The Strait of Hormuz crisis has cut off nearly a billion barrels of oil from the global market and demand is starting to crack. Asia is rationing fuel, Europe is bracing for what comes next.
A few more weeks of this and we’re looking at the 1973 crisis all over again.
Source: Bloomberg
🇺🇸 The Iran war is handing America a level of energy dominance it couldn't have achieved any other way.
U.S. crude exports hit a record 5.2 million barrels a day last week.
Europe now gets over a third of its jet fuel from U.S. refineries.
Oil investors are cashing out at the fastest pace in 17 years. $USO is up +91% year-to-date, one of its best runs this century. But April has seen -$900 million in outflows, putting it on track for its largest monthly withdrawal since 2009’s -$1.2 billion record. The trade ran +100% from January to early April. Now the early winners are walking out the door. When the smartest money in a trade starts leaving at record speed, the rest of the market should pay attention. Source: Bloomberg
Let’s remind our listeners what Palantir is. It is one of the key startups created by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp in Silicon Valley. They are developing a system for global surveillance of everything happening on the planet: in space, in the civil society of Western countries, and far beyond their borders. All these databases converge into unified hubs, into centers which, despite their formal “private” status, are deeply integrated into the system of intelligence agencies and political decision-making.
In fact, we are witnessing the construction of an Orwellian world in which absolutely all sensors, satellites, phones, and any devices capable of transmitting a signal are connected to a single network. The line between online and offline is blurring, becoming seamless. Huge arrays of artificial intelligence decode, catalog, and accumulate all of this in one place in real time. We find ourselves in a society of total control, the kind George Orwell wrote about in his dystopian 1984: “eyes” everywhere, devices everywhere, and Big Brother relentlessly watching everyone.
Palantir is that Big Brother today. It is no longer just a company with a multibillion-dollar turnover—it is the embodiment of the West itself and its technological superiority. As soon as we come into contact with anything digital—and we do this constantly—we instantly fall within its sphere of influence. Everything we say, write, and do near even a turned-off gadget instantly becomes the property of this surveillance system. And Palantir is, in essence, a Matrix that has already been created and launched, putting humanity on the path toward total, meticulous control.
Consider what we have encountered during the Special Military Operation: this is not merely a new war; it is a new way of life. Drones, tracking systems, satellites, secure communication channels, and high-precision guidance are virtually eliminating the advantages that formed the basis of traditional battles.Tanks, ships, infantry, and even individual soldiers are losing their former significance right before our eyes.
Today, robots, artificial intelligence, and instant data transmission rule the roost, hacking information and immediately triggering political and informational processes. Statements by politicians around the world, combined with these technologies, create a wall that is extremely difficult to break through. We have encountered something unexpected. We are marching toward victory, but this war would have been won long ago and decisively were it not for these new parameters, these forms of civilization and warfare entirely unknown to us.
Behind the disputes within American politics, behind Trump’s election and his strange behavior—when he posts twenty contradictory messages a day—the contours of the real power we are dealing with are gradually emerging. This is Palantir, or the “Technological Republic”, named after Alex Karp’s book. Previously, many thought it was merely an ambitious startup promoting its product in the defense sector to attract customers. It turned out to be something much greater.
It is the West’s new philosophy, the path by which it seeks to preserve its hegemony and unipolar system.Plan B for the global elites is to defeat those who uphold traditional values and an alternative understanding of reality. The Epstein scandal, Trump’s strange moves, the new conflicts — all of this is part of a single mosaic called Palantir. Alex Karp’s Technological Republic has turned out to be not just a project, but the key to deciphering what we are dealing with today.
The recently published manifesto—the “mini-manifesto” of 22 points based on Karp’s book—directly states: the humanistic values of the past are no longer needed. The proposal is that liberal humanism be consigned to history in favor of the ruthless advancement of interests through violence, power, and domination. The recipe for saving the unipolar world, which has begun to crack, is total global surveillance and the concentration of big data in the hands of the United States.
It is no coincidence that Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, regulars at the Bilderberg Club and the World Economic Forum, are now dictating this agenda. The fact that Thiel’s name appears on Epstein’s lists almost more frequently than any other—along with the names of people from Trump’s inner circle—only underscores the nature of this elite. The manifesto itself contains a call to ignore the psychological or moral “peculiarities” of the representatives of this new ruling class.
