Most of what gets written about how criminals choose a target comes from college professors and profilers who’ve never once had to worry about getting jumped walking to their car. They build their theories from case files and crime stats while sitting safe in an office. Fine as far as it goes. But it skips the only thing that actually matters, which is how the guy on the street is thinking in the few seconds before he decides to move on you.

I didn’t learn this from a textbook. I grew up around people who did this for a living, spent years having to watch my own back in some rough places, and I can tell you their world doesn’t work anything like the movies make it look. Here’s how it really works. The guy sizing up your house, or sizing up you, has no idea what you own. He can’t see your bank account. He isn’t thinking about your stuff yet at all. He’s running one calculation, fast, usually without even knowing he’s running it. Risk, reward, effort. That’s the whole game. So drop the idea that having nothing valuable keeps you safe. What keeps you safe is making his math come back wrong before he ever commits.

The Three Numbers Every Target Gets Scored On

Every target, a house or a person, gets scored on three things whether the guy could put it into words or not.

Risk is his chance of getting caught, getting hurt, or getting shot. Reward is what he figures he walks away with. Effort is how much work and time it takes to get it.

Notice reward is only one of the three, and it’s the one you’ve got the least control over and the one he knows the least about from the sidewalk. He’s guessing at reward. He’s reading risk and effort straight off your house. That’s why “I don’t have anything worth stealing” is a garbage defense. He doesn’t know that, and by the time he finds out he’s already standing in your living room.

Most of It Isn’t Even Planned

Here’s the part that a lot of people don’t understand. Most crimes, even break-ins aren’t some patient, cased-for-weeks operation.

Now, I’ll be the first to tell you I don’t put much stock in what some researcher cooks up from behind a desk. But every so often one of these studies lines up with exactly what I watched growing up, and this is one of them. A team out of UNC Charlotte surveyed 422 convicted burglars across North Carolina, Kentucky and Ohio. About 41% said their jobs were spur of the moment. They weren’t watching your place for a week. They saw an opening and took it, usually the same day the idea hit them. And more than half said they were doing it to get money for drugs. A guy who needs a fix in the next two hours is not a careful planner. He wants the easy one, and he wants it now.

Worth knowing the alarm industry paid for that study, so naturally the big takeaway is “go buy an alarm.” Take the sales pitch with a grain of salt. But the raw answers from the offenders match what I’ve seen with my own eyes. These guys want fast, quiet, and gone.

Nothing Scares a Burglar Like Thinking You’re Home

So what tips the scale?

Occupancy. Number one, every single time. The biggest thing that sends a burglar walking is thinking somebody’s home. Those same convicts said running into a person was the thing they feared most, getting hurt, getting caught, catching a longer sentence for hurting somebody. A car in the driveway. A TV flickering through the curtains. A dog going off inside. None of that protects your stuff because it’s tough. It protects your stuff because it shoves his risk number through the roof.

After that it comes down to how easy you are compared to the house next door. A side gate hanging open. A slider with no bar in the track. Bushes tall enough to work behind where the street can’t see him. Mail piling up that quietly tells him nobody’s been home in four days. I wrote a whole piece on the little things people do that basically roll out the welcome mat for a burglar, and none of it has a thing to do with how much money you’ve got. It’s effort and exposure, plain and simple.

Roughly 60% of those burglars said an alarm would send them off looking for a different house. Not because the alarm physically stops anybody, it’s a sticker and a noise. It’s because the house down the block doesn’t have one and takes less work. You don’t need to turn your place into Fort Knox. You need to be more of a pain in the ass than the guy next to you. Even something as dumb-simple as a door wedge buys you time and noise, and time and noise are exactly what he doesn’t want.

You’re the Target He’s Sizing Up

Your house is one thing. Getting picked as a person, on foot, is worse, because now he’s looking right at you and reading you in seconds.

I’ve said for years that criminals can smell weakness from a mile away, the same way a predator in the wild reads a limp in the herd. Turns out a couple of researchers proved it back in 1981. Betty Grayson and Morris Stein filmed regular people walking through a rough part of New York, then played the tape for inmates locked up for violent crimes against strangers and asked them who they’d pick. The unsettling part is the criminals mostly agreed, tested separately, without ever comparing notes. The same handful of people, over and over.

