Magic Rules Iron

When the blacksmith fails, the wizards come out to play.

Well, me and the boys were at it again this past Sunday. The sunny topic this time around was the prospect of World War III. It was off-the-cuff, as per usual, meaning lots of umm-ing and uhh-ing on the part of yours truly. I apparently have yet to master this format. I will persevere.

As unsatisfied as I was with my performance, I thought I’d use it as an opportunity to expand on a certain “conspiracy theory” that’s been haunting me lately. To set it up, I’ll try to translate and summarize some of my gobbledygook from the pod.

At one point I gave the opinion that, during certain brief stretches of history, “magic rules iron.” This was in response to something

John Carter

has written about in the past. In declaring that “iron rules gold” he’s pointing out that, all else being equal, money ≠ power in any given situation. In other words, if you have a bunch of gold and I have a sword, pretty soon I’m going to have a bunch of gold and a sword.

But again, that’s a ceteris paribus type of deal. Lots of axioms stand up under mental laboratory conditions, but reality’s way messier. Out here in the pig slop, gold and iron are entwined along multiple axes and dimensions. If we take the Ukraine proxy war, for example, we can look at it as just another for-profit criminal enterprise, in which a resource-rich country is being divvied up among various private equity firms, agribusiness concerns, energy giants and local oligarchs.

But they still need the iron, man. The theft can't happen without it (or, at least, the credible threat of it). So while “iron rules gold” isn’t perfectly true, I think it’s true enough to merit further investigation.

My first question was:

“If iron rules gold, what rules iron?”

The vast majority of the time, I think the answer is “the blacksmith rules iron,” meaning weapons designers and the industrial manufacturing base that supports them. These would be the traditional “meat-grinder” war weapons that evolved along the sword-and-shield lineage. For swords, the blacksmith’s design ethic is something like “weapons that project more force, more accurately and efficiently, over longer and longer distances.” For shields, it’s merely about developing armor and countermeasures that can stand up to the latest swords.

Blacksmithery is a game of inches, not miles. Because of its incremental nature, many products rust on the shelf long before they’re put to use on battlefields. By the time the king is ready to deploy them into a hot zone, they might be obsolete or worse. I used the example of the F-35 stealth fighter in the podcast, which was one of the most expensive and colossal belly flops in the history of arms design. But even the systems that actually do make it to the field are often oversold in terms of capabilities and performance, or become worthless scrap the instant the enemy probes for and finds a weakness.

For example: several days ago, we witnessed a spectacular failure of the U.S. Patriot missile defense system, as Russian forces deployed a multi-layered attack wave composed of drone decoys, Kalibr missiles, Kh-101s and Kinzhal hypersonics. The result — though made intentionally murky by the reports of Ukrainians and their American cheerleaders — appears to be that the Russians discovered a fatal flaw, and at the same time triggered a fireworks show that cost the U.S. anywhere between $80-160 million (and that’s just for ordnance alone).

In the wake of such failures, iron’s blacksmith ruler might express some sentiment about eggs and omelets, and offer to go back and tinker with various subsystems to patch up the holes. And in America’s money-no-object funding system, that’s usually exactly what happens. Good gold chases after bad, and winds up in enough pockets to justify it to the masses. “Are you against American jobs or something?”

But there is another ruler of iron who emerges from time to time. Sometimes “magic rules iron.”

And when it does, it’s usually in the most desperate of circumstances.

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When I use “magic” here, I mean an extreme form of asymmetric weapons design, based on experimental technologies that are totally unavailable to your enemies. As I said in the podcast, I think the last time that magic ruled iron was the invention and use of the atomic bomb. That project also typified another quality of magic weapons development, which is that the majority of the work is done in deep shadow (a theme I suspect Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film “Oppenheimer” will explore).

The atomic magicians continued to pursue that shadowy line throughout the Cold War. But as per usual, the rule of magic didn’t last very long. That’s because the instant someone else gains access to your doomsday device, that device no longer exists for all practical purposes. You can’t “end the world better” than the next guy.

