DARK SIDE OF THE SWOON

Tuesday, April 28, 2026

What a Data Center Does to Where You Live — And How Far the Damage Reaches

They tell you it's just a building full of computers. Here's what they don't tell you.

AT THE FENCE LINE:

The air around a data center is not the same air you grew up breathing. Diesel backup generators — which these facilities require by the dozens or even hundreds — release fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) linked to asthma, heart disease, and respiratory illness. Those generators emit 200 to 600 times more nitrogen oxides than natural gas plants. (World Resources Institute) At the xAI facility in Memphis, a Time Magazine investigation found that nitrogen dioxide levels in the air markedly increased from pre-data center levels in areas immediately surrounding the facility. (Sehn)

The noise never stops. Internal noise levels can reach up to 96 decibels — well above the 85 dB threshold considered harmful to human hearing. (PubMed Central) Neighbors near a Virginia facility described sound levels of 90 decibels at their homes. One resident said he can no longer open his windows. Another put mattresses against the glass to block it out.

The light from hyperscale facilities runs all night, disrupting the natural circadian rhythms of the body — including melatonin production and sleep-wake cycles. (EHP) Sleep disruption. Chronic stress. Hearing loss. These aren't hypotheticals. They are documented outcomes in communities that said yes before they understood what they were saying yes to.

WITHIN A MILE:

The land changes. The average data center site in 2024 covered about 224 acres — roughly 450 football fields — a 144% increase in footprint since 2022. (World Resources Institute) Farmland gone. Forests cleared. Viewsheds destroyed.

The water starts disappearing. A mid-sized data center uses roughly 300,000 gallons of water per day — the same as 1,000 homes. (Nixon Peabody) Between 80 and 90 percent of that water comes from surface water or groundwater — often the same sources your tap water comes from. (Fwpcoa) Most of it evaporates in the cooling towers and never comes back.

Wildlife starts acting differently. Researchers describe data centers as potential "sensory danger zones" — places where light and noise exceed the thresholds at which there are measurable fitness consequences for species. (National Wildlife Federation) Animal communication breaks down. Migration patterns shift. Nesting fails.

MILES AWAY — AND DOWNSTREAM:

The water table doesn't stop at the property line. Heavy reliance on groundwater can lead to aquifer depletion that threatens ecosystems and diminishes long-term water availability for surrounding communities — not just those next door. (Waterplan)

The power plants that feed these facilities pollute far beyond the data center itself. Datacenters rely heavily on energy from large-scale power plants — facilities now increasingly co-located with data centers to avoid delays in grid upgrades. (arXiv) Whatever that plant burns, your airshed absorbs.

A September 2025 study found that air pollutants from data center operations increase rates of respiratory diseases and cardiovascular conditions, and elevate cancer risks among nearby communities. (EHP)

THIS IS PENNSYLVANIA RIGHT NOW.

From Penn Forest Township to Kline Township to Salem Township to Archbald Borough — proposals are moving. Permits are being filed.

Ordinances are being written or ignored.

The research is clear. The damage is real. The question is whether your municipality is asking the hard questions before the ground gets broken — or after.

You deserve to know what's being built next to your water. Your air. Your land.

PA Data Center Accountability / Carbon County, PA

Unpaid. Independent. Sourced.

#VESTLife #Amazon #SusquehannaRiver #Pennsylvania #DataCenters #DontBelieveThoseLies

Sources: National Wildlife Federation (Sept. 2025) · World Resources Institute (Feb. 2026) · Environmental Health Project (Feb. 2026) · PMC/Public Health Research (2025) · Science & Environmental Health Network (Aug. 2025) · Nixon Peabody/Joyce Foundation (2024) · Smithsonian Magazine (Sept. 2025)

While Ghislaine Maxwell trafficked children with Jeffrey Epstein for a military intelligence pedophile compromat operation, her two oldest sisters — twins almost nobody has heard of — were quietly building surveillance infrastructure technology for the CIA and Israeli intelligence. Their work has been a continuation of their father Robert's intelligence spy software work. One twin built the FBI's post-9/11 counterterrorism database, still in use today. The other became Israel's primary back door into Silicon Valley, with backing from Bill Gates.

