To quote from our NEFARIOUS RUSSIAN MINDSET MANUAL FOR SURVIVAL, in which we use ancient Soviet wisdom to help Americans survive and thrive during decline (on sale this Sunday at the KGB Bar):

“Under individualism, males are exploited…Men in America will not be liberated with Men’s Rights individualism. True male liberation will only come with collectivism.”

Take a listen. And…

Want to know more?

We here at NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS have been speaking and writing about American decline. It’s hard to not notice the signs. The procession of senile heads of state, top-level corruption, pointless wars, wide-scale cynicism, soaring costs of living, an insulated and parasitic elite involved in the pursuit of fantastic projects — like their attempts to build all-powerful AI slaves to replace the unstable mass of humanity underneath them.

The decline is noticeable everywhere. Americans are increasingly moving abroad or dreaming of moving, and millions watch videos of Chinese high-speed trains and modern infrastructure with disbelief and longing. “Why can’t we have this here?” It reminds us of the way Soviet people dreamed of moving abroad; the way they salivated over American cars and blue jeans.

Yes, as immigrants from another collapsed society, we see you Americans and try not to enjoy the schadenfreude too much. In fact, we empathize with you enough to offer a practical manual to survive and even thrive during collapse. We’re drawing on ancient Soviet wisdom for self-help — wisdom we didn’t know was worth very much until recently!

We have experienced collapse in our own ways. Yasha’s early childhood was in the last decade of Soviet Leningrad. Memories of food shortages and empty grocery stores and abandoned construction sites. His parents, even though they had decent, stable jobs and their own new apartment, believed so little in a Soviet future that they decided to flee the country as if they were running from a war zone, thinking that it was better to plunge into the unknown and even live in refugee camps and start all over at 40 with two kids than to remain at home. That’s how little faith they had in their own country. Yasha had relatives and family friends who stayed and lived through the collapse. His cousin became a mail-order Russian bride, his childhood friend’s sister became a prostitute, the next-door neighbor kid he used to play with got hooked on heroin, fell under the train, survived but got his legs cut off, and eventually died of AIDS.

Evgenia was born a few years before Boris Yeltsin dissolved the USSR, and she grew up in a truly collapsed society — among rampant cynicism, a nonexistent government, Moscow run by thugs and mafia, makeshift markets selling cheap Chinese goods as if Moscow was a shantytown, a “tochka” where women sold their bodies not far from her apartment, and a class of carnivalesque New Russians zooming around in Range Rovers and blowing through money at expensive restaurants and casinos. It was surreal — like living through the reverse of the Russian Revolution. Turned out that this shock privatization was as painful for people as collectivization was. So the people suffered again, while a tiny minority enriched themselves and bohemians enjoyed freedom of speech, the lifting of censorship, and freedom of travel.

We look at what’s happening here in the United States and can’t help but feel empathy. We’ve lived through collapse. We were formed by it. We’d like to help. This upcoming event on June 7th in NYC is about.

To us outsiders, to people who came from a more collectivist society, we see that one of the biggest weaknesses of American society is the cult of individualism that has been pushed on everyone here.

Individualism is one of the most powerful myths in America. It’s basically enshrined as one of the main divine laws of the land — “Be Selfish” might as well be the 11th Commandment here, handed down by Moses and ratified by Jesus Christ. This myth has made individualism synonymous with strength and vitality. Being selfish and self-reliant is like rock that can’t be broken: cowboys, tycoons. This is the idea pushed by another Russian immigrant, Ayn Rand. The strength of the individual vs the weakness of the collective.

And when society is stable, institutions function, and things more or less work as promised, individualism seems to work. You can go out there and make money and then buy things that you need to survive. You don’t need to lean on friends or family or your community; you can just tap the commercial market for goods and services: nannies, movers, shrinks… They are all there for you to buy. Transactional relationships take up all the space and are seen as normal while friendship remains decorative and aloof. You are not supposed to impose on people or ask them to help — you don’t want to be a drag and you don’t want friends to be a drag either.

Americans have been psyopped into thinking that individualism is a strength. But we see it differently: Individualism is fragility. Individualism depends on impersonal institutions — you become dependent on a job and market for everything, even things that shouldn’t be commercial. And if those institutions fail or you lose access to them, your whole life will come crumbling down. Real strength lies in collectivism — in cooperation with other people. TaskRabbit is not cooperation, but the opposite of it. Paying someone $20 to install your shelf is psychotic, not normal and efficient.

The thing to remember is that America’s cult of individualism is a historic aberration. It came out of a very particular period of American history. It’s a product of the post-WWII economic boom and the need for a countervailing ideology in America’s fight against communism. Individualism is largely a psyop, foisted on Americans through films, books, even art. And this individualistic society is very fragile. Its survival depends on post-WWII institutions — institutes that, paradoxically, are rooted in socialistic principles. And when these institutions begin to implode, so will individualism. Material conditions will force people to abandon individualism one way or another. And as things get progressively worse, people will have no choice but to embrace a collectivist mode of living. This psyop won’t survive collapse.

