Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Is Virtue An Advantage Or Disadvantage For Societies?

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On February 24, 2026

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There’s an idea going around that virtues are anti-competitive. That being loyal, honorable, honest, generous, kind, etc… puts you at a disadvantage.

It’s one of those half true statements. It’s true if your society is shit, but in a decent society it can be disadvantage, and if a society has predominantly virtueless people in charge, or as the majority of the population, then the society as a whole is at a disadvantage against virtuous societies.

In a society where everyone is out for themselves or a small group, and where any behaviour is acceptable as long as it “wins”, like the US (notice that even child rape is acceptable to US elites, if it wasn’t, they’d punish it) having morals will hold you back, no question. If you won’t make decisions which impoverish mass numbers of people, or kill them, if it’s in your self interest or the interest of your small group (bank, political party, corporation, family, whatever) then you’re at a disadvantage.

The problem is that such societies self-cannibalize. Instead of growing the pie they fight over who gets how much of a slice, and what they do makes the pie smaller than it otherwise would be. (Ignore every dipshit who tells you how rich the US is. It’s less rich in real terms than it was 60 years ago compared to its competitors and in many cases even to itself. A CT scan in China costs about $50, and you get it the same day.)

Whatever one thinks of China, the fact is that its elites concentrate on making the population more prosperous and the country stronger in real terms. They aren’t offshoring their steel production. They can build ships. They lift people out of poverty, they don’t shove people into it. There aren’t massive homeless encampments everywhere. They arrest senior party members and billionaires for corruption and even execute them for crimes.

They are better people than Americans. Doubtless that will outrage many, but if you think otherwise you’re engaged in special pleading. How many countries have they invaded and destroyed? How many people have they killed or impoverished, including their own people? They’re expanding education and healthcare, working hard to make housing cheaper, etc, etc…

This is an old observation. Societies which work for more people out-compete those that don’t. Lee Kuan Yee, the founder of Singapore was massively impressed with the Britain of the 30s and 40s because he saw, for example, that newspapers were simply left in a pile, people would take one and leave money and no one cheated. They dynamism of 50s thru 90s America (all a result of post-war government spending, by the way, the internet is a government creation all the way up and down) massively impressed him as well.

Good is stronger than evil. It always has been, because cooperative societies defeat societies which are competitive in the wrong ways. It’s alright to have some competition, but when it becomes existential and unbounded by ethics, it damages the host society. America can’t even ramp up weapons production any more because the firms in the business want to charge 10x what weapons cost. Russia and China, no problem increasing production if they choose.

None of this is to say that being evil doesn’t have advantages. Of course it does. But evil, as Tolkien observed, consumes itself over time: it is a war of all against all, with any alliances temporary and untrustworthy.

This is true even when dealing with “evil” societies. It isn’t the evil which makes them effective, it’s the parts they have that are good. Mongol loyalty and discipline and bravery, for example. Genghis Khan never had a single senior general or administrator turn on him. Not one. At the very least a nation needs to be good to more of its own members than than its opponents, but even this has problems, because what you do to external enemies eventually seems reasonable to do internally.

Good isn’t weak. Instead it’s hard. It’s easy to be evil, to betray, to hurt and to take advantage. But if you run your group or your society that way you will weaken it and in time that weakness will lead to destruction.

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The Weirdness Of Getting Old

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On February 23, 2026

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So, I’m now fifty-eight years old. My body feels it, though that’s more residual damage from various health problems than age, but my soul doesn’t: I feel like I’m still who I was when I was five years old, staring at multicolored fish in tide pools, making sand castles and telling myself stories about the freighters I saw steaming past my grandmother’s beach home.

When it comes to my life work, to understand the forces of history and civilization, it’s mostly given me a sense of the pace of change, and a feeling for momentum in human affairs. A human life, even a long one, isn’t very long. Human history operates on generations, with three and seven seeming to be the numbers which matter most.

A normal sub-ideological cycle (New  Deal and post-war liberalism, neoliberalism) is about 3 generations. Sometimes they can go longer, but making a bet of about fifty to sixty years for a run will usually work. The changes FDR made stayed substantially in place till 1980 with Reagan. Neoliberalism is dying as we speak. There’s always an overlap period, where the old order is dismantled, but substantial spars remain in place. It takes till the late 90s to repeal the major market reforms of New Deal liberalism, for example.

I was born in 1968. I was twelve when Reagan was elected. I lived the very end of the post-war order, and my entire teenage and adult life has been under neoliberalism. I watched as social services were cut, as every building went from “just walk in” to having security guards. I saw Universities go from being open to the public to closed. I remember the old “middle class” economy and I lived thru the transition to one where the top 10% does over 50% of all spending.

I predicted the ways that the neoliberal order would end, and was right about almost all of it: the rise of China, the end of dollar hegemony, elite capture, the effects of surveillance and electronic money, but in terms of a human life it has all felt like very a long time.

It isn’t, really, in historical terms. Fifty years isn’t very long, unless you’re living thru it.