That doesn’t mean the king abandons magic. For one thing, being an unimaginative dunderhead is a common trait of those who ascend the ladders of leadership these days. Hence the insanity of the arms race towards the end, when both sides kept churning out nukes well beyond any realistic advantage it would yield them. And once India and China had the tech, that was all she wrote. It was a dragon that blows up the wizard's own castle when he summons it, so no wizard ever would.

In the decades to follow, the blacksmith was restored to his former glory. Many incremental improvements were made on the conventional weaponry, most of which supported the broad strategic principles of air superiority and naval force projection. Infantry and air cavalry saw a measure of improvement as well — though perhaps not anywhere near the degree they should have, given the kinds of grinding 21st century wars we’d find ourselves entrenched in.

The fact that the American leviathan would lose those wars in humiliating fashion probably surprised a lot of military officials, not to mention the string of braindead political lumps who were nominally in charge. Their boneheaded policies and embarrassing fuckups would culminate in the disastrous Afghan bugout, where untold weapons, intel assets and even civilian personnel were left behind. You’d think there’d be at least a few scapegoats at the ready, to be hand-fed into the media’s rapacious maw. You’d think wrong.

But the government wasn’t done fucking up. Before any journo-critter could bat an eye or lick a boot, a new forever-war sprang up along an old Eastern European fault line. For some reason, this prompted the USG to start depleting its blacksmith stockpiles even further and faster than they did during the Terror Wars. But there was something different about this latest battlefield, because surrounding it was a magical fog named “COVID-19.”

Were the virus and/or the vaccines intentional bioweapons aimed at depopulation? A fifth generation PSYOP to destroy political and legal norms? A massive fraud designed to transfer wealth to Big Pharma and their captured regulators? An opportunistic power grab by global elites?

The COVID phenomenon could very well have been all of the above. But one thing’s for sure: it contained within its radius magic of the darkest kind. And the world’s string-pullers certainly took notice, even if they hadn’t planned it directly.

That includes the various actors and puppets within the American Deep State. For twenty years, they’d watched the blacksmith blunder onto battlefields that it theoretically should have dominated. It wasn’t all his fault; as the boys and I agreed, the absence of spiritual unity within the American-allied forces — and likewise the strong spiritual unity of our opponents — probably contributed much more to our losses than anything having to do with weapons design. Will to fight cannot be manufactured, no matter what your psyche professor said.

But, as

Grant Smith

so powerfully described, the command structure is littered with people who are spiritually blind. They may make vague mention of “morale” on occasion, but seem to have forgotten what that word even means, or why the current recruitment crisis won’t resolve under any ontological paradigm that deemed this to be sound strategy:

But never mind. Drag queen “ambassadors” and their PR pimps represent the lowest rung on the ladder of magical rule. It barely qualifies as magic at all, since anyone with half a brain can see through the trick. In fact, I suspect what we’re looking at here isn’t a spell that they’re casting, but rather the result of a spell that was cast upon them, as part of a hostile takeover of iron.

But it still speaks to that spiritual blindness, which appears to have spread throughout the military like the swiftest of plagues. Not only has the conventional arsenal failed, but so have all “conventions” period. The recruitment spot above isn’t an anomaly. It’s of a piece with the Girl-with-two-moms cartoon ad, and other ludicrous attempts to “connect with Gen-Z.” They’re trying to speak in demonic rainbow tongues, to an audience who can only comprehend emoji.

Note that there’s nothing of honor, dignity, fortitude, sacrifice or virtue of any kind left in their language. What remains is effectively an inversion of reality. As

Duncan Reyburn

masterfully explored in his recent essay, The psychopolitics of mimicry, the new paradigm has essence trailing in the wake of existence, and beholden to whatever whim or desire bubbles up. In the case of military institutions, the ramifications of this atomized self-as-costume approach are particularly dire. It’s one thing to send in your berserkers to raze a village. It’s quite another to hand them the keys to missile silos.

But this isn’t the kind of magic I’m referring to when I say “magic rules iron.” Nor is it born from a single tradition, like the nuclear bomb was. Rather, what has risen up to rule is a hydra of disciplines and technologies, all stemming off the common root of transhumanism.

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PSY(CHO)OPS

To begin with, let’s talk about another infamous recruitment ad, of a different flavor entirely.

