Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. I know you all want to keep talking about gay Klingons, but restrain yourselves!
Author: Ian Welsh Page 6 of 439
I saw an article today by the American Conservatives, who tend to be more sensible than most conservatives. It posits that peace can’t be made with Iran till Trump gets tough with Israel, because it’s Israel who keeps escalating.This is true, but it avoids the pedo-elephant in the room.
It is almost certain that Israel has blackmail on Trump. Videos and pictures of him raping kids or young teenagers. (I print this because I know there is zero chance Trump can risk discovery at a trial.)
Trump is completely compromised. He’s on a leash.
Is this 100%? Of course not. But well over 90%. Trump was Epstein’s best friend for years, and Epstein’s properties were all saturated with video cameras. Epstein clearly worked for Israel.
Trump needs to be impeached or removed with the 25th Amendment, but the problem is that a proportion of Congress are certainly compromised as well, another proportion are bought and paid for, and another proportion are scared of Zionist money being used against them.
So the war seems likely to go on until Israel wants it to stop, and what Trump wants is irrelevant. As for ordinary Americans, their interests are not represented: no one in power gives a damn what they think. The correct action is revolution, but Americans talk big about the 2nd amendment, they don’t use it to resist tyranny.
Iran has some simple needs to be willing to declare peace, the most important of which is “this is the last war”, the second of which is “no more assassinations and no more attacks” and the third of which is “since we can’t trust you to keep any agreement we have to make you incapable of attacking us again or too terrified to do it.”
Manjier has a lot of contacts in the Resistance, here’s the list he published:
The Americans are begging Iran for a quick deal to end the war, but Tehran rejected the US request, forwarding their clear non-negotiable demands: pic.twitter.com/MI0BnkuQY1
— Elijah J. Magnier 🇪🇺 (@ejmalrai) March 26, 2026
Notice that it includes stopping the war/genocide on Libya/Hezbollah and Gaza. There’s no way the Israelis will agree to that unless they have no choice.
I don’t see any way this war ends before Israel is a smoking ruin, and the Gulf States are so terrified of Iran they declare they’ll never allow US bases in their countries again.
Can Iran enforce this? I think so. The US and Israel seem to be running out of interceptors a lot faster than Iran’s running out of missiles and drones. China’s in their corner, quietly supplying them with all the “non military” equipment they need. And Iran’s pain tolerance is extremely high: the decision makers know that if they don’t win decisively again Israel will just assassinate them later and probably kill their families at the same. The new Ayatollah lost his father, wife and kids.
Here’s one analysis of the munitions numbers:
The problem, as has been stated many times, is that no “deal” is possible. America will not keep them. Israel will not keep them. So they must be defeated for Iran and its leaders to be safe. The victory must be crushing. If I were in Iran, I would be making the exact same calculation.
We’ll end this with another Iranian propaganda video, sort of a palate cleanser.
Iran doesn’t seem intimidated at all and has just released another Lego video mocking the coalition. pic.twitter.com/DBkeSCebH1
— Patricia Marins (@pati_marins64) March 27, 2026
Everyone reads these article for free, but the site and Ian take money to run. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.
Of all the wars I’ve covered in my writing career, this one has been the hardest in the sense that figuring out what’s true and what isn’t is difficult. The baseline assumption is that nothing the US says about the war can be trusted. Most of what Iran says in concrete terms about what they fired and hit can be trusted. AI images and video have proliferated, so the old “show me picture” routine doesn’t work unless y0u’re a good image analyst and willing to spend hours. Trump, of course, lies about everything. Iranian official media exists, but it’s often censored by the West so reading their official statements is often difficult.
All that said, I think it’s time for something different: a collection of propaganda videos that are Pro-Iranian. Because of all the above, it’s unclear to me if these are official, but they’re interesting nonetheless.
The first appears to be official, was published by Russian “news” outfit RT, and makes the ethical case:
Iran 🇮🇷 just released this emotional video
I don’t think they are stopping until all their objectives have been met pic.twitter.com/0jmyZbkkaY
— . (@LBGamestips) March 25, 2026
Iranian underwater drones:
🇮🇷 “The Strait of Hormuz is my territory.”
Iran’s Yazdā underwater drone introduces itself.8 meters long. Electric propulsion. Zero noise. Range of 600 km on a single charge. Operates at 200 meters depth. Carries 200 kg of explosives.