And that’s a good thing. Collapse isn’t only bad. There are positive elements, too. Along with hardship and struggle, it’s a time for renewal and reconfiguration. There’s freedom from rotten institutions and toxic societal expectations, and a chance to remake society. It’s good for art and anyone doing anything creative. And for others, it’s a chance to get out of the dead-end bullshit corporate jobs and do something meaningful with their life. Don’t be scared. It can be liberating.

So come out on Sunday June 7th.

A bad NEFARIOUS RUSSIAN tricked you poor Americans into cruel Objectivism. So it’s up to a couple of good (and much better looking) NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS to teach you to be Collectivist again — and collectivism is the most natural state of man.

We moved to the living room and sat on a couch facing the big window. I was leaning back, drinking the cider now, watching a beam of sunlight crawl across the wall and listening to Audrey describe her daily schedule at the resort. “I never thought I’d end up like this — working as a bar wench. It was I who had servants. It was I who sat by the pool and was waited on.” She laughed and took another drag off her joint. She was leaning back now, too, looking at the ceiling. “Hard to believe that life was real, you know? You shoulda seen the home we had in Marin. Weekdays we were at our place in SF and then on most Thursdays, if we didn’t have anything happening socially, we’d head out and spend the weekends in Bolinas, surfing, lounging, visiting friends. The old me wouldn’t believe the now-me, but I strangely like my new life,” she said, speaking sluggishly, slightly slurring her speech on account of all the weed she’s been smoking. “I was so bored back then. It was too nice. Too comfortable. I sorta knew it back then but…I was too scared to admit it, I think. Keeps me busy…plenty of interesting people to observe, and when I’m not on my shift, I take care of the chickens, tend the garden, sunbathe, read, take walks around the resort beyond the walls. I’d live on the property full time, if I could. But Leo makes me rotate out once in a while, says I need to spend time in society. But…what society? I come back to a studio I rent from one of Leo’s distant aunts in an apartment building full of immigrant families that always smells like onion and cabbage. So my favorite place to live is the hotel where I work. I’m like some English peasant attached to the land or something. And I can trace my lineage back to the Mayflower, you know that?” She was giggling now, uncontrollably. “And now I’m changing linens in a hotel…and liking it.”

I watched her as she spoke, the light from the window falling on her face. I got the sense she wasn’t even talking to me but just vocalizing her inner thoughts…she didn’t expect any reply from me…she didn’t seem aware that I was there at all. But all her talk about her fallen status reminded of a short novel I read about the Russian Revolution. There were a few characters in there, aristocratic young women, who had to resort to sleeping with crude peasants who had become powerful Soviet bureaucrats after the Bolsheviks took power just so they wouldn’t starve. I tried to remember how it ended…one of the young aristocratic women ended up committing suicide, I think. And I realized I was seeing Audrey up close for the first time. When we had met and she spent the night in my bungalow, I had been high on oxys and drinking all day. My mind had been fuzzy. Now I was much more sober and saw her in the full resolution of daylight. She exuded a classic regal beauty — the only sign that something wasn’t right was her skin. I want to say it was like a cadaver’s, but that would be too much. Her skin had a grayish tint to it and was slightly pitted. When she’d laugh and move her head, I’d see the tension build up in the skin of her neck, with long lateral stringy ripples appearing on the surface, like if you were stretching out cellophane. It was something you saw in people exposed to direct radiation in the early days of the fallout — at least those who survived. Anetoderma it was called, a destruction of the skin’s subcutaneous fat and collagen. Being up in Bolinas, stuck there for days on Highway 1 with hundreds of thousands of other people fleeing south to the city, she got a good dose of cesium-137 and iodine-131 and strontium-90, gamma waves hitting her skin like millions of invisible flechettes, grinding up the epidermis, dermis, hypodermis, killing sweat glands, nerves, capillaries, calcifying arteries and veins…If you were lucky to not have your skin go cancerous on you, you were left with skin that aged fifty years in a week.

“A hunting party came through and killed a two-headed black bear right after the lockdown was lifted,” Audrey was saying, still talking to the ceiling. “It was sad. Why kill such a magnificent creature? It’s sociopathic. Those hunters make me really angry. But Leo says he needs the business these asshole killers bring. They’re the most stable clients…they keep the resort afloat. A family stayed with us at the same time. They had two kids. Well…actually, I guess, technically, three. Two of them were those, what do you call them, Siamese twins. One body from what I could see, but two heads. So we had these asshole mutant hunters and this mutant baby in the resort at the same time. They were there at the same time. I thought it was super weird. The hunters were at the bar by the pool talking loudly about their kills…bragging about all the mutants they tracked and slaughtered while the father with the Siamese twins swam with his girls right there no more than five feet away, holding them up by their armpits in the water.” She paused to take a hit off her joint. “I just found that to be so off-putting.”

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LIVE EVENT ALERT!

Evgenia and Yasha will conduct a NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS MASTERCLASS in Manhattan on how to survive and thrive during AMERICAN DECLINE using ancient Soviet wisdom.

A limited edition booklet will be available for sale. You can buy one with your ticket in advance.

