As such, the market’s outsized reaction underscores how sensitive investors have become to Treasury policy signaling amidst persistently above-target core inflation, large fiscal deficits, and an unprecedented boom in AI-related capital expenditure. This brings us to the likely reason the Treasury announced the change to its buyback operations in the first place: concern over rising long-term Treasury yields and mortgage rates, rather than acute liquidity problems in off-the-run bonds. Mortgage rates had been falling towards 6% earlier this year, a threshold at which house buying becomes more attractive, but are now heading back towards 7%. [Emphasis added.]

Notice the words and terms I bolded: market’s outsized reaction, signaling, announced, concern, and becomes more attractive. These are all representations of subjective judgments that may or may not have an objective basis. They are all terms of narrative control. And of course sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The article itself is about Treaury Secretary Scott Bessent’s announcement about bond buybacks on August 19th. This provided a short break in the rise of long-term bond yields but then the bond market clawed back its higher yields and we are about where we were before August 19th. The pundits are calling it “market mayhem.”

Several points. The stock market had an outsized reaction. There is a term in stock trading called the “animal spirits” of the market. This is a quasi-mystical term which is really just a catch-all phrase for, “We don’t know why the market moved the way it did. Let’s just call it ‘animal spirits.’ ” What the pundits and analysts are NOT saying is, “We cannot call it market irrationality because our neoclassical economics depends on the paradigms of efficient markets and rational humans.” Oops. So the stock market overreacts in an irrational response to the irrational movement. But the stock market sometimes overreacts to a rational or objective movement too. I will leave it to you to consider whether Bessent’s announcement was rational or irrational.

The Treasury was signaling something when they announced the buybacks. They were signaling an intent to take pressure off rising bond yields and the announcement of it was just as important as the decision and the action. Just doing it without the announcement would not have the desired effect of controlling the narrative.

The Treasury made this announcement because of their concern over rising long-term Treasury yields and mortgage rates. They are concerned over new issues (on-the-run bonds) rather than liquidity issues of bonds already purchased and in the market (off-the-run bonds). Liquidity in the US bond market is not really a big deal because US bonds are more stable than any other country’s bonds. To use a popular phrase, “They are the cleanest dirty shirt in the hamper.” In fact, countries sold off some of their gold reserves rather than dump their US treasuries when the price of oil went up and supply was constrained after the start of the Iran War. Turkey was a prime example.

Sidenote and brushup: Bills, notes and bonds are often collectively called bonds or treasuries. A Treasury bill - also called a T-bill - is a short-term debt obligation (essentially a short-term loan) issued by the federal government. These bills mature in one year or less from the date of purchase. A Treasury note - or T-note - is a medium-term debt obligation and has a maturity in the 2- to 10-year range. Treasury bonds - also called T-bonds - are long-term debt obligations that mature in 20 or 30 years.

T-bills, notes and bonds are generally considered to be below-risk and highly liquid fixed-income investments, backed by the US government.

The US government is concerned because they depend on the US housing market keeping the whole debt structure going. As the article says, “Mortgage rates had been falling towards 6% earlier this year, a threshold at which house buying becomes more attractive, but are now heading back towards 7%.” A mortgage is the biggest commitment most people will ever make (a bigger commitment than marriage or having children!) and it locks you into the System for most of your working life. Even with a starter home in their 20s, most people just leverage their first home into a bigger, better home in a better neighborhood and still carry a mortgage. Paying the mortgage off and staying in that first house for the rest of your life is not the way things work nowadays. Even the most stable couples often cash out and downsize in their retirement.

So why did Treasury Secretary Bessent make this announcement amidst a lot of fanfare? He is trying to control the narrative. He wants the “animal spirits” of the stock market on his side. He wants the domestic & foreign investors on his side. He wants the whole world to believe in US treasuries again.

