Ian Welsh

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

Month: September 2026

Information Overlord: Dmitry Orlov Changes His Hypothesis for US Collapse

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On September 5, 2026

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Nat Wilson Turner = Information Overlord = Flames Up = Phones Out = No Sense of Urgency
From me this week

Worth watching

  • Disgraceful Degradation — Dmitry Orlov. Orlov, one of the founders of “collapseology,” moves to YouTube and makes a major change to his famous analogy that US collapse will resemble Soviet collapse.

    I feel sorry to have led people down a garden path that doesn’t lead to anything specific. People wanted to know when to throw the bags full of cans of spam and shotgun shells into the back of the pickup truck and drive for the hills. Feel free to do that anytime you like, I kept telling them. But I feel that I must do better. And now I believe that I finally can. If I think about something long and hard, sometimes a good idea does eventually pop into my head. I have no idea how that happens. It just happens. or it doesn’t. And in this case, it has finally dawned on me that there was to begin with a flaw in my comparison of the USA and the USSR. They’re not quite symmetrical after all.

    There is a key difference that have that I have been neglecting to take into account. Yes, they were both 20th century military and industrial superpowers, and they both espoused opposing now defunct ideologies. and my superpower collapse soup analogy applied almost equally to both of them. But there is a rather important difference between them. The US is a colonial empire much like the British Empire and other western empires were once. These empires were based on the exploitation of their colonial possessions. They sucked resources out of them while preventing their social and economic development. Along the way, they saddled them with permanent debt servitude. They enforced their trade policies through military means. But the heavy-handed tactics of previous colonial eras are no longer necessary. Instead, there is control of mass media, cyber warfare, color revolutions, the IMF, the World Bank, and the US Treasury with its endless sanctions. These are all means of coercing compliance. from countless from countries around the world. And what this compliance means is willingness to export products and commodities in exchange for US government debt.

    This is the wealth pump which the US has been running for decades to drain wealth from around the world to export inflation and to subjugate much of the planet. This wealth pump has become less effective over time. But even if it stops working altogether, there is a fall back to an older American technique, piracy. How well it can be made to work in the 21st century remains to be seen. But it won’t fail for the lack of trying.

  • Cold War 2.0 #84: Russia Secretly Helps Iran Develop Supersonic Missiles — Syriana Analysis, with Tarik Cyril Amar. Tarik Cyril Amar’s weekly appearances on Syriana Analysis are a weekly must listen to me. I love their dynamic, their accents, their humor, and they are subject matter experts I trust as much as I trust anyone about these topics (I trust no one about these topics).
  • Russia’s Ukraine Endgame — Putin Has Lost Patience With Zelensky — Vladimir Brovkin. Former Harvard Prof Dr. Vladimir Brovkin understands Russia better than most. He’s worth listening to.
  • Setback for Trump: Iran intensifies US strikes as Vance denies wedding attack — Janta Ka Reporter. Great daily anti-Imperialist news round ups, and presenter Rifad Jawaid’s vicious and hilarious commentary on Trump regime buffoonery is always amusing listening — even when covering the most awful shit.
  • On Sh*t… Another Private Credit Fund Just Blew Up — Eurodollar University. My go to for coverage of private credit’s struggles.

The AI bubble and its doomers

Politics and corruption

Also worth your time

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Lack of Fear of Death

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On September 4, 2026

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Back in 93 I spent 3 months in hospital. It was… beyond bad.

But it had one great advantage. I lost my fear of death.

I don’t know what happens after death (though as someone whose done ludicrous amounts of spiritual work I have strong suspicions) but even if it’s “that’s it, it’s over” I don’t fear it because I know that bad shit, beyond most people’s imaginations, can happen while you’re alive. Death can becomes one’s best friend.

Westerners fear death greatly. They say stupid things like it being your job to make the other person die for their country.

Sure. Obviously killing them and not dying is preferable in most cases.

But being willing to die for your beliefs, whatever they are, is also incredibly powerful. You’d think so-called Christian countries would understand the power of martyrdom.

Shi’a society is remarkably based around this. Iman Hussein refused to acknowledge the Umayyad caliph Yazid I, whom they considered corrupt. He went into battle knowing he would lose and indeed he did. He did the right thing even though it cost him his life.

And what that has lead to, in the modern era, is organizations like the Iranian government and Hezbollah. Sure, they’d rather not die, but they know there are worse things than death, like living on your knees or crawling on your belly. Martyrdom is celebrated. It helps, of course, that they believe there’s a heaven waiting, but so do many religions whose followers are far less willing to die for their beliefs. (Most Christians aren’t any more.)

