Ian Welsh

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

Category: Media Page 1 of 10

The Abuse of Language By Media and Government

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On April 27, 2026

26 Comments

I stumbled across this, completely typical word usage today:

The Somali government officially announced that it was starting a blockade. Same as the US blockade. Same as the Iranian blockade.

So either it’s all piracy, or it’s all “boarding.”

We have seen a constant refusal to call Palestinian children, children. The words “Israel killed” are never used in the Western press. And then there’s the constant use of the words terrorist and terrorism, the two most meaningless words in the English language.

Britannica says:

terrorism, the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective

Cambridge:

violent action or threats designed to cause fear among ordinary people, in order to achieve political aims.

By either of these definitions, the world’s greatest users of terrorism are America and Israel. No one else comes close, not even the Russians.

The word terrorist always describes non-state actors with limited reach, or state actors like Iran. Yet Iran’s strikes were not intended to cause fear among the civilian population: they were intended to hurt the economies and militaries of the West and the Gulf Arab states which allow attacks on Iran. Schools and hospitals were not targeted.

Iran has gone out of its way to not kill civilians. In the Ukraine war the death rate for children is under 1%. In Palestine it’s somewhere around 32%. In Iran it was about 16%.

The US and Israel have repeatedly said that one goal is to cause the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the Iranian state. The method of doing this is attacking civilian targets. Indeed the latest war on Iran began with an attack on a children’s school. Hospitals are systematically targeted, as are paramedics and firefighters.

Hezbollah, likewise, tends to stick to military targets. Even Hamas mostly hits military targets.

Yet somehow the nations who are primarily committing terrorism: the US and Israel, are never described as terrorists. Russia, Iran, Hezbolla and Hamas: they’re always terrorists, even when they attack military targets.

In Britain terrorist designations have been used against protesters who have never harmed civilians. The same is true in Germany.

The word means nothing, and Western media outlets are nothing but propagandists. Most aren’t even allowed to say the word “genocide”. It’s publisher policy. (Publishers always make these decisions. Editors are downstream and are routinely over-ridden by publishers, though most American journalists seem to be OK with being propagandists. Those who aren’t tend to be fired, or eventually leave in disgust.)

Terrorism means “violence by people who are our enemies” and nothing else. Genocide is never done by us, only by our enemies. If half a million children die due to sanctions, it’s “worth it”, in the immortal word of Secretary of State Madeline Albright.

None of this will come as a shock to my readers, I know. But I think it’s worth emphasizing just how worthless our media has become. They lie, they propagandize, they refuse to state the obvious: indeed their job is to lie, to pretend the sun is purple with silver polka-dots and that the sky isn’t blue. There’s no genocide in Palestine. No sir. But there is one China, oh yes. And our enemies are terrorists, but we, who actively target schools and hospitals and bomb weddings and funerals, we’re the good guys.

It was always bad, to be sure. But I’ve lived a long time now and it keeps getting worse. In the old days some columnist would be allowed to tell the truth. Articles would have misleading headlines but the actual facts were in the article, albeit sometimes near the end.

You can still, with very careful reading, get some truth from the legacy media. Some. But if you want unfettered news and not to have to work like a dog, you have to go to alternative media and read foreign sources directly.

This isn’t trivial, because most people don’t do the extra work, which means that even if suspicious of official narratives, they live in a soup of lies and their understanding of the world is wrong. I still regularly run across people who think the US can open the Strait of Hormuz with direct military naval action, which is deranged. It’s not possible.

But there is something good about completely out-to-lunch propaganda. Over time people see thru it. They stop trusting. They stop believing anything they’re told.

But that’s also a bad thing: there is no consensus world view left, just a series of tribes with their own echo chambers. Without a shared understanding of the world that is not completely unhinged from reality, there’s no basis for social action which works. China has the buy-in of most of their population because they believe in what China does, and trust the government. (Research on this is very clear. Chinese citizens do trust the CPC.) In the US there can be no concerted action because their is no trust left. Hell, Trump contradicts himself regularly. He’ll say the sky is green in the morning and announce it’s magenta at supper.

