***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Economic Fare:
After decades of domination by the neoliberal consensus, Washington has started to break with that paradigm under recent presidential administrations, including Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s. Their embrace of tariffs and efforts to rebuild domestic manufacturing capacity are a departure from previous policy orthodoxy, inspired in part by the rise of China as an economic and geopolitical powerhouse and, in Biden’s case, by the challenge of climate change. ...........
.............................................. Second, the financial system is a source of the huge distortion of the income and wealth distribution in this country. Why are we doing this? This was not the case fifty, seventy years ago. A great advantage Franklin D. Roosevelt had was that the financial system had collapsed when he took power. He could build up what was essentially an industrial, middle-class country.
I don’t think we can recover the industrial aspects; maybe we should want to. But you need to dismantle the oligarchy. The oligarchy is finance and the capital valuations in the tech sector. Those are obviously very closely related; they are who runs the country these days. That’s where you should be thinking about social reform. Then let the rest of the country try and figure out how to rebuild its own basis for sustainable prosperity. And maybe you can get some environmental progress in that as well. ............
Doomberg: Marginal Rations
The ominous math driving the current diesel crisis and how it will inevitably resolve.
The global distribution of engines that power the economy was no accident. It evolved in a way that made maximum use of the prototypical barrel of oil that existed when that energy input came of age. The number of cars, planes, and heavy-duty vehicles currently running on gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel was a natural consequence of the relative concentration of molecules that comprise those cuts, paired with the overarching need to minimize waste at refineries. Had the molecular mix of standard crude barrels been materially different back then, so too would society’s contemporary inventory of internal-combustion engines.
The ability of chemists to flexibilize refineries and of arbitrageurs to close supply-demand mismatches with new engines notwithstanding, global events can temporarily overwhelm such buffers. When it comes to diesel, the twin wars in Ukraine and Iran make this one of those times: ...........
Shortages of diesel are particularly threatening to the global economy. Because of the higher torque that diesel engines produce, their main applications dominate important aspects of the global supply chain, including how food is harvested and how most goods are transported across long distances. Price surges and fuel stockouts invariably lead to product shortages and bursts of inflation, outcomes that are never desirable but are particularly threatening given the current fiscal crisis embroiling Western governments.
................ The divergence between crude and fuel prices tells the story. Benchmark Brent crude oil is currently around $90 a barrel. Even though that is up about 25% from levels at the outbreak of the conflict on February 28, it is a significant retreat from the wartime peak at $118.
Refined products have not enjoyed the same relief. European diesel prices have surged more than 70% since the war began, while U.S. gasoline prices have climbed around 60%.
This reflects a dramatic decline in refining output. The war knocked out more than 20% of the Middle East's 9.6 million barrels per day of refining capacity, according to the International Energy Agency, while fuel exports remain suppressed due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The loss of Gulf crude, in turn, led many refiners, particularly in Asia, to curtail operations.
That strain was then amplified by months of relentless Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure. These attacks have cut Russia’s refining throughput by nearly 30% to below 4 million bpd in recent months, forcing Moscow to ban diesel exports in July.
Meanwhile, diesel refining margins in Europe, Asia and the U.S. have surged to unprecedented levels. European diesel cracks have more than tripled since February to above $75 a barrel. U.S. diesel margins have climbed more than 140%, reaching a record $100 earlier this week.
The crisis has been mitigated somewhat by pre-war fuel stockpiles – but that buffer is essentially gone. ..............
............................. Nearly six months into the Iran war, the world appears to be witnessing a slow-motion crash. The fuel market’s safety buffer has been stripped away as inventories have been depleted, while disruptions caused by the war continue to strain the overstressed refining system.
The energy crisis that really matters to the global economy is just getting started.
Somewhere in a Riyadh sitting room in 2004, a Saudi prince and a Bush family pollster worked out, over multiple finjans of black gahwa, that the American electorate’s memory is exactly ten months long. Not nine. Not eleven. Ten. Prince Bandar bin Sultan—nicknamed “Bandar Bush” on account of being closer to the Oval Office than most cabinet secretaries—had figured out that you don’t need to fix an economy; you just need to get it wobbling in the right direction. They all knew James Carville’s maxim—“It’s the economy, stupid.”
