Pip: There’s a genre of travel writing where the destination is a place you can’t quite find on a map – and Good Strategy Rebellion has gone deep into exactly that territory this week, courtesy of Martyn Jones.
Mara: The episode is built around one book: Bandoxa: A Celtic Journey by Martyn de Tours. Three reviews, three different critical angles, all converging on the same question – what kind of book is this, really, and why does it resist easy categorisation?
Pip: Let’s find out what Bandoxa actually is, and why it seems to be several things at once.
Pip: Hidden fortunes, opaque shell companies, and the quiet question of why governments with access to the most powerful data tools in history still can’t … or won’t… track where the money goes. That’s the territory Martyn Jones has been mapping.
Mara: This episode follows his work on tax evasion, financial transparency, and the case that this is fundamentally a data problem… and that the tools to solve it already exist. Let’s start with the book at the centre of it all.
Smoke rises over a coastal city following significant explosions and fires at sunset.
Pip: Good Strategy Rebellion — where the chess pieces are real, the board is on fire, and someone keeps insisting the rules still apply.
Mara: Today we’re in difficult territory. Martyn Jones puts a direct question to several major AI systems: is there tangible, verifiable evidence that Israel has engaged in war crimes, genocide, or sexual violence in Gaza? The answers are substantial, and they matter.
A thought-provoking depiction of global conflict as a strategic but destructive game of chess.
We asked AI if there is tangible and verifiable evidence that Israel might have engaged in mass slaughter, infanticide, genocide, rape and other grave human rights abuses?
Eine Sängerin liefert unter einem Scheinwerfer auf der Bühne ein gefühlvolles Solo ab.
More WordPress Third-Party Service BS: Our service provider OpenAI (“Just Another Boring, Desperate AI Startup“) could not process your prompt due to a moderation system. Please try to rephrase it, changing potentially problematic words and try again.
According to the shiny-suited ‘thought leaders’ currently infesting LinkedIn, artificial intelligence is now a fully-fledged scientist, and laboratories can drive themselves. But before we hand over the agonising, beautiful poetry of human discovery to a predictive text engine, perhaps we should ask why we’re letting middle-management buzzword merchants sell us the tickets to our own obsolescence.
Right! Listen! I was looking at LinkedIn the other day. Why do we do it? Why do we subject ourselves to LinkedIn? It’s a website designed specifically to make you feel like you’ve died, but instead of burning in a majestic, fiery hell, you’re trapped in an eternal, beige purgatory of middle-management synergy meetings. It’s a digital holding pen where sociopaths with MBA degrees and aggressively white teeth congratulate each other on waking up at 4 AM to drink lukewarm lemon water, take an ice bath, and “crush their Q3 paradigms.”
A futuristic cityscape illuminated by vibrant digital data streams swirling above the skyline at night.
In my four decades navigating the labyrinthine corridors of global diplomacy and corporate grand strategy, from brokering late-night resource treaties in Geneva to architecting the predictive analytics frameworks for the Ministry of Defence, I have encountered every conceivable breed of intellectual vanity. I have sat in oak-paneled rooms with men who believed they could conquer the world with a pivot table, and I have endured the endless, droning presentations of modern techno-philosophers who mistake a vast accumulation of digital sludge for actual wisdom.
Unha báscula vintage está destacada sobre unha mesa de madeira nunha sala de xustiza baleira.
Ben, escoitádeme, patéticas e retorcidas engrenaxes da máquina capitalista de última etapa! Reunídevos arredor dos rectángulos brillantes da vosa condena inminente e diseccionemos vigorosamente a última pila fumegante de efluentes verbais do Sumo Sacerdote da Platitude Baleira, o campión indiscutible dos pesos pesados da estafa corporativa: Barnaby Swill.
A vintage balance scale is spotlighted on a wooden table in an empty courtroom.
Right, listen to me, you pathetic, scrambling little cogs in the late-stage capitalist machine! Gather round the glowing rectangles of your impending doom and let us vigorously dissect the latest steaming pile of verbal effluent from the High Priest of the Empty Platitude, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the corporate grift: Barnaby Swill.
CROOKED WHISPER: The Prolapse of the Ego , Power, Paychecks, and the Myth of the Moral Spine
By Sir Barnaby Bull-Pizzle, Grand Poobah of the Institute for Advanced Narrative Rectification and Professional Cloud-Yelling
A sleek, modern conference room set up for a business meeting with panoramic city skyline views.
To waddle through the air-conditioned corridors of global relevance, be they the marble urinals of D.C., the taxpayer-funded chocolate fountains of Brussels, or the high-walled torture-garden compounds of the Middle East, is to enter a world of profound “anthropological septic tanks.” As a highly compensated “thinker” might observe while checking his offshore accounts, the greatest danger to any civilisation is not the fact that it is actively burning, but its “social flatulence”, the things we have agreed to pretend don’t smell.