Sidebar: The core theme here is that the US is now going to do what Japan has done since the 2000s. Japan suffered an asset price bubble collapse in 1991, which led to a prolonged period of economic stagnation described as the “Lost Decade,” with GDP falling significantly in nominal terms through the 1990s. In response, the Bank of Japan set out in the early 2000s to encourage economic growth through the non-traditional policy of quantitative easing (buying up Japanese government bonds). The Bank of Japan (Japan’s central bank) is still doing this and still carries a large balance sheet, which it is trying to unwind. The key BOJ rate in Japan just went up to 1%. The low, low interest rates of the last two decades are the reason Japan has been able to keep inflation low and still have a debt-to-GDP ratio over 200%. Right now it is 204-248%, depending on which source you use. The US debt-to-GDP ratio is “only” 125%. So, my prediction is that the US has plenty more room to run in following the Japanese model, and will do so. Bessent is signalling this.

And what has caused US treasuries/bonds to get a bad rap in the global economic system? $40 trillion dollars in US government debt. This is a new threshold which was crossed without a major world war or another depression. It is just the US government printing money with abandon. And of course, this has been the modus operandi since Nixon took the US (and the world!) off the gold standard in 1971, but the sheer incompetence and greed of deficit spending has reached a new high. It really is up into the stratosphere now. And for what? So rich people and corporations can get even richer. Meanwhile the working class suffers more and more.

But the working class votes and - more importantly - buys things. If the working class were ever to realize that a 20-year-old car is better than a new car because it makes them free from car payments and is cheaper in the long run, or that they really don’t need or want the next new shiny object in the marketplace, the jig would be up. So Bessent and Trump and Merz and Macron and all the other incompetent political overlords have to SOMEHOW convince the working class that they still have it good and should just “go along to get along.” Bessent’s belief in controlling the narrative and hoodwinking the public yet again has a clear precedent. Twice, Donald J. Trump convinced half of the US voting public that a rich playboy with a nasty streak had the interests of working people firmly in his grasp. Twice they bought this lie. Bessent may be a fool, but he can read the newspaper and listen to the news. He may actually be able to control the narrative. Are Amerikans really this stupid? Bessent thinks so.

The foreign bond investors may not buy Bessent’s spin on the narrative, though. It appears that the buyback scheme, just like the yen purchase scheme, has run its course rather quickly internationally. In other words, foreign investors saw through the con. Now the “bond vigilantes” are demanding higher interest rates on all classes of treasuries. They may get it. OR the Fed and the US government may have to start quantitative easing (QE) again, the Fed program that mitigated the effects of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-09. The TARP bailout was just the start. QE was the next step and it has been argued that the US economy never really came back from the GFC.

Let’s be brutal for a moment. Trump spews out bullshit about the Iran War and the Strait of Hormuz in order to keep the stock market going mostly up. He also telegraphs bombing raids and “peace deals” to make the oil price go up and down. Those in his inner circle can make money either way this narrative pushes the market. When the oil price is up, they short oil stocks. When the oil price goes down, they buy back their shorts. Trump even started a program so more investors can get notice of these moves ahead of the market by paying a monthly fee. This is both immoral and criminal. So far, the market still buys Trump’s manipulative bullshit and no one knows how long it will take to wise up. And the animal spirits are not telling.

What can writers on Substack learn from this? First off, everyone is trying to control the narrative. I am too. My whole program is to provide a new way of thinking so that other people can 1) look at their situation and 2) shift their paradigms to 3) control their situation 4) to their advantage. Small moves in a local environment.

But there are other writers who want to sell you an idea. One idea is that reform of the existing System is possible. Another idea is that, “If we just vote for Bernie Sanders or AOC or (your favorite politician here), everything will be all right.” Still another idea is that if we use AI we can be more creative. Hah! All three of these ideas are false. But if you cannot even see that “someone” is controlling the narrative and has a vested interest in persuading you of these three ideas, you may be seduced by these bright, shiny, false ideas. Once you grasp the idea of controlling the narrative, you are less vulnerable to their propaganda. And it really is propaganda. They are selling you something and altering your behavior by controlling the narrative. Look closer. Figure out what their intentions are. Closely criticize their motives, assumptions and methodology. I do it to myself all the time and I certainly am open to others’ criticism of my work. But a warning is due here. If you are going to criticize me, you have to make sense. You have to write clearly and concisely. No fuzzy thinking allowed.