SUNY Professor Charles Hall laid the ground for Bandar’s number. Hall argued that a modern, high-GDP society with advanced healthcare, education, and art requires a high societal Energy Return ratio (EROI of roughly 10:1 or better). When energy prices spike or easy-to-reach fracked reserves deplete, a nation must spend a massive chunk of its GDP just to acquire more, starving the rest of the economy and risking recessions or stagnation. Folly would be to ignore a growing energy deficit while trying to build data centers and power up more air conditioners. Vaclav Smil suggests that steel, cement, ammonia (fertilizer), and plastics—which require cheap, massive quantities of fossil energy—are the first to fail. I would propose air travel. Robert Ayers and Eugene Odum would likely have said it is everything, all at once. ...............
In 1975, in the fevered afterglow of the Arab oil embargo, Gerald Ford signed off on the idea that America should keep a rainy-day fund of crude oil buried in salt caverns along the Gulf Coast—the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).
The SPR has been tapped exactly five times for real emergencies, and the shape of that list tells you everything about the trajectory we’re on. The first tap was Desert Storm, a minor 17 million barrels—10 percent at the time—to smooth over the defense of Kuwait. Then Katrina, then Libya, each toke a little bigger than the last, each a little more dizzying. In 2022, Genocide Joe
Biden, worried about Ukraine, Nordstream, and Russian sanctions, sucked up 180 million barrels with a long straw. Jaws dropped. So did inflation.
Now in 2026, we’re already 172 million more barrels deep into an SPR deficit, and the depth meter is clicking still lower with each fighter jet launch from the USS Abraham Lincoln. This is the lowest the reserve has ever been. Gas prices did their obedient little dance—$2.81 in January, up to $4.48 by May, back down to $3.93 by July—because that’s what an SPR is for: not solving the problem, just anesthetizing the public long enough to get through the news cycle.
Except the anesthesia is running low. The Government Accountability Office—not known for excitable prose—reports that a significant part of what’s left in those salt caverns can’t actually be pulled out anymore. Forty years of use has degraded the salt to the point where the reserve has a floor, a hard stop, a place where “strategic” starts colliding with “geological.” We built a hedge against scarcity and then trimmed the hedge. There’s a word for that: “Covfefe.” Definition: saying something is so, magically makes it so. I liked Bush’s “Voodoo Economics” better. Republicans are just so gifted at framing.
The Energy Information Administration, doing its level best to sound neutral about the SPR unraveling, offers three scenarios for the back half of 2026. In the cheerful one, Kushner/Witkoff/Rubio step aside, reparations are promised, diplomacy breaks out, and crude eases back to $69–75 a barrel. In the middle one, the Hormuz standoff grinds on, insurance premiums stay nosebleed-high, and pump prices hold at the current miserable $4.10, don’t ask me why—I don’t work at EIA. And in the third one—the one where the diplomats give up and the reserve runs out of room to absorb more shock—the EIA’s chart goes vertical. Crude markets experience a sudden “slingshot,” forcing national average retail gasoline to break past previous highs. $7/gallon is not impossible. The U.S. economy falls into an inflationary recession.
I think Scenario 3 is a given. ................
Pair a depleted strategic reserve with a climate system running years ahead of schedule, and you’ve got what a nuclear engineer would call a double fault—two independent failures stacking on top of each other in a system that was only ever designed to absorb one at a time. Down that road lies meltdown, or, in the industry’s gentler house language, “energetic disassembly.” I’ve always admired that phrase. It’s the kind of euphemism you reach for when the thing you’re describing is megadeath-scale.
Biden, worried about Ukraine, Nordstream, and Russian sanctions, sucked up 180 million barrels with a long straw. Jaws dropped. So did inflation.
Now in 2026, we’re already 172 million more barrels deep into an SPR deficit, and the depth meter is clicking still lower with each fighter jet launch from the USS Abraham Lincoln. This is the lowest the reserve has ever been. Gas prices did their obedient little dance—$2.81 in January, up to $4.48 by May, back down to $3.93 by July—because that’s what an SPR is for: not solving the problem, just anesthetizing the public long enough to get through the news cycle.
Except the anesthesia is running low. The Government Accountability Office—not known for excitable prose—reports that a significant part of what’s left in those salt caverns can’t actually be pulled out anymore. Forty years of use has degraded the salt to the point where the reserve has a floor, a hard stop, a place where “strategic” starts colliding with “geological.” We built a hedge against scarcity and then trimmed the hedge. There’s a word for that: “Covfefe.” Definition: saying something is so, magically makes it so. I liked Bush’s “Voodoo Economics” better. Republicans are just so gifted at framing.
