O Shocks
A while back, I wrote about American Glasnost. We are now in the thick of it - an apocalyptic period in American history that involves the unveiling of significant previously hidden truths. These unveilings are causing, or will cause, extraordinary ontological shocks for the public. Let’s call them O Shocks. This is when a person’s core beliefs are being challenged to the point that we humans are forced to let go of long-held belief systems. These moments create existential uncertainty and what textbooks call “disruption of fundamental axioms”. We are currently living in a time where the foundations of collective belief — what we thought we knew to be true — are being repeatedly and profoundly shaken. This is not just about the erosion of trust in institutions; it is a deeper rupture in our understanding of reality itself. These O Shocks are triggering profound cognitive and emotional disturbance as we, individually or collectively, confront evidence that our worldview is fundamentally incorrect. But, rather than contend with the new realities, we want to forget. We want to pretend the bad things never happened. It is easier to sacrifice a person than it is to sacrifice a belief system.
O Shocks are not new. But what makes the current moment unique is that we are experiencing multiple such shocks simultaneously. It’s the relentless and compounding cognitive shell shock that is so disorienting, causing people struggling to recalibrate their beliefs, identities, and sense of meaning in the world. Today we face multiple simultaneous O Shocks spitting out across the headlines: Epstein, Russiagate, dredging up the various assassinations of American leaders like JFK and MLK, new mind-blowing discoveries in physics and technology, a changed approach to the Federal Reserve and money. The list goes on and on. What matters is the cumulative effect of all this. What matters is that we try to understand how to navigate life amidst an onslaught of ontological shocks. O Shocks make sensemaking hard.
Let me give you the punchline now. Most juicy scandalous happenings tend to disappear, South Park style, in an “and it’s gone” moment. It’s been happening like this for decades and, certainly, since the end of WWII. Many people who have committed scandalous acts are suddenly gone, pardoned, and forgotten. Remember Marc Rich, the metals trader who President Clinton pardoned at the last minute? There are many such characters and even places that are suddenly just ….gone.
I recently visited a very weird place in Berlin called Teufelsberg. It was a reminder of how an important place from WWII and the Cold War was simply forgotten, twice. Teufelsberg, which means Devil’s Hill in German, was built by the Nazi’s, deep in a German forest and high above Berlin, to house their super-secret exotic technology research. Then, it was suddenly abandoned. Later, in 1963, the American NSA then built their Cold War super-secret Echelon listening station there. Then one day, after the Berlin Wall fell, the whole huge place was abruptly abandoned again. Artists moved in and painted beautiful graffiti all over it. No one has ever redeveloped it. There is a strange feeling that time itself has abandoned this place. It’s as if it never happened. It’s a ruin and a relic. The place itself is in denial, and we are in denial over this place. Now let’s ask ourselves an interesting question that may challenge our ontological understanding of the world. Did the US win WWII? You say yes! Of course we did because that’s the official story. It’s overwhelmingly well documented and there’s overwhelming evidence for it. And yet, how did Otto Skorzeny end up as a farmer in County Kildare in Ireland? Skorzeny was Hitler’s Head of Special Forces, the Waffen SS, and referred to as “The Most Dangerous Man in Europe” and the most daring commando the Nazi’s ever produced. How was he acquitted by The Hague? How did he end up in a lovely house in the West of Ireland after the War and later, after being outed by the neighbors, in sunny Marbella? Even then, how did he evade the post-war Nazi hunters? Answer, by becoming a consultant to Mossad, the CIA, Egypt, Argentina, and to many other national intelligence services. A deal was cut. He got a free pass. Forgotten. Rehabilitated. “Gone”.
That’s what seems to be happening with the Jeffrey Epstein story and also with President Obama’s evidence of Russiagate. These O Shocks matter because it’s not about the man. It’s about the system that the man’s situation reveals. We want to understand a system that is still operational, still powerful, and still hidden. When a huge person like Epstein or Obama disappears from the system, it ironically causes a very bright searchlight to shine on all that is normally hidden and invisible.
In Teufelsberg, I was listening to the new Agents of Chaos podcast by some of the journalists who broke the Wirecard story. Why did the FT journalists take so long to break the Wirecard story? Why was there so little editorial support to pursue the story? Was Wirecard like BCCI, the scandalous bank that failed in the 1980s, an organization that many intelligence agencies, even opposing intelligence agencies, used via plausibly deniable intermediaries like Epstein? How does this system really work? You think you understand the economy, and the financial markets, but do you? Can you understand financial markets if you don’t understand the forest of mirrors that is the world that both Epstein and Wirecard’s point man Jan Marsalek inhabited? O Shock.