No society riven like this and basing its decisions on delusion rather than truth can act effectively. America can’t fix anything, can’t win wars, can’t reindustrialize and much of this is because Americans live in a world of fantasy.

The first step in fixing anything; in running any sort of society worth living in, is facing at least some of the facts: of living in the real world. It’s been a long time since the West acknowledged reality, and our delusions are just getting worse.

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The Twin Pillars of the Interregnum of Unreality Are Under Stress

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On April 8, 2026

29 Comments

Guest Post by Nat Wilson Turner

Last Fall, I posited that the US and greater West are in the grips of an Interregnum of Unreality that began when Barack Obama successfully papered over the Great Financial Crisis while addressing none of the causes and leaving the very same banksters whose antics caused the crisis in place.

The Interregnum of Unreality is the legacy of Barack Obama who achieved near-total information dominance via traditional and social media and used that power to promulgate a message that everything was fine, nothing ever happens, the neo-liberal order will never end because it rests on two indestructible pillars:

  1. The perception of American prosperity
  2. The perception of global American military dominance

Thanks to Trump’s impericidal decision to attack Iran in February, kicking off a war he can’t TACO out of, the reputation of American invincibility has taken a beating.

The estimable Aurelian writes in his latest missive of the global political implications of the ass-whipping the American military has taken in the Ramadan War:

That hit is going to be all the larger because of the massive, orchestrated PR campaign that has been going on for more than a generation, presenting the US as the Empire and the Hegemon, its military the unstoppable colossus trampling small countries underfoot. But the test of a hegemon is not how loudly you shout, but whether you can in fact do what you claim. In spite of defeats in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and the ignominious scuttle from the Red Sea, both boosters and critics of the US have been prepared to believe the US had that much power until the last month or so. But now we have price discovery, and it turns out that the US has large and quite capable forces, but it’s not the unstoppable giant ogre that it claimed to be, and never was. The whole “hegemon” thesis, people are beginning to realise, was smoke and mirrors all along: it’s just that now it’s obvious. It’s not just how it is now, it’s how it always was: a traditional result of wars, after all, is to reveal the truth about militaries. No doubt even as I write, pundits are busy composing apologias along the lines of “well, of course by hegemony we just meant Quite a Powerful Nation with a Large Military, actually.” But overselling and underperforming will have their usual political consequences.

He also brings in the second pillar of our interregnum of unreality, the markets:

There’s an interesting comparison to be made with the “Artificial Intelligence” racket, which was similarly hyped, and also expected to somehow guarantee world-dominating status for the US. But in quiet corners away from the hysteria, people who know what they are talking about have been pointing out for several years now that “AI” is a scam, that as an industry it will never be profitable, and that the money, and even more the power and the infrastructure needed, will never be available. And just in the last few weeks, the media are discovering that that’s how it is, and indeed that’s how it always was, if you had bothered to do a few sums. We can add the interesting rider, however, that in a world where generating power is going to have to be rationed, and silicon chips may be scarce, the “AI” scam may come to a swifter and more brutal end than even its worst critics supposed. Exactly what that will do to the US economy I’m not qualified to say, but I imagine it won’t be pretty.

And the damage will not just be financial. Most of the big names of international business, the Musks, the Zuckerbergs, the Altmans and the rest of that lot, treated with fawning reverence by the media and governments of the world, and who have persuaded us that what they think is actually important, will turn out to have empires built on not very much. How badly the poisonous mixture of world depression, financial crisis, and shortage of power and chips will hit them I don’t think anybody knows, but if they survive, their image, and that of the US as a technological leader, will have suffered as badly as the image of its military.

Earlier this week I posted at Naked Capitalism about the deep ties between OpenAI, Oracle and the UAE and that there are indications they are deepening those ties even as the foundations of their partnership are being lit on fire.