Young adults today have the same relationship to the 80s and 90s that I do to to the 50s and 60s. They don’t remember them, but they grew up with adults who lived thru them. Heck, I knew adults who remembered the Great Depression, the 20s, World War I and II. My span—what I either experienced myself or what I heard about from people who were there goes from about 1910 to the current year. My teachers included Old Edwardians, Lost Generation types, Hippies and square jawed GI and Silent Generation types.

My parents had me late, so I was really raised mostly not by Boomers, but by the Silent Generation. My father was in training as a pilot when the war ended. Had it gone on another six months he’d have been deployed.

They were very foreign people, not at all like those who are adults today. There was an acceptance of personal violence that has faded, but also a sense of honor which no longer exists. The male adults who were most important in my life were all men whose word you could trust. They might be assholes, many of them were, but if they said they’d do something, they did it. They rarely lied, and they believed in duty and honor.

That’s all gone now in the West. I hardly meet anyone who has principles I trust them to stick to under duress. There isn’t even a pretense any more. Hypocrisy as the tribute vice pays to virtue is gone in America. Trump and the people around him don’t even pretend to be honest, good or honorable. They’re all cruel bastards looking out for number one and willing to hurt or kill anyone, and they don’t even pretend otherwise.

One can see that as preferable to the hypocrisies of Clinton, Bush and Obama, and in some ways it is, but it’s also an indication of how far we’ve fallen, that our lords and masters (and they are our masters, and we are their slaves) don’t even pretend to have any virtues. The only virtue left is being rich or powerful, if you’re neither, you’re nobody and if you’re nobody, in the eternal words of George Bush Jr, “who cares what you think?”

They have, of course, in becoming virtueless scum, destroyed their host nations. Both Europe and America are going down, and hard and it is precisely because of the loss of virtue in the ruling class and the inability and unwillingness of the ruled to do anything about it.

It’s not that you have to be “good”, precisely. It’s that if your culture is lead by people who are cowards, faithless and concerned only with personal wealth and power, well, they can’t run a society effectively. They will always run it into the ground. The punishment for neoliberalism is China’s rise and the end of hundreds of years of European superiority.

And I (and most of my readers) have had to watch this. The destruction of our societies and the aggrandizement of the worst among us. I assume these days that if someone is very successful, either in politics or private enterprise, that they are untrustworthy and effectively a psychopath, and the vast majority of the time, I’m right.

It’s felt very long. I knew it could not last. I knew how it would end. I fought to change it, and failed (no surprise).

This is nothing new, of course. Confucius felt this way, and died convinced he was a failure. “Stop doing all these evil things,” he screamed, and no one listened. The Chinese are good at this. They recognize there are times when public affairs are so evil that good men and women can do nothing but withdraw and try and live good lives, because any success in public affairs can only come at the cost of one’s character. To succeed, to become a billionaire, in America today, is to scream to the heavens “I am evil. I make money hurting people. I care only about myself and perhaps a few friends or family.”

But the torch passes on. China has its problems, but the Chinese leadership has, in fact, mostly made their people far better off. When they say they’ll do something, it isn’t a lie, they track what they do and publish the results against their promises. If they say they’ll build a thousand parks, be sure a thousand parks will be built.

And so it is this I have seen over the span of my life: the civilizational torch passed from the West to the East, from Europe (America is European, sorry) to China. I’ve seen the West lose its virtues, get rid of the civil liberties which were our greatest glory, and in losing its virtues lose its place.

Now we come to the rise of the Chinese century. I wonder how much I’ll see, and how weird it will be to no longer be a member of the important, ruling civilization, but only a barbarian, watching my civilization collapse and the glory and the future move elsewhere.

May the Chinese do more good than evil with their time in the Sun, and may they remember too, that the sun always sets.

And I’ll keep watching, because while most of this has sucked, the one virtue of interesting times is that they are interesting, and age’s great advantage is perspective.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 22, 2026

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On February 22, 2026

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 22, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

 

Don’t Be Fooled By the Corrupt Court’s Tariff Decision

Josh Marshall, February 20, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]

The depth of the Supreme Court’s corruption has forced us to find new language to describe its actions. Today’s decision, undoing Trump’s massive array of tariffs that upended the global financial system, is a case in point.

We say the Court “struck down” these tariffs. But that wording is inadequate and misleading. These tariffs were always transparently illegal. Saying the actions were “struck down” suggests at least a notional logic which the Court disagreed with, or perhaps one form of standing practice and constitutional understanding away from which the Court decided to chart another course. Neither is remotely the case. There’s no ambiguity in the law in question. Trump assumed a unilateral power to “find” a national emergency and then used this (transparently fraudulent) national emergency to exercise powers the law in question doesn’t even delegate….