The Energy Information Administration, doing its level best to sound neutral about the SPR unraveling, offers three scenarios for the back half of 2026. In the cheerful one, Kushner/Witkoff/Rubio step aside, reparations are promised, diplomacy breaks out, and crude eases back to $69–75 a barrel. In the middle one, the Hormuz standoff grinds on, insurance premiums stay nosebleed-high, and pump prices hold at the current miserable $4.10, don’t ask me why—I don’t work at EIA. And in the third one—the one where the diplomats give up and the reserve runs out of room to absorb more shock—the EIA’s chart goes vertical. Crude markets experience a sudden “slingshot,” forcing national average retail gasoline to break past previous highs. $7/gallon is not impossible. The U.S. economy falls into an inflationary recession.
I think Scenario 3 is a given. ................
Pair a depleted strategic reserve with a climate system running years ahead of schedule, and you’ve got what a nuclear engineer would call a double fault—two independent failures stacking on top of each other in a system that was only ever designed to absorb one at a time. Down that road lies meltdown, or, in the industry’s gentler house language, “energetic disassembly.” I’ve always admired that phrase. It’s the kind of euphemism you reach for when the thing you’re describing is megadeath-scale.
Eight major oil producers earned almost $93 billion between April and June 2026, nearly double their combined profit in the same quarter of 2025.
Market Fare:
Areas You Should Add Exposure
.... We’re still in a bull market.
The primary trend remains higher, long term breadth is healthy, and I’m not seeing anything in the bigger picture that changes that.
So I’m approaching this market the same way I approach most Bull markets.
Being opportunistic and owning leadership.
The interesting part right now is that leadership looks increasingly different from the S&P 500 itself.
... Lately, some of the strongest participation has been coming from places most investors would probably describe as boring.
Healthcare. Energy. Materials. Financials.
............ This is exactly what I mean when I talk about owning leadership.
I don’t need a narrative telling me copper should go higher.
I don’t need to predict where energy prices are six months from now.
I’ve got price telling me where money is already flowing.
......... And it certainly doesn’t mean I know how long this rotation lasts.
I don’t need to know.
I want to own leadership while it’s leadership, manage risk around my positions, and let the market tell me when something has changed.
That’s the beauty of the process.
We align with the market and let the market do the work.
***** "Get Long And Buckle Up": Jeff Currie Says Commodity Bull Market Entering Next Leg
........ According to veteran commodities strategist Jeff Currie, the convergence of tight physical markets, currency debasement, and policy intervention represents the hallmark of a structural commodity bull cycle.
........ According to veteran commodities strategist Jeff Currie, the convergence of tight physical markets, currency debasement, and policy intervention represents the hallmark of a structural commodity bull cycle.
..... Currie began the thread:
Wake up, folks. Commodities are telling you something, and yesterday the Treasury confirmed it.Scarcity in the physical world. Repression in the financial one. Scarcity pushes prices up. Repression holds yields down. The gap between them is the debasement.Commodities are the only asset class that wins on both sides. The structural case for commodities has been turbo charged.Underinvestment, deglobalization and electrification all pushing markets like diesel cracks and copper to new highs.Meanwhile the chokepoints are increasing, from Hormuz to the Red Sea, the Rhine, the Panama Canal, the Black Sea grain corridor and Russian refining capacity. It is becoming increasingly apparent that not a single one of those is reachable by anything in Washington’s toolkit whether it be caused by war or weather.The illusion of abundance is likely behind us. I said as much on CNBC this Monday, and I got long gold, silver and agriculture last week.
................... 10. Conclusion: Scarcity is repricing the numerator, while repression is debasing the denominator. Own what benefits from both: product markets, grains, and freight for the scarcity leg, and gold for the debasement leg. Gold is at $4,510 versus the earlier January high of $5,600 referenced above. The bond market will spend the next six months discovering what product markets already know. Expect more volatility and higher highs across more markets.
Bubble Fare:
............. Of course, just because something is a bubble doesn’t mean it will soon burst. Bubbles often become much bigger and last longer than anticipated because the expansion of the bubble sustains the investment and profit growth that led to the bubble in the first place. The beliefs of advocates are reinforced, while skeptics lose conviction and influence.