The weak links in the AI boom and the Middle East — OpenAI, Oracle, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — are strengthening their ties even as the Ramadan War exposes their increasing vulnerabilities.

Spoiler alert: Despite OpenAI’s jarring strategic shifts last week, the UAE is still pouring money down that hole.

Is reality finally intruding on our generation-long delirium?

When Trump failed to calm the markets last week with his ridiculous address to the nation, it seemed that a little reality was peeking through the veils.

But when Iran joined Trump yesterday in claiming that the basic terms of a ceasefire and ensuing negotiations had been reached, the markets roared their approval, with American equities markets posting huge gains.

This despite the ceasefire never taking place and the Strait of Hormuz only being open for a few hours.

As I attempted to document in a post earlier today at Naked Capitalism, “cognitive dissonance and conflicting agendas among key players” has allowed the western media to engage in an orgy of chatter about this ceasefire that never was even as Israel, Iran, and reportedly the UAE all launched strikes at civilians and industrial infrastructure.

One hopes that Trump realizes he went too far in his genocidal threats to destroy Iranian civilization and will at least refrain from implicitly threatening to nuke Iran going forward.

However it’s almost certain he will attempt more attacks on Iran involving US ground forces and equally certain that those attempts will end as disastrously as his first.

We’re seeing a full-on anti-Trump mutiny from leading MAGA media figures and even 70 of the senescent US House Democrats are calling for Trump to be removed from office because Trump’s rhetoric freaked the American mainstream the fuck out.

Democratic 2028 aspirants Rep. Ro Khanna and Sen. Chris Murphy both capitalized on the Trump-triggered panic and ensuing TACO to raise their profiles. Most of rest of the Dem 2028 aspirants have been caught flat footed, trapped by their zionist obligations and inability to recognize the political moment.

The freakouts and cognitive dissonance will continue until they can’t.

And as Aurelian pointed out, the consequences of the Interregnum Ending will be serioius:

For the US, as I’ve indicated, the shock is likely to be existential: Americans have been so misled for so long by their governments and media about their economic and military strength that the sudden discovery of its limits will be brutal and de-stabilising. Above all, a political culture of entitlement, which is used to issuing demands and threats to try to get what it wants, will suddenly have to cope with the US becoming the demandeur, as it is over the current “ceasefire,” obliged to make compromises and sacrifices to get what it needs to keep the country going, and seeing others expand into the strategic space it has vacated. Whether the current political system will survive the shock, and whether it will be capable of actually making the concessions necessary for survival, are very open questions.

Meanwhile the majority of Americans are getting their faces vigorously rubbed in the litter box of reality every time they pump gas and soon the inflationary impact of Trump’s war will resonate throughout the economy.

The longer it takes for the official narrative to adjust to new circumstances, the longer the Interregnum of Unreality continues, the worse the impact will be and the bigger the looming revolutionary moment will seem to be and the more forceful the ensuing crackdown will need to be to snuff it.

Risk and Reward As Perceived in American Strategic Culture

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On March 26, 2026

17 Comments

~by Sean Paul Kelley

How does the way an individual perceives time affect the way they approach risk? And can the way individuals perceive time and risk be applied on a macro scale?

Let’s take a look.

Sociologist Phillip Zimbardo developed a five way typology of how individuals perceive time. People who inhabit certain zones have certain characteristics unique to their typology. Diane Maye, commenting on attitudes toward risk by the US military at The Strategy Bridge writes, “future-oriented people tend to be more successful at achieving their goals, whereas people who frequently reminisce about the past can be overly nostalgic or fearful.” Makes sense, no?

What about those who live in the present? How do they perceive time and more importantly how do they approach risk? This type inhabits what Zimbardo calls the present hedonistic mode, and as Maye elaborates, “[are] more likely to engage in risk-taking behavior.” Maye adds that “the present hedonistic person “lives in and for the moment” and demonstrates a “lack of regard for future consequences.”