Tickets: $20.

Ticket + signed special edition how-to guide: $35.

Discussion and drinks after.

The NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS return to discuss Wizard of the Kremlin, a new film about Putin’s rise to power, where Jude Law plays Putin. Yeah, Jude Law. While formally it’s a pretty bad film that feels like an illustrated wikipedia article, we were still surprised by it. Because, for a mainstream film, it offered a fairly honest and factual portrayal of the preconditions to Putin’s rise to power and why his reestablishment of the power vertical in Russia was popular. We didn’t expect much and it exceeded our (low) expectations on that front. This is maybe the first western film about the Soviets/ Russians that shows them not as caricatures but with a bit of humanity and respect. This feels like a seismic shift — Did Putin conquer Hollywood or does reality increasingly have a pro-Putin bias?

Some notes…

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I had just come back from Skinny’s when the doorbell rang. The video screen showed a person in a breather and an orange suit standing outside. I hesitated, wondering who it was. Then they lifted their mask and waved at the camera — it was Audrey. She was early. I buzzed her in.

“Sorry, I hope it’s okay if I came early,” she said after going through the decon tube and dumping her suit and boots in the designated spot. “It was a slow day. Only two guests were scheduled for the next week, so the boss let me get off early. Figured I’d surprise you!” She paused and smiled. “Surprised?”

“No, yeah, surprised. And glad you’re early,” I said. We hugged, and she gave me a peck on the cheek.

“Hold on. I have something for you,” she said and then bent down, rummaged through her oversized bag, and came up with a bottle of wine and a paper bag. “Careful,” she said, handing it to me. “The bag’s fragile.” I peeked inside. It was a bunch of eggs. “They were hatched this morning. I picked them myself.”

“Is this wine? Real wine?” I asked.

She smiled. “Yeah, I snuck one out. It’s a Pinot Noir, I think. Hard to tell because the label rotted off,” she said.

“Are you hungry?” I said. “I got some fresh tomatoes from my neighbor’s greenhouse and a bit of milk from the goat he keeps. I can work up an omelette fast.”

“No, thank you,” she replied. “I had lunch at the resort before I came.”

We walked to the kitchen and I carefully stored the eggs in the fridge. She had sat down at a table in the corner and was now rummaging in her bag again.

“Should I open it now,” I asked. “Or we can save it for later…I have this cider the neighbor makes from our food scraps. It’s not bad. Quite well balanced, actually.”

“Let’s do the wine. Actually…do you mind if I smoke inside?” She hold up her little weed pouch, which she had been trying to find in her bag all along. “They don’t let you smoke in the company shuttle.”

“Sure, go ahead.” I found two wine glasses on the top shelf of my cabinet and, as I uncorked the bottle and poured, Audrey rolled her joint expertly — first crumbling the buds in her hand and then encasing them in paper with one quick roll with her two thumbs and a quick sideways lick. She lit up — quickly, almost nervously — and then blew out a thick cloud of smoke in relief. “Actually, let’s go into the living room,” I said, handing her a glass. “There’s more light and an ashtray, too.”

I had bought this apartment with the money my parents had left me and, before the divorce and the war, had rented it out for income. It’s one of four units in a corner Victorian, and it’s got this awkward old-timey layout that gives it a certain charm. From the stoop, the front door opens up into a narrow windowless corridor that runs the length of the flat — with doors to the bedrooms and bathroom and kitchen and closets jutting out from a central walkaway. Spending months and weeks under lockdown with windows covered and the air filtration unit blasting, I began to imagine the hallway as a central tube of a one-man space station, connecting all the different sections: life support, control room, food intake, waste disposal…

Audrey walked out into the hallway and instead of turning into the living room, the first door immediately to the left, she kept going. “Do you mind if I take a tour?” she asked without really asking.

“Of course,” I said, following behind her. She was wearing a tight-fitting black sweatshirt and matching sweatpants — standard under rad suit wear. The pants sat low, accentuating her wide hips and extremely thin body. I could see the spines of her tailbone protruding just below her waistline, moving left and right as her hips swayed. Looking at her hips, I remembered a flash from a dream I had the night before — Audrey was naked on the bed with me…legs spread open…wearing her full head breather. She glanced into the bedroom and briefly paused in front of a portrait of my daughter that my ex-wife had painted. Then she glanced into the bathroom and then moved on to the last door at the end of the corridor. This was the second bedroom, which was my office. She stood in the doorway, surveying the worn leather love seat and armchair and the big glass desk. Shelves with books covered every wall and there were books on the floor in piles, many of them collected during my medicine cabinet raids in those first few months after the war. Walls

“It’s so cozy in here,” she said, coming up to inspect some of the sketches I had pinned to the wall above the desk — a two headed coyote, a pigeon with three legs, a multicolored Moses with a fucked up skin…“I expected…I dunno…well you know how single men live sometimes,” she said.

“I guess.”

