Paramount Skydance buying Warner Bros. Discovery is the “Warner Bros.” portion of the deal. In fact, that’s a take I read a lot about Warner Bros., ever since they caught Netflix’s, and then Paramount-Skydance’s, eye. In short, multiple companies (Time, AOL, AT&T, Discovery) have bought and then regretted buying Warner Bros.
    “if you want to add a traditional Hollywood studio to your portfolio (be it a magazine publisher, internet service provider, cellular phone company, linear cable bundle or rival movie studio), you have to convince the owners to sell.
    “And that usually means overpaying. The opposing executive team has to want to sell, and then they have to clear it with their shareholders. Overpaying accomplishes this. (This is a variant of the winner’s curse in auctions.)
    “So that’s the price of the deal. And usually it shows up on balance sheets as…
    “Debt.
    “Indeed, the history of Warner Bros. buyers is folks taking on wayyyyyy too much debt to buy the company. Servicing that debt cripples the new combined enterprise. And they can’t invest in new opportunities. And often they make bad decisions to help pay off that debt. Eventually, this impacts the stock price, so they sell. Then the cycle with Warner Bros. starts again!”
  • What David Ellison’s Latest Moves Say About How He’ll Lead Now — Wall Street Journal.
  • A High-Stakes Gambit Clinched Paramount’s Warner Deal — Wall Street Journal.
    • Ellison waged a concerted behind-the-scenes campaign, people familiar with the matter said.He crisscrossed the country courting politicians, hired well-connected operatives and lobbyists to work regulators and lawmakers, cultivated allies among Republicans and Democrats and, in a pivotal move, even threatened to move his empire out of California.California Gov. Gavin Newsom publicly called on the two sides to settle the matter, and privately encouraged the attorney general to go to the table. Ellison met with Newsom on more than one occasion, the people familiar with the matter said.
      …
      Next, Ellison had to get the deal through regulators here and abroad.That task fell primarily to chief legal officer Makan Delrahim, one of Ellison’s first hires after acquiring Paramount. Ellison set up a war room on the Paramount lot where he, Delrahim and one or two other executives would meet daily to map out strategy and measure progress, said one of the people familiar with the matter.A former Trump administration antitrust chief, Delrahim was intimately familiar with Warner. As head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, he led the government’s ultimately unsuccessful effort to block AT&T’s acquisition of what was then called Time Warner, in 2018.

      One of Delrahim’s first moves was to tap Jon Leibowitz, who chaired the Federal Trade Commission under President Barack Obama, as an outside antitrust adviser.

      Getting approval from the Justice Department came with relative ease, as did approvals from the European Union, United Kingdom, China and other regions.

      But a hurdle emerged when California’s Bonta, joined by 11 other states, including New York, Connecticut and Colorado, sued to block the merger on antitrust grounds. The states alleged the deal would illegally consolidate markets including those for theatrical films and basic cable channels.
      …
      Meanwhile, Ellison and his team began making their case to Newsom and warned that Paramount would pack up and move to another state if the deal was blocked. The company spoke to officials in Tennessee about a potential move, The Wall Street Journal reported.

      While Bonta categorized those threats as bluster and blackmail, people close to Ellison said they were genuine. That message was conveyed to Newsom, the people familiar with the matter said.

      In early August, Ellison tapped former California Assembly Speaker and Democratic power broker Fabian Núñez to help build political support for the deal in Sacramento.

      Núñez, founder of the consulting firm Actum, met frequently with Bonta’s office in an effort to broker peace. Ellison also enlisted Democratic former California Sen. Barbara Boxer and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to help, both of whom are partners with Actum, people familiar with the matter said.

