Note for new readers – auto-estimated reading times are greatly exaggerated (lots of pix/links)
Hey folks!
I have a few different elements to bring together today – including an update on what is really going on, what it really means, and why way more of our ideas are obsolete than we think. Most importantly, I want to touch on why the end of our supremacy is actually a good thing.
So – what is going on, big-picture? The great centuries old western hegemonic empire of banking war and oil helmed by the UK for a long while, then more recently fronted by the USA, just dared a middle power (Iran) to a game of chicken and lost not only the game, but their trousers, also. The whole evil and predatory system is out and exposed, and it is revolting decrepit and pathetic.
Just by looking at planning and logistics, barring random weirdness (much more rarely causal or decisive than we think) there was never any other outcome possible. Short version? Drones are cheap and Iran has hundreds of thousands and interceptors are very expensive (multi-millions each), and the USA and Israel are now down to hundreds. But more fundamentally, the whole ‘informing’ idea that Iran would topple like a house of cards when pushed was always purest racist shite (like almost everything said here in the west about Iran – by both left and right – for a half a century).
I was heartened to see Caitlin Johnstone put her finger on it precisely the other day – and I have tried to express this myself a few times. The question you have to ask about Iran (and Russia and China also) isn’t – why are they that way? But – what would they be like if we in the west hadn’t spent billions to sabotage, repeatedly supported outright terrorism and actively fomented violent internal ethnic uprisings against their states, for the last half a century? (and more)
Iran is what it is now, precisely so that it could successfully face-down this psychopath in this challenge, which they correctly understood was coming, when they were named on the list of countries to destroy just after 9/11 – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finally Iran.
The absolutely clear reality is that Iran has not been working on a nuclear weapon since 2002 – even the war-promoting CIA said so – but Iran does now have every possible justification, and is entirely vindicated in wanting to have ‘breakout capability’ by this unprovoked war on them.
For the armchair strategists who can’t believe they could have the capability, but not close that final distance to a deployable weapon, even after this latest threat, we have to step back and remember strategy isn’t tactics, they think long view and always have. As soon as Iran announces a deployed weapon, the Saudis and Turkey will acquire nukes right quick also.
As my math friends intuitively appreciate, a relationship between two parties, even complex states, is comparatively simple (even when quite a few of those involved are insane). A+B.
Add a third to any relationship, and suddenly you have not one but four relationships to think about (A+B+C, A+B, A+C, B+C) and even if we’re just talking high-school friend groups, the strategic complexity gets mind-bogglingly more difficult, very fast, as you add more parties.
The safest sanest outcome for Iran is to go from one nuclear power in the region (Israel) to zero, not from one to at least four! (and who knows who else might pile-on, in Armageddon FOMO).
Again, for the armchair crowd who feel a punch needs a punch back, Israel is still not even legally allowing honesty about the toll of Iranian missiles on key sites and bases. Deterrence has already been established by Iran’s outstanding rocketry skills. Much better than USA, in several categories of re-entry vehicle, because they train superb home-grown scientists in huge numbers and then work them toward a goal, where the west has spent decades importing clever students in huge numbers from elsewhere and then working them exclusively for shareholder returns!
More broadly, the reason the Iranians won (and the Russians are winning and the Chinese will surely win, if seriously challenged) is that they have all been thinking about long-term planning in the sound and reality-grounded way that we in the west used to, but haven’t, for about a half a century. “Just in time” economics (the ultimate consequence of Reaganomics) is a system which pares every last thing back to bare minimums to maximize shareholder returns, but is not even slightly useful when stress-tested for endurance under difficult circumstances (as war always is).
My technician-head instantly thinks “Shitty Gear” because quality gear is thoughtfully overbuilt, and so, highly fault-tolerant.
We in the west perfected the exact suite of techniques that others around the world are now using to surpass us by leaps and bounds (not just in technological progress, but in rapid advances of living standards for normal people), not by cheating or being in any way sneaky, but because we abandoned our own most rational techniques in favour of higher profits for fewer people and a level of widespread self-delusion that seems to the ultimate product of consumerism (absolutely comforting, even when wildly self-harming – like my unsupervised-child diet – a very rational ‘dollars per calories’ calculation – of nothing but liquorice allsorts and arrowroot biscuits!)
No really folks – I know we are all supposed to chant “Chechens and Uighurs and Girls, oh my!” like nervous Dorothy heading into the forest, feel evil, simple as, and move on, no re-thinking. (Which is to say, Liberalism demands we faithfully maintain wildly racist assumptions, often, and about many).
But we’re back to the thing I was talking about last time – coming to a moral(istic) conclusion and then being too lazy to look again, when our justification for that judgement has become obsolete. Chechnya is now prosperous and developing like never before, and Chechens are some of the fiercest and most patriotic soldiers fighting FOR Russia in Ukraine! Xinjiang is also experiencing an extraordinary surge of growth and development, cutting-edge infrastructure, more and better jobs and far better transport connections than ever before. But more to the point, the Uighurs are traditionally Sufis, and the ones the CIA has armed and trained for decades are Salafists – which is to say, Gulf-Monarchy funded extremists of a type which simply does not reflect Uighur culture (but does suit CIA goals for causing the Chinese much internal trouble and paranoia).