Nevertheless, there are several reasons why this bubble will likely burst before the end of 2027.
First, the favorable impact of the artificial intelligence investment boom on economic activity and earnings will likely diminish significantly in 2027. That’s because what’s relevant for growth is how much investment is increasing, not its level. The increase in investment in 2026 will almost certainly be the peak. There aren’t sufficient resources — construction workers, electrical generation capacity, or chip manufacturing capacity - to increase investment by the same magnitude in 2027. Nor are the dominant hyperscalers likely to have the free cash flow and balance sheet capacity to sustain a bigger increase in investment in 2027 compared with 2026.
Second, as the growth of investment spending slows, the growth in earnings of hyperscaler suppliers will falter, profit expectations will diminish and price-earnings ratios will shrink. The “picks and shovels” providers will suffer a double whammy - slower demand growth and profit margin compression. On the way up, higher demand leads to wider profit margins that sustain equity market valuations. On the way down, the outlook for earnings deteriorates quickly as the shortfall of demand relative to expectations is exacerbated by a collapse in profit margins.
Third, as the investment cycle matures, the focus will shift to the returns that the hyperscalers are expected to earn on their massive investments. I suspect it will be difficult for the AI hyperscalers to generate sufficient revenue ($2 trillion or more per year) to generate the returns needed to justify an AI capital base that is likely to reach $5 trillion. ...........
This chart says the stock market is ready to crash
Wall Street on alert despite claims the AI boom upends old rules
.......................... “It tells you that it probably is a bubble, but you don’t know when it’s going to end,” says Goltermann.
................... “The moment we’re in right now, it feels like it is more driven by narrative and momentum. The price goes up because the price is going up.”
................. “What you’re going to need to have a really big correction in risky assets is actually a shock or evidence of a downturn in the global economy,” he says.
............... “It’s not a timing tool,” adds Tipp. “You always have to look at the specifics of the situation. And the specifics of the situation are that investors for a handful of years running have underestimated the potential of major corporations to throw up sustained, very positive earnings growth. And if anything, we’re seeing that accelerate.”
............ “Beware of people saying ‘it’s different this time’,” he warns.
Charts:
1:
7:
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Recent Temperature and Energy Imbalance Trends Point to Higher Estimates of Future Warming
Climate models simulate a wide range of 21st century warming for a given forcing scenario. Constraining this uncertainty is a central challenge in climate science because of its implications for climate policy and adaptation. The Transient Climate Response (TCR) is a key idealized metric used to quantify future warming in response to an exponentially increasing CO2 concentration. Climate models span a range of 1.3–3 K for TCR. In attempts to constrain this range, emergent constraints on TCR based on historical temperature trends consistently pointed towards TCR values at the lower end of the range of models. However, recent evidence from trends in the short-wave and long-wave components of Earth's energy imbalance (EEI) at the top-of-atmosphere suggests that models with higher TCR lie closer to the observed EEI trends. ............... When considering the recent 2001–2025 period, our results show that both surface temperature and EEI trends support higher TCR values than previously estimated. This result implies that it is increasingly difficult to exclude high climate sensitivity models from the plausible range of future warming.
Sci Fare:
Pics of the Week:
Regulators and investors should pay attention to the strain in the direct loan market
A.I. Fare:
Quotes of the Week:
Buffett: “It’s tough to find values when everybody is preferring gambling.”
Buffett: “It’s tough to find values when everybody is preferring gambling.”
Professor Luis Garicano: “Adam Smith said a bunch of stuff that was mostly right. Marx said a bunch of stuff that was wrong. Keynes fixed some things up, messed some others. Then Lucas broke everything again. Now we’ve basically got it all worked out, except for money, growth, recessions, banks, bubbles, inflation, unemployment, exchange rates, and what human beings are about.”
Charts:
1:
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Renowned climate scientist James Hansen says the developing super El Niño has already "blown past" previous events with months to go before it peaks
***** Hansen et al: Super-Duper El Nino and the Bigger Problem
...................................... The present acceleration of global warming (Fig. 4) is well-established and its cause is known. Climate sensitivity is significantly higher than the best estimate of IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and the net human-made climate forcing, including aerosol effects, is now larger than their best estimate.
