Operation Epic Fail

Posted on May 15, 2026 by camelotkidd

Trump’s attack on Iran is turning into the biggest military disaster in US history. Even the neocons are saying it, and the corporate media is reporting it.

On May 10, Robert Kagan, arch-neocon who’s married to Maidan cookie-monster Victoria Nuland, lamented in The Atlantic that the United States had “suffered a unique defeat in its efforts to subjugate Iran.” He says that the US defeat “can neither be repaired nor ignored.” The Strait of Hormuz would not be open as it was prior to the US and Israel’s attack on Iran. Meanwhile, far from being destroyed, Iran’s regional position had dramatically improved. China and Russia have been strengthened, while the US’s position has been “substantially diminished.”

A New York Times story makes official what I and many other heterodox analysts have been saying all along. U.S. Intelligence Shows Iran Retains Substantial Missile Capabilities: “The Trump administration’s public portrayal of a shattered Iranian military is sharply at odds with what U.S. intelligence agencies are telling policymakers behind closed doors, according to classified assessments from early this month that show Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers and underground facilities.”

It gets worse. The Washington Post reported on May 6, that after examining Iranian satellite imagery, some 228 structures of pieces of equipment at US military sites across the Middle East since February 28 had been damaged and destroyed. Hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft, vital radar, communications and air defence equipment had been struck by Iran’s forces. The dangers posed by Iranian strikes had been so intense that US military personnel were forced to work “remotely,” as to force some US bases in the region to relocate personnel out of missile range. Mark Cancian, a former Marine Corps colonel and senior advisor to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), found the strikes to be deadly accurate.  “There are no random craters indicating misses.” 

Other facts of Trump’s misadventure continue to leak out. Rep. Ed Case explicitly confirms the Pentagon has lost a staggering 39 aircraft in the disastrous war against Iran, exposing the unprecedented destruction of American military assets.

Wait. I’m pretty sure I never saw anything about that on CNN.

There are numerous reasons for the US’s defeat. The military/industrial/complex (MIC) builds fussy, boutique weapons that cost staggering amounts of money which don’t perform as advertised, and in limited quantities. The US military is geared towards short, expeditionary conflicts, not protracted industrial wars, something Iran and other adversaries have picked up on. Then there’s the fact that our putative elite still believe it to be 1991, when the US empire was at its zenith. All of this has been apparent for any of us who cared to notice but seemed to come as a surprise to Trump and crew.

US air defense weapons used to cope with Iranian strikes are a good example of the dilemma. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimates the use of at least 190 THAAD interceptors and 1,060 Patriot interceptors between February 28 and April 8, running down inventories of both at 53% and 43% respectively. Just to rub it in, Iran, according to an analysis by the US intelligence community, retains roughly 75% of its prewar inventories of mobile launchers and roughly 70% of its pre-war missile stockpile.

Unfortunately, it’s not just Trump. In an interview with Danial Davis, John Mearsheimer makes an important point. Davis: “What are the chances do you think that given all of the options here that President Trump does some version of the declare victory and walk away theory?”

Mearsheimer: “I think the chances are about zero. Uh first of all, the national security establishment in uh the United States is addicted to war. It’s deeply committed to policing every inch of the planet. Uh and the idea that we would walk away from the Middle East from the point of view of the American national security establishment is unthinkable.”

Meanwhile, the damage to the US economy from the closure of the Straight of Hormuz continues to accumulate, even as the stock market posts record gains.

Prices for these grocery items have spiked highest since the war began

Relentlessly climbing energy costs, coupled with tariffs and ongoing agricultural and farming issues, mean grocery bills are rising quickly and might continue for months. Costs spiked especially for a few key staples of Americans’ diets, including fresh produce and beef.

Overall, grocery prices are up more than 18 percent since January 2022. And the energy shocks from the war are only just now starting to be felt on supermarket shelves. But the inflation this time differs from rising prices after the pandemic, William Masters, professor of food policy and economics at Tufts University, said. In 2022, people had saved money after saving while in the pandemic lockdown and could more easily absorb some of the demand-fueled inflation. Now, supply costs are driving the increases. “Here, there’s not even the higher paychecks to cushion the blow.”

Does Trump care?
Reporter: “What extent are Americans’ financial situation motivating you to make a deal?”
Trump: “Not even a little bit. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation“

Of course, Trump does care about some American’s financial situation, and the billionaires who control our country’s wealth are closely connected to US national security policies for better or, in this case, for worse. Their enormous fortunes are a direct reward for their devotion to the American empire, and the tribute that flows into the empire from far off vassals increasingly rewards this narrow cohort. In normal times the billionaires prosper at the expense of the rest of us, but Trump’s epic cluster-fuck has the potential to harm them too.

Too funny.

The real story is in the wreckage. Why did Trump, the deep state and the financiers decide to roll the dice on Iran? Maybe it because there’s a perverse logic to war in late-stage capitalism. War destroys capital, reorganizes markets, accelerates technological restructuring, expands state subsidies to strategic sectors, and enables surplus transfer through monopoly, sanctions and geopolitical control. In Orwell’s 1984, Emmanuel Goldstein observed that “War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking to the depths of the sea, materials that might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and in the long run too intelligent.”

