History, Poetry, Security

Snow Globe: CIA Shows AI Use in Historiography Fabrication Engine

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The official etymology of “snow globe” from a 2024 arXiv paper about AI war games is “a simulated snowstorm contained in a glass orb, and by analogy this work is a simulated crisis self-contained in software”.

We introduce “Snow Globe,” an LLM-powered multi-agent system for playing qualitative wargames. With Snow Globe, every stage of a text-based qualitative wargame from scenario preparation to post-game analysis can be optionally carried out by AI, humans, or a combination thereof.

But let’s be honest, “snow job” is the better name, as vintage intelligence community slang for exactly what the arXiv paper is actually talking about: overwhelm a target with plausible-sounding material until they stop interrogating the premises.

The globe as the scope is comprehensive, it’s planetary. We are talking here about a paper describing a global disinformation machine that:

  1. Takes 496 real historical crises as training data.
  2. Generates “plausible” blends of fact and fiction by design.
  3. Segments output by psychological persona type.
  4. Treats confabulation as a core feature.
  5. Runs thousands of automated iterations to optimize framing.

News flash (pun intended obviously), this does NOT describe an analyst training tool. It is a very fancy historiography fabrication engine. A mythology machine. An intelligence waffle iron.

It produces believable sounding precedents on demand, like historical analogies that feel authoritative but are computationally optimized to move specific audience segments toward predetermined conclusions.

Let me explain how this works in real life.

The nails-on-chalkboard contradictions about President Truman being spread all over the world right now serve as proof of concept. Within small targeted communities, targeted lies stick like peanut butter. The Trump operation spreads the following contradicting narratives all at the same time:

  • MAGA frame: “Department of War is a title that restores founding strength, by reversing Truman for being too weak and woke”
  • Constitutional conservative frame: “Truman was strong and brave, he did Korea without Congress, and the big man established precedent”
  • Interventionist hawk frame: “We’re back to winning, like before the weak-kneed Truman messed it all up”
  • Legal skeptic frame: “America in Panama 1989 was perfectly normal”

Yeah, what a mess. Internally, each frame is meant to be coherent, despite contradicting other frames. Collectively, it makes zero sense. It’s a “power” transfer model that bypasses the cognitive defenses of isolated communities.

The “snow job globe” performs computationally generated targeting of weighted personas from a crisis database. But I guarantee you that the algorithm cherry-picking Reagan invading Panama is not good at historical analysis. It’s a tell, like when an algorithm draws human hands with eight fingers.

Panama? Really? Let me be clear here, because I know this historiography is going to grow legs.

Panama was never an arrest operation. Delta Force were sent to kill Noriega ASAP, right after a dramatic prison breach. It was a full invasion of nearly 30,000 troops causing over 500 Panamanian deaths and widespread destruction from bombing. The guy who ordered the invasion, President Bush, ran the CIA when it had Noriega on their payroll ($200,000/yr) throughout the 1970s. The US indictment of Noriega was after their own operation of him, as he became politically inconvenient (e.g. refused to aid Contras). It was violent regime change (UN 44/240) that ended with a kangaroo court. The CIA used a show trial to cover themselves.

The Snow Globe algorithm is pattern-matching on the cover stories, not real history or the actual operations.

I see a retrieval system mining a crisis database, popping out what it incorrectly thinks is “likeliest” analogy for “regime change via arrest warrant.” Imagine an analyst typing police act… and the algorithm says “did you mean Panama?” It’s like the autocorrect concept has been pushed all the way into automation of autocratic aggression. What could go wrong?

The “open source” release is to legitimize this rushed AI methodology before anyone notices what has been deployed operationally. It’s the same pattern we saw with the torture memos. Publish the methodology in legitimate venues first. Then when the operation surfaces, the defense is “established practice.” Peer-reviewed literature shows up as bad stuff too-late-to-stop-now.

The OLC memos came out through official channels, got cited as “legal guidance,” and by the time anyone traced the circularity (DOJ asks DOJ if DOJ actions are legal, DOJ says yes), the practices were institutionalized. Snow Globe goes to same laundromat: IQT builds it, CIA tests it, Studies in Intelligence publishes it, and now the methodology has institutional provenance. Challenge it and you’re challenging “peer-reviewed research.”

Fabricated historical analogies clearly already leak into White House fact sheets (they can’t seem to get Truman right, let alone Roosevelt), and now all the laundered and targeted snow job machine work can plausibly be called “research outputs.”

