***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Economic Fare:
Japan is in stagflation, Korea’s won is at 17-year lows and China’s trade surplus is cratering — and the oil shock has yet to fully hit
.................. So the current seeming stasis masks economic pressures building up along many fault lines. And the longer it persists, the worse the eventual earthquake is likely to be. ....................
It's not just heating: It's cold chains, plastic supplies and life-saving drugs from Insulin to antibiotics to anaesthetic
In March, Canadian commodities analyst Rory Johnston warned that blocking the Strait of Hormuz would cause the largest oil shock in history - that we could be facing $200 a barrel by June. He has maintained that stance. This is the first in a series of bulletins on risks and needed responses. ..........
The U.S. is not energy independent—and cannot be—because oil quality matters. The U.S. has plenty of oil. A lot of it’s just not the right kind.
The U.S. now produces more oil than Saudi Arabia and Russia combined, and as much natural gas as Russia, Iran and China combined. That’s the headline from a recent Department of Energy release .........
The numbers are technically correct—and deeply misleading.
Production alone says very little about a country’s underlying energy position. Saudi Arabia holds roughly four times more oil reserves than the United States, and Russia about 1.5 times as much. For natural gas, Russia has nearly three times U.S. reserves, and Iran more than 2.5 times.
Production is a flow. Reserves are the stock.
Producing more today means depleting faster tomorrow. It’s not dominance. It’s draining America first.
Yet the belief that the United States is “energy independent” persists, reinforced by official statistics.
The United States has been a net total energy exporter—total energy exports have been higher than total energy imports—since 2019.
U.S. Energy Information Administration
That statement is also technically correct—and just as misleading.
It aggregates crude oil, refined products, natural gas, coal, and electricity into a single heat-equivalent metric. In doing so, it collapses fundamentally different energy forms with different end uses into one number and obscures a critical reality: the United States still depends on imports of specific fuels—especially heavier crude oil—to keep its energy system running.
That distinction matters because oil still dominates U.S. energy, accounting for nearly 40% of the total ..........
Goldman consumer analysts Kate McShane and Bonnie Herzog cut their 2026 discretionary cash-inflow growth forecast for the second time this year, citing a worsening squeeze on U.S. households as slower disposable income growth collides with higher fuel prices at the pump. The revision points to a softening among cash-strapped consumers as the US-Iran conflict enters its third month. ...............
Market Fare:
.......... Central banks have continued to add to their holdings of gold since the conflict began in late February, including those in China, Poland, the Czech Republic and Uzbekistan, according to data from the World Gold Council. In March, China’s central bank bought more gold than it had in more than a year. Guatemala also bought gold in March, for the first time in about six months, the council said.
“Recent market developments, driven by the instability in the Middle East, have reinforced our view that instability has become the defining feature of the global economy,” Adam Glapinski, the governor of the National Bank of Poland, said in response to written questions. “I would reiterate the importance of diversifying foreign reserves and the role of gold as a strategic asset.” .........
In the past year, software stocks have gotten crushed while semiconductors soared.
Software stocks include companies like Microsoft (MSFT), Adobe (ADBE), and Figma (FIG). Fears over AI disruption, combined with silly-high valuations, have caused investors to flee the sector.
Meanwhile, all the money is being made in semiconductors (microchips). Companies like Nvidia (NVDA), AMD (AMD), Intel (INTC), Qualcomm (QCOM), are absolutely crushing it. .......
As you can see, semiconductor companies on average are trading at a 60 P/E. And a price/book ratio of 10. ..........
Bubble Fare:
Crescat: Nosebleed Territory
The US stock market is historically overvalued, posing a major potential risk to investors at large. The extent of the bubble is illustrated by Warren Buffett’s favorite valuation risk measure, total stock market value to GDP. It just reached a new high, 228%, 59% higher than it was at the peak of the Internet boom in 2000!