As for women in Iran, they are better educated and hold more STEM degrees than American women, and after Minab – just shut the fuck up about that line anyhow, ‘kay?
If you honestly support the mass incineration of schoolgirls for the sake of ‘feminism,’ you are beyond insane.
The problem here, is that we in the west have got so used to thinking of ourselves as the central judge of the universe, we actually believe our feelings about things are the reality of the world. So people felt very strongly that Afghan women should be in school (and I agree) but didn’t give the slightest shit that during decades of western occupation, famine did permanent damage to half the population!
No really, we have to look hard at that one while it is still fresh. Leftists, peace people, feminists, progressives, all ended up suckered into supporting a disgusting decades long foreign occupation and insanely violent and destructive war because we felt “Girls in school” instead of THINKING.
When I talk about the manipulation of the public, with techniques developed by Public Relations people but sold just as eagerly to governments, as to business, I mean stuff like this, where we end up feeling so strongly we lend our support to things completely contradictory to our own ethics.
And now, a brief word about Armageddon
I am a lifelong atheist, not an agnostic, but also not a dogmatic materialist. I’m humble enough to know there is a lot of stuff we don’t understand, and we are fools to think we do. Just to be clear (because so many recent atheist figures have been outright assholes) I am also not hostile to religion or to those of (any) genuine faith. I just experienced too much false belief early in my life, to return there again. (almost an immune response, but built as survival adaptation, not snark).
I am also super-curious about people, their experiences viewpoints and insights, not just because I love to learn and share (nothing beats trading best gems with a perfect stranger, to make your day) but also because of something I realized when I was just a kid, trying to teach another kid some math that made sense to me already. The idea that made it click for me didn’t work for him at all, he just couldn’t see it, but when I tried a couple of ideas I hadn’t found useful, he found one perfect!
We live in a horribly dumbed-down oversimplified over-emotional age (like culture itself has been shoe-horned into network TV sitcom conventions, sad in every way).
I have lost count of the number of false theories with millions of dedicated followers which insist that we not only can but must understand everything, through one single filter (which best justifies their group wanting a bigger share of whatever is going, every single freakin’ time, of course). Understanding just doesn’t work that way, it is modest, multi-level and multi-faceted, not least because it is shared between multiple minds, who construct their useful ideas differently.
All of which is a long winded way to say I have never once had a boring conversation with anyone of genuine faith. They like me almost as much as scientists do, not just because I am interested in the work they do, and the effort required, but because I’m interested in the deeper questions they are looking at, through whatever means are available to them at the time.
Just to complete the thought (digression) the important inverse of that math lesson (gather many ways of seeing, because the clue that works for you, might not be the one which will work for someone else) is a curious, rarely discussed, but very important thing I saw demonstrated over and over again from the model stand, when I sat as a costume model for art students.
The reason some students make rapid progress and some are mired, frustrated and fall behind, is that some are active enough to have already asked the key questions. How do I indicate: form, depth, light, mood, underlying structure, implied motion, etc. The students who are natural art nuts without needing any prodding, have already faced these challenges in their own exploration, so when the teacher gives them a lesson about them, they know just what to use it for (and which piece they already wrecked, ‘cause they didn’t know it!) For other students, they might as well be memorizing the Kings and Queens of England. It’s just facts on facts on facts, in a big grey pile.
We need several keys for any lock we want to open, but also, a lock that wants to open!Just as surely, we must be a lock that wants to be opened, for others to reach us!
My favourite conversation about Armageddon was a lot like this. A gift that changed my ideas and my attitude about Christians, all very unexpectedly. It began with a rare chance for me in my technician days, usually stuck in the busy basement repair lab (so under-ventilated, we literally had mushrooms growing out of the wall), to spend a couple of days doing tech work upstairs in the windowed and sunlit credit office. Even better, I was able to spend several hours with a couple of the ladies in accounting who I had always noticed for their intelligence and their unusual bearing. They were much talked about, stuck together, were unbelievably productive as a team and absolutely did not indulge in gossip or any unpaid company activities after hours.
They were also both very serious Christians, without being in any way judgemental toward others. Lived by the code themselves, as those of deep faith demonstrate.
I know the social convention is to be careful and restrained when talking to people who don’t share your beliefs, to avoid any chance of conflict or misunderstanding, but I kinda was raised by wolves, and take more chances (helps, to also be an eloquent apologizer). I like to share the thing I am most interested in at any moment, a story problem, a poetic question, a philosophical or political insight, an art project or even a technical challenge. Bullshit is too much work for me. Sincerity is easy (and why would I want to share anything but my best and freshest enthusiasm, anyhow?)
At that moment (25 years ago) I was thinking a lot about various kinds of end of the world, ecological, economic, cultural and intellectual, and trying hard to see my way past the event horizon of the collapse of this weird and suicidally leveraged game we’ve all been living inside for so long that we don’t even realize it’s a game anymore. In particular, I was feeling a strong temptation toward a weird angle of hope, which ran contrary to all the righteous panic and fulmination we are all so easily tempted toward, when talking war (or environment).