And it wasn’t the smallest people, or the women, or the elderly the way you’d assume. It was how they moved. A stride that didn’t match their body. A shuffle. A walk that looked disconnected, head down, checked out. The ones who got skipped moved like they were awake and comfortable in their own skin. The ones who got picked looked like they’d already left the building.

Ted Bundy said almost the exact same thing once, that he could tell a victim by the way she walked, the tilt of her head, the way she carried herself. I hate that it’s true, but a serial killer and a room full of muggers landed on the identical read. That’s not luck. That’s a system, and you can score well on it or badly on it. Present yourself as the predator, not the prey, and most of them go find somebody else. I get deeper into that mindset in my piece on defending yourself from an attacker.

They test you, too. The guy who bumps you and watches how you react. The one who calls out asking for the time or a smoke from fifteen feet off. That’s not small talk, that’s an interview. He’s checking whether you clocked him, whether you’ll hold a boundary, whether you freeze. Fail the interview and you’re the pick. Pass it and he waits for the next person who won’t.

So What Do You Actually Do About It

Once you see target selection for what it is, a system, the whole gear conversation flips on its head.

You’re not trying to be unbeatable. Nobody’s unbeatable. A determined crew with time and a plan will get into anything you can build. You’re trying to be the wrong choice. You want his math to come back “too much risk, too much work, no guarantee it’s even worth it” before he ever steps onto your property.

Which means the cheap boring shit matters way more than the cool shit. Lights on a timer beat a gun safe you’ll never reach in time. A dog, even a little loud one, beats one more camera nobody can see. A door that’s actually locked and a slider with a dowel in the track beat the alarm you forgot to arm on your way out. A driveway that looks lived-in beats a system nobody can spot from the sidewalk. Walking to your car with your head up and your hands free beats the pepper spray buried at the bottom of your bag.

You’re managing three numbers on somebody else’s spreadsheet. Push his risk up. Push his effort up. Kill his confidence about the payoff. Do that and most of them, the impulsive ones, the ones chasing a habit, the ones who came looking for easy, are gone before anything ever happens.

You can’t control whether you get looked at. You can control what he sees when he does. Every one of these guys is asking the same silent question the second his eyes land on your house or on you: is this one worth it?

Your whole job is to make the honest answer no.

The post How Criminals Actually Pick a Target: It’s Risk, Reward, and Effort, Not What You Own appeared first on Activist Post.

It’s becoming clearer than ever that the US and Israel are locked into a long-term conflict with Iran, as revealed by their deliberate violations of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) ceasefire agreement with Iran. Trump’s planned hostilities seek to prevent Iran’s ability to control the Strait of Hormuz, and this US aggression will certainly extend right through the upcoming US midterm elections. Also, the US are pushing a weak Saudi Arabia to attack Yemen—a move that is most certain to hurt Saudi in the near term and beyond. Meanwhile, the dangers of more death and destruction for West Asia have never been more apparent. All this and more. 

Dialogue Works host Nima Alkhorshid talks with 21st Century Wire’s Patrick Henningsen. Watch:

READ MORE IRAN NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire IRAN Files

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The EU is considering a ban on third-country crypto services providers for the first time and is targeting 14 crypto companies, which it has not named yet.

The European Union (EU) extended sanctions against Russia to include four designations related to the cross-border A7 network, including its new links to Africa.

The EU is also extending its transaction ban to 14 unnamed crypto-related service platforms based in Georgia, Panama, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the Marshall Islands, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus.

Chainalysis recently noted that on the A7 network, where the A7A5 stablecoin operates, has processed nearly $120 billion to date and that it is purposely built for Russia’s sanctions evasion.

“We’re hitting over a hundred banks and crypto operators, 40+ vessels in Russia’s shadow fleet, and several oil refineries in Russia and Belarus,” Kaja Kallas, High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and chair of the Foreign Affairs Council, said in a statement.