She picked up a big brown book lying open face down on my table…a big thick tome with a hard brown binding. On the cover, the word “BERAKHOT” was stenciled in gold. She transferred the joint to her mouth, holding it between her lips, and turned the book over with both hands. “Interesting,” she said, and then started reading: “There was a particular bathroom in the city of Tiberias, where, when two would enter it, even during the day, they would be harmed by demons,” she read aloud from open pages. “When Rabbi Ami and Rabbi Asi would each enter alone, they were not harmed. The Sages said to them: Aren’t you afraid? Rabbi Ami and Rabbi Asi said to them: We have learned through tradition: The tradition to avoid danger in the bathroom is to conduct oneself with modesty and silence.”

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Check out the book Samuel wrote: Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It. It’s a really wonderful book. I’d go straight to the first chapter.

—Yasha

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The NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS return to discuss their favorite topics: fame, movies, morality of media, power, cults, collapse, similarities between the Soviet Union and the United States… We also discuss Evgenia’s ongoing precog abilities: she sensed that there would be a White House correspondents’ dinner shooting the morning before it happened and talked about it.

Due to technical issues (aka sabotage), the episode cuts off mid-sentence. We apologize and promise to hold those responsible (Yasha) accountable.

—NF

Josh Golin is an Executive Director at Fairplay. They’re great. Check them out here.

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Lots of news about data centers these days. In fact, it appears that opposition to data centers is the only issue that can cut through America’s psyoped political culture, dominated as it normally is by petty divisions and cultural grievances manipulated and magnified by an oligarchic-industrial communication apparatus.

It makes sense that people are united in fighting data centers — that for people being against data centers is “above politics.” If a data center comes to your region, you’re going to get screwed over one way or another. There’s the loud noise that’ll give you actual Havana Syndrome. There’s the pollution coming off the massive gas turbines and/or diesel backup generators that’ll poison your lungs and the local environment. Then there’s the electromagnetic radiation given off by the massive electrical infrastructure that’s plugged into them that may or may not give you cancer. Then there are property values to consider. For many people, their home is their own store of wealth. And data centers depress home values wherever they appear, robbing people of whatever meager wealth they tried to store. Then there’s the cost of energy, which has been spiking everywhere data centers appear, adding to the crushing inflation we’re all feeling these days.

The companies building these data centers — Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Google — have been doing themselves no favors. There has been growing agreement among people that the technologies they’ve been forcing use are a malicious force. And so their data centers, arriving so forcefully and aggressively, are only helping to confirm people’s expanding suspicion. My sense is that data centers have made the internet real for people for the first time in their lives. Faced with these things, you can’t help but not realize that for years and years you’ve been sold a lie — “the cloud” that powered this magical tech is actually a bunch of polluting industrial sites.

I’m working on a short VAMPIRE VALLEY installment about data centers — particularly about the data centers of Loudoun County, just outside of Washington D.C., infamous as the densest region of data centers in the world. One thing that comes up again and again as I log the footage is just how seamlessly these giant warehouse-sized computers fit into the larger suburban landscape. If it weren’t for the massive gas turbines and the carpet of AC units on their roofs, data centers would be hard to distinguish from the concrete tapestry of freeways, malls, drive-throughs, generic office parks, hospitals, and distribution centers. Data centers might be louder and hog a lot more energy…but, still, they blend right into the landscape. The fact that it’s hard to distinguish between normal suburban infrastructure and satanic data/soul harvesting machines…well…it says something about “normal.”

I promised I’d share my work with subscribers as I went along…so here is a video of me wandering around one of the satanic data mill complexes in Loudoun County, Virginia. As you can see, it doesn’t look all that different from an IKEA, Home Depot, or maybe an AMC movie theater.

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Joe’s been on the show a few times before. Check him here:

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“I’m Jake. Borya—”

The door buzzed, and I heaved it open. It sat on big, fat hinges and took a lot of force to move, like a door to a bank vault. I found myself inside a decon tube and submitted myself to the usual routine: First, I raised my arms as jets of air blasted me from all directions, and a powerful vacuum vented all the radioactive particles blown off my clothes and body. Second, I took off my mask and slipped a pair of disposable plastic booties on top of my shoes. Then I walked through another door and entered a waiting room. Inside, I found a shotgun pointed at my face. “Turn around and raise your hands, and back up towards me. I gotta check you,” said the guy holding the gun. He wore slacks and a polo shirt. I noticed his hands: meaty, top of his fingers overgrown with thick black hair.

“Sure,” I said, and raised my hands in the air. I knew the drill.

He patted me down from my boots all the way up to my sleeves. As I stood there, I saw a woman appear from an inner door and quickly cross the room towards the decon tube. She was blond and tall and thin and had an uptight regal bearing. She zipped up her suit as she walked, but I caught a glimpse of exposed skin and a necklace and a diamond and something black and smooth underneath, like the top of a silk dress or a low-hanging blouse. She had the look of a arrogant anglo type who should have been in Nob Hill or Pacific Heights rather than here in this cheap and gaudy office in the Outer Richmond. She averted her gaze, staring straight ahead, as she passed.

