Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Author: Ian Welsh Page 1 of 439
Every society is three meals from chaos
-Vladimir Lenin
On May 4th I wrote that a year of hunger and famine is baked in for most of the world.
This was based on the effects of Six Week War and the continued blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. But, in addition, we have the strongest El Nino is a hundred and fifty years incoming:
Lurking below the surface in the equatorial Pacific is possibly the most impressive blob of above average ocean temperatures we’ve ever recorded since we’ve had the ability to measure this stuff. When that enormous concentration of bath water reaches the surface over the coming… pic.twitter.com/Olip0bQwRN
— Matthew Gross (@HurricaneAddict) May 17, 2026
I’ve personally seen my food prices, before any of this is baked in, rise about 20% this year. I just saw a 33% increase in the price of tomatoes, beef is up over 40%, and so on. Almost nothing isn’t more expensive and this is BEFORE the absolutely catastrophic harvests we will have this year.
It’s easy to say that America and the West won’t have a famine because they can outbid most of the world for food, but the prices will be extremely high and a lot of people are going to go hungry.
I’ve been wondering for a long time what it would take to get Americans to actually do anything about their elites. The recent defeat on Thomas Massie (a noted Israeli critic) in his Republican primary has made it very clear that the powers of reaction in America are extraordinarily strong still.
Thomas Neuburger has an excellent article asking if the election was stolen.
I don’t know if it was stolen, and I’m not sure that it matters much. If it wasn’t, well Jews spent 30 million and bought the election. If it was, well Jews spent 30 million and bought the election. (The most expensive House primary in American history.)
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
-John F. Kennedy
America has few problems it can’t, in theory, fix. It has no significant problems it can fix if current elites remain in charge, and its foreign policy can’t be improved as long as Israel controls Congress, and most State governments, which it does. (I don’t regard this as in question. Anyone arguing against it is arguing against massive evidence to the contrary.)
Opposing Israel is political suicide. That’s why AOC dances around pretending to be anti-genocide while actually covering for it. It’s why Mamdani has kissed the ring repeatedly.
They will come for you. If they fail, which is rare, they will try again. Eventually they will destroy you.
And that means that peaceful change is impossible.
Combined with the continued impoversishment of Americans, the building of AI centers in communities where the majority is opposed, mass lay offs due to AI, a very likely financial crisis next year, rising fuel prices, shortages of diesel, bunker and jet fuel, I’m going to be very interested to see how many riots there are and how many people decide to go after politicians and CEOs.
As for the rest of the world: oh yes. There are going to be riots, revolutions, civil wars and coups in multiple countries. The question is how badly first world countries will be effected.
I remind readers to stock up now on as much as they can and I remind rioters that your job is to riot in the neighbourhoods of rich people, or industrial or office areas, not in your own neighbourhoods. Burning down your own homes is foolish.
I will also add that any competent government that cared could easily have made sure that most of the planting happened. Prices were the primary issue, and prices can be controlled and government can decide who gets how much diesel, prioritizing, y’know, tractors and trucking related to agriculture. This is something every western government could and would have easily handled in the 1950s.
Letting people go hungry and starve is entirely a result of government action (a war that was unnecessary, fought for Israel, not America), and government inaction. If people go without food next year, the people who caused it are known: they live in Washington, Tel Aviv and in every country which failed to take effective action they are your politicians the people who bribe them to not care about ordinary people.
You know who they are. They are you enemies. Their actions will kill or impoverish you, if they haven’t already.
And you know what you should do to enemies.
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In the first article in this series we discussed freedom under capitalism. The conclusion was simple: capitalist freedom for the vast majority of the population means the right to choose your master, your job, if you can find one. Once you have a master, you do what they say for most of the day, for most of your life. If you can’t find a master, you’re free to be homeless, hungry and eventually (few people survive being homeless more than about five years), and soon enough you’re free to die.
Yay Capitalism.
Note that this is structural: yes some people will become capitalists or otherwise escape the master trap, but the vast majority won’t and can’t. Someone is going to lose the dire game of musical chairs (jobs.)
Now let’s look at representative democracy.
In a democracy you’re free to choose your legislators or executives. You can’t vote for just anyone, though, only approved candidates. In most systems if someone runs without belonging to a party, they won’t win, and parties usually control you can become a candidate.
As a group the people who are elected will decide pretty much everything about how your society runs. Sometimes they seem to care about the citizens (FDR say) and sometimes they don’t. (Every American government since Nixon.) I can’t remember the last time food stamps were increased, rather than cut.