I can’t think of anything that describes the outlook of most Americans with more accuracy than this. America is a nation riddled with a present-mind perspective. Our media diet is now totally skewed towards immediate gratification with absolutely zero thought for the future. No one reads long-form essays any longer, much less books. Tik-Tok, X and even the nightly national news is geared towards quippy repartee, not well-informed consideration. Balance and objectivity in reporting just takes too long, especially when you can strike a pose, Right or Left. Such a thing is much easier and much more rewarding to ones endorphin producing centers. Intellectualism is so passé.

Indeed, one of the greatest losses of the last several years was NPRs shift from a medium whose central bias was intellectual, to one that skews left is overtly political. All part and parcel of the slippery slope towards an all pervasive AI-driven society concerned only about its own immediate gratification.

This typology can just as easily be applied to our national approach to such existential matters as voting, domestic economics, and foreign risk, mainly in the context of our conduct of war, best summed up as “bomb first, analyze the loss later.”

The consideration of risk and reward became uncoupled from each other during the Reagan Administration, when the debt markets were restructured drastically by a crucial innovation: MBSs, mortgage-backed securities and junk bonds–supposedly to democratize finance–and the equity markets were deregulated and then a Bull’s ass was set aflame by Greenspan’s long era of easy money. The spread between them only grew worse under Clinton, doubly so under Baby Bush, Obama and aren’t even spoken in the same sentence under our new Maximum Leader, Trump.

Americans, however, are soon going to learn that when you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. The consequences of which will be grim.

AI & New Social Media Rules Are Strangling Independent Sites

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On March 4, 2026

26 Comments

This table is pretty typical:

Back in 2017 Google changed their algo to prioritize “reliable” sites: aka. mainstream sources like Wikipedia. The blogosphere, what was left of it got hit hard. Now everyone’s getting hit. AI scrapes whatever someone writes and presents the information without referring traffic to whoever created the actual information.

This has been a long trend. Google and Facebook from about 2004 on slowly strangled everyone, taking almost all the value for themselves and destroying the ad-networks which existed before them. The money dried up, the audiences dwindled and sites went under, including some very large ones. Places like mine survived only because they had enough legacy goodwill, but I certainly saw massive decreases in referral traffic, especially from 2017 on.

The Web which existed has been replaced by a bunch of walled gardens, all offering the same takes. Once the Web was amazing, full of weirdness, beauty and opinion diversity. Those days are gone, perhaps never to be seen again.

This is part of an endless drive in the West towards creating oligopolies with massive profit rates. “I’ll just take 80% of the value since people can’t find you without me.”

The end result is less and less real interesting content because it pays less and less, and even people who don’t care about that can’t get an audience.

If you decide to join the crowd and post on X, instagram, Facebook, Youtube or whatever, your account can be removed at any time, and there’s no recourse. Usually you can’t even find a human to to talk to, 99% of censorship and appeals are entirely automated.

All this before the various “real ID” stuff being justified by “protecting the children” and the buy-up of both old and new media by Zionist billionaires. It’s becoming much harder to find any non oligarch approved content on the web.

It’s sad, because the web used to be a marvelous place full of the oddest most interesting people. Now it’s just a mass surveillance and value extraction machine for half a dozen billionaires.

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Pre-Internet Journalism Was Optimized For Information Transfer Efficiency, Post-Internet For Inefficiency

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On February 16, 2026

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We’ve all seen the titles of articles “Big Company decides to do something BAD” or “This famous actor’ adorable dog saved his life!”.

Click bait. The information you want is “what the big company is what big company did what, or who the actor is.

Back when we had newspapers the titles would have been “X AI is making degrading nudes of people without their consent”. It would name the actor.

The rules of pre-internet Journalism were as follows: the most important information goes into the headline. The first paragraph summarizes the article and each paragraph after includes information in order of importance, with the least important information in the second last paragraph. The last paragraph sums up the article again.”