You see Iranian leaders say things like death is preferable to living in an unjust world. Almost every single senior leader of Iran from before the war was killed in the first part of the war. I believe only two survived.

And it didn’t make a difference, except that it strengthened hard-liners who wanted to fight.

Western leaders are, as a group, cowards. This wasn’t always the case: in WWII elites fought or sent their children to war. Many of the died. In WWI the cream of Britain’s elite youngsters died in the trenches, often leading suicidal charges.

But our modern leaders like Trump are cowards. They never fought in war and they don’t send their kids to war. They aren’t willing to die.

Further they lead societies where they are hurting the majority of the population. Western leaders think they are special because the people who work for them fundamentally don’t want to. There is no sense of mission, despite all the MBA bullshit trying to create purpose and meaning in corporations.

Everyone knows that the only thing Western leaders believe in is making the rich (themselves, usually) richer. So to get a western organization to work requires extreme incentives: greed for the rulership class, the whip of hunger and homelessness for the peons.

Western leaders thus consider themselves special, because they need to force people to do what they want and without their constant threats and incentives their organizations would fall apart. No one works for a bank or private equity because they believe in anything other than getting rich, or at the lower level, they believe in not winding up homeless.

So Western leaders are, in fact, important: they’re leading their societies in directions that are bad for most people, and that takes an immense amount of cunning and work.

Further there isn’t a deep bench. Because no one believes in the mission who isn’t near the top. Why would they? It doesn’t benefit them, and there’s nothing uplifting about “mint more billionaires”.

This is not to say that all Iranians are true believers or support the government. But the people in the military and government, do believe in the “mission”. They are the metaphorical children of Iman Hussein. They do not fear death.

Hezbollah is the same, but more so: if you’re a Hezbollah member, odds are you believe strongly and you know that Israel only left Lebanon last time because you forced them to.

And if you get killed, someone else replaces you who believes. There’s a deep bench, right from the top to the soldiers and bureaucrats (and remember, Hezbollah runs clinics, picks up garbage and even provides pensions. It’s a government within Lebanon.)

Western leaders can’t wrap their heads around this. They’d do anything to save their own lives and they don’t understand people who would rather die than give up their beliefs. They don’t understand the people who then replace the dead and continue the fight.

If Iranian leaders feared death, the war would be over. They would have cut the sort of deal Delcy Rodriguez did in Venezeula “yes master, I’ll do whatever you say if you leave me at the top of a society I no longer run. Just don’t kill or kidnap me, please.”

Greedy coward.

That won’t happen in Iran. There’s no one in the leadership with enough support to pull it off, if there’s anyone at all who would consider it.

Sometimes to serve your cause, to remain true to your beliefs, you have to be willing to die. Americans knew that once. The West knew it once. Christians knew it once.

Today? The leadership of the West are substantially all cowards.

The truth is that if you will do anything to avoid dying, you’re a slave to anyone who can credibly threaten you with death.

Iranians and Hezbollah members refuse to be slaves.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years, Part 1: COVID

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On September 2, 2026

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From the vantage point of September, 2026 it might seem like pointless assholism to kick cancer-ridden, senile old Joe Biden when he’s down.

After all, we’ve got a rancid dotard in Trump threatening to nuke Iran in the midst of what John Mearsheimer is calling the greatest geo-strategic disaster in US history, why both with ol’ black-hearted Joe?

The reason is simple.

Until Americans, particularly Democrats reckon with just how vile, stupid, and deadly the last three Democratic presidential administrations have been (yes, America’s neocon foreign policy starts with Bill Clinton blowing up Yugoslavia and turning NATO into an offensive alliance and has continued to warmonger ever since, regardless of which party was in power), we’ll keep getting stuck with more of the same “not quite as bad as the Republicans” bullshit and the end of the republic will only escalate.

There is currently a well funded counter-revolution occurring in the Democratic party in which centrist Dems and the MSM are aligning to destroy anti-genocide candidates like Graham Platner in Maine (got him) and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan (they’re still trying although he’s up in the polls).

If Dem voters don’t belatedly realize that their party establishment leadership is as corrupt as the GOP and actively push to purge them, we will not be able to vote our way out.

Never forget the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

So let’s look at the Delaware liar’s abysmal record as US President.

I’m going to argue that the senile asshole and the people around him actually running the country were responsible for not one, not two, but three mass death events that may or may not meet the legal definition of genocide, but certainly meet the moral one.

