Menacing the Region

Just like you couldn't read an article about Venezuela in the corporate media that didn't contain the phrase "Maduro is a terrible individual", you can't read an article now about Iran that doesn't begin by telling you they are "menacing the region". Now think about two other countries which are menacing the region, that is the Middle East. Hint: they both just started a war. And of course Israel is still orchestrating a genocidal project in Gaza as well as siezing territory in Syria and Lebanon. Now think of a country menacing the Carribean and Latin American region, for instance kidnapping the President of a country, randomly blowing up ships, imposing devastating sanctions on countries, etc.. That seems pretty menacing to me. Took my mom to the No Kings protest and watched people wave signs and elicit honks of support. With the usual mix of revving trucks and people flipping the bird. Same as it ever was, the grotesque status quo that is at once frozen and speeding towards the cliff. Holding both of these ideas as true at the same time is the esssence of post-post capitalism. Speaking of which, in his new history of capitalism, author Sven Beckert writes: "In a sense, capital freed itself from that nation-state in the late twentieth century, while trade unions and social democratic and socialist parties remained rooted in it." This is exactly what the IWW instinctually realized, that it would take workers organized globally in industrial unions to successfully challenge global capital. Unfortunately, trade unions remained stuck in their state-bound fiefdoms. So it goes. The Commander in Chief says he is willing to accept "two to three weeks" more of Market turmoil to defeat the evil empire. But the U.S. is still ahead of schedule. Our Nato allies are saying thanks anyway, but you broke it, you fix it. They tend to have serious military analysts who understand the grave peril involved with "opening the Straight of Hormuz." Meanwhile, whitey is going around the moon and I'm supposed to be concerned that Pam Bondi has been fired. I'm actually waiting for Pete Hegseth to be fired and blamed for the whole debacle. The perfect whipping boy.

From The Halls of Montezuma

How would you like to be some twenty-two-year-old kid steaming towards the Straight of Hormuz right now? Thinking I'm going to get my dick blown off because that moron started an insane war? I'm going to liberate the Straight so oil America doesn't need can flow to Japan? So Israel can achieve its decades-long project of ethnic cleansing? Oh dear. There to serve and protect global finance and it is a good time to invest in caskets. Next day: Markets plunged after Trump threatened to blow up energy infrastructure in 48 hours. So Trump caved, of course. This is government of, for and by the Market. Now he claims to be putting together a great deal, which translates to him bullshitting his way out of his self-induced catastrophe. Which most Americans will buy as long as the price of gas goes down. Trump and Rubio will probably move on to Cuba, a much easier, smaller country to bully. Closer to home, certainly. Digression: From 3 Quarks Daily: "The Championship (ethics) Bowl featured fifteen cases including, what to do about a hypothetical billionaire experimenting with geoengineering to mitigate global climate change without cooperating with any nation or group?" Just like in the famous novel Oblivion's Cross. I wonder what ethics were considered? I also wonder what sort of career choices these young folk will make. Another digression: It occurs to me that Howard Stern was the Father of our current Age of Transgression. He is described as a "comedian", in the same sense that Trump is a comedian. From his little booth starting in 1986, he would broacast outrageous slurs into the airwaves, titillating a tribe of mostly young men who had no political agency, who knew they were just cogs in a machine they couldn't name. But what they could do was gum up the gears of culture, blow up the accepted norms in a desperate, nihilistic cry. And now stupid outrage is the accepted currency of our attention economy. Most droids still have zero power, but they have a tribe of fellow spectators. And that's not nothing when you are dying of loneliness and alienation. When you have no agency to change your destiny. When dignity is a dream. Back to the Marines (and other US forces) heading for Iran: Even Doomberg is totally at a loss when it comes to predictions, which is his stock and trade. It beggars belief that the administration might be posting casualty figures on Truth Social but nothing is Real. To the Shores of Tripoli.