This is a case where the legal merits of the President’s action were just too transparently bogus even for this Court to manage and — critically — his actions and the theories undergirding his claims to the power were, for the Corrupt majority, inconvenient. The architect of the current Court — the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo — was behind the litigation that undid the tariffs. That tells you all you need to know. In this case Trump’s claim to power was neither in the interests of the Republican Party — the Court’s chief jurisprudential interest — nor any of their anti-constitutional doctrines. So of course they tossed it out. This may sound ungenerous. It’s simple reality.

Indeed, today’s decision is actually an indictment of the Court. These tariffs have been in effect for almost a year. They have upended whole sectors of the U.S. and global economies. The fact that a president can illegally exercise such powers for so long and with such great consequences for almost a year means we’re not living in a functional constitutional system. If the Constitution allows untrammeled and dictatorial powers for almost one year, massive dictator mulligans, then there is no Constitution.

Part of the delay of this ruling is the fact that most major corporations were afraid to bring litigation because they didn’t want to go to war with the president. But that’s also an indictment of the Supreme Court’s corruption. Because they made clear early on that there was little, if any, limit they would impose on Trump’s criminality or use of government power to impose retribution on constitutionally protected speech or litigation. So that’s on the Court too. But it’s only part of the equation. The Court also allowed the tariffs to remain in place while the government appealed the appellate decision striking down the tariffs back in August. Let me repeat that: back in August, almost six months ago.

In other words, most of the time in which these illegal tariffs were in effect was because of that needless stay. The logic of the stay was that deference to President’s claim of illegal powers was more important than the harm created by hundreds of billions in unconstitutional taxes being imposed on American citizens. It’s a good example of what law professor Leah Litman — one of the most important voices on the Court’s corruption — earlier this morning called the Court’s corruption via “passivity,” empowering anti-constitutional actions through deciding not to act at all or encouraging endless delays it could easily put a stop to in the interests of the constitutional order….

The Supreme Court Fractures While Striking Down Trump’s Tariff Policy

Matt Ford, February 20, 2026 [The New Republic]

It may look like the justices made a clean break with the president, but the mess the conservative bloc made for itself raises some major questions….

The six-justice majority brought together the court’s three liberal members and three of their conservative colleagues: Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. But while they agreed on the outcome, they differed widely on the reasoning that led them there….

Roberts, on the other hand, argued alongside the other two conservatives that the tariffs were invalid under the “major questions doctrine.” Under that doctrine, the executive branch cannot invoke congressionally delegated powers in novel ways on matters of “vast economic and political significance” unless the courts decide that Congress has “spoken clearly” enough to authorize it.

In practice, the major questions doctrine has served one real purpose: It’s given the court’s conservative justices a freewheeling veto over Obama and Biden administration policies over the past decade. The doctrine has also received criticism in legal circles for its lack of a firm jurisprudential basis, for the uneven ways in which the court applies it, and for its vague and insubstantial nature. (What is a matter of “vast economic and political significance,” and what isn’t?)

While the differences between the justices may seem arcane, the implications for the court’s jurisprudence could be significant. The court’s conservatives missed a chance to bolster the doctrine’s legitimacy by applying it to a Republican president for the first time. Their failure also exposed fissures among the conservatives over the nature of the major questions doctrine itself….

 

We Won? The Supreme Court Checked Trump? That’s what happened, right?

Christopher Armitage, Feb 21, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]

…The media frames the 6-3 vote as evidence of cracks forming between conservative justices. Look at what the split actually is. Three conservatives said IEEPA authorizes tariffs. Three said it does not because the statute does not use the word. Nobody on either side said the president lacks the authority to impose tariffs. The disagreement is over which form to fill out.

But the Court did not even strike down all the tariffs. It struck down roughly half. Everything imposed under Section 232 and Section 301 never went before the Court at all. Fifty percent on steel. Fifty percent on aluminum. Twenty-five percent on every imported car. Fifty percent on copper.(5) All still in effect. The effective tariff rate dropped from 16.9% to roughly 9.1%, and 9.1% is still the highest since 1946.(6) The Tax Foundation estimates the surviving tariffs alone will cost American households $400 a year and raise $635 billion over the next decade.(5) Not one headline I have found leads with the fact that half the tariffs survived untouched….

 

The Quiet Architect of Trump’s Global Trade War

[New York Times, via The Big Picture, February 20, 2026]

Jamieson Greer, a low-key lawyer from a working-class background, is rewriting the rules of the global economy at the president’s behest.

 

Trump EPA strips legal bedrock supporting clean energy

[Renewable Energy Magazine, via Clean Power Roundup, February 17, 2026]

President Donald J. Trump has announced the single largest deregulatory action in American history: the full revocation of the Obama-era “Endangerment Finding” and the consumer mandates that depend on it. The move could dismantle the legal justification for federal solar incentives and emissions standards.

 

Poll finds half of Americans describe Trump as ‘corrupt’ ‘racist’ and ‘cruel’

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo sent this in an email earlier today.

Yesterday [Axios] ran a piece about the looming midterms warning for the GOP. The first line of the piece is both arresting and provides some reassurance that the images of recent months have broken through to the public at large. It reads: “Nearly half of Americans would describe President Trump as ‘corrupt,’ ‘racist’ and ‘cruel’ in new polling full of midterm warning signs for Republicans.”