The number of elected people with real power is small compared to the population, and as an ordinary person your vote is generally meaningless. It’s never YOU who makes the difference. Big donors and other people who can organize groups of votes do, but that’s a vanishingly small number of people. So elected officials, especially at the national and State level pander to people with money or votes (pastors, for example. Used to pander to unions, not so much any more.)
Your choice of ruler is better than a hereditary aristocracy. Yes. But your actual power is insignificant. And Democracies have all the normal powers of government: they can draft you and send you off to die. They can send you to prison. They can take property to you. They can coerce you to work. Ideally they make it so people who lose the musical boss game are taken care of anyway, but often they don’t. Certainly they can do good and sometimes do.
But any freedom you have in a society is contingent on the government. Not drafting you. Making it so you don’t have to have a master. Making it so you can get health care, or not. Your freedom is contingent on what elected officials want: officials who structurally have every reason to pander to those with money or power: and that’s before we even get to the issue of bribery, whether while in office or after: Bill Clinton became very rich after leaving office. He was bribed post-facto and everyone knows that was the case. The last President who didn’t get taken care of this way was Carter.
Trump, of course, is just blatantly accepting bribes while in office, which has the dubious virtue of complete honesty.
A system where the people who decide what freedoms you have are structurally more likely to favor a small minority with wealth and power, and where if they are corrupt, you can’t bribe them, isn’t likely to maintain your freedom very well if important people think they’d benefit from you losing your freedom, is it?
Certainly people with money and power don’t really want you to not need a job and a master, because the people who have influence over them want cheap workers who will do anything they’re told to do.
Churchill quipped that Democracy was the worst system except for all the other ones we’ve tried.
Perhaps so, though the CPC and most Chinese disagree.
But even if true, representative democracy, at least in a system with significant wealth and power differentials, is a shit system where you have freedom only if elites feel it benefits them that you be free.
Perhaps in an egalitarian system it would work better, but under capitalism, which by its nature requires concentration of power, it does not
We’ll discuss other forms of organization as this series continues. For now, just note that representative democracy, by its very design, will tend to be more responsive to people who don’t want ordinary people to have freedom than to those who do want ordinary people to be free.
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The Goddess Libertas
Are you free if you need a job? For most people lack of a job means homelessness (indeed many homeless have jobs, that’s how far things have sunk) and you’ll go hungry, and almost certainly wind up dead sooner than otherwise.
This was well understood by the people who created capitalism. The central requirement of capitalism was enclosure (getting rid of common land which people could use for crops and animals.)
The fact is that peasants worked a lot less than workers. They had more holidays. They had to do some work for their lord, to be sure, but that was far less than the 12 hour days typical of industrialization, or even the eight hour days we now work. And, mostly, they controlled their own time.
The condition of having a job is that you do what your told. It was called wage slavery by Americans being forced off farms by low profits (because of railroad monopolies) for a reason: they had controlled their own time before. To be sure they had to work, even work hard, but they weren’t taking orders from a boss.
The fact that one can, sometimes, choose one’s master (for that’s what a boss is) doesn’t change the fact that they’re a master. In good capitalist times, in my experience before 90 or so, the worst boss behaviour was mitigated by plentiful jobs and easy choice: but today people put out hundreds of applications to get a job. Once you’ve got one, you can’t risk it by telling your master to bugger off if they order you to do things you find distasteful.
Bottom line, modern life is do what you’re told in school for twelve to twenty years, then spend your adult life doing what your told by bosses, then when you’re too old to work maybe you’ll be allowed a few years of declining health without a master. Quite likely you won’t even get that.
This is the modern form of slavery, where we pretend that most people have a choice. Oh a few escape, I have (at the price of poverty), and some others do, but the structure of the economy is that most people, the vast majority, must spend most of their life as wage slaves, doing what their masters tell them to. There is no way around this, it’s what giving control of the means of production (what you need to feed yourself, have shelter and goods) in the hands of a tiny minority of people.
It’s been a while since I discussed fundamental of how societies operate and what to change to make them better. We’re going to come back to freedom, a lot, as part of a series. We’ll also do a series on the fundamentals of societies: what is used to make them stick together, what determines how we run them, and how those are used against us or could be used by us to make a better world for 99% of humanity.
For now it is important simply to understand the chains that bind us, and not to fall for the lie that we are free or that our current civilization is the best that is possible.
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Well, mostly.
Krugman shared this chart, as part of an argument that it’s ridiculous for Europe to be scared of Russia:
GDP indicates the value of the parts of the economy which are subject to money. (If you do something but don’t use money, it doesn’t get measured.) As such it theoretically measures how much you can mobilize using money. Back when most people lived off commons, before that was enclosed, and didn’t need to do much paid labor, you couldn’t mobilize much.