Adaptation

“The demand for climate information is going up,” said Sarah Kapnick, global head of climate advisory for J.P. Morgan. The position at the bank, created two years ago for Dr. Kapnick, a former chief scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, underscores the desire in the business world to understand the risks and opportunities of global warming, she said. So this dude Steffen started a seminar you can join for $25,000.00. He mostly talks about places you can move to that will be more climate resilient, a good lifeboat. "Most New Yorkers who take the seminar want to stay in the city, despite its risks of extreme heat and flooding, and buy themselves second homes elsewhere, Mr. Steffen said." Just so we know who these people with climate anxienty are, they are the people most responsible for the catastrophe, Rich Americans. One guy in the class bought himself 40 acres in the Catskills as a "sanctuary". So not exactly Extinction Rebellion and not exactly Dark Mountain. On the other end of the spectrum there is Max Wilbert of Biocentric saying eco-sabotage is our remaining hope for slowing the warming. Like myself, he points out how catastrophic events like the pandemic, the 2007 economic collapse and today's war in the Middle East are the only times emissions actually go down. A harsh reality. Straddling the middle is the venerable Robert Jensen ( not to be confused with Derek Jensen) who has a great critique but suggests "we" need more conversation and dialogue. I heard him on a new podcast put out by the folks at Overshoot, a subsidiary of Population Balance. Riding the wave, their slogan is Shrink Towards Abundance and by shrink they mean population and economic throughput/ resource use. Speaking of abundance, Ezra Klein had Naomi Klein on his show and when asked to recommend a book, she suggested Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History, written by fellow ecosocialist Michael Lowy. I have always been intrigued by that essay, especially the thesis that examines Klee's Angelus Novus, the crazy angel looking back at the wreckage of history as the wind of "progres"s blows her into the future. Progress in scare quotes because it is modernity itself which is the catastrophe. Or as Bruno Latour put it: "we have never been modern". Techno/industrial capitalism

Trump's Abundance Bill

Trump has jumped on Ezra Klien's abundance agenda, proposing legislation that would gut environmental protections in order to fast-track the building of housing. Apparently the thing holding back construction of more houses is the inability of developers to fill in wetlands or wipe out threatened species. So while the Pres is busy right now destroying another country he might find time at some point to get some de-regulation going. At the same time "Many of the consequences of global warming — such as more intense storms, warming oceans and melting glaciers — are arriving faster and more powerfully than many scientists had expected." This little blurb can be found at the bottom of page six in the NYTimes because all the headlines are about oil supplies being cut off in the Straight of Hormuz. From the same article: " new research found that the rate of global warming has nearly doubled over the last decade. " Doubled! Wow! That could prove troubling but all our attention is focused on securing reliable supplies of the stuff causing the warming! Remember 1.5 to stay alive? Well, you might need a new chant. How about 2.0 Here We Go! Ask a politician of any party what their plan is and you will get this answer: we are looking at common sense solutions that keep our economy strong and allow us to remain competitive in a global (China) market. Translation: drill, pump, burn. Meanwhile, you might want to let your membership in Antifa expire because the Feds want to lock you up as a terrorist. You could find yourself in Guantanamo just because you like wearng black outfits. And black boots. Actually, the FBI is investigating anybody who is anti-capitalist so if you don't see a blog post for a couple of months... Last point: I have always believed that the best Trump doppelganger is Rodney Dangerfield and this latest episode, where Trump, sitting next to the Prime Minister of Japan, says: "“We didn’t tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise,” he said. “Who knows better about surprise than Japan, OK? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor, OK? Right?" That got some laughs, the kind Dangerfield would get in Caddyshack playing a rich guy throwing his weight around.

Risk

“The line between betting, speculating and investing has largely disappeared,” said Timothy Massad, who served as the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for financial stability after the 2008 recession. “It’s very worrisome to me.” As if there was a well-defined line in some mythical past. We pretend it is not a casino so as to preserve legitimacy, I guess. But the system rewards and therefore creates gamblers. “Since 1980, the Arctic annual air temperatures have warmed nearly three times faster than the rest of the planet,” according to Dr. Druckenmiller. permafrost has been melting since the early 2000s, and researchers have now discovered toxic chemicals leaching into rivers in northern Alaska as the permafrost melts. Turkey, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, “pushed to dilute wording on the climate crisis, the science of melting glaciers and the role of young and Indigenous people”. Oil and gas profits drive this resistance, of course, and these profiteers are gambling with the future, betting on some miracle techno solution to emerge soon. How about AI driven quantum computers developing fusion energy? Perfect! "Time of Monsters" kind of says it all. Wack grifter ideologues warning us to wake up to "wokeness". All this as the next "extreme El Nino" begins to build and the polycrisis morphs into total chaos. War, "political" idiocy, in a word: oblivion. "The worst are filled with passionate intensity..." "We would rather die than change", plenty of ancient wisdom out there but none of it acknowledged. It should be obvious by now that there is only one way to reduce fossil fuel consumption in capitalism: catastrophe. We last saw reductions during the pandemic, but as soon as the masks came off, people went back to the status quo. Now we see the Straight of Hormuz closed through war and again consumption will go down temporarily. It is not difficult to extrapolate from this as to what needs to happen to arrest climate change. As Max Wilbert puts it, no one wants to see the inevitable short-term suffering, but "ecologically, collapse is likely the best path forward, given that governments and communities have refused to take meaningful action to halt global warming, the mass extinction of biological life, and the rest of the eco-crisis." The obvious argument is always "but we don't know if what comes after is better or worse". By this they mean governance or economic conditions or liberty/ rights etc.. This is a totally human-centric approach. The question we need to ask is "Will this be better for Nature, for the biosphere?"