Recent Temperature and Energy Imbalance Trends Point to Higher Estimates of Future Warming
Climate models simulate a wide range of 21st century warming for a given forcing scenario. Constraining this uncertainty is a central challenge in climate science because of its implications for climate policy and adaptation. The Transient Climate Response (TCR) is a key idealized metric used to quantify future warming in response to an exponentially increasing CO2 concentration. Climate models span a range of 1.3–3 K for TCR. In attempts to constrain this range, emergent constraints on TCR based on historical temperature trends consistently pointed towards TCR values at the lower end of the range of models. However, recent evidence from trends in the short-wave and long-wave components of Earth's energy imbalance (EEI) at the top-of-atmosphere suggests that models with higher TCR lie closer to the observed EEI trends. ............... When considering the recent 2001–2025 period, our results show that both surface temperature and EEI trends support higher TCR values than previously estimated. This result implies that it is increasingly difficult to exclude high climate sensitivity models from the plausible range of future warming.
................................................................. These effects have had a negative effect on Eurozone growth and unemployment levels. Importantly, they have also left the EU vulnerable to exactly the type of crisis that appears to be emerging.
The central problem facing Europe is that it does not have the infrastructure capacity to cover all its winter needs. It therefore must import more than it needs in summer. This excess is stored in giant underground salt caverns, aquifers or depleted gas fields to be released in winter to supplement the import system when it is already running at maximum.
Over the last three years, this has not been a problem. Natural gas is cheaper in the summer than the winter. This gives private traders and consumers an economic incentive to buy gas in the summer, store it, and then lock in contracts to sell in the winter when it is more expensive. The EU has thus been able to fill its reserves to beyond the 90% of capacity that it mandated through private-sector, market mechanisms.
The Iran War has broken this system. ................
................................................... The underlying problem we’re dealing with, that connects everything, is the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI).
When we built industrial civilization, you could stick a spade in the ground and high quality oil would just start spewing out. The EROI of oil back then, was about a hundred to one, you invested one unit of energy and got a hundred in return.
.......................................... I think, based on where we stand today, I can say that the experiment failed. I don’t have some study I can point to that explains in simple terms that the EROI of solar + wind + storage is too low. I would urge you instead, to look at the actual state of the country.
I think it speaks for itself.
Sci Fare:
U.S. B.S.:
Thoughts on how Trump-era corruption is affecting Americans as a people.
.......................................... An odd thing about all this is the absence of furor. There is no broad public outcry. Why? Because corruption is a constant and “the other side is dirty too.” Because the scandal threshold has skyrocketed. President Trump walked into history dragging a long tail of litigation, accusation and lawsuits behind him. He never sold himself as a man of moral rectitude, and most supporters didn’t think that’s what they were buying. Jimmy Carter’s shaking down the system to see what coins fall out would have been news, Donald Trump’s doing the same is Tuesday.
And there’s the sheer scale: The extraordinary becomes ordinary through repetition; scandals add up and become a blur, not a call to action. But the country pays a cost for all this. Institutionally, everything happening today sets a precedent. Every abuse we accept widens the range of possible misbehavior for the next administration. ...........
Frank: All the Change in the World
Competitive magnificence is the main aesthetic principle of modern presidential libraries. From the rectilinear sprawl of the George W. Bush Presidential Center to the elevated glass box of Bill Clinton’s edifice, each new entrant is required to outdo its predecessors in price, grandness, and architectural spectacle. The second principle, almost as important, is that with each successive presidential center, the vanity function of these facilities increasingly overshadows their research function. Technically, the institutions I am describing are quasi-public; they exist in order to catalogue the records of the executive branch and make them available to researchers. But what they have in fact become are ever more ostentatious monuments to the man in question, would-be Lincoln Memorials built by the would-be Lincoln himself. Each one features a museum of the years in which he occupied the Oval Office, and each describes history in a manner that only the most committed partisan would accept as legitimate. .............
............. Fifteen years ago, conservatives used this sort of anodyne sentiment—then as now one of Obama’s favorite modes—to spin nightmares about our “radical” president and how he intended to “socialize” America. Others, like me, brushed it off because we came to see Obama as a moderate’s moderate, a would-be Blue Dog Democrat, a man who honored norms, precedent, and incrementalism to a self-sabotaging degree. This man was no progressive, we would realize: he was a fan of the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman; chose Larry Summers as his principal economic adviser; and longed to strike a “grand bargain” with the Republicans in Congress. (Cuts to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for tax increases, for those who don’t remember.) .......................
