Funnily enough, the currently airing Starz program, Spartacus: House of Ashur does this, has Caesar as a character and all political sides use “pirates” as a bogeyman to justify all sorts of things and stage false flag attacks while pretending to be pirates. It’s meant for entertainment not historicity but it’s kind of reminding me of Battlestar Galactica reboot touching political themes in this one aspect except with swords and prosethetics flying everywhere.
He was also abused in a psychology study at Harvard when he was 17, which may have been part of the CIA’s MK Ultra drug experiments. Maybe he would have done it all the same or not in the absence of that, who knows.
If you are open to a bit of reading I would recommend The New Jim Crow, Usual Cruelty, and Copoganda. The USA has a disproportionate amount of prisoners and armed law enforcement compared to every other comparable country - because it is a hugely profitable industry that self perpetuates itself really well- it’s similar in a way to how hard it is to get any consumer protections in USA from predatory and polluting entities.
We already know just based on the limited amount from the annual payment to all residents of Alaska from their state wide oil and mineral fund over the past 40 some odd years, there are a lot of studies - off top of my head some study found people who were unemployed were in aggregate slightly more likely to get work, because the money enabled them to look farther for jobs instead of just surviving, it also increased demand for goods and services provided by other Alaskans. Here's one of many that breaks things down from economist point of view
https://home.uchicago.edu/~j1s/Jones_Alaska_2022.pdf
There are multiple examples in the literature of people leading perfectly ordinary lives whilst unknowingly having no more than 5% of the typical amount of brain matter (typically because of hydrocephalus). For example, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.7434023 from 1980.
The brain is indeed incredibly resilient - some kids with serious epilepsy get an entire hemisphere taken out - but which 5% you're left with matters enormously.
Given the veracity of the current administration, the repeated history of the US government lying to justify military interventions (Vietnam Tonkin Gulf incident looks fake going back a little further), I think people who know a little bit of history and are paying attention have legitimate reason to want more than just one source. Whatever the number is in Iran it's terrible but there's no military intervention outside countries can do that's going to change that given Iran is already sanctioned to the gills and it's a huge country that presents many challenges - the people there are going to have to do it themselves.
For others who don't know, this is detailed in this podcast. A change in the way new power generation is funded is starting to happen so the datacenters are more responsible for the costs of the added power plants so they cannot just pull out willy nilly, but in lieu of that, existing customers have had to pay for the power plants in spite of not benefiting in the slightest
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/19/nx-s1-5649814/ai-data-center-...
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