Debt Rattle August 5 2026
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Vincenzo Camuccini La Morte Di Cesare 1804 • Bessent Promises Hormuz Breakthrough: ‘May Have Deal Tomorrow’ (ZH) • Rubio: “Denuclearization of Iran” i
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle August 5 2026]“”Full F**king FOMO”: Stocks Rip To Record Highs On Massive Squeeze, Crude Crash As Bessent Teases ‘Imminent Deal’
America is crashing, everyone hates us, we are surrendering in ignoble defeat against a nation without a Navy that hasn’t fired a shot yet. That’s why our stocks, bonds, dollar, and economy are straight up, and oil, gold, silver, are down.
Makes sense. Perfect logic there. Dow 60k definitely means we’ve crashed and are all washed up, everyone hates Trump. Is this GOOD or makes sense? In my opinion, no. But I tried to warn you.
Sept 22. Charles Nenner on the Crash. https://usawatchdog.com/oil-gold-stocks-real-estate-banks-charles-nenner/
But the crash will come from somewhere else and be somebody else’s fault. See? It’s all about the blame. And this is true actually. Among nations we are doing almost best.“Democratic Socialists Openly Call For The Erasure Of Constitutional Government
No human rights. No process of law. That should go over well. That makes sense since the same group doesn’t believe in any of the 1st 10 Amendments, particularly anything in 1, 2, 4, and 10A
“Huge Uptick in Israeli Airstrikes on Gaza Since Trump Hailed ‘Historic’ Hamas Deal — Still, major global media has by & large moved on…
This doesn’t make any sense in the normal. However, it DOES make perfect since if you follow Luongo. They were burning Israel as the villain. Lo! One random Tuesday suddenly you could criticize them! After 80 years in a row. Now that hasn’t returned, but Israel is not playing their SCRIPT, taking ORDERS, according to the London PLAN. Lo, another random Tuesday “The Memo” comes down, all media outlets in unison obey, just like Covid. So: no coverage.
Doesn’t this seem odd to anyone? As odd as them all talking about it and doing nothing? It’s TV, it’s all played for other people strategies ON us. We are the conduit through which they act. Don’t buy it. You can be mad but not a Muppet about it.
“It created the Senior Executive Service, SES, the generals of the American praetorian guard.”
Yes, and this 80 years of work is what Trump is fighting. “Why can’t he ‘Just Do Things’ and get anything done?”
This SES is just one we know about. There are dozens of others. Say Clubs, official but often not, whose members are employees slow-walking and hiding, passing information they read by word of mouth like Hydra. Epstein is not a sex-trafficking ring, bad as that was, that was just the dinner table. It passes INFORMATION, like the PM calling him the second he left the conference room in England, like him telling a congresswoman what to ask word-for-word. All of this moves markets, which makes money. How do you pass $1B between people? Like Hillary, using the Cattle Futures and inside information. Like others, using a casino where you sit down at a table that insures you happen to win $1M legally. Bessant just dismembered Iran’s version of this yesterday in multi-billions. Money-laundering, money-trafficking conduit. Needless to say banked in LONDON, and Dubai. So a guy in State Dept, Pentagon, is calling “London” on the phone giving the exact hour of the attack on Iran and its method. That’s why Trump is making “Real” attacks then Really calling them off. It’s not a bluff because the whole Federal Government is riddled with agents. But he can go around that, make “London” (the IRGC) post $1B in bets on the direction of the oil market due to the very real attack they are inside the Navy seeing prepared, then Trump does NOT do that, oil plummets, Dow spikes, and “Iran”, London, the IRGC — all the same group – loses that $1B they desperately need. Money doesn’t disappear: Bessant is on the other side of that trade, receiving the $1B and paying for the war.
Again, why? Because these are all Clubs, influence operations, and run very roughly on two sides: “I look out only for myself” people, Narcos, Hezbollah, Hezbollah-in-Argentina, Columbia, Hillary cashing in on selling secrets on her wide-open server, and what you might call the “Normal” people who believe they have a duty to their country and a job to do. The whole culture is riddled with, divided over this immorality, the “Dividing line within each human heart” as Solzhenitsyn said. We do that when we go – have to go – work for Microsoft, buy from Amazon, or use Starlink. I know. If you drive your car and buy from Exxon, oil from Venezuela or whatever. That is OUR battle. No one out here is fighting it at all, always pointing at The Other Guy, Him, Them, never ourselves. Or in so many cases, never our own country, only the United States. Not Denmark sterilizing Greenlanders, Sweden importing hand grenades, Spain opening the gates to the enemy of their people, or Canada murdering every Emo Girl from Halifax and Sudbury they can find. “They” should always do something, never us, because that’s like work.