We’ll start with COVID.

Somehow Biden’s COVID Policies Were Worse Than Trump’s

An idiot like Trump, who’s openly an anti-science ignoramus could have been expected to bungle the response to a once-in-a-century pandemic like COVID. And of course Trump’s policies were a disaster. I don’t have time or space to litigate that here.

I’m just saying that as awful as Trump was on the issue, Biden managed to be even worse — when competence and sanity were key parts of his campaign pitch.

But Biden explicitly promised a return to best practices, “follow the science” and all that.

Instead we got “take the vax” and “get back to work.”

There was never a correction of the bad science of 2020 to clearly explain to people that COVID was spread via aerosols in the air, was rarely transmissable outdoors, and could be largely contained indoors with good ventilation systems and air quality monitoring.

There was also the huge lie that the vaccine would prevent transmission. That lie fooled a lot of people because many vaccines do prevent transmission (measles, polio, mumps, etc), but not for a corona virus like COVID. It shouldn’t have been a hard sell — people know that there’s no point in making a common cold vaccine because it’s a corona virus and changes too fast. We’ve accepted the need for new flu vaccines every year for the same reason.

But no explanations were forthcoming from the ghouls in the Biden administration. Just quiet announcements that data was going to be restricted2

It was the gaslighting of the Biden era that was the hardest thing to take (as long as his policies didn’t give you COVID that is). Four years of assholes insisting “he’s not senile, he’s got a stutter,” “the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine”, “the IDF is investigating” and all that crap. Was enough to drive a person insane. It certainly strained my relationships with friends and family and cost me at least one decade-long creative partnership.

The injury added to the insult was diverting money for COVID relief and prevention diverted to law enforcement3 and other bullshit.

Nearly twice the toll of the first year
444,583
Covid deaths under Trump
Weeks ending 1 Feb 2020 through 16 Jan 2021.

776,832
Covid deaths under Biden
Weeks ending 23 Jan 2021 through 18 Jan 2025 — 1.75 times as many, in a period when vaccines were free and universally available.

Both figures are sums of CDC’s own weekly provisional counts of deaths with Covid-19 on the certificate (dataset r8kw-7aab, data as of 27 Aug 2026). 2021 alone — the administration’s first year — killed more Americans than 2020 did.1

Bar chart of recorded Covid deaths and CDC excess deaths by year, 2020 through 2024. Recorded deaths peak at 463,267 in 2021; excess deaths peak at 530,876 the same year. The excess-death series stops after 2022, when CDC quit publishing it.

The green series ends after 2022: CDC’s excess-death dataset stops at the week ending 16 September 2023 and was never resumed. The gap in the chart is the blackout, drawn to scale.

If Biden Was Out of It, Who Actually Did This?

Funny you should ask.

I happen to think it’s important to lay the blame where it belongs with murderous vermin like Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Obama’s ebola coordinator whose hiring was supposed to signal a return to competence.

Instead he pulled shit like retweeting MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle calling the OSHA vaccine rule “an ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations” which retweet was then cited by The Fifth Circuit as an endorsement when it stayed the rule, and Gorsuch pointed to it when the Supreme Court killed the mandate that January. The chief of staff’s own tweet helped sink the only workplace-safety rule the administration attempted.

Then there was Covid-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients, a management consultant and one-time Facebook board member with no public health background, wwho was somehow selected to run the response as a logistics problem for the entire vax-only stretch: the May 2021 unmasking, the Delta summer, the December 2021 rapid-test shortage, the blame-the-unvaccinated presser that December.

Criticized on the way out for rosy predictions of a Covid-free summer and for the test shortage; Public Citizen went after him on global vaccine access. He failed upward to become Biden’s chief of staff in February 2023 with God only knows how many American corpses ground under his wing-tips.

Somehow Zients’ Deputy Response Coordinator Natalie Quillian didn’t save the day, I guess her experience as Deputy Campaign Manager hadn’t really prepared her for handling a pandemic. Go figure.

And who can forget CDC Director Rochelle Walensky who wrote the May 2021 guidance telling vaccinated people to unmask at roughly 35% full vaccination, the statement that vaccinated people don’t carry the virus, the December 2021 isolation cut from ten days to five under airline pressure, and the February 2022 Community Levels metric that turned the map green. A regular magician of mass murder!

And then there’s Zients’ replacement as Covid-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha, who kicked off the “personal risk assessment” era and fobbed off the government’s responsibility to lead a united national pandemic strategy off on individuals left to fend for ourselves.