............ Two observations stand out. First, current forecasts, especially for next year, imply sales growth at roughly twice the expected pace of GDP. Historically that typically has occurred when the U.S. economy was coming out of a recession. Second, sales growth is projected to exceed GDP growth for each of the next three years. This would not be unprecedented, but taken together, these assumptions represent the first clear sign of elevated optimism in the forecasts.
On the earnings side, expectations are even more ambitious. Earnings growth is projected to run at roughly twice the pace of sales growth, implying meaningful margin expansion. For example, earnings are expected to grow by about 20% in 2027. This is again the type of growth that typically occurs in post-recession environments, when sales rebound and labor costs remain below pre-contraction levels.
The bridge between roughly 9% sales growth and 20% earnings growth is a significant increase in margins. This is where the most optimistic assumptions are embedded and will be the primary focus of the remaining discussion. Currently, based on earnings through the end of 2025, operating margins are just under 16%. They are projected to rise to nearly 19.5% in 2026 and to almost 21% by 2027.
The recurring pattern in financial crises is broadly the same. For one reason or another, a shift occurs in the economic cycle — such as war, innovation, or new regulation — which alters profit opportunities for banks and firms. Demand and prices rise, drawing ever larger parts of the economy into a state of euphoria. Speculative mania — whether in tulip bulbs, property, or mortgages — takes hold. Sooner or later, someone sells to realise their gains, triggering a scramble for liquidity. It becomes time to step off the carousel and convert securities and assets into cash. A financial disturbance emerges and spreads. Prices begin to fall, bankruptcies increase, and the crisis intensifies into panic. To prevent a complete collapse, credit tightens, and calls arise for a lender of last resort to guarantee liquidity and restore confidence. If this fails, a crash becomes inevitable.
Financial markets essentially function as centres of information. Since participants lack complete knowledge, they infer economic fundamentals by observing one another’s behaviour. Herd instincts lead them to act in unison, producing dynamics that often resemble those of a casino. With new technologies and financial instruments, there is an inherent pressure to trade rapidly, further reinforcing herd behaviour. Information is not fully digested but instead translated immediately into action, based on expectations of how others will react once it becomes public. This, in turn, increases exposure to risk.
The foremost theorist of financial crises in our era, Hyman Minsky, argued that crises are endogenous (systemic) phenomena in which stability breeds instability, eroding safety margins in financial transactions and encouraging excessive leverage. During the expansion phase of financial bubbles, these safety margins diminish, and even minor setbacks can lead to unmet expectations, forcing firms and investors to revise their plans in order to meet cash-flow commitments. As a result, asset liquidation may become necessary, contributing to a debt-deflation process in which the real burden of debt rises and liquidity problems become harder to resolve through asset sales.
The “Minsky Moment” Drags On: The Financial Instability Hypothesis According to Minsky, these processes are inevitable. Stability creates instability even in the absence of euphoria or excessive optimism. ...............
These crises arise from a financial system that systematically underestimates risk and overestimates creditworthiness. The instability that Minsky saw as inherent in financial markets cannot be entirely eliminated. However, appropriate regulations and institutions can mitigate the damage. Bubbles are an inevitable feature of economies in which markets operate with minimal constraint. Yet our changing attitudes to work and wealth also play a role. Over time, people’s perception of their place in the economy has shifted profoundly. Where work was once seen as the foundation of prosperity, there is now a growing expectation that wealth should come from investment. Today’s ideal is no longer the industrious worker but the astute investor, for whom money has become an end in itself rather than a means. This shift is one of the deeper causes of the recurring crises of recent decades. Here, perhaps, lies the heart of the problem.
A.I. Fare:
.................. And that's why AI is now not only a market bubble, but it has become a core anchor propping up the entire US economy; it's also why the US government will have no choice but to backstop it once the inevitable AI bubble pops.
Executive summary
The AI and energy nexus continues to evolve rapidly
The largest technology companies are contributing to a surge in data centre investment, as their capital expenditure exceeded USD 400 billion in 2025 – and is expected to jump by another 75% in 2026. Capital expenditure of just five technology companies is now larger than global investment in oil and natural gas production ............