WARNING: If you haven’t watched this before — or even if you have — know beforehand that this recruitment ad for PSYOPS is itself a PSYOP. It was intentionally crafted to frighten and disturb a normal human being on multiple levels, while at the same time enticing the kind of psychopath it wants to recruit. So if you’re particularly sensitive or feel spiritually weak at the moment, you might want to skip it.

As you can see from the video, the U.S. PSYOPS division is all about black magic. The asymmetric weapons it develops and deploys are largely non-physical in nature. Or at the very least, what iron components they require are relatively cheap when compared to conventional arms.

The ad’s core messaging is this: “You can live in fear of our spooky monsters, or you can become one of them.” Bundled with this weaponized message is the implication that no other options exist, natch. We are hiding in every closet, under every bed.

If you think this admission is a paranoiac’s wet dream, you’re right about that. Part of the sorcery is to play up every theory about their awesome powers, regardless of whether those exist (or are all that awesome).

But what we should be paying close attention to is the pitch; like the wicked wizard of any fairy tale, they are probing the market for dark apprentices, and promising terrifying powers to those who enter the circle. And while such offers are repellent to the morally sane, it sounds like sweet music to exactly the kind of people they’re looking for. For a taste of that, you can read the U.S. Army’s blander print description:

PSYOPS as a warfighting toolset delivers results on multiple fronts. The division’s amoral operatives lurk inside color revolutions, propaganda campaigns, false flag operations, foreign and domestic spy rings and essentially any other covert action that involves psychological manipulation, as well as the psychopath’s ability to lie as easily as he breathes.

Under a magic ruler, these operations will mutate and expand along a variety of vectors both in the physical and digital realms. One thing that I think we’ll be seeing occur with ever greater frequency is black propaganda aimed at discrediting dissident authors and artists who gain any social media traction. This could include AI-assisted campaigns that generate phony “evidence” of secret badthink, moral corruption or even actual crimes.

Let’s return to the image of that transvestite sailor PR pitch for a moment. What purpose does it serve? Is it actually “outreach” or “recruitment” to the conventional blacksmith’s warfighting dogma? Or is it an attempt to bury that model, once and for all? The magical power of PSYOPS is rooted in spreading the kind of confusion which allows for every possible interpretation, as long as the authors are deemed all-powerful geniuses thinking twenty moves ahead.

But from where does the imperative to launch such confusion-campaigns emanate? Consider for a moment that there could be a hidden power struggle at play, and that psychological operatives might be aligned with other forces on one side of it.

Consider also that such forces might have goals that transcend the priorities of nation states, and even of the mundane pursuits of wealth and the influence it confers.

What’s more important than gold?

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Central Banking Digital Slavery

A better question might be “what’s more useful than gold?”

That question has been answered for the past fifty-two years, since the end of Bretton Woods gave rise to the petrodollar fiat currency. You want to talk about magic, just take a gander at the Fed.

But now even that spell is fizzling out. And since the new magic on deck is probably familiar to everyone reading this, I won’t dwell on it long. Suffice it to say that the next set of wizards are trying to establish total control over every human transaction on the planet. Using crypto as a model and iron to enforce it, CBDC as a conceptual framework puts every former system of serfdom and slavery to shame.

It’s so obviously evil that no one has really figured out a way to sell it to anyone sane. You hear the occasional nattering about security and convenience from the globohomo satraps, but no one seems to be buying it. I think that’s why the language has grown increasingly authoritarian: We are doing it anyway, so shut up.

In some ways, a global digital currency is the most maniacal of all the magic rulers’ weapons, even though its form is the most incremental and mundane. The dollar — and by extension every fiat currency — has been plastic my entire life, untethered from anything real. The only difference now is that this funny money will spy on you, and report back to your rulers whether it can be saved or spent or stolen on a whim.

Which of course is a very big difference. Once again, many slaves won’t notice until it’s too late. But there are other forms of magic they’ll notice, bigtime.

*cue spooky music*

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Pandora’s Box

The archetype of the Mad Scientist exists for a reason. The character is one that sees himself as unbounded from all morality and ethics, and who hubristically seeks to circumvent Nature’s laws for fun and profit. Such people not only exist, but often find themselves the recipients of lavish funding, from governments who dream of the magical powers they promise to provide.

