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When a Story Finally Lands Somewhere

Some months ago, I branched out into fiction. After finishing my short story Seed, I assumed it would sit on my devices and go nowhere. That is the normal fate of most short fiction and most ideas thrown into the world. Instead, it ended up in The Writer’s Workout’s Tales from the Unknown anthology. That outcome says more about the piece than I ever could.

What is worth speaking on is how the story loops back to the work I’ve been doing here on The Rumination Compilation. Seed did not appear out of thin air. It is built from the same ideas I track through my essays:

  • how environments, natural and digital and political, co-engineer human behavior
  • how systems pretend to be neutral even when they are steering everything
  • how progress hides its costs until the bill arrives
  • how the line between organic and engineered life keeps thinning while no one names what is happening

If you have read Mamagotchis & Digital Dependents, Precision Consumer 2030, or The Products of a New Environment, you have already seen the underlying structure of Seed. The story is the compressed form. Fiction lets me take the same ideas and apply pressure until they become something solid.

That is why the publication matters. It is not just a win. It confirms a suspicion I have had for a while: readers can tell when a piece is part of a larger architecture of thought. Even if they cannot articulate it, they feel the depth behind the lines. They sense something moving under the surface. Similarly to when we read, or hear, proposed legislation and innately understand something substantial is left unspoken.

Although this is the first time my fiction and my work here have formally crossed paths, it won’t be a singular event and I hope to share more when the time comes.

When the anthology is published, I will update this page with a link to the physical and digital versions of it, as well as the individual story itself.

© 2025 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.

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Digital Identity in the UK: The Hidden Architects Behind the Framework

Across much of the developed world, governments are translating social contracts into code. The UK’s digital ID rollout is simply one of the first to garner serious attention.

The UK government presents its digital identity initiative as simple, even practical. Secure. Voluntary. Privacy-preserving. A tool for proving who you are, without standing in line or waiting for forms in the mail. A step toward modernization.

The Digital ID isn’t being built in isolation. It’s emerging from a web of institutions that have long studied human systems — economic, social, and behavioral — and are now embedding those lessons into code.

Understanding these connections matters. The same expertise used to map, predict, and influence consumer behavior is now being applied to national digital identity infrastructure.

The Tech They Sell to You

Officially, the UK’s digital ID system operates through the Digital Verification Services (DVS) Trust Framework, to be embedded in law by the Data (Use & Access) Bill. It is designed to be interoperable and user-centric, allowing citizens to authenticate identity digitally across multiple services (banks, government, utilities) without repeatedly sharing documents.

The government’s communications emphasize privacy and choice. Each user controls their ID, and only necessary data is shared with service providers. Biometric data, at least at launch, is limited: photos of faces, not fingerprints or behavioral tracking. On paper, it is a modest system. Yet the technical scaffolding is built for expansion. Standards, APIs, and privacy frameworks could, in principle, accommodate far more data points than are currently being collected.

Behind the government’s polished language of security and efficiency sit institutions shaping not just how data is handled, but how people are expected to interact with systems of trust.

This is where the architects of the system come in, and where my warning begins for those in the UK.

Open Data Institute: Shaping the Rules

The ODI, headquartered in London, submitted formal written evidence to Parliament during the passage of the Data (Use & Access) Bill. Their recommendations were technical but far-reaching:

“We recommend a new clause tasking the Secretary of State, in consultation with relevant standards bodies (W3C, ISO, IEEE) to develop an automated privacy framework.” (bills.parliament.uk)

“Citizens should be able to use the holder in the Gamma framework to pull in data to reshare at their discretion.” (bills.parliament.uk)

These statements reflect a focus on interoperable, citizen-centered control. But they also establish technical flexibility: the very framework that allows citizens to pull in and share data could, in future iterations, include behavioral or biometric elements. The ODI does not advocate for this explicitly; it is the architecture that permits it.

If the ODI, in any way, shapes the system’s technical skeleton, the Tavistock Institute shapes its behavioral soul: the psychology of adoption and normalization.

Tavistock Institute: Historical Continuity in Behavioral Systems

The Tavistock Foundation, listed as a partner in the WEF’s Future of Personalized Well-being, has a far longer history applicable to the Digital ID.

Founded in 1947, Tavistock grew from the Tavistock Clinic, which conducted wartime studies in morale, psychological resilience and propaganda, into an institute focused on social systems, organizational psychology, and behavioral adaptation — fields that, while individually benign, form a powerful mix when aligned with technology and governance. Governments, NATO, and corporations have sought their expertise for decades.

Their involvement in the WEF initiative is framed in terms of improving health outcomes:

“The Future of Personalized Well-being initiative aims to harness the power of digital biology to be the game-changer needed to improve people’s quality of life.” (World Economic Forum)

It is easy to dismiss this as abstract or aspirational. Yet when behavioral expertise historically applied to wartime and organizational contexts now intersects with digital identity systems, the implications for user adoption, normalization of surveillance, and behavioral nudges are difficult to ignore. Tavistock is not writing laws, but their work informs the design and reception of systems that shape how people interact with their own data.

The World Economic Forum’s Reimagining Digital ID paper explicitly notes:

“These communications campaigns should explain the link between privacy and digital ID and seek to counter misinformation and conspiracy theories related to digital ID.”

Given Tavistock’s expertise in behavioral systems and its partnerships in related initiatives, it is reasonable to surmise that institutions like it may play a central role in shaping public perception and acceptance of digital IDs. The task is not merely informational, it is a subtle orchestration of narrative and trust, guiding citizens toward voluntary submission within the framework being constructed.

Precision Consumer 2030: The Bridge Between Digital IDs and Behavior

Co-developed by the WEF, IBM, 23andMe, and over 20 other partners, Precision Consumer 2030 envisions personalized data streams—biosensors, wearables, AI predictions—that guide individual behavior. The report emphasizes the potential benefits: preventive interventions, better individual health outcomes, more efficient services.

“Advancements in technology and the use of personal biodata hold the promise to move beyond mass ‘one size fits all’ solutions to more personalized solutions that preventatively improve well-being…New business, operating, and governance models are needed to realize the benefits of personalized well-being solutions at scale” (World Economic Forum)

The conceptual overlap with digital identity is clear. Digital IDs create a legally recognized digital anchor for a person, while Precision Consumer 2030 envisions systems that measure, predict, and guide the same person’s behavior. The same principles—data collection, interoperability, user-centric design—apply in both contexts. The difference is in scale and integration: one is domestic, one is global; one is currently modest, one is aspirational.

The Implications

Taken together, these strands suggest the UK’s digital ID rollout is more than convenience. It is a platform designed with foresight into behavior, interoperability, and potential expansion. Citizens will control their data, but the architecture will allow for more data types, more services, and greater influence over the parameters of individual participation in society. As Prime Minister Keir Starmer stated plainly:

“You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID.” (2025 Global Progress Action Summit, in London)

There’s no reason to believe that statement is the end of the plan, nor the limit of its scope. Whether meant literally or rhetorically, the remark reflects a policy direction where participation in the economy becomes increasingly contingent on digital verification.

This is not speculation. The evidence is public, in the written submissions, the WEF partnerships, and the report itself. What is less public is the extent to which future iterations could integrate behavioral and biometric elements, or the subtle ways adoption can be encouraged through system design.