So I asked them what they thought about Armageddon – and they came back with an entirely unexpected perspective. They weren’t interested in accusing others of sin, or listing who deserved to be struck-down (grotesque leftist caricatures of Christian belief, in any case, I now realize) they were both outright looking forward to Armageddon – but not as the end of the world – just as the end of our illusory world constructed entirely of vanity and falsehoods – in favour of a global transformation into a higher state of being and relations between people and nations.
We talked for a couple of hours, and I think they were as pleased to find my ideas consonant as I was theirs. The overlap with the concepts of global revolution, jubilee (forgive ALL debts) economic transformation, and establishing sound governance for people’s thriving, no longer corrupted by the commercial sphere, was all way beyond sympathetic to my old leftie ear. They were surprised to find that I was so critical of popular culture movements and sanctimonies (even as the Liberal left was gaining the cultural and institutional high-ground, everywhere, and already abusing power in a way to discredit itself), and moved by my insistence on fairness and principle, not faction or tribalism. On peace, with no compromise, we were fully united!
It might also be worth mentioning that I was reading Ray Kurzweil’s strange and much too influential books about the AI singularity at the time, and even then, long before AI was technically feasible, the man I knew who best understood the scale of the threat, was gleefully in favour anyhow (made me laugh and think of Oppenheimer “It was just so technically sweet!”)
I saw a fantastic short clip from Orson Welles recently (link below) where he talks about ‘cold reading’ which is an old trick used by music-hall psychics for at least a century. You make a very general observation about a person, they think you are insightful, because it applies to them (without realizing it also applies to almost everyone) and you gradually gather clues from their feedback to your general insights, until they become very specific – not because you really are ‘psychic’ but from your use of clues offered up by the person being singled-out and amazed.
There are two extra subtleties which apply here, and give us even more useful lessons. One is that with practise, one really can get very good at reading quite a bit about another person from clues which would seem insufficient to others (think Sherlock Holmes). If you do it a lot, you even stop realizing you are doing it, because the data comes in without being consciously sought. This is where you run a real hazard of being tripped up by the oldest problem with this ‘psychic’ game – when you start to believe you really are psychic, and not just clue-processing!
Now of course I have to remind all of my friends who have made friends with AI (which is the new TV in a way, because lots of sophisticates pretend they don’t, but play anyhow) that every part of AI which seems to anticipate you delightfully, is absolutely always cold-reading. You gave it clues, it used them, period.
It is not your friend. Your friends are human. It is a piece of software run by a company that also does things like spying, war communications and bomb targeting. (even the nicest, are creeps)
I am not saying it isn’t fun and interesting – I am saying do not ever let yourself invest faith in that con-man which is using what you give it, to beguile you. Just don’t. Meet people, hug them and fight with them and have fun and make music and art and great moments and struggle.
DO NOT TURN YOUR LIFE INTO A GAME WHERE YOU ARE THE NPC!
Before I leave the subject of cold reading, I should note my personal experience with it. The optimistic commune in which I grew up, which over time turned into a demented cult, might always have been doomed (Spider Robinson, a veteran of more than one commune, came to the conclusion that they have a natural life-span of about five years, and if you try to force them to stay alive longer than that, they become something that none of the originators intended). But the fact that the brilliant charismatic who led the commune began only moderately insane, and became progressively far more so as she gained power, had a lot to do with it also.
When I say brilliant charismatic I should really say she was a gifted cold reader, with a psychotic level of boldness, enabling her to make invasive use of every insight she gleaned. How convincing was she? Some local Catholic clerics considered our (non-religious) commune a potential Vatican III!
I won’t digress into that story today (bits of it scattered over the last decade of writing already, and I hate repeating myself) but two very rare lessons are worth noting. The first is completely distressing, and yet should not shock us. In a matriarchy (we only ever had one immaculate figure, a woman) emotional and even sexual violence are still used as tools of control – contrary to modern false-thinking, women’s greater emotional precision does not automatically translate into kindness. (See the grinning rictus on Hillary’s death-cultist face, if you need current evidence).
Far stranger and more hopefully, the few dozen kids who went through the most demented phase of that cult and came out the far side were, without exception (so far as I can tell) fantastic natural cold-readers, but also aware enough of the moral hazard to use it for good. Had we enough scale for a decent emboldening sports program (and less profound spiritual injury) I’m pretty sure we weirdly empowered Machiavellian eggheads would have produced a great detective and at least one master outlaw! (and I still honestly wonder if we were a DARPA project – since our insane headmaster was working with (then ARPA) on other (data-side) projects, that whole time).
Now I want to look at a bit of very persistent and yet obviously contradictory history, before I return to our present crazy and frightening moment, because it is a great way to see how big lies continue to have effects on us, even when they are truly dumb, right on their surface!
I have mentioned that studying the Second World War is a great way to become skeptical and politicized – but only if you dig from several directions at once, into the differing narratives of different nations and factions. Any one telling is airtight. Taken together? They leak like a seive!
General Bernard Montgomery, popularized as “Monty” is a nice neat example. He is recorded in British tellings of history as the brilliant general who was finally able to stand against the small German expeditionary force (commanded by the actually brilliant Rommel) which was causing all kinds of disaster for Britain in North Africa and threatened their oil holdings in the middle east.