The EU announced its previous package of sanctions against Russia in April, saying it was the “biggest package” of sanctions against the country in two years. In that statement, the EU said “Russia is becoming increasingly reliant on cryptocurrencies for international transactions.”

The new sanctions come just three days after Russia’s State Duma passed legislation establishing the country’s first comprehensive framework for regulating crypto with most of the rules slated to come into effect on Sept. 1. The law creates a legal framework for crypto exchanges, depositories, other digital asset providers as well as traders and investors.

The 21st sanctions package also sees the first introduction of a possible full third-country ban for crypto-asset services. This new instrument will enable the EU to ban any transaction between an EU operator and any crypto provider used by Russia.

Alongside the digital asset crackdown, the EU is imposing asset freezes and a prohibition to make funds available to 94 banks and major financial institutions. It is extending its transaction ban to 33 additional Russian credit and financial institutions.

The post EU hits Russia with massive 21st sanctions package targeting $120B crypto network appeared first on Activist Post.

There’s a powerful new documentary out called Earth’s Greatest Enemy by Abby Martin about the ecocidal abuses of the US war machine, and it addresses the most pressing existential hurdles we face as a species like nothing I’ve seen before.

Reading by Tim Foley:

There’s a powerful new documentary out called Earth’s Greatest Enemy by Abby Martin about the ecocidal abuses of the US war machine, and it addresses the most pressing existential hurdles we face as a species like nothing I’ve seen before.

The film breaks down how the US military has become the single most environmentally destructive institution on our planet by an extremely massive margin, walking the audience through the many ways the Pentagon and its global metastases have been churning out carbon emissions, pouring toxins into the air and water, wiping out precious ecosystems for gratuitous military bases, and pummeling our sea life with sonar and noise pollution, all while gleefully salivating at the prospect of plundering the resources which lay hidden beneath our planet’s rapidly thawing polar ice caps.

Martin skillfully ties the planet-devouring behavior of the US military to the global systems of capitalism and imperialism it was built to uphold. The viewer is left with a crystal clear picture of the ways ecocide, militarism and capitalism are inseparably intertwined, and an understanding that meaningfully opposing any of these malignancies necessarily entails opposing them all. The liberal fiction that one can be pro-environment while also supporting the US military is forcefully exposed for the absurdity that it is.

It’s a jarring film with extremely dark subject matter, but it also manages to be a work of transcendent beauty and optimism. A deep love of humans and all of earth’s creatures shines through in shot after shot, while slick editing and an inspired soundtrack allow the movie to zip along at a lively and entertaining pace. Martin concludes with a galvanizing call to use our outrage to loosen the empire’s already weakening grip on humanity’s collective consciousness, because our entire world depends on it.

Perhaps the most touching aspect of the documentary is the personal element Martin chose to bring in to her overarching narrative. She discusses how she and her husband (antiwar activist Mike Prysner, who co-directed the film) had their lives forever altered when they had kids and experienced a new level of urgency to help give rise to a brighter future. Their family of four becomes a microcosm of humanity’s struggle to liberate itself from the tyranny of the machine to create a better world for our children, and we see Martin’s love for her son and daughter reflected in a great tenderness for the world as a whole.

Anyway, I’ve never felt inclined to write a film review before so I don’t know if I’ve done a good job of encouraging people to watch this thing, but for my own audience I truly cannot recommend Earth’s Greatest Enemy enough. It’s available streaming on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Watermelon Pictures. Screening tour dates and further information can be found on the Earth’s Greatest Enemy website. Be sure to leave a review on Letterboxed or IMDB if you can.

Enjoy!

__________________

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The post ‘Earth’s Greatest Enemy’ Delivers A Penetrating Insight Into The Heart Of Our Dystopia appeared first on Activist Post.

Turkey is simultaneously dumping US Treasuries, deepening Russia’s energy embrace, rolling out a tax regime to poach capital fleeing the Gulf… and squaring off against an Israeli political class that now speaks openly of Turkey as an enemy. It’s strategic.