Jha’s October 2022 National Strategy for Improving Indoor Air Quality is the document that proves they knew what ventilation would take but for reasons that have always baffled me, the chance to do well by doing good (ie it would have been a massive honest graft and payoff opportunity, the kind good government runs on) and funding and leading a national campaign to improve indoor ventilation in schools, hospitals, nursing homes and workplaces….instead he declared the pandemic over while hundreds of thousands died.

And let’s have a special shout-out for the The Biden-Harris transition COVID advisory board: Co-chairs David Kessler, Vivek Murthy, Marcella Nunez-Smith. Members Ezekiel Emanuel, Michael Osterholm, Céline Gounder, Atul Gawande, Luciana Borio, Rick Bright, David Michaels, Julie Morita, Loyce Pace, Eric Goosby, Jill Jim, Jane Hopkins.

Special plaudits to board members David Michaels and Ezekiel Emanuel (older brother of disgraced ex-Chicago Mayor Rahm and UFC and WWE owner Ari Emanuel).

Michaels, an epidemiologist and Obama’s head of OSHA for eight years, who publicly called for an emergency OSHA standard covering inhalation hazards but was awful quiet when Biden (or someone not senile acting on his behalf) killed his own OSHA’s proposed rule.

Emanuel joined five other former transition COVID advisory board members in publishing three JAMA viewpoints calling for a “new normal” of life with COVID, explicitly rejecting elimination, just as Omicron peaked.

Dr. Emanuel boldly said “we’re not going to defeat the coronavirus. It’s here to stay.”

The White House distanced itself from the papers — and then adopted the posture seven weeks later with the Community Levels change.

But never fear, Zeke got his back when he was very early to distance himself from the Biden administration’s disastrous COVID policy. Family trait of the Emanuels to be on both sides of every issue.

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Notes

1. Four ways to count the dead

“Excess deaths” means different things depending on the baseline, and the answers differ by a factor of two.

Measure 2021 2022 Baseline
Recorded Covid deaths
CDC provisional counts, r8kw-7aab		 463,267 246,297 None — a direct count of death certificates.
CDC excess deaths, all causes
CDC xkkf-xrst, summed by year		 530,876 331,469 Observed deaths minus the average expected from prior years.
Same, conservative version
observed minus the upper bound of expected		 443,697 232,223 The cautious read of the same CDC data — the floor.
Academic pandemic baseline
Paglino & Stokes et al., Science Advances		 538,708 — County-level model, March-to-February years. Year one was 620,872.
Peer-country gap
Bor et al., JAMA Health Forum		 1,098,808 820,396 Deaths that wouldn’t have happened at the death rates of 21 peer countries. Only partly Covid.

These measure different things and are not additive. Excess deaths include overdoses, missed screenings and untreated disease — everything a wrecked health system does to people, not only the virus. ↩

2. The order in which the counting stopped

1 May 2021 CDC stops investigating breakthrough infections that don’t end in hospitalization or death. Everything milder goes uncounted — including the data that could have tested the claim that the vaccinated weren’t spreading it.
20 Feb 2022 The Times reports the CDC is withholding most of the data it collects — booster effectiveness for adults 18 to 49, hospitalizations by age, race and vaccination status, wastewater. The stated reason was fear the numbers would be misinterpreted.
25 Feb 2022 “Community Levels” replace community transmission, four days before the State of the Union. The threshold for a green county moves from under 10 weekly cases per 100,000 to as many as 200. Most of the map turns green overnight and the mask recommendations lapse with it.
Spring 2022 Free testing winds down and reported cases detach from wastewater readings. From here the case count measures who can still get a test, not who is sick.
18 Sep 2022 Biden, on 60 Minutes at the Detroit Auto Show: “The pandemic is over.” The line complicated his own administration’s pending request for Covid funding.
11 May 2023 The public health emergency ends and the authority to collect goes with it. CDC stops reporting new cases nationally, loses the power to compel labs to report results, and electronic reporting of negative tests ends. Hospital reporting drops from daily to weekly.
16 Sep 2023 The last week of data in CDC’s excess-death dataset. The tracker simply stops, and was never resumed — which is why the chart above has nothing to show after 2022.
30 Apr 2024 Federal hospital reporting requirements expire and reporting goes voluntary. CMS reinstated mandatory reporting for Covid, flu and RSV on 1 November 2024.