The thing is, what Montgomery did is exactly what the last three generals before him wanted to do, only Churchill told them they couldn’t have the equipment they said they needed. When they failed (and were blamed for it) Churchill finally sent enough gear, and Montgomery got the credit for the bonehead-obvious plan which Connel, Wavell and Auchinlek all would have liked to do.
We remember Montgomery as a hero, so we don’t remember Churchill as an asshole.
But even more fundamentally, let us have a second look at the most successful public-relations campaign in the last century – hands down – the “Battle of Britain.” To be super clear, I come at this one from four directions, a pacifist, a history nut, an airplane geek and a technician.
I mentioned a few months ago that America pretended to have a sincere moment of reckoning after the war in Vietnam – but that ‘questioning’ and ‘soul searching’ was actually a trick of mass misdirection, to hide the fact that the war turned America from a lender into a borrower, destroying fundamental American prosperity in the process (exchanging real material productivity for speculative magic beans – which only works as long as more suckers also love magic beans).
Just like the psychic who believes their own line, America effectively forgot it was bankrupt, and kept right on borrowing ever deeper, against paper (beans) gains, inflated by that same delusion.
Britain did something even stranger, and even more poisonous to their long-term health as a nation. After centuries of being the world dominant slave trading, mass-murdering psycho-bully empire, they rebranded themselves into a plucky little underdog hero standing against the big bad wolf.
There are two big problems with that story. No, you do not get to walk away from the crime scene and pretend you were just a bystander, your victims still need justice, no matter your story! But also – the idea that it was heroism, or even “THE SPITFIRE” (most holy Icon) which won that important but not in fact decisive battle, is a load of absolute nonsense. To be clear, there was a lot of incredible courage shown in the skies, but what really counted was Imperial skills (making most effective use of the greatest number of subordinate others).
The Battle of Britain (for those who don’t study the war) was when the air forces of Germany attempted to establish air superiority over England, so they could invade it later, even though they never at any time had suitable boats to support such an invasion, nor even plans to build them. (and a few bombing raids quickly took out all the unsuitable vessels, also). Yes, there were operational plans for “Sea-Lion” an invasion of England (played it through a few times on tabletop scenarios) but armies don’t cross water by imagination (logistics is everything).
I have a snippet of sweet witness which applies, and appealed to my technician head immensely. My informal apprenticeship in audiophile repairs was with the son of an aviation technician who fled Poland as the German army over-ran it. Many pilots and specialists ended up in Britain, and they were quickly put to use with their own (extremely storied and successful) squadron of Hurricanes. The Hurricane is the poor cousin of the Spitfire, a bit older, slower and less capable, it was nevertheless available in much greater numbers, and it was also made completely differently, with many parts fabric-covered tube-steel or made of wood (so, easy to repair, even for furniture manufacturers, saving specialist aviation shops for more exacting machine tasks).
The funny thing is, he said his father not only considered the Hurricane a better plane in terms of repairing the damned thing, he also preferred it to fly! This was not intentional, but rather the result of the fact that the British officers commanding the Polish squadrons could not speak Polish, and so he found himself ordered by one who mistook him for a pilot, to fly a Hurricane, to get it up in the air to avoid an incoming German bombing raid on their airfield! He was very grateful to get it back on the ground again in one piece, and never again hung around the dispersal area.
But it is far more than just the apocryphal. The British rapidly organized widely dispersed repair depots, transport networks and salvage teams to make sure they harvested every usable part from every wreck, they enlisted furniture and auto manufacturers, airlines and airports into a massive centrally coordinated repair establishment, guaranteeing that throughout the battle, many more planes kept entering (or re-entering) combat than could possibly be manufactured against losses.
The Germans by contrast acted a lot more like the Americans are acting lately (though I mean no moral taint, just talking operational arts here). They did recover downed airframes (though many fewer, since so many were lost in the English channel, before being able to ditch safely), but they shipped them all the way back to Germany by rail, so the licensed manufacturer could work on them (and make the money for doing it). Meaning not only that way fewer machines were repaired, but also that it took way longer and cost far more than it had to.
But most importantly, the Germans, wildly overconfident from a long string of successes against much weaker or more poorly organized (France) foes, made a whole series of incredible tactical mistakes, limiting their fighters to less than thirty minutes of fighting fuel, and leaving their precision bombers exposed to devastating losses (Stukas – fresh from being the screaming scourge of the continent, were withdrawn entirely, after a huge number of the best pilots in the Luftwaffe were lost).
They almost destroyed British Radar, but backed off the final blow. They almost destroyed the RAF, then got distracted with anger powered vengeance attacks on civilian targets. Both of these were absolute tactical necessities, and both were within reach. Their planners simply failed.
But what happened to Britain, because they took that ‘plucky underdog’ myth so seriously? They failed so completely in their duty to have a post imperial moral reckoning (look in the mirror) that they are still trying to reassemble their f#cking empire! Still can’t handle not being the boss of everyone, even though they can’t even run their own economy anymore (or culture).