So . . . A little bit of research and understanding about the bond market can be beneficial for all of you writing your own articles on Substack. And if you are not a writer, you can still benefit from using the bond market as a focus for understanding control of the narrative. What makes us human is culture. Culture is carried by language. Language influences culture too. Controlling the narrative influences the culture which you inhabit 24/7.

First, notice the cucumber shell in the top of the photo. See how it is getting brown on the left side but is still bright yellow on the right side? Inside the cucumber, the seeds in the brown area are already pulling away from their attachments to the fruit, although they are still housed in the gelatinous liquid. In other words, more mature and ready to drop into the convenient nooks and crannies of the soil as the fruit degrades. The measuring tape provides the size of this particular fruit in centimeters.

The bottom part of the photo shows the seeds in their gel. Some people wash it off, some people let it ferment like saving tomato seeds. I don’t bother. I just let the whole plateful of seeds and gel dry and then rub them apart. This is another stressor, by the way. I want tough seeds that can take abrasion.

I took this cucumber in from the field a few days ago after it had slipped from the vine. I let it grow because it increased in size while I wasn’t paying attention and thus signalled to me I should let this one go to seed. I then watched it for a couple of weeks after it passed harvesting size. It still had some green on it when I took it in and placed it on the mantle over the fireplace, where it was in my line of site every day. I cut it open today because it was getting soft and brown on one end.

This cucumber variety is a landrace I have been growing for several years. It is a hybrid of National, which I brought over from the US and had been growing for several years as a standard open-pollinated variety. I crossed it with a Cornichon Petit de Paris variety I got from the grocery store seed racks. Now I have an open-pollinated variety that breeds true every year but still has the flexibility to adapt to climate change. I don’t particularly like the stippled skin of the French cornichons (French for pickle; it also can mean a ninny, crétin, or mutton-head in the vernacular) but the taste is good. I select my type specimens for the National-type skin. When I was a market gardener, the National out-produced the other pickling cucumbers I tried, had a pleasing shape, and tasted good eaten raw. The Petit de Paris variety provides more adaptability to the hotter climate of southern France.

Sidebar: Just because Paris is in the name does not mean the variety is acclimated only to the climate of north-central France. It it mostly branding. The same is true of the Radis noir d’hiver de Paris, or black winter radish of Paris, which are just cylindrical black radishes that grow in the fall and winter. The round black radishes are usually typed as Spanish black radishes. I grow both.

Notice how nice and plump the seeds are. If the seeds are flat, they are not mature. The dark spots are bits of the flesh still clinging to the seeds in the gel. This small plate contains enough seeds for several years in the garden and I can still give some away. I also have leftover seed from past years, which I often mix in with last year’s seeds. This provides a greater depth and breadth of the seed samples and is just a variant of line breeding. I could also just throw out a mature cucumber and cover it with a little bit of soil and not disturb it until it grows up next year, for instance in a 1 meter x 1 meter raised beds, of which I have plenty.

This simple exercise in saving cucumber seed is a good time to think about seed-saving paradigms at their most basic. The basic protocol for conventional seed-saving is to get a good sample. The last seminar I went to many years ago suggested saving seed from 50 plants or fruits, mixing them all up, and then taking a sample from this larger sample. This is based on Gauss’ Central Limit Theorem, which states that if you take sufficiently large samples from any population, the distribution of the sample means will form a normal (Gaussian) curve. When n=30, i.e. 30 randomly selected pieces are selected, that is usually enough for your sample. The independent seed savers in that last seminar suggested 50 to err on the side of caution. The key here is make sure your samples are random and normal. N=30 takes care of the normal part.