How the nation was persuaded to choose this crude bigot over the handpicked successors of the high-minded Obama is a mystery too painful for the principled to unravel. Obama and Trump seem like cosmic opposites: the tasteful and the vulgar; the respecter of norms and the smasher of precedent; the reluctant president and the would-be tyrant who will stop at nothing.
But there is a common thread if we look closer. Both men are celebrities who headed up popular movements that turned out, when challenged, to be as thin as a coating of ice on a windshield. They are both men of image, and in both cases the image is a sort of phony populism. Obama’s salutes to “ordinary people” were not much more sincere than Trump’s shout-outs to the “forgotten man.” ..................
War Fare:
Simplicius: Iran's Strategy Vindicated as US's Logistics Chain Hobbled and Stretched by Early Strikes
........................ Amidst the total lack of military options, the US continues to stall for time, plying its charade of “controlling the Strait”. Ex-Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed to have insider info as to what kinds of desperate options are actually now being put on the table in Trump’s manic war room: .............
Well, when you run out of usable munitions—for both attacking and defending yourself—one supposes that the consideration of an all out nuclear option is only logical—in a manner of sheer desperation. Given that America’s decline is clearly on its final terminal arc, it would almost be a kind of poetic valediction, in a twisted sort of way: the country which rose to ‘superpower’ prominence with the first ever use of nuclear weapons in 1945 comes full circle to reach its waning civilizational surrender with another final nuclear send-off.
More likely though, no such thing will happen, and the only thing resembling nuclear fallout will be the US economy, with the continuation of Trump’s blind intransigence on the Iranian issue. We’ve now seen that he is willing to stake everything on his Hormuz vanity project, including the wellbeing and livelihoods of all Americans.
Geopolitical Fare:
Iranians have long considered how China would act in a crisis involving the US and Israel. It got its answer in the recent Iran war, where it has had to lower its expectations and extract practical gains from China, observes Iranian analyst Mohammad Khatibi.
................... The 25-year Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, signed in 2021, reinforced the perception that bilateral ties had entered a new era. As competition between Washington and Beijing intensified, many in Tehran increasingly assumed that China’s rivalry with the US would translate into stronger backing for countries confronting American pressure, particularly Iran.
The war exposed the limits of that assumption. ..................
.................................... The entire system is cracking apart.
The smartest money isn’t the money that has been plunging into the AI bubble, it’s the people who have kept their powder dry, because as everything goes to hell, there will be significant buying opportunities. Warren Buffet, for example, built up a huge amount of cash, though his successor has spent some.
.................... Anyway, all of these things all happening at the same time is all sorts of bad news. I’d expect some sort of financial crisis within a year and it will be a doozy. Wherever it starts it will hit everything in the US and Europe and the Anglosphere and much of the rest of the world. Central banks will have to spent trillions in another bail out.
But this will be the last major US bailout, because after this there will be nothing. The US will not have the tech lead in almost anything, is not creating the world’s future techs other than AI (which China is winning, anyway) and will have lost much of its military intimidation factor.
Welcome to the end of the American Empire.
Lawrence: “Why can’t we see ourselves as we are?”
The ‘apocalyptic blindness’ of Americans.
The other night I watched a documentary called Coup 53, a brilliant treatment of the coup that deposed Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister of Iran in the year the film notes in its title. Taghi Amirani, the director, has produced a superb piece of work, narrated in part by the estimable Steve Kinzer. Tomorrow, 19 August, marks the 73rd anniversary of Operation Ajax, as M.I.–6 and the C.I.A. named their covert assault on Iran’s first democratically elected government. A link to the film is here.
How well I recall learning of the Iran coup during my teenage years, when my eyes were just opening upon how, by the mid–1960s, the United States (and in this case Britain) treated those in foreign lands whose misfortune was to possess resources the world’s newest imperium sought compulsively to control. And how well I recall discovering at the same time the remarkably pervasive ignorance of this conduct among all but a very few Americans.
........................ Among those who watch Taghi Amirani’s film, and I hope many do, I imagine few will be as surprised to learn of Operation Ajax as my mother was. America’s lawless barbarism and all its messes are easier to see now. The plain-as-day defeats of April 1975 have something to do with this. So do digital technologies and the emergence of independent media. The invasion of Venezuela and the blockade of Cuba, the killings-from-the-air of fishermen in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, the installation of a murderous jihadist in Syria, the genocides in Gaza and the West Bank, the illegal bombing of Iran: There is no missing any of this.