Its target today was the HMS Anson, a… pic.twitter.com/HsanKCjJF5
— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) March 25, 2026
This one made me laugh:
Iran is now releasing cartoons that Trump can understand. 😂🤣👇 pic.twitter.com/8st6rIGH98
— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) March 23, 2026
And the Korroamshahr-4 missile:
The Iranian missile “Khorramshahr-4” has become a topic of anime in the world. Be sure to watch it — it’s very beautiful. pic.twitter.com/JGWCjpjmcM
— Sprinter Press (@SprinterPress) March 25, 2026
More serious posts next, though the third video is actually a pretty accurate summary of Iranian war efforts so far.
Everyone reads these article for free, but the site and Ian take money to run. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.
Some of the issues from the Iranian war are obvious: everyone’s talking about oil and natural gas, for example. Many have mentioned fertilizer. But I think it’s worth going into in a bit more depth.
First is that in addition to gasoline, oil is used to make bunker fuel (98% of freighters and tankers), jet fuel, and diesel (heavy machinery, large trucks.) The prices for all three are rising faster than gasoline prices and there will be a worldwide shortage. Production of semiconductors, phones and so on will shut down some time after that, depending on how the small reserves available are shared out. Taiwan is particularly vulnerable and production can be expected shut down in a couple weeks.
The chart below is from six days ago:
Don’t take the above chart too seriously, I’ve heard different numbers from different sources, and the type of oil in reserve matters a LOT.
This will, of course, hit the AI Bros hard. They have significant stockpiles of some of what they need, but not everything. Worried about that data center coming to where you live? If you’re lucky, Iran has just saved you from an AI driven spike in your energy prices, but not an oil shortage spike!
Airlines are already reducing flights. Expect prices for travel to spike significantly. If you don’t already have tickets for a trip get them now. Even so, it wouldn’t surprise me if many already booked flights are cancelled without recourse, citing forece majeur. Diesel and bunker oil shortages will mean supply line disruptions, and primary processing disruptions. Fertilizer shortages are already changing planting decisions, farmers in Australia are planning on planting much less wheat, for example.
Oil goes into a lot of things. Here are a couple of graphics showing some of them:
And,
To oversimplify, pretty much everything has some oil in it. For example I’m stocking up on NSAIDs and Tylenol 2s (legal in Canada.) I saw one person saying they went out and bought about a year’s supply of pretty much everything which can be stored. One side benefit may be that insane levels of plastic packaging might, at least, be reduced.
China’s bunkering up. No refined oil products are being allowed for export. Fortunately for China, they, unlike apparently almost every other nation in the world, are not run by retards, so they have massive petroleum reserves and they bought about 50% of the world’s grain production for the last four years and stored much of it. But this goes far beyond petrochem: they produce, for example, almost all of the world’s tungsten, and no more exports of that.
Stockpiles in the the West are essentially at zero, right now, and yes, most advanced weapons cannot be made without Tungsten.
There’s been a crash in silver prices recently. You may have read about it. But here’s the thing, there’s an actual physical shortage of it because it’s used in essentially all electronics, including semiconductors and even more importantly, solar panels. Everyone’s going to want solar panels now.
China, not being fools, are no longer allowing export of silver because they know it’s the physical shortage that matters, not the paper price on paper exchanges where delivery isn’t expected to happen.
I spent years railing that just-in-time logistics was sheer fucking insanity and should be outlawed. In addition every country who isn’t a net producer should have at least year’s stockpile of fuel and even net producers should have three years of food stored (because things like droughts and fertilizer shortages happen.) Medication and key medical goods should also be stockpiled. A lot of people are going to suffer and die when key drugs hit shortage and many cancer drugs, for example, are produced in India and on top of the factories not being able to operate without energy, many drugs use petrochemical derivatives directly.
This war should never have happened. Even if it ended now there would be serious shortages for about four to five months, and it would be three to four years before full production could be resumed, if it can be. (Shutting down oil and gas well production often damages the underlying fields.)
Oh, and which major nations will suffer the least? Russia and China. It is to laugh.
I know this is the second article on this subject in a few days, but the impacts of the war are important for you to understand.
Everyone reads these article for free, but the site and Ian take money to run. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.
My friends, this is it. America isn’t going to win this war, unless they use nukes, but even if I’m wrong and they squeeze out their .01% chance of success, it is over. The army is exhausted and can’t be re-armed in less than a decade, with Chinese help. The Middle East will be in ruins. The AI bubble will crash out without money and resources from the Gulf. Everyone’s going to turn hard from hydrocarbons to renewables, especially solar, and that means China is going to make absolute bank.
This is the second stupidest war decision I’ve seen in my entire life. (The first was Ukraine refusing a very generous peace deal and, as a result, losing the majority of its fighting and breeding age male population.)
The war is lost. It was lost the moment Iran proved it could keep fighting and wouldn’t accept a peace without achieving its aims. The Americans, with, it appears, help from NATO nations, are going to try and open the Strait militarily. They will fail and it will be a military clusterfuck of epic proportions. There is approximately zero chance of opening the Strait, and if they are stupid enough to try and land marines, those marines are DEAD.