Sidebar: When I did my master’s thesis on Neandertals and modern humans 40,000-30,000 years ago, I addressed the problem that has always plagued studies on Neandertals - small sample size, n < 30. There is no problem with independence or randomness of the samples, as the specimens pop up when someone is digging a mine or building a road, or someone just notices something while in a cave or rock shelter. Also, the dating revealed thousands of years in difference between when the specimens were alive. These are all independent and random events and specimens. But the Neandertal skeletons are never at a level of a village cemetery, for instance. So the sample size is the biggest problem. Most paleoanthropologists just go ahead and ignore the sample size problem and measure/test the Neandertal specimens anyway, with whatever methodology they are using. My solution was to test the specimens themselves for normality, using the measurements already in the literature. There have been all kinds of normality tests devised in the last 200 years of probability studies and statistical methodology, so I stood on the shoulders of those who came before me, as it were. To corroborate my tests and as a backup of my methodology, I also used non-paramentric methods, which do not need the assumptions of normality, independence and randomness. My methodology was proven solid and it was clear Neandertals were separate populations from the modern humans who co-existed and then replaced them. Genetics later confirmed this separation and replacement of one species over another, although there was still interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Homo neandertalensis.

Back to the cucumbers and the landrace paradigms. What the conventional seed-savers are doing, whether large companies or the small independent seed breeders I know, is to regress to the mean. They want a large enough samples that they can count on the consistency of traits. Nothing is 100% of course, but if they have a large sample of cucumbers that thrived under drought conditions, as an example, they have a consistent base to predict that future plants will respond in the same manner and do better under drought conditions. They do NOT want the outliers.

However, I WANT the outliers. I want that odd plant or fruit that survived and thrived against all odds, whether it was a new mutation from this year OR was a beneficial mutation that was there all along over many generations, never was selected against, and now has the chance to shine. Okay, got that? I WANT the oddballs.

This leads to another paradigm shift. You can test your paradigms, as well as testing your theories. The process is the same. You observe, form a hypothesis, gather data, test your data, come to a conclusion and then use your results as feedback to the paradigm, just you do with your theories. You then can modify your paradigms to fit in better with the “true state of nature,” just like you modify your theories. In this case, my seed cucumber was inside a hot greenhouse near the open door. It was not as hot as in the back of the greenhouse, but hotter than in the open field. So I can take this saved seed and test it against my other seed from previous years and see which seed does best in either a non-irrigated or an irrigated patch. I can also just see which does better within an irrigated patch. It may be that the new drought-selected seed is better overall. There may be other factors of course, but we work with what we have. My paradigm shift here is to select for specific drought-resistance rather than general yield and viability as I have done in the past. This can be extended to other crops or I can utilize multiple selection paradigms at the same time.

My cucumbers were in two places this year. One planting of picklers was in my small greenhouse that got extremely hot. This was where I got the seed specimen for my pickler seed. The other planting was out in the open and the picklers and slicers were close together. I will save some of the nicer slicers for seed, but I don’t need to, as I have plenty of that landrace, based on Marketmore, and I can still get Marketmore seed anywhere. Also, I don’t worry about mixing the seed for slicers. Because of the opportunities provided by the climate changes, I have a drought-selected landrace.