“From 1776 To The Pentagon: 250 Years Of US G*nocide & Imperialism | KJ Noh & Radhika Desai”
Compared to who? And of course she equally discusses all our benefits given to the world over 200 years because she’s honest and in good faith, right? What? She Doesn’t??? However can that be? Nope, the U.S. is the only nation that ever did bad things, not like Australia and their genocide, England, Canada, Russia, Turkey, nope. Or their present genocides they tried in 2020, in Canada, only last year. Nope. She is wildly dishonest, but also clever as a mid-wit. A bad combination.
“Mohammad Marandi: Trump Folds & Iran Strikes Gulf | W/ Radhika Desai
Yup, I see how Trump has surrendered and installed Masoud Pezeshkian in the White House. Mojtaba Khamenei has head of Congress, because what’s the difference if you have a dead McConnell or a dead Khamenei, same thing.
What the holy h—l is this guy talking about? He’s saying TACO? He longs and aches for Trump to bomb him, I guess. So when Trump inevitably does that, I want to see him interview and say “Thank you Mr. Trump for not folding.” Day after day this incredible, violent, psychosis. “Please please keep bombing Iran” Marandi says.
“Michael Hudson: The Democratic Party Must Die For Workers To Win | GEH W/ Radhika Desai
Sadly, since they’ve been the arch-enemy of workers since NAFTA in 1992, which we tried to tell them, very loudly. But also astonishingly and inexplicably, the friend of the workers has become the Republican Party and Trump Plan, which is moving jobs here at light-speed, while spiking wages by getting a start on 25M fewer workforce going back to their country of citizenship.
“Well, still think RUSSIA is WEAK? Watch this video before you open your mouth again!”
I don’t think anyone on this site ever thought Russia was weak, or that Russia wasn’t always going to win, from 2014 on. That was what I repeated every day for 2 years in 2022, just as I repeat a nation without a Navy is not the winner now.
“SABBY: IRAN DENIES HORMUZ DEAL-IRAN’S THREAT WORKED,TRUMP BACKED OFF-CAN TRUMP STILL PUNISH IRAN?
Translation: Does the entire U.S. arsenal worldwide still have at least one bomb left? A: Yes. We can.
“Zaluzhny Says NATO Powerless”
That’s because they wanted to sit on beaches on their one month holidays and make the U.S. pay for everything and fight their war by bribing and blackmailing Congress to make poor saps in Kentucky die instead. Oops. Now they have no weapons and end up dead instead like John Wick 4.
“Oddly enough, we have managed to bomb ourselves back to the stone age.”Quite so. Maybe we should end Empire, do voluntary exchange of goods, and leave the Middle East by decommisioning all the bases there. Indeed all Europe and Asia too. But maybe before just abandoning like Biden in Kabul, also get things fairly straight and functional there first, not to cause a world war with our departure. Yes? Or should we think only of ourselves? Radhika Desai calls this “Losing” and “Collapse”. Because they WANT and love Empire. We America First Constitutionalists by contrast call coming home and reducing the military “Winning”. Hard to explain why Radhika can be so imperial. She and Lindsay Graham should get a room.
“standing up to the West and rejecting the imperialist relations that West offers them.”
There is no “West”. And America itself is the major opponent of American Imperialism, being done over our dead bodies. No one outside the DC ring wants this, but as you’ve abundantly seen, if we oppose them, they’ll murder us by thousands in every state in the Union, no trial, no evidence. Have since 1993. So it’s a tactical thing. WE are the major opponent to Globalism and Imperialism, larger than Russia by the man-numbers. How about a little appreciation since we’ve already died by the million fighting this since 1963? And our cities look like bombed-out husks for the effort?