“You can wait over there,” the guard finally said. He pointed to a black leather couch on the opposite side of the room and returned to reading a book. I sat down and looked around. The waiting room was fitted out with neoclassical Italian armchairs, a couch, and a coffee table, all of them with gold trim. The front facade of the shop — which had originally been made of glass — was now reinforced from within with thick metal slabs that had been welded together and attached to the foundation. Radiation-proof and bomb-proof, too. The place hadn’t changed much at all. It had been a year or so since I had been here — the last time was for Weenie’s funeral. He was an old childhood friend of ours and had become one of Skinny Boris’s top guys. He was shot when they had a big turf war with the Chinese groups right after the war. That’s all over now…there’s a reigning peace now. The Chinese, the Russians, the Mexicans, the Blacks, the Admirals, the hick clans out at the periphery — everyone’s been at peace for several years now. Well, at least they had been until last week.

Skinny was one of those unremarkable people who suddenly become remarkable at a time of crisis — the kind of people who shine when everything is collapsing. When the fallout came and organized society pretty much evaporated, he was one of those who filled the vacuum of power. In San Francisco, a few cops tried to take control, but most of the department didn’t live in the city or even anywhere close to the city and had no real connections to the community. So the cops were out. There was no big military base around, either. And so it was various locals…guys with connections…guys who just happened to have a knack for organization. Small businessmen, petty scammers, a doctor, a gangbanger, a priest. The guy that took power in the northwestern quadrant of the city — my old neighborhood — happened to be Skinny Boris.

I had known him pretty well since middle school. We were part of the same little pack of friends that remained tight all the way through high school. He was an immigrant like me but from a small Ukrainian city. He had dropped out of school and did petty crime and ran with a conman immigrant crew, ripping off credit cards, running a bootleg CD and DVD business. He was known as Skinny because there was already a Boris around, a short and fat hoodlum that people called Fat Borya. Skinny was a bit of a loser but he had a big extended family from the same Ukrainian town and knew pretty much everyone in the neighborhood, and he was easygoing and everyone liked him. When the war happened and the fallout came and the government disappeared, offering no protection, everyone panicked. The looting began immediately, and there was chaos and violence. But Skinny kept his cool. In a time of crisis, all his latent talents — which had been marginalized and repressed by society all his life — came rushing out. He had a knack for organization, a firm hand, good judgement, and the ability to use violence when necessary.

People still needed food, medicine, filters for their homes, gasoline, solar panels, pain killers, batteries, baby formula…and so he stepped into the void to provide. He leaned on his friends, his cousins, his second and third cousins, his uncles, and the friends of his many uncles and cousins, and he made himself the center of a distribution and protection system built on trade and favors. Needed baby formula or antibiotics? Running from the fallout in the north and needed a place to live? Thugs terrorizing your street? If you needed anything you couldn’t provide yourself, you went to him. And if you couldn’t pay or trade right then, he’d eventually get something out of you as payment. You’d work security at his compound, join a raiding party, knife an enemy of his — whatever you could do. And people were happy to do it. And there was something else, too. Skinny earned the goodwill of the community early by going after the sexual predators and the pimps — guys who’d take lone destitute girls and women under their wing and set up prostitution rings in exchange for food and a place to live. Skinny was a family man. He had been married to his wife since he was nineteen and he had four daughters, and so he made sure everyone knew this kind of thing was not going to be tolerated on his turf. He made a big and bloody show of it, too, publicly executing anyone who violated his rules. Any pimps he caught, he had his guys first cut off their dicks and stuff them into their mouths and then hang them up on lamp posts on Geary Boulevard. Locals would gather to watch the spectacle, clapping and cheering as they kicked and dangled on their ropes. That alone made him a folk hero in the community. People were fiercely loyal to him, and Little Russia had thousands who’d be willing to die for him. By the end of that first post-war year, Skinny was the Supreme Ruler of Little Russia…and one of the most powerful people in California. Skinny wasn’t alone, either. Others like him emerged. The Chinese had a few groups that ran a powerful operation out of Chinatown that was probably two or three times bigger than Skinny’s. Then there were the Mexican groups in San Francisco. People called them the Mexican Mafia, but really it was mixed…it was basically Spanish speaking people from all over Latin America. The blacks controlled big parts of Oakland. Indians and South Asians took control over most of Silicon Valley. The post-war world, at least in the cities, belonged to the immigrants. It was only natural. We ethnics had cohesion. Even before the war, we were more communal and used to sharing and treating our friends like close families, and this natural cohesion became useful when everything collapsed. The saddest and weakest group were the Anglos and the various watered-down and atomized Americans and deracinated corporate types. They had no support to fall back on at all. Their social groups were based on their jobs or their industries or some hobbies they had — like rock climbing or cycling or jogging. These ties weren’t strong enough to endure an apocalyptic event. They had no support to fall back on at all. And so they found themselves all alone when the fallout came and many died in those first few months. The woman that was on her way out the door, she was no doubt belonged to this class. A woman who occupied the top of the society and now she was here…as what? As Skinny’s lover? Just someone coming in asking for favors…and offering what in return?

A voice startled me out of my thoughts. “Hey. Hey! The boss is ready for you.”