Relevant Timeline:

  • April 2024: arXiv paper drops, GitHub goes public. Academic legitimization.
  • April 2025: CIA-IQT joint war game. Operational testing.
  • September 2025: “Department of War” rebrand. Symbolic infrastructure deployed.
  • December 2025: Studies in Intelligence publication. Institutional canonization.
  • January 2026: Venezuela. Live fire.

We are looking at nine months from intelligence waffle iron “research collaboration” to airstrikes justified by contradictory historical framing targeting different constituencies.

The machine takes raw crisis data and stamps out shaped narratives from the same batter, using different molds for different consumers.

Their “persona” system clearly skips right past understanding psychology; it’s about setting up a topographical grid for carpet bombing. Pacifist, Aggressor, Tactician, Strategist aren’t analytical lenses. They’re targeting categories with an architecture that treats confabulation as the product, not the bug.

Snow Globe fabricates, then it iterates to improve fabrications. The paper says it can run “multiple iterations of fully automated games to anticipate possible outcomes.” That’s A/B testing at speed. The system is meant to rapidly learn what sticks to which audience, then optimize and information bomb the hell out of them.

Every LLM developer was being taught hallucination is bad, yet this system flips the entire script into weaponizing hallucination as if it’s magic agitation juice. The explicit statement that blending facts with fiction is “actually a benefit” isn’t a research finding. It’s a capability specification for snowing people around the globe.

History, Security

Trump “Police Action” is Obvious Crime Against Peace: Just Ask Hitler

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Trump calling his unilateral aggression a “police action” is the Gleiwitz doctrine. The explicitly named “Department of War” saying it will punish whomever it wants, whenever it wants, then trying to appropriate the language of law enforcement after the fact?

A German citizen named Franciszek Honiok has been recorded as the first victim of World War II. He sold farm machinery and had openly sympathized with Poland. For this the Gestapo picked him up August 30, 1939, dressed him in a Polish uniform, gave him a lethal injection, shot him dead, and left him at the Gleiwitz radio station as “evidence” of Polish aggression against Germany.

The Nazis called him and others they killed the “Konserven” (canned goods) because they were so well prepared — humans murdered to send a very specific public message that served Nazism.

Hitler made this playbook infamous. Trump is running it again. This is what Hitler said to his generals on August 22, 1939, the week before murdering Honiok:

I will provide a propagandistic casus belli. Its credibility doesn’t matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth.

Then Operation Himmler (August 31, 1939) used Honiok’s body and staged fake Polish attacks on German installations, including the famous Gleiwitz radio station incident, to fake the appearance of Polish aggression. Nazi SS operatives dressed in Polish uniforms, broadcast anti-German messages, and left Konserven behind.

On September 1, 1939 Hitler broadcast pure propaganda, as he said he would:

This night for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory. Since 5:45 a.m., we have been returning the fire… I will continue this struggle, no matter against whom, until the safety of the Reich and its rights are secured.

Trump is repeating this Gleiwitz history as the true precedent for his abuse of the phrase “police action” in Venezuela. The criminal espouses the vocabulary of law enforcement and blocks police from responding, while committing the crimes.

That’s abuse, not misuse, of language. It’s Hitler’s stated doctrine of propagandist inversion. The term now means its opposite, to enable crimes against peace, an intentional and very targeted violation of 1945 Nuremberg.

Trump is basically the armed bank robber projecting “strength” by stating he’s the police recovering stolen money. Historian Florian Altenhöner has pondered:

The lie being constructed there is breathtaking. On the other hand, one has to ask why this regime doesn’t rely on its power, but wants to give the appearance of acting morally, that the [Hitler or Trump] offensive war must be justified as a defensive war. A strange notion of strength.

Tom Dannenbaum (Stanford Law) called it:

The action violated international law.

Milena Sterio (Cleveland State) made it clear:

Drug smuggling “does not constitute an armed attack and does not authorize the U.S. to use force in self-defense.” And: Washington “cannot exercise extra-territorial jurisdiction to arrest individuals anywhere it pleases.”

Adil Haque (Rutgers) said it too:

The capture was “an illegal infringement of the inviolability and immunity of a sitting Head of State.”

It’s not complicated. It’s not a mystery.

The East Wing of the White House represented American victory against fascism, and so it was attacked by Trump. The historic symbol of Hitler’s defeat was completely demolished under a plan that had stated it would be expanded without touching it. Get it? Expansion can’t touch the East Wing if it’s not there anymore.

