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

Open Thread

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. I know you all want to keep talking about gay Klingons, but restrain yourselves!

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Getting Real About The Second Iranian War

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 29, 2026

8 Comments

  1. mago

    When you’re staggering like a crippled rat down a dark and dangerous alleyway just remember that you’ve got a friend in Jesus who wants you to stumble and die for the greater glory of god and man and some venomous creepy entity whose name shall not be mentioned because anti something something is verboten, capiche?

    Actually I was going to say a thing or three about the pernicious ubiquity of avocado oil and its effects, but got sidetracked along the way. Maybe later when and if I collect my wits.

    Have a nice day, a nice life and remember, Jesus loves you because the Bible tells you so. Resurrection’s but a week a away.

    Rape and murder it’s just a shot away a shot away. . .

  2. You don’t see the myriad endless Dem astroturf channels covering the REAL meat and potatoes of what is truly going down behind the insane spectacle that is Donald Trump’s antics. Trump’s insane antics and rhetoric provide ingenious cover for the main purpose of all of this — the final Big Grift where anything and everything is for sale like it was in Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEvDnuglCKw

    If the billionaires have their druthers, the planet will be entirely terraformed into a barren desert replete with mining waste and data centers amidst the squalor of packed-to-the-gills favelas with brutish, crude humans climbing all over one another like cockroaches.

    Note from that excellent video that the mining of the these precious minerals is not to make America self-sufficient. The copper, for example, is being shipped to China for processing thus betraying the lie that it’s about national security.

    This is from Lenin’s How to Organize Competition cited in A People’s Tragedy. Where have all the Bolsheviks gone, I ask? For that matter, where have all the cowboys gone? All of them have been subsumed by The Net — the great neutralizer/mitigator.

    Each village and town should be left to develop its own means of cleansing the [Russian] land of all vermin, of scoundrel fleas, the bedbug rich and so on. In one place they will put into prison a dozen rich men, a dozen scoundrels, half a dozen workers who shirk on the job … In another place they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third they will be given yellow tickets [such as prostitutes were given] after a term in prison, so that everyone knows they are harmful and can keep an eye on them. In a fourth, one out of every ten idlers will be shot. The more variety the better … for only practice can devise the best methods of struggle.

    Of course, by the time Lenin issued this challenge, the worst of the rich Russian abusers had fled the country and taken their wealth with them. What was left were the administrators that served the whims and fancies of the Russian aristocracy but did not have the infinite means to escape.

    If Lenin could see the fruit of his project today. The contemporary Russian oligarchy are descendants of the revolution. It has come full circle and aristocracy is once again flourishing in Russia and holding sway. All of those countless lives, all of that immense suffering, FOR NOTHING. Back to Square One.

    If there were to be a revolution, there won’t be but we can imagine and even perhaps hope for the impossible, this time around the rich cannot be allowed to escape. The world is much smaller these days. Death squads like a Delta Force representing the peasantry versus the rich should be created to scour the globe for every last fleeing rich vermin and bring them to justice and any country harboring them and protecting them would be destroyed even if nuclear weapons are necessary to accomplish that.

  3. Mark Level

    Interesting case that Due Dissidence covered last night and the New York Post even covered as well. In NYC, an undercover cop, for once working on the side of law and justice, infiltrated a Beitar and likely JDL-associated want-to-be killer of the pro-Palestine activist Nerdeen Kiswani, who has organized peaceful protests against the Gaza Genocide. Post-link here: https://nypost.com/2026/03/27/us-news/fiery-assassination-plot-against-prominent-palestinian-activist-nerdeen-kiswani-foiled-by-nypd-intel-fbi/

    Fat Pig Randy Fein has called for her death, among others. The terrorist group Beitar, known for offering “beepers” to anti-Zionist activists like Norman Finkelstein and Kiswani, did a whining Tweet calling the arrest anti-Semitism, and saying they are no longer active in New York (evidently the state, not NYC alone.) The perp, Mr. Heifler, had made several Molotov Cocktails to bomb her house with, and had a plan to flee to Israel. In custody.

    Speaking of Molotov Cocktails and pivoting a bit to passive-aggressive Love/Hate takes on Russia and “Communism”, Lenin (the GOAT) etc. LG&M has a laughable piece on Putin “betraying” his former best bud, the Donald (they’ll never drop Russiagate, though even Rachel Maddow won’t speak a word about it now) and blowing up a giant US billion $ AWACS plane on the runway in Saudi Arabia. There were 16 of these in the world, now there are 15. Of course the Green Goblin Zelensky supposedly leaked this “treachery” of “Putin” giving the Iranians satellite pics of the plane to hurt the Empire. (LG&M writer mad that “we” got hit, but simultaneously gleeful that something Donroe Doctrine got hit. One intelligent comment slipped thru, however: at least the Iranians knew how to hurt Donnie, taking out a billion dollar killing machine. He wouldn’t care about dead US soldiers.