The lesson is not fear, but awareness: the architecture exists, the actors are connected, and the system is being built in plain sight. How it will be used, and how it will evolve, is a question that rests partly with the public—and partly with the invisible hands that designed the foundations.

Questions to Carry Forward

  • How will the UK define the limits of digital ID data collection as new biometric and behavioral data types become feasible?
  • What transparency exists in the influence of organizations like ODI and Tavistock on policy and system design?
  • If the Precision Consumer 2030 framework informs system design, how far might predictive and adaptive digital services extend into everyday life?

The government’s framing is simple: convenience, security, privacy. The systems’ potential is far more complex.

Complex enough that civil-liberty groups such as Big Brother Watch, Liberty, and the Open Rights Group, along with campaigns like NO2ID and StopBritCard, have already warned that digital identity schemes risk the creation of a checkpoint society — one where access to work, housing, and even participation in public life may hinge on a single government-issued credential. Their objections aren’t noise from the fringe; they touch on cybersecurity fragility, digital exclusion, and the quiet expansion of state reach under the banner of modernization. Even parties outside Westminster’s mainstream, like Plaid Cymru, have raised these same alarms. That alignment — activists, technologists, and politicians speaking the same cautionary language — suggests this isn’t paranoia but recognition of an emerging pattern.

For those following the threads of emerging governance and digital influence, this discussion of the UK’s digital ID is only part of the story. The systems being built today draw on principles first outlined in Precision Consumer 2030, where personal data, predictive analytics, and behavioral insight converge under the guise of well-being. To see how these frameworks were imagined—and how they quietly shape the infrastructure now being deployed—read my earlier exploration, Precision Consumer 2030: Wellness as a Window into You, republished by OffGuardian.org.  Understanding the blueprint is the first step toward recognizing the structure being quietly built around us.

© 2025 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.

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Painted Quarters Cattle Company: Where Soil and Sound Money Meet

I first heard of Painted Quarters Cattle Company through word of mouth. After reviewing their methods, I concluded they produced some of the best beef available. For me, the decision was personal: I wanted my 8-month-old son to eat the best food possible during these critical developmental months. That pursuit brought me to their stand at the Hobe Sound Farmers Market.

I had a rough idea of what cuts I wanted and an even clearer idea of what it would cost after visiting Painted Quarters’ website. I paid for two ½-pound brisket patties with a Utah 1 Goldback and a Florida 1 Goldback. When I mentioned my intention to use Goldbacks, Greg Flewelling, who hadn’t been assisting at the counter, came over with a smile, genuinely pleased to see them in action. 

Our conversation quickly turned to economics: the failing fiat dollar, gold and silver as stores of value, and how Goldbacks create steady transactions on both sides of the counter. Greg mentioned that he travels the world teaching other farms how to implement regenerative practices. In that brief exchange, the scope of Painted Quarters became clear to me: this is more than a cattle company. It’s a model where ecological stewardship and financial resilience intersect; an example of how farming might endure in a future defined by economic and ecological challenges.

Greg Flewelling, founder of Painted Quarters, takes a hands-on approach to cattle and land management.

Greg’s story begins long before Painted Quarters. Food was always his family’s work; his father and relatives were butchers. As a boy, he spent summers on his uncle’s dairy farm in Canada, situated in a Mennonite community, though his family did not practice the faith themselves. The exposure there shaped his early perspective on resilience, self-sufficiency, and where he first absorbed the rhythms of food production and community. As an adult, he showed horses competitively, even ran a rodeo while raising cattle of his own.

Before Painted Quarters, Flewelling ran a rodeo and showed horses competitively, a foundation for the discipline he later brought to cattle.

The crash of 2008 became his pivot point; amidst a downturn in demand for horses, he sold his rodeo and shifted his focus back to vegetables and cattle. Greg began traveling abroad to teach regenerative methods, which he’s done in six countries so far. Back home, he took every chance to tour American feedlots. Those two tracks, mentoring and researching, eventually converged into a single realization: the food system in America was structured for profit, not health, and its effects were showing up in children.

Today, Painted Quarters operates on principles that take longer but restore balance and trust. It can take him five to six years to raise an animal, compared with the 18 to 24 months common in industrial agriculture. That difference exists because Greg refuses the shortcuts: steroid shots, antibiotics on arrival, and feed laced with more of the same, the commercial production standard. Unlike large-scale operations where cattle stand shoulder to shoulder on concrete, fed for maximum weight while machines scrape away their daily excrement, Greg ensures his animals touch grass and walk on natural earth. He respects each animal, herding them thoughtfully and letting them move freely. That philosophy also informs how he approaches the economics of farming. The pricing of farm goods is another reason commercial operations prioritize weight over quality: futures contracts and derivative mechanisms allow industry and organizations to skew the system. The market pays for heavier cattle, not healthier ones. Greg, however, can sell his cattle slightly above these futures prices at live auctions because the value is tangible. Real animals, raised well. Not just numbers on a contract. That tangibility is also why he favors Goldbacks over fiat, currency that carries real, discernible worth, not faith. For him, being a farmer is not about the straw hat stereotype but about proving there’s another way to do the work while remaining profitable. He mentors young farmers, emphasizing that agriculture doesn’t need to serve corporate profit alone but can be reoriented toward community profit.


One of Painted Quarters’ bulls grazing on Florida grassland, raised without shortcuts.

The fight hasn’t been easy. When hurricanes wiped out his greenhouses, Greg received no help from the USDA, while corporations like Del Monte were bailed out, all because of red tape that always seems to favor the big guys. He has seen firsthand how agricultural policy serves consolidation, not small independence. “Get big or go broke,” as farmers say, and inheritance taxes make sure family land doesn’t last beyond a few generations. Greg told me a family farm these days is lucky to survive past 3 generations. 

Along the way, sound money became more than an experiment for Greg; it became a necessity. “I have no confidence in fiat,” he told me, noting that the dollar has already lost 11 percent of its value this year. For him, Goldbacks and constitutional silver represent not just alternative currency but survival tools. Gold is already priced out of reach for most, leaving silver and fractional notes like Goldbacks as practical options. “They control the population by controlling the food, they control the food by controlling the money,” he said. He appreciates that Florida has legalized gold and silver transactions, but he also knows people need to relearn the art of barter. We shared anecdotes about the first time we held silver and gold coinage, agreeing it’s easier to hand over paper currency than hand over an ounce of real value. The phrase “weighing your options” has a deeper meaning when you feel the weight of a Troy ounce and remember the work it took to earn it. 

For Greg, financial resilience and ecological resilience are inseparable. “Hand in hand,” he told me. A farmer who learns to cut out the middlemen, go vertical, and keep that wealth within the community is as regenerative as soil that retains its fertility. Both systems—soil and currency—are depleted by extraction and strengthened by care. 

Flewelling sees resilience in both soil and currency, an outlook shaped by decades of farming.

Looking forward, his outlook is both sobering and hopeful. He sees large corn farms already collapsing, with massive auctions happening. He recounted the news about Walmart and Sam’s Club expanding further into cattle production, swallowing even more of the market that could have gone to independents. Regulations will continue to strangle small operators while leaving corporate giants untouched. At the same time, he is encouraged by young farmers willing to adapt and build resilience. He mentors two a year, and says, “if I can make 20 copies of myself, I’ll consider all my work worth it.” To farmers at large, his advice is simple: form groups, co-ops, and online networks to create a stronger voice, one resilient against government efforts that hinder choice and freedom. Spend physical money amongst yourselves and your wealth will never end up in the accounts of corporations you inevitably compete with. He sees urban farming rising in the next five to ten years, while food from corporate channels becomes increasingly artificial, “food out of tubes” as he put it.