This last summer - 2026 - provided a laboratory of stress. There were 5 canicules (heat waves), hot winds, little temperature relief at night for either plants or animals, a lack of rain, and fires that either burned areas or filled the air with smoke (this affects aerobic plants as well as humans). I have a garden across the street which I cannot irrigate but which has some underground moisture that trickles down from the forested slope of the hills. When I planted one of my landrace sweet corn varieties there in May, I did not know the weather would provide a laboratory of stress. The only thing I did to mitigate the heat/wind/dryness was to mulch some of the young plants. This did not measurably affect the stunted growth of the corn, but it did affect whether the plants tasseled or not. The tasseling happened after a nice rain we had between canicules. Now I will have some ears of corn for seed. Once I saw how my usual planting in that garden became an experiment in drought-selected seed, I lowered my expectations and decided I would be happy to get the equivalent of ONE full ear. An ear of corn has about 200 kernels and is enough to plant a 4-row plot 50 feet x 10 feet at 1 foot seed spacing. It looks like I will get quite a few ears, so I will have seed to give away too. And even if I only got a few kernels out of this plot, I could STILL plant a few hills of 3-4 seeds per hill so they would pollinate each other. This is the planting style of the Pueblo people of the American Southwest. It works here too and it would allow me to keep these new drought-selected seedlines going.

Important point. The climate disaster summer of 2026 was an opportunity for those who knew how to adapt. To quote Sandy Denny in the song Stranger to Himself, when she was with Fairport Convention. “Hazards are risks, and risks are chances.”

So on August 26th, I pulled the old hay off, harvested the potatoes and left the “bullets” to seed for next year’s volunteers. In case you don’t know what “drops” and “bullets” are, the drops are the small potatoes you often get for seed potatoes. You don’t need to cut them into “slices” or “pieces” and they therefore don’t have a propensity to disease on the cut surfaces. A drop is about the size of a pullet egg. [Sidenote: Pullet eggs are from chickens who are just getting the hang of laying eggs. They are noticeably smaller than regular eggs and can even occasionally be quite tiny as the hens work out their learning curve.]

Drops are all you need for planting, so you can just store your drops and eat the large potatoes. Potatoes start growing using the stored carbohydrates in their flesh. That is why your potatoes sprout in storage when conditions become favorable and produce the stolons. However, the potato shifts from using stored carbohydrates to using nutrients in the soil as soon as it can. Thus the old slices you sometimes dig up when you are harvesting potatoes. You will notice they are still the same size as when you planted them. That is because the slice prefers soil nutrients to stored carbohydrates.

Bullets are just the smaller drops that are about the size of a musket ball or a black powder bullet. These bullets grow potatoes just as well as drops or slices cut from large potatoes. That is because of the preference for soil nutrients over stored carbohydrates in the potato flesh.

A note on how to “chit’“ your potatoes. You can just throw your potatoes or cut slices into the ground and they will grow. However, the fresh-cut surfaces will be more conducive to disease. If you let the cut surfaces of the slice harden off for a few days, they will do better. It is also a good idea to let them “chit.” Chitting is just letting them grow rudimentary stolons in a warm atmosphere (warm but not too hot) and then plant them. The second photo shows what these chits look like. Chitting gives your potatoes a jump start on the season.

A stock image of chitted potatoes.

So how much of a yield did I get from my 15 square feet of potatoes? 2292 grams. This is a little over 5 pounds of potatoes and potatoes have 350 kcal/pound. In 15 square feet, this comes out to over 5 million kcal/acre.

Equation: 5 pounds / 15 sq ft * 43,560 sq ft/acre * 350 kcal /pound = 5,082,000 kcal/acre.

This is a good yield for southern France and for doing nothing. Plus, I left the bullets to grow up next year. I will just leave them and till around them next season when I am doing row/bed prep. Keep in mind I don’t have acres of potatoes or any other crop. These numbers are equivalence numbers. They allow me to compare myself to commercial growers, just like doing energy accounting in kilocalories or kilojoules allows me to compare my methods to industrial agriculture. In this case, I am salvaging stolons that I don’t want to plant (I have plenty of drops and bullets) and tucking them into an area that would normally lie fallow for next year.

There is also a bit of acclimation and adaptation going on with these somatic clones too. It is not all genetics. A person needs to do a little bit of reading into epigenetics too. This does not make you a Lamarckian.

Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) was a French naturalist who made a simple error in how evolution works (the giraffe long-neck example) but who made a lot of contributions to biology. In fact, he was the first to use the term “biology” to designate the science that studies living beings. He was also the first to propose a materialist or mechanistic understanding for the origin of living beings, from which he developed a theory of their appearance through natural evolution. Lamarck was a materialist before Darwin and laid the foundations for Darwin’s natural selection. However, Lamarck used a “transformist theory” of individual organisms adapting to their environment. The neck of a giraffe getting longer because it needs to get leaves high up in trees is his famous example. And that is wrong because the variation comes from genes, not as a result of an adaptation of an individual’s behavior or organs to the environment. Now remember, Darwin did not know about genes either. Lamarck was thus one of the first naturalists to have assumed the theoretical necessity of the evolution of living beings, long before Charles Darwin and On the Origin of Species in 1859. I mention epigenetics in this context because we now know that genes can be switched on and off due to the environment or regulatory genes acting on somatic genes (as differentiated from reproductive germ cells or “sex genes” - a clunky term).

So in addition to my experiments with seed lines, I am doing experiments where I stress the somatic clones of potatoes and other crops (like sunchokes) in order to force them to adapt - at least as much as they can. If it gets so hot potatoes cannot be grown anymore in southern France, I will have to move north or higher up into the Pyrenees.

Just like I use salvage techniques of leftover stolons and leftover mulch in fallow areas, so too one can apply the same salvage idea to other crops, like pumpkins. After Halloween in the US, you can buy pumpkins really, really cheap. I used to buy a truckload for 20 cents/pound. Pumpkins are high up on the nutrient chain and are like little bags of complete organic fertilizers.

Raw pumpkin flesh contains roughly 1.0 gram of protein per 100 grams. This equates to approximately 0.16% nitrogen content by wet weight. The seeds are 4-6% nitrogen by wet weight. When I made my own fertilizer for 50 cents/pound, I mixed it up to be 3% nitrogen. So the flesh is 1/20th of my homegrown fertilizer, but the seeds are double the value of nitrogen in my homegrown fertilizer. Because of the weight of rind, fiber, seeds and flesh, it is hard to compare cost per pound, but pumpkins feature a balanced carbon-to-nitrogen (C:N) ratio of roughly 11:1 to 15:1. This is what we call “green” elements, versus the “brown” elements of grass hay at 30:1, or straw at 80:1. And pumpkins contain far more nitrogen relative to carbon than materials like dry leaves or straw, so discarding pumpkins into a compost pile accelerates decomposition by feeding the beneficial microbes responsible for breaking down waste. Or you can just throw them out onto the field and chop them up with an axe or sword to speed decomposition. It is fun to throw a pumpkin up into the air and draw your sword for a cut while it is in the air. [Fun fact: I had a very focused volunteer a few years ago who could plant a straight line of cabbage plants the first time she tried. I showed her how to draw a sword and then threw a potato up into the air for her to draw and slice in half in mid-air. She did it cleanly the first time. I was impressed.]

Another experiment in using stolons was to put them into a ditch between old raised beds and cover them with hay. I have not harvested these yet, as they still have some life left in their top growth. Even if they are not growing, they are safe for storage in the ground until I get around to harvesting them. I have other potatoes to harvest.

To summarize, I threw some stolons on the ground, covered them with leftover hay and brush and forgot about them. A couple of days ago, I raked aside the mulch to harvest the potatoes. I left the bullets and covered the ground back up with the old mulch. I will get potatoes again in this spot next year. They will not be as good because potatoes are heavy feeders and you shouldn’t plant in the same spot two years in a row, both for rotation purposes and for disease prevention. But they will be there. I have volunteer crops all over the garden just like this, encouraged by crop rotation.

At any rate, the role of kings in medieval France is of importance to me, as well as the whole Medieval period in France. After all, I can see the Château de Montségur from our front yard and the well-worn paths of the Cathars are all around us and still used. Montségur was the last gasp of the Cathars and was taken by force in 1244. Over 200 people – some children – were burnt alive after the castle was taken. Kinda puts the brutalities of the US and Israeli militaries into focus doesn’t it?

