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Anyway, this is getting real. Between the Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries, which have been very successful, Iranians hits, and now the Houthis, I don’t see how we avoid serious shortages. It’s the refineries that matter most: crude is worthless without refineries and they’re expensive, take a long time to build and aren’t always easy to repair, depending on what exactly got hit.
I also don’t see how we avoid massive famines and increased food prices in places that don’t have a formal famine. A lot of fertilizer runs from oil thru refineries.
The irony here (conspiracy theorists of elite intentions to depopulate the world, here you go) that Trump confirmed he OK’d the Saudi strike on the Houthi airport which set Ansar-Allah off. They’ve closed the strait and they’re going right for the jugular vein with these refinery strikes. If they keep shooting, the missiles will get thru. The defenders have to be lucky every time, they only have to be lucky on occasion.
Beans and rice. If you need distillates like diesel or motor oil, stock up now. It’s hard to stock up on medicine, but a lot also used petrochemicals, so do what you can: even simple things like aspirin are included.
Anyway, I don’t think Trump is together enough to have a diabolical super villain plan. To the extent he can plan at all, it’s about his next corrupt scam or bribe. But it amounts to the same thing in the end.
It’s hard to overstate how much this will destroy all goodwill for America in the globe. I mean all of it. Everyone knows the US started the war and refuses to stop it, whatever their reasons are. And when people can’t eat, the hatred will be immense. Iran will catch some backlash, but most people get that they’re defending themselves.
Empires end ugly and stupid. The rule of incompetence in late Imperial rulership maintains its record. I expected stupid, but it’s still flabbergasting to witness late Imperial Roman levels of moronitude.
Amazing.
Amazing is not a synonym for good.
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Former CIA Agent John Stockwell on the CIA’s propaganda war on Cuba:
“We pumped dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities…we didn’t know of a single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure false propaganda to create an illusion of communists eating babies for breakfast.”
One of the most fundamental reasons the world is screwed up is that most people believe a bunch of lies. This can be flagrant, like the “drones of death” Iraq supposedly had, ore that Iran killed 50K protestors or that Iraqi troops bayoneted babies in Kuwait.
But it can also be subtle. The generations long understatement of inflation in the consumer price index, for example, means that people lost a third of their actual purchasing power (or more) while the government gaslit them.
Everyone’s walking around talking about stats which have no relation the real world and which predict nothing. It’s like GDP: “Spain’s GDP is about the same as Russia’s.”
So? GDP measures the market value (price) of what your country is spending money on. That’s all. It doesn’t tell you how much industrial capacity they have: how many drones, artillery shells and weapons they can create. Whether or not they can generate their own energy without imports. Whether they can feed themselves. Whether their energy grid could survive mass adoption of air conditioning (hello Britain.) Britain’s water companies added a lot to GDP while flushing sewage into rivers.
American intelligence recently noted that Iran had repaired most of the damage from the first part of the war. But Iran’s GDP is tiny.
Turns out, however, that since they couldn’t buy industrial and construction goods for so long, they became good at making them themselves. Sanctions mean they mostly can’t sell to foreign markets, so they don’t show up much in GDP, but they have the capacity. Meanwhile the US has a massive GDP and takes years to build or repair a bridge that China can fix in weeks or building in months.
We’re swimming in a sea of toxic bullshit. The “facts” our decision-making apparatus uses are often just straight wrong. The population is lied to even more systematically.
If I were writing laws it’d be a mandatory prison sentence for a politician or government official to knowingly lie to the public. No one can make good decisions with bad facts.
Now this isn’t to say that often we do have good facts and do the wrong thing anyway. I’m old enough to remember the doctor shortage in Canada being predicted back in the late 80s, especially the shortage of family physicians. Same with the nurse shortage.
The solution was obvious: train more doctors and nurses. This takes time: more medical school slots, more residencies, etc… But we knew well in advance. We did nothing except think “we can steal doctors and nurses from the third world”, then make it hard for them to work in Canada.
So good facts alone won’t save you. But bad facts make it hard to do the right thing even if you wanted to. Just before the Iraq War over 70% of Americans thought that Iraq was behind 9/11. There is zero evidence of that. There was zero evidence of that back then. But if you believe a lie, you may act on the lie and so Americans supported the war.
For going on 40 years we’ve been making our statistics not reflect reality. This was deliberate, because low inflation stats meant low adjustments to pensions, wages and so on. GDP goes up as the only statistic that mattered concealed that the industrial base was being offshored, which made some people very very rich.
Some people knew the lies were lies, but many didn’t, and the longer the lies continued the more people forgot they were lies.
Till reality (that grocery bill) became impossible to ignore, but compromised stats made it nearly impossible to make the argument to do something.