If we were aware of history, the way people in other parts of the world are, we would celebrate by having a great international ceremony, where once a year, a foreign dignitary from a former British possession would travel to London to knock the Prime Minister’s teeth out with a cricket bat, live on national television. “This is for a hundred million dead in China” sort of a thing.
Great party, much drinking, perhaps fireworks (Guy Fawkes can always use more screen time) the kind of truth and reconciliation that the working class could really enjoy also. (at last!)
But of course we go “SPITFIRE” sigh, and think “those plucky chaps and the dastardly hun.” (go back to sleep, as the music box plays that same inane tune, over and over and over).
The strange thing about trying to understand our time as a historical period (never an easy thing) – what will others think were the really important processes and changes, when looking back many years from now – is that we’ve never been so loudly and often lied to, or so very good at lying – but also (and this part never gets discussed) we’ve never wanted to believe lies more.
Now I understand that last part sounds like a grumpy and arbitrary thing that an old coot might say (in lieu of shaking a stick and telling kids to get off his lawn) but the weirdest evidence for this comes from modern studies into the placebo effect – which researchers have been surprised to find is becoming measurably more powerful over time, even as we moderns happily congratulate ourselves and each other for being less superstitious, better informed, more skeptical principled and generally rational than any humans before us (but only within the groups that always agree with us).
In analogical terms, we have just been to the doctor, who told us that liquorice allsorts and arrowroot biscuits are giving us all kinds of health problems, then heard from our accountant who is very worried about the magic bean market, and especially, our magic bean leverage.
In harder terms, the bill for using pretend money, ever since the costs of the Vietnam war destroyed the dollar and created the Petrodollar in its place, are finally coming due – and by the way, the petrodollar is now over too (could have held on a few more years, but this war hastened its demise to an absolutely incredible degree, considering the level of voluntary self-harm).
Meanwhile, while we’ve all been distracted with culture war games (designed precisely to distract us, while our pockets were being robbed) work and cost of living have been utterly destroyed.
Jobs, pensions, even the idea of paid labour itself is in question – and uncountable specialist trades (and the generational uncodifiable wisdom contained within each and every one of them) are being destroyed wholesale by crude new technological means centralizing not just profit, but also control over the whole of our information society, in frighteningly few monopoly platforms.
As I mentioned a few pieces ago, if you take away AI buildouts and gambling revenues, America hasn’t had any real economic growth at all in several years. And both of these are things which are opposed by many, apply direct costs against social thriving, with negative or questionable benefit for the average person. But the way the new IPO series is being launched (right at the top of the bubble) guarantees that pensioners and union funds will be left holding the bag, when the tech lords have all cashed-out to buy their own islands (local governments, US senators, etc).
And still, most fundamentally – zooming out to look at this as a historical moment – we really are watching the end of the empire we grew up inside. How do empires fall, when they have all the power and control? Simple – hubris. They mistake the source of their power, and abuse their control.
America did not become great because of the magic bean market, and it did not rise against British monopolism by accident, but by sidestepping their global control of capital and markets with a revolutionary unleashing of workers and innovation, creating unheard of markets, which in turn stimulated new forms of work and industrial creativity – and also helped inspire worker movements in many other parts of the world (most, still monarchies, during America’s rise).
As I wrote a few months ago (link below) – what most modern people hate about America as an empire was really only solidified after WWII, when Britain could no longer afford to ‘guarantee’ (skim and/or strangle) international trade and markets, and the USA took up that mantle. Yes, there were many violent interventions and outright thefts before this, but the economy was still set up to contest the British empire. When the USA became the empire, it lost that economically creative upstart spark, and traded it in for “free traderism” (total domination by the already most dominant – a lot like funnelling wealth to the already wealthy) which got US corporations a skim off almost every economic game in the world (the whole point of making your currency the reserve currency of the world, and of establishing military, especially naval, dominance) but devastated average citizens.
As I said below – what we hate most about modern America is its corporate Britishness!
So – understanding that this will all be hard to take, for those who still believe Television is real (sorry, Howdy-Doody is not a boy, he’s a puppet – and your parents were right – Maynard G Krebs is an ass!) I’m going to do reality for a bit – then go back to the connecting lies again, to “show my work.”
The reason I keep returning to the US going bankrupt because of the Vietnam war, and being forced to drop the gold standard (reality backed currency) and go to the petrodollar (magic bean economics) is, that period was the last time things changed as much as they are changing now.
The other really important reason to go back fifty years or so for reference to today, is that we are currently living through a gigantic complex interlinked disaster, caused by the failure of some grand strategies which were so patient and so large-scale, they remain hard for many to believe are real, even when they are faced with the evidence for them, every day of their lives.
One of the first great double-crosses of the industrial age was the trick British manufacturers played with textiles, first destroying textile production in their possession India, forcing that entire great nation to be captive consumers to British production, then, when British workers started getting uppity and organizing to get a share, the owners moved all the manufacturing equipment to India for cheap labour and turned the British into a captive market too (confiscating the worker’s share, once again, just when they were sure they were making gains toward fairness).