    Speaking of which, they just raised the draft age to 42. Somebody quipped all the younger MAGA die-hards need to go: Larry Loomer, Ben Shapiro, Benny (in the closet) Johnson, etc. This year’s CPAC a total bust. Junk grabber Matt Schlapp started it by asking the non-crowd (seats about 80% empty) “Who wants to see the President get impeached,” and the crowd cheered for that, twice!! Don Jr. right behind Shlapp, grimaced noticeably. Then Sloppy Steve Bannon came out and told the crowd they need to give up their “fathers, sons, daughters, sisters” to the Iran Crusade. No applause.

    (By junk-grabber, Schlapp outed during #MeToo for grabbing other Right Wing Family Values Republican men between their legs; he & his insane Harpy wife “Mercedes” did a public exorcism of their house to save him from Satan’s power, more effective than Rehab I guess.)

  4. spud

    the supreme court just legalized torture that the police can use now, its called pain compliance. fancy clean words meaning torture. dictatorships use torture to get you to comply.

    the dirt bags that set us down this course,

    Memory lane and still true. THE MOST PERFECT DESCRIPTION OF MILTON FRIEDMAN–A GUY WHO PUT CAPITALISM ON STEROIDS WITH NEOLIBERALISM AN ECONOMIC SYSTEM THAT OPENLY STEALS FROM THE PEOPLE AND SAYS F YOU WHEN CAUGHT.

    YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY THE USA IMPLEMENTS SO MANY COUPS ALL OVER THE WORLD. It’s because of Milton Friedman and his neoliberal economic theories that have been fully embraced by the leadership of the USA–beginning with Reagan. Bill Clinton put the program on a fast track.

    Friedman was a Chicago guy that men like Obama and women like Hillary revere.
    Milton Friedman believed in free-market capitalism and was regarded as a leader of the Chicago School of monetary economics. He supported the military dictatorship in Chile because of the relation of economists of the University of Chicago to Pinochet.

    What did it take to maintain Friedman’s neoliberalism in Chile? Intelligence agencies under Pinochet’s regime instituted secret detention and torture sites to conduct political repression. In total, Chile had 17 torture centers. On occasion, prisoners were released after being confined and tortured.

  5. KT Chong

    So this “peace talk” with Iran in Pakistan that Trump has been bragging about for a week… representatives from the U.S. and few Middle Eastern nations were there — but NOT Iran.

    This is like the “peace talks” the U.S. has been holding over the Ukraine war — Russia was never part of those talks.

    So apparently this is a thing for America now: claims it’s holding “peace talks” when the other side isn’t even at the table. Then America issues unilateral demands — which basically amount to telling the other side to surrender — and just calls it a “peace deal”. This peace talk “with Iran” will end up like all the peace talks “with Russia”… fake and going nowhere.

  6. mago

    While L&S calls for some kind of Final Solution, the Doomsday bus careens brake less down the highway, and when that sucker crashes we’ll see unprecedented levels of chaos and suffering with attendant violence and repression. Of course the marginal will be the first to go.

    What the hell is this crank talking about? At least that’s the reaction I’d receive from many I know who are clueless about the latest Zionist disaster that’s likely to go nuclear. (And even if it doesn’t, the fallout will spread for years.)

    Stock up on dry goods, and paper and plastic products if you can. Medicine. Miso and seaweed. Stuff like that. Actually, any survival tips and suggestions would require a few thousand words beyond the scope of a blog comment section.

    I just hope that those who are aware of this crisis in the making are positioned and have the skill set, stamina and resilience to make it through. I don’t think the dystopian movies and books are close to nailing what’s coming our way, but that’s just me being my usual happy go lucky self.

    Enjoy what you’ve got while you’ve got it and have a nice day.

  7. bruce wilder

    George Carlin explains how he leveraged detachment from outcomes to realize the entertainment value of the tragic human comedy in which we are all drowning.

    https://substack.com/@thememoryhole/note/c-234395477?

  8. KT Chong

    “Klingons are for pussy. Real men bleed for Muad’Dib, Astartes, and MechWarriors.”

    If you have not been paying attention.

    Many young men no longer have the appetite for the sanitized, bloodless utopia of Star Trek and the naive optimism of Gene Roddenberry. Men nowadays crave the ‘Black Label of Science Fiction’: brutal, gritty, violent dystopias that dispense with ‘Live Long and Prosper’ and instead idolize authoritarianism, militarism, moral ambiguity, religious fanaticism, and ideological extremism in space. They want to celebrate the honor and glory of blood and steel — forever war, jihad, crusade, purge, and the genocide of the unbelievers.

    If it isn’t a galactic jihad to spread the Word of Lisan al-Gaib, the Eternal Crusade to purge the galaxy of Xenos and Heretics, or centuries of endless wars between — and amongst — neo-feudal corporate houses and gene-bred religious warrior castes, it’s just a bedtime story for the DEI and LGBTQIA++.

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