In one of its points, the authors of this manifesto urge us not to be too harsh on the “psychological deviations”— in essence, the perversions—of political and economic leaders.The logic is this: if these people are creative and drive technology forward, society must show leniency toward their “peculiarities,” no matter how monstrous they may be. We are dealing with outright techno-fascism in its most radical form. The sole criterion for success here is declared to be technological development.
According to the manifesto, nuclear weapons take a back seat—possession of artificial intelligence becomes the new deterrent.Welcome to “The Matrix.” One of the most shocking points is the call to abandon the restrictions imposed on Germany and Japan after World War II.They are being offered the chance to once again become powerful militarized structures, but now under the full digital control of Palantir.
In effect, this amounts to dismantling the Yalta system and completely overturning the outcomes of World War II. Traditional international law no longer means anything.Might makes right, and power lies with those who control information and methods of total surveillance. We’ve woken up in this world in April 2026.
Against the backdrop of the rollout of Neuralink chips and talk of the technological singularity, we find ourselves in a post-liberal, techno-fascist dictatorship. Humanism and human rights have been cast aside into the dustbin of history. Now the rule of technocratic elites is openly proclaimed, and they do not even attempt to hide their true goals. READ HIS THOUGHTS HERE https://arktosjournal.com/p/the-neocon-upgrade-and-the-new-totalitarianism
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, offers a sobering view: The biggest technological shift in human history is happening, and almost no one is talking about it.
Schmidt opens with a startling industry prediction:
Jeffrey Sachs on the real origins of the Iran war, and the coming economic devastation.
(0:00) Where Does the Iran War Go From Here? (10:13) Iran’s Growing Power Since the War Began (14:37) Where Does the Hatred Towards Iran Come From? (24:37) The Nuclear Weapon Lie Surrounding… pic.twitter.com/yHg5BvY3Qp
Last week, the Peter Thiel-cofounded company poured fuel on the fire with a 22-point summary of CEO Alex Karp’s 2025 book “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West,” an ominous corporate manifesto that critics called a “hideous ideology” and “example of technofascism.”
Now, Palantir’s seemingly endless run of bad press has current and former employees shaken, Wired reports, with some starting to wonder whether “they’re the bad guys.”
“I think there’s a bit of an identity crisis and a bit of a challenge,” one former employee told the magazine. “We were supposed to be the ones who were preventing a lot of these abuses. Now we’re not preventing them. We seem to be enabling them.”
While Palantir prides itself “on a culture of fierce internal dialogue and even disagreement over the complex areas we work on,” as a spokesperson told Wired, workers and alumni are required to sign non-disparagement agreements and forbidden to speak to the press.
Meanwhile, employees have vented in internal Slack threads, voicing their growing concerns over Palantir and ICE’s relationship, especially after the shooting death of numerous protesters.Palantir started auto-deleting conversations in at least one Slack channel after seven days, per Wired, raising even more questions.
Palantir maintains that its ICE contract allows the firm to make a “difference in mitigating risks while enabling targeted outcomes,” according to an internal blog post.
Following the deadly strike on the Iranian school, one employee asked in a Slack channel if “were we involved,” and whether the company is “doing anything to stop a repeat,” as quoted by Wired.
And the company’s most recent manifesto summarizing Karp’s book drew yet another heated reaction internally.
“I’m curious why this had to be posted,” one frustrated employee wrote in a Slack thread viewed by Wired. “Especially on the company account. On the practical level every time stuff like that gets posted it gets harder for us to sell the software outside of the US (for sure in the current political climate), and I doubt we need this in the US?”
“I’ve already had multiple friends reach out and ask what the hell did we post,” another employee wrote.
“It’s like we taped a ‘kick me’ sign on our own backs,” another worker wrote. “I hope no one who decided to put this out is surprised that we are, in fact, getting kicked.”
I’m a senior editor at Futurism, where I edit and write about NASA and the private space sector, as well as topics ranging from SETI and artificial intelligence to tech and medical policy.
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