Russia offered U.S. a deal for minerals in Ukrainian territory it seized

Russian officials proposed to Trump administration officials an agreement for the U.S. to make money off critical minerals and metals under Moscow’s control.

NBC News (www.nbcnews.com)

The financial services industry of the UK & USA are always willing to lend fascists a hand.
https://nationalpost.com/news/how-six-months-before-the-second-world-war-britain-gave-hitler-9-million-in-gold-that-belonged-to-another-country

Documents reveal Bank of England sold stolen gold for Nazis

Archived material details how gold bars plundered from Czechoslovakia were sold on behalf of Germany's central bank in 1939

The Independent (www.independent.co.uk)

How Bank of England 'helped Nazis sell gold stolen from Czechs'

Official account of what many believe was British central bank's most shameful episode revealed more than 70 years after event

the Guardian (www.theguardian.com)

Russian invasions provide a handy excuse for delay of restitution
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/19/russia-warsaw-pact-1968-invasion-czechoslovakia

Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

Nazi Gold: Why Hitler's Germany was Desperate for Bullion

During World War II, the German Nazi government robbed more than 600 tons of European gold

TIME (time.com)

Resolving the Czechoslovak Gold Dispute – Association for Diplomatic Studies & Training

(adst.org)

How The Arab Spring Affects Saudi Society

Revolt continues to pressure governments along Saudi Arabia's borders. Saudi Arabia experts Bernard Haykel and Toby Jones explain the effect of the Arab Spring on Saudi society and government, and what the turmoil across the Middle East and North Africa may mean for the U.S.-Saudi relationship.

NPR (www.npr.org)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/world/europe/trump-lauder-ukraine-lithium.html

That's why Trump attacked Iran. Before the uprising by the young people of Iran could get ahead & the covert sale of sanctioned oil was revealed.
https://popular.info/p/update-after-sending-billions-to

Trump's fossil fuel overlords don't want examinations of the fossil corruption looting every nation's national treasuries.
https://popular.info/p/kushner-breaks-pledge-seeks-5-billion

Gulf royals are looting like Putin's oligarchs loot Ukraine & Hungary and AI launders the cash.

Venture capital firm hit with $216 million penalty for ‘egregious’ violations of US sanctions against Russian billionaire - ICIJ

The Office of Foreign Assets Control said the firm managed a $20 million investment for Suleiman Kerimov, a member of Putin’s inner circle, after he was sanctioned in 2018.

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (www.icij.org)

Oil profits fund the AI spyware & election meddling necessary for ubiquitous surveillance.

As the planet fries, oil oligarchs need a means to quell dissent & revolutions while laundering their money.
https://popular.info/p/billionaire-surveillance-enthusiast

Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure 'citizens will be on their best behavior'

Billionaire Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison said he expects AI surveillance systems to reach a point where all citizens are under constant watch.

Business Insider (www.businessinsider.com)

The Terrifying Tentacles of Paramount’s Media Empire

With Paramount’s Warner Bros. Discovery takeover, the Ellisons are building a multicorporate empire of data mining, surveillance, news, and entertainment. What could possibly go wrong?

(www.theringer.com)

They're laundering their cash in a rush, via American tech, before the citizens of those countries realize how they're being looted & pillaged and launch revolutions like the Arab Spring.

Heavy lies the crown: The survival of Arab monarchies, 10 years after the Arab Spring | Brookings

Arab monarchs may find that their usual containment strategies will prove less effective as populations and opposition movements transform, and that the time has come for them to adapt their behavior.

Brookings (www.brookings.edu)

These children have the full backing of trillion dollar petrostate despots & oil oligarchs terrified of a fossil fuel phase out.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-17/openai-anthropic-deals-power-abu-dhabi-s-100-billion-ai-bet

nytimes.com

(www.nytimes.com)

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

(www.bloomberg.com)

AI is the fossil fuel industry's ticket to keeping fossil fuel prices high.
https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-google-hand-dissident-data-to-saudi-arabia-activists-say-2023-7

Gulf states want to be a global version of the Russian Internet Research Agency's hack-for-hire business model.

The AI singularity is just a euphemism for looting others assets.

1/

(A techbro would rather sacrifice the world on the altar of his dark GPU gods than go to therapy.)

That 'supposedly' is the clue.

(My guess: they are hardcore rationalists who took that position in order to flatter their own egos ("*I'm* too *smart* to believe in the Sky Bully") and so didn't think that position through. They are also so insulated from reality by their wealth that they don't know how to handle being wrong about something. So now they deal with the downsides of that choice by techbro-inventing religion from scrstch^W SF.)

All that to say, awesome thread

If you think about it, we’ve been building tech designed specifically to manipulate human behavior since the advent of social media… and it’s effective. If humanity were any good at protecting itself or organizing for the greater good, the perverse reward systems of capitalism would’ve been brought into check long before US oligarchs like Musk and Zuck could have been able to amass their power.

In a hypothetical world where machines rule, the more likely scenario is a majority of humans self-oppressing because they’ve been manipulated into it by adjustments to the algorithms that feed them the information they use to establish reality. We become part of the system.

The only real difference between that world and today is that today it’s a handful of billionaires controlling the algorithms. Replace Zuck and a few others with sufficiently capable AI and is it really that unbelievable that society would just keep cranking out more machines despite a slow degradation of quality of life?

Anyway - great thread and a fun topic to kick around. Thanks for posting it.

I can just barely (barely!) imagine a future where someone manages to use AI to get a more efficient form of AI, which would allow further bootstrapping without requiring more hardware. Same hardware gets more compute.

You're spot-on about the supply chain limitations, though. Good luck to the AI that wants to dig up more cobalt or whatever.

Edit: For context, a lot of the world's helium trade goes through, you guessed it, the Strait of Hormuz.

LLMs are not even close.

It’s a great idea… when I read it in 2000AD comics. But only good enough to be my third favourite series after Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper, not something that keeps me up at night.