In the modern context, China was supposed to be India, a captive market for our high-value goods and a place to send our machines for cheap labour to destroy our unions. They were also supposed to stay that way and be happy taking orders from foreign investors and manufacturers – oh dear!
But let me skip back twenty years further to the end of the second world war for just a second to make a point that far too few people think about nowadays. I have many times mentioned the US National Security Act of 1947 (which created CIA, amongst other malign structures) as being the most fundamental governmental instrument opposing genuine democracy (since the FBI, which was invented for union-busting, and enjoyed the booze racket gig for ‘moral’ publicity).
But I ought also to have mentioned the Ford Strike of 1947 in Windsor Ontario, right across the Detroit river from the heart of American steel. What made this strike unusual was not just that it was extremely well organized and capably led, but also that it was made up of highly disciplined (and violence capable) veterans, who were quite certain they had earned peace and prosperity for their sacrifice, and were determined to stay the course for the win.
The concessions made by Ford to those strikers set the pattern for American negotiations nation wide, and also served as a very sobering caution to the big makers, not to push workers too far.
So – when we talk about post-war prosperity (the boom which made the boomers think growth and prosperity was normal) we don’t just have to factor-in the destruction of Europe (they needed tools to build tools to build tools) but also a level of worker resolve not ever seen here since. Just in case you think the corporate titans don’t actually have anything to be scared of (or at least, didn’t)
Back to our ‘recent’ fifty-year strategy cycle. Nixon going to China was to help widen a breach with the Soviet Union (which the Soviets had caused themselves, when Khrushchev began to repudiate Stalinism, long before the Maoists were ready to go there) and to open the door to the next great cheap-labour big-factory play against (then, still powerful) American union workers.
I have seen several, smarter than I, argue that it was actually Carter who caved to the banks and shifted to the “magic bean economy” as the new forever paradigm (instead of trying to recover solvency and independence from the banks – that is, corporate influence on government).
But Reagan was the guy who made sure Magic Bean Producers were the most influential and empowered economic actors in the economy, hence the extraordinary inflation of magic-bean wealth, which we all saw happening simultaneous-to the undermining erosion and outright loss of countless time-tested institutions and, over time, long fought-for rights, also.
Everyplace I Ever Started They Were Closing Up For Good
I really did not like Lindsay, nor was he in any way impressed with me – both for fair reason. He was an older man, the very model of restraint discipline and propriety – straight as straight could be. I was a seventeen year old dance club goth who had to glue my chin-length bangs back with hairspray every morning, just to appear office acceptable, and …
I always think of the magician’s artful patter, “Look at this hand, or look at my pretty assistant.” (Look anywhere but at the hand which I’ve got in your back pocket, pilfering your wallet!)
There was still some interesting stuff to come in technology especially, thanks to creativity and capital meeting the relatively low cost environment of the times, but by the time Clinton went all in with Wall St magic beans, utterly betraying American workers in the process, the economy which we have all considered real and solid this whole time, was already more bubble than substantial, and despite the dot-com pricks (couldn’t resist) the bubble has inflated ever since.
So – where are we? – Western Capitalism is not just broken (no jobs or houses for young people) but also outright broke. In debt up to the eyeballs (some exceptions, but damned few) lowering quality of services and programs “for austerity” for decades in a row, and still sliding.
Worse yet (I know this will sound subjective, but bear with me) we in the west (and some parts of the advanced industrial East also – like South Korea and Japan) are now hopeless. I mean that technically, without hope. This shows up in the most negative possible versions of Armageddon thinking, millions now consider human beings a form of pollution! (can anything be more outrageously supremacist – or sadder – or make the tech-overlords rub their hands with glee and cackle louder, than young people hating themselves and each other pretty much completely?)
Self-deleting peasants – the ultimate goal of the corporatists and bankers for centuries – finally in sight!
My history geek side insists that if you tune out the details and step back, all of our furious culture wars come down to two flavours of demented self-righteous (and ignorant) denialism – but even stranger, they sound and look exactly like every doomsday cult and mania in history. Swept up with so much emotional certainty they are effectively insane (incapable of engaging with reality).
If you still support lockdowns uncritically, you helped make ICE excesses possible (and still are) by agreeing that rights are conditional and can be removed wholesale, with a good enough “feeling” story.
If you support the completely western provoked war against Russia, using Ukraine as a tool (always intended to smash both Ukraine and Russia, so the west could buy up the resources cheap) then you are still helping to make the madness in Gaza and the insane war on Iran possible, because you already helped to legitimize insane mass murder as a replacement for diplomacy. (Like Putin or not, he really has been trying to get a European security architecture together – so all parties could trust more and disarm further, to improve all of their economies, for more than twenty years).
It is our western economies which are so addicted to the Magic Beans game that we actually have to mass murder people regularly, just to keep our stock valuations high enough that the entire insanely leveraged house of cards doesn’t tumble from great height to flat, in one go.
Our BigWar/BigMedia lies outrageously now (tricking many well-intended people into believing lies that serve the creepiest CIA corporate agenda). So do many individual figures.
At risk of repeating myself bothersomely – TWO THINGS AT ONCE. The most important modern case of this is that Trump really is a crazy liar – but also BigWar/BigMedia has been lying about him (and the rest of the world) for a decade, in the weirdest most dangerous ways (Russiagate was shocking, racist and war promoting, and still no firings punishment or apologies).