The growing focus on cruelty and corruption shows that Trump’s cratering public support isn’t just about tariff anxiety or affordability. The brutality and corruption of his government, the fulsome rejection of the civic democratic order are breaking through with a broad public. The public increasingly sees the reality of Trump’s rule, and a majority doesn’t like it.

[TW: I think this is a very important development. The Democratic party leadership needs to realize how quickly the public is being alienated and angered by the Trump / MAGA regimes’ cruelty. This can become a far more promising issue than affordability.

[No amount of public shaming or protest is going to get Trump to stop being cruel. Cruelty and violence are central to what they believe about the proper ordering of society and how to maintain it. Last week, on his Culture, Faith, and Politics podcast Pat Kahnke used the example of Pete Hegseth to this. There is “a direct line from antebellum pro-slavery theology to modern Christian nationalist ideology.” Basically, American right wing christianists have fallen for the theology developed by Confederate leader Robert Lewis Dabney to allow slaveholders claim to claim they are a Christian while owning slaves and using violence to keep them under control. This confederate thinking was revived in the mid-20th century by conservative extremist activist R.J. Rushdoony.

[Marshall continues:]

It’s tempting to think that Trump has some secret plan to rig or overrule or maybe even cancel the election. But in fact it’s not a secret. He claims he’s going to “nationalize” the election, which actually just means putting his Republican friends in charge of counting the ballots in places he’s upset about losing in prior cycles. Maybe they’ll pass the SAVE Act, though Republicans would need to abolish the filibuster to do that. So that almost certainly isn’t happening.

I don’t think Trump’s plans are going to work. Especially if the opposition is vigilant. What seems more likely is that Trump is falling prey to that common peril of aging strongmen: he’s trapped in a bubble of his own making, in which he hears only the voices of lackeys and sycophants and — when it’s not one of those — people more committed to degenerate ideology than to Trump’s public approval. People like Stephen Miller for instance….

 

Yes, They Do Want to Send ICE to the Polls

Asawin Suebsaeng, Feb 19, 2026 [Zeteo]

…Ever since the early months of the second Trump era, several well-placed sources – Trump appointees in the government, other MAGA diehards close to the White House – relayed to me private conversations happening in the upper tiers of the federal government about potentially sending armed ICE agents to US polling places, during the 2026 midterms or other elections. Some of these on-again-off-again conversations – preliminary and casual as some of them were – happened with President Trump in the room or at the table.

To some of MAGAworld’s most prominent anti-immigration zealots, the logic (or, authoritarian and racist wish-casting, depending on who you ask) went: The president has been saying for a long time that “the illegals” are voting in massive numbers and hence rigging elections for the Democrats. It makes no sense NOT to send ICE agents to polling places during critical elections.

It goes without saying that the GOP’s persistent claim that undocumented voters are swinging elections all over the place to the Dems is all a bunch of bullshit that isn’t happening, and that Trump and his party are the ones working overtime to steal and rig elections. Trump’s federal goon squad showing up, possibly with loaded guns, at or near your local polling station – even just to stand there and stare – would be nothing short of thuggish, corrupt voter intimidation tactics, especially given what we know they’re capable of doing both to citizens and noncitizens….

 

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

The Increasing Attacks on Francesca Albanese Presage a New Dark Age 

Chris Hedges, February 16, 2026

…Francesca was placed by the Trump administration on the Office of Foreign Assets Control list of the U.S. Treasury Department — normally used to sanction those accused of money laundering or being involved with terrorist organizations — six days after the release of her report, “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide,” which documented the global corporations that make billions of dollars from the genocide in Gaza and occupation of Palestinians.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control list — weaponized by the Trump administration to persecute Francesca and in violation of the diplomatic immunity granted to U.N. officials — bans her from entering the U.S. It prohibits any financial institution from having her as a client. A bank engages in financial transactions with Francesca is banned from operating in dollars, faces multimillion-dollar fines and is blocked from international payment systems. This has cut her off from global banking, leaving her unable to use credit cards or book a hotel in her name. Her assets in the U.S. are frozen. It has seen her medical insurance refuse to reimburse her for medical expenses. It has resulted in institutions, including U.S. universities, human rights groups and NGOs that once collaborated with her severing ties, fearing onerous U.S. penalties. The sanctions followed those imposed in February and June of last year on The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor Karim Khan along with two judges for issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant….

Credit cards cancelled, Google accounts closed: ICC judges on life under Trump sanctions 

[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 02-19-2025]

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Open Thread

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On February 21, 2026

18 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Genocide & Brown Shirts Are Being Normalized

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On February 19, 2026

31 Comments

So we have an ongoing genocide in Gaza. The death toll, as estimated by scientists, is probably north of half a million. (The official toll is laughable and obviously wrong, growth slowing over time.)