And we can’t have that.

Unfortunately, America’s obsession with domination and exceptionalism eliminates every possibility for the US to exist among nations like a normal country and sets the stage for a calamitous downfall.

Update: This seems like a useful metric for our milieu. “The Apocalypse Early Warning System is a sign of the times: it assumes the rich will know it before everyone else, and that it may therefore be deduced from signs of panic among the rich. Namely, scrambling for their private jets.”

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Gotta get in to get out

Posted on May 12, 2026 by camelotkidd

To be an apostate takes courage, tenacity and perseverance. Oh, and bloody-mindedness.

But in addition, becoming an apostate–an outsider–requires introspection. An examination of your own consciousness reveals a lot of unfounded assumptions about who we are, our place in society and the institutions we learned about in school.

Of course, to be an effective critic you have to understand the system that you’re critiquing. That means history, politics, economics, foreign policies etc. But also sociology, psychology and anthropology, because you’re dealing with people who aren’t rational but rationalizing. Then there’s the art of pattern recognition utilized to connect the dots. It really helps to have a galvanizing sense of outrage.

Along the way you come to the realization that our world is organized by sociopaths and actual psychopaths, and that there are an abundance of perverse incentives that drive their behavior. This has led to decades of right-wing policies like more tax cuts for billionaires, more deregulation for monopolists and more handouts to fossil fuels, which are not only wildly unpopular, but have created the massive crisis we face as a country. Our present political and economic moment is characterized by extreme and deliberate cruelty, fear, and baleful destruction of all that is social in nature.

Liberals may whine but the Democrats are totally down with these policies too, Meanwhile they deploy identity politics as a cover for their betrayal. Then they wonder why millions of working-class Americans vote for a scumbag like Trump. The Democrats evidence no sign of changing, instead conjuring up new and improved ways to be just as corporate and warlike as the Republicans, while covering it all up with slick liberal propaganda and hatred of Trump.

I’ve also come to realize that everything they warned us about the USSR and its oppressive state-controlled communism should apply to the monopoly capitalism that controls every aspect of our lives here in the homeland. Crazy that. In Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell, came to the realization that the communists and fascists were, at the base level, identical, simply with a different set of elite. Our elite are similar in the way in which how ideologies may change but the commitment to subservience to power is constant. The result is that the US state has been fully enlisted in the authoritarian project, where you can vote all you want but local, state and federal authorities will still ram through approval for the construction of massive data centers, with its concomitant usage of energy and water.

Fellow iconoclast, Ian Welsh writes—“This is the fundamental disconnect in the West: the people who are making the decisions do well no matter how much ordinary people are hurt; no matter how much they weaken their own countries. In fact, it’s worse than that: the worse their countries and citizens are doing, the better they do.

Every disaster is used to allow more looting. Are there oil shortages? Raise prices even more than costs? Food? Same thing. Are some companies going bankrupt? Buying opportunity! Are citizens desperate? Great, they’ll work for less.

Life is good for our elites and the more they destroy our countries, the better life is for them.

So sorry about high gas prices, high food prices, high health care costs and no future for you or your children. None of that matters. Trump’s getting rich being President and so are American elites and in the eternal honest words of George W. Bush “who cares what you think?”

You don’t matter. It’s been 60 years since anyone in power in America cared about America or Americans. Europe’s leaders are about the same.

Suck it up buttercup. Life’s getting worse and no one with the power to change that cares, because they’re doing more than just fine—they’re the richest rich in the history of the world, and life is good”

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Mapping the Deep State

Posted on May 8, 2026 by camelotkidd

Federalist Papers author and first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Jay, presciently described the deep state: “The people who own the country ought to govern it.”

And so they have. America is not really a country. It’s a multi-national corporation controlled by capitalist billionaires. 

Unfortunately for them, Trump’s attack on Iran has exposed the US as a failing industrial power with an aging military. Because elites in failing empires always behave thusly, the capitalists have responded with unprecedented savagery. Trump assassinated the Iranian leadership while they were negotiating, and kidnapped Venezuela’s president and wife and stole their oil. Now he threatens to bomb Iran back to the “Stone Age”, while bragging about his ongoing piracy.

Trump is simply responding to elite stimuli. Foreign policy is driven by the capitalist nature of our country, leading the US to embrace a military-centric hyper-imperialism in response to a marked erosion of its economic and, financial power. Beyond the president and congress there is a deeper structure of power in the United States, where real authority derives from the ownership and control of capital. Our elite comprise an overlapping ownership and control over capital, production, and finance. They include institutional investors who control massive pools of assets, corporate executives who administer production and financial institutions that allocate credit.

They, not we, control a militarized state that enforces domestic and foreign supremacy for capital. To understand who rules America is not to identify a deep state. It is to recognize a structural reality–that economic power is afforded through the ownership of capital, control of finance, and management of production.