Sometimes an O Shock happens slowly. It took three generations for people to fully accept that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Today, O Shocks are hitting us fast like machine gun fire, blasting apart our assumptions about what is true. Here are a few:
Epstein and all his data are, well, gone. The President says there’s “nothing to see here,” and Epstein was all a made-up, Democrat-fabricated scandal, and the evidence is not just missing. It was never there, or so we are told. In a sense, this is right. It’s not Epstein the person that matters. It is his role in the power structure that matters. But, Epstein’s role in that system is hardly discussed. It seems perfectly obvious that Epstein was deeply involved with multiple intelligence agencies over many decades. As Mike Benz so beautifully explains, the intelligence community is now dancing around semantics, leaving the public having to figure out that there is a profound difference between working “for” an intelligence agency as an asset and working “with” it (not as an asset). Benz explains the different categories of people that work with but not for the CIA: A cooperative contact, a co-optee, a friend of the station, casual quid pro quo relationships that are never formally recruited, a liaison, a facilitator, and salaried assets who are people that work for NGOs or news organizations. Assets have 201 files. These other categories and valuable people like Epstein do not. They “belong” to the CIA but aren’t assets. So, when Alex Acosta justified his extremely lenient treatment of Epstein when, as Attorney General, he sentenced him for sex crimes in 2008, he implied that Epstein “belonged” to intel, but was also not a CIA asset. Both statements can be true. Epstein was a different category altogether. Benz says people like Epstein, Bruce Rappaport and Marc Rich are brought in to facilitate and broker deals between private investors, top scientists/technologists, and intel agencies. So, Epstein was a useful off-the-books bagman for financing technologies and deals. The question is, what were these deals? Why do such agencies need third parties to accomplish such deals? Why is it so important that there is no trace of official fingerprints? Why is no one asking this?
We find out that the evidence of Russiagate is also gone because it, too, was all a made-up, fabricated scandal. The ODNI released extensive and unprecedented documentation, including, extraordinarily, the President’s Daily Briefing. The cache of documents seems to confirm, as ODNI's Talsi Gabbard put it, that a “treasonous conspiracy” has occurred of such historic consequence that it cannot be limited to one or a few people. Many of America’s highest ranking policy leaders have already been referred to The DOJ and will be facing legal action and public scrutiny including: President Barack Obama, John Brennan, the former Head of the CIA, Secretary of State Clinton and others but also the Crossfire Hurricane investigators including former FBI Director Robert Mueller, John Durham who led the Special Counsel investigation into Russiagate, the FISA Judges and Jeff Boesberg who warned that Trump constituted a Constitutional Crisis and has constantly tried to override him. Gabbard says, “they all must all be held accountable” because the American public were told that the election was, as Hilary Clinton said on December 16th, 2016, “unfair, not free, illegitimate”. The result of these stories is a series of O Shocks that are creating an earthquake in global geopolitics. And now Pam Bondi, the DOJ, is going after the Clinton emails and the famous private email server. You can be sure that we are going to hear more about the Hunter Biden and the Anthony Weiner laptops as well. It’s all coming. Hunter Biden knows it and is already lashing out at everyone who undermined his father, especially George Clooney. Trump is accelerating public prosecution by deploying AI. He released a fake AI video of Obama being arrested inside the Oval Office. This is another O Shock – what happens to public opinion as the quality of AI videos improves and Presidents post them? What is real and what is not?
The ODNI Tulsi Gabbard says that Russiagate was a “years-long coup”. This hints at the possibility that more than one President has been similarly challenged, constrained, or outright overthrown by the intelligence community over many decades, including not just President John F Kennedy but perhaps also President Richard Nixon. Or, perhaps a President is not overthrown but micromanaged to the point that they are not calling the shots. Did Obama call the shots in Russiagate or was he framed? Or micromanaged? Or outright culpable? Gabbard has now released the Martin Luther King files. Already we see that intel officials were directly involved with both JFK and MLK in the runup to their assassinations. The MLK story reveals how even unelected voices have been controlled. It reminds us that Ernest Hemingway also spoke about being continuously under surveillance. This rattled him to the point of suicide. His best friend, AE Hotchner, did not believe him. When the authorities declassified and released the Hemingway files, it was clear that he had indeed been the subject of extremely aggressive surveillance. Today, we live in a world where surveillance has been constant for decades, yet the authorities totally missed Epstein moving billions of dollars around while working with the world’s most important investors, sceintists and technology innovators? One now has to consider the possibility that the American political system and the White House do not operate the way we thought. O Shock.