Painted Quarters is not just Greg’s business. It’s his counter-argument to the way food and money have been handled for decades. It is proof that agriculture can serve people and land together, without cutting corners or bowing to corporate dictates. If agriculture is to survive the twin crises of ecological degradation and economic instability, it won’t be through business-as-usual models propped up by fragile fiat systems. Painted Quarters Cattle Company shows us what a different path can look like: regeneration of the land paired with the resilience of sound money. Supporting farms like this, and building parallel economies of barter, silver, and Goldbacks, isn’t just preference, it’s preservation. It may well be the foundation of food security and sovereignty in the decades ahead. 

© 2025 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.

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When Code Replaces Congress: AI, Expiring Law, and the Disappearing Line of Accountability

The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) of 2015 expires in less than 48 hours. A replacement is inevitable; the government can’t simply relinquish a power it once held. It will be framed as necessary, but the reality may prove quite the opposite.

CISA’s language was dressed up in the rhetoric of national security, but in practice it was an information-sharing system that blurred lines between private platforms and federal agencies. It was controversial, for good reason, but it was still bound to the machinery of government. There were names, faces, and offices that could be subpoenaed. 

But CISA is expiring, and the draft of its replacement—H.R. 5079—shows us where the baton is being passed. Instead of agencies tasked with oversight and decision-making, the text anticipates AI-driven “threat classification engines” as the functional arbiters of what constitutes a risk, a violation, or even a crime.

The bill goes further. In Section 108, it explicitly clarifies that nothing in the law should block the use of artificial intelligence strictly deployed for cybersecurity purposes. In plain terms, agencies now have the discretion to use AI as they see fit, and the law ensures that such use cannot be legally precluded. What was once subject to human judgment, oversight, and debate can now be filtered through algorithms that evolve on their own, all while remaining fully lawful. This codification turns AI from a tool into a quasi-authority: it can act, adjudicate, and classify, and the law gives it a protected seat at the table, all without the same lines of accountability that once existed for human decision-makers. This is worth noting: many content creators banned from 2019–2021 were legally removed under this law. Now, we may face the next round with AI-driven enforcement.

That shift matters. It means authority no longer lives in an office or under a director’s signature. It lives in code: dynamic, opaque, and designed to evolve on its own. What once could be debated in congressional hearings now dissolves into machine reasoning, cloaked in the language of efficiency and national security. And that is where the plausible deniability begins.

When an agency misclassifies information, it can be scrutinized, corrected, even dismantled like we’ve seen countless times. When an AI does it, the blame evaporates. Was it a bug? A training data error? A gap in oversight? Or simply the “best assessment” of a probabilistic engine? The answer will always be flexible, and that flexibility is precisely what makes it dangerous. Code becomes the shield, not just for the state but for the actors behind it, because the code can always be said to have “misinterpreted.”

This is not a matter of efficiency; it’s a matter of sovereignty. Agencies exist to receive direction from Congress; they are meant to be the executors of democratically expressed will, however diluted that may be in practice. Replacing them with adaptive systems means allowing the rationale of the machine to fill in legal gaps on its own terms. Those gaps will grow over time, as the law ages, as threats evolve, as interpretations stretch. 

The expiration of CISA should be a moment for reflection: do we want more accountability, more clarity in how information is shared and acted upon? Or are we quietly accepting that accountability is a relic, and that narrative control can be handed off to code because it is less visible, less contestable, and ultimately harder to discuss in the public square?

The choice isn’t just between one law and its successor, it’s between governance we can confront and governance we can’t even see. Between accountability we can demand and code that answers to no one.

Want to understand how this erosion of accountability fits into the bigger picture of civic life? Dive deeper into the patterns shaping our society in Civic Ineptitude: Signals in a Nation of Noise here. It’s a critical read if you want to see the forces behind public inaction, systemic noise, and how power quietly moves in the shadows.

© 2025 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.

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Civic Ineptitude: Signals in a Nation of Noise

Some time ago, I wrote a song with a lyric I find myself repeating more often to coworkers, and even in online conversations:

“Pay attention to what you pay attention.”

It’s the simplest way I’ve found to gesture toward the problem of the signal-to-noise ratio and how its manipulation breeds civic ineptitude.

Most of what we take in, whether from commerce or politics, isn’t meant to sharpen judgment. It’s engineered to trap us inside a single topic, to overload the civic ear. Not to expand participation, but to shrink it under the weight of constant input. Inputs irrelevant to both daily life and future prospects.

Democracy likes to sell the story that people can separate signal from static, that citizens have reviewed all sides of a problem and reached true understanding. The reality rarely matches the pitch.

Defining Civic Ineptitude

Civic ineptitude is a manufactured incapacity, not an accidental occurrence. It’s not that people are unwilling to participate, it’s that they are overloaded with inputs designed to trap attention in outrage and trivia. Citizens debate endlessly but rarely govern themselves or the institutions meant to be by the people, for the people. They are trained to consume noise to the point they delegate their sovereignty to an outside source, until they no longer truly think for themselves.

Commerce & Politics: The Social Noise Complex

Politics delivers daily scandal, a viral hearing, or a televised confrontation in all caps. These moments are designed to impress upon viewers the breaking news matters more than they could ever know. They digress from legislative maneuvers that might actually impact daily life and repress the viewer’s ability to think independently.

The churn promises significance but rarely explains consequences without exaggeration. Slow, structural signals (like infrastructure, demographics, environmental planning, national debt) fade into silence because they don’t trend. Because the ones in charge don’t need your input anymore, just your compliance.

Commerce is louder still. Advertising and financial media bombard us with promises of autonomy through consumption. New gadgets, lifestyle upgrades, and speculative bets are sold as independence. But the true signal, legitimate questions of sovereignty, labor, and national debt, goes unheard. Instead, the illusion of participation is kept alive by trading apps, side hustles, and brand loyalty. It looks like engagement but it’s only noise. Sometimes they’re blatant about it: “escape from real life, escape the burden of civic duty.”

While headlines focus on tech scandals, trillion-dollar corporate buybacks reshape ownership of the entire economy. Credit, conspicuous consumption and engineered complacency drive the system.

Historical Shifts that Made It So

This condition has roots. The 24/7 news cycle rewarded outrage over substance. The modernization of the Smith–Mundt Act blurred propaganda into domestic media. The dollar’s divorce from gold made inflation and debt permanent features, not temporary policies.

Citizens are still taught to treat dollars as solid. In reality, the currency became an abstraction, an IOU backed only by government promise. A system that once had a natural limit (gold convertibility) turned into one that could expand infinitely. The public was never educated on what that shift meant, because understanding it would expose the truth: debt is not a temporary emergency but the backbone of fiscal policy. The so-called debt ceiling is theater, not restraint.

When the money supply lost its anchor, spending lost its discipline. Citizens could still count dollars in their wallet, but they could no longer count on those dollars to mean the same thing tomorrow. The disconnect between appearance and reality became the foundation of modern civic ineptitude.