In Who Rules America?, William Murphy, details the hidden architecture of the ruling class–“This is why power in advanced capitalism often appears decentralized while functioning in a deeply coordinated way. It is not that someone is issuing orders from a hidden center. It is that the system itself produces alignment through its structure.

At its core, the ruling class is defined not by wealth alone, but by control over the strategic levers of economic life: investment, credit, production, and enforcement.

The role of the state in this system is often mischaracterized as either neutral arbitration or direct corporate capture. Both views miss the deeper structural function.

The state in advanced capitalism operates as a stabilizing apparatus for the reproduction of the system as a whole. It does not simply enforce laws; it manages the conditions under which capital accumulation remains viable over time.

This includes monetary policy, fiscal intervention, legal frameworks for property rights, and, crucially, the capacity for coercion through military and policing institutions. In moments of crisis, whether financial collapse, social unrest, or geopolitical conflict, the state absorbs shocks that private capital cannot manage alone.

Far from standing outside the economy, the state is deeply embedded within it. It provides the institutional continuity that allows capital to survive its own contradictions.”

Trump’s Iranian adventure is certainly raising all sorts of contradictions. Meanwhile, there’s a changing of the capitalist guard, with the tech-bros making a play for primacy.

What’s clear is that no matter which faction comes out on top, elections and candidates have little to do with this architecture of power. Murphy says that “…elected officials occupy a specific and limited role. They are not sovereign decision-makers in the full sense often implied in public discourse. Political leadership functions primarily as a mechanism for managing legitimacy, mediating competing interests within capital, and translating systemic imperatives into publicly acceptable language.”

Might be something to keep in mind as the midterms approach, where we will be besieged with propaganda claiming it to be the most important election in American history.

Update: The new order materializes.

“How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next”
“Under the banner of “patriotic tech”, this new bloc is building the infrastructure of control—clouds, AI, finance, drones, satellites—an integrated system we call the Authoritarian Stack. It is faster, ideological, and fully privatized: a regime where corporate boards, not public law, set the rules.” 

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The Hamptons are not a defensible position

Posted on April 28, 2026 by camelotkidd

Skimming Karp’s screed it stuck me once again that our feral elite would kill us off without a thought as they transform the US government from being run by humans to being run by algorithmic computations. And they don’t seem to care that we know it. These AI systems are designed to maintain the status quo and power of the financial and tech elite by strengthening the control and surveillance capabilities of the state. It’s illustrative that they don’t want to drown that particular governmental function in a bathtub.

Of course, The Technological Republic, a ponderous manifesto, similar in a lot of ways to Atlas Shrugged, is set against a rapidly deteriorating planet, riven with wars, environmental disasters, political upheaval and monumental inequality, which raises the possibility that our elite are actively trying to cull the population. Watching Trump careen across the domestic and foreign affairs landscape with his massive indifference to collateral damage certainly lends credence to my conspiracy.

In The Peripheral, William Gibson described a fictional situation in the near future where all of the problems we confront now have produced a jackpot, killing off much of the world’s population leaving a kleptocratic elite ruling society.

Hmm, sounds vaguely familiar.

Techno-fascists like Karp, Bezos, Theil, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc. are driving us headlong into our very own jackpot, while plotting to abscond to their fortified compounds in Hawaii and New Zealand and ride out the turmoil. But can they really trust their pilots and ex-Seals to protect them when the shit hits the fan? Then there’s the fact that the Hamptons are not a defensible position. And neither are Hawaii, New Zealand or Silicon Valley, for that matter.

Mark Blyth, a Scottish-American political scientist and a professor of international political economy at Brown University, says that “It seems that the folks with the pitchforks have figured out where the Hamptons are and it’s not a defensible position after all. In response, the folks in the Hamptons have done what threatened elites always do in such situations, they hire mercenaries, or as we call them today, more private security. The problem with such a move is that you can’t buy a private solution (build walls) for a public problem (rising anger). Finding Elysium or an island off Fiji run on Bitcoin, are not viable exits. Eventually, those on top need to recognize that their fates are not separable from those of their fellow citizens, and they are your fellow citizens, not a threat to be managed. Throughout history, most elites have failed to recognize this and things get worse before they get better. Let’s hope that the smart money in the Hamptons gets the memo this time around.”

Hate to be a Debbie-Downer but I’m pretty sure that our feral elite definitely did not get the memo. And, that, judging by their intellectual spewing, they plan to develop AI to indoctrinate, surveil, track and murder opponents instead of changing their sociopathic behavior. Historically this is the behavior of elites in the late stages of empire collapse, where they double down on the things that have worked in the past while increasing repression. It never works, but, for our feral elite, hope springs eternal, and they are banking on drones and robots to protect them from populist anger.

Update: Drones are a low-tech, asymmetrical force-multiplier, and I’m surprised that some aggrieved citizen has not flown a Shahed 136 into Jeff Bezos’s mega-yacht, or Musk’s cyber-truck, or Sam Altman’s Stargate.