Yves here. If Servaas Storm is not one of your favorite economists, this post may persuade you to put him on your personal short list. Servaas systematically (and often wryly) takes apart the key claims of AI touts. One of my faves: “No, AI will create a lot of bullshit jobs.” ..................
Zitron: AI's Economics Don't Make Sense
What the AI cheerleaders don’t tell you
AI coding tools are genuinely revolutionizing the software industry, but more than almost anything I have ever seen, they fall into the category of things you maybe shouldn’t try at home without significant prior experience:
And, see especially this long, thoughtful report of another case, which has gone completely viral. ..........
................... The anger at the rapid building of data centers to fuel big tech’s artificial intelligence apparatus is widespread, deep, and non-ideological, and voters are voicing their wrath at the polls, rightfully concerned about the effect booming data center construction will have on their utility bills, environment, and quality of life. $64 billion worth of data centers projects have been blocked or delayed in just the last two years.
There’s a story there about this particular political moment, of course, with tech and AI receiving a backlash to real (and perceived, to be fair) overreaches. But the data center boom is also, in many ways, emblematic of the larger failure that is U.S. economic development policy at the state and local level. .................
The AI market continues to evolve and surprise. In recent months, Anthropic withheld their latest model Mythos, OpenAI made a U-turn and started experimenting with ads, and Meta bought a “social network for AIs”. This could point to increased divergence in AI companies’ business models. While this might increase AI risk to society in the short term, it is likely a good thing for managing risks in the longer term. It should be encouraged.
AI products have up until now been strikingly uniform
Until now, the AI market has been “one size fits all”. All main providers operate by the same playbook and offer similar products. ............
AI shattered the forecasting models utilities have relied on for decades — and the gas plants going up today will outlast every net-zero deadline on the books.
The grid cannot keep up with AI. For decades, electricity demand grew slowly and predictably, giving utilities comfortable margins to plan capacity years in advance. That model broke almost overnight. Between 2023 and 2024 alone, utilities’ five-year summer peak demand forecasts jumped from 38 GW to 128 GW, a more than threefold increase in a single planning cycle. ........
Energy companies are no longer treating hyperscale data centers as large customers to be served from the grid, but rather as anchor infrastructure to be co-built with.
What follows is a look at what that shift actually demands at the systems level — why natural gas is currently the only tool that can fill the gap at the required speed and scale, what that means for emissions commitments already being made today, and what the longer path to balancing this with storage, transmission, and cleaner alternatives realistically looks like. .............
The great skeptic gets taken in
.............. The fundamental problem here is that Dawkins doesn’t reflect on how these outputs have been generated. Claude’s outputs are the product of a form of mimicry, rather than as a report of genuine internal states.
Consciousness is about internal states; the mimicry, no matter how rich, proves very little. Dawkins seems to imagine that since LLMs say things people do, they must be like people, and that simply does not follow.
In his framing, Dawkins confuses himself, and does violence to the concept of consciousness. You can’t just look at the outputs, without investigating the underlying mechanisms, and conclude that two entities with similar outputs reach those similar outputs by similar means. And the differences are immense; one (the LLM) effectively memorizes the entire internet; the other (the human) builds a mental model through experience with world. ..........
Quotes of the Week:
Klein: It is convenient that Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta all reported their 2026Q1 results the night before the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) published its initial estimate of U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in January-March 2026. Those four providers of cloud computing services, plus Oracle, which reported slightly earlier, together reported about $150 billion in capital spending in 2026Q1. That capex was equivalent to about 2% of the value of all of the goods and services produced within the U.S. in the first three months of 2026.
Klein: It is convenient that Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta all reported their 2026Q1 results the night before the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) published its initial estimate of U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in January-March 2026. Those four providers of cloud computing services, plus Oracle, which reported slightly earlier, together reported about $150 billion in capital spending in 2026Q1. That capex was equivalent to about 2% of the value of all of the goods and services produced within the U.S. in the first three months of 2026.