Trump was able to use oil piracy and a kidnapping to bend Venezuela to his will.

Now he’s cut off oil to Cuba, and because of how modern economies work, that means famine.

Deliberately causing a famine is genocidal.

This genocide creep. America could have done this to Cuba any time after the fall of the USSR. Sanctions were nasty and caused a lot of suffering and even deaths, but they didn’t rise to the level of “let’s just starve them to death. They’ll give in.”

Mind you, they tried to do this to Yemen, engineering a low-grade famine. Deaths were in the low to mid hundreds of thousands. Genocide. It was intentional, everyone knew that’s what was the intention.

In Israel a lot were killed by arms, but the cutting off of medical supplies, fuel and food I’m sure will have killed even more people.

Multiple times the US and/or its allies has engineered a famine. In Yemen with Saudi Arabian help. Israel with Israelis taking the lead, but the US supporting it all along the way, as when it cut funding to the primary aid agency, UNWRA.

Now Cuba.

This is the way it works. Whenever something evil is done by the powerful to the weak, they look to see if there were consequences. If not, they expand, moving inwards. Yemen is a place no one cares about in the West: there wasn’t a lot of coverage. Palestine got tons of coverage and even law cases, but in the end no one powerful suffered, and the genocide was and is pushed thru. Opponents lost their jobs, went to prison and were deported or lost their banking access (Albanese, for example.)

Since those responsible for the genocide got away with it twice, they’re now doing it a third time.

Everything the powerful do to someone else is something they are willing to do to you if they think it’s in their interest, or just fun.

In the US we have the ICE crackdowns. I wrote for years that if Trump went wild, ICE would be his brown shirts, and here we are. Substantially we have masked men in unmarked cars without badges or in most cases judicial warrants, terrorizing Americans. Not as bad as what Israelis do to Palestinians or America and NATO did in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the same sort of thing. Just call everyone an immigrant or a terrorist and do what you want to them. Refuse to obey the law, ignore judges (what can they do) and on your way.

Start internally with “immigrants” but sweep up lots of citizens and treat them abusively, without reference to their rights.

Set those precedents. And if you get away with it: if no one important winds up punished, then you can expand it. Go after the citizens next. Kick out native Americans. Keep people locked up for months on end without any real judge even knowing about it. Ignore health care problems, let them suffer and die.

Every time the elites of any country get away with abusing regular people, whether foreign or domestic, the line moves on what is acceptable.

We fight for other people to be treated well not just because we aren’t monsters, but because we know that it could be us. Every time we fail to make sure other people are treated fairly and well, we make ourselves less secure. What was done to them can now be done to us. It is for this reasons that even people accused of the worst crimes, like pedophilia and rape have rights, because an accusation isn’t proof and the government and police often get things wrong or lie.

The precedents are now firm that anyone who isn’t in the elite has limited rights: no free speech, no right to see an attorney, no right to security against search and seizure, and so on.

Genocide and ignoring the rule of law, even ignoring judicial rulings, are now the norm.

And the goal isn’t genocide of foreigners. The goal is to get to the point where they can lock up or kill anyone they want domestically.

That’s what American elites want. If an election is going to be lost, fix it. If a person is against a genocide, lock them up or deport them or de-bank them. Anyone who is inconvenient because they oppose what the elite group in power find the rule of law is increasingly no shield. It’s been broken too often, elites know they can mass murder, rape and traffic children and teens with few or no consequences.

What has been done to outsiders will increasingly be done to us, core Western citizens. By failing to protect others, we set the precedents that we were no longer protected.

Never think “it’s OK to do monstrous things to outsiders” because everyone who isn’t an elite eventually becomes an outsider.

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Short Take On Possible/Probable War On Iran

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On February 18, 2026

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~by Sean Paul Kelley

I don’t know if we’re going to bomb Iran or not. I hope we don’t but hope is not a policy. All I’m left with is my personal experience in Iran and how I go about analyzing foreign affairs.

As many of you know, I’m a realist. Once upon a time, my realism was based on the correlation of powers and what the United States could and couldn’t do with its capabilities so long as they were in line with political adjectives that were achievable.

Today I’m a realist, a chastened realist; more a pragmatist who has withnessed war after war after war lost. I’ve witnessed “Western powers often wage wars disconnected from achievable political outcomes (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya),” instead of aligning the wars with achievable political aims. You know, the exact opposite of Uncle Carl Clausewitz!

Moreoever, my hardcore realism has ameliorated over the years after several long discussions with Ian. Ian’s never been afraid to upbraid me publicly and privately for my quasi imperial impulses. I’m grateful to Ian for helping me see the error of my ways.

But I digress.

I know for certain two things will happen if we attack Iran.

First, based on my experience in Iran, the Iranians will rally around their legitimate government and support it to the end. When I was there the Iranians were warm and engaging. Even the Mullahs at the mosques we visited. But when it came to the subject of US interference in internal Iranian affairs, all were a unified voice: stay out of our government. Seems like a reasonable request, if you ask me.