The rule of thumb I was taught is that half the readers only read the title and that you should expect to lose half the remaining readers per paragraph. I don’t think it was always that bad, and it varied by type of article, more people will read an entire book or movie review, for example, but the thrust of it was correct.

Newspapers knew that people wouldn’t read the whole article so tried to get the most important information to them first, the second next and so on.

Modern internet journalism optimized for clicks and for time on site. The title leaves out the important information to get a click. The article is often written so that the most important information is near or at the end, so you have to read all the way thru, with paragraphs before that being teases, meant to keep you reading.

One reason people are more likely to be ignorant today is simply this change from “get them the information they need as fast as possible” to “get them to click and stay on site as long as possible.” Bonus points if you can get them to click on more links inside your site. While strictly speaking internet news isn’t optimized for inefficiency, it might as well be: that’s the effect.

Overall I think that the internet has been bad for humanity. I don’t make this judgment call lightly, I make my living here, after all, and there’s a lot I love about the internet, especially the ease of looking up information.

Inefficient information transfer is just one part of why the internet has been bad for humans, I’m going to return to this issue over and over during the next few weeks.

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2028: Red and Blue Vs. Tech?

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On December 10, 2025

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By Nat Wilson Turner

Sounds good to me.

Not my idea though. I must give credit where credit is due.

Balaji meant it as a warning to his fellow tech bosses, but I’m taking it more as a great suggestion.

Those of you not familiar with Balaji Srinivasan should reference this Gil Duran piece from the New Republic from 2024.

Relevant bits:

…you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what’s to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.

“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji’s 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. I mentioned Balaji’s ideas in two previous stories about Network State–related efforts in California—a proposed tech colony called California Forever and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco’s government.

Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”

“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.

Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless.

The Financial Times had more on the “network state” or as they call them “for-profit cities.”

John P. Ruehl at Naked Capitalism has covered a specific “network state” in Honduras called Próspera that has been underdevelopment for some years and may have played a role in Trump’s decision to interfere in the recent Honduran elections after pardoning their drug-dealing ex-president.

I’d include an excerpt or two from the above, but I want to stay on topic as this is just by way of background on Balaji.

The main point is he can tell that the techbros (and the rest of the oligarchy) are close to wearing out their welcome with the American people.

When/if the AI bubble pops and when/if it takes down the larger stock market and possibly the entire U.S. economy, their welcome will be thoroughly worn out.

The secondary point is that Balaji and his ilk don’t care about The United States of America, they’re already planning their post-nation state moves.

His rhetorical tactics remind me of those AI boosters who choose to contribute to Nvidia’s stock price by “warning” that “imminent AGI” is a threat to destroy humanity.

American “AI” Is a “No Win” for Society

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On November 13, 2025

15 Comments

Let’s lay out the big picture for LLM-style AI.

It is a statistical prediction of what should be the next word or symbol. That is why it required so much data to train and why, even if we had the tech, we couldn’t have created it 20 years ago: There wasn’t enough data in digital format. It is not intelligent. It is not conscious. It is just an algo trained with a TON of data and which used massive amounts of processing power (and thus electricity) to produce results. Hallucinations are part of the tech, they cannot be eliminated, which means that LLM “AI” will always make mistakes and many will almost certainly be the sort of mistakes trained humans rarely make.

The current build-out in the US involves only a few companies, all in a huge circle jerk, and they make up 40% of the entire public stock market’s value. Neither Open AI nor Anthropic actually make a profit, and it costs more to do a query than is made even from paying customers, let alone all the free ones. There is absolutely no question in my mind that they are in a bubble.

The maximalist claim for “AI” is that it will become so smart it can replace at least 40% of jobs. (Or smart enough.) The more realistic claim is that it’s good for some things and can replace some workers by making those who remain more efficient. Plus, after all, most tech companies don’t care if their products are shit as long as they make money. See Google for “who cares what you think, it’s us or no one. You’ll use our product no matter how shit it is.” (Ironically, Search is one of the few things AI is better at than incumbents.)