Charts:
1:
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Hansen: 2026 On Track for Warmest Year
........................ As an alternative, let’s try a physics-based approach, with the hope to learn something from it by the end of the year. Specifically, let’s assume that the budding El Nino will have strength at least comparable to the 2023-24 El Nino. We assume that global temperature change is caused by climate forcings (imposed changes of the planet’s energy balance) and that “Nino” variability is the only substantial source of global “noise,” i.e., unforced global temperature change.
Why is this exercise of interest? Because, as we discussed in prior posts, the main issue is not El Nino, but the need to understand accelerated warming, unprecedented marine heat waves, and increasing climate extremes. The high rate of global warming acceleration was not anticipated by IPCC because their best estimate for climate sensitivity (3°C for 2×CO2) was an underestimate. We have shown in four independent ways, with greater than 99% confidence, that climate sensitivity is substantially higher, 4-5°C for doubled CO2.[5] IPCC compensated for low climate sensitivity by failing to recognize that aerosol cooling increased during 1970-2005. Since then, especially since 2015, a reduction of aerosols and their cooling effect has caused the decadal growth rate of net climate forcing to be about double what it was in 1970-2005.[6] This increased net forcing combines with high climate sensitivity to cause recent global warming acceleration. ................
It provides a budget-friendly, high-endurance answer for the world’s massive energy storage needs.
Sci Fare:
The Real Story Behind One of Social Psychology’s Most Replicated Findings
This is a guest post by Roy Baumeister, who is a social and personality psychologist who has published hundreds of articles and nearly 50 books on diverse topics. Throughout his long career, he has worked toward building a big-picture understanding of the human mind based on integrating facts and findings from large areas of research. He is ranked among the world’s most influential psychology researchers.
The Intellectual Origin of Ego Depletion
Early in my career, casting about for a theme, I decided to focus on trying to understand the human self. Lots of eminent thinkers were talking about the self, back then. Hippies were taking drugs to discover their inner selves. Researchers were also interested in the self, seeking to use scientific methods to understand it, not necessarily their own individual self, but the essence of selfhood. It sounded good to me. I signed up.
In the 1980s, some of the foremost thinkers in the field started saying that the crucial key to understanding the self was how it controls and regulates itself. There were plenty of specific self processes being studied – self-esteem, self-presentation, self-concept, self-monitoring, self-awareness — but the smartest folks (Charles Carver, Shelley Taylor) were saying that self-control was different. It was not just one more of those but the basis of the whole system. So I thought I should learn about that. I spent a year or so reading many research studies. I noticed a pattern that nobody had remarked on — the self’s ability to exert control over itself seemed to deteriorate over time with continued use. .....................................................
The serious-adverse-event signal found in the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA Covid-19 vaccine trials has been in the peer-reviewed literature for nearly four years. Mainstream media outlets, on the rare occasions they address it, have treated it not as evidence to be weighed but as misinformation to be managed - dismissed on the authority of experts without relevant expertise, or simply ignored
U.S. B.S.:
*** How Can This Be?
wow: a lot of truth inter-mixed with a lot of TDS, as if the problems are Trump and the far-right, but not politics (and journalism, and our ambivalent relationship with truth and reality), in general (particularly interesting reading this in the context of having read The Vaccine Signal article above)
Liberals, progressives, and others who closely follow U.S. national politics often experience a sense of vertigo and disorientation, of being emotionally upended and mentally exhausted trying to untangle and refute the incessant barrage of lies, disinformation, and conspiracy theories emanating from the White House. While Trump frequently makes outrageous and inflammatory remarks to elicit a response from his political opponents and dominate the news cycle, the primary effect of his rhetoric is to envelop people in a fog of incoherence, to psychologically overwhelm them by flooding the zone with a tsunami of falsehoods, inconsistencies, and contradictory narratives that leaves them cognitively numb. ......
War Fare:
Unable to overthrow Iran's government with US-Israeli bombs, Trump settles on a bipartisan policy of economic strangulation.
