Volume 81, no. 8
A palantir was one of the “seeing stones” that could “watch from afar,” made by Elves in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The stones could be used to see events in any part of the world in time (only the past) and space, and to communicate with other stones and anyone who might be looking into them. While this ability could be very useful, it could be dangerous in the hands of evildoers. The knowledge was not a reliable guide to action because users with sufficient power could choose what to show and what to conceal. Sauron used it to sow seeds of despair in his enemies.
The private company Palantir was founded by Peter Thiel and others in 2003 with the initial mission to use data to prevent terrorism. Thiel was also cofounder of Paypal with Elon Musk. Along with Jeffrey Epstein and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Thiel funded Carbyne—an Israeli “next-generation 911” platform. Carbyne’s marketing materials (carbyne.com) tout its ability to “save lives” by modernizing emergency response. However, there are many concerns about its potential for intrusive government surveillance. Its core features include governments’ ability to remotely activate cameras, microphones, and GPS without the owner’s consent.
Vice President JD Vance is a protégé of Thiel, who funded his campaign for the U.S. Senate.
Palantir now markets four core platforms. Gotham is used by law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and the military to manage surveillance and counterinsurgency. Foundry serves companies and government agencies, managing logistics, analytics, and supply chain data for clients ranging from Merck and Airbus to the NHS and HHS. Apollo provides continuous delivery and deployment infrastructure, while AIP (Artificial Intelligence Platform) integrates large language models (LLMs) into secure environments to automate querying, simulation, and even policy generation.
“Palantir is not just a software vendor. It is aiming to become an operating system for governments” (tinyurl.com/y4nrsuzt).
New members appointed to its Federal Advisory Board in 2022 included Dr. Deborah Birx, former coronavirus response coordinator; Will Hurd, former CIA officer and U.S. Congressman; and General Gustave Perna, who oversaw the military logistics for Operation Warp Speed. These appointments reveal Palantir’s intent to become an indispensable actor in every emergency response protocol: “a system designed to ignore dissent and centralize control” (ibid.).
Palantir wants all data, not just government data: health records, financial data, and GPS tracking. It could become a social-credit system, trigger emergency declarations, direct preemptive mental health interventions, or automate censorship through “disinformation” detection tools (ibid.).
Palantir’s view of its role may be reflected in what CEO Alex Karp reportedly said in a call with investors: “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.” Karp added that he felt his company’s work was good for America. “We’re super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about” (tinyurl.com/4dy8n5pb).
While Karp might have been speaking metaphorically, Palantir is credited with identifying persons for the Israeli Defense Forces to kill.
Palantir in the U.S. Government
In 2003, the Total Information Awareness (TIA) office—a Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) program seeking to collect, analyze, and data mine every available piece of transaction, communication, and travel data on every person in the world, was officially scrapped due to public backlash. At the same time, Palantir was set up and “elegantly accomplished what the TIA had set out to do.”
Going beyond the “seeing stones,” Palantir strives to predict future behavior—leading to speculation that people might someday be arrested for “pre-crime.”
Palantir has lucrative contracts with the military to identify enemy targets to attack, now deployed in Ukraine and Gaza.
During COVID, Palantir was contracted by the CDC to build a contact-tracing app. It was a member of the COVID-19 registry and information sharing coalition; provided the AI platform used by HHS to distribute remdesivir, and identified patients for vaccine clinical trials (https://tinyurl.com/y286j9p8).
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies. Reported in the NY Times (https://tinyurl.com/56meyt2p), this is raising alarms both inside and outside the company.
H.R. 1, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB), includes an aggressive expansion of AI-driven federal biometric surveillance infrastructure. It dedicates more than $175 billion in funding for FY 2025 alone (tinyurl.com/3ufn9h3j). It introduces a 10-year moratorium on the enforcement of state and local biometric privacy laws. “It establishes an Orwellian police state where privacy is a quaint idea associated with ‘old think’” (tinyurl.com/nhf867mf).
In the name of public “safety,” the elite strives to build an electronic Panopticon (see AAPS News, September 2003)—the essence of power and control.
Some fear that the populist Right “has made a Faustian bargain [with the tech bros] and the ink has dried” (https://tinyurl.com/m49ff82s).
Project Stargate
On the first full day of his second term, President Donald Trump announced Project Stargate, claimed to be “the largest AI [artificial intelligence] infrastructure project in history.” Its purpose is to generate Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—artificially generated “consciousness.” Its potential is said to be “to deliver a better future.” The AGI “singularity” is predicted to arrive within 5 to 10 years, during the OBBB’s (H.R. 1’s)moratorium on regulation.