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When I had hired him over the phone, I had given Billy a cover story — a spiel I made up on the spot about how I was hired by some investors to do property scouting. “It’s confidential business, and I can’t really get into the details, but they’re interested in some parcels in that area for a development project,” I told him. He had made no comment. I doubt he really cared.

Now, as we approached the location, I told Billy not to stop but to drive right past the spot. “I don’t want these guys to know that anyone is out here scouting their property. So just drive by and keep driving, and I’ll decide what we should do once I get a sense of what there is,” I explained. “If anyone’s there, they’ll just think we’re random people passing through.” He nodded. As it turned out, there was no need for decoy maneuvers.

The car skidded to a stop. “Are you sure this is the right place?” Billy asked.

I hesitated. “Yes, this is it. Has to be,” I replied, craning my neck to look through the narrow window slit, now almost completely covered in dust and grime. “I made sure the location and the coordinates were correct before I left.” I checked again. “Yeah, this is the spot that my client gave me.”

Sarah had sent me a photo of the ARK research facility as it was supposed to exist. Misha had texted it to her about a year ago, not long after he had personally come down here to set it up. The photo showed a person fully suited up, hand raised as if waving hello, standing in front of two large dome structures. The buildings were beige or maybe brown in color, and they blended in with the dirt-brown lot on which they stood. The photo had been snapped in the evening with a flash, and the background was all in shadow. In theory, it could have been taken at this spot. But it wasn’t clear. The domes could have been anywhere — on any large dirt lot.

Billy shrugged. “Well, looks like you can report to your client that the land’s empty. So they can come in and do whatever they want with it. I don’t know what their plans are, but I hope they have some pull because they’re going to have to deal with the air force guys down the road,” he said, pointing to the horizon on the left. “They’re the ones in charge here. Nothing happens in the highlands here without their permission.” He must have seen a puzzled look on my face, because he added: “I didn’t mention it to you by phone?”

A shook my head. “What air force?”

“The Air Force,” Billy said.

“The fucking US Air Force,” Tommy added from the back.

“The military’s still here?”

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I found this book while doing research for my novel Radiance, which is set in a post-nuclear war world. But the topic of nuclear technology intersects in a big way with my work on the internet and vampire valley, too. The two technologies — nukes and information systems — were part of the same co-evolving meta-technology. America’s use of nukes in Japan, and the nuclear arms race that this attack helped launch, massively sped up and shaped the development of modern communication systems and surveillance technology, giving it the form that it has today. You could say that our hyper-real information society was built on the back of the nuclear bomb. And it feels that way, doesn’t it? Paranoid, constantly on edge…

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Pistachio gangsters Lynda and Stewart Resnick

The most recent American-Israeli war on Iran has been designed to cripple Iranian society — schools, hospitals, apartment blocks, airports, and pretty much all important economic infrastructure. And last week, this campaign took (for some) an unexpected twist: Israel and America struck pistachio infrastructure in Iran’s Kerman province, the center of the country’s pistachio industry.

Are these US-Israeli strikes on pistachios being done on purpose? To anyone who has read my work or watched our film Pistachio Wars, it wouldn’t be a surprise if they were. The big pistachio lobby in California is just one business interest among many doing its part to keep America’s foreign policy aggressive and murderous.

I’m sure you want to know a bit more about the history of the pistachio industry in America and why it depends on destroying Iran. So I thought I’d repost a chapter from A Journey Through Oligarch Valley, a travel guide I wrote back in 2013 — targeting the misanthropic tourist who wants to explore the toxic dark heart of California, rather than the usual boring sights like the Golden Gate Bridge or Yosemite. This chapter’s about Lynda and Stewart Resnick, the Beverly Hills couple that made California into a global center for pistachio production and made billions in the process…and have been lobbying for war with Iran.

You can buy the full recently reissued book on Amazon — or, if you are in the United States, order a signed copy from our humble little publisher. And of course…watch Pistachio Wars today!

RESNICKS (EXIT 253)

Driving north at NASCAR speed takes me to the home turf of one of Oligarch Valley’s newest and oddest landlords: Beverly Hills agri-billionaires Lynda and Stewart Resnick. You might not recognize the name, but you’ve certainly seen their luxury Fiji Water bottles at your local 7-Eleven, or maybe you’ve seen Palin family dropout Levi Johnston hawking the Resnicks’ Paramount brand pistachio nuts on TV. If nothing else, you’ve eaten their Sunkist oranges.

Fiji Water comes from Fiji, but just about everything else the Resnicks sell comes from Oligarch Valley, where they preside over several hundred square miles of land. A large chunk of their of their empire straddles Highway 33, just north of Taft and right next to the gas station where James Dean stopped for a Coke right before ramming his souped-up Porsche racer head-on into a hapless university student driving a Ford Tudor.

The Resnicks bought this land from Mobil and Chevron decades ago, and transformed the oil-stained desert into lush farmland filled with hundreds of miles of leafy green almond and pistachio orchards. The trees are planted with space-age precision—a perfect grid as far as the eye can see, whose countless rows recede endlessly in the horizon. At the center of it all is a giant factory with rows and rows of gleaming metallic silos where the company preps, packages and distributes its foodstuffs.