Even right now, the news is trying to convince every citizen the reason other governments and foreign banks are dumping U.S. Treasury Bonds is because of tariffs. They can’t let you doubt the longevity of the dollar too, you know?

Present-Day Illustration

The imbalance is obvious: the public spends weeks locked onto scandals, while consequential legislation moves quietly in the background. The pattern is clear:

  • 2008 financial collapse: While the public debated Wall Street outrage, Congress passed the $700 billion TARP bailout with little scrutiny.
  • Post-9/11: Fear of terrorism overshadowed the Patriot Act, quietly expanding surveillance.
  • Pandemic: Debate over masks and mandates eclipsed multi-trillion-dollar stimulus packages, shaping long-term debt obligations.

Here’s the next one: In about two weeks (from the time I published this) CISA, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, will be hitting the 10 year expiration date and needs to be re-enacted/rewritten.

Why? Because in 2018, Congress created CISA, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency, an agency with almost unrestricted authority over citizen communications, a component of the Department of Homeland Security. (Notice the acronyms are identical, blurring law and agency. Hardly an accident.)

Since the Agency’s creation, Congressional Oversight Committees have run multiple investigations that uncovered the Agency is apparently more concerned with what you and I say online, rather than cyber attack threats. Working in tandem with social media platforms, CISA has censored comments and posts, employed “narrative intervention” tactics, and surveilled US citizens unconstitutionally with the Mis-, Dis, and Malinformation (MDM) team.

CISA was disbanded in 2022, but government power rarely disappears, it reincarnates. When the new CISA passes (and it will) the agency will return, maybe under a new acronym, but with the same powers reborn.

I fully expect the law to be revived with further additions that exacerbate this issue of government weaponization upon the citizenry of the United States. I also fully expect only a sliver of the populace to even know it happened.

Why? The spectacle is always designed to be louder than the substance. Outrage consumes the civic ear while policy slips by unnoticed, and the government is always watching, waiting for us to be distracted or disinterested in what they’re doing this week.

The Democratic Mirage

Democracy promises citizens can separate signal from static. In reality, engagement is mediated by distraction. Civic aptitude is nearly nonexistent.

Candidates are products of party machinery, donor networks, and lobbying groups. Not public deliberation. Most voters respond to slogans, sound bites, and marketing repetition. The candidate becomes a brand, politics becomes advertising.

Appointments reveal where real power sits and why the candidate was dangled before us. Positions of influence often benefit industry, private networks, and political machines—not citizens. Just look at the last 25 years of questionable appointments:

George W. Bush

  • John Bolton – U.S. Ambassador to the UN (2005)
    Bolton was openly hostile to the UN and multilateral diplomacy, which made his appointment look like sabotage by placement. Bush didn’t even wait for Congress to vote on the appointment, he just signed off on it while Congress was in recess. 
  • Also appointed over 700 judges in the wake of 9/11, judges who provided no opposition to warrantless surveillance requests from the then-created Department of Homeland Security. 

Barack Obama

  • Mark A. Patterson – Chief of Staff to the Treasury Secretary (2009)
    Patterson was a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, put into a senior Treasury role just after Goldman benefited from TARP bailout policies. 
  • Gary Gensler – Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (2009)
    Former Goldman Sachs partner, placed in charge of regulating derivatives, the very instruments central to the 2008 crisis. 
  • Jack Lew – Director of the Office of Management and Budget (2010) then Treasury Secretary (2013)
    Former Citigroup Chief Operating Officer, another bank complicit in the 2008 derivatives scandal. 

Donald Trump (First Administration)

  • William Perry Pendley – Acting Director, Bureau of Land Management (2019–2021)
    Pendley had spent much of his career arguing for selling off federal lands, yet was appointed to oversee them.

Joe Biden

  • Gary Gensler – SEC Chairman (2021)
    Another Great Financial Crisis banker appointed by Obama, later reappointed under Biden to lead the SEC.

Donald Trump (Second Administration)

  • Ed Martin – U.S. Attorney for D.C. (2025)
    Martin had no prior experience as a federal prosecutor or judge, but was appointed to one of the most powerful legal posts in the country.

This is the democratic mirage: the appearance of choice, the ritual of participation, the illusion of sovereignty. All sustained by noise. The decisions made behind closed doors have had lasting impacts on these last 25 years, and more than likely, will for the next 25.

Returning to Attention

Civic ineptitude is not stupidity; it’s engineered overload. The signals of governance, sovereignty, and responsibility are still there, but faint, competing against an industrial volume of noise.

The question isn’t whether people can still hear them. The question is whether anyone remembers how to listen.

Pay attention to what you pay attention.

If this piece resonated, you may also find these worth your attention:

Market Forces: Foreign Factors & Domestic Actors

Precision Consumer 2030: Wellness as a Window Into You

© 2025 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.

Posted on by The Rumination Compilation

H5N1: When the Wild Whispers Across Continents

From the wetlands of Asia to the frozen coasts of Antarctica, from the farms of Europe to the forests of North America, H5N1 is moving quietly yet relentlessly. Once called “bird flu,” this virus has slipped through the cracks of public attention, expanding its reach across species and continents. It is no longer just a disease of birds: it is a cross-species contagion, touching goats, pigs, seals, sea lions, cats, cows and numerous other wild mammals.


Yet despite this, media coverage is fragmented and human awareness is uneven. H5N1 is everywhere, but our gaze often stops at borders, political lines, or convenient news cycles. The virus does not respect such boundaries. Its spread is a mirror to our selective attention.

A Global Cast of Hosts

Consider the reach of this virus. Across the globe, new species are being documented with infection and the list is become extensive to say the least (FAO, 2025). In Europe, swans, wild geese, poultry and even foxes and martens have been infected (ECDC, 2025). North America has seen seals, sea lions, wild birds, domestic cats, cows, raccoons and skunks (USDA, 2025). South America reports penguins, sea lions, gulls and other marine mammals. Swine are the historical step before human transmission but because of the amount of mammalian hosts thus far, it could be anything from cattle to sea lions that lead to a mutation that’ll cause the jump (Nature, 2025).


From Antarctic penguins to goats in Asia, from big cats in American sanctuaries to backyard poultry across the globe, the virus leaps in ways that are both biological and symbolic. It reminds us that human, animal and environmental health are never separate; they are threads in a single, tangled web.

The Global Eye: How States Track (or don’t track) Bird Flu

Even as H5N1 spreads across species and continents, the ways in which governments observe it diverge sharply. Some countries maintain strict, systematic surveillance; others glance occasionally; some have turned away entirely.


United States: Federal oversight has receded. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention treats H5N1 updates as a subset of routine influenza data (CDC, 2025). Voluntary testing programs in dairy herds draw participation from just a tiny fraction of farms. The state’s gaze has shifted elsewhere, leaving large gaps in knowledge.


China: Poultry markets and farms are disinfected daily, weekly, and monthly in a meticulously enforced rhythm (ScienceDirect, 2025). Every bird cough, every unusual death is a signal in a network designed to catch the virus before it leaps.


Europe: Coordinated regionally, member states report any case within 24 hours. A sick bird in Spain triggers alerts across the continent (ECDC, 2025).