President Trump has not achieved regime change in Tehran, nor its surrender to his ultimatum of abandoning nuclear enrichment. With the bombing phase of an unpopular war waged jointly with Israel on pause, Trump is settling on a third, familiar objective: strangling Iran’s economy long-term.
Trump has reportedly instructed aides to prepare for a prolonged naval blockade of Iran. Trump insists that his goal is to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon. But it was Trump who tore up the 2015 pact that blocked a path to a bomb, and then shunned Iran’s acceptance of even stricter limits during February’s Omani-brokered talks in Geneva. Therefore, his stated objection to Iranian “nuclear weapons” is a euphemism for Iran having any nuclear program, even for peaceful purposes. ..............
From the president’s perspective, the other problem with reaching an agreement is that it would formalize the failure of his regime change campaign. For that reason, Iran’s latest proposal – to end the US blockade, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and delay nuclear talks until later – is a non-starter. ............
Plus: Please Take the 'Ass' Out of Assassination Attempt
.................. The people who run Russia and China will eventually take issue with Trump’s economic murder-suicide if it persists. What Trump is currently doing is roughly analogous to the US naval blockade of Japan that inspired the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Giving nations a choice between fast or slow strangulation inspires desperate measures. China and Russia both have extensive arsenals of weapons and aren’t burdened with being led by Donald Trump and his Cabinet choices.
What makes Trump such a dangerous fool in the present circumstance is that he doesn’t know history or strategy and he has surrounded himself with self-interested fools, liars and thieves. But most of all, Trump doesn’t understand elementary school arithmetic. Every day that the Strait of Hormuz remains closed removes 20% of that day’s oil and gas supply from global markets. That day’s shortfall bleeds over into the next day’s accumulated aggregate supply shortfall. It is the accumulated shortfall that measures the economic damage underway...............
Is Trump running out of time to end the war before the American economy catches up?
...................... With respect to alleged negotiations, the US is currently putting forward the same demands to Iran that it has for most of the last year. This continuity suggests inflexibility as the product of an as yet unstated agenda. That Trump has thus far insisted that Iran commit national suicide by acceding to US demands suggests that his goal is the destruction of Iran. The destruction of Iran would give US-Israel control of the territory of Greater Israel.
This prospect gives every actor in the region as well as Russia and China a stake in the outcome of the current war. ..........
........ But as mentioned before, there are reserves and more importantly, rather than the war producing the hoped-for coup d’etat and regime change, many Iranians have rallied around the flag on the back of an upsurge in nationalist sentiment.
As with Russia, the Western mainstream media continually reports on the likely implosion of Iran’s economy as sanctions and global isolation intensify as a way to legitimize the war’s continuance. But, if Iran wasn’t going to buckle economically in the years before the war when its oil exports and earnings were sagging, it isn’t going to do so now, with the oil market booming in its favor.
Inevitably, the calculus in Tehran, as it has been in Moscow, will be that they have a higher pain threshold on the back of decades of hardship, and that they can inflict greater pain on their Western opponents. ..............
........ As for definitions of 'hardline vs. moderate' - these are somewhat superficial and manufactured by the West (akin to prior Middle East wars and regime change operations, with one recent example being so-called "moderate rebels" in Syria).
With the MSM and Iran, this is based fundamentally on speculation from afar and circular logic. Any Iranian official who is against pursuing more negotiations - while understandably coming to the conclusion that Washington can't be trusted (after it bombed Iran twice during talks) - gets automatically labelled 'hardliner' by the MSM, and this also carries all kinds of implications overlapping with radical Islam. The idea is to make anyone not amenable to Washington and Israeli plans for the region look irrational and fanatical - even if their decisions might be rational and understandable based on Iranian national self-interest and survival. ...........
Meanwhile Ghalibaf has continued trolling the US on X over rising oil and gas prices, which again suggests that Tehran is settling in for a long war, and is willing to endure and survive politically...