Take a close look at the photo. A young couple enjoying pizza with my father and I in 2006. This is who we’ll be kiling. They have faces and names.

Second, we will use an enormous amount of ordinance attacking Iran and leave ourselves even more vulnerable than we already are because we have such a shitty military industrial complex that can’t make anything without a long lead time and shit tons of profits. Our defense industry is dominated by general and flag officers on the grift.

Like I said, I don’t know if we’re just posturing or if we’re really gonna attack.

I hope we’re not but I’m afraid we are.

Nota bene: In the comments Nat mentions a depressing X thread worth a read. But if you really want to be depressed check this X thread out where Col. Wilkerson says, “I think Israel will cease to exist unless Netanyahu does turn to a nuclear weapon or two.”

A Story of Iran from 2006 That Deserves To Be Retold

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On February 18, 2026

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~by Sean Paul Kelley

This narrative originally appeared in the San Antonio Express News on 3/17/2007, which is no longer online. 

Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport is a cheerless backwater, especially at four in the morning, after enduring a ten hour flight to Amsterdam, a nine hour delay, followed by the six hour flight to Tehran. At this hour clearing customs takes an eternity and the only stimulus in the lonely, echoing arrival hall, other than young female passport inspectors sporting lumpy black chadors and henna tattooed hands, is the faded portrait of the Ayatollah Khomenei grimly staring down at those unlucky enough to remain in the customs queue. But that’s how my pilgrimage to Iran began last October, bone-tired, bleary-eyed and ready for whatever came next.

Then, like the click of a slide show I was off to the golden domes of Qom, through elegant Isfahan, the desolate, ancient beauty of Pasagardae and Persepolis and graceful Shiraz. I dashed across the Dasht-i Kavir desert, passing through Yazd long enough to explore its underground aqueducts. I spent one lonely night in Tabas, Queen of the Desert and then to Nishapur the gateway to Khorasan and Iran’s most wrecked, ruined and rebuilt city, which has survived earthquakes, Scythians, Turks, Mongols and Timurids. It was two short weeks of grasping memories from the jealous clutches of time; three thousand years of culture rushed by me in a blur until I arrived in Iran’s holiest city, Meshed, the chief object of my journey.

Once known as Sanabad, it was here, in 817 AD, that the eighth Shi’ite Imam, Reza, a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, arrived after a triumphant tour of the Shi’a heartland. The Abbasid Caliph Ma’mun, a Sunni, grew jealous of the Imam’s rising popularity and imprisoned him. Fearing the Imam’s growing spiritual authority might mature into something more temporal, something the greedy Caliph could not allow, Ma’mun devised a plot involving pomegranates and poison, which were fed to an unsuspecting Imam who soon fell ill and died.

Immense waves of grief washed over the sands of Persia and the martyred Imam’s tomb quickly became a site of pilgrimage, one that attracted the scattered Shi’a of the Caliph’s far flung empire. Surviving invasions, earthquakes, rapine and ruin, the site, and even the name changed. Sanabad became known as Meshed—‘place of Martyrdom’—and Meshed turned into a booming modern metropolis sitting astride the old Silk Roads, some lead north to Samarkand and China and others west to the Levant and the Italian city states.

I crawled out of the car just as the sun set and walked into the hotel. Members of the Tajik national soccer team milled about the small, two-star hotel lobby; a curious mélange of Tajik, Farsi and Russian filled my ears.

“Passport please,” the attendant asked. I fumbled through my money belt but quickly complied.

I looked up, behind the desk stood a clean shaven young man with slightly receding hair and cheerful, pecan colored eyes.
“American?”

“Yes.”

“How awesome!” he exclaimed in perfect iomatic American English.
“Never met an one of you before,” he blurted excitedly

He came out from around the lobby desk, arms outstretched, exclaiming all in one breath, “This is the best day of my life.”

And hugged me.

After two weeks of kind salutations, warm welcomes and polite, almost infectious pride I still wasn’t prepared for an outpouring quite like this.

“So, now that I’ve hugged a complete stranger, do you have a name?” I joked, awkwardly.

“Amir Isazysadr,” he said, stretching out his hand.

“Sean-Paul Kelley,” I replied.

We shook hands vigorously. Full of contagious enthusiasm, I liked him instantly.

“Why Meshed? It is a big, dusty, ugly city, filled with too many people.”

“Gohar Shad,” I told him, as if in a whisper. “If I’m lucky I will see the Gohar Shad.”

“The mosque surrounding the Shrine of the Imam Reza is splendid,” he said.

“Are you Muslim?” he asked.

“No, I am not.”

“That is a pity my friend, because one pilgrimage to the Shrine of the Imam Reza is equal to 17,000 Meccan pilgrimages, or so say the mullahs.”