India: Reactive measures, like the temporary closure of the National Zoological Park in Delhi after two painted storks died, illustrate intervention that follows tragedy rather than anticipation (Times of India, 2025).


Across the globe, this spectrum of vigilance (from obsessive monitoring to passive observation to deliberate neglect) illustrates the human choices behind surveillance. The virus moves indiscriminately, but our attention is selective. And selective attention, in a pandemic of interspecies proportion, is a choice with consequences.

The most recent iteration of government action related to H5N1 is quite literally a polar opposite of the U.S. approach: The Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention conducts a national diagnostic test practice mock training for animal influenza human infection (KCDCP, 2025).

A Reflection on Our Relationship with the Wild

H5N1’s march across species and continents forces a question: how do we relate to the wild when it can suddenly turn contagious? When a virus moves from birds to goats to marine mammals, when pets and livestock are implicated, the boundary between nature and human society blurs.


As with other technologies or threats, the unintended consequences unfold over time. The virus is impartial; we are not. Our awareness is shaped by policy, economics and media attention. What we choose to track, or not track, determines not just who gets sick, but who notices, who acts and who survives.
And so the question lingers: if a virus can hop continents and species, why do our eyes remain shut? When does selective monitoring become neglect, when does the world’s quiet whisper demand that we finally listen?

Closing Reflection

H5N1 is not just a threat to poultry or wildlife; it is a mirror of our attention, our governance, our relationship to the planet. The wild was once where humans went to disappear; now it is a place where contagion can travel undetected, where the boundaries between species and borders blur.


We can ignore it, as some states do. We can track obsessively, as others do. But no matter where the virus moves, it challenges every human assumption about control, safety, and care. And perhaps the greatest question is not whether we can stop it, but whether we are paying attention in time.

For further reading on how lobby groups are influencing the U.S. decision to ignore H5N1, see Bird Flu & The Great Disappearing Act.

References / Further Reading

Photo credit: NIAID

© 2025 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.

Posted on by The Rumination Compilation

When Ledgers Rewrite Culture: The Social Side of Sound Money

The technocrats will eventually tell you Basel III was a technical fix. The pundits will call BRICS a geopolitical contest. Both are true in their limited ways but us real people do not live inside policy memos or summit communiqués and will have our own perspective. We live in the real world of habit, rituals and desire. As the scaffolding of global finance is quietly remodeled (physical bullion regaining status and liquidity rerouting to the Global South) the most consequential shifts will be cultural, not merely fiscal.

This is the story no headline quite tells: how an accounting reclassification becomes a tiered, shared experience.

The West: From Immaterial Credit to Material Anxiety

In economies that grew comfortable with digital balances and endless credit aka “easy money”, the cultural shift will feel different, it will be slower and then sudden. Crack-up boom. Daily life is calibrated to cheap, frictionless money: mortgages, subscription living, bulk pricing. When policy nudges value back toward the tangible, the result will be a new kind of cognitive dissonance.

Expect changes in language first, personally, interpersonally and then communally/politically. Conversations will shift from “How much can I borrow?” to “What is real?”

Nostalgia will warp itself into politics. Calls for protectionism, reclaiming physical assets, other varying populist sentiments will resonate with people who discover a mismatch between their actual costs and their imagined abundance.

Mutual Aid and Parallel Economies: Gardens and Barter

When trust in fiat frays, communities adapt. We’ve seen it in Argentina, Zimbabwe and during wartime rationing but the west will have variation:

• Community gardens reappear as survival infrastructure, where calories mean more than currency. As fiat fails, big chain grocer prices will madden the masses and local growers will become pseudo-heroes.

• Barter centers allow exchange without the reach of taxation or failing banks. I expect this to be a mainstay of the West post-wealth transfer as citizens will lose respect and trust in the institutions they blindly followed. “Why give them taxes when they got us into this mess?”

• Local scrip or informal IOUs return as a temporary patch for frayed systems. This is already happening in terms of the Goldback movement in 7 states of the U.S., with two more announced but not yet active at the time of writing. In the U.K., the Bristol Pound (backed by sterling) is the closest example as it is a functioning local currency but lacks association to precious metals.

What begins as improvisation can calcify into an alternative, parallel economy. Trust, not credit, becomes the currency. Skills, not stocks, will pay the dividends. Trickle-down economics will be exemplified by the kind ones in the community, not the corporations.

Rituals, Class and the Story of Ownership

Ownership is never neutral: it’s class-status and identity. The form of possession matters as much as the fact of it.

In BRICS-aligned nations, gold is held whole. A coin is a coin, a bar is a bar. Jewelry is worn not just for ornament but for sovereignty. Wholeness is permanence: the signal that your wealth cannot be deleted by a keystroke or dissolved in a bankruptcy court.

In the West, scarcity will force a different adaptation: tokenization. Instead of outright ownership, assets will be broken into fractions and sold back as digital claims. Families will cling to ledger entries representing “one-tenth of a coin” or “a fraction of a house.” Cities and corporations will tokenize infrastructure just to stay liquid, slicing the material world into abstract coupons.

This isn’t innovation though, it’s desperation disguised as fintech. Tokenization is a coping mechanism for a civilization that can no longer afford wholeness, that can’t afford endless growth. It lets people pretend to own what they cannot hold.

The divide will cut deeper than economics. To the bullion-rich nations, the West will look like addicts trading scraps of paper to simulate the real thing. To Western citizens, the sight of others wearing or storing full reserves will feel like betrayal: their leaders sold them futures, while others secured permanence.

The new class line will be brutal and obvious: whole vs. fractioned, real vs. synthetic, permanent vs. provisional. One side will pass their wealth on intact. The other will spend their lives juggling slices.

This approach isn’t unique to the U.S. though; across the West, similar experiments have emerged. In 2018, the U.K.’s Royal Mint launched a gold-backed cryptocurrency: The Blockchain-based coin, called Royal Mint Gold (RMG), is a digital representation of gold stored in The Royal Mint vault. One RMG coin may be equal to one gram of gold but in a world of hard assets, I’m not sure how attractive this digital placeholder will be over the real deal. But you know, this might be the best the West might have to offer.

Theology, Disillusionment and the Question of Faith

Religion bends around money’s shape. In the West, Christian sermons may reach for familiar motifs: Judas’s thirty pieces of silver, the dangers of idolatry, the fleeting nature of wealth. But overuse risks cliché and invites criticism of hypocrisy. Different branches of Christianity may fracture in their responses:

Catholicism could lean into what’s lasting ie liturgy and sacrament as the “true store of value” against a collapsing fiat world. Evangelical Protestantism may frame gold resurgence as a divine order reasserting itself: God’s money returning into life after man’s failed experiment with paper. Prosperity gospel will struggle the most, almost collapsing entirely, as its glitzy promises seem outlandish in a world where even the faithful cannot finance new SUVs on credit.

The collapse of fiat’s aura may also push in two opposite directions across the board:

• Renewed Faith: A turn back toward God, with bullion framed as a sign of “end-times upon us”. The sentiment might find greater hold in non-denominational settings, though I imagine it’ll be common to the point of standardization.

• Rising Atheism: A wave of disillusionment, rejecting not only money but the institutions and faiths that blessed the old order and inevitably request tithes in the form of precious metals.

Theology will not be a bystander; it will be a contested arena for interpreting what gold’s return “means.” I fully expect the sermons post-wealth transfer to be extremely centered around Proverbs 3:13-14, along with stern reminders that the coveting of money is the root of all evil.