It’s the Nazi Lebensraum strategy, as espoused by Peter Thiel. It’s the loophole of destruction.

JD Vance, funded by Thiel, announced that the U.S. courts no longer constrain its supreme leader, after he gladly accepted the VP role under the man that he had called America’s Hitler.

If you read that right, Vance claimed to be discouraged by the rise of America’s Hitler. Discouraged about what exactly, his chance of success at the polls? Vague. I mean he then called shotgun to ride with America’s Hitler into office and help declare the end of democracy.

The U.S. claiming that Article 51 self-defense is relevant is an inside joke. They know such a claim is laughable on its face. They are mocking the world, by pardoning convicted drug lords to send them back to work, while claiming an emergency War Department self-defense necessity against drug lords.

Drug trafficking is not an “armed attack.” No quoted legal scholar supports it. Drug war is not, and has never been, anything to do with war. But Hitler proved it doesn’t matter, because the U.S. is operating above the law as Hitler did.

Washington is saying it cannot be held accountable for any violation by the U.N. Security Council. It is stating that everything put in place to prevent another Hitler can’t stop… America’s Hitler. JD Vance is no longer discouraged.

The system designed to prevent this crime cannot punish the criminal because the criminal has a veto.

Security

U.S. Legal Basis for Invading Venezuela Was Known False

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Buried in Axios’s explanation of “why the U.S. went after Maduro” is a sentence that merits closer attention:

U.S. intelligence determined last year in a classified memo that Maduro did not actually control Tren de Aragua, infuriating some in the Trump administration.

The legal architecture supporting the invasion of Venezuela, the indictments, the foreign terrorist organization designation, the narco-terrorism charges, all rests on the lone assertion that Maduro controls criminal organizations trafficking drugs to the United States.

U.S. intelligence had concluded this was not the case.

The operation proceeded illegally.

Students of recent American history will recognize the pattern of crime. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq on the assertion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Intelligence assessments expressing doubt were overridden or ignored. The weapons did not exist. The invasion proceeded illegally.

What distinguishes the Venezuela case is the compression of the crime timeline. The intelligence contradicting the stated justification was not buried in classified estimates that surfaced years later. According to Axios, it was known beforehand and intentionally ignored. The Trump administration was “infuriated” by the assessment because the truth complicated the narrative of lies.

The narco-terrorism framework, it appears, was never the reason for the invasion.

It was the pretext.

President Trump, echoing Hitler in 1938, stated his objectives on live television with some clarity:

  • The United States would “run the country” until a transition could occur
  • Venezuelan oil sales would benefit Venezuelans, “but so will the U.S.”
  • The American military presence would remain until “United States demands have been fully met”

The legal apparatus of indictments, designations, and charges provided the form of legal justification for actions whose actual motivations lay elsewhere.

This is a familiar mechanism.

Aggressive military action requires domestic legitimation. A framework that sounds legal serves that purpose even when the underlying claims are known to be false.

The Nuremberg judgment against Nazism was specific on this point:

To initiate a war of aggression… is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

The United States prosecuted German leaders under this standard. The United States constructed the international legal architecture to codify this standard.

The question of whether the United States has now violated this standard, with clear knowledge that its stated justification was false, is one that legal scholars and historians will presumably now examine in great detail.

What can be observed at present is the structure of the reporting.

The Axios sentence appears in paragraph seven of a piece framed as explanatory journalism. It is surrounded by discussion of oil reserves and immigration flows. The false intelligence, the overt admission of supreme crime in violation of law, is noted as one might note an interesting complication in a policy dispute.

The framing is not suppression. The fact of a crime is reported. But neither is it emphasis. A head of state was illegally captured by military force. A nation’s administration was illegally assumed by its invader. The legal justification was known beforehand to use a false premise. These facts appear, but they do not drive or even organize the narrative.

How such events are recorded in their first hours often shapes how they are remembered.

The intelligence assessment is now part of the public record. Whether it becomes central to the historical understanding of what crimes occurred on January 3, 2026, remains to be seen.

Food, History, Security

Tesla Diner is the Starlink Canary: You Want Loyalty Fries With That Erratic Autocratic Infrastructure?

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Less than six months after opening, Elon Musk’s Tesla Diner in Hollywood has the feel of a Rhodesian ghost town.