Firnhaber-Baker’s book focuses on the unbroken succession of fifteen Capetian kings from 987-1328 CE. The reviewer does a very good job of integrating the foibles of the kings, their impact on French society and the world, as well as exploring the bias of the author. Here is an example.

Such​ is the emphasis in House of Lilies on the unrestrained sexual behaviour of the Capetians that the book might almost be read as a subversive portrait of the ineffectiveness of kings. What did kingship entail? Firnhaber-Baker notes that the ‘two most important ingredients of power’ in the 12th and 13th centuries were friendly relations with influential churchmen and victorious armies.

In contrast to the little kingdom to which Hugh Capet had laid claim in 987, France by 1328 was a major political presence in Europe.

The reviewer also delves into wider social themes.

Yet lectures given in 1937 by the Annales historian Marc Bloch and published posthumously by Fernand Braudel in 1958 as France sous les derniers Capétiens (Bloch was executed by the Gestapo in 1944), similarly associate the Capetians and their administrative structures with the formation of France. Bloch integrated the history of the Capetian rulers with the development of every aspect of French society, culminating in the ‘expression of French mentality’ in literature and art.

It should be noted that the Annales School is gaining credibility again with The Defeat of the West (La Défaite de l’Occident – 2024) by French historian, demographer, and sociologist Emmanuel Todd. Todd is the originator in this book of American Nihilism, a paradigm I have signed onto and fully support based on my own research and life experiences. Marc Bloch has been the go-to guy on medieval slavery, serfdom and manorialism for nearly a hundred years. Two of his books are: Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages (a collection of his earlier essays in French but collated into an English publication in 1975) and his masterwork Feudal Society (La Société Féodale – 1939, English translation 1961).

Bloch’s Slavery and Serfdom explores the transition from ancient slavery to medieval serfdom, the evolution of peasant legal status, and the social structures of the Carolingian and feudal eras. Obviously, this would be a good historical background for the coming collapse in Europe. The US and the UK may have different trajectories, especially as they are both hypercomplex rather than just complex societies like France, Germany and Spain.

The broader theme of the state itself is bound up with the contrast between so-called “democracies” and authoritarian regimes. I look at kingship as a chiefdom on steroids and not really a state because of its access to power by rank versus class. This then gets into the whole class argument, which I abhor because it invariably calls up the Marxists, who are on-call 24/7 and guaranteed to inject a tremendous amount of drivel into the argument. All Marxists should strive to be like Ernest Hemingway and write in simple sentences, instead of their convoluted arguments guaranteed to make even the interested reader’s frontal cortex glaze over and lapse into sleep.

Another point about kingship is its reliance on kinship/families. In the US we see this element in the interlinked Witkof-Trump-Lutnick kinship group, all of whom are making tremendous amounts of money off The Donald’s grip on the Presidency. I think it was Democracy Now which mentioned that Trump himself is making $1 million per day in his second Presidency. The amounts being made by the rest of the Trump family group is considerable and unknown, as is the amounts being made by the Witkofs and Lutnicks. The point here is access to resources by rank and/or proximity to the “king.”

So let’s “inhabit” this different continuum. In the following article from CNBC on 21 August 2026, the focus is on winter planting. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/21/grain-price-russia-food-supply.html Key points are:

• Russian and Ukrainian strikes on infrastructure in the Black Sea region are continuing to pressure wheat prices, compounding global food security concerns.

• Analysts warn farmers may not be able to plant their usual levels of crops this winter as they face profitability and financing pressures, jeopardizing next year’s supply.

• Extreme weather is a major complicating factor, from extreme heat and unseasonable downpours to the coming El Niño weather event.