Secrecy Replaces Display: the Death of Flex Culture

Today’s culture of flaunting lifestyles, enabled by credit, will become dangerous in a metals-driven economy. Buy now, pay later schemes have almost entirely ensnared millennials and Gen-Z. But in a metals-driven economy, this visibility becomes dangerous.

• Those who stacked metals early will avoid attention, adopting aloofness and secrecy. This is already a norm, as it is for the general prepper, though the lengths these people will take to ensure privacy and security will impress just about anyone.

• Those who struggle amidst the post-wealth transfer will conceal their “bad luck” by retreating from the shame of scarcity both online and in real life.

• The algorithmic culture of flaunt-and-scroll will erode, replaced by discretion and silence.

Social media will have its reckoning in the post-wealth transfer world. Without a doubt, the failure of fiat will dismantle decades of “flexing” and the result will be admittedly cathartic for those who used to subscribe to content creators of all sorts, as the seemingly synchronized decline in quality of leisure is observed, the subscribers will realize it’s not just them, it’s just normal.

Everyday Behavior: Thrifting , Working and Timing

Culture is habit, and habits follow incentives. As money rewires, so too does the cadence of daily life.

• Work: jobs built on speculation, abstract consulting and branding will thin out. The booming will be in agriculture, repair trades, personal security, medical basics and food logistics. The gig worker who once delivered takeout may now be fixing farm equipment. The “creative consultant” and “affiliate marketer” will look more like a hustler without a market.

• Consumption: novelty becomes a liability. The fast-fashion buyer becomes the thrift-shop regular. The broken appliance gets repaired, not replaced. Mending, patching and improvising will become core skills, especially among the young who never learned them.

• Time Horizons: in unstable regions, people will hesitate to sign a 12-month lease or take out student loans for degrees tied to paper economies. Short-term survival dominates. But where gold and silver are treated as security, the opposite emerges: multi-decade infrastructure projects, new family compounds, community institutions.

The cultural split will be sharp. In one town, neighbors trade tools, seeds, weekend labor. In another, boarded-up shops and “for sale” signs multiply. The wealth transfer will redraw which places feel livable, which don’t and it’ll happen far faster than governments can manage.

Media, Narrative, and the New Moral Economies

How people interpret this shift will depend on who controls the story.

• State media in bullion-rich nations will frame accumulation as sovereignty and “what we deserve”. Depending on the nation, newscasters may invariably parrot state-sponsored rhetoric related to the “defeat of the West” and support re-election for many leaders within the Global South.

• Western outlets may cast it as loss, betrayal and “temporary”. On the other hand, I imagine investigative journalism may rise as the citizens of the West hunger for truth, valuable information and explanations of how the shift happened when decades went by of leaders and institutions saying it wouldn’t.

• Social platforms will fracture the narrative into memes; without a doubt humor will veer further into dark comedy, especially as the humor of Gen-Z prevails online as they are the growing bulk of the most active user base. Humor heals to a degree and humor will find a way to soften the financial blow.

Stories will shape behavior and politics, not spreadsheets and quarterly updates. The way media summarizes the drop in sales, the rise in unemployment, how things are the “new normal” will be at odds with how the common people view things.

Migration, Mobility and the Geography of Belief

Money moves people as much as goods. As liquidity tilts eastward, migration will not only follow jobs but a deeper quest for security.

For Western immigrants who left the Global South, the arc may reverse. A banker’s son who once left Lagos for London may find himself heading back. Skills, connections, and a sense of Western fragility will travel with him. A daughter who studied in Boston may bring her expertise home. Accreditation knowledge leaves one region and finds roots in another.

Western nations losing both talent and capital gained through immigration may find themselves hollowed out. Skilled professionals will no longer see New York or Paris as the obvious endgame. Families will weigh where their real, tangible savings feel safest.

Diasporas will change their tunes and ties. They won’t just wire money home; they will re-anchor their futures there. This will be a cultural migration as much as a physical one. My own mother, like millions of others, came here to the U.S. on the promise of stability, safety, and opportunity. In a post-wealth transfer world, that promise may not hold. The dream of “making it in the West” could erode, replaced by a dream of returning to one’s motherland or fatherland and not as escape, but as reclamation.

Closing Reflection

The mechanics of money are written in ledgers; the consequences are written in kitchens, altars and the streets. Basel III’s technical recalibration and BRICS’ geopolitical choreography are the inorganic architecture. The organic architecture will be cultural: how we talk about value, how we teach children to save, whom we trust which rituals we carry forward, how we consume, how we view leisure.

If you want to understand the future, don’t look at trading floors, prospectus statements or anything of the sort. Listen to the markets filled with people like you and people nothing like you: what songs are being sung at weddings, what words children learn about wealth, how neighbors share food in hard seasons, how people talk about their government. Those small things are the real indicators of where an economy has landed in the human heart and how people conceptualize worth.

When ledgers rewrite culture, ‘sound money’ becomes less about accounting conventions and more about the sounds in the marketplace, the voices in prayer halls, the silence at the dinner table.

This write-up is a cultural assessment of the banking changes coming into play that I’ve outlined in Basel III and the Return of Gold: A Comparative History.

© 2025 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.

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Basel III and the Return of Gold: A Comparative History

When the Bank for International Settlements finalized Basel III in 2019, it didn’t make headlines. But in elevating physical gold bullion to a Tier 1 asset (and relegating paper contracts and futures to near-irrelevance), the rules of global finance shifted as profoundly as they did in 1933, 1944, or 1971.

To understand the magnitude of this change, it helps to compare it with the last century’s monetary resets.

1933 — U.S. Gold Confiscation & Revaluation
• What changed: Franklin Roosevelt suspended the domestic gold standard, forcing Americans to hand in their gold at $20.67/oz. Months later, the government revalued gold to $35/oz.
• Effect: Citizens lost bullion, the state gained reserves, and the U.S. Treasury booked an overnight windfall that supported Depression-era finance.
• Parallel to today: A rule change, not a war, restructured wealth by reclassifying gold’s role. Value didn’t vanish—it was reassigned.

1944 — Bretton Woods & Dollar Hegemony
• What changed: Allied powers agreed to anchor global currencies to the U.S. dollar, itself pegged to gold at $35/oz.
• Effect: Nations no longer settled accounts in gold directly; they settled in dollars. The U.S. consolidated financial supremacy by holding the world’s largest bullion hoard.
• Parallel to today: Liquidity was centralized under one system. The illusion of stability masked a transfer of gold’s role into state-backed paper claims.

1971 — Nixon Closes the Gold Window
• What changed: President Nixon suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold. The Bretton Woods system collapsed, leaving a purely fiat world.
• Effect: Currencies floated, debt exploded, and dollar dominance survived only because oil and global trade continued to be priced in dollars.
• Parallel to today: A pivot disguised as necessity. Rules were rewritten mid-game to preserve credit expansion, even as trust in the old system eroded.

2019 — Basel III Redefines Gold’s Value
• What changed: Physical gold was upgraded to Tier 1, recognized at full value on bank balance sheets. Paper gold contracts and futures were risk-weighted down to ~10%.
• Effect: Sovereigns and central banks suddenly had incentive to accumulate bullion, not paper promises. The East has led record purchases, while Western markets cling to futures.
• Parallel to history: Like 1933, 1944, and 1971, the change was regulatory and quiet—but it redefined gold’s place in the system. Instead of removing gold, Basel III restores it to the balance sheet.