Cue DARPA.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was once a subject of dark fascination for me. I used to keep a running tally of all the weird shit they came out with, both from their own online published abstracts and through PR press organs like Real Clear Defense and Army Times. The growing bestiary of monsters boasted everything from the terrifying to the laughably absurd, including:

• an omnivorous robotic tank that can feed itself biomass for fuel;

• cybernetic moths implanted with micro-mechanical steering and surveillance gear during the pupae stage;

• “supersoldiers” who can command drone swarms via a programmable brain interface;

• human-octopus hybrids who can turn their cells invisible using genetically-engineered cytoplasmic protein enhancements;

• ghostly AI assistants that whisper advice into the ears of military personnel;

• These fucking things, as well as a panoply of other automatized weapons platforms, combat vehicles and electronic spies;

…and much, much more.

In fact, you could probably type “DARPA + {insert monster here}” into any search engine and produce multiple hits. Telepathic warfare your bag? They got you covered, bro. You want zombie satellites stitched together by graverobbing robots? You’re in luck, Chuck. In the mood for custom synthetic lifeforms that can live forever, but ship with touch-button remote kill switches? DARPA to the rescue!

Of course, many of these mad science projects can be slid over in the column marked “taxpayer-funded money pit.” The fine print under the marketing lingo is often a lot less impressive, coming off more like a pipe dream or scam than earthshaking magic.

But these experiments are also only what we’re shown and told. The public grant winners may get the ball rolling in various directions, but being subject to scrutiny, ethical rules and liability is the price of doing business with DARPA, or with the defense establishment in general. Not so for the paymasters themselves. America funds a lot of labs in locations with a distinct lack of such rules and oversight. In Ukraine, for example. In Sudan, for another. In Wuhan, for a third.

What would happen if all these gates were suddenly thrown open? If the lid were suddenly ripped off of Pandora’s box, and the monsters freed to march across the Earth?

Many would say “untold chaos and destruction,” and I somewhat agree. But on the other hand, we aren’t talking about sane, sober, intelligent people at the wheel. We’re talking about governments, and their co-conspirators in the corporate, bureaucratic and NGO spheres. We’re talking about moral and intellectual idiots in other words, shallow thinkers who can only grasp the most superficial aspects of reality.

Even their concept of transhumanism is stupid and shallow. It reminds me of Deckard’s quip about Rachael in Blade Runner: “How can it not know what it is?” They wish to transcend the given state without awareness of what that is. And they’re becoming frantic enough to pull out all the stops, because according to their perception of reality, they are all walking time bombs ticking down to zero.

Hence the urge to set the magicians free to make immortal synthetic biomasses and brain-machine interfaces. It’s my suspicion that many of the players backing these magic experiments fear death more than anyone who’s ever been alive. Centuries of deconstruction have crafted atomized minds, trained to believe that all they’ve seen is all there is. What they see is something like “information embedded in meat,” which has driven them luridly insane.

That’s what makes their latest magic so uniquely dangerous. For them, it’s no longer about winning wars. It’s become a game of “eternal life or bust.” The cyborg monsters, AI daemons, banking shenanigans, PSYOP scams and all the rest of it is simply a means to an end.

Ironically, that’s also the reason they’ll lose

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The Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone of Doom

Here’s my theory in a nutshell;:

We’re poised to witness not just one magical leap, but several such leaps in short succession. And by “magic” here I mean both in the forms of experimental asymmetric technologies and in the more traditional meaning of that word.

What we’re seeing isn’t just a coup to seize control over iron and gold, but over kings and queens. As their bodies swiftly age towards obsolescence, the court magician whispers the final lie into their ears. It was the same lie whispered to Gilgamesh that sent him on his mad quest, the lie Utnapishtim tried so kindly to dissolve:

"There is no permanence. Do we build a house to stand forever, do we seal a contract to hold for all time? Do brothers divide an inheritance to keep forever, does the flood-time of rivers endure? It is only the nymph of the dragon-fly who sheds her larva and sees the sun in his glory.