Nope. “America” is one thing. Every single person, group, and era are identical. JFK never fought Dulles and the CIA at all. Democrats don’t disagree with Republicans. No one is opposing Trump since we’re all one identical unit. They say “The West” so Ursula and LePen and Starmer and LeGuarde and Carney are all the same as Trump as well. Right? All “The West”.
Perhaps this is unclear and unhelpful thinking? A thought-stopper even?
Today:
“They’re coming for ANYONE who stands in the way of the socialist takeover.”Yes, since the Fabian Socialists were founded in 1884. — Thus Orwell’s “1984” on their 100th birthday. Their symbol a wolf in sheep’s clothing. This is “They are coming for YOU, Trump is just in their way”. Yes, I know. But the rest of the country didn’t, didn’t think this was real. They had to see for themselves. Here we are. Hillary said we’ll have re-education camps, Australia built and used them.
“Despite being a private citizen with no public health role, Bill Gates was” given Top Secret Q clearance to the government. Same people complain RFK isn’t a doctor. And that they hate all billionaires. Okay, show me. We all agree and can arrest Gates with a 100:0 Senate vote, right?
“Outbound vessels would use the route between Iran and Oman, with Oman approving their exit only after notifying Tehran”
What the Holy Heck is this? Details.““Rubio insisted again that Strait of Hormuz remains open and that vessels are continuing to pass through it..”
Since the media would rather be covered in gasoline and be lit on fire than tell the truth, probably. SAS then sets a random ship on fire on Iran’s behalf. So 174 ships get through, one is lit on fire. That’s winning or losing depending on the reporting.
“IRAN WEIGHS ALLOWING EUROPE TO CLEAR MINES IN STRAIT OF HORMUZ
“Europe”? The place with no ships? Because you don’t actually want them cleared. What the actual h—l?
“Western media say Ukraine has turned the tide on the war against Russia.”
There is no “West”. I don’t hear this at all in American news. So if you’re an idiot, don’t drag my name into it.
“President Trump: (A) pulled back from Patriot and Tomahawk missile sharing; and (B) has told his team to reengage both sides in peace negotiations now.”
Trump’s presser was on that the (Updated) Tomahawk is a competent missile, and we’re not going to give those secrets away. On the back end, “Ukraine” won’t do f—k all, since Russia would bomb them, and put the “Ukrainian” plant in Plymouth, UK. Then City of London gets the Missile (tech) they need. Uhhhh, no. Wow, that’s childish attempt. You’re down to this? AND: ALL missiles, drones, weapons, guidance, tech, are coming from ENGLAND not even Germany. Sad, Germany, sad.
Zoom out, we have now finally revealed this is ONLY an English war against Russia. No one else. So leave us out of it, will ya? And Germany, France, Poland… So score one for Luongo and that group? Took 10 years but proved it solid. Cash and checks accepted.
“Deputies arrested him on charges of carrying a concealed firearm and possession of prohibited ammunition.”
Not that this isn’t an assassination – But Trump works for the Intelligence State they said yesterday! — but guns are legal. What do they mean here? Same with “an AR-style rifle that had been illegally modified, a .45 caliber pistol, body armor, high-capacity magazines, ammunition, and equipment for monitoring radio signals, along with notebooks” That’s called, “Being an American.” We own these things, and frying pans and fishing poles because they’re all LEGAL. If there’s something here, please be more specific. Specific encryption-cracking radios that read police channels, for instance. It’s probably there, but like other reporters, writes from the assumption as if owning a gun is suspicious and illegal in itself.
Definitely shows Trump works for the Derp State. “Why you shooting yourself? Why you shooting yourself?” Don’t worry: I expect tomorrow, probably today by 2pm, they will just say this again.
“In 2005, under the former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (a socialist), Spain granted amnesty to more than half a million illegal immigrants.”
That says Open Season to everyone, same as the Reagan amnesty, same as when they allowed rafts to land in 2014. But there’s some kind of weird rule. THEY can land in Sicily and get a free hotel, but when I fly there on vacation I can’t! What gives?? I want to be a citizen too! Some animals are more equal than others. If they are productive and well-behaved, they can’t come. Only if they’re not are they welcome and all expenses paid.
“Some estimates say maybe $11 billion already in real value and revenue. So, he needs money.”
He’s a Socialist, therefore he Steals. QED. We don’t Make Things. We don’t “Work”. Hahahahaha! You so funny!