The Throughline

Across each reset, the same pattern emerges:

• Gold is never eliminated. It is reclassified, revalued, or hidden behind paper substitutes.

• Fiat credit is preserved. Whether by confiscation, substitution, suspension, or regulation, the system shifts rules to extend its lifespan.

• The burden of adaptation is global. Citizens in 1933, allied nations in 1944, world markets in 1971—all had no choice but to adjust. Basel III sets up the East as the next adjustment point.

As analyst Lena Petrova notes, “We are being told a story of multipolarity, but what we’re really seeing is continuity. The structure doesn’t vanish—it relocates.” The “relocation” now is not merely geographic (West to East) but material: away from paper contracts toward bullion. The BIS and World Bank aren’t losing control; they are orchestrating the transfer. To preserve fiat credit, bubbles must migrate, and liquidity must sink somewhere new.

If the 20th century required world wars to enforce its financial resets, the 21st may achieve the same outcome more subtly but no less disruptively. Basel III is the quiet hinge-point: a reminder that while money changes form, its gravity keeps circling back to the same metal.

What Comes Next, A New 1971 Moment?

If 1933 was confiscation, 1944 was consolidation, and 1971 was suspension, then Basel III may be the preparation stage for a fourth great reset. The difference this time is that it is not centered in Washington, London, or Paris, but in Beijing, Moscow, and the capitals of the Global South.


The BRICS bloc has already signaled its intent. Its member nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and now a widening circle of others—are exploring settlement systems that bypass the U.S. dollar. Without a peg, such systems risk fragmentation. The glue, as history shows, is gold.

• Eastern central banks are buying record tonnage of bullion, not futures contracts.

• Western banks remain tethered to paper claims, increasingly downgraded by Basel III rules.

• Liquidity migration is not a conspiracy but a pattern: when one region’s fiat exhausts credibility, another inherits the burden and backstopped by gold.

As Petrova observes, “This is not about destroying the dollar—it is about keeping fiat alive by shifting its weight onto new pillars.” Those pillars may look multipolar, but their load-bearing material is the same as it has always been.

The Shape of the Next Reset

If history holds, the shift will not be announced openly. It will arrive by necessity disguised as inevitability:

• A commodity crisis forcing nations to accept settlement in a BRICS-linked system.

• A financial shock exposing the fragility of Western futures markets.

• A global liquidity squeeze that can only be relieved by bullion-backed credit.

The pivot could take many forms: gold-linked settlement units, hybrid currency baskets, or digital instruments backed by physical reserves. But the essence will echo 1971: a silent rewriting of the rules, enforced globally, with citizens and smaller nations adjusting afterward.

Closing Reflection

The world has seen this cycle before. Gold is confiscated, concealed, dismissed, and restored again under new terms. Each reset claims permanence, but each is temporary scaffolding for the next.

The question is not whether BRICS will displace the dollar, but whether fiat itself can endure without a metallic skeleton. If the 20th century taught us that wars were the price of financial rearrangement, the 21st may show whether quiet regulation and rebalancing can achieve the same outcome or whether conflict remains the final enforcer of monetary truth.

Photo credit: PER-ANDERS PETTERSSON/GETTY IMAGES

© 2025 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.

Posted on by The Rumination Compilation

When Trees Bear Witness

Give it some time, the trees will start listening to you. A device once used only to track growth rates is now the seed of something else, a quiet grafting of the forest into the cloud. 

Dendrometers (used to measure the growth of trees and other plants by monitoring changes in diameter) have gotten a recent boost in applicability for more than just forest management teams. Thus far, they’ve allowed forest managers to cut down site visits needed to gather data on tree growth and carbon capture rates, but because of a recent innovation, much more is possible and I want to paint a picture for you. 

As per usual, what begins as a gesture to efficiency, a nod to preservation, may warp into something far more insidious.

The company Treemetrics, working alongside the European Space Agency, created sensors that link through wide-area networks and satellites, feeding streams of data into a platform called Forest HQ. If your tree is growing, Forest HQ knows. The forest becomes an extension of the cloud, feeding numbers related to diameter growth, height, location—change of all sorts. So, the forest is no longer a place. It is a feed. The company calls this project the Internet of Trees.

The logic is seductive: better measurement equals better care. Carbon accounting strengthens climate response. Carbon credits for the cap-and-trade markets gain more authenticity. But inside that necessity lies a governance architecture: every tree, instrumented; every growth curve, visible; every beat of the forest, rearranged as data. A swarm of data waiting to be further monetized or weaponized—unfortunately, humans do one or the other. Often both. 

I know what I will soon describe may seem altogether far fetched, but it does not take much imagination to see the scope widen in the way I expect given the right amount of time.

The slope is not hard to imagine. Already, forests are wired with listening devices meant to detect chainsaws, trucks and any other prohibited criteria. Artificial intelligence runs on-site, flagging the sounds of illegal logging before they reach the cloud. It is admittedly clever, even noble. But anything involving criminalization soon collapses into categories: nuance is stripped, anomalies are flagged, people are reduced to signals. 

We’ve seen this arc before. The Global Positioning System was once sold as a gift for navigation: finding your way home, never getting lost. Now it’s the backbone of precision strikes and geofencing. Closed-circuit television cameras were rolled out for “public safety.” Now they’re stitched together in networks that can track a face across an entire city and can even recognize your gait amongst a crowd. Social media began as a way to connect with friends and now it’s a sprawling apparatus of profiling, targeted persuasion and behavioral nudging.

Each began as benevolent. Each hardened into control.

For a good number of technologies, the arc of applicability tends to bend toward something darker. Monetized until meaningless or weaponized against anyone not in control of the weapon. 

What begins as protection of ecology can just as easily become the monitoring of people. A hiker’s footsteps, a group of protestor’s chants; any human activity can be parsed as anomaly, pinged to headquarters. With the right contracts, the forest becomes surveillance infrastructure, camouflaged in green.

What if Forest HQ evolves from tracking growth to performing guard duty? What if the forest ceases to be wild and becomes a grid, mapping bodies as much as making bark? 

Conveniently, this year a viral post showcased a new service from XFinity that uses WiFi signals to detect motion in your home, “without relying on sensors or cameras.” The technology has existed for years, but only now is it being pitched as household convenience. Tracking once reserved for homes and offices will soon extend to the wilderness.

You can opt into this service, which routers and WiFi connected objects around you don’t give the option to opt out?

This shift matters not only technologically but culturally. What happens when forests are no longer trusted as wild refuges, but feared as watchtowers? What happens to the human imagination when trees are not symbols of mystery or sanctuary, but extensions of a monitoring state? Jokes about birds not being real will lose their humor. Children will hesitate or outright refuse to climb a tree.

Surveillance always arrives dressed as care. It comes with drones, dashboards and dragnet data streams in the name of stewardship and security. But benevolence, left unexamined, can harden into coercion. The trees will stop watching silently; they start reflecting, transmitting, bearing witness.

And so the question lingers: at what point does monitoring, however noble its pitch, become policing? 

Throughout our history, the wild was once where we went to disappear. Now it has the potential to be where we are found most easily. 