The scale of their farm numbs the mind. It’s a small self-sufficient settlement and includes its own small airport—how else do you expect Oligarch Valley farmers to get around? And this piece of farmland is only one small part of a diversified global agribusiness operation that brings in $3 billion in revenue a year.

But here’s the fun part: the continued economic viability of this piece of Oligarch Valley depends on Iran being kept in a state of a permanent economic blockade.

It depends on it so much that the Resnicks have joined forces with raving neocons and hardcore rightwingers, funding think-tanks and lobbyists that hype the Iranian threat and push all out war.

I stumbled onto Stewart and Lynda Resnick almost as soon as I started investigating California’s billionaire dominated public water system. The Oligarch Valley family that had made an easy $74 million selling water to the desert subprime suburb of Victorville was closely connected to the Resnicks. Both families owned shares of the Kern County Water Bank, a natural aquifer at the southernmost edge of the Central Valley that had been converted into a privatized water storage facility.

The water bank was designed by California’s Department of Water Resources to function as an emergency reservoir. In wet years, it would collect excess water shipped down the California Aqueduct from Northern California and hold enough water to keep Los Angeles hydrated nearly two years in case of prolonged drought.

The water bank was supposed to serve as a last-line defense to protect urban users. But in 1995 California water bureaucrats tweaked a couple of arcane water regulations and handed the water bank over to a small clique of Oligarch Valley landlords.

Once water entered the water bank, it stopped being a public resource. From that point, the owner could sell it to the highest bidder. “This means they become middlemen making profits on state-supplied water,” reported Redding’s paper Record Searchlight. “If they choose to, they can dry up vast areas of productive agriculture and ship the water to municipalities south of the Tehachapi range.”

Stewart Resnick masterminded the scheme, and emerged with a majority stake in the new Kern County Water Bank. In fact, the Resnicks dominated and controlled the water bank so thoroughly that it’s become a de facto extension of their private agribusiness. They run it out of one of their corporate offices near Bakersfield, California.

Resnick’s scheme did more than privatize a single piece of public infrastructure. It created a novel legal framework that gave Oligarch Valley famers the power to create nonexistent water out of thin air. Resnick created “paper water.” Like the leveraged subprime-backed securities and exotic debt instruments dreamed up by Wall Street, “paper water” was built on pure fantasy and innovative accounting fraud. The simple fact was that half of California’s “paper water,” water able to be sold, bought and traded on the market, simply does not exist, and never has.

It sounds nuts, but it’s true. And it all has to do with the California State Water Project started by Governor Pat Brown. The project involved a series of dams, aqueducts and massive water pumps to siphon water from Northern California and to send it down through Oligarch Valley and into Southern California. When the system started being built in the 1960s, the state allocated guaranteed water rights to farmers throughout Oligarch Valley. These contractual obligations were not based on reality, but were worked out using the estimated capacity of a fully built-out state water system. And that was the problem: the State Water Project was never fully completed. Attempts to dupe California voters into paying for the final parts of the system have been tried on many occasion, but have yet to succeed. Contractually, the state was obligated to deliver 4 million acre-feet a year. But in reality, the state could only deliver half the water it promised.

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It took us about another hour to climb to the top of Tehachapis. For a time, we had to leave the highway to get around a washed-out section that lasted for miles, backtracking down the hill and doing a big loop. When we finally got back on the highway, Tommy suddenly perked up and swiveled his gun. “Easy there, kid,” Billy said, and let out a few deep honks on his airhorn. The same pattern — short, short, long, short — came back to us from the approaching cars. Tommy relaxed. “It’s a friendly. Probably making a supply run to Bakersfield,” Billy said to me. The caravan passed us going the other way — two big trucks flanked by modded pickups like the one we were in. Still, Tommy kept his hands on the swivel gun at the ready. “We change the codes every few days. But you never know…”

The Jewish incident behind us now, Billy and Tommy got talkative on the way. I found out that Tommy was Billy’s nephew. Their family — their extended clan — had been in California since the Gold Rush. “Story is my great-great grandfather killed a man in Arkansas and fled out west on one of those wagon trains and did some mining but the fucker didn’t have any luck. So he ended up staking claim on a chunk of land in the foothills out by Sacramento, farming and raising cattle,” Billy said. “Rumor’s that we got some Indian in us, too. The old goat worked his way through three or four wives and one of them was a half-breed.”

“I got a little of that ferocious native blood in me. I can feel it,” Tommy added, excitedly.

“Old goat killed bunch of Indians, too,” Billy said, smiling. “I remember grandfather telling me about the scalps they had hanging over the fireplace when he was a kid. They drove those poor bastards up into the mountains to starve them out. So they took to stealing cattle to eat. But that couldn’t be. They had to be punished.”

“Where’d it hang? At the Fresno house,” Tommy said.

“No, the one in Los Banos. The one that burned down.”