So here’s the thing: no matter whether AI is a real tech or not, it’s in a bubble. (The internet was real, it had a bubble.) No one actually knows who’s going to make money from AI. The big internet winners (Amazon, Facebook, Google) came after the dot-com bust. The Feds may backstop and/or bailout, if they do, it will hurt everyone not involved.

If I am wrong about AI and the maximalist claims are true then what will happen is a massive replacement of tens of millions of workers. Since those people will now have almost no income, that will lead to a classic demand depression. A great depression like the one in the 1930s. The only way out would be a massive guaranteed annual income. Given our rulers and ideology, we’d probably have food riots long before they realized they were risking their own throats.

If it is a real tech, but not that big a deal, it will lead to a shittier economy where even more mistakes are made, and it’s even harder to find a human being to fix anything. Which is what tech wants: they want everything automated and certainly they don’t want to have real customer service.

And, if it is a real tech, as I have noted before, China is actually going to win. Their models are 20 to 30 times cheaper to run, and are open source. If your business uses AI you will use open source if  you have half a brain, because with open source one of two major providers (Anthropic/Open AI) can’t just raise prices or change the model. To use closed source would be so stupid that even most American CEOs will not do it. Certainly no one with sense outside American vassal swarm will be so stupid.

So:

  1. Maximal AI leads to a great depression.
  2. Moderate AI leads to a shittier economy and shittier projects.
  3. There’s a bubble either way
  4. At the end of it China’s AI models will be used far more than American ones anyway. The US has already “lost” the AI race and can’t even see that. (Why? Fundamentally because they’re greedy and want to become billionaires of trillionaires. Genuine open source AI won’t print nearly as many rich people.

America can’t win at anything that matters any more, because the people who lead America are stupid, liars and so greedy they can’t think of anything but money. (See Trump, who is the avatar of all these vices.)

 

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Trump Has Achieved Biden Levels of Delusion and Denial

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On November 11, 2025

14 Comments

I mean…

Not to mention firing BLS workers because he didn’t like the stats, which even Biden didn’t do. Given how dubious most BLS stats relating to inflation are already, that’s some impressive cope.

The fact is that prices keep going up, and if you aren’t in the golden AI Ponzi Scheme, the economy sucks.

Rosenberg Research did some analysis:

If they aren’t in expansion, they’re in contraction. This is also known as a recession, even if they didn’t shade it.

Some further supporting data:

 

Sure doesn’t look like those tariffs are causing manufacturing to flood back into the US, does it? Data centers and power station building are both AI-related, and as for hospitals, they are part of a protected oligopoly, or, they were until the ACA subsidies were cut. That’s not likely to be good for the health “industry,” which would be wonderful — except that people will die and suffer as a result. “Get rid of part of the shitty way we provide health care now without replacing it with something else.”

Anyway, unless you’re in a monopoly/oligopoly, and have some control, or you’re connected to the AI spigot, the economy is ass. And remember, major tech companies are engaging in mass layoffs, so just working for tech companies won’t protect you; the reverse is true. Unless you’re actively working on AI, you’re first to the gallows, as their workers are where they’re starting with the replacements.

For decades, I warned coders (“engineers”) that their days of being King Shit of Turd Island, pretending their skills were super-special, would eventually come to an end. The moment senior management could figure out how to replace them, they would. Unless you’re truly at the very top of your field, you’re always replaceable — mediocre isn’t as good as average, but it’s usually a LOT cheaper.

Anyway, the end days are nigh. There isn’t much left of the middle class in America, with little left for the rich to steal. The US either changes its politics radically (and Trump has always been a billionaire whose policies are good for billionaires) or the US continues its descent to becoming an unutterable shithole for about 80 percent of its population.

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