But that’s theoretical ability. It’s important, but what matters is what you do with it.
And the thing is that Russia does with it is build drones, advanced missiles, advanced jets and other weapon systems. And they build them in large amounts. Europe’s production of weapons is much smaller, and they’re less advanced than the Russian weapons. Russia also produces lots of oil and natural gas and has a huge refinery sector. They have a lot of rare minerals and resources in general. And they do still have both heavy and light industrial sectors.
Meanwhile Europe is hemorrhaging industrial jobs and its industrial energy costs are much higher than Russia’s.
So Europe may have more theoretical economic capacity, but it can’t translate that capacity into state capability where it matters. Russia is stronger than Europe.
It’s not that it necessarily has to be this way, but for Europe to match Russia it has to maintain and expand its industry, find cheap energy, and source natural resources that are scarce in Europe. It also needs a lower cost structure than it has in general terms.
These are not trivial problems. Europe is pushing on renewables, to be sure, but has some way to go and effectively has to buy those from China. It needs to get resources like oil and minerals from other countries and the closest and cheapest source of hydrocarbons, which it needs during the transition, is far more expensive than it otherwise would be. American oil and natural gas is FAR more expensive.
The other traditional source of resources was Africa: mostly ex-French colonial possessions. France never forgave their debts, had military bases all over and often forced them to sell resources at very low prices. But now that Africa doesn’t need European goods, they’re kicked the French out and raising prices and moving to do primary processing domestically.
So sources of cheap minerals are drying up.
All of this could be worked around, if Europe was a technological leader, but…
Now legacy industry matters. Machine tools. Steel. Chemicals. Stuff that Germany is good at. (Automobiles are dying, because yes, the future is EVs.) But Germany and Europe are losing those industries. And they aren’t producing the industries of the future. Everything they have is basically legacy industry, developed in the late 19th and 20th centuries. They aren’t creating, mostly, the industries of the 21st century.
GDP only matters if you can use the resources it suggests you have to produce what you need. When it comes to competing with Russia, Europe’s ability to do so is limited. Not non-existent, Germany has significantly increased artillery shell production, for instance, but not what it needs to be.
Without a colonial empire and without resource rich nations willing to trade Europe the resources it needs at reasonable prices, and without a tech lead, What does Europe have?
Very little.
And this is why Europe’s in for a long fall. There’s no easy route out and no one is even talking about doing what’s right. The center still thinks that the problem is that workers have pension and time off, the rising right are complete idiots who think the US is a good model and the left is not, in most cases, in contention. Germany’s AfD will not make Germany better off, it will continue destroying Germany. The same is true of UK’s Reform part and France’s right wing.
GDP is a stupid stat. It conceals more than it reveals. It doesn’t tell you much about the structure of a country. India, which in GDP terms is a great power just lost a minor war to Pakistan. High GDP can actually be bad, since it includes waste, billionaire income that does nothing for the country, and all the money earned in harmful industries like finance and private equity.
Europe’s high GDP isn’t meaningless, precisely, but it isn’t what matters. If it was, Ukraine would have won the war already and the EU wouldn’t constantly be on its knees groveling to America.
What matters is what an economy CAN do. And Europe’s economy can’t create what Europe needs.
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There are a lot of people who believe that in this world you either fuck other people, or get fucked. The world is full of predators, and if you aren’t victimizing someone, you’ll get victimized.
After all, if you hurt someone, that means you’re stronger than them, and mean, and others will be scared of you.
Pretty much how the US, indeed all Empires, operate.
Kill or be killed, this isn’t. If someone attacks you, or someone else, and you kill someone in self defense, well, that’s not the same thing.
Rape’s a good case, because there’s never justification for rape. It’s taking pleasure from someone else’s degradation, and it makes you, well, evil.
I’d argue the same is true of torture. (No, torture doesn’t work for extracting information.)
And then there’s murder. Not self defense, but say joining a military and going and killing a bunch of innocent people. Or, on your own behalf or the behalf of some church or belief or company, killing people. The purest example is certain types of draft: “you kill for us or we kill you.” Perhaps its less than that “kill for us or we throw you in prison” or “kill for us or we impoverish you.”
There are less pure versions. You work for a company which pollutes or poisons or makes products designed for murder. You know (or should know) that people will die because of the pollution. Working for cigarette companies, perhaps. Manufacturers who leach cancerous poisons into the air, water and land. Defense contractors for aggressive countries.
Or perhaps you’re just an abuser. A prison guard, say, in a nation where abuse and what amounts to torture of prisoners is routine.
A propagandist, who provides justification for war and war crimes.