Keep that in mind as we watch in utter disbelief as congress supports the pardon of Ghislaine in coming days.

Whatever dark things can be known about the lawmakers who will decide Ghislaine's fate, her sisters surely possess.

I have a piece about the twins coming on Monday.

No one in corporate US news media is telling the truth about this family or the child sex trafficking ring.

~ Alisa Valdes Rodriguez

The Pugilist, Substack

The family of Robert Maxwell is so saturated with unadulterated evil it makes one wonder if there isn't a bloodline connection with the Rothschild's'.

Monday, April 27, 2026

Scott Ritter: It is a bad time to be a Gulf Arab State.

The United States and #Israel took a gamble when launching their surprise attack on #Iran on February 28 of this year. To the extent that they were consulted beforehand, America’s Gulf Arab allies did so as well.

They lost.

No discernable political or military objectives were attained by the practitioners of perfidy—neither regime change, missile suppression, nor control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Instead, the anti-Iranian cabal was compelled to seek a ceasefire that left Iran in total control of the strategic Strait of Hormuz, throttling both regional and global economies by blocking the transit of the very energy that they rely upon for their functioning, and their military intact, capable and defiant, able to deliver devastatingly damaging blows to their enemies lairs.

The 40-day war between the US/Israeli/Gulf Arab States cabal and Iran has underscored a reality that is difficult for many to accept—that military capability of the United States to project force into the Middle East has eroded to the point of near impotence, and that the original US-centered security architecture that has been in place for decades has failed to prevent Iran from acquiring de facto control over the very energy chokepoints the US was supposed to secure. This new reality will compel the region and the world to move away from concepts centered on US-based military-centric deterrence to a multipolar security framework derived from economic reality which will involve #Russia, #China, and #BRICS-like relationships. The legacy military doctrine upon which the old security relationships were founded is no longer viable, and any effort to revive legacy military doctrine would be prohibitively expensive, and ultimately unachievable.

In short, the US lost because its foundational military-centric approach toward regional problem solving was no longer effective, and no amount of defense spending can reverse this reality.

This is going to be a very difficult reality for those nations, like the Gulf Arab States and #India, who had premised their strategic postures on the premise and promise of American military dominance.

Now these nations warn the world about the weakening of the rule-of-law when it comes to losing control of the Strait of Hormuz, noting that there are numerous similar chokepoints which could be at risk if the Hormuz precedent stands, risking wider conflict and disruption of globalization. These leaders now promote the notion that peace depends on co-prosperity, pipelines, trade, and sustainable economic networks rather than military occupation or escalation.

These, of course, were precisely the policies Iran has been promoting for decades, only to be given the stiff arm by their Arab neighbors who felt safe and secure behand a US security umbrella which proved illusory.

Indian officials likewise reside in a never-never land which seeks a return to the pre-conflict status quo. It is too late for this, however. India has habitually been on the wrong side of the equation when it comes to Iran, siding with Israel (which Prime Minister Modi visited on the eve of the war) and the US when it comes to Iran and its strategic partners, like China. India’s involvement in the Quad does not escape notice at a time when the US is promoting the naval blockade of Iranian shipping.

The reality for the Gulf Arab States is that the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed and that their past assumptions about the automatic military-based reopening by the US Navy no longer holds. While the energy producing nations of the region seek concrete contingency measures such as expanded use of the East–West pipelines in Saudi Arabia and proposals for additional pipelines and increased loading capacity at Yambor and Fujairah, the reality is that the majority of the regions energy production capacity remains locked in the Persian Gulf, unable to reach market. production remains locked in. Even if the war ended today, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and regional infrastructure recovery would require months to resolve.

The arrogance of the Gulf Arab States remains manifest, however. These nations posture that the Gulf states need not accommodate Iran, and that these same Gulf states are waiting for Iranian good faith before engaging on solutions to the problems that exist today.

It’s as if the Gulf Arab States didn’t have decades of history of colluding with the US and Israel against Iran, including providing facilities and territory used by both nations to stage the military. intelligence and logistical resources which enabled the February 28 surprise attack. The Gulf Arab States were complicit in this perfidy, and yet today they wish to play the victim card.

Iran isn’t buying it.