Back before the war, when these distinctions mattered, Tommy and Billy would have been considered hicks by the coastal professional class. They talked with an almost southern drawl, barely finished high school, cursed, smoked, dressed in hunting gear. I could imagine these guys with their families back before the war — their rural houses on several acres of land somewhere up in the mountains, a couple of giant trucks, an ATV, and a Harley parked out front. There’d be an RV, too. And boat of some kind parked on a hitch. They’d own a construction business, their uncle would own a car dealership, a cousin would be an ex-Navy Seal meth addict with PTSD who’s in jail for beating up his wife. Coastal types — when they’d run into them at a gas station while on a family holiday to Yosemite or when getting work done on their vacation home in Tahoe — would look down their noses at Billy and Tommy…but they’d also fear them. And envy them, too. Deep inside the mind of the professional class, these specimens were a reminder that there were people out there that had not been fully housebroken…there were people who could still do something autonomously on their own. It was not even true but it didn’t matter. It appeared as true.

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Have a great week. Pray with us that Trump does not nuke the world. Praying is all we got left. 🙏

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For this vamp valley stream, I had Peter Korotaev on to talk about drones and war. Drones, which I see as very much related to the internet, have made big leaps in battlefield adoption in the last few years: first in the Russian-Ukraine war and now in the Israeli-American war on Iran.

The United States pioneered drone technology. In fact, as I mentioned on the stream, the same ARPA program that funded the internet was at the same time funding research into drone technology for use in the Vietnam War…a small helicopter operated by a remote control so big it barely fit on an Army jeep. But even though the U.S. security state has been pumping money into drone technology for more than half a century, it hadn’t explored the use of drone technology to its fullest potential yet. It’s been up to peripheral states like Ukraine and Iran (and also Israel) to take drone warfare to the next level. And what’s happening on the periphery of the empire is going to be coming home soon…there is no doubt about it. Drone tech is just too easy to use, too effective…like smartphones. It makes me think of Philip K. Dick’s wonderful novella, Second Variety, which is about autonomous robotic weapons that were designed to kill people…until they ran out of people and started fighting each other. I’m pretty sure Second Variety inspired Terminator, even though it was never credited.

Anyway, Peter writes the great Events in Ukraine newsletter. I highly recommend reading his stuff. He’s a funny writer and covers the subject with the respect and black humor that it requires.

See you next week!

I’m doing these streams every week, broadcasting against Vampire Valley from within Vampire Valley. All live streams will be available to the public but most recorded streams will be available only to paying subscribers. Influencers are people. We need to eat, too. Reminder: If you donate $100 or more to my Vampire Valley doc, you will automatically get an annual sub. If you’re thinking of giving a larger tax-deductible donation, get in touch with us at vampires@yashalevine.com.

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ZOMBIE LAKE (2026). Directed by Rowan Wernham. Original score by Dan Boeckner.

Rowan and I are screening Zombie Lake, a short disaster zone film we shot as we were wrapping up production of Pistachio Wars. It was our final trip out to the Central Valley to witness a brief moment in time when nature seemed to be healing, when it rained and snowed so much that winter that it seemed no amount of terraforming or geoengineering could hold back the flood of water coming to rewild Tulare Lake, a once beautiful part of California that had been drained and turned into a marscape by a couple of oligarchic families to grow nuts and cotton and other assorted items.

For the first time in many generations, it seemed like Lake Tulare really was in for a come back. A flood of biblical proportions was coming to wipe out all the toxic fields and agri-infastructure that had been festering on the land like a plague…water that would turn the region back into the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi that had extended across the heart of California as a region of shifting marshes and wetlands. Or…that was the hope. So Rowan and I went to investigate. This film is about that.

If you’re in the New Year area, come out to watch it with us on Sunday, April 19th at 7 p.m. in Brooklyn. Here’s the info:

Film Noir Cinema
122 Meserole Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11222
$10 suggested donation 

Reserve your spot and buy tickets in advance. It’s a small theater.

The screening will be followed by a short Q&A and drinks at a nearby bar.

First 25 people to buy tickets will get a signed poster.

Photography: Rowan Wernham. Producer: Daniel Grjonko.

There’s been a lot of reporting on the massive data center buildout happening in Northern Virginia — just west of Washington D.C. But none of the coverage has mentioned perhaps the most interesting part: These data centers are being built right in the middle of a military contractor zone. That’s right, the densest data center region in the world — one that uses something like 20 percent of all energy in Virginia and hosts data harvesting and compute services for Amazon, Google, Facebook, OpenAI, Oracle, and all the rest — is interlocked with the biggest private police state contractors out there: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, BAE…

Here’s me talking about the situation at a historic street corner in Northern Virginia: what used to be AOL’s sprawling headquarters is now being turned into a massive cluster of data centers…and this cluster of data centers has sprouted like mushrooms around Raytheon. It makes sense. The internet was created by America’s police state…and it is still very much a part of the police state today. In fact, if my book Surveillance Valley could be distilled into a single intersection, this is it…

This a snippet of the first Vampire Valley episode — EP 01 — I’m working on right now.

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