The celebrity chef is gone. Eric Greenspan, a Le Cordon Bleu graduate who helped build Mr Beast Burger, quietly departed and scrubbed his Instagram of any association with the venture. The hundred-person lines evaporated. The global expansion plan went the same way as Musk’s other promises, nowhere. On a recent Friday afternoon, more staff lifted fingerprints off chrome walls than there were customers.

The Guardian reports that the novelty of eating at a restaurant owned by the world’s most hated man “seems to have worn off.” A more precise diagnosis: the reputational cost of association with investments in Musk now exceeds any benefit, and the competent professionals have done the math.

Greenspan’s Instagram scrubbing is the digital equivalent of removing a company from your résumé before it gets raided. He hasn’t publicly explained his departure. He doesn’t need to. The AfD promotion in Germany and Nazi salutes at Trump’s inauguration—”repeatedly portrayed in the picket signs held by Tesla Diner protesters,” per the Guardian—made the calculation straightforward.

This is what the Musk ecosystem is all about: not dramatic collapse, but a leaky hype balloon with gradual evacuation by anyone with options, leaving behind only the true believers. The diner can absorb not being a diner. A shiny chrome dumpster fire in Hollywood is embarrassing but survivable.

Starlink is the other side of this coin.

The same week the Guardian documented the diner’s decline, Forbes published what reads like Starlink investor relations copy. Joel Shulman, who discloses financial affiliations with investment vehicles that benefit from exactly this narrative, celebrates Musk as playing “a different entrepreneurial game.”

Different is an interesting word choice. The piece inadvertently catalogs every Musk vulnerability while fraudulently framing them as strengths:

“His companies iterate faster than regulators, incumbents, and even capital markets are structured to absorb.”

The simple stupidity of raw speed is presented as true genius. It’s actually the explicit strategy of toddler-like skills, operating outside democratic accountability. The speed isn’t about innovation—it’s about fait accompli. Get the absolute worst possible version of infrastructure embedded before anyone can object.

“A vertically integrated, globally scalable communications network that bypasses nearly every legacy constraint of the telecom industry.”

Those “constraints” include safety and reliability, regulatory oversight, spectrum licensing, and the political processes that prevent private actors from controlling critical infrastructure without accountability. Bypassing them isn’t really a feature, especially after governments decide it isn’t.

“Infrastructure that governments, industries, and populations increasingly depend on.”

The Ukraine episode already demonstrated what happens when Musk controls infrastructure that anyone depends on. He toggled access based on a personal whim. The piece treats dependency as a moat. It’s actually an invitation to regulatory intervention, if not forfeiture.

“Switching costs are high where Starlink is the only viable option.”

The monopoly framing. This is the argument for why regulators will eventually act, not why they won’t. Shulman bizarrely invokes railroads and electricity as precedents for infrastructure monopolies that compound private wealth indefinitely. He appears not to have read the second half of that history.

Railroads: The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Federal rate regulation. Antitrust action. Eventually nationalization of passenger rail. The robber baron era ended precisely because railroad dependency triggered democratic backlash.

Electricity: Heavily regulated as a public utility. Rate-setting by state commissions. Must-serve obligations. Prohibition on discriminatory pricing.

The monopoly dream Shulman celebrates was tamed by regulation in every historical instance he cites. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was broken up. AT&T was broken up. The Gilded Age produced the Progressive Era.

“Infrastructure makes it permanent,” Shulman writes, as if history ends at the moment of monopoly formation.

It doesn’t.

The political economy of essential infrastructure has a second act: public assertion of control over private power to prevent catastrophe. He’s describing the conditions under which democratic societies historically decide that private control of critical infrastructure is obviously unacceptable.

Apparently he wants to rewrite history, or just doesn’t realize he’s making the argument against himself.

The Tesla diner shows the trajectory. The Forbes piece shows the radical investor class hasn’t noticed.

When the competent people flee and only the loyalists remain—people selected for devotion rather than capability—you get soggy industrial fries served in a soulless, empty and shiny corporate diner.

That’s the optimistic scenario.

The pessimistic scenario is the same dynamic applied to global communications infrastructure that governments and militaries depend on. An erratic autocrat who has already demonstrated he’ll use infrastructure access as political leverage. A workforce increasingly selected for loyalty over competence. No democratic accountability structure. Explicitly designed to outrun regulation.

Starlink is exposed as an erratic, autocratic, global communications infrastructure, maintained by a loyalty cult.

The diner is the proof of concept—showing exactly what happens when the reputational toxicity reaches escape velocity and the professionals calculate their exit.

The only question is timeline.