The bottom line is that the Gulf Arab states have effectively lost whatever strategic position they enjoyed before the war. Instead of seeking a reset to a time when their complicity was ongoing yet not openly acknowledged, the Gulf Arab States must—if they wish to survive this current crisis intact—accept the strategic defeat of the US-led regional anti-Iranian cabal, and recognize the permanence and prominence of the Islamic Republic. To do this, these Gulf Arab States must learn to think beyond a US-dominated paradigm, and instead embrace a new reality where Russia, China, and eastern powers factor in future security planning.

Simply put, a resumption of the war is not an option the Gulf Arab States can entertain, if for no other reason that they will not survive such a turn of events. The Iranian government has published the strategic energy production infrastructure which will be targeted for destruction by Iran should Iran be subjected to an attack. If Iran were to follow through on their threats—and past precedent strongly indicates it would do so—then the Gulf Arab States would suffer permanent crippling of their energy-based economic capacity, which would be the

knell for these nations as viable modern nation states.

Diplomacy is the only path forward that does not lead to the certain destruction of the Gulf Arab States. There is no military option. And given the fact that Iran holds all the cards (despite what President Trump says), the Gulf Arab States must understand that any diplomatic solution to the current crisis must acknowledge and comply with Iranian demands to remove the US military presence from the region.

The bottom line is that, going forward in the Middle East, there must be a recognition by all parties involved that the US is the problem, not the solution, and any nation which continues to rely upon the US to get them out of the current predicament will only find sorrow and despair.

There is a new Middle Eastern power paradigm at play today.

And it doesn’t include the United States

Do You Ever get Sick of the Constant Gaslighting by Shitty Journalists and Sold-out Politicians?

Western media is perpetually shocked. They clutch their pearls and gasp for breath whenever the predictable blowback of imperial overreach lands. How much fake surprise do they have in reserve for events that were entirely foreseeable. It seems as though presenting predictable events as shocking breaking news has become their entire editorial model.

NATO creeps, inch by inch, in broad daylight, right up to the Russian border for thirty years straight. Every anti-imperialist, every Marxist, and the occasionally mainstream journalist with an actual spine warned us that NATO expansion would lead directly to trenches and artillery.

The legacy media called those warnings conspiracy theories circulated by useful idiots and Putin apologists. Now they report daily on the Ukrainian front as if it were a shocking surprise that the Russians have held on to all the positions they "liberated." Western media pundits and academics seem incapable of drawing the direct line from the Maidan coup to the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties.

Quell surprise that the Russians treated what they always understood and always claimed was an existential issue as exactly that. An existential issue. When the wolf is at the door the Russians don't have a tradition of running to hide.

Who could have predicted that all the Russian diplomacy conducted prior to the Special Military Operation would lead to the exact consequences that Russian diplomats pleaded and warned about. Who could have guessed that the deliberate sabotage of the Minsk agreements by Zelensky would result in a massive escalation of tensions on the border between what used to be Ukraine and the Russian Federation.

Russian diplomats begged the US to rein in the rabid ultra nationalists from western Ukraine. Who could have guessed that US funding and arming and encouragement of Azov and the Banderites to keep shelling Donetsk, would result in Russian tanks rolling across the border. The answer is anyone who was not suffering from western propaganda brain rot.

We were told on a daily basis that Russia had a smaller economy than Texas. We were told it was a gas station masquerading as a country. We were told it was Nigeria with snow, run by incompetent mobsters. We were told they had to disassemble washing machines to use the microchips for weapons. And we were told after a month that they had completely run out of bullets. If you take the time to go back and look at Russian coverage of the special operation during this period you will find that they correctly called out all these lies peddled by western "experts."

Russian media understood perfectly that the west had to pretend the invasion was unprovoked and morally reprehensible. They understood that western media would pretend Ukraine "held all the cards" and pretend they had every chance of winning a real war against Russia.

The only way they could convince western media audiences of this Ukrainian victory fantasy was to pretend that Russia was weak and unprepared.

The relentless lies and omissions pushed daily by western media weren't a miscalculation or a mistake. They were an important part of the imperialist plan to convince ordinary Western workers that it would be okay if all our tax revenue was transferred directly into the bank accounts of the billionaires who own US arms companies.