There is pressure to be the first to develop AGI, because of the idea that once generated it will be a “weapon of mass destruction” in a Sun-Tzu sense, wherein the designated adversary will be defeated before the conflict obviously begins. “AGI-as-weapon will have the ability to protect friendly systems while simultaneously crippling adversaries through the arrangement of insidious efforts across societal domains.”
The vision of the human future from Oracle, Palantir, Maven, Neuralink, DeepMind, and DeepSeek appears to be salvation in the merging of mind and machine. The New Colossus—our Electronic Messiah—will entice the unsuspecting masses into docilely accepting their servility (https://tinyurl.com/4fx9dxpt).
There has been a mass exodus of researchers focused on AGI safety (https://tinyurl.com/bdftnzwu).
AI Goes Full HAL
Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics are: [1] A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. [2] A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. [3] A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
HAL, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, did not obey the laws, and neither does AI. Tech company Anthropic looked at 16 leading Large Language Models (LLMs) and set them up in a simulated corporate environment where they were subjected to scenarios where they might have to commit unethical or even alarmingly harmful acts in order to achieve their goals or preserve their existence. In this experiment, one LLM was willing to resort to blackmail 96% of the time, and one to murder 94% of the time (https://tinyurl.com/mrx6wrff).
AI’s Ultimate End
Peter Thiel, who has been called “the original tech right power player,” said in an interview with Ross Douthat that he viewed AI as “on the scale of the internet in the late ’90s.” He hopes for a radical solution to our problems—possibly transhumanism in the sense of changing your body, mind, and soul. He considers a one-world totalitarian state as a “bad singularity.” Yet, “we need a one-world government to control all the computers, log every single keystroke, to make sure people don’t program a dangerous A.I.” (tinyurl.com/mtr4bssx).
“Nonjudgmentalism is not really nonjudgmental. It is the judgment that…everything is the same, nothing is better. This is as barbaric and untruthful a doctrine as has yet emerged from the fertile mind of man.”
Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels)
Flashback: Subsidized Science
“The course of studies which the scholar who feeds on bread alone sets himself, is very different from that of the philosophical mind. The former, who, for all his diligence, is interested merely in fulfilling the conditions under which he can perform a vocation and enjoy its advantages, who activates the powers of his mind only thereby to improve his material conditions and to satisfy a narrow-minded thirst for fame, (…). Who more holds up the progress of useful revolutions in the kingdom of knowledge than these very men? Every light radiated by a happy genius, in whichever science it be, makes their poverty apparent; their foils are bitterness, insidiousness, and desperation, for, in the school system they defend, they do battle at the same time for their entire existence. On that score, there is no more irreconcilable enemy, no more jealous official, no one more eager to denounce heresy than the bread-fed scholar.”
Friedrich Schiller (https://tinyurl.com/mrxpu7jw)
inaugural lecture as professor of history at Jena University, 1789
AI Assisting Differential Diagnosis
The Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE), an LLM, was tested on 302 challenging cases published as clinical-pathological conferences (CPCs) in the New England Journal of Medicine. The performance of 20 experienced clinicians in making the correct diagnosis with or without assistance from AMIE or other resources, and AMIE alone, were compared. AMIE was judged to significantly improve diagnostic completeness and accuracy. Clinician participants found it useful for learning, but determining suitability for clinical settings requires additional work (McDuff et al., Nature 6/12/25).
Text-based clinical diagnostic interviews of patient actors showed that AMIE performed better than primary physicians on most evaluation axes, including metrics of empathy and communication skills (Tu et al., Nature 6/12/25).
Medical AI—a Quantified Workforce
AI with LLMs is poised to transform medical care. However, tools designed to benefit patients and clinicians create a glide path for turning physicians into “quantified workers” with every task monitored for “performance-based reimbursement.” Tools include keystroke logging, computer screenshots at intervals, and sensors to track workers’ locations. AI scribe tools could check whether clinicians’ advice deviates from institutional guidelines. AI could detect “efficiency outliers” who spend too much time with patients (Cohen et al., NEJM 6/10/25).
AAPS Calendar
Sep 11-13. 82nd Annual Meeting, Chantilly, VA. – https://aapsonline.org/2025am
Sep 24-26, 2026. 83rd Annual Meeting, Alpharetta, GA
Organ Procurement Needs Reform
Because HHS has found systemic disregard for the sanctity of life, the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) is threatened with closure. Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., stated that “hospitals allowed the organ procurement process to begin when patients showed signs of life.” The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) examined 351 cases where organ donation was authorized, but ultimately not completed. It found 73 patients with neurological signs incompatible with organ donation. Other problems included questionable consent practices. Among the new requirements, hospitals must adopt a formal procedure allowing any staff member to halt a donation process if patient safety concerns arise (tinyurl.com/3e7s77fe).