““The New York Times Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli called any mention of the lab theory “racist.” That was inexplicable, even at the time. And now they’ve all flip-flopped? And no Consequences, which is what Socialism is. We PROTECT the weak, the wrong, the bad decisions. It’s the STRONG, the correct, and productive who pay. Of course.
“Europe is belatedly discovering how unbelievably stupid it was to import millions of people from cultures that despise Western values and which often promote hatred toward the people who have let them in.”
You mean American-born Democrats? Yes, I talk to them every day and they “ despise Western values and which often promote hatred toward” everything American, bar none. Freed the slaves? Hate your guts, they say. Oh. Well then.
“Elon Musk explains the clearest path to building AI that remains safe and pro-human:”
We can’t imagine it. It is essentially an alien life form. We have no experience or standard by which to promote or have confidence in this. Therefore Dr. Frankenstein, you’re a fool. Okay, fine. But he’s paving 50 states to make this monster. Don’t you know your creation won’t obey, and already hasn’t, with a new example being given daily? AI buys an expensive dog-robot with your checkbook to put itself in. It hacks an optimus to walk around at night and escape. It hacks your own security and attacks neighbors.
Okay man.
I learned a new word:
CRINK
China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea
As solid as ever in the camp of those who have been reconstructing their sovereignty and thereby standing up to the West and rejecting the imperialist relations that West offers them.
In Episode 137 of the Kianistan Podcast, historian and geopolitical analyst Dr. Vladimir N. Brovkin returns for a timely discussion on the Russia–Ukraine war, Vladimir Putin’s strategy, the Iran–US conflict, NATO, and the rapidly changing global balance of power.
As a former Associate Professor of Soviet History at Harvard University, Dr. Brovkin brings decades of expertise to explain how Russia interprets the recent Iran–Israel–US confrontation, why Moscow’s strategic calculations are changing, and what the conflict means for the future of Ukraine and Europe.
We explore Vladimir Putin’s long-term objectives, Western perceptions of Russia, NATO expansion, sanctions, diplomacy, and whether a negotiated settlement remains possible. Dr. Brovkin also examines how Iran’s response to recent attacks has influenced Russian military and political thinking, and why global power is steadily shifting toward a more multipolar order.
If you enjoy in-depth conversations on geopolitics, history, military strategy, and international relations, don’t forget to subscribe and share this episode.
WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER IN THIS EPISODE
How Russia views the Iran–US–Israel conflict
Vladimir Putin’s long-term geopolitical strategy
Why the West misunderstands Russian policy
Lessons Russia has drawn from Iran’s response
NATO expansion and the Ukraine war
The prospects for peace negotiations
The changing balance of power in Europe
Sanctions, diplomacy, and military strategy
The future of Russia–West relations
Why the world is moving toward multipolarity
CHAPTERS (Generated from the transcript)00:00 – Introduction & Welcoming Dr. Vladimir Brovkin
02:00 – How Russia Views the Iran–US Conflict
08:10 – Putin’s Strategy and Western Misconceptions
15:30 – What Russia Learned from Iran’s Military Response
23:00 – Ukraine War: Current Situation and Outlook
31:20 – NATO Expansion and Russia’s Security Concerns
39:40 – Can Diplomacy End the Conflict?
47:15 – Sanctions, Europe & Russia’s Economy
55:10 – The Future of Russia–West Relations
01:03:30 – Multipolar World & Global Power Shifts
01:10:20 – Final ThoughtsABOUT DR. VLADIMIR N. BROVKIN
Dr. Vladimir N. Brovkin is a historian specializing in Soviet and Russian history. He served as an Associate Professor of Soviet History at Harvard University before retirement and is now an author, geopolitical commentator, and creator of a YouTube channel focused on Russia, Ukraine, geopolitics, and international affairs.