  • Ari Emanuel Tours His Book and Hollywood Yawns: ‘No One Gave a F—k’ — The Wrap.
    Hollywood didn’t bother to show up. A few rows up front were reserved for Emanuel’s friends and VIPs which consisted of some family members, his close pal, director Pete Berg, and some agents, according to one person who sat nearby. The green room had a small selection of friends, no more than 20, circulating afterward. The audience was made up of “civilians,” as one person put it, rather than the insider VIPs that Emanuel, as one of Hollywood’s most powerful players, should command.Just as well, though, because apparently Emanuel was really boring. He did not hold forth on the accumulated wisdom of his 40 years in the industry: building an agency, taking over a legacy rival, buying companies like the UFC and WWE for billions of dollars, pushing hard into live sports and going public and then private again.Instead, he fell back on his grievances with his previous longtime partner Patrick Whitesell, who he swears he will never talk to again; complained about Jeffrey Katzenberg and President Joe Biden; and parried Swisher’s probing about his friendship with Elon Musk. By all accounts, it didn’t land with an audience that wasn’t interested in these personal scores.
  • Paramount Stock CRUSHED After Merger with Warner Discovery Closes — Big by Matt Stoller.
    The transition is not promising. Consider the two things that David Ellison did after buying Warner Discovery. He organized mass layoffs, and he gave himself and his entire executive team a big raise. Specifically, Ellison awarded himself a $150 million bonus upon closing the purchase, even though he doesn’t need the money, and has accomplished absolutely nothing except saddling two historic movie studios with $80 billion in debt.His legal consigliere, Makan Delrahim, received $25 million, and his operating officer Andrew Brandon-Gordon got $38 million. To do the layoffs, he hired Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz, and paid him $46.5 million. That’s all on top of the massive $550 million payout to former Warner CEO David Zaslav, which was negotiated as part of the deal.Amid that backdrop of endless zeros for executives, the layoffs will be significant, and Kreiz and Ellison sent a memo on the “difficult decisions” ahead. That’s a crushing blow to morale, since it says very explicitly, “we’re not all in it together.” Every employee at Skydance has essentially been told to act like a mercenary and to extract as much as he or she can while he or she can.

UAE

  • Khaldoon Al Mubarak is the man trying to pull City back from brink of football oblivion — The Telegraph. The Telegram fluffs Khaldoon. “It was November last year and City had just been beaten 2-0 at home by Bayer Leverkusen in the Champions League after Guardiola, as needlessly as inexplicably, made 10 changes to the team.
    “Al Mubarak was furious and expressed as much privately to Ferran Soriano, the City chief executive. “I can’t speak to him [Guardiola],” he said. “Honestly, I didn’t speak to him yesterday and didn’t message him and I can’t speak to him today I’m so angry. He’s put a mix in this that’s so unnecessary.”
    “But it was what Al Mubarak said next that cut to the heart of how one of the most powerful, influential and recognisable non-royals in Abu Dhabi likes to conduct himself.
    ““Let’s let this pass then we’ll talk about it in the right way with a constructive approach,” he said.
    “Perhaps it should be little surprise that a skilled business leader and government policymaker who has played crucial roles in brokering nuclear non-proliferation deals and long straddled the worlds of global finance and international diplomacy was not going to let his heart rule his head and overreact.
    “After all, you do not become the planet’s longest-serving head of a sovereign wealth fund and a key strategist by being a hot head prone to wading in with both feet when something irks you, even in a sport as emotive as football.”
  • A Soccer Cheating Scandal Has Ballooned Into a Geopolitical Problem for Britain — Wall Street Journal. The UK finds that selling your most beloved cultural institution to an amoral family fiefdom comes with strings. “The acquisition of Manchester City by an Abu Dhabi royal was always much more than a billionaire buying himself a shiny foreign toy.
    “From the very start, the project was the tip of a soft-power campaign to entrench the tiny Emirate deep in the British economy.
    “Now, 18 years later, it has emerged that the club was at the heart of the largest cheating scheme in English soccer history. And as City, which denies any wrongdoing, awaits an unprecedented penalty for financial doping, the scandal has rippled all the way to new Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
    “The predicament is especially awkward for Burnham, who built much of his political appeal on his everyman soccer-fan image, but now finds himself caught between a major investor in the U.K. economy and defending the integrity of the Premier League, Britain’s most popular cultural export since the Beatles.
    ““This does need to be done carefully without everybody jumping in and providing their conclusions,” said Burnham, who in his previous job as mayor of Manchester lobbied against punishing his beloved Everton for similar, smaller-scale infractions.
    “The U.K. has spent much of the past decade wooing the U.A.E. to invest in the country in an attempt to kick-start its slow-growing economy. A Sovereign Investment Partnership between the two counties, announced in 2021, initially targeting £10 billion over five years, has already seen nearly £30 billion committed across more than 50 direct investments.”
  • The chairman of scandal-hit Man City has worked with Trump and Macron as part of the UAE elite — AP. The UAE connects Trump, the Ellisons, Ari Emanuel’s TKO empire, and the UK in a web of corrupt dealings. “Khaldoon Al Mubarak, chairman of the scandal-plagued Manchester City soccer club, sat with Donald Trump in Davos this year, signing on to the U.S. president’s Board of Peace on behalf of the United Arab Emirates government.
    “He was with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles in June at a signing ceremony for a business summit.
    “Al Mubarak, 50, also is a UAE special envoy to China, and welcomed Xi Jinping to the club when the Chinese leader visited England in 2015.
    “Why the head of an English soccer club — albeit one of the wealthiest, most successful and now highly controversial — should be a key player at such political events is easily explained.
    “Al Mubarak, the public face of the 2023 Champions League winner now embroiled in one of soccer’s biggest scandals, is a member of the ruling elite in Abu Dhabi — part of the United Arab Emirates — and the head of a $385 billion sovereign wealth fund.”