No single order shut this off. It went piece by piece over three years, each removal defensible on its own, the sum of them leaving the country unable to say what was happening to it. ↩

3. The Covid money that went to the police

This one isn’t an inference. The administration campaigned on it in public, and the spending was tallied by reporters.

13 May 2022 Biden asks cities to spend more relief money on police. A Rose Garden event and a fact sheet urging state and local leaders to “deploy as many dollars as possible before the summer months.” By then $10 billion of American Rescue Plan money was committed to public safety, $6.5 billion of it from State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds across 300-plus communities — which the White House itself called one of the largest single-year federal commitments to state and local law enforcement on record.
7 Sep 2022 The Marshall Project tallies where it landed. Of $101 billion allocated by governments through the first quarter of 2022, $52.6 billion was booked as “revenue replacement” — and roughly half of that, an estimated $26.3 billion, went to criminal justice. The LAPD took over $300 million for officer salaries; Alabama put $400 million toward two new prisons. Community violence intervention, the program Biden kept naming, got $187 million — under 1 percent. The figure is a keyword tally of vague Treasury filings, so treat it as an estimate rather than an audit.
More on the same flow: The Appeal, EPIC on relief money buying police surveillance tech, Prism.

Tit for Tat US/Iranian Strikes Resume

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On September 1, 2026

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America hit Iran last night, taking out a couple launchers and radar aiming at ships the US is trying to get out of the Strait. Iran responded by hitting a US base in Jordan.

Today, around 8pm Iranian time, the US hit a variety of targets, some civilian (a fish powder plant?) and some military. Iran has now started its retaliation, which includes a lot of anti-ship missiles going after US naval vessels.

Last night’s attack by Iran:

launched its attack on U.S. bases in response to an American strike on Iranian naval facilities, which caused multiple casualties. The reported expenditure of more than 80 PAC-3 interceptors in a single engagement by some estimates represents more than ten percent of the entire American arsenal, at a time when interceptors are in very short supply across the Western world primarily due to mass use against Iran, but also due to mass donations to Ukraine. While U.S. government sources claimed that there was no damage to facilities from Iranian strikes, footage from the ground and satellite imagery has confirmed damage, compounding longstanding concerns regarding the Patriot’s limited effectiveness.

This comes back to what I said day one of the war: that the math favors Iran—the US and Israel will run out of interceptors long before Iran runs out of missiles and drones.

Both sides have been degrading the other sides radar (the US was late on this, but is now hitting the hard), but both sides still have satellite imagery to work from. (I’m 99% sure that China, Russia or both are providing real time feeds to Iran.) Loss of radars degrades defense more than offense, so more attacks can be expected to get thru on both sides, but, of course, Iran never had a lot of AD to begin with so this effects the US more.

Today’s attacks seem to mostly be tomahawks launched from US naval vessels, which are also in short supply.

The US attacks came as:

just yesterday, the U.S. Secretary of the Army AND the U.S. Deputy Undersecretary of the Army both reportedly resigned from their roles, leaving the United States without the Army’s number one and number three man.

Three of the remaining five regional commanders also gave Hegseth a non-concur on the plans, which means “we’ll do it because it’s a legal order, but we think it’s stupid.”

After the second set of American attacks Trump bloviated:

Once again, America can’t do this without indiscriminate use of nukes. Those nukes would not take out Iran’s missiles, which are deep in mountains, and Iranian commanders would then take out Israel, which yeah, they can do. Probably effectively destroy the physical economy of every US vassal within range and those regimes would not survive the fallout. Saudi Arabia is already in enough trouble that they’re negotiating an 8 billion dollar loan.

Iran was willing to let the war drag out because their calculation was that they could take the economic pain for longer than the US, and it avoided a lot of damage to Iran. But that doesn’t mean they can’t win a hot war, by my calculations they can, will and in fact, really already have except that Trump (unlike most of his generals) won’t admit that America has lost.

We’ll see if this keeps going. I don’t really see how it should, given American weaknesses, but Trump isn’t a rational actor. though I’d guess he really wants the war over before the midterms.

As for Iran, they’re digging their heels in hard, saying that peace only happens if Trump and Israel obey the MOU (which includes an end to Israeli attacks in Lebanon, where they are bulldozing entire towns that have existed for thousands of years.)

Since Trump can’t or won’t rein in Israel, if Iran’s serious, this is going to go on until Israel is begging for peace.

And folks? You’re living thru a war which will be studies by historians for ages as the war that marked the end of America as a superpower.

Update: interceptor depletion is real

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