........... What we have is an endurance race. Can the US withstand high priced oil longer than Iran can survive without significant oil exports?
If Iran breaks first, the question is whether it will offer the US a better peace deal, or if it will go back to the military option. ...........
***** Welsh: The Abuse of Language By Media and Government
........ By either of these definitions, the world’s greatest users of terrorism are America and Israel. No one else comes close
.......... Iran has gone out of its way to not kill civilians. In the Ukraine war the death rate for children is under 1%. In Palestine it’s somewhere around 32%. In Iran it was about 16%.
........ Hezbollah, likewise, tends to stick to military targets. Even Hamas mostly hits military targets.
Yet somehow the nations who are primarily committing terrorism: the US and Israel, are never described as terrorists. Russia, Iran, Hezbolla and Hamas: they’re always terrorists, even when they attack military targets.
In Britain terrorist designations have been used against protesters who have never harmed civilians. The same is true in Germany.
The word means nothing, and Western media outlets are nothing but propagandists. Most aren’t even allowed to say the word “genocide”. It’s publisher policy.
........ You can still, with very careful reading, get some truth from the legacy media. Some. But if you want unfettered news and not to have to work like a dog, you have to go to alternative media and read foreign sources directly.
This isn’t trivial, because most people don’t do the extra work, which means that even if suspicious of official narratives, they live in a soup of lies and their understanding of the world is wrong ...
But there is something good about completely out-to-lunch propaganda. Over time people see thru it. They stop trusting. They stop believing anything they’re told.
But that’s also a bad thing: there is no consensus world view left, just a series of tribes with their own echo chambers. Without a shared understanding of the world that is not completely unhinged from reality, there’s no basis for social action which works. China has the buy-in of most of their population because they believe in what China does, and trust the government. (Research on this is very clear. Chinese citizens do trust the CPC.) In the US there can be no concerted action because their is no trust left. Hell, Trump contradicts himself regularly. He’ll say the sky is green in the morning and announce it’s magenta at supper.
No society riven like this and basing its decisions on delusion rather than truth can act effectively. America can’t fix anything, can’t win wars, can’t reindustrialize and much of this is because Americans live in a world of fantasy.
The first step in fixing anything; in running any sort of society worth living in, is facing at least some of the facts: of living in the real world. It’s been a long time since the West acknowledged reality, and our delusions are just getting worse.
Geopolitical Fare:
.......................................... Having established its hegemony after World War II, the United States shifted to “soft power” (culture and values) for cost-effective global control, as opposed to traditional intellectual exchange. “This involves forced transformation, malicious manipulation, covert infiltration, and long-term erosion,” as the report states.
The Chinese report points to well-known phenomena such as:
– White propaganda (open, via Voice of America and Hollywood), black propaganda (covert, via the CIA such as Operation Mockingbird and PRISM) and gray propaganda (semi-open, via NED and NGOs).
– English as lingua franca, narrative hegemony, media control and knowledge production (Western academic dominance).
– Securing cultural hegemony (making American values universal), political dominance (making US interests global norms), and economic privilege (using public opinion to suppress competitors like Huawei and TikTok).
The report points to the role of Hollywood, which has been strongly controlled by the Pentagon and the CIA, Disney, NewsCorp, information warfare after the breakthrough of television, ideological warfare through new media and the transition to cognitive warfare after 2016. Here, social media, not least Facebook, plays a central role.
Technological system: Monopoly on communications (satellites, Starlink), social platforms (algorithmic manipulation) and cognitive technologies (AI, biotechnology for brain control). ...................