UK PM Andy Burnham on Man City — @BBCSport. “‘I haven’t downplayed the seriousness of the findings.’
“Andy Burnham has addressed concerns that he devalued the verdict against Man City after the club were found guilty of Premier League financial rule breaches.”

Israel

  • Nothing has changed, and everything is changing — Alon Mizrahi. “…since October 7, I avoided Israel as much as I could. And it hadn’t felt like my place and my home for a while before that. This didn’t begin on October 7. Nothing began on October 7. But since October 7,
    “as I had a very early realization that this was a fateful event and life was not going to return to normal. And even more than that, and I shared this a couple of times, I had a very strong feeling that this was the beginning of the end of Israel
    “and I needed to be somewhere else and I want my family to be somewhere else. And I did that. To make a long story short, I spent some time in Israel this year and also very recently. And this gave me a chance to look at Israel, to see Israeli society, to hear Israelis, to look at Israeli media.
    “It’s not the same when you’re in and when you’re out. It’s not the same. It feels different. And since I really love to observe people and societies, this is one of my favorite things in the world to do, really. I took the opportunity to look and see. Not that I was expecting any surprises.
    “I mean, this is Israel. After all, I grew up in it. I know it so well. It’s a society. It’s a… It is a political creation that doesn’t change. The discourse, the narratives, the beliefs, the talking points, everything is on endless repeat. Nothing ever changes and this is really a very clear sign of a manufactured identity.
    “If you always say the same things and think the same things and react the same way and repeat the same talking points, no matter what happens in reality, it means that your very sense of self and reality and where you come from is false. Because in real life, you react differently to different things.”

Trump Regime

  • The Speech That Gets You Banned From America — Ken Klippenstein. “Secretary of State Marco Rubio has formally decided to bar some on the political “left” from visiting America, according to a diplomatic cable he sent to embassies this week.
    “When I obtained a copy of the internal cable banning those in vaguely “aligned groups” of “far-left terrorists,” I couldn’t help but laugh at the timing. The next day, Rubio was in Greece where, with the Acropolis behind him, he celebrated “free debate and public discussion, the contest of mind with mind.””
  • ‘Honey Please’: Kimberly Guilfoyle Pushed Donor to Wire $100,000 to Her Amex Account — Wall Street Journal.

Democrats

  • Democrats Have a Bill Maher Problem — The Nation. “Establishment Democrats obsessing over Hasan Piker’s every move seem to have no issue talking to Maher, despite his decades of open bigotry.”

Yemen

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Buy, Borrow, Die—Another Way the Rich Avoid Taxes

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On October 8, 2026

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One of the long term themes of my writing is that the rich have engineered a system in the West which insures they will continue to get richer, generally in a way which simultaneously impoverishes everyone else.

Buy, borrow, die is another example. The idea is simple enough: rich people

  1. Buy or otherwise obtain assets. Ideally these are assets which produce income or capital gains, but if you have a millions of dollars of stocks that works. This is one main reason for stock and option grants: they don’t register as income per se, and thus aren’t taxed as income but as capital, which means they aren’t taxed until you sell them, no matter how much they appreciate.
  2. Borrow is the next step: use your assets as collateral. Loan rates for the rich are usually 1.5 to 2% higher than short term treasury rates (which means that from 2008 to 2020 they were rarely more than 3%, they’re higher now, especially due to Trump’s insane war with Iran and its consequences for treasury rates. This rate of interest is far lower than you would pay for capital gains taxes, let alone income
  3. Die. When you die the price of your assets for estate tax purposes are reset to how much you bought them for. So your heirs pay taxes as if there had been no appreciation in asset prices.

This has been going on for a long time, but only become the default for “high net worth individuals” after 2008. It’s viable somewhere between ten and 30 million dollars of wealth.