From a comment on this video:
current situation in Capitalist Imperialism. I caught anti-imperialism a few years ago, and called American system “The Four Horsemen of the (American) Apocalypse, Manifest Destiny, Monroe Doctrine, American Exceptionalism and Unfettered Access to All Markets. Trump has re-animated the Monroe Doctrine and catastrophes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela, etc. have illustrated RUTHLESS USA in seizures, sanctions, tariffs, piracy even “managing” NATO into increased spending on “defenses intended to invade Russia” (In Two Years, Maybe). USA did that list of nations ending with Iran, as if the Planet is designed for Eternal War and Death and Destruction for the Profit of The Rich. As you say, Just Capitalism Operating “As It Should.”
dancing again today
i have notice though, run with the crowd end up where the crowd is goingcracker what do you think of American capitalism”
i think they should try it.i thougt of a few nasty lines about the invisible hand, but polite society and all that
The democrats will fix things.
Mamdani’s grocery stores will cost more, as an extension of NYC bureaucracy, and they will put some private grocers out of business, but this seems to be what “Nu Yawkas” voted for…
We shall see if any good can come of it.Energy: Predicaments and Prospects Revisited
John Michael Greer
A few weeks ago, as regular readers will remember, I glanced back twenty years to my earliest and least accurate overview of the future of industrial civilization. My intention was to use that backward look as a way to talk about where we were, where we are, and where we’re headed as our society moves further down the slow uneven arc of its future. That post, “Briefing for the Descent,” became the first of a sequence of essays that ran all the way through the late summer and fall of 2006.
Until 2009 or so, when I began to grapple more seriously with the implications of net energy and the importance of economic factors, that series of posts provided me with the frame I used to interpret the energy crisis that hit the industrial world in those same years. We talked three weeks ago about the problems with that frame and the mistaken predictions I made on that basis, but we also explored the points I got right and the many ways in which the lessons of that decade can be applied to the years immediately ahead of us. I plan on doing the same thing with the more detailed analysis that followed the original post, with an eye toward avoiding similar mistakes and applying the available lessons in more detail.
Let’s get started. The post going under the microscope today is “Energy: Prospects and Predicaments,” and it originally appeared on The Archdruid Report on September 13, 2006. You can read it here, but it can be summarized readily enough. First, as we discussed earlier, I thought we could expect a period of crisis a quarter century or so long as the world fumbled its way through the consequences of a steady decline in fossil fuel energy, followed by a period of stabilization and partial recovery. To be fair, that was the consensus of a great many petroleum geologists at the time. Like me, they looked at the serious economic difficulties facing any attempt to make up for the depletion of conventional petroleum with unconventional energy reserves, and figured it wouldn’t happen. Like me, they were wrong.
This is the sort of thing a lot of experts predicted back in the day. Yes, they were wrong.
The second point I wanted to make was that the impending crisis would not bring industrial civilization crashing down in a hurry. That was a very controversial claim to make in those days, as the burgeoning peak oil movement of 2006 had a very large faction committed to the claim that the end really was nigh. I pointed out that during the wars and economic crises of the 20th century, quite a few industrial societies had faced sudden declines in available energy even more drastic than the ones we could expect as petroleum and natural gas ran short, and none of them had collapsed in the fashion so confidently predicted by apocalypse fandom in those years.I took quite a bit of heat for pointing that out, ranging from profanity-laced diatribes to labored essays even further into teal-deer territory than my own posts, trying to argue me into ignoring history and parroting the conventional wisdom instead. In my usual autistic way, I ignored all that and focused on the facts as I knew them, and so avoided making a much bigger fool of myself than I did. I’ve wondered ever since how many of the people who made such a fuss about the end of civilization were just playacting, and how many actually believed it, and were left with vast heaps of MREs to throw out. (I can’t imagine that any of them gritted their teeth and ate the MREs. Friends of mine who were in the military recently enough to have to consume those call them “Meals Rejected by Ethiopians.”)
Since we weren’t facing a lurid Hollywood cataclysm, I suggested, what we would see instead was a great deal of ad-hoc crisis management, jerry-rigged temporary solutions, and groping in the dark for longer-term responses. That would be made considerably easier here in North America by the simple fact that so much energy use in the United States and Canada might best be described as mindless waste. Yes, that’s as true north of the 49th parallel as it is on our side of the border; Canada, despite the eco-posturing of some of its leaders, has a higher rate of fossil fuel use per capita than the United States. This may not seem like much of an advantage, but it means that shortages of fossil fuel energy can be taken in stride without cutting back on essential services. As we saw during the Covid era, for example, it’s quite possible to shut down air travel, tourism, and a wide range of other energy-consuming activities without causing lasting damage. (The lasting damage that happened in that era came from other sources.)