The billionaire class who push imperial policy in the West want us to forget completely that every escalation, every step along the path to where we are, was as predictable as it was easily avoidable.

European leaders now want us to be as coddled and infantilised as US media consumers. They expect us to play along with pouring billions of precious European taxpayers money into a terrible and unnecessary war against an enemy who only ever wanted peace.

It's worth reminding everyone that both Yeltsin and Putin himself made many attempts to join our NATO gang. But they were refused because NATO was never about the security of Europe, it was always about US led Western imperialism. It always was and remains to this day inherently Russophobic.

This is how Western media has always conducted itself and it's just useful to look back over previous events while examining the current ones. They inflict horrific violence on the targeted nation. And when the targeted nation reacts in a completely understandable predictable manner they gaslight media consumers in the west into imagining that the response was unprovoked, out of the blue, disproportionate and shocking.

The leadership in the targeted nation is presented as uniquely evil and Hitler-like Then 'hey presto' you've got a Western propaganda narrative ready to be used as justification for economic war, total blockade, invasion, bombing hospitals, shooting children in the head, all the way up to mass murder by famine. It's always the same.

The Cuba narrative is equally grotesque. We've watched the blockade for six decades. Recently we're seeing starvation by design. Now that the island nation suffers their worst crisis of scarcity in history, those same voices who cheered for the continued strangulation of Cuba under the Helms Burton Act are suddenly shocked that the Cuban regime has allowed itself to fail so far, that her own citizens are dying.

Fake humanitarian champions. They posture as saviours of a people they intentionally starved. They feign ignorance of their own sanctions regime whilst blaming socialism for the very crimes they committed in the name of western imperialism.

You're not supposed to remember that the only reason the Cuban people struggle at the moment is because the US is deliberately trying to kill them. You're supposed to forget that and pretend that Cuba is a dictatorship that's deliberately trying to kill its own citizens.

Look at Syria. They told us al-Assad was a monster. Another Hitler to be removed. They told us the "moderate rebels" were a hothouse for true democracy. Good independent journalists and those from outside the imperialist propaganda sphere knew very well what was coming. They warned us. They knew Idlib was a petri dish of CIA funded Wahhabi head choppers.

They knew that the continuation of the al-Assad government was fundamental to the smooth running of a nation as complex demographically as Syria. And they warned us that if Assad was removed he would be replaced by something far more dangerous.

Every step along the path was entirely predictable if you listened to the right people. But you're not supposed to know any of that. You're supposed to wake up every morning and think that the news cycle started today. The western press then run a three part docuseries about a country they helped dismantle, wondering aloud how it became a playground for radical Islamists.

We're all supposed to be surprised that this post Assad Syria isn't a utopia for free Syrians. Again surprised by predictable events. Spend five minutes reading about Operation Timber Sycamore. Billions in dark Contra style money funnelled into groups of radical jihadists who promised to assist the CIA with their regime change operation in Syria. The inevitable blowback of Syria falling into the hands of ISIS head choppers is as predictable as the timely departure of a Swiss train.

As for the EU, what a pathetic circus that's turned into. Commission mandarins act stunned that the EU population has turned against them. They can't fathom why ordinary people might not wish to fund a genocide in Palestine with hard earned European tax money. They've turned the EU into little more than a rubber stamping operation for US imperialism and now that monster is turning on its own imperial junior partners.

Collapsing empires always begin to eat themselves. That's why heavily armed police are on the streets of the US shooting civilians in the face without cause. That's also why the US has begun deliberately sabotaging the EU. Threats of invasion (Greenland), the destruction of EU energy infrastructure in Nord Stream, trade tariffs etc. The honeymoon is very much over and the only people in Europe who want to be part of a gang that endorses genocide, are the Fash, the Billionaires and the bent politicians.

We're supposed to be shocked that European industry is collapsing. Even though it's the direct result of sanctions we slapped on ourselves to stop buying cheap Russian energy. We could be paying a fifth of the current price. We could be making our own fertiliser plastics and chemicals.

We could be providing the world with these exported goods from the EU, building up our continental economy and reinvesting into our infrastructure, improving the lives of European citizens. Instead we've allowed US imperialists to bring us on a merry dance of war, regime change and genocide. This was all entirely predictable yet we're supposed to be surprised that things aren't going our way.

