Wile. E. Coyote

In my recollection, it was Slavoj Zizek (twenty-five years ago?) that first used Wiley and the road runner cartoon as a metaphor for our current reality, such as it is. Now I am watching Adam Tooze appropriate the same image of that goofy coyote lured off the edge of the cliff, suspended there as he realizes his predicament, not wishing to look down. As if magically, by not looking down, he will somehow escape his fate. Welcome to modern progress! For Tooze, the coyote is the financial and stock markets, oblivious to the overwhelming evidence of the polycrisis, assuming tomorrow will be like today. That there will always be a bailout, that the economy is too big to fail. But what about "pricing in the risk"? For instance, the type of brinkmanship that we are seeing in Iran, with the Revolutionary Guard daring Trump to invade or start more bombing. China daring the US to interdict one of its ships. And oh yeah, the planet heating past 1.5 degrees, bring super-storms and draught and mass migration. How would you actually price in that risk? You can't, obviously, so best to ignore it, pretend it will all work out. Pretend that you haven't run off a cliff. Just don't look down. After following the saga of The Straight of Hormuz for weeks now, I have decided it basically exists in a quantum state, a superposition, where it is both open and closed at the same time. This presents a dilemma for the Market, which has been bouncing like The Wham-O Super Ball, a famously high-bouncing toy invented in 1964 by Norman Stingley, made from a durable, synthetic rubber compound called Zectron. We citizens, however, are required to believe The Market is the best vehicle for pricing in risk, that insurance actuaries can tell us the future. What we know is that the longer this stalemate lasts, the less storgae capacity Gulf petro states have, forcing them to shut down wells. Some of which will be extremely difficult to get back online.The best strategy for investors is to just not look down. At some point I suppose we will have to open the box and see if Shrodinger's cat is alive or dead, but we can put it off as long as possible.

Prisoner of War or Peace

Quote of the DaY: "The market is inscrutable — and a terrible predictor of price moves. One thing we do know, though, is that we can’t separate ourselves from the global marketplace." Mark Finley an energy fellow at the Baker Institute at Rice U. (James Baker?) This is his answer as to why the price of gas won't go down. The deeper revealed truth is that we have all been captured and colonized by an "inscrutable" force, one from whose tentacles we can't escape. Apart from that minoir glitch, we are all kinds of free! Free to post on X, free to choose any deoderant you choose... This is an interesting take from a minister in the UAE government, basically set up as a mafia, saying they want to invest over a trillion of their hard earned dollars in the US. If only we can bring some stability to the region: "American firms increasingly see the Emirates as a launchpad into Africa, South Asia and the wider Indo-Pacific. In the other direction, the country’s vast network of family-run businesses, a largely untapped force in cross-border investment, is ready to deepen its stake in the American economy alongside Emirati sovereign capital." I guess No Kings doesn't include our new friends in the Middle East. To hear the neo-neocons, bringing freedom to the Iranian people is of the highest order but they are less concerned with the people living under the Gulf monarchies. Of course, the Iranian people would not be free to build a nuclear weapon, as are the Israelis. Sure, they can vote on it - but we have veto power. On the climate front, Microsoft has decided to back off on its committment to carbon removal. The latest IPCC report says not only do we have to stop burning fossil fuels starting yesterday, we also have to remove 5-16 gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year from now to 2050 to prevent massive overshoot of 1.5 degrees. So there was investment in technologies like direct air capture followed by burial. Bill Gates was buying carbon offset credits from these unproven projects but now he sees the need to invest in AI data centers instead. Air capture and storage was always a joke and planting trees isn't going to cut it either. All this news is on the bottom of page six because what are you going to do? Massive overshoot, obviously. Now just imagine the emissions caused by these latest wars. Yes there is some slight possibility that nations will begin to orient more toward renewable energy, but it will be added to the mix of fossil fuels.

Legal War Doctrine

Tuesday: You can't throw a dead cat without hitting some statement about "war crimes". With Trump's threat (empty) about destroying civilian infrastructure, the world was suddenly up in arms. illegal, immoral, just not cool. We know such hypocritical bullshit will fly right past most Americans, but it is worth noting a few examples of unpunished "war crimes". For instance, the fire bombing of cities by Allied forces in WWII. Dresden, as written about by Kurt Vonnegut. Beginning in 1945, the US military led by Curtis Lemay used napalm to burn 67 Japanese cities, constructed with wood, killing 26,000 civilians and making 13 million homeless. That's before we dropped atom bombs on them. Pick a war; Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. In, as Trump puts it, "the long and complex history of the world", targeting civilians and infrastructure was always part of the strategy. But of course, this is not the dominant narrative. Instead, all of that history goes down the memory hole and we are fed endless statements like these: “Our nation has always conducted military operations for just causes and through just and moral means. This must continue in the future; otherwise we forfeit our legitimacy to lead the world. So, let me be clear: I do not support the destruction of a ‘whole civilization.’ That is not who we are, and it is not consistent with the principles that have long guided America,” Moran wrote. Lisa Murkowski: “This type of rhetoric is an affront to the ideals our nation has sought to uphold and promote around the world for nearly 250 years. It undermines our long-standing role as a global beacon of freedom and directly endangers Americans both abroad and at home,” Blah, blah ,blah. Wednesday: Packistan managed to broker a ceasefire, so no "war crimes" or civilizational destruction for now. There are plenty of questions left unanswered but the main thing is that Markets are happy and the price of oil dropped. People can go back to TicToc or go enjoy a burger (unless you happen to be in Lebanon). We have a two week reprieve in "the history of the world", a history which, as Benjamin noted, is simply one huge pile of wreckage piling up higher and higher. I also enjoyed this little bit, an article on the perils of "growing inequality" in the New York Times today: "For any society in which this much wealth gets concentrated in so few hands, and is then so easily parlayed into political clout, the question becomes one not just of economics but of basic civic standing. At some point soon, we are no longer sharing in self-government." A liberal warning that we citizens might be losing our ability to determine our own fate! Wouldn't that be tragic! Along with the wreckage of history we have mountains of ideological rubble. And now this slop. So it goes.

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.