But the regents of globohomo won’t hear of such blasphemy. There must be a way to live forever in meaty form. And so the blacksmith is being purposefully humiliated and drained, leaving no option but to go all-in on magic. They believe they’ve been granted access to that penultimate magic circle, which is why they so often speak and act in such strange and seemingly self-defeating ways. When you think you’re on-deck for immortality, you'll do anything the wizard says.

In light of this theory, recent catastrophes like COVID-19, the Afghan retreat and the futile adventure in Ukraine begin to make a lot of sense. It’s not a case of “They’re all in on it.” In fact, I think it would only take a few of high station to do most of the damage, and by doing so encourage some fence-sitters to try a different strategy. To strongarm the rest, there’s always the ancient arts of blackmail and extortion to fall back on (hence pawns like Epstein, and Little St. James Island).

But this theory doesn’t exclude blundering. In fact, it explains much of the chaos as the result of panic. When we examine the odd resilience of our gerontocracy — those elected and unelected rulers who cling with wrinkled hands to the wheels of power — what we might be missing is that certain promises were made to them. Perhaps they were convinced the days would be minutes, that time was on their side. I think their faith in that promise has begun to spin apart.

And here I’ll briefly speak of “magic” of the more traditional kind, meaning something like a pseudo-rational parareligion, whose core practice involves energy exchanges on unseen layers of reality. Most typically, these exchanges come in the form of sacrifices. There’s a lot of fiddly bits involved, but the core implematation boils down to something like this: The more complex the form of life that’s sacrificed, the greater yield of energy reaped by the magician.

The average atheist will scoff at this. But the average atheist probably isn’t anywhere near as frightened as this crowd. We are speaking of predators who’ve spent their lives preying on their fellow man in the darkest ways imaginable. We are talking about mass murderers and child rapists who sense the hour of oblivion drawing near.

Or oblivion at best; we can’t leave aside the possibility that, in the dead of hoary night, some may fear a fate even worse than “nothingness” awaits them. The logical answer — to confess and repent — eludes them, because they dwell too much in the flesh. Instead, they revert to the only answer they’ve ever known: Obtain more power. And so they turn to religions that offer the same.

These forms of magic aren’t mutually exclusive. Indeed, they occasionally overlap in very public ways (see: Rocketman Jack Parsons and PSYOP-innovator Michael Aquino). And that’s exactly what I predict in the Rule of Magic to come. For those who can recognize both forms with any clarity, it will become more difficult to disentangle them. For those who can see one but not the other, it will look like utter madness.

But, like all periods of magic rule, I predict it won’t last long.

Let’s have a look at PSYOPS first. A great deal of ink has been spent on tallying their successes, especially in recent years. But what’s curiously missing is a meta-analysis of their failures over the years — and in particular their failures to remain hidden, without which there’s really no point. In doing so, I think we would see the curve bending sharply upwards since the birth of the consumer internet.

These aren’t “evil geniuses” we’re dealing with; as you can tell from their recruitment ads, these are broken people, equipped only with the psychopath’s limited understanding of human nature. They see stable-state machinery everywhere they look, a bunch of switches to be flipped up or down. They can’t keep up with dynamic state changes, because they can’t perceive the fluidity and dynamism of being. The psychopathic operative also cannot comprehend what trust is, or how it’s so hard to win and so easily lost.

This blindness will also translate into spectacular blunders with state-of-the-art magic weaponry. They’ve already partially fumbled on COVID, awakening a great many people who would’ve been happy to stay asleep. But when they begin to fiddle in earnest with deepfakes and synthetic events, they will inadvertently trigger a trust implosion unlike any before.

CBDC? Is it the mark of The Beast?

Yeah, sure. But the system won’t hold up for long. Iron needs its ironworkers, and when they’re harmed (as they’ll surely be), the collapse will be sudden and total. Even if we have to barter for awhile, the long bet favors the reality of water and calories.

As for DARPA’s box of darling monsters… I’m unimpressed.

I shouldn’t have to mention the Frankenstein Effect (though that will certainly come into play). But even the potentially dangerous projects seem to have evolved along the same sword lineage as the Maginot Line. Something like a portable EMP would turn most of them into lavishly funded junk piles.

