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.