When we describe Iran, Russia and China as “Closed Societies” (even while we arrest people for speech – or in the case of England just for wearing T-shirts protesting massacre of innocents) what we are really saying is that they have rudely closed their legs and refused to be raped by us.
Which – the most powerful people in the world are telling (yelling at) us – makes them evil.
Which is why they are deliberately crashing our economy – so (they hope) we’ll be dumb and desperate enough to go to war to reestablish the centuries old imperial right to rape everyone.
Me? I say not in our name. I say they shall not pass. I say wake up before we lose everything!
In short, I’m with George Bellows (From the long forgotten WWI Pacifist Movement)
Or, as I said in my all time best short poem:
It won’t matter much who finally ran it,
if all this ends in a lifeless planet
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
First off I want to point you to some absolutely fantastic and insightful recent writing, by people far more specialized and authoritative than I (should you doubt my cred, or want more sources). (Wacky Bibliography to follow – I’m having too much fun with that to drop it, fear not) ;o)
I know it is a bit presumptuous – but for me, reading Fabio Vighi is like encountering a friend I feel like I’ve known for decades, at first hearing. His combination of insights into economics, culture and psychology is exquisite – and reminds me again of Alan Watts’ insight about the Shaman, not just a doctor, but also a priest and a psychologist – and so much more powerful for the synthesis, that we who scoff at the specific archaic techniques and science involved, miss much we could use.
This is really important – capitalism needs growth, growth, capital – but it ain’t there!
“…We are witnessing an unprecedented historical inversion: a post-productive, hyper-financialised economy is attempting to finance the most capital-intensive technological transformation since electrification – not from surplus value or productivity gains, but from debt created out of thin air; more debt than has ever been issued in the history of humankind.”
And also
“...In June 2026, Blackstone capped redemptions on its $79 billion private credit fund after requests hit 10%, while D.E. Shaw informed clients that from January 2027, investors in its flagship hedge fund would need four years to fully exit – both firms citing the need to protect portfolios against “future crises.” The message couldn’t be clearer: as in the famous South Park episode, the liquidity “is gone”. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs projects $1.175 trillion in US equity supply in 2026 – IPOs, secondaries, and lock-up expirations – just as hyperscalers like Meta post negative free cash flow and consider stock offerings because they can no longer fund their AI ambitions from operations. Add to this the approximately $900 billion in US corporate debt maturities coming due in 2026 (rising to nearly $1.5 trillion by 2028, according to S&P Global Ratings), and the picture is one of a market being squeezed from both sides: equity supply flooding in, debt needing refinancing at higher rates, and cash flow nowhere to be found.”
And this piece no less so – especially since the MOU is a stall-tactic, not a peace treaty (meaning we absolutely ARE heading for a depression – world wide - and purposefully). What I was just saying about a magic-bean economy and crazy leverage? Fabio is way more convincing!
“...The AI narrative has been a pillar of the bull market, but the economics are starting to fray. OpenAI, the poster child of the revolution, is losing billions: $21 billion in losses against $13 billion in revenue last quarter. Microsoft, its largest supporter, is scaling back commitments. It has walked away from a $3 billion cloud lease and is exploring cheaper, open-source alternatives. Even DeepSeek is reportedly being considered as a lower-cost option. The AI trade has been a story of limitless potential, but the margins continue shrinking. Token costs are down 20% this month alone and computer rental prices are at one-month lows. The AI trade increasingly resembles a classic technological paradox: exploding adoption alongside collapsing unit economics. Investors may eventually discover that these are not the same thing.
Here the risk is not merely that oil prices rise, but that higher energy costs arrive in a market built on optimistic assumptions about growth, inflation, and monetary policy. Shortages become crises especially when they collide with leverage, and modern markets remain heavily dependent on leverage of one form or another.”
I have shared pieces from tireless ex-FBI Mark Wauck who writes “Meaning in History” many times over the years. He has a sharp logical mind and an interesting collection of smart sources that he follows closely (several of which, like Sean Foo and Arnaud Bertrand, I follow myself). He also has some interesting big-picture insights. Don’t always agree with his conclusions, but his analysis is a very good reflection of rational old-school conservative thinking on geopolitics.
In case you think I’m being paranoid linking the magic bean petrodollar and war.
“Bessent just said on CNBC that the dollar invoicing of oil was a factor in Venezuela, Iran, and Ukraine/Russia policy decisions.
Such wrongthink was previously considered solely the purview of “conspiracy theorists.”
Rapid Response 47 @RapidResponse47
@SecScottBessent: “Dollar dominance is essential, and everything @POTUS is doing here — if you look, the new Venezuela... the dollar is going to be the centerpiece of their trade... We’re seeing in the Iranian negotiations, the Iranians will be invoicing in dollars. Everything we are doing is pushing the dollar back... we’re reinforcing it.”