Turkey sold nearly all of its US Treasury holdings in March — cutting them from $16 billion to just $1.8 billion in a single month. The official narrative frames this as emergency reserve management amid a weakening lira and inflation running above 32%. But the mechanics of financial stress don’t explain the direction of travel. Nations don’t systematically dump the debt of their allies.

President Erdogan has been explicit. In a recent address he cast Turkey as “one of the shining stars of the new era,” invoking the restoration of Ottoman-era influence across the region. Turkey vehemently opposes Israel’s operations in Gaza, and in Ankara’s strategic calculus, Washington and Tel Aviv are increasingly viewed as a single entity. The Treasury sell-off is as much a political signal as a liquidity operation. The Turkish government has smelt blood in the streets and wants to capitalise on the situation.

The energy relationship with Russia tells the same story. Rosatom’s Akkuyu nuclear plant — a build-own-operate project in which Russia retains ownership for decades — just received a further $9 billion in Russian financing, with $4–5 billion deploying in 2026 alone. Turkey has loudly advertised its renewable credentials and a 2053 net-zero target, but Akkuyu sits outside that narrative entirely. When it comes online it will supply roughly 10% of Turkey’s electricity and lock in a structural strategic dependency on Moscow that no solar panel cancels out. Turkey talks diversification; it acts with ruthless pragmatism.

The Iran conflict has handed Erdogan an unexpected opportunity on the capital side.

The disruption to Gulf Cooperation Council financial hubs — Dubai chief among them — has put mobile, internationally structured wealth back in play. Investors who relocated to the UAE for zero-tax treatment are now reassessing. Into that gap, Turkey’s parliament on recently passed Erdogan’s flagship fiscal incentive package — nine permanent structural reforms that together represent one of the most aggressive capital attraction plays of the decade:

1. 0% income tax on foreign earnings for 20 years
2. 1% inheritance tax on all wealth
3. Full citizenship from $400,000
4. 2% one-off tax to repatriate overseas assets, no questions asked
5. 9% corporate tax — permanent
6. 0% tax on trading through Turkey
7. Business registration in one day via AI-assisted process
8. Machinery and equipment imports: duty-free, 0% VAT
9. Mortgage overhaul: 10% down payment, terms up to 25 years

The last item deserves particular attention. The mortgage reform isn’t just a financing tweak — it unlocks millions of first-time Turkish buyers who were previously priced out of the market.

That domestic demand surge lands at precisely the moment foreign capital begins flowing in under the new tax regime. Turkey’s residential real estate market was already undersupplied. The combination of newly bankable local buyers and inbound international capital chasing a low-tax domicile points to a meaningful price cycle ahead — at minimum in Istanbul and the coastal cities where foreign demand concentrates.

The architect of Istanbul’s financial hub ambitions goes back to at least 2009, when former Deputy PM Nazim Ekren was championing Atasehir as the anchor of Eurasia’s financial capital. Aran Hawker, who provided trading infrastructure to Istanbul’s exchanges in 2011, expects wealth repositioned not only from the GCC but from North America, Europe, and the UK — from people “not happy with political situations in those respective countries.” Istanbul Finance Centre transit trade income is now fully exempt from corporate tax through 2047.

The Greater Israel Shadow

Beneath the fiscal and energy calculations runs a darker strategic undercurrent — one that Ankara is acutely aware of and Western analysts largely ignore.

The expansion of Israeli strategic ambition across the region, accelerated by the Gaza operation and the broader Zionist maximalist project, now has Turkey explicitly in its crosshairs.

The Bosphorus — the narrow strait connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, through which a significant share of global energy and grain trade passes — is not simply a Turkish asset. It is one of the most strategically significant chokepoints on earth. Control of it, or the ability to influence who controls it, is a prize that serious regional powers do not ignore.

Israeli political figures have begun to speak with unusual candour about Turkey as a threat rather than a competitor. Israeli Minister of Culture and Sports Miki Zohar stated plainly:

“We must begin to treat Turkey as an enemy state.”