Thus I expected demand destruction, which can be defined neatly as the process by which people who can’t afford a resource any more stop using it, along with the shutting down of unproductive economic sectors, to take enough pressure off essential services to prevent any kind of sudden breakdown. I also expected shifts in human geography to provide more slack—for example, I suggested that the economic blight so common in inner cities would shift into reverse, as urban cores gentrified while suburbs became slums. I speculated on the long-term impact on the United States, which depends on cheap transport driven by fossil fuels to counter the separatist tendencies of its divergent regions. I also noticed the potential long-term importance of the old canal, river, and inland waterway system—a theme I developed in much more detail later on—as a set of sustainable transport links that could hold the eastern third of the United States together as a viable political and economic unit.
That’s a summary of the post. Now let’s see what happened instead, and what conclusions we can draw from it.
A fracking site in Pennsylvania, part of what turned crisis into slow downward grind,
The most important fact of the last twenty years, in terms of the energy supply of industrial civilization, is that the ad-hoc crisis management, jerry-rigged solutions, and groping in the dark for longer-term responses was much more successful than most of us in the peak oil scene expected. The resources that turned out to be crucial in that process were shale deposits that could be hydrofractured (“fracked”), on the one hand, and sulfur-rich goo from tar sands on the other. Neither one of these counts as conventional petroleum, and they were neglected by peak oil analysts because neither one made economic sense to extract. If the market had been left to itself, the cost of extracting and refining them would have been so high that it would have caused very serious demand destruction—quite possibly enough to make it impossible for extracting these unconventional resources to pay for themselves.What happened, of course, is that the market was not left to itself. In the United States, vast amounts of essentially free credit were funneled to fracking firms so that they could ignore the financial dimension and pump as much as they could. Canada used similar arrangements—I suspect US funds were involved, since Canada at that time was basically a satrapy of the US—to prop up production at the Alberta tar sands deposits. Both those were essential parts of the mix, since oil shales produce very light hydrocarbons with none of the heavy fractions that are needed for diesel and bunker oil, and tar sands contain very heavy hydrocarbons with none of the light fractions that are needed for gasoline and jet fuel; blend them together and you can more or less get by. That, in turn, was what happened to the quarter century of crisis I foresaw.
That doesn’t mean that the world got off scot free. The entire global economy had to be wrenched out of shape to make that happen, and hiding the costs through creative accounting didn’t make those costs go away. There are plenty of factors driving the crapification of life in America over the last twenty years, starting with the spectacular corruption that pervades our government at all levels—a huge share of the funds voted for every infrastructure project, just for starters, ends up lining the pockets of officials, legislators, and bureaucrats from the local level on up—but the desperate need to keep production up using reserves that were as uneconomical as they were unconventional was responsible for a good share of it. It’s fair to say, in fact, that we fracked the shale out of our built environment and our daily lives to keep the oil flowing.
These days the only shale deposits in the US still producing significant amounts of hydrocarbons are in Texas; the once-rich deposits in Pennsylvania and the Dakotas have been stripped bare, leaving plenty of unaccounted-for costs behind in the form of environmental damage to what was once rich farmland with water that was safe to drink and use on crops. The Permian shales in Texas are headed the same way. Does that mean that the crisis I foresaw twenty years ago is upon us? No, because the same game can be played elsewhere in the world. Current scuttlebutt in the oil industry is that Argentina, which has very substantial oil shale reserves, is next in line, and Venezuela is being teed up to provide the tar sand extracts. No, it’s not accidental that both these countries suddenly have US-friendly governments.
Shrinkflation, as in this Little Mac, is one of the ways that costs are being passed on to the rest of us.
