In December 1989, the United States invaded Panama. I not only remember it well, I remember the years prior ROTC recruiters asking “are you ready to do something meaningful” and watching my classmates rush for the opportunity to grab a parachute.

Manuel Noriega’s face, scarred as a child, meant he grew up being bullied for having “Pineapple Face” — a term American officials used freely when they explained why his regime change was so necessary and urgent.

The official justifications centered on Noriega’s forces killing an American citizen at a checkpoint. Moreover, the U.S. was outraged by Noriega’s Dignity Battalions targeting and attacking politicians who dared to oppose him. Photos and video circulated of the injustice, the cruelty of a leader amassing centralized power.

And finally, there was the nullification of election results. If the January 6th assault by Trump militants to seize the Capitol after an election just came to mind, you’re on the right parallel.

Fast forward to January 2026, and ICE agents killed Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen and mother of three, at a checkpoint in Minneapolis. It was at least the fourth fatal shooting by federal immigration officers in five months.

Look at the 1989 Time magazine cover and then read that paragraph again. Trump shock troops have set up checkpoints based on political targeting and killed American citizens multiple times in just a few months.

The current U.S. administration, as if reading the Noriega playbook (cough CIA cough), has even rushed to falsely label an innocent woman a domestic terrorist. It’s as unbelievable as any Noriega bulletin. The American Vice President has declared federal shock troops who target and shoot a citizen are “protected by absolute immunity”. Stephen Colbert has called it “obey or die in America, and if you die that’s proof that you didn’t obey.” The killing is being set up to be both punishment and evidence of guilt.

The same week, the U.S. President announced that senators who vote against his unauthorized and illegal war authority should be removed from Congress. His administration has meanwhile defied one in three federal court orders issued against it. A loyalist serving as Speaker of the House has mused about eliminating federal courts entirely. He said no courts is a plan, while he also says anyone who interferes with such a plan will be prosecuted… in court. Get it? This is Kangaroo court logic, made infamous by the 1943 execution of Sophie Scholl.

The United States invaded Panama for far less. And at the time it barked loudly about Pineapple Face being the grave threat to Americans, the man who had to be stopped. I suppose I could use a bingo card for this, but a checklist seems more useful right now.

Notably, Noriega was a U.S. asset for many years, paid handsomely through corrupt channels under George Bush at the CIA, before suddenly becoming inconvenient when George Bush became President. The parallel there writes itself.

The checkpoint killings are the most obvious and direct parallel. Noriega’s forces killing Lt. Paz was a trigger for George Bush ordering Operation Just Cause. Today we read about ICE, just like Noriega’s goon squads, killing at least four people in five months, including a U.S. citizen.

Where’s the just cause now? Where’s Junior Bush calling for regime change?

I mean, I wonder who does the Bush family recommend in 2026, to come invade us and remove America’s pineapple face?

An astute commenter on this blog has prompted me to go deeper into what a genuine German anarchist collective attacking energy infrastructure would call themselves.

I can say with certainty, based on history, that investigation of left-wing extremism leads to names and tags like these:

• Autonome Zellen (Autonomous Cells)
• Schwarze Flamme (Black Flame)
• Klimarebellion (Climate Rebellion)
• Anti-Atom Aktion (Anti-Nuclear Action)
• Bewegung 2 Juni (date of disaster)

This clarification of identity is not about speculation as much as experience from inside anarchist hacking culture, and decades of evidence.

In complete contrast, however, a name like “die Vulkangruppe” reads like someone in the Russian military contractor business wanted a dramatic German-sounding name like Wagner Group. Hitler loved Wagner. Hitler loved Roman mythology.

In fact, when you look at over 100 years of anarchist naming habits, the use of the Roman god name Vulkan fails every single test!