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett went further, framing Turkey in the same breath as Iran:

“A new Turkish threat is emerging. We must act in different ways, but simultaneously against the threat from Tehran and against the hostility from Ankara.”

These are not fringe voices. When a sitting minister and a former head of government use the language of simultaneous threat management for both Iran and Turkey, they are signalling a strategic posture — one that has obvious implications for NATO cohesion, for the future of the Bosphorus as a neutral passage, and for the stability of the broader region.

Erdogan reads this clearly. The deepening of Russian energy ties, the rejection of US debt, the cultivation of Ottoman-sphere influence — these are not reactions to Gaza alone. They are pre-positioning against a regional order that Turkey now judges to be hostile to its existence as a sovereign power.

The Greater Israel project, in its maximalist form, envisions territorial and political influence stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates. Turkey sits at the northern edge of that strategic horizon. Control or destabilisation of the Bosphorus would fundamentally alter the balance of naval power in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea — a prize of the highest order for any power seeking regional hegemony. Whether or not one assigns full credibility to the maximalist reading, the signals from Israeli political leadership are sufficient for Ankara to treat the threat as real and plan accordingly.

A NATO member that sells US debt, builds Russian nuclear plants, courts capital fleeing Western disorder, and now faces explicit identification as an enemy state by Israeli leadership is not drifting. Rather, it’s repositioning on every front simultaneously.

The picture that emerges is coherent and accelerating….

Turkey controls the Bosphorus. It borders the Middle East, maintains NATO’s second-largest military, and imports the energy that geopolitical conflict makes more expensive — hence the inflation, the rate pressure, and the reserve burn. But Erdogan’s response is not to seek Western reassurance. It is to deepen the Russian energy anchor, signal alignment with the Global South’s reading of the Gaza conflict, position Istanbul as the beneficiary of Gulf instability and Western political dysfunction, and quietly fortify against a regional order that now names Turkey an adversary. The Treasury dump is one data point in a larger sequence. The Ottoman ambition is the frame. And the clock is moving faster than most investors realise.

Editor’s Note: Turkey’s repositioning is part of a much larger shift now reshaping the global economic and political order. In our special report, Clash of the Systems: Thoughts on Investing at a Unique Point in Time, a contrarian money manager explains the forces driving this transition, the risks they pose to your wealth and personal freedom, and how you can position yourself to stay one step ahead.

Get instant access to the special report here.

The post Erdogan’s Ottoman Gambit: Turkey Prepares for a New Regional Order appeared first on Activist Post.

The Pacific Ring of Fire has been extremely active this year, and that should deeply alarm all of us. Approximately 90 percent of all global earthquakes occur along the Pacific Ring of Fire, and we have just gotten another reminder that danger is potentially lurking every single moment of every single day. Those that were killed by the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that just hit Japan were just living their lives like normal when disaster suddenly struck. Unfortunately, the entire west coast of the United States also sits directly along the Pacific Ring of Fire, and scientists openly acknowledge that the clock is ticking.

As far as I know, nobody was forecasting that a magnitude 7.1 earthquake would hit Japan on Tuesday.

But that is precisely what happened…

A 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit Japan’s southern Kumamoto prefecture on Tuesday, knocking out power to thousands of homes, rupturing roads and leaving some trapped and others presumed dead inside a partially collapsed shopping mall.

Speaking to reporters from her office in Tokyo, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said authorities were still assessing the full extent of the damage in the area, which was devastated by a deadly quake a decade ago.

“We have already been informed that people have been injured. Power outages and fires have occurred in some areas, and there has also been damage to roads and bridges and the collapse of buildings,” Takaichi said.

One moment, local residents were casually strolling through a shopping mall.

But then everything started shaking and the shopping mall collapsed right on top of them…

Footage on social media shows members of the public running for cover and crouching down on the floor as the ground shook at the shopping centre.

An unknown number of people are believed to have become trapped in the rubble of the mall, with rescue operations being carried out, the Fire and Disaster Management Agency said.

There have also been several reports of injuries and damage to roads, bridges and buildings, as well as blackouts and fire.