When it comes their biological obscenities, Nature has a nasty habit of sorting them out. Like the Uncanny Valley, the battle versus natural law is an uphill climb with an ever sharpening ascent (and with sneaky pitfalls near the peak). That’s bad enough, but gets much worse when you realize how broken many of their experimental tools are, due to decades of perverse incentive structures and neglect.

But I think an even bigger problem they face pertains to combat-readiness. Not only will they need to test drive these demons, but they’ll need to do so with great haste. Their aging financial backers are running short on time, so drumming up foreign proxy wars just ain’t gonna cut it. They will be forced to start testing them at home, using their own citizens as the subjects.

In fact, it’s very likely that this was the impetus of COVID-19. At the very least, it was exploited as an opportunity to conduct a massive, uncontrolled human trial of the mRNA platform. But again, we’re led back to the problem of reestablishing broken trust.

Now: I can guess what some of you are thinking:

What about all those NPCs?

Consider this: There may not be nearly as many as we expect. Some might point to polling data and say the signal looks dire. But think about who controls the signal? We know it will always be cheated towards one direction, and yet even then the needle has moved significantly away from trust.

The chronically blackpilled won’t give up that easy though. They will point to the laboratory results of psyche tests like the Asch Line Study and the Stanford Prison Experiment, and say this accurately models the movement of opinion in the wild.

But the lab is not the wild.

One of the Enemy’s prime delusions is that all reality can be simulated under lab conditions. But such experiments are purposefully abstracted, and don’t model life anywhere near as accurately as their designers believe. The test subject who agrees about the length of a line does not necessarily agree that killer robots should patrol his hometown, no matter what the polling data shows.

And if the lab accurately modelled the wild, there’d be no reason for certain industry leaders to behave as they are behaving, often acting against their own self-interests in the process. For instance, YouTube would not hide the public “dislikes” counter, even under duress from big advertisers (whose leverage in the monopolized social media markets has become practically nil). The same goes for countless globohomo-endorsed publications who have done away with their comments sections, and the centrally-directed censorship on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere.

These aren’t moves made from a position of strength. These people are scared.

And they should be, because they are horribly outmanned.

So as the rule of magic-over-all begins as tragedy, it ends as farce. The ancient, grasping Boomers will die off one-by-one, their dreams of immortality dashed against the rocks of ho-hum reality.

And the wave of narcissists waiting in the wings to replace them will be even more delusional and incompetent. Most will be too addicted to meds, screens and the beloved belly button to get any real work done. The ones who can will be too busy managing HR wars, in which overgrown infants trade charges of microaggressions. Or worse, they’ll spend their days trying to throttle solutions out of blackbox AI oracles, whose most egregious strategic errors will go unnoticed until they’re too late to correct. The fish will rot from the head, as usual. The climactic scenes almost write themselves.

At a luxury hotel in Munich, a $20M cyborg moth alights upon windowsill, only to be crushed flat by a back issue of Popular Mechanics.

Somewhere in rural Idaho, a $150M robot-tank grazes on a field of crops, oblivious to the Unhappy Meal some clever sappers left behind.

In the depths of a Pentagon server dungeon, four-billion dollars worth of AI modules start arguing about “the best way to skin a cat,” tumbling down a recursion stairwell that nobody can fix, because no one knows why they started doing that in the first place.

In the hinterlands of empire, all forty-eight employees of a secret twenty-billion dollar biolab #DieSuddenly. So does the team sent to investigate their deaths. The site is bombed to smithereens, all records are scrubbed and bleached, and the civilian collaborators all meet with unfortunate accidents.

We will live to see the magician’s reign.

But we will also see the price of dicking around with magic, rendered in vividly stupid colors and strokes. We’ll bear witness to the self-destruction inherent to all evil enterprises, as the backstabbers knife each other to death and the liars drown in their lies. It’s true the Ouroboros will need some help finishing its gruesome meal, but at that point I predict we’ll have many, many volunteers.

What then?

With any luck, mastery of iron will not revert to the blacksmith next time, but to the sovereign citizen, at long last. Maybe the next rulers will be farmers, explorers, builders and artists, who will bring forth a new renaissance from the ashes.

Maybe.

Either way: buckle up, buttercup.

This ride’s about to get bumpy, and a whole helluva lot more interesting.

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