Just wondering?

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Can’t run an empire with neoliberalism as the operating system

Posted on April 24, 2026 by camelotkidd

Trump’s attack on Iran is proving conclusively that the US can’t run an empire with neoliberalism as the operating system. The evidence mounts every day, from inability to manufacture more than a few precision munitions, to fragile supply chains, to private equity vampires seizing essential infrastructures, to tech-bros proposing to privatize the Pentagon.

Rogue economist Michael Hudson says that the US economy is essentially a Ponzi scheme, where private equity sharpies take over companies and make money by essentially looting them. “After the Wall Street crash in 2008 when Obama bailed out the banks, and the Fed drove interest rates to zero, telling the banks that we are providing you funds at 0.1%, to lend out to the economy. But banks don’t provide money that way, banks lend money for assets, real estate, stocks, and bonds, already issued, already in existence. Bank credit isn’t extended, in the United States or Britain, to finance industrial capital investment. That’s the job of the stock market, if anything, or of companies to reinvest their earnings. Instead, banks lend money out to intermediaries, saying, ‘“You do the job; you find the companies to take over”’. Hence the explosion of private equity as intermediators.”

Unfortunately, private equity has proceeded to bankrupt whole swaths of the American economy by cutting back the quality of what companies were doing, slashing expenses, working labor harder, making them work overtime and cutting quality. 

You, dear citizen, might have noticed some of the malign effects, and it’s fitting that Cory Doctorow coined the phrase enshittification to describe late-stage neoliberal capitalism, where the whole purpose has been to make the elite fabulously wealthy while fucking the rest of us.

Meanwhile, as Hudson details, “this predatory financial system was making so many gains for the companies that were financialized and using their profits not to invest in new capital formation and new factories and means of production; all of that was done abroad; it was sent to China and other Asian countries.”

What’s ironic is that US military planners appear unaware of such developments as they plan to attack China after the neoliberals transferred US manufacturing there.

Where to start?

The financial class, along with the emerging techno-fascist elite have acted to take over government as part of their looting operations. It has resulted in the privatization of sovereignty. When Palantir proposes to assume the governmental role of predicting, surveilling, targeting and murdering, while releasing a techno-fascist tract arguing for an end of democracy and embrace of a Sparta ideal, we’ve entered a new paradigm. The ability to wield lethal force has been the bedrock of statecraft since Hobb’s Leviathan.

Palantir co-owner Alex Karp has recently produced a badly written manifesto that goes a long way to explain why it’s impossible to run an empire on neoliberalism. Even as they loot the republic they exhort the commoners to sacrifice for the greater good, and if they won’t, they propose a draft.

Ancient rulers understood that for an empire to prosper the commoners must be kept solvent–hence the debt jubilee–where the king would cancel debts periodically so that he had soldiers instead of serfs. This behavior wasn’t sentimental but practical. Citizens in desperate straights and miserable are hardly the sort who can defend the far reaches of an empire. Contrast that with Americans who are up to their eyeballs in debt, while the Trump Administration is carrying out savage cuts in social and supplemental food programs, and proposing to cut daycare for members of the military.

The stupid, it burns.

Update: The US spends upwards of a trillion dollars a year on what they laughably call defense but this is the chow our sailors are subsisting on.

“Images obtained by USA Today of poor-quality meals being served to U.S. service personnel in the Iran war have sparked alarm.

The images have highlighted concerns about the welfare of service members and the food being served to them while they are deployed, with the official account for the Democrats on social media dubbing the pictures “disgraceful.”’

I wonder where all that money went?

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What Now?

Posted on April 17, 2026 by camelotkidd

The US government in its present captured state is beyond redemption. Under Trump the US has openly declared itself to be a violent empire that’s above any international laws. The only available courses appear to be a US military coup or a revolution, neither of which seems likely. If Congress wasn’t completely compromised, they’d have already impeached Trump, so there isn’t really a political/legal solution.

The US and Israel’s attack on Iran has made this increasingly obvious, but as I’ve discussed before the captured aspect means that the spell can only be broken by a monumental military defeat or stock market crash. A disaster so pronounced that there can be no escaping the consequences for our feral elite, who seem to fail upwards.

Even worse, simply replacing Trump won’t fix our problems. Trump is perfectly representative of late-stage financial capitalism, with its rampant corruption, extreme violence and incompetence, but there are plenty of similar replacements out there.

The consequences for the US and Israel’s attack are already reshaping the global political and economic order. Crucial resources are curtailed. Countries are increasingly moving away from the U.S. dollar in trade. Supply chains are being disrupted. Economic alliances are shifting, often in ways that bypass traditional Western control. Iran is not solely reacting to these changes—it is actively trying to accelerate them.

What is emerging is a world that looks very different from the one the United States has spent decades trying to maintain.

Chris Hedges compares this moment to the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Britain’s attempt to assert control revealed the limits of its power and marked the beginning of imperial decline. The parallel is difficult to ignore. The United States is not collapsing overnight, but it is confronting a reality it has long resisted: it can no longer dictate outcomes as it once did.