Videos on social media showed clouds of smoke billowing into the air as flames engulfed a building, while firefighters scrambled to tackle the blaze.

This is a great tragedy, and it shows how quickly something like this can occur.

But it shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us.

Throughout 2026, Japan has been hammered by sizable earthquakes over and over again.

Back on April 20th, northern Japan was hit by a magnitude 7.7 earthquake…

On April 20 this year, a tremor measuring 7.7 hit the country’s north, injuring at least 10 people and shaking large buildings in Tokyo.

This prompted authorities to issue a special advisory warning of an increased risk of earthquakes of magnitude 8.0 or stronger.

That one made headlines all over the planet.

About a month ago, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake shook northern Japan on June 25th…

At least 10 people were injured after a magnitude 7.2 earthquake hit northern Japan on Thursday morning, registering a rare upper 6 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale of 7 in the town of Hashikami, Aomori Prefecture. No tsunami warning has been issued.

A mild quake was also felt in Tokyo.

The Japan Meteorological Agency said the epicenter was 44 kilometers deep off the coast of Iwate Prefecture.

One day later, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake rattled Yamanashi Prefecture’s Fuji Five Lakes area…

An earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 5.6 hit Yamanashi Prefecture’s Fuji Five Lakes area at 10:28 p.m. on Friday, registering a lower 6 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale of 7 in Fuji-Kawaguchiko, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.

The JMA estimates that the earthquake originated at a depth of 20 kilometers. The earthquake did not trigger a tsunami.

Two days after that, residents of Iwate Prefecture were awakened by a magnitude 6.1 earthquake…

A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Iwate Prefecture early Sunday, the latest in a spate of temblors to shake the area.
The quake, which occurred at 5:21 a.m., registered a lower 5 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale of 7 in Hachinohe, Aomori Prefecture. No tsunami warning was issued.

According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, the epicenter was at a depth of approximately 40 kilometers.

I could provide many more examples, but I think that most of you get the point by now.

Japan is being shaken over and over again, and there is no end in sight.

Here in the United States, we have been very fortunate.

There have been a lot of sizable earthquakes along the west coast this year, but no really big ones.

That is the good news.

The bad news is that the amount of accumulated tectonic stress in Southern California is “higher today than at any point over the last 1,000 years”…

And the time is ripe. According to a new paper, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, accumulative stresses in the Earth’s crust in California are higher today than at any point over the last 1,000 years, raising concerns over the potential for a massive rupture in the Los Angeles region.

The research could help scientists better understand the specific conditions that come ahead of massive earthquakes, giving us a clearer picture of what range of potentially devastating scenarios we should be ready for. Predicting when these events will occur, however, remains next to impossible, despite scientists’ best efforts.

The densely populated LA region is home to the Cajon Pass, a “critical fault junction,” meaning that a major earthquake could cross from one fault line to the other. The international team led by University of Bern Earth sciences researcher Liliane Burkhard modeled 1,000 years of earthquake history along these fault systems. They found that tectonic stresses, measured in force per unit area, have been building up since the last 7.9 magnitude quake that shook the LA region in 1857, reaching and even exceeding the highest levels over the last millennium.

Yes, a “massive rupture” is most certainly coming.

This is something that I have been warning about for many years.

So what would such a disaster look like?

One expert is warning that a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Southern California would cause more than a trillion dollars in damage…

When the next “Big One” hits, it could carry a massive price tag, according to a California earthquake expert.

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake along the southern San Andreas Fault, rupturing from Imperial County to Los Angeles County, could result in an estimated $1 trillion in damage across Southern California.

That’s according to a state earthquake expert who calculated the costs based on previous disasters, including the recent Los Angeles wildfires. The estimate has also been adjusted for inflation.

In my opinion, when the “Big One” finally arrives it will do far more damage than that.

Much of Southern California is just barely above sea level.

When the “Big One” strikes, the ground on one side of the San Andreas fault could end up sitting much higher than ground on the other side of the San Andreas fault.

The magnitude 7.8 earthquake that hit the Philippines earlier this year raised the seabed in some areas by about 6 feet.