Between the late 9th and 14th centuries the area surrounding Meshed witnessed the collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate, an irruption of Turkic hordes into Persia and then the Mongol cataclysm. Through it all the pilgrims returned. Finally, Tamerlane’s son Shah Rukh, who, faced with the growing demands of pilgrims, enlarged the shrine in the early 15th century. His formidable wife, Gohar Shad, ordered the construction of a new congregational mosque around the Imam’s tomb as well, commissioning the Persian architect Qavam al-din Shirazi with the task. In the 1930s the shrine, by now a burgeoning complex in need of restoration, was again enlarged by Reza Shah. After the revolution it was enlarged once more to its present size encompassing more than 75 hectares in the heart of the city.

Since the revolution non-Muslims have been prohibited entry into the Shrine housing Imam Reza’s tomb, but the rules regarding the Sacred Precinct and mosque surrounding the Shrine are more confusing. Some guards let non-Muslims pass. Others do not. Sometimes it just depends on what day one visits. Aware of this maddening state of affairs long before I arrived in Meshed, it wasn’t until the night before my visit that I asked Amir and his brothers, who had come for dinner at the hotel, for help.
“What should I do? I want to get in, but I don’t want to see the Shrine, that would be disrespectful. I only want to see the Gohar Shad.”

“Talk to the guards, express to them your deep admiration for the art of our land,” he told me, winking.

“No,” said Ali, with a strange grin, “it would be best if he said nothing. Just act like an Iranian.”

Adel, the youngest suggested that I hire a local guide, one who might be able to bribe the guards.

“No bribes, not for this,” I replied.

The brothers looked at each other, said something in Farsi and laughed.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“You are funny. This is such a serious matter for you. But Ali is right. Just walk in. Say nothing to the guards. Act like you belong there.”

“So, I’ll have to brazen it out, yes?”

They laughed again, as if in on some secret.

“Yes,” said Adel. “I’m certain you will be fine.”

The next day I set off before late afternoon prayers. The walk from my hotel to the Sacred Precinct in the heart of the city was easy. I only stopped once for directions before I arrived.

I crossed the street, dodging traffic, stepped onto the large plaza and strode towards the entrance gates. A large family ambled slowly in front of me, the mother pushing a baby stroller. I followed them closely, better to blend in. A guard waved a security wand over and around me as nervous fear and excitement pulsed through me. He patted me down for good measure and sent me through the gates. Not a word was spoken until I was about ten meters away. I said nothing and kept walking.

Once inside the main gates I took a moment to absorb the outer plaza. Polished and sparkling in the sun the immense outer courtyard was paved in bluish marble. A thick wall of brick geometrical shapes rose up in front of me, not, however, high enough to block out the sun, as I shielded my eyes. Finally, I caught a glimpse of a small passageway, took three deep breaths and walked into the main quadrangle of the Gohar Shad.

For a moment all activity around me stopped. The colors were mesmerizing, as turquoise, pink, purple, yellow and green danced along the walls. Tall bands of ivory white kufic calligraphy topped four high iwans (monumental arches). Arabesques and floral patterns blended into the right angles of the courtyard. A perfect symmetry of light and beauty collided and caromed up and across the walls climaxing in a narrowing pointed arch, its niche filled with deep blue muqarnas. Sitting against a wall in a small niche I watched pilgrims enter the courtyard, hundreds of them milling about under the cerulean sky. Like the sacred spaces of any religion, they all come to participate in something personal but paradoxically bigger than themselves. Perhaps a few came, like me, hoping to snatch a hint of inspiration, to touch the walls and feel the echoes of the past on my fingertips. Or maybe there were others seeking surcease from their own troubles, finding peace at the foot of the Imam’s tomb.

A thick cloud covered the sun while the faint prayers of the devout rose up into the cool air of the courtyard. An inner calm came over me, that wondrous calm which is reserved for the summits of mountains, perfect sunsets and the birth of one’s children.
The call to prayer sounded. Thus, like many other more famous travelers before me, my time was cut short. Out of respect for traditions not my own, I left. I walked back to our hotel in contented silence.

Later that evening I ate a last meal with the Brothers Isazysadr. All three asked me the finer points of certain English words and taught me a few similar Farsi words, but cautioned me not to speak them in public or in mixed company. Towards the end of the night, Adel asked me about my day.

“I hear you made it into the Gohar Shad today, yes?”

“I did. It was worth coming all this way just to have ten minutes there.”

“Indeed, they let many foreigners in at this time, especially Americans. I think the Mullahs are trying to, how do you say it, ‘play nice’ with your government?”

Slightly crestfallen, I replied, “I didn’t know that. I thought I was sneaking in. Like a real adventurer, you know? You three knew all along I would get in, didn’t you?” The table erupted in laughter.

“Sean-Paul, my good friend,” said Ali, “nothing is ever as it appears in Iran. Surely you have learned this by now.”

Apparently I hadn’t. But I was catching on.