I have never seen such military insanity in my life. If I were a colonel in the US army I’d be organizing a coup and I am not kidding. There are suicide missions and then there’s trying to land troops in the Strait while Iran has missile and drone dominance, thousands of speed boats and has mined the Strait. The US does not have air superiority, even, we just saw the Iranians hit an f-35, they’ve shot down at least eight aerial refueling planes, forced the US to keep its aircraft carriers far away, made it impossible to use most of the local bases and taken out almost all US radars in the area.
This is a loss. The smart thing for the US to do would be to just declare the war is over and evacuate the region. If Israel wants to fight on its own, let it.
But the Israelis almost certainly have video of Trump raping kids, and Americans can’t admit they’re losing, so the war will go on.
The oil field damage is severe enough already that it will take years to repair. Iran will probably retain control over the Strait permanently, deciding who gets to transit. Nations they like go thru free. Nations they hate have no access. Everyone else pays: after all Iran’s going to have a lot of rebuilding to do.
Meanwhile France, still under the delusion that it’s a great power, seized another Russian oil tanker. The Russians have said they’re considering military escorts in the future. This could go south in very bad ways, and France’s missile defense systems and interceptor stockpiles are not in any shape to fight a war with Russia. The EU has decided not to ease Russian oil sanctions and Putin, in any case, has said he doesn’t want to sell to Europeans any more because they’re unreliable.
Europe’s industrial base is evaporating. They’re so far behind in tech that they don’t even show up on lists of the top five tech leaders, even when you lump all of the EU together. (Top 4 are China/US/Japan/South Korea.) Trump just massively cut science and tech spending and scientists and academics are fleeing the US, often for China. Russia, by itself, produces more missiles, drones and artillery shells than all of NATO, which should tell you meaningless GDP is as a measure of state capacity.
The US is about to become a regional power. And I don’t think it will sustain even that. Iran has just taught everyone how to make tangling with even a medium sized nation unbelievably painful. The process of turning into porcupines should take five to ten years, at which point the US navy loses 90% of its power projection ability.
Further the loss of dollar hegemony will lead to a good 30% drop in the American standard of living. But America’s cost structure (if you need an MRI fly to China, stay in a five star hotel for a week and pay cash for your MRI. It’ll cost less than getting it in America) means that high nominal wages mean very little. Americans are going to strangle slowly to death. Meanwhile one-third of the world’s fertilizer supplies are about to evaporate, helium (used to make chips among other things) is about to become rare and expensive and China has put export controls on key elements like silver and all petroleum products. As the supply chain shocks multiply (who thought just in time was smart? Oh, all the usual morons) multiple countries will stop exporting key goods up to and including food.
US bases have been proven not to protect your country but to make it a target. Every American ally is noticing this and the Phillipines and South Korea in particular are taking note. Japan is still talking tough, but they’re being morons. They either get nukes and destroy their economy when China sanctions them, or they cut a deal.
The scale of this clusterfuck is mind boggling. America is destroying its ability to coerce other nations, destroying its economy and making having an alliance with it not just worthless but actively a detriment, while devastating all of its allies’ economies: Europe, Japan and South Korea are all going to take HUGE hits from this.
Meanwhile China’s oil stockpiles are at record highs, they spent the last 4 years buying 50% of the world’s grain supply and piling it up, and their hard move into renewables has proved to be 100% correct. As for Russia, another big winner, since their oil and gas, minus some minor damage from the Ukraine war is just fine, thanks.
While Ukraine’s decision to fight the Russians as a cat’s paw for the US was arguably worse it lacks the awe-inspring scale of this bout of epic stupidity.
As Mencken wrote,
“the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
And here we are. Americans elected the stupidest President in history, a known rapist, a pedophile being blackmailed by a foreign power, a con man, who is also suffering from dementia and all of this was known before he was elected to anyone paying attention.
America’s empire was doomed by Reagan and Clinton. Trump’s just bringing it to a messy end. But the decline could have taken another twenty years and been much, much less painful. Trump has decided to end it in the most spectacular and stupid manner unimaginable to anyone with the intelligence of a door-mouse. Meanwhile, Europe’s pygmy leaders are feeding Europe’s economy into a woodchipper, foot first and greasing the gears, “why is this machine so slow!? What can we do to speed it up?”
Welcome to the end of Western hegemony. It’s stupider, more venal and more darkly funny than I could ever have imagined.
Had a lot of subscribers unsubscribe recently. I assume it’s the economy and/or hating my coverage of Israel. If you value my writing and can, please subscribe or donate.