The Trump Administration may not be able to dictate outcomes like previous administrations but they can wreak plenty of havoc on the way down. In fact, Trump has blown-up established rules, norms and structures because the US no longer benefits from them. In the multi-polar world unfolding the US has turned into an arsonist, where if they can’t rule as the dominant hegemon then they will burn it down. Of course, financial insiders are still able to profit from the disorder by front-running Trump pronouncements.

Welcome to the interregnum.

I’m convinced that our K-shaped economy is not going to change unless rich people lose money, while we will have to pry the empire out of the cold-dead hands of our feral elite.

As for the rest of us it will be like the old African proverb: “When the elephants fight, the ants get crushed.”

Stay safe out there and try not to get trampled.

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Be Evil

Posted on April 15, 2026 by camelotkidd

I thought I hated the tech-bros before but this article reinforced just how despicable they are–2026: The Year US Corporations Used AI to Allegedly Help Commit War Crimes and Make Themselves Military Targets: The Untold Story of Google, AWS, and American Corporations Being Accused of Committing War Crimes

It turns out that Google, Amazon, Open AI, Palantir, Microsoft, and Oracle power Israel’s Gaza genocide and enable the US’s double-tap missile strikes on girls elementary schools in Iran. Google turned its mission statement on its head: don’t be evil became be evil. The company removed the iconic pledge quietly in 2018.

The author of the article, Christopher Armitage, writes–“The US military and its Israeli ally run AI targeting systems on cloud infrastructure supplied by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Palantir. Those systems generate kill lists. Palantir’s Maven Smart System, built in partnership with the Pentagon, powered AI targeting throughout Operation Epic Fury; CENTCOM’s commander publicly confirmed the use of advanced AI tools to process battlefield data at a pace unprecedented in American military history.

In April 2024, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham published an investigation in +972 Magazine based on testimony from six Israeli intelligence officers, exposing two of those systems by name. One, an AI program called Lavender, generated a ranked kill list of up to 37,000 Palestinians by analyzing phone metadata, social media activity, and movement patterns, assigning each person a threat score from one to one hundred. A companion program called Where’s Daddy tracked each name on that list to their family home, timing strikes for when they were inside with their families at night. Six active Israeli intelligence officers confirmed to a journalist, on the record, that their military ran a program designed specifically to bomb people when their entire families were home. One officer told Abraham: ““We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building… the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.” Another described the process plainly: “You put hundreds into the system and wait to see who you can kill.”’

Silicon Valley powers Israel’s death machine. Israel’s IDF computer chief described cloud technology as part of “a collection of systems with which the IDF fights,” citing Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in her presentation. After October 2023, the Israeli military dramatically increased its purchases from all three companies in order to accelerate the genocide.

None of this should be surprising. Silicon Valley is a crucial cog in the military/industrial/complex and it powers the US’s death machine too. The tech-bros pretended to be all liberal and woke when the Democrats were in power but they have shown their true colors since Trump’s second coming. Meanwhile, AI is a giant bubble, looking for a profitable function and getting on that sweet Pentagon gravy train solves many of the problems related to the massive debt overhanging the data center build-out. Besides, they’re techno-fascists; so surveilling, tracking and murdering human beings gives them a woody.

Unfortunately for the tech-bros, they picked the wrong country to fuck with.

When the US attacked Iran in February 2026 and began assassinating Iranian military and political leadership, the IRGC looked at what was powering the targeting apparatus and started hitting it. In an amazing bit of schadenfreude, Iran is targeting the data centers that the tech-bros conveniently sited right next door in the Gulf States. The data centers in Bahrain and Dubai are a core part of the AI data center targeting ecosystem, and Iran is methodically eliminating them.

A single data center holding 50,000 of Nvidia’s current processors contains roughly $1.5 billion in hardware. The drones hitting those buildings cost tens of thousands of dollars each. This is the asymmetric war where Iran is running circles around the US. Instead of attacking aircraft carriers that are heavily guarded, Iran is going after the soft targets that are every bit as important to the US’s war effort. The most expensive military infrastructure in the world sits in commercial districts in Dubai and Bahrain, unfortified, reachable by consumer-grade drones, belonging to billion dollar corporations whose investors care about next quarter’s earnings.

Too bad Iran can’t bomb the data centers that the tech-bros are building here in the homeland. Luckily, in a bit of serendipity, the Iranians are doing us a solid with the blockade of the Straight of Hormuz and concomitant curtailment of petroleum products essential to the furtherance of AI. It turns out that lots of elements crucial to our modern world come from the Persian Gulf.

This black swan event might also, if we’re lucky, take out the private equity vampires that are sucking the life out of the US economy.

Unfortunately, the captains of the tech industry will not confine their war crimes to the periphery of the American empire, They are already providing targeting data to ICE, Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, NSA and the rest of the deep state alphabet agencies that are surveilling, tracking and murdering Americans.