I Miss the Lies of the 1990s but I Don’t Want to Go Back

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On February 17, 2026

18 Comments

Watching this Richard J. Murphy podcast with John Christensen I was struck by an anecdote that Christensen shared about corruption on the Isle of Jersey in the late 1990s (note that I didn’t have time to confirm spelling of the proper names mentioned or fact check, so I’m redacting those):

John Christensen:I for quite a long time I had been very disillusioned with the government in Jersey. It’s become clear to me that by and large the the regulatory pro processes the laws in play and regulations in place were window dressing exercises and there was very very weak enforcement or compliance.

So the whole thing as far as I was concerned was a charade.

Late one January evening (and this is 1996) the phone went at my home and it was a Wall Street Journal investigating investigating journalist calling an and he started questioning me about a currency trader who was operating in Jersey and a subsidiary of the Swiss bank UBS.

The subsidiary was called [redacted] and and and a major churn client churning exercise which had cost a bunch of American investors tens of millions of (dollars).

And what he said was that the government of Jersey was thwarting any attempt at investigating this and allowing these investors who had lost tens of millions to have access to justice.

I said, “I know nothing about this whatsoever.”

He clearly thought I was bullshitting. He said, “But it’s your department that issued the license to the currency trader to trade in Jersey. (The trader) was not a Jerseyman, and it’s your department that gave him the housing or or supported his application for a housing license to rent property in Jersey.

And I said, “Well, to be honest, mate, I know everything that goes on in my department. I’ve never heard of this.”

He clearly thought I was a liar. And I did a deal. I said I will go in first thing tomorrow morning and check the files and if what you’ve said is correct then I will help you. I will cooperate.

Now I was in this extraordinary situation because I was a very senior civil servant. In fact I headed the government economic service. Part of my job was to work with international media.

I went in, checked everything he said, stood up and I realized that in order to circumvent me and my department, my boss, [redacted], the chief adviser…had gone round my back um and issued a license which should never have been issued and had given support for a housing consent which by policy should not have been supported.

And he’d done that because it turns out that at that at the time when this felony started, the most important politician in Jersey happened to be a member of the board of [redacted].

So here’s corruption in a very British form.
…
Another part of the corruption lay with the media in Jersey. BBC Radio Jersey never asked the the correct questions. The Jersey Evening Post never asked the correct questions; which were how the hell did this guy get a license to operate in Jersey and how the hell did he get a housing permit?

Because both were against government policy. And the reason they did that was because the Jersey Eden Post at that time belonged to a very senior politician which itself is corrupt.

This is all very British. This is the way things operate in Britain.

Journalists go to great lengths to not ask the right questions because they are themselves corrupted. …It was a staterun organ in effect at that period and it probably still is to some extent.

This anecdote raised conflicting points in my mind.

On the one hand, I admire the seriousness, technical expertise, and ethics of Murphy and Christensen. They represent the best of their generation and have multiple qualities I don’t see from younger reformers.

I also am nostalgic for an era in which a whistleblower like Christensen could actually make an impact by talking to the press. People were tried and convicted, etc.

That kind of thing is much missed in the Trump/Starmer era.

On the other hand, my lived experience of the 1990s contrasts so strongly with how the period is damned to be remembered historically that it inspires awe at the power of the dominant narrative in the West in that era.

The 1990s was the age of Sir Jimmy Saville after all.

In America we had Bill Cosby and Woody Allen, who may not have been knighted but had a comparable status as secular sages, beloved and admired.

Of course, we didn’t know then what we know now about Saville being a prolific sex predator, or Cosby being a serial rapist or in Allen’s case, people were trying to tell us, but many people were convinced his marriage to his ex-wife’s daughter was a love match.

We certainly didn’t know Woody was having dinner with Noam Chomsky….and a man we hadn’t heard of yet named Jeffrey Epstein.

It was comforting to watch the official propaganda of Ken Burns’ Civil War series on PBS and be reassured about the noble nature of both sides in that war and then follow it up with Eyes on the Prize which taught us that things had been bad in the racist past but the miraculous 1960s had solved everything.

Perhaps I was just young and naive, but in the 1990s it somehow seemed plausible to accept the mythologies of the capitalist west.

Things like the Iran-Contra Scandal or Watergate showed that there was corruption, but it was limited and could be dealt with.

After all, wasn’t that bright young Rudy Guliani bringing down the Mafia itself?

Hadn’t the evil empire of the USSR fallen without a war?

Hadn’t an American president united the whole world against Saddam Hussein’s aggression and fought and won a war to liberate Kuwait?

Even better hadn’t the Color Revolution in Serbia shown that Gene Sharp had distilled the non-violent revolutionary techniques of Gandhi and MLK into a formidable instrument for freedom?

From the vantage point of 2026, post-Enron, post-9/11, post-2008, post-Maidan, post-Trump/Brexit, post-COVID, it’s just as impossible to look back fondly at Gene Sharp and company as it is to enjoy the comedy of Bill Cosby with your kids.

Yes, it is upsetting and alarming to watch David Ellison’s CBS blatantly censoring a late night show or US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declaring a new era of colonialism, but perhaps it’s good that the lies of this era are so flagrant.

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