I’ll keep this one short. Israel just hit a major Iranian oilfield. Iran has said it will now hit Gulf oilfields in retaliation. Ali Larijani, probably the last person in the Iranian administration who could have negotiated an off-ramp, has been assassinated.
This war is about to enter the economic devastation phase.
Unless you live in China (bought half the world’s grain production for the last 4 years and massively increased its fuel stockpiles) you’d better start preparing. Stock up on food. Check your local power grid to see how reliant it is on natural gas and oil turbines (Europeans, this is you.) Buy medicine. Acetaminophen, for example, is basically 100% a petroleum product. Figure out how to stay warm or cool and how to cook — can you still get some solar power and batteries. India mostly relies on gas for cooking, and it’s going to run out soon.
Australia’s got maybe 3 weeks of petroleum left. The Gulf States aren’t going to be able to run air conditioning soon. Everyone’s going to start putting export bans on key supply chain items soon. The Chinese have already banned export of natural gas and oil, but this will spread to food, key medicines, etc, etc… if the war goes on much longer.
Don’t assume this is all going to work out, even in most countries which can keep the power on and enough food, there will be price increases. A lot of the world economy is based around oil, gas and… fertilizers. About a third of the world’s fertilizers come from the Gulf, thru the Strait. Even if the war ends in a couple weeks, there will be aftershocks, and, of course, companies like supermarkets will jack up prices then keep them up even after the shock, just like they did during Covid.
But over the next few months expect shortages and increased prices and in some parts of the world straight up energy brown outs.
Unless you’re Chinese or Russian, don’t expect your government to do anything competent to protect you. Even if it can, it won’t, unless you’re part of the 1% at least.
Prepare. Perhaps we’ll be lucky, but don’t be count on it.
Everyone reads these article for free, but the site and Ian take money to run. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.
Recently stumbled across a thread by someone who dug deeply into the most recent data from Britain. It’s pretty abysmal, but what’s most interesting is the notes:
- There’s no systemic testing for either covid or long covid any more;
- Long Covid is often diagnosed as something else;
- You can have organ damage from Covid without it having symptoms (though you’ll pay for it later);
- Covid damage often leads to other health events (like heart attacks and cancer) which will not be shown as Covid related.
And:
Final note: The charts of the GP-Patient survey data in this thread were created by me. They are not official charts from the survey report… …and that’s because the data on prevalence of Long Covid (Q40) was curiously *left out* of the national report.
Luckily, data from the Long Covid question (Q40) is still available in the raw data files which is how I’ve been able to create my chart. However, these LC stats will have been seen by very few people unless they’ve been digging around in the raw data.
If we just pretend it’s not a problem… so typical of almost everything in the West these days. Whistling past the graveyard is all our elites do except march a bunch of proles straight into graves.
The entire thread is worth a read, but I’ll pull out two more charts:
Second:
The date where it all goes… north, is instructive.
I would add further that I think in a couple generations it will be recognized that the greatest damage was done to children in school, where they were reinfected multiple times. It often doesn’t show up as “long covid” because of their youth, but I’m laying long odds that their lifespans and healthy lifespans took a huge hit.
We continue to refuse to do anything about this. Every time I suggest making proper clean air changes to buildings, especially public buildings like hospitals and schools, the comments are full of people saying “but it would be expensive, we can’t do it” as if we aren’t wasting trillions on war and AI and various corporate subsidies, or haven’t lost trillions in tax revenue thru tax cuts for the rich and couldn’t do it if it was important to us. It’s always amazing to me how many proles spew back up the same bullshit elites use to justify their depravity.
Anyway, hardly anyone’s talking about Covid, but I’ll keep doing so. And my advice remains the same as it has for years: if your children are in a school which doesn’t take this seriously, find another school or home school them if there’s any way you can. If you care about your children, this is worth making some sacrifices for.
Most people rant on and on about how they love their children, but I watch how they act, and it’s a love expressed in words, not action, let alone sacrifice. When I was sitting next to my mother’s bed for the last two weeks of her life the province had people helping care for her at home, and I talked to them. They said almost no children do what I did, and recounted stories of the most horrid behaviour imaginable. I felt I was doing the absolute minimum. They thought I was a Saint.
(I didn’t sit by my Dad’s bed. Part of it is that it wasn’t clear when he’d die, but frankly he was a horrid father and husband and made my mother and my lives hell and that’s the real reason.)
Judged by how children treat their parents when they’re old, I’d say most parents sucked. Try not to be one of those.
Had a lot of subscribers unsubscribe recently. I assume it’s the economy and/or hating my coverage of Israel. If you value my writing and can, please subscribe or donate.