Looking at West Asia and the mess that western imperialists have created there should make your head spin. The West has spent decades planting US assets and puppets as leaders in each of the phony statelets that surround the Zionist regime. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, even Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan. These countries are all occupied. If you've got a US military base on your land, it's not your land.

With regard to the US Israeli attack on Iran we're supposed to be shocked and surprised when Iran retaliates by targeting US military bases in neighbouring "countries." Iran is one of the only unoccupied countries left in the region. They are known to have huge weapon stockpiles and it's commonly understood that they've spent the last year since the 12 days war preparing for another invasion by US/Israel.

How cucked do you have to be to believe that Iran wouldn't immediately retaliate with strikes against US military bases in their vicinity. It's been clear for decades that Iran's number one policy would be to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. I remember Iranians telling me in September 2001 that if the US invaded them without provocation, in the same way that they threatened to do in Afghanistan, that the Iranians would shut down the Strait and block all their neighbours oil from getting out. Again completely predictable events being described as shocking or surprising by western media.

I notice yesterday that the Russians have issued a warning to the government of Finland and the Baltic states against allowing Kiev to continue using their airspace for drone attacks on Russia. Will this be one of those moments when the Finns cross a line after which the predictable consequences of their own actions will be presented as shocking breaking news. Russian retaliation would be presented by Western media as unprovoked imperial aggression rather than the predictable consequences of Finland's refusal to comply with international law. It's the same thing all over again.

Some of us have been studying this for years and thankfully the gaslighting has no effect on anti imperialists or anyone from a post colonial country with a culture of resistance but I'm watching people all around me wake up and smell the bullshit. Everyone is sick of being gaslit by low IQ journalists and compromised politicians. It's not journalism we get in the west. It's all one deep US imperial psyop, dressed in beige chinos, with a phony smile exposing painfully veneered teeth and game show host hairline.

They're manufacturing amnesia so they can continue to make up the narrative as they go along. If nothing exists within actual historical events, if everything happens without context, it's a perfect environment for mass mind control.

Every day we're surprised by predictable events. But we need to wake up, there should be no surprises. The people screwing us are doing what they've always done. We should be disgusted by the fact that our leaders keep making decisions on our behalf which have predictable apocalyptic consequences for the rest of us schmucks. We need a revolution.

Polemics by Rory Mo-ran (Critical Theory) published on Substack.

Inspired by Chris Hedges.

4-24-26

America's surveillance-tech bros: Thiel, Musk, Sacks, and Botha didn't inherit techno-authoritarian politics from nowhere — they inherited them from apartheid South Africa.

Peter Thiel's formative geography:

Peter Thiel was born in Germany and brought to South Africa as a child, attending a German school in Swakopmund in what is now Namibia during the 1970s. The New York Times observed in 1976 that Swakopmund "remains more German than Germany," noting that "Heil Hitler!" was used there as a casual greeting. Thiel later co-founded Palantir, now one of the primary contractors building surveillance and targeting infrastructure for the US government and military.

Elon Musk's apartheid Pretoria:

Musk was born in Pretoria and attended Pretoria Boys High School before emigrating to Canada in 1988. Pretoria served as the administrative capital of South Africa's apartheid regime from 1948 to 1994. The 1970s and 1980s — the decades of Musk's childhood — saw intensifying racial repression and growing internal resistance across the country.

David Sacks and Roelof Botha:

David Sacks, former PayPal chief operating officer and Trump's crypto czar, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the white South African diaspora in Tennessee after his family emigrated when he was five. Roelof Botha, former PayPal chief financial officer, is the grandson of Pik Botha, apartheid South Africa's last foreign minister. Testifying before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997, Pik Botha acknowledged recognizing apartheid's immorality as early as the 1970s while failing to act decisively against the regime.

The politics track the biography:

The documented political positions of this cohort — Thiel's published skepticism of democracy, Musk's Nazi-salute controversy, their shared enthusiasm for AI militarization and authoritarian governance models — did not emerge from abstract ideology. They emerged from men who were formed inside a system that institutionalized racial domination and called it order. That context does not explain everything. It explains enough.