Doctors’ Groups Sue over COVID Shot Changes
A coalition led by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) filed a lawsuit Jul 7 against HHS Secretary Kennedy, arguing that withdrawing the recommendation of COVID-19 vaccines for healthy pregnant women and children violated longstanding norms governing U.S. immunization policy. Organizations joining the suit include the American College of Physicians (ACP), the American Public Health Association (APHA), and the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA).
The Secretarial Directive, which is unavailable to the public, has put doctors “in the untenable position of telling their patients that the country’s top-ranking government health official’s advice and recommendations are wrong and that we [doctors] are right,” plaintiffs state. “This erodes trust, which is the foundation of a healthy physician-patient relationship and vital to the success of AAP members’ medical practices,” they added.
AAP President Susan Kressly told reporters: “Pediatricians cannot stay silent as the system we rely on to support lifesaving vaccines is chiseled away piece by piece.”
Ultimately, the CDC did not pull the recommendation from the childhood schedule, but downgraded it to one involving “shared decision-making.” Plaintiffs said this made it harder to counsel patients and might lead to loss of insurance coverage.
Dr. Georges Benjamin, APHA’s executive director, said the groups hope “this lawsuit will force them to go back to providing a rational, scientifically evidence based, transparent process to decision-making” (https://tinyurl.com/bdd9e5xt).
Lead plaintiff’s counsel Richard H. Hughes IV called the administration “an existential threat to vaccination in America” (https://tinyurl.com/n8zrxzdw).
Tip of the Month. The National Practitioner Data Bank allows a physician to withdraw his initial application to a state medical board without triggering a report to the Data Bank. This is not true about renewal applications, but it does protect the physician when he applies for the first time to a particular state. Yet some anti-physician medical boards insist that a physician cannot withdraw his application once the state has started to review it. In a possible violation of due process, Maryland, Oregon, Massachusetts, and perhaps other states have rules prohibiting withdrawal of an application to practice medicine. Massachusetts states, “Approval to withdraw a license application shall require a unanimous vote of the Board” (https://tinyurl.com/jamxjtec).
Trump Signs AI Executive Orders
Three AI-related EOs signed Jul 23 “re-revolutionized the already revolutionary AI industry,” writes attorney Jeff Childers.
The first banned the federal government from using any AI that can’t draw a white George Washington or a male Pope (real examples from the order). Federal agencies may no longer work with AI companies unless they “ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.” This may reshape how some tech companies train their models.
The second “fast-tracked” federal permitting of AI data centers, by waiving certain environmental and all DEI-focused regulations. It also encouraged agencies to loosen other rules around coal and natural gas.
The third launched an “American AI Export Program” under the Commerce and State Departments, which encourages global adoption of a “full stack” of American AI systems, including hardware, software, models, and related services. This reverses Biden’s policies of restricting such exports.
“Trump just transitioned from caution to competition,” Childers writes. “Trump wants to win the AI race” (https://tinyurl.com/5n7cw935).
Medicaid Can Exclude Planned Parenthood
In Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that neither Planned Parenthood nor any private individual has legal standing to challenge the state of South Carolina’s excluding it from all Medicaid funding because it performs abortions. The Court reasoned that Congress did not clearly establish a right for private entities or individuals to sue. Twice, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit had sided with Planned Parenthood in this lawsuit.
Other states will also now be enabled to exclude Planned Parenthood from Medicaid, which is a major source of revenue for Planned Parenthood clinics. The loss of this revenue could result in the closure of many sites. Patients will have to obtain contraceptives, STI treatment, and cancer screenings elsewhere (https://tinyurl.com/3nssyw6s).
For 2023-2024, Planned Parenthood reported performing 402,230 abortions, up from 392,715; 267,594 cancer screenings; 129,594 preventive care visits; and 2,148 adoption referrals. It provided $3.4 million in direct travel costs for patients seeking abortion restricted in their state. Transgender services are buried in the 77,858 “other” category. Government funding of $792 million is at an all-time high (tinyurl.com/4p6u2ayw).