And when I insist (as I have for years) that the secondary aim of the Ukraine war was to get Europe to buy super expensive American energy, which was a crazy thing for Europe to do, I didn’t just mean because the price would multiply (as it has) but that the yanks don’t have it to sell! – Here’s economist Chris Martenson, doing a bit of math that proves the “grand AI buildout” (like European industrial recovery) is outright delusional (and our politicians, liars).
Here’s Simplicius the Thinker with a characteristically interesting take on the state of play (and the scale of the downside economic implications which have been set in motion – and absolutely NOT yet even close to averted – this freight train is still coming right at us, and it will not now be stopped!)
Now here is that wonderful short clip of Orson Welles talking about cold reading
And I’ll give the last word to the brilliant James Baldwin – who pulls a mic-dropper here, several times over (one which is sadly no less relevant, all these many years later).
Now – Another Instalment of my Eccentric Bibliography Series
Bookstores are temples – keep your brain well-fed by keeping them busy and active!
Beneath the Underdog – Charles Mingus
I am crazy for autobiographies of truly original thinkers – and Mingus was that for sure! One can argue that distant observers might be more objective or even truthful, but they can never hope to convey the particular quality of mental energy that made you interested in the first place – and honestly, I’ll take a hundred hours of myth by a creative genius over any perfectly footnoted monograph ever written. This book also has perhaps the all time best literary advice about cunnilingus!
The Quiet American – Graham Greene
Some people disdain fiction and think true things are best said truthfully, I think a superb novelist can sometimes say big hard to grasp things that wouldn’t fit any simple objective telling, but are incredibly important, all the same. Here, Greene perfectly captures not only how America would fail in Vietnam, from just before it did – but also a truly sublime piece of writing, with an outstanding ‘unreliable narrator’.
Flatland – Edwin Abbot
This is the strangest short, easy to read, math book I own. There are a lot of things which seem bizzarre and old-fashioned about the description of social mores in particular (though even these, make an interesting frame for looking at our own niceties) but as you find your way through the strange story, you will find yourself thinking about geometry and dimensions in a whole new way (which is both fun, and useful). Years later Dionys Burger wrote a sequel “Sphereland” which I would also recommend very highly (higher dimension mindbender – so much fun!). But ‘flat’ first.
Zen and the Art of Writing – Ray Bradbury
My wife and I were casually wise in a few fortunate ways, oddly young. We took our retirement while we were healthy enough to enjoy it (worked four day weeks, throughout our careers) and understood the emotional risk of trying to commercialize creative impulses which are actually supposed to enrich your whole experience of life, not the cynical commercial market. But wise or not, the landlord don’t take IOUs! So, I am among those hopeful scribes who has read many many many books about how to do the thing and do it well. This is one of my very favourites. Compact and to the point (and not about zen at all, that was just a publishing trend of the moment). Above all Bradbury commends us to make use of our passion in our writing, not recklessly, but rather, in order to come to a higher resolution through the page.
The Human Use of Human Beings - Cybernetics and Society – Norbert Weiner
There are two versions of this book, a small “Popular” edition which I read then lent away years ago, and a larger version with more (mind boggling, to me) mathematics, which I still have on my shelf, accusing me of ignorance! I read the slim popular version a few years after reading Machiavelli, and I could not shake the feeling (then or now) that Weiner’s work was no less a manual for manipulation, and was taken no less seriously by our modern princes. I mentioned Gregory Bateson recently – the most humane and accessible among the originators of cybernetics. But I was struck by the fact that even much more cynical Weiner understood the social disruption which would be unleashed by mechanization, and suggested we begin to adjust societies decades in advance, so as to be sure we remember to preserve human thriving.
Anything by Cordwainer Smith
I am pretty sure every book he wrote is now out of print – so this is a fun used bookstore treasure hunt quest (and while you are so questing, grab John Brunner and Doris Lessing stuff when you see it, too!)
Cordwainer Smith is perhaps not a great master prose stylist, but he was a guy who left the CIA during a time when it was thinking especially big and weird thoughts about how to rule the world (and America itself) and then ended up doing a whole series of science fiction novels about the economic and cultural implications of new slave races which were specifically genetically engineered with animals, so they weren’t entitled to human rights (and could be owned and worked as property).
Of course ridiculous - they would never dream of destroying labour rights altogether - ha ha ha!
Just because Montgomery was much puffed up for propaganda purposes, that doesn’t mean he was an idiot. After the war, when he was given command of the combined western armies facing the Soviet Union along the newly christened “Iron Curtain” line in Europe, he was asked exactly what sort of equipment the Soviets would require, in order to conduct a successful invasion of western Europe.
He replied “Shoes.”
Just to be clear about our ‘civilizational priorities’
The great nations of the west are promising to spend five percent of GDP on War (that is, promising to prop up the disintegrating American economy, by sacrificing their hard earned and already stressed social programs entirely, into the ever ravenous maw of war).
Meanwhile, we can’t get healthcare workers in the Congo who are treating the Ebola outbreak PAID at all (many are now striking, even as the crisis grows)
Please – just stop thinking anyone here (including you) is ‘the good guys’.
That just ain’t our thing, folks. (never once was, but the old illusion of it, is beyond stupid, now)
Jung said “You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”
Cyberneticians say “The purpose of a System is what it does” (not what it says it will do).