• NO political descriptor – not “Revolutionary,” “Red,” “Autonomous,” “Anti-“
• NO commemorative element – no date, no martyr
• NO class signifier – no worker/proletarian reference
• WRONG frame – anarchists believe “NO gods, NO masters”
• WRONG aesthetic – Roman mythology is bourgeois classical education associated with fascism
• WRONG imagery – Forge/weapon of Vulkan god symbolizes dictator, strong man

I’ll say it again. 100 years.

Here’s another way to explain the naming problem. The left never uses anything that the Vulkan framing does. The meaning is so far removed from political conventions on the left, that its use becomes evidence of extreme right-wing symbolism.

On top of that, Germans culturally reject Roman imagery because their national identity was built on defeating Rome. Russians, by contrast, embrace it: “Third Rome” ideology, Tsar derived from Caesar, imperial inheritance from Byzantium. The Vulkan name fits Moscow’s right-wing mystic vocabulary, not Berlin’s.

And what about the Icelandic volcano aliasing like the Hekla and Katla pseudonyms? Germans have no cultural connection to Iceland. Nothing. More importantly, climate activists focus on human-caused problems: fossil fuels, carbon emissions, nuclear waste. Volcanoes are natural geological events that represent the opposite of what environmentalists protest.

No genuine green anarchist would brand themselves around volcanic imagery, because why would they? Such a meaningless foreign geological reference is an implausible German activist naming story. The volcanic aliasing instead reads like backstopping by GRU; a thin cover fabricated after the fact for Russian military contractors to obfuscate Roman god worship.

The 2011 Hekla-Empfangskomitee attributed to the Vulkangruppe is even worse German! It makes no sense unless you speak Russian.

A Russian naturally would say: “Комитет по встрече Гекла” or “Committee for the reception of Hekla”. That becomes… Hekla-Empfangskomitee.

A German would say Hekla-Begrüßungsgruppe or just use the volcano name alone. In German left-wing militant groups we never see any reference to any committee:

• Fraktion (RAF)
• Zellen (Revolutionäre Zellen)
• Gruppe (Baader-Meinhof Gruppe)
• Bewegung (movement)
• Bund (league)

However, in Russian the word Комитет (Komitet) is everywhere like КГБ = Комитет государственной безопасности (Committee for State Security). I mean the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti is a canonical example because that’s the KGB. Therefore the “reception committee” phrase is alien to Germans, and practically a Russian fingerprint for the terror group.

The construction of “Hekla-Empfangskomitee” combines:

• A foreign geological reference with zero connection to Germany, zero connection to climate
• A word (“Empfang”/reception) Germans would not use
• An organizational suffix (“Komitee”) that is a default in Russian, and only appears in Germany under imposed Soviet bureaucracy

Add to all this that there have been attempts by Russian intelligence services to organize vandalism in the name of environmental activists. The recent “Be Greener!” operation proved over 270 vehicles were damaged by Russian assets across Germany to inflame public sentiment against the Green Party and Robert Habeck. The perpetrators were not climate activists but rather individuals recruited by the FSB.

“Die Vulkangruppe” appears by all accounts to be a Russian term, about as “German” as Russia’s infamous “The Wagner Group”.

The bogus “innovation” rhetoric from Californian billionaires Sacks and Khosla is so thin, it isn’t even a cover. It’s a form of disinformation. What they describe is elites performing harsh extraction.

Larry Page is officially moving business out of California ahead of a proposed billionaire’s tax

This is some late 1800s boondoggle language by robber barons. They swindle. They cheat. They hornswoggle. All that heated rhetoric just to take as much as they can and avoid giving.

Stanford, the actual man who founded the school, literally took huge government payments for services and goods he never delivered. His name is best associated with fraud, racism and genocide. Perhaps, so much hidden for so long, that we should not be surprised to see ongoing atrocious behavior from the graduates of Stanford.