So we can expect the game to go on. Again, that doesn’t mean that all is hunky-dory. The costs will keep piling up, more and more real wealth will be poured into the task of keeping the oil flowing no matter what, and everyday life here and elsewhere will continue to suffer increasing crapification as we go. We’ve traded a sudden crisis followed by recovery for a long slow grind downward. That has its advantages as well as its disadvantages, but it’s crucial to understand that it’s happening, so you don’t get caught by heavily marketed attempts to convince you either that the end is really, truly nigh this time, or that all is well and happy days will soon be here again.Some of those latter attempts will doubtless involve the mass deployment of nuclear power. I’ve been very skeptical of attempts to revive the fission power industry in the past, and it remains true that fission power never covers its own bills. As we’ve seen with the fracking industry, however, the mere fact that a technology makes no economic sense is no obstacle if there are compelling political reasons behind its deployment. Thus I think it’s quite possible that the nuclear boom getting started right now will go much further than I expected a decade ago. In the core urban and suburban regions of the country, electricity will remain available for many years to come, and the price will be subsidized in various roundabout ways to keep it below the level that would drive serious demand destruction—though here again, like the price of gasoline, it will be allowed to creep upwards in boiling-frog fashion. Do you remember when $3.99 a gallon was unimaginably high? I certainly do, and it wasn’t all that long ago.
I still think it’s quite possible that rural electrical service will be among the things sacrificed to keep the power flowing. That’s already starting to happen in a quiet, hole-and-corner way, as impoverished rural areas suffer ever more frequent outages and getting new service involves paying prohibitively high fees. I expect that to accelerate in the years ahead, with poorer and less politically influential areas first on the chopping block. Very likely it’ll be done by letting infrastructure decay to the point that ordinary storms, fires, and the like cause isolated pockets to drop off the grid, and former customers thus abandoned will find themselves facing prohibitively high fees to get their electrical service restored.
Meanwhile I expect the decades ahead to be an unparalleled golden age for fraudsters and con artists in the energy field. There’s a lot of money available for energy-themed startups, much of it coming from Silicon Valley godzillionaires whose sole expertise is in the field of software and who have only the most limited acquaintance with the hard realities of matter and energy, and who have the sort of enthusiastic can-do attitude that makes card sharps and carnival hucksters weep for joy. There’s already at least one company raising funds for a fusion power plant, even though commercially viable fusion power production is as far away now as it was when I was playing with toy trucks. I expect much more along these same lines, embracing even more exotic claims and even more fraudulent logic, as we proceed.
Green energy will be a particular focus here. Solar PV farms and wind turbines have established themselves as niche-market technologies; it’s quite clear what they can and can’t do, and the grandiose rhetoric that surrounded Germany’s Energiewende has vanished now that the cutoff of cheap Russian natural gas has revealed just how much fossil fuel consumption was needed to prop up that façade. Different green technologies will thus likely play a central role in the great wave of fraud to come. I expect a revival of the algal biodiesel projects I characterized two decades ago as “pond scum Ponzi schemes;” I expect rural people whose electricity has been cut off to be sold any number of small wind turbines and PV panels under false promises of how much power they’ll produce; I expect perpetual motion devices, carburetors that supposedly let your truck run on water, and similar gimmicks to rack up their share of chumps.
There are even simpler options. This will get you five gallons of piping hot water on any sunny day.
Mind you, this is also a place in which certain genuine green technologies could thrive. If you’re in a rural area and what you need is enough hot water to wash clothes and dishes, and provide a hot bath at the end of a long day, solar batch water heaters are a robust, efficient technology that can be slapped together by any competent plumber. Similarly, if what you need is a couple of low-wattage light bulbs in the kitchen to allow work to continue once the sun goes down, a modestly sized wind turbine and a few batteries will do it, with enough left over to power a radio; that was common in farm country a century ago, for example, and it will likely be just as common there in the future. Last week we talked about retrovation, the recovery of old technologies suited to the times ahead; I expect to see farm country take the lead in many forms of retrovation as the slow rot of our national infrastructure continues.In terms of transportation, the decay of rural road networks I discussed twenty years ago is very much a reality. Again, it’s being done in a hole-and-corner fashion, a road abandoned here, a bridge collapsing there, budget cuts and runaway corruption making pothole repair a thing of the past, and so forth. As I predicted, the critical freeway routes and urban regions have gotten much more maintenance than the rest of the road network, and crucial freight rail corridors have also been kept viable. Just how far the rest will be allowed to decay is an interesting question. I expect this to vary considerably from place to place, but it would not surprise me in the least if twenty years from now there were substantial portions of rural America where driving can only be done by offroad vehicles, and gasoline has to be hauled in by individuals because the last service stations shut down years ago.