Why did President Trump and the leadership of the FBI and DOJ jazz up Jeffrey Epstein case as a huge juicy story and then suddenly reverse, blithely saying “there’s nothing to see here” and that all the records are South Park style “and it’s gone”. This sudden reversal implies that even The President is somehow either acting under threat or is genuinely powerless to do anything about the Epstein situation. Either way, this means facing the possibility that we do not understand the power structures that define and dominate how the US Government really works internally or operates outside the US as well. That’s an O Shock. Yes, Epstein seems to have been quite expert at sexual kompromat. Yes, Trump palled around with him. But, if the Democrats had the goods on Trump, why wasn’t it released before now? Perhaps all this is less about Epstein’s peccadilloes and more about the fact that he was deeply entrenched in the global scientific community at the highest levels. He was a deal broker. Why was Intel involved in such deals that were clearly structured to be beyond government oversight and protected from public visibility? What we see here is a tiered justice system that gives ridiculously preferential treatment to some and not to others. That’s a profound O Shock.
A further O Shock arises from the fact that Epstein’s first boss at age 20 was Donald Barr, the father of Bill Barr, a former CIA officer who was the serving US Attorney General handling Epstein’s case when Epstein was arrested and mysteriously allegedly committed suicide in a suicide-proof cell in August 2019. He was not on suicide watch. There was no cellmate. The guards disappeared at the critical moment. The videotape is missing the exact few minutes when the death occurred. Wired says the video was was tampered with. Add to all this the fact that Donald Barr was OSS, the precursor to the CIA, and wrote weird novels in his spare time. One of these is Space Relations, which features humans being kidnapped by “an empire of ant-like alien bug people” for sexual abuse. Barr hired Epstein to teach math at the prestigious Dalton School in spite of the fact that Epstein strangely had no college degree. Epstein went on to join Bear Stearns, where he was put in charge of certain very specific high value client portfolios. Several billionaires, like Leslie Wexner, handed him the keys to their kingdoms, giving him full control over their wealth and running the logistics of his huge global clothing empire. Notably, Wexner had been business partners with characters from the mob world (Meyer Lansky’s successor Eddie DeBartolo). Epstein became the sole advisor to the world’s largest arms dealer in the 1980s, Adnan Khashoggi. Remember that Jeffrey Epstein's will, which was signed just two days before he died, named three people as his executors. Two were his long-time lawyers. But, one was Boris Nikolic, a Harvard Assistant Professor of Medicine who became Bill Gates’s science advisor. Nikolic declined the role, but Epstein’s involvement in such advanced tech and with weapons dealers raises questions about the government’s history of handling and managing classified and secret advanced technologies. Meanwhile, why is there no record of Epstein’s fund management operations? This alone is an O Shock. For a deeper dive, see Tucker Carlson’s interview here and Vicky Ward’s interview about her interview with Epstein in 2002 here.
Why was Epstein involved with gravity, zero gravity, physics, and deep math? Eric Weinstein recently asked, Why was Epstein so deeply familiar with his mathematical work when Weinstein was back at Harvard, when ‘nobody’ understood what Weinstein was doing? Weinstein draws our attention to the fact that the data from the James Webb Telescope and the Hubble Telescope seem to indicate that our understanding of physics is off. It’s not a matter of faulty data. It seems to be a real inconsistency that undermines the current models that shape our understanding. As Weinstein puts it, “the field of theoretical physics is once again being threatened almost daily by new ideas. Keeping those new ideas out of theoretical physics when we have the 50YO "Standard Model of Particle Physics", the 25YO "Standard Model of Cosmology", and our over 110YO "General Relativity", has fallen to a tiny handful of aging gatekeepers and increasingly aggressive enforcer-psychopaths who know that true progress requires that patience be measured in millennia when we already have the one true theory in every case. What calamity would befall physics if those science enforcers faltered? One shudders even to contemplate. The "Grift", The "Arrogance", The "Charlatanism!", The "Bunk", The Change, The Repudiation of Dogma...my god. The progress could be unbearable. Imagine if we were wrong and the critics of the last 40+ years weren't crazy after all.... ;-) We might even have to apologize.”
It’s ontologically challenging to adjust to these sorts of scientific discoveries, especially as they are happening at an increasingly rapid pace. The discovery that Jeffrey Epstein was deeply involved in science and technology, not only tracking young stars like Weinstein but also tracking gravity, is also an O Shock. In 2004, Epstein curated a conference on gravity which featured Stephen Hawking and some of the world’s top physicists. He was also deeply involved in genetics research, having funded Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. As an aside, it seems that Donald Barr’s other son, Stephen, is a nuclear physicist and now President of the Society of Catholic Scientists and author of books on “Nuclear and High Energy Physics”. His specialty, according to his website, is “ Grand unified theories (or "GUTs") are theories that give a unified mathematical description of the three non-gravitational forces, namely the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions”, "time reversal symmetry" and Baryogenesis, which refers to dark matter and “the