In order for this to work, of course, you need to know that asset prices and returns on income producing assets will be higher than borrowing costs. Fortunately ever since Greenspan and his infamous Greenspan’s Put, the Federal Reserve has always insured that the stock market and asset prices in general, always rise fast. This has broken down a bit with real estate assets since 2020, but the stock market is reaching unseen highs regularly, and unlike in the pre-Reagan era, there are no sustained bear markets.

This is, again, a policy choice. It doesn’t have to be this way. Doing this in China would not work even if the law allowed it, because the stock market isn’t juiced and doesn’t provide essentially automatic increases. It does work in most, perhaps all Western nations, though in general other countries aren’t quite so permissive. The “die” part also required some significant changes to estate taxes for it to be viable for the merely rich (tens of millions) as opposed to the really rich with hundreds of millions or more.

As a result of this the rich often pay far less in taxes, as a percentage, than the upper middle class, especially highly paid professionals who still mostly get their money from wages.

I’m going to return to this later, but for now the important thing is simply to understand that the economy, which includes the tax system, is set up structurally to favor the rich. Yes, they still wind up paying a lot of taxes in absolute terms, but in proportional terms they often pay less than ordinary citizens. Warren Buffet famously noted that he paid a lower percentage of his income than his secretary did.

This is also organized to keep wealth together over generations, creating an oligarchic aristocracy, which is something America’s founders were very much opposed to. Along with permission for oligopoly, monopoly, price fixing and the structure of monetary production (many rich people are connected to banks and other financial firms which are allowed to create money out of thin air), plus law changes like Citizen’s United (money is speech so restrictions on election spending are illegal) this is a structural preference for oligarchy.

The only way to end this requires significant legislative changes, along with changes to the Supreme Court makeup, since as it stands right now the Supremes would strike down any laws intended to challenge oligarchy.

Since oligarchs own the politicians and the supreme court, this won’t happen unless the rich lose their power in a Great Crash that even the Fed and Treasury can’t bail them out from, and since they can print as much money as they want, that means it isn’t going to happen short of some sort of revolution. The money as speech decision makes it unlikely this will be an electoral revolution (though not entirely impossible), so it will likely require a full revolution.

If that doesn’t happen America’s decline will continue until it is just a larger version of Brazil or India: lots of poor people, a small but prosperous upper middle class who are direct retainers of the rich and a mass of poor people.

It’s quite clever really, the only downside is that this sort of financialization and rentierism weakens America as a whole since returns on manufacturing can’t match financial returns under this sort of economic engineering, and industrial power is effectively military power in the post-industrial revolution world.

America’s oligarchs have thus chosen American decline in exchange for what they hope is permanent oligarch status.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Saudi Arabia Has Truly F**cked Around & Is About To Find Out

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On October 7, 2026

17 Comments

Saudi Arabia made a major counter-offensive against Ansar-Allah with mercenaries. It took a bit of ground, and is now being pushed back hard.

No one with sense is surprised. The Yemenis are far tougher than mercenaries or any Saudi troops, which are an international joke.

Now:

The Sauds started all this by attacking Ansar-Allah’s capital airport. The Houthis hit back and told them for peace they had to stop all attacks and end their decade long blockade, which has killed hundreds of thousand of people.

Back in the 1920s the Sauds took two provinces, Najran and Asir from Yemen. Mohammed Bin Salman better hope that’s all they take away from him because unless either Turkey or Pakistan are willing to commit a large ground force, I don’t think the Sauds can defeat Ansar-Allah.

And while the Sauds were able to get oil flowing thru the pipeline that was taken out earlier faster than most of us, myself included, expected, it doesn’t really matter. An Aramco refinery was hit yesterday, which is actually even worse, since it’s distillates like diesel, jet fuel and bunker fuel (used by large ships) which is in short supply.

Meanwhile even for crude, ignore the futures prices, and check the spot. Here’s the spread:

Futures markets have been highly manipulated, but the spot is the actual price. Nor can I see any likelihood that spot oil or distillate prices will be cheaper in a month, Iran has been hitting tankers hard, and unlike before they’re aiming to do serious damage to them, not just disable them.

MBS is the worst leader Saudi Arabia has ever had. Like Trump, he just can’t conceive that he should make peace. He’s got a crap army, the US is now helping somewhat but is overstretched and his only hope is Turkey and Pakistan.

If he’s not lucky he may be Saudi Arabia’s last leader. Very few people will miss the House of Saud.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

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