So don’t think that it can’t happen.

What we have witnessed so far is just a preview.

Much larger earthquakes are on the way, and the vast majority of those living along the Pacific Ring of Fire are completely and utterly unprepared.

The post The Huge Earthquake In Japan Is Another Example That Shows The Pacific Ring Of Fire Is Roaring To Life – Is California Next? appeared first on Activist Post.

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There was a time when America’s industrial titans built railroads, steel mills, and oil companies. Today, influence is measured in data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, media, and information. Few families illustrate that transformation better than the Ellisons.

Larry Ellison built Oracle from a small software company into one of the world’s largest technology firms. His background and rags-to-riches story are quite interesting. Today Oracle is one of the dominant providers of enterprise databases and cloud infrastructure, serving governments, financial institutions, healthcare providers, defense contractors, and many of the world’s largest corporations. Oracle’s software touches enormous portions of the global economy. When governments collect taxes, hospitals manage patient records, banks process transactions, or corporations analyze data, Oracle systems are often operating behind the scenes.

Larry Ellison’s personal fortune has placed him among the wealthiest individuals in the world for decades. His influence extends well beyond technology. He has invested billions in real estate, owns nearly all of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, has backed medical research, invested heavily in artificial intelligence, and has maintained relationships with political and business leaders from both parties. The TikTok debacle this year was solved when the power was handed over to Ellison’s conglomerate. The sheer data this family has access to is staggering. Wealth at that level naturally provides access to decision makers across government and industry.

Then we come to his son, David Ellison, who founded Skydance Media in 2010. The company produced or co-produced major franchises including Mission: Impossible, Top Gun: Maverick, and Star Trek, before expanding into television, animation, gaming, and streaming. This was never merely a wealthy man’s son playing Hollywood producer. Skydance became the vehicle through which the Ellison family entered the machinery of American culture.

The Skydance takeover of Paramount for $8 billion brought CBS, CBS News, Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, Showtime, and decades of film and television rights into the Ellison orbit. The father built an empire around the storage and processing of information. The son moved into the business of selecting, packaging, and distributing information to the public. That combination should concern everyone, regardless of politics. Oracle occupies a critical position within the technological infrastructure used by governments and corporations, while Paramount reaches millions of people through news, entertainment, sports, children’s programming, and streaming. One side of the family empire helps manage the data. The other side can help shape the narrative.

This is how oligarchies emerge in the modern world. They do not need to abolish elections or openly seize control of government. They acquire the infrastructure, the platforms, the studios, the databases, and the channels through which society communicates. Politicians then come begging for access, favorable coverage, campaign support, or technological assistance.

I have written extensively about the growing surveillance state because data is the new instrument of political control. Oracle does not merely sell office software; its databases and cloud systems sit beneath governments, banks, hospitals, corporations, and defense institutions, processing information on countless individuals. This does not mean Larry Ellison personally searches through anyone’s private records, but it does mean his empire occupies a powerful position within the infrastructure where that information is stored and managed. Governments no longer need to kick down every door when they can pressure a handful of technology companies to surrender the data voluntarily or obtain it through the courts. Now his son controls a media empire capable of influencing what millions of Americans see, hear, and believe about that very system. The father’s world helps store the information while the son’s world can shape the public narrative, and anyone who cannot see the danger in combining those two forms of power is refusing to understand how a modern surveillance state is constructed.

Some will say there is no evidence that the Ellisons have committed any crime merely by owning these businesses. That misses the entire point. A concentration of power does not become dangerous only after somebody is convicted. The problem is creating a structure in which a handful of unelected families can exercise more economic, technological, and cultural influence than entire governments. America once feared monopolies because people understood that concentrated economic power eventually becomes political power.

The Ellisons did not invent this system, but they have become one of its clearest examples. Larry Ellison built the technological empire. David Ellison extended the family’s reach into media and culture. When one family can occupy both the infrastructure of information and the institutions that distribute it, we are no longer discussing ordinary entrepreneurial success. We are looking at the architecture of modern power.

The post The Rise of the Ellison Empire appeared first on Activist Post.