Lying is a primal sin exactly because it makes even understanding a problem either impossible or much worse. I lie is how we change the world into something fake but better for us. It’s one thing to say “my dog ate my homework”, it’s another for public officials to lie so that some people benefit and others (always a much larger group) suffer. If it was up to me a politician or government official knowingly lying would carry a mandatory prison sentence.
Our “masters” have completely forgotten that democracy is supposed to be about service to the people. Politicians work for the public, not the other way around.
At least in theory. But the further the theory moves from practice, the more politicians act for any reason other than the common weal, the more they need to lie so they can do what they really want. In this era, mint more billionaires.
The complete normalcy of government lies, politely called propaganda, conceals the sort of rot which destroys civilizations, and it’s helping destroy ours.
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From the Seoul Economic Daily:
The overhaul is expected to partly resolve an unusual gap between PCE and the more widely known Consumer Price Index (CPI). The annual core CPI rate in June was 2.6%, while core PCE was estimated at 3.3%. Typically CPI runs slightly above PCE, but recently the two reversed because of software and investment advisory figures. Both items are expected to show smaller increases after the overhaul.
Why the change? Well, “chipflation” was bleeding into software.
The SED continues:
For the software price measurement being revised, the BEA uses the BLS computing cost index. But that figure includes items such as USB flash drives. Their prices have surged amid a spike in demand for artificial intelligence (AI). The result was a distortion in which rising hardware prices were reflected in the software index.
For some reason game consoles are included in the software measurement. As I argued on July 14, these numbers are fraudulent. And this story is pretty solid evidence of that reality.
Amazing stuff, and sooner than even I expected. China’s Kimi is now about equal to GPT and Claude:
For the first time, a Chinese model Kimi K3 has taken #1 on the Frontend Code Arena and is scoring at or near the frontier on other benchmarks.
And the majors are noticing:
there it is – microsoft will use kimi k3 to power their flagship copilot ai assistant saving up to 60% per token or $600M on every $1B spent on inference spend.
if microsoft chooses to self-host the model once Kimi open sources it on the 27th then this cost reduces even more… pic.twitter.com/BwrXXZvAim
— Ejaaz (@cryptopunk7213) July 20, 2026
Meanwhile Trump is talking about banning Chinese AI.
Alternatively, the smart lads at Open AI have a regulatory plan:
I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don’t need to “ban open source” (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. “A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models.” It needn’t be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don’t want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There’s a happy middle ground here. I’d assume they will do some version of this.
Even more fun, the Feds want to approve all AI releases and not allow everyone the full models.
The Trump administration has taken new steps to assert more control over the rollout of future artificial intelligence model releases by dictating which companies and entities are allowed access to the latest frontier models, two people familiar with the matter told CNBC…
….
This week, the administration launched its own program, dubbed “Gold Eagle,” aimed at collaborating with the private sector to find and fix cyber vulnerabilities.
The so-called clearinghouse would put the White House in charge of greenlighting which companies can access new AI models, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss information that is not public.
China is going to eat America’s lunch on this. If they ban Chinese AI (harder than it seems, given it’s open source) all that means is writing off the rest of the world. And since American models are handicapped, smaller American companies will be stuck with worse AI.
Since Chinese AI is far cheaper, as well, I’d expect American companies to set up subsidiaries overseas to use it, rather than be stuck with American AI.
The entire situation is a complete clusterfuck. Major companies have taken on serious debt in order to build data centers which have a lifecycle of five to seven years, and often less (since new generations of GPUs are much better.) But the Chinese product is cheaper, open source, lacks nearly as much sovereign risk and I’ll bet multiple models will soon be about as good as Anthropic and OpenAI’s.
Where’s the business case that spending all these trillions of dollars is going to produce enough revenue from US AI to pay for all of it?
There isn’t one. It doesn’t exist.
And that means that, at least in America, this is an AI bubble. All bubbles burst and this will not be an exception. If the government bails them out it will be the last major US bailout.
This is also very likely one of the last major tech revolutions which will start in the US (which it did.) Going forward they China will produce the vast majority of them.
This is the endgame. The turning point where China obtains not just the industrial base but the absolutely undisputed tech lead. From now on China will like America in the 1950s — it’s where almost everything new is created, the dynamic center of the world, and soon people will be competing to move there, because everyone knows it is the future.
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The math is simple. If Iran keeps firing, and the US/Israel does not take out the launchers and missile stockpiles in large numbers, Iran will run the US and Israel (it has its own variants, but the same supply issues) out of interceptors. At that point Iran hits everything it shoots at.
If Iran just keeps going long enough, it WILL win the war. The main danger is Iran’s leaders accepting a cease-fire too soon.