For more reading on how technological advancement affects our interaction with nature and cultivated products, see The Products of a New Environment.

© 2025 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.

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Critical Minerals: The Silent Tell of a War Economy

When the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) updates its critical minerals list, the headlines barely notice. It reads like administrative trivia: a few minerals added, others removed, technical notes buried in appendices. But the 2025 draft list, now including copper, silver, lead, potash, silicon and rhenium, is not trivia. It is a tell.
These are not just “resources.” They are the circuitry, fuel and substrates of distance warfare: drones, satellites, AI servers, hypersonic craft and cyber networks. Naming them “critical” is not geology; it is policy. It signals that Washington intends to underwrite, secure (and if necessary) militarize the supply chains for tomorrow’s conflicts.
If history is the guide we expect it to be, we understand such lists are never neutral. Before WWII, Washington catalogued strategic materials like chromium, manganese and nickel as tanks and planes would have remained sketches without these metals. The Cold War stockpiles of uranium, titanium and rare earths told their own story of nuclear escalation and aerospace competition. Whenever governments build inventories of earth and ore, war usually follows.

Copper

Copper has long been civilization’s wire. Today it is the bloodstream of unmanned systems. Every drone swarm, every electronic countermeasure, every power-hungry radar dome requires copper’s conductive veins. The Pentagon’s own electrification push (from hybrid tactical vehicles to expeditionary battlefield grids) makes copper as strategically indispensable as oil once was.
The USGS data shows about two-thirds of copper production comes from private multinationals, while state firms like Chile’s Codelco anchor the rest. In war, that’s a chokepoint: private profit and public sovereignty tugging against U.S. demand. The federal “critical” designation is the mechanism for resolving that tug, by aligning private output with military need.

Silver

Silver is the mineral of precision. Its conductivity makes it indispensable in the circuitry of surveillance satellites, the sensors on drone wings, the guidance modules of missiles. It’s also the mirror of the heavens: silver-coated panels and optics sharpen the eyes of space-based reconnaissance.
Mexico’s silver (highlighted in USGS modeling as a $435 million GDP risk in the event of disruption) is more than jewelry export. It is the fragile tether of America’s electronic warfare capacity. If WWII needed steel and oil, the drone wars of the 21st century will need silver: it’s in every chip, every reflective surface, every sensor that makes remote systems function in real time.

Lead

Lead sounds archaic, a relic of musket balls. But logistics never sheds old tools. Lead-acid batteries remain the workhorse of backup power, rugged vehicles and forward-deployed comms units. They start engines in the desert, stabilize grids in the field and keep lights burning when lithium-ion fails under cold or cost.
China dominates production, with “private” firms bound to state direction. By putting lead on the list, the U.S. acknowledges what the generals already know: battles are won not just with drones and code but with batteries that still crank when newer chemistries fail in the field or fail the budget.

Potash

Food is logistics. Napoleon’s armies starved; Hitler’s armies sought Ukrainian wheat; America’s mobilization in WWII required fertilizer to keep farms feeding troops and allies. Potash, as a primary input to fertilizer, is not about crops alone, it is about sustaining human capital in war.
With Belarus, Russia and Canada holding the export reins, potash is geopolitically entangled. Its presence on the USGS list signals that Washington understands a modern war economy will not only hinge on missiles and AI but on whether its population (and allied populations) can eat under blockade or disruption.

Silicon

If copper is circulation, silicon is cognition. It is the substrate of AI, the backbone of cybersecurity, the etched brain of every satellite, drone and digital fortress. Without silicon wafers, there are no chips; without chips, there is no digital battlefield.
China’s industrial policy has made it the center of silicon refining. That means the U.S. must either subsidize domestic fabs or militarize semiconductor flows (hello Intel). By declaring silicon “critical,” the federal government isn’t just protecting consumer supply. It is announcing that AI warfighting, drone autonomy and orbital cybersecurity are national defense priorities and that silicon will be commandeered to feed them.

Rhenium

Rhenium is the most esoteric of the six, but perhaps the most militarily revealing. Added to nickel-based superalloys, it allows turbine blades to withstand searing temperatures. Without rhenium, high-performance jet engines melt; without those engines, fighter jets, hypersonics and reconnaissance craft can’t fly.
In WWII, nickel and chromium were critical because they made steel tanks roll and engines run. In the Cold War, titanium allowed spy planes to reach the stratosphere. Today, rhenium plays that role. Its scarcity (less than 10 metric tons globally in 2024) mostly recovered as a byproduct of copper mining makes it a perfect “tell.” It is not industry that demands it at scale; it is the Air Force.

The Historical Echo

Every mobilization has its list. The National Defense Stockpile Act of 1939 quietly laid the groundwork for industrial war, identifying which resources would decide victory or defeat. The Cold War Defense Production Act extended the logic, aligning corporate supply with strategic need. Each list is both an inventory and a prophecy.
The DoD Industrial Capabilities Report underscores the stakes: vulnerabilities in minerals like copper, silicon, silver, rhenium, and lead are national security threats. Adversary control or disruption of these materials would undermine warfighting readiness and the Pentagon already treats this as an operational, not just economic, issue. The USGS 2025 draft list is therefore more than academic: it is the civilian-facing reflection of a military strategy that assumes scarcity could decide battles.

Stimulus or Inevitable Conflict?

The genius of bureaucratic language is that it conceals what it reveals. The report never says “we are preparing for remote wars and orbital conflict” on page one. It doesn’t have to. The list itself is the confession.
By designating these minerals as “critical,” the federal government is signaling that two possibilities are on the table:

  1. War as Stimulus: Subsidies, stockpiles and corporate alignment redirect production into a defense-driven growth cycle. The late 1930s provide a historical parallel: FDR’s pre-WWII rearmament quietly built the arsenal of democracy while simultaneously pulling America out of the Depression. Factories humming with war contracts were both shield and lifeline.
  2. War as Expectation: The alternative is grimmer: Washington is preparing for conflict because it expects it: whether in orbital control, cyber escalation, or contested supply chains. Just as FDR’s military buildup acknowledged looming global confrontation, today’s mineral maneuvering may be a recognition that certain conflicts are unavoidable.

Either way, these minerals are no longer neutral commodities. They are instruments of war planning. Copper wires it. Silver refines it. Lead powers it. Potash sustains it. Silicon thinks for it. Rhenium lifts it into the sky.
This is structural war prep: either as a lever for economic revival or as preparation for a fight the state believes it cannot avoid.

Works Cited

1. Nassar, Nedal T., et al. Methodology and Technical Input for the 2025 U.S. List of Critical Minerals—Assessing the Potential Effects of Mineral Commodity Supply Chain Disruptions on the U.S. Economy. U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2025–1047. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, August 25, 2025.


2. U.S. Geological Survey. “Department of the Interior Releases Draft 2025 List of Critical Minerals.” USGS News Release. U.S. Department of the Interior, August 2025.


3. U.S. Geological Survey. Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025 (ver. 1.2, March 2025): 212 p. U.S. Geological Survey.


4. Bloomberg News. “US Agency Proposes Including Copper, Potash in Critical Minerals.” Bloomberg, August 2025.


5. U.S. Department of Defense. Annual Industrial Capabilities Report to Congress. Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, January 2024.

© 2025 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.