But there is one failure to see that remains, and its persistence is symptomatic, it seems to me, of an empire in its late, desperate phase. This is the steadfast refusal among most Americans to see their complicity in the imperium’s conduct. .............................
Life in the 2020s comes with so much dissonance and dysphoria because everyone knows this civilization is doomed, but it’s not being acknowledged by any of our mainstream institutions.
We can all see everything getting worse and worse before our eyes in real time, but our government officials don’t talk about it. Our mass media outlets don’t report on it. Our education systems don’t recognize it. There’s a giant elephant in the room with us at all times, and normal people are acutely aware of it, but the talking heads keep speaking as though everything’s going to keep ticking along normally into the foreseeable future.
We can all see the summers heating up.
We can all see that there are fewer insects and less wildlife around than when we were young.
We can all see that the western empire is on borrowed time.
We can all see that younger generations are having much more difficulty affording housing and life expenses than their parents and grandparents.
We can all see that technology has stagnated as capitalism’s innovation-for-profit model hits the limit of how far it can carry us as a species.
We can all see the apps, search engines, social media platforms and tech services getting shittier and shittier year by year.
We can all see AI making everything worse and turning everyone into cognitive infants who can’t do anything for themselves while consistently failing to deliver what its proponents say it will deliver.
We can all see the people around us getting dumber, crazier and more miserable as we are pushed into dystopian conditions where everyone gets more and more alienated and must pay a monthly fee for the experience of connection.
We can all see that state authoritarianism is escalating in proportion to public discontent with the status quo.
We all know we’re in a completely unsustainable situation. We all know we are riding a bus with disintegrating wheels. ...............
The wheels on the bus are coming off, boys and girls. The ride is near its end.
I’m not saying we’re all going to die, I’m just saying this civilization as it presently exists cannot possibly be sustained. Immensely drastic changes are coming up around the bend whether we like it or not, either by a deliberate transformation or by some cataclysmic event occurring against our will. ............
The people in charge are just going to keep driving this thing into the ground until there’s nothing left to save. If there’s going to be a world-saving revolution, it’s going to come from we ordinary people who are willing to acknowledge reality, not from the oligarchs and empire managers presently steering things who have been blinded by the pursuit of profit and power.
We either find some way to get their hands off the steering wheel and take control, or we find ourselves confronting the future horrors they’ve been discouraging us from thinking about while they drive us to our doom.
Johnstone 2: "What Radicalized You?"
“What radicalized you?”
I dunno man maybe it was all the wars based on lies or the corporate ecocide or the live-streamed genocide or the people sleeping on sidewalks while billionaires become trillionaires or the plundering of the global south or the mass surveillance or the police drones or the Israeli torture prisons or the IDF rape dogs or the starvation sanctions or the proxy wars or the acts of nuclear brinkmanship or the encircling of our planet with hundreds of US military bases or the CIA black sites or the Epstein files or the government secrecy or the increasing persecution of journalists and whistleblowers or the fact that the US just openly assassinates and kidnaps the leaders of sovereign nations or the internet censorship or the way all western media and all Silicon Valley tech platforms operate as propaganda services for the US empire or the aggressive push to outlaw pro-Palestine demonstrations or the legalized corruption of western governments or the way AI is being shoved down our throats while data centers choke our ecosystem or the thinly disguised rush to develop militarized robots for domestic use or the glaring plot holes in the official 9/11 story or the glaring plot holes in the official October 7 story or the complete impotence of electoral politics in an oligarchy where the rich get everything they want or the vanishing ice caps or the vanishing rainforests or the vanishing wildlife or the plummeting insect population or the ocean desertification or the giant continent of plastic in the North Atlantic or the microplastics in our brains and in our blood or the fact that we live under a globe-spanning empire that cannot exist without mass-scale violence and exploitation or the fact that younger generations are economically far worse off than their parents and grandparents or the fact that ordinary people are having to work harder and harder as everything gets more and more expensive while the capitalist class reaps record profits?
At this point “What radicalized you?” is a much less interesting question to ask people than “Why aren’t you radicalized yet? Seriously, how is that possible? How have you successfully managed to avoid conversion to a radical political worldview despite everything you are seeing right in front of your eyes?”