China’s Reduced Exposure to Persian Gulf Oil Disruption via Hormuz/Malacca Chokepoints
Preface: Since the outbreak of renewed kinetic hostilities against Iran on 28 February 2026, and Iran’s military and non-military response by way of a closure of the Strait of Hormuz, discussion has turned to questions of impacts on different countries and regions’ economies. I have explored aspects of these issues in previous essays here in my Substack, and in mainstream media publications. A constant background, however, is the question of implications for China in the context of the wider dynamics of geopolitical rivalry and contest with the United States. Two particular aspects of this warrant closer scrutiny. That China has accumulated substantial strategic oil reserves is beyond question as a matter of empirics. However, how are we to understand this? Secondly, there’s persistent chatter about “American grand strategy” that argues that everything — and I mean literally everything — is about America’s ambitions to contain China, and the U.S. blockade of the Persian Gulf is part of this multi-dimensional “chess game.” This begs the question, if it’s all about China, China surely has a say, right?
Understanding Putin's KGB mindset
................... A key failure in western understanding is that Putin is a moderate within the Russian system, however he is caricatured in the western mainstream media. Putin as an ex- KGB intelligence officer tries to maintain relations with everyone, if only to influence them.
Alexander argues that Putin is in fact the most pro-western Russian leader since Lenin and yet the UK and America have managed to ‘screw it up’. Putin’s future replacement may well be more hardline. .................
A RAND study explodes the West's ‘Irrussianality.’
'Arte, ‘the’ Franco–German television channel, broadcast a documentary earlier this month titled L’Europe dans la main de Poutine? “Europe in Putin’s grip?” opens with a scene in the Kremlin on 18 March 2014, when President Putin announced the formal annexation of Crimea after a referendum concluded two days earlier. This film is available simultaneously with a two-part doc’y entitled “Putin’s Secret Weapons,” which purports to review the Russian Federation’s “state-directed terror,” its routine theft of Western technology, its “opaque network of spies,” its stockpiles of hypersonic missiles, and so on. “The country could strike Europe within minutes,” the film advises viewers.
Russophobic paranoia of this sort is nothing new, of course. You can go back to Czarist Russia’s 19th century modernizations and find evidence of it, and then on to the British defeat in Crimea (1853–56), the Red Scare that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, the second Red Scare of the Cold War decades. I trace the current wave to Putin’s 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference, where he assailed the United States’ pretensions to global preeminence. Then came the cynically manipulated Russophobia Donald Trump provoked when, as he rose to political prominence in 2016, he advocated a new détente with Moscow.
What we have seen since the Biden regime intentionally provoked Russia’s February 2022 intervention in Ukraine ranks with any of these previous occasions as measured by the fear-mongering, the war-mongering, and the manufactured delusions that are now woven into daily life, as the just-noted documentaries suggest. This is especially evident in Europe, where unimaginative “centrists”—incompetent to a one, in my view—have been as deer in headlights since Trump II stepped back from Washington’s profligate support of the bottomlessly corrupt regime in Kiev during the Biden years. ..............
Anyone paying attention can discern without much effort that the threat of “Russian aggression” in Europe is a construction with no basis whatsoever in fact. ...............
This week he republished a piece that first appeared in 2021. It is based on a RAND Corporation study that had recently appeared under the title Russia’s Military Interventions: Patterns, Drivers, and Signposts. The full, 186–page research report is here. .....................
Other Fare:
I want to spend more time writing about the baseline assumptions of our political economy.
One of the worst is that people have to work to get resources. “If you don’t work, you don’t eat”.
This made sense at one time, when famines were common, food and resources were scarce and predatory nobles and priests took most of the surplus. There wasn’t a lot of space for people who didn’t work.
But it doesn’t make sense now. Buckminster Fuller most famously said it: ....................
At least much of this administrative bloat is just wasteful. People working shadow banking, Private Equity and Wall Street make their money buy rolling up companies, loading them up with debt, laying people off, raising prices and then causing bankruptcy of firms which were actually profitable, who provided real work and products at reasonable prices.
They are actively damaging. It would be more than worth it to forbid such people from working at all and pay then low six figures to stop hurting other people. .................
We need profit, so we produce vast amounts of crap we only need because of of that “need” for profit.
This insanity has caused global warming, mass extinctions and vast amounts of needless unhappiness, bad health and lives wasted doing meaningless or harmful work.