Well, confirmation from within the government:
“The U.S. is planning for a wider war,” said one U.S. official familiar with internal administration discussions, adding that the Pentagon was increasing the number of military aircraft in the region.But the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, cautioned that the expansion of U.S. operations will be limited by dwindling stockpiles of air defense and long-range munitions and constraints on the ability to surge more troops and aircraft into the area because of battle damage.“We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that,” the official said.
You will notice that I said the main mistake the Iranians could make was going to peace too soon. At least militarily speaking, there were diplomatic reasons to do so, since both Pakistan and China wanted a peace deal, and Pakistan has a defense pact with Saudi Arabia. Iran needed to prove that they had made all possible efforts, to continue receiving the support they need from China and to keep Pakistan out of the war.
There were also significant internal political reasons. What most people don’t understand is that the supreme leader almost never over-rides government consensus. Elijah Manjier is reliable on this (part behind a paywall). He has a lot of contacts in Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas.
The Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Sayyed Mojtaba Khamenei, never trusted the Memorandum of Understanding negotiated with Washington that was too good to be true. From the outset, he reportedly expressed reservations about American real and honest intentions and questioned whether the United States would ultimately implement its commitments. Nevertheless, despite his scepticism, he did not impose his personal assessment on the country’s political institutions or prevent the agreement from proceeding once it had secured substantial institutional support equivalent to the majority of the National Security Council voting.
In doing so, Sayyed Mojtaba Khamenei reportedly followed the political approach adopted by his assassinated father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, during the negotiations that produced the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Although the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei repeatedly warned that the United States could not be fully trusted, he allowed President Hassan Rouhani, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and the majority supporting them within the Supreme National Security Council to pursue the nuclear agreement because they believed diplomacy remained preferable to confrontation.
This position reflected a broader principle within Iran’s strategic decision-making system. The Leader establishes the general direction of national policy, but crucial security decisions are debated within institutions that include officials elected directly or indirectly by the population and their representatives, among them the president, the parliamentary speaker and senior government and military representatives. When a substantial institutional majority supports a particular course, the Leader permitted that collective judgement to be tested, even where it conflicts with his personal assessment of the risks involved.
However, the MOU’s failure strengthens those in the government who thought it was a waste of time.
The damage extends beyond the current political leadership. Future Iranian governments, regardless of their ideological orientation, will judge the risks of dealing with Washington against the combined experiences of the JCPOA and the more recent Memorandum. Even officials inclined towards negotiation may conclude that engagement carries prohibitive domestic costs unless future arrangements include enforceable guarantees, simultaneous implementation and mechanisms preventing one party from receiving concessions before abandoning its own obligations…
…Yet diplomatic options have not disappeared completely. The Memorandum itself showed that both sides remain capable of negotiating when the military, political and economic costs become sufficiently high. Any renewed process, however, would require a substantially different structure based on reciprocal implementation, verifiable sequencing, the release of assets alongside measurable Iranian steps, and guarantees sufficiently credible to survive political change in Washington or Tehran.
Manjier’s connected. I’d assume the last paragraph reflects what the Iranian government wants said about any possible new agreement.
Meanwhile in the war itself the Iranians are concentrating on taking out US bases, radars, supply depots, command/communications centers and so on. They’re systematically degrading the infrastructure the US uses. Note that they have started attacking in Jordan, which they had rarely done before. Jordan could be considered the “last shield” before Israel, and Israel’s basing of US assets is the next big goal, I suspect.
It seems clear that Iran is taking apart US logistics and command and control, and depleting weapon stocks faster than the US is doing this to Iran.
Again, the simple math.
Anything can happen in war, but I don’t see any way for the US to win this war if Iran stays the course, and we haven’t even included all the shortages coming down the line, especially now Ansar-Allah has closed another strait. The only people with serious leverage over Iran are China and Pakistan (and Pakistan’s is limited. There’s a deal, but they’d have mass riots if they tried to attack Iran. Pakistan’s population support for Iran polls around 80%.)
If America were even marginally competently run this would be the point where Congress would impeach Trump. He won’t admit defeat and oil stockpiles are running low. He has no viable part to victory, but keeps acting as if he does. He’s turning a military defeat into an economic catastrophe thru his delusional disconnect from reality, or perhaps because he’s being blackmailed. Whatever the reason for his behaviour, he needs to go. (Yes, I’m aware this won’t happen, that’s the point.)
In all my life, and I’m getting old now, I have never seen a stupider war or an American elite more determinedly detached from reality.
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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 19, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War on voting
Letters from an American, July 11, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Jul y12, 2026
Meanwhile, on Friday a Pentagon official told Rebecca Turco of WJLA 7News in Washington, D.C., that National Guard troops will stay activated in Washington through Inauguration Day 2029 “until law and order are fully restored in our Nation’s Capital.”