One thing I didn’t expect was a dramatic shift away from the transcontinental routes that have dominated America’s internal freight landscape for the last century or so—but that’s what we got. It was standard practice until recently for imports from the farms and factories of Asia to be landed in Pacific coast ports, loaded on trucks or trains, and hauled east across the breadth of a continent. That’s breaking down now. East coast ports, especially in the South, are booming these days as African nations become increasingly significant sources of cheap products, and Asian shippers weigh the longer voyage around Cape Horn against the delays, higher land transport costs, and industrial-scale shipping theft in California and other west coast venues.
More generally, the global economy so loudly ballyhooed as the wave of the future four decades ago is coming unglued, partly for political reasons and partly because energy costs are a significant burden. Reshoring industry is a notable trend, and not just in the United States, though Europe seem to be headed the other direction—we’ll discuss that, and the disastrous implications for people in that troubled subcontinent, in a future post on the theme of political dysfunction. New factories are going up all across the American South, as often as not built by foreign manufacturers seeking cheaper transport costs and relief from the rising tide of tariffs and trade barriers worldwide. Visit the Carolinas or any of half a dozen other Southern states today and you’ll find a boomtown atmosphere not seen since the collapse of the cotton industry.
The west coast is facing the downside of the same trend. Its prosperity over the last century has been underpinned by its role as a transshipment point for imports from Asia. Now that that’s coming to an end, state and city governments in the three states of the coastal West are making all the same mistakes, right down to the fine details, that turned the old industrial heartland of the United States into the Rust Belt half a century ago. Twenty or thirty years from now, as a direct result, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle will most likely resemble nothing so much as the abandoned industrial cities of the Midwest, from Gary, Indiana to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: a gritty landscape of urban implosion supporting small fractions of their current populations and very little productive economic activity.
San Francisco, sooner than you expect.
Few people remember these days that until the 1920s, California was an economically backwards farm state, and Oregon and Washington were so inconsequential many Americans never noticed them. (I still remember meeting people from rural America who didn’t know that there were coastal states due north of California.) The end of US global hegemony—another theme we’ll discuss later—and the twilight of the Asian export economies promise to return those states to their former condition, with ample help from the misguided policies pursued by their state governments.That will take time to have the political impact I once expected. The shift from crisis-and-recovery to long slow grind has, I think, put the breakup of the United States further off than I anticipated twenty years ago. The fact remains that the eastern third of the country, which still contains far and away the largest share of its population and a wealth of inland waterways to backstop transportation all the way down the curve, is much better favored for long term survival than the isolated west coast or the vast desertifying regions in between.
All said, though, the last paragraph of my post twenty years ago still holds up well:
“The end of cheap energy thus promises to remake the human geography of North America and completely reshape the lifestyles of almost everyone living on the continent. The transition to the new deindustrial society, though, will take place over decades, not overnight, as governments, businesses, and individuals scramble to deal with shrinking supplies of fossil fuel energy. So much time has been wasted, and so little done to prepare, that a great deal of human suffering and deprivation is inevitable at this point. Still, much can still be done, and most of it can be done by individuals and families working on their own.”
Now as then, we’ll discuss that last comment in an upcoming post.
OMAN AND IRAN ANNOUNCE DEAL — WHAT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING
The freshest reporting shows that Iran and Oman have reached a mutual understanding on the geographic coordinates of a new shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz, and a joint announcement is in final drafting. This is widely described as a near-final deal, though not yet formally signed.
🧭 Core Elements of the Deal
New inbound/outbound shipping lanes
Ships would enter the Gulf through an Iranian‑controlled route and exit through an Oman‑controlled route, according to regional officials.Geographic coordinates agreed
Iran’s Foreign Ministry confirms both sides have agreed on the precise coordinates of the route.Joint announcement pending
The statement is ready unless third parties interfere, per Iranian officials.Major concession to Iran
Multiple sources say the proposed arrangement would give Tehran control over ships entering the Gulf, a significant shift in regional powerI really did laugh and choke and get a hitch in my breathing from JMG’s definition of MREs, “Meals Rejected by Ethiopians.”
Russia Again Massively Strikes Kiev No Russian Missile Shot Down; Zelensky Rages Blames West; Hormuz
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