Cui Bono

Governments and companies explain what they did by telling you why they did it. That explanation is usually the least reliable thing in the story. A better question is who benefited, who paid, who moved before anyone else knew what was coming, and who is working hardest to make sure you read the event a particular way.

That question is old. Cui bono, ancient Roman law, meaning “who benefits”. Asked loosely it is also how people end up on YouTube with a whiteboard and a ball of string, because if you go looking for a beneficiary you will always find one. Everything is connected to everything if you’re willing to draw the lines far enough.

So this isn’t cui bono asked loosely. Every report here runs the same structured process: map the actors with a hard stop rule against endless expansion, generate several rival explanations rather than one, give each a starting probability drawn from a stated reference class rather than a gut feeling, and weigh every piece of evidence against every explanation at once using a scoring method built on CIA tradecraft. The reasoning is AI-assisted and I say so on every report. I sign off on the calls that matter and a script does the arithmetic, so the numbers can’t be quietly rounded toward the answer either of us would prefer.

Read how the engine actually works for the full method, including where it can go wrong and the four rules that keep it honest.

Reports