Update: So it’s hardly a surprise that American citizens are revolting against the rollout of AI: “On the morning of Friday, April 10th, a 20 year-old Texas man named Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama was arrested for allegedly throwing a molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s mansion on Russian Hill in San Francisco. Less than two days later, police arrested 25 year-old Amanda Tom and 23 year-old Muhamad Tarik Hussein for allegedly firing a gun at the same house from their car before speeding away. 

Earlier the same week, and thousands of miles away, an unknown assailant fired 13 shots into the front door of city councilman Ron Gibson, who had just voted to approve a new data center in Indianapolis against a groundswell of public outcry. A sign that read “NO DATA CENTERS” was left tucked under the doormat.”

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Priorities

Posted on April 10, 2026 by camelotkidd

By threatening the civilization of Iran and the social cohesion of America, Trump is making the priorities of our feral elite crystal clear. Savage cuts to health care and childcare while massively increasing Pentagon spending to kill more people.

Donald Trump made a characteristically blunt statement last week, inadvertently encapsulating the reigning neoliberal/neoconservative philosophy. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things. They can do it on a state basis; we can’t do it on a federal basis. We have to take care of one thing: military protection,” Trump said at a private lunch at the White House.

What wild is that Trump’s own secretary of state, Marco Rubio, just pointed to this exact kind of thing as a prime example of the Iranian regime’s own villainy. “Imagine an Iran that, instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars, supporting terrorists or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran,” he told George Stephanopoulos this past Monday.

Yeah, imagine that.

Of course, Trump is lying about military protection. Trump is waging aggressive war–vicious attacks on the Iranian people with shifting rationales and increasing brutality and sadism. Unable to degrade Iran’s military capacity, Trump has shifted to making war on its factories, hospitals, universities, pharmaceutical researchers, bridges, and school children. To be fair, he’s simply following the Israeli method of warfare by bombing cities and turning civilians into red mist.

Trump’s 18 minute televised speech on April Fools’ Day merely doubled-down on all his past policies, refusing to admit that he had been disastrously wrong and instead declaring that he would continue his attacks on Iran. He also emphasized that these attacks would now heavily target Iranian civilian infrastructure, perhaps one of the first times that an American president has declared his intent to commit major war crimes in such a high-profile fashion. “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

There is a deeper ideological logic at work here, which is neoliberalism. Neoliberal economics reduces human beings to units in a system, economic cogs with conditional worth. When civilians are treated as expendable targets in a war in Iran, that is not aberration. That is the neoliberal system working as designed. The attack on Iran is part of the larger capitalist class’ projects of imperial domination. As New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman wrote—“McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas,” to point out that neoliberalism requires non-stop violence for the “market” to function properly.

Trump’s budget cuts are not just incidental to making war on Iran. They’re part of the same war that people in Trump’s income bracket are waging on Americans and Iranians alike. It’s not quite the same–bombing hospitals and schools is worse than defunding them. But while the tactics are different, the targets are strikingly similar.

Even as Trump appears to be a psychotic megalomaniac and his administration is filled with advocates of death and destruction, the so-called opposition party favors war too. The Democrats are already attacking Trump from the right, complaining that he has allowed Iran to maintain nuclear enrichment and their missile forces, while maintaining control over the Straight of Hormuz. While Trump committed electoral fraud with his record on starting wars, it’s useful to recall that he ran to the left of the Democratic candidates in 2016 and 2024 in regards to waging endless wars.

What’s clear is that both US political parties favor non-stop violence to maintain the American empire. Going further, Trump and the entire US political class has proven itself to be completely dishonest, incompetent, and corrupt. Perhaps the turning point was the end of the Cold War which allowed the neoliberals/neoconservatives to believe they could reassert their dominance over a socialist model that in the previous decades had provided an alternative. But the crackup of the Interregnum of Unreality is at hand, because Trump, in his own ham-fisted way, is destroying the neoliberal American empire in real time.

The shock is likely to be existential: Americans have been so misled for so long by their governments and media about their economic and military strength that the sudden discovery of its limits will be brutal and de-stabilizing. We are now approaching a crisis of the neoliberal ideology which has been forced on us over the last generation or two, and it will rapidly be seen that it has nothing to offer to explain, let alone address, the situation in which we will soon find ourselves.

Update: “The Trump administration’s self-congratulations for the ceasefire with Iran immediately fell apart after Israel bombed Lebanon and killed more than 250 people.

This was a breach of the ceasefire agreement which Pakistan had arranged and announced and which had included Lebanon and other areas of the conflict.

The Trump administration had been begging for a ceasefire for several days. It had been involved (archived) in formulating the message the Pakistani Prime Minister had issued. Trump himself had endorsed the 10-point condition sheet the Iranians had proposed by calling it ‘“a workable basis on which to negotiate”’

With knowledge of the imminent ceasefire members of the Trump administration had (again) waged bets on commodities and won large amounts of money.