We all make compromises, I think. We all do things to survive we’d rather not do.
But where’s the line?
What is there that you won’t do?
Is it murder? Is it mass murder for your nation? (Don’t pretend that America has had a war of self-defense in generations.) Is it producing harmful products because you need a job? Is it lying about evil to justify it? Is it looking the other way?
I think we all need to decide. Personally if a gun was on me and they said “you rape that person, or you get raped” I hope I’d choose to be raped. I’d rather be a victim than victimizer, at least when it comes to such an abominable act.
Would I join a draft to go kill Iranians and help kill Palestinians? No.
I admire Israelis who go to prison rather than join the IDF.
Muhammad Ali, refusing the draft for Vietnam:
My conscious won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father… Shoot them for what? …How can I shoot them, the little poor black people, poor little babies and children and women … Just take me to jail.
What’s your line? What would you refuse to do even if it meant you’d become a victim?
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The Swastika is an ancient symbol. It’s been used for thousand of years. It wasn’t evil, quite the opposite.
Then the Nazis adopted it and if you wear a swastika or have a swastika tattoo, people judge you. Badly.
The Star of David is an ancient symbol of Judaism. Then Israel used it for its flag and engaged in a historically vicious genocide, engaging in rape and torture, all live-streamed.
And so..
Bondi Massacre victim’s daughter: “I have witnessed cars driving past on main roads with passengers shouting “free Palestine,” followed immediately by “F*** the Jews.”
“A man pointed at my star of David necklace and called me a F***ing terrorist.” pic.twitter.com/KzWVFOGBKQ
— Michael Starr (@StarrJpost) May 5, 2026
As everyone with sense has noted the rise in anti-semitism, such as it is (much measured anti-semitism is fake, since outfits like ADL count people saying “from the river to the sea” or “free Palestine” as anti-semitic) is caused by Israel saying it’s the only Jewish nation and that any criticism of its genocide are anti-semitic.
Well, if Israel = Jewish = Genocide, which is the logic of these statements, then people are going to be anti-semitic.
This isn’t helped by the fact the majority of synagogues raise money for Israel, and many sell stolen Palestinian land and recruit soldiers for the IDF.
There’s also the rising presumption that if someone is Israeli, they’re a war criminal who has probably killed women and children. The majority of casualties in Gaza are women and children, after all, and Israel has a draft. Unless an Israeli wasn’t drafted because of religious exceptions, or went to prison, they’ve been in the IDF and given how Israel makes war they’ve either killed kids, or helped other military members kill kids.
Then there was the time that prison guards were caught on tape raping a prisoner, and the only person charged with a crime was the person who released the video. The guards have become celebrities, going on TV, and there were huge demonstration in their support.
The majority of Israelis appear to be, forgive the word, evil. They approve of rape. They approve of genocide. Most of them have helped kill civilians. (Civilian murder was common long before the straight up genocide, and targeting of children is well documented. Israeli snipers in particular love shooting kids.)
So the Star of David is now a symbol of genocide, like the Swastika. Israeli citizenship means the presumption of actual participation in the murder of civilians, and even if somehow one avoided that, the majority of the population supports the genocide, as well as rape of prisoners.
I’ve never seen a country destroy its reputation so quickly. America, widely hated, took generations to land itself in the garbage heap of world opinion. Israelis have managed it in a few years, and because of their conflation of Israel with Judaism have managed to also smear Jews as a group. I feel for those Jews, and they do exist, who have opposed Israel and Zionism. But as with Germans who opposed Hitler and genocide, they’re going to smeared with everyone else.
In the past I said it would happen, now it has. I personally will not do business or be friends with any Israeli who didn’t refuse the draft, and I won’t be friends with anyone, Jewish or not who is a Zionist. Any politician, journalist or business leader who supported the genocide is dead to me, and what little influence or power I have, for as long as I live, will be used to see them prosecuted for their crimes.
As for Israel, it’s going to have to be de-Zionized. I don’t know how we get there, but the first step is ending US and European support, and the first step to that will be replacing current Zionist leaders and throwing them in prison. All pro-Zionist lobbies will have to be broken up, and their funders and operatives tried for their crimes.
Israel’s not a strong country. It appears strong because of vast support from America and from rich Zionists who have bought political support in America and Europe. If that support ends, Israel is doomed, and that’s the only way they’ll stop committing war crimes, raping and torturing.
Perhaps in a few centuries the Star of David will lose its association with genocide. Till then, if you wear it or display it, people will and should assume that you’re either a war criminal, or support war criminals.
Everyone reads these articles for free, but the site and Ian take money to run. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.