cybersecurity – The Rumination Compilation

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.

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Market Forces: Foreign Factors & Domestic Actors

Precision Consumer 2030: Wellness as a Window Into You

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:

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.
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.

The Rumination Compilation

Tag: cybersecurity

Civic Ineptitude: Signals in a Nation of Noise