“So,” Bill Kristol of The Bulwark commented. “[M]ilitary troops under the direct control of Trump and Hegseth will be on the streets of our nation’s capital for the rest of Trump’s term. The rationale—they’re here to help with a crime emergency—is laughable. But of course the real reason is ominous.”
Miller Labels Leftists a “Cancer” That World Must “Root Out” in Fascistic Speech
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 07-17-2026]
Representatives from 67 countries gathered in the U.S. on Thursday for a meeting called Rubio on the supposed “Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” In addition to Rubio and Miller, several U.S. officials spoke, including figures like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
The remarks from top officials quickly made clear that the meeting’s purpose was to put forth a global offensive against people with left-wing beliefs….
Letters from an American, July 17, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Jul 18, 2026
Yesterday President Donald J. Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller all threw the weight of the U.S. government behind a far-right conspiracy theory that says Trump and his loyalists are defending the United States of America against a communist takeover.
As Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich recalled today, two years ago, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec and co-author Joshua Lisec wrote a bestselling book called Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). Trump ally and media guru Stephen Bannon wrote the introduction. Donald Trump Jr. blurbed the book, saying that it provided a playbook to deploy “immediately to save the West.” Then–Ohio senator J.D. Vance also blurbed the book, saying: “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”
Posobiec is a loyalist who worked to keep Trump in office after voters elected Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. He is known for courting controversy by promoting what Maya Oppenheim of the The Independent in 2018 called “wholly erroneous and debunked conspiracy theories,” including the infamous 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that Democrats were operating a child sex ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.
In Unhumans, Posobiec and Lisec argue that the United States is under siege by “the left,” which in their view means anyone from communists to “progressives.” “For the purposes of this book, we will call them the unhumans,” the authors write, because they “oppose everything that makes up humanity. As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”
Miller’s Ministerial: The Most Dangerous Speech Wasn’t Trump
Jim Stewartson, July 17, 2026 [MindWar]
While everyone focused on elections, Stephen Miller was putting the architecture in place to ensure they never matter….
… a few hours before Trump’s dud of a speech, Stephen Miller gave a “ministerial” to an international audience at the State Department that was nothing short of Third Reich plagiarism. If this had just been a rally speech, it would be extremely disturbing, but it went along with a simultaneously released document entitled “Trump Administration Unleashes Global Campaign to Crush Radical Left Terrorism.”
Put together, Miller’s speech and official policy document enshrine an overtly fascist, transnational program to persecute nearly anyone the regime wants in the name of “leftist terrorism.”
Here is a key section of Miller’s speech which is textbook dehumanization—the precise language Joseph Goebbels used to target Jews, communists, and Bolsheviks.
Miller draws a picture of the in-group as “morally superior,” ordered,” “beautiful,” and “normal.” The out-group on the other hand, identified as “leftists,” is “abnormal,” “scarred,” and “deformed.”….
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
Dr. John Gartner: Trump is “the most pure incarnation of evil that I have ever encountered” (video)
Dean Obeidallah, July 18, 2026
… Dr. Gartner explained that he meant that very much from a clinical point of view, explaining that Dr. Erich Fromm had studied Hitler and coined the term “the essence of evil.” Fromm explained that “evil” from this perspective is not a supernatural force but a severe psychological pathology.
And when you see what Fromm said next you will see Donald Trump. Fromm explained this essence of evil was marked by a dangerous combination of extreme self-absorption, sadism, destructiveness, and a lack of empathy or conscience. It was also Fromm who created the term “malignant narcissism”—which many apply to Trump today.
But it’s the “evil” part of this that really stuck with me. As Dr. Gartner noted, Trump is a sadist who “gets pleasure from chaos, and destruction, and fear, and damage, and death.” He continued on, stating, “Every indication is that when Trump first started bombing Iran, he was gleeful and talking about, you want to see the fun and showing people the videos of the blowing up targets and talking about it like he was having fun.” ….
After Killings, Homan Says There Will Be ‘More Bloodshed’ Unless Dems ‘Shut Their Mouth’ About ICE
Stephen Prager, July 16, 2026 [CommonDreams]
… Instead of trigger-happy agents, he said that anti-ICE “rhetoric” from Democrats was to blame for the recent killings.
“It all goes back to the Dems who want to continually attack ICE and tell people to evade them and tell people don’t comply, tell people to resist, and tell people ICE isn’t a real law enforcement agency,” Homan said.
“You and I talked about this a year-and-a-half ago, Laura,” he continued. “I said, if the hateful rhetoric didn’t stop, there would be bloodshed.”
“I’m saying it right now,” Homan said. “There’s still going to be more bloodshed unless they shut their mouth and let ICE enforce the laws that they enacted.”
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