We need a better way, and the first step is to end the idea that if you don’t work you shouldn’t have a home, food and a decent life.
Aurelien: It Does Now.
Send the wrong signals, get the wrong society.
............ His experience is a microcosm of the way in which the subject populations of the Nazis survived, some in extreme circumstances as here (one could add Primo Levi, another resistance worker whose life was spared in Auschwitz because he was a chemical engineer), others in a more everyday fashion. I will say a few words in this essay about both physical and mental survival and resistance, starting deliberately with some exceptional cases, because I think we are now moving into very difficult times, where the kind of psychological strength needed for personal survival, and the kind of physical and organisational capabilities needed just to keep society going, will not be those that out society currently values, or for that matter is even able to generate. I’ll make a number of references to the Second World War as we go, because what happened then and afterwards is an extreme exemplification of the wider argument I want to make. ......................................................................
Progress & Poverty: A Practical Review
Only a few economists’ works have inspired eponymous schools. Marxism and Keynesianism come to mind, but almost memory-holed is an American, Henry George, whose “Georgist” movement was a major political force in the heady days of late 19th- and early 20th-century progressivism. George was the author of Progress & Poverty, a bestseller shortly after its publication in 1880. In the 1880s and 1890s, P&P outsold every English-language book except the Bible. ..................................................................................................................................................
The Best Lack All Conviction: Russell’s Other Paradox
Vids of the Week:
............... I think what is rather at issue here is the combination of two factors. One is that, quite simply, we’re dealing with a case of inverted causation: it isn’t the case that the stupid are ‘cocksure’ despite their stupidity, it is that they remain stupid because of their certainty in their own superiority. Why revise your own beliefs if you know you’re right? Why work on yourself if you’re already great? Conversely, the doubtful are wise precisely because of their doubt: because they have examined their beliefs, questioned and revised them, thrown out what they found wanting and adopted what they thought more apt. It is not a surprise that those most self-assured are also those most lacking in sophistication, it’s a consequence.
There would, of course, not be any great problem with this state of affairs, if it weren’t the case that for some reason, it seems to be increasingly the crass, the unjustifiably self-assured, the ones unfazed by their own incompetence that seem to be running the show. If they’re so incompetent, then how is it they come to power? This is the second factor: our world has increasingly become one that rewards certainty over doubt, no matter whether there is any base for such certainty, or whether the doubt just reflects genuine vagaries. The reason for this, I will argue, is quite simply the management of complexity and information flow in a hierarchical system: a strong signal, any signal, is preferable to uncertainty.
Russell put the cart before the horse: the trouble with the world is not the dominance of inexplicably confident idiots, but rather, that the systems of power reward the sort of confidence that breeds ignorance over honest doubt. .............
.................. Crude oils extracted from different parts of the Earth will have different mixtures of hydrocarbons and other molecules, which has given rise to a sort of crude oil taxonomy. “Heavy” crude oils, found in places like Canada’s oil sands, will have more heavy molecules, while “light” crude oils found in places like Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar field will have more light molecules. “Sweet” crudes, like the crudes extracted from the Brent oil field in the North Sea, have lower sulfur content, while “sour crudes,” like some of the crudes extracted from the Gulf of Mexico, have greater sulfur content.
The job of an oil refinery is to process this mixture of hydrocarbons and other molecules: separating the mixture into individual chemicals or groups of chemicals, and using various chemical reactions to change low-value chemicals into more valuable, useful ones. ................
............... Showing up to work in a military uniform, let alone the uniform of a military which has committed genocide and war crimes, and whose former head is an ICC-indicted war criminal, is not only unprofessional and unethical, but clearly an unabashed display of arrogance and impunity. ..................
Vids of the Week:
🇯🇵A Japanese developer built an app that puts a fat cat on your screen and forces you to take a break
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) April 28, 2026
Silicon Valley spent billions on wellness platforms, mindfulness subscriptions, and digital detox retreats
A guy in Japan said: fat cat, problem solvedpic.twitter.com/PaTzsGYpUV
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