But just a few hours after the Israeli attack the Trump administration repudiated two central points of the ceasefire. Lebanon was not included in the ceasefire, it suddenly claimed, and Iran’s 10 point sheet had been “thrown into the trash” even before Trump had endorsed it.”

Posted in anti-imperialism, deep state, feral elite, neoconservatives, neoliberalism, propaganda | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Birth Pangs

Posted on April 3, 2026 by camelotkidd

In July 2006, following the the US’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, Condoleezza Rice stated: “What we’re seeing here in a sense is the birth pangs of a new Middle East and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we are pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old one.”

Now, with Trump’s disastrous attack on Iran, the Middle East is poised to be transformed again. But I’m pretty sure Condi didn’t have Trump’s Iran cluster-fuck in mind when she made the declaration.

What’s ironic is that prominent advocates of the attack on Iran claimed that it would drastically alter the political map of the Middle East. And Trump assumed that he would be the US president to “remake the Middle East”, a mad scheme all of his predecessors had resisted since George W Bush’s dismal failure to achieve the same goal, alongside Israel, more than 20 years earlier.

With Iran having apparently now gained the upper hand, there are growing indications that this prediction might indeed come true, though not the way Condi, Trump or all the other neocons envisioned. Prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran had generally been seen as the dominant power in the region. The results of Trump’s war might easily return Iran to that powerful position, while degrading or even eliminating some of the Gulf Arab monarchies that were allowing the US to attack Iran from bases in their country.

Iran has instead made lofty demands of its own to end the war. The closure of all US bases in the Gulf States, Israel ending its hostilities in Lebanon, and returning the occupied territory, relief of all sanctions, acknowledging Iranian sovereignty over the Straits of Hormuz, and war reparations for the atrocities inflicted upon them.

These conditions, if agreed upon, would be tantamount to the complete military and political defeat of the United States in the Middle East and its expulsion from the region. Such humiliation by a regional power such as Iran would not only mark the end of American influence in the Middle East, but it could very likely end America’s tenure as a global superpower.

The Zionist-American war on Iran was intended to be a quick beatdown, starting with the decapitation of Iran’s leadership and ending, hopefully, with a spontaneous regime-change which would culminate with the Islamic Republic’s collapse, or at least total capitulation. There was seemingly no sense in Washington or Tel Aviv that Tehran could fight back at all, let alone cripple the US’s Middle East military archipelago.

Barring a quick turnaround in favor of the US-Israeli war effort, the hosts of these bases may want to begin planning for life without them. If the current status quo persists, with Iran maintaining its missile capacity, its deterrence capacity, control of Hormuz, and with US bases dysfunctional, we are entering a ‘New Middle East’ very different from what bloodthirsty Neocons have been fantasizing for decades.

Along with neocon hubris has been the rank incompetence of US military planning. It’s like they learned nothing from observing Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine with its emphasis on drones and precision strike missiles. Then there’s the grifting of the US military-industrial complex, whose only recent technological innovation has been to increase costs by reducing reliability with their cost-plus pricing. Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has thrown the American empire’s already shattered defense industrial base into total disarray. Commodities and components, like rare-earths and computer chips, central to constructing and maintaining digital and electronic systems, and precision-guided munitions, which before transited the Strait daily are now hard to come by and way, way more expensive.

I’m going to quote big, steaming chunks from: America’s Military Is Never Coming Back From This, because it lays out the calamitous effect the war is having on the US military.

“People talk about how Iran is a ‘second-tier military’ but they ain’t Iraq and this ain’t Desert Storm. This is Desert Shitstorm and Iran is not just a peer military to ‘America’s’, they are demonstrably superior. Just look at the scoreboard, which isn’t school massacres but military targets. Behold, then, ‘American’ airframes burning in the sun while Iran’s rockets are safe underground. The White Empire stood astride the Middle East like Colossus, but now they lie there in a wreck, colossal morons.

It’s not like any of this was a mystery. As the US itself said in a 2024 report called, somewhat hilariously, The Tyranny of Geography,

Moreover, the thousands of short-range missiles that Iran possesses are a factor here. There is no strategic depth. An F-35 is very hard to hit in the air. On the ground it is nothing more than a very expensive and vulnerable chunk of metal sitting in the sun. The refueling and rearming facilities on these bases are also vulnerable, and they cannot be moved. These bases are all defended by Patriot and other defensive systems. Unfortunately, at such close range to Iran, the ability of the attacker to mass fires and overwhelm the defense is very real.

They should have made this report a 15-second ad and run it on Fox because it’s obviously news to Donald Trump. 

It’s not just that the American military is crashing under its own weight, they’re going the wrong way. They brought a fighter jet to a rocket fight and are getting eviscerated. Observe that Iran has no fighter jets to speak of, just as Apple never made phones with keyboards. It’s a completely different business model. This is the age of Tunnel and Rocket Wars, and ‘America’s’ still geared to fight World War II against enemies that don’t exist anymore.

Now ‘America’, in retreat, is parking its 60-year-old airframes out in the open while Iran has modern missiles in tunnel cities.”