Because to the rest of us, that shit looks like a goddamn magic trick. It looks like a superhuman feat of willpower to continue believing everything’s basically okay and our leaders will sort this all out for us if we just vote for the correct plutocratic meat puppet in the next election. You’re just chilling out while everything burns, like that Buddhist monk sitting calmly in meditation after setting himself on fire. How are you even doing that?
Other Fare:
Aurelien: They Don't Care.
And they lie to themselves.
There have been political and ideological systems in history that sought to dictate popular understandings of truth and knowledge; there have been systems that have fought violently over the meaning and control of both of them, and more recently there have been systems of thought that deny that either can really be said to exist objectively. But I think that ours is the first society in history where the ruling classes genuinely don’t care about truth and knowledge, and so don’t give either much importance. They are not actively hostile to either truth or knowledge: they just haven’t found either to be particularly useful or necessary in their own lives and careers. They are happy—indeed eager—to make use of them for political advantage, and to pretend to take them seriously for tactical purposes, but no more. This is an extraordinary state of affairs, and here I discuss how it arose, how it manifests itself today and what the potential consequences may be. ......................
But the origins of this problem lie, I think, not with Foucault or Derrida (though I’ll touch on them briefly) but with something very different: theories developed by right-wing economists in the 1960s and 1970s. When I was studying Economics, the subject was a bit like engineering: mainly descriptive and analytic, telling you how to do things, and what happened when you pushed different buttons. For years, economists on the fringes had been trying to persuade governments that inflation could be controlled by changes in interest rates. Putting rates up, they claimed, would (theoretically) reduce the demand for money, so that inflation would go down, at least for some values of “inflation,” and some types of interest rates. Inflation was a huge problem in the 1970s as a result of the 1973 oil price shock, and, whilst it was falling substantially by the end of the decade, the Tory government that came to power in 1979 was obsessed with inflation as a threat, and brought these ideas blinking out of the shadows and applied them. Now in practice, the result was a disaster: high interest rates pushed the Pound up and made exports un-competitive, companies went out of business, unemployment doubled, and, ironically, inflation shot up again as high interest rates increased costs. Whoops. But what’s important here is that this is the first known sighting of the idea that knowledge and truth were something to be imposed by fiat, not sought. There was no supporting evidence whatever for the hypothesis linking inflation and interest rates, but those involved didn’t care. The theory was by definition right because it was intellectually persuasive to them, and indeed it continues to have an influence even today.
As economies became more and more virtual, as production of practically everything was outsourced to China, and everything became financialised, statistics became steadily more ethereal. Once, the economic news would be about the balance of payments, the strength of sterling or the rate of unemployment and changes in industrial production. These were all real things that you could in principle measure, and had real effects on peoples’ lives. But now the powers that be have decided that they don’t care about such things and the practical effects on peoples’ lives. Indeed, they don’t care about the real world at all, the world in which we live. This became clear to many people for the first time in the 2008 economic crash, where an astonished public discovered that most of the wealth that was supposed to exist actually didn’t, and that for years clever bankers had been selling sliced-up underperforming mortgages to each other, which were actually worth nothing. Yet if anything, the problem has become worse, with the financialisation of financialisation itself, where the ruling class simply doesn’t care about the real world, but works itself into lathers about futures prices of barrels of oil, and how low they can get them so they can sell them at a profit later. No matter how often they are told that you can’t buy and sell things that don’t exist, they don’t understand and anyway they don’t care.
Of course, this is part of a wider tendency to live in an Ideal world, where truth and knowledge are optional, and where reality is what we say it is. .........................................
Our political class and the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) that serves it, have been bought up in a largely virtual world, and now inhabit one that is almost entirely so. It’s notorious that few of our leaders have ever trained as scientists and engineers: increasingly, they study the kinds of amorphous non-subjects that “Dr” Arday would have taught if there was any evidence that he had ever taught a class. They study subjects which begin from conclusions rather than seeking them, and which are about finding, or even just assuming, evidence for norms that are already accepted. It all makes medieval debates between Realists and Nominalists seem gritty and banally practical by comparison. Consequently, political questions today are about management, presentation and image: they are almost never about reality. Traditional “knowledge” is often unwelcome, and frequently dangerous. Rather, knowledge today is derived from norms, and norms are enforced by power, just like the deconstructionists said, although probably not in the way they expected. Truths are normative truths, not pragmatic ones. ..................................
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