Google launched on public funding out of Stanford, built on the back of Yahoo—also launched out of Stanford. A university built with huge land grants and public research funding was the genesis. The early search algorithm was developed under a federal taxpayer grant from the NSF. The internet itself was a taxpayer funded DARPA project. California’s public university system, its roads filled with Google buses and Waymo cabs, its courts that enforce contracts and intellectual property—all of it is the substrate that made Google possible. Without taxpayer funding, Silicon Valley, let alone Google, would not have existed.

And the response to being asked for a measly 5% tax to keep the system running is to flee to a state specifically structured as a shelter for robber barons—one whose entire political system has become a preferred destination for Russian blood capital.

Related: Feb 2025 press release about DOJ conviction of elites laundering Russian money through Sunny Isles properties. Florida, it’s where elite money extraction schemes run to hide.

It was not “I disagree with this policy and here’s my counter-proposal.”

Just: no, I don’t share, I grab and run to where the sun don’t shine.

Five percent as public benefit? Five percent to give back to those he has taken so much from, and to help the next Larry Page?

If it were about policy disagreement or preferring a different state’s governance, you’d see some alternative contribution. Instead it’s pure negation: I will pay into no system of representation I don’t control, or into any democratic institution of law, anywhere.

Florida gains nothing because there’s nothing to gain. No state income tax, no wealth tax. Page isn’t relocating his tax burden to a different American community. He’s eliminating it, hiding like an imperialist baron trying to delay the fall of his empire by amassing wealth into a walled island.

Imperialism framing is a precise fit. It’s the same pattern: extract value from a territory, externalize costs onto that territory’s population, use legal structures to ensure the profits flow elsewhere. The only difference is they’re doing it to their own country rather than colonies—though the distinction blurs when you consider which communities bear the costs of underfunded schools and infrastructure. The racial geography of Silicon Valley wealth is not accidental; Palo Alto was built on restrictive covenants, and tech money has only accelerated the displacement patterns that followed.

Page fleeing California to avoid paying taxes is just the individual-scale version of this logic. His entitlement is breathtaking evidence of mental gymnastics and cruelty. He registers $156 billion in accumulated value and the response to a small public contribution—like what he benefited from—is to run like a Victorian drunk refusing to pay the bar tab because “do you know who I am.”

The question isn’t what Google elites pay, it’s what they’d pay without their long-term anti-social cheat-the-system architectures. These people who’ve captured massive value from a hedge on top of public infrastructure, from publicly educated workforces, and from public legal frameworks are cruelly engineering their affairs to contribute back as little as possible to those foundational systems, or nothing at all.

The structure was predation defined: intellectual property licensed to a Dutch subsidiary, which paid royalties to an Irish holding company, which was tax-resident in Bermuda. Profits generated by American engineers, using American infrastructure, research funded by DARPA, educated at public universities, all routed through tiny island shells to avoid contributing back any of it.

What’s next, seasteading for Lebensraum or to colonize Mars and revert humanity to strongman fantasy zones of zero laws, just for one guy’s latest whimsy? Slavery next?

Google intentionally paid an effective rate in the single digits on foreign earnings for years despite a statutory US corporate rate of 35%. The “Double Irish” closing didn’t end the game, just shifted it to different structures. The proposed single digit 5% wealth tax on Page’s $156 billion comes to roughly $7.8 billion. Not much. Would you give an $8 tip on a $160 meal? Imagine being asked for 5%, a whopping 30 point discount under the statutory corporate rate, and then running for the door rather than pay your unsalaried uninsured waiter even a cent.

There’s also the irony that tech elites constantly lobby for H-1B visas, importing workers educated at other countries’ public expense, while refusing to fund the domestic systems that educated their founders. Pulling up the ladder after climbing it is toxic, and very typical of American elites.

Page claims he’s escaping to freedom, but he’s actually building his own cage of misery. His island-buying will never be liberation, only isolation and exile. The man with $156 billion ends up scared and guarding his rock like a tin-pot dictator because he couldn’t bear to participate in real freedom.