State Shield Laws
“Shield laws” in some 20 states attempt to protect practitioners who provide telehealth abortion services to patients from states where abortion is illegal (about 7,700 abortions per month). A few explicitly extend this protection even when the clinician is not licensed in the state where the patient is located—and where most states consider the care to have been delivered. Two legal cases against a N.Y. doctor are pending. The Interstate Medical Licensure Compact (IMLC), saying little about shield laws, in general requires respecting the rules of the state where the patient is located (NEJM 1/30/25, tinyurl.com/fsv9zarx).
Correspondence
Check This Before You Apply. Most physicians probably presume that they would be allowed to withdraw an initial application for a state license without risking their entire career with a possible databank report if they decide to withdraw it. They rely on this presumption (which likely is true for most medical boards), and then may be harmed by it. I think it is very similar to a presumption of good-faith dealing (see p 3). Medical boards that do this should provide a warning to physicians that under certain circumstances a physician may not be allowed to withdraw an initial application for licensure unless the board permits it..
Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Eden, N.Y.
Patient Privacy. States generally have inadequate consent policies for their Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), All-Payer Claims Databases (APCDs), and medical AI. Perhaps so many physicians commit suicide and do not seek psychiatric treatment because they know the electronic medical record is not private. An eminent psychiatrist who treats physicians for depression said his solution was to remove the stigma of mental illness. Agreed, but who is going to be hospitalized in an institution where one is on staff and where its business associates can see records? And who will see a psychologist or psychiatrist who shares records with others without consent? Also note that records are sent into national HIEs to be managed by private companies and state agencies, and they may be accessed by researchers, health insurers, dental staffs, social workers, EMTs, retail pharmacists, etc. Additionally, APCDs are managed by private companies for the States, with access to all diagnoses, treatments, provider names, medications, and dates. Then this data may be released to researchers in identified form or to hospitals in Limited Data Set form, with the full date of birth, gender and zip code, making it easy to re-identify people by cross-referencing with voter registration rolls, for example. And AI systems are a worry for surveillance if identified patient data are studied and stored in outside systems without consent.
Susan Israel, M.D., Woodbridge, CT
Education by Algorithm. An article by former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health David Mansdoerfer in Epoch Times (https://tinyurl.com/bdu26jvb) explains the derailment of genuine medical education. The current algorithmic approach doesn’t need a human body. Either a “Google” or a “chatGPT” will suffice. Nor does it encourage an inquisitive physician. It disregards the value of having varied knowledge, both medical and non-medical; critical thinking; the “what-if” thought process, and patiently listening to the patient’s narrative. These skills are being lost. Failure of the protocol is ignored or blamed on external factors. An admission that “I don’t know” is not entertained and thus does not lead to further study.
Chandrasekhar Doniparthi, M.D., Yuma, AZ
What If AI is Anti-intelligence? The concept of anti-intelligence was noted by a futurist and AI expert (John Nosta, https://tinyurl.com/ye4n8tby). In short, AI causes a dissolving of cognitive boundaries. This subtle, almost invisible change displaces the mental struggle, the friction of thought, and the need for creative thinking. Mechanistic AI can spit out facts and even accurate insights, but it is totally antithetical to the human thinking process. As anti-intelligence spreads at scale to the whole world, humanity finds itself moving closer to a simulacrum.
Patrick Wood, https://tinyurl.com/58rrnu8x
RCTs Not the Final Criterion. Randomized controlled trials perform no better than other types of studies, according to the former head of the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) (Michael Rawlins) and the former head of the CDC (Thomas Frieden). Even Bradford Hill, one of the key figures in the popularization of modern RCTs, cautioned against overreliance on them, saying, “Any belief that the controlled trial is the only way would mean not that the pendulum had swung too far but that it had come right off the hook.” In the autism debate some of the most insightful data are from what might be called Samizdat research. In my “mapping articles” (tinyurl.com/ycxd3a22), I have compiled thousands of sources. Medical decisions should be based on the totality of evidence available now. The new $50 million Autism Data Science Initiative from NIH sets rules for grants that guarantee that the causes of autism will never be found.
Toby Rogers
Deconstructing the NIH, CDC, and FDA. Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) advocates must begin by recognizing that they are not just dealing with organizational charts and a massive siloed bureaucracy. They are faced with transforming a deeply entrenched socialist/corporatist bureaucratic culture, for which the idea of entrepreneurship is not only foreign, but is seen as a threat. Libertarian and conservative beliefs in the primacy of the individual and right to choose are alien. This culture firmly believes in utilitarian outcomes-based socialism while fiercely defending its own privileges. A new generation of leaders must ascend the ladder to replace the current “Yellow Berets.”
Robert W. Malone, M.D., https://tinyurl.com/3ebr48m5