Trump once said that to lose dollar hegemony would be worse for America than losing a major war. Yet this is precisely what is in play in this ‘game of chicken’ which Trump started with Iran, but where he is now at a loss for how to exit, without damaging humiliation.

Like the US/Israeli attack on Iran, Condoleezza Rice’s notion of birth pangs and of a new Middle East follow in the intellectual footsteps of A Clean-Break and the Yinon Plan, both designed to remake the region into Israel’s playground. Some intrepid journalist should ask Condi what she thinks about the new and improved birth pangs as a result of Iran’s surprising success against the American empire and their genocidal sidekick.

Update: As the attack on Iran goes pear-shaped and the Straight of Hormuz remains closed, Trump, in a pique of rage, is resorting to the US’s imperial blueprint; attacking hospitals, university’s and factories, while escalating US-Israeli bombings of Iran’s civilian infrastructure. “Over the next two to three weeks,” Trump said, “we are going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”

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La-La Land

Posted on March 27, 2026 by camelotkidd

Our feral elite inhabit a completely different reality.

It’s what Naked Capitalism writer Nat Wilson Turner calls “The Interregnum of Unreality ” and what I refer to as La-La Land.

Trump’s daily social media posts set the standard, becoming more and more unhinged as his Iran adventure goes pear shaped. Nevertheless, he continues to declare victory in the war: “In a certain sense, we have already won.” In reality, there’s been so much winning that we read in an astonishing article from the New York Times: Iran’s Attacks Force U.S. Troops to Work Remotely, since Iran Rendered Virtually All US Gulf Bases Uninhabitable.

I wonder what losing looks like?

The fact that the U.S. initiated this war without a clear achievable goal, without a plan for contingencies or an exit strategy, only adds to the cray-cray. No surprise, but it appears that there is a financial method to the madness, as politically connected insiders are making bank on foreknowledge of Trump’s pronouncements.

Then there’s that old-time-religion where a group of evangelical pastors, led by Paula White-Cain, White House faith advisor, and other members of the Faith Office, have prayed for Trump and the U.S. to succeed in this war. Pete Hegseth, the self-designated Secretary of War, has also made explicit remarks about the religious nature of this war, and the U.S. military has framed it as “all part of God’s divine plan.”

I guess since it’s God’s will there wasn’t any need for the Trump administration to have a plan, or any need for accurate information on how things are going. It’s been reported that Trump thinks the war is going great and all the negative press coverage is wrong because the Pentagon provides him a daily “highlight reel” of successful strikes and stuff being blown up in Iran. It’s the new technological “Potemkin Village”, with Trump the distracted, social-media Tsar.

But there is lots of detachment from reality out there, from the corporate media’s cheery pronouncements to Wall Street’s financial complacency in reaction to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and catastrophic downsides that are starting to emerge. Yves Smith asks–“when will Mr. Market awaken from his relative stupor to force some sort of state change? 

Trump was able to sweet talk the markets by pretending that negotiations with Iran were underway, but now there are preparations for a ground attack with elements of airborne infantry, special forces and Marines moving into position. The attack appears destined to occur Friday night after the markets close, naturally.

Former CIA analyst, Larry Johnson lays out the force structure. “…when you see this kind of deployment, it can only be one of two things: it’s an exercise or it’s an actual mission. I don’t see this as an exercise…the fact that it looks like they’re bringing in both SEAL Team Six and Delta Force by and by themselves, those are just, you know, they’re not they’re not an assault force. They’re good at RA, you know, rescuing hostages, that kind of thing, but you know, somehow they’re getting activated, but they’re being accompanied by the 75th Rangers. And I recall in all the exercises that I scripted, when they involved either Delta or Seal Team Six, you always involved the Rangers, you know, at minimum they go in and seize an airfield, you know, and and and accompany that. And then you got the 82nd. So it looks to me like what’s happening that 5-day. So that started on March 12th. March 13 was when Trump activated the 31st MEU, the Marine Expeditionary Unit. They started setting sail. When do they arrive in theater?
Friday or Saturday. Gee, that’s right at the end of that 5-day period.”

There is talk of capturing Kharg Island, where Iran loads oil and gas tankers for shipment, but any cursory examination of the geography of the Persian Gulf, and knowledge of Iranian missile, artillery and drone capabilities, relegates the scheme to La-La Land.

It seems to be a theme, where the ship is taking on water fast while the first class passengers rearrange the deck chairs.

What’s worse is that as deranged as Trump is, nothing will fundamentally change by impeaching him. Trump embodies the American ruling class: greedy, immoral, and overconfident. Even Trump being held responsible for a failed war seems like a remote possibility because it would mean that the deep state has accepted being driven out of the Middle East.

Update: It’s not just Donnie Darko who’s living in La-La land. Melania Trump wants to replace teachers with robots. What could go wrong?

Update 2: Vice President Vance thinks Iran will be using nuclear suicide vests to attack Americans.

We are governed by the dumbest fucking people in America.

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