The airline first teased Bitcoin payments back in 2022.

People can now pay with Bitcoin to buy flights from Dubai-based airline Emirates. 

Working with Crypto.com, Emirates said Tuesday the customers now have the option to book flights using the crypto exchange’s payment feature.

Crypto.com and Emirates last year announced they would work together. 

Emirates’ Deputy President and Chief Commercial Officer Adnan Kazim said the move “reflects the rapidly evolving preferences of a younger, digitally fluent generation who manage their money and plan their journeys primarily from their phones and they expect the airlines they fly with to keep pace.”

Emirates first teased plans back in 2022 to implement Bitcoin payments; the latest move allows Crypto.com customers to use any digital assets to make payments. 

Under the new setup, travelers with a Crypto.com account can select Crypto.com Pay at checkout when booking on emirates.com or through the Emirates App. 

The option is limited for now to eligible UAE residents making bookings priced and settled in Emirati Dirham.

The integration runs through Crypto.com’s Dubai-licensed entity, which the company says was the first virtual asset service provider to receive a Stored Value Facilities license from the Central Bank of the UAE. 

The launch also feeds into wider government targets. It supports Dubai’s Cashless Strategy, part of the D33 Economic Agenda, which is aiming to make 90% of transactions across the emirate’s government and private sectors digital by the end of 2026. 

It follows on from an earlier Emirates partnership with Dubai Finance to advance digital payments, and comes after Crypto.com struck its own deal with Dubai Finance to accept digital payments for government services.

The post Dubai-Based Emirates Airline Adds Bitcoin and Crypto Payments appeared first on Activist Post.

It’s not just all the war, injustice, ecocide and dystopia that hurts. It’s knowing it didn’t have to be this way. It’s knowing what could have been.

Reading by Tim Foley:

It’s funny the things that get to you when you’ve been at this for a while. 

Today the thing that smacked me upside the head and made me lay my face in my hands for a minute was a viral video clip of Canadian politician Bill Oliver accidentally reading out text from the AI chatbot which had authored his speech before the New Brunswick legislature.

“Public confidence in the office of an advocate matters,” Oliver said while reading from his prepared statement, before blurting out “Here’s a more natural, flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points.”

I mean, damn dude.

I can’t get over how this is the future we wound up in. Things could have been so beautiful, and instead we wound up with this.

It’s not just all the war, injustice, ecocide and dystopia that hurts. It’s knowing it didn’t have to be this way. It’s knowing what could have been.

All this innovation that’s being poured into finding new ways to conduct mass military slaughter, to surveil and control our entire society, to restrict and manipulate the flow of information, to create artificial scarcity for products that people need, to create artificial demand for products that people do not need, to compete with rival corporations in order to turn billionaires into trillionaires — none of that needs to be happening. Humanity could be using its creativity and cleverness to make the world a better place instead.

If we were pouring all our resources, time and energy into collaborating with each other for the common good instead of competing with each other for power and profit, we could easily create paradise on earth. If all our brainpower was going toward improving life on this planet without worrying about our competitors or overlooking any possible advancement that doesn’t generate value for shareholders, our innovative potential would easily increase a thousandfold.

We could heal our biosphere while ensuring that everyone on earth has what they need to live. We could provide healthcare, education and rapid public transportation to everybody while using automation to eliminate the need for human toil. We could be living lives of ever-burgeoning leisure, wonder, and satisfaction, assured of a better future for our children and grandchildren.

Instead we get this shit. Mass murder and exploitation in an increasingly dystopian civilization on a dying world, where the front line of scientific discovery is the military-industrial complex and the construction of an AI tech surveillance network.

All because we haven’t yet managed to unplug ourselves from the abusive system of capitalism and its outgrowth into global imperialism. We’re being held strangling at this self-destructive chokepoint humanity created for itself a few hundred years ago, and soon it’s going to squeeze the life right out of us.

And it could have been so good. It could still be so good. We’ve just got to find some way to use the power of our numbers to throw off these oppressive chains and build the kind of world that needs to be built. Because the current system clearly is not working.

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