There are four confounding effects on food security for the end of 2026 and into 2027. 1) The reduced traffic in the Straits of Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb have reduced food supply into the wider Persian Gulf region and fertilizer exports out of the region. 2) Russian attacks on Odessa have restricted grain exports from Ukraine, the “breadbasket of Europe.” 3) Heat waves have caused major agricultural damage in Europe, parts of South Asia, and sections of North and Latin America. 4) Severe drought conditions are currently affecting central and southwestern Europe, parts of eastern and southern Africa, the Amazon Basin, and northern and western regions of the Americas. Keep in mind that these are interactive variables, so the effects of drought, for example, are affected by heat waves and closures of the straits, etc. The effects of interactive variables are not only that they create new problems, but amplify existing problems. Which is why we are in a polycrisis and not just a debt crisis nor just an environmental crisis nor just a political crisis. The polycrisis comes from the interaction of the various crises.

I look at the price of wheat on Bloomberg nearly every day as a barometer of food security in the West. After the usual lackadaisical price movements during the bombing phase of the Iran War and the continuing Ukraine War, the settlement price went up from $5.80/bushel on June 26th to $6.98/bushel on August 26th. (Remember these are contracts and not physical sales, although actual deliveries are the foundation for futures contracts. You can see a nice graphic on wheat futures in the article.) This is a 20.3% price increase in two months and it likely reflects the bombing and blockade of Odessa more than the greatly-reduced shipping in the two SW Asian straits. Per the article, I worry about food security becoming a structural issue that will be with us for some time. Ergo, I will compensate with increased winter planting of rye, wheat, and favas.

The value of fall planting of grain and peas (or favas) is that the plants get a start over winter - when it’s wet - and then are relatively immune to drought and heat because they are at the end of their life cycle in the summer. My rye and wheat did just fine during the five canicules (heat waves) we had this summer. (The usual number here in southern France is 1-2 per summer.) I grow grain in case I need it, and will likely just whack down both crops and till them in during October-December for next year’s crop of volunteers. If I needed them right now, I could still go out and cut and thresh them. I already started weed-whacking this week with the break in the extreme heat and have knocked down a plot of Khoisan wheat and spelt which didn’t do very good.

The rye I plant comes from volunteers that pop up every year here and there. Last year I harvested the rye in disparate patches and planted a 990 square foot patch (92 square meters). It did very well, even in the heat and had no irrigation. The wheat is from my own harvests plus some local wheat varieties. Wheat doesn’t volunteer as readily as rye, even though the domestication of wheat precedes rye’s domestication. The evidence indicates that rye just went along for the ride in wheat fields and waited for humans to realize its value. There was also a high degree of introgression in the rye genome, which is the incorporation of genetic material from one species into the gene pool of another through repeated interbreeding events. In the case of rye, this was a sort of natural line-breeding from the wild rye back into the cultivated rye. BUT there may have also been a “weedy” phase, where rye grew as a weed in cultivated patches of wheat and barley and was then later domesticated. This is a “third node,” or
wild—>weedy—>domesticated instead of wild—>domesticated, like wheat. It seems oats went through this third node development too. Here is an article on this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674205221004858

As for favas (broad beans for all you Brits, fève for the French), I have had good luck planting them November-December for May-June harvests. Spring plantings get eaten up by aphids and black spot in our area, so fall planting is the only way to get a crop. This year I also planted a plot on 17 February as a way to “push the envelope” in early spring. No disease issues and I got a good crop in mid-June, only a couple of weeks after my December-planted favas. Since favas are a legume and do an excellent job of adding nitrogen to the soil, I am going to plant a LOT of favas this fall and winter. I have plenty of my own seed, but I can also buy bags of them cheap from the Moroccans at our local market. This is how I got my original stock of seed and have been keeping the seed lines going ever since. Some of the seed originally came from Australia and they did just fine in our climate.

As for vegetables, I have been babying some cabbage, cauliflower, celeriac and beet starts for several weeks now. I started some celeriac on May 15th and the cabbage, cauliflower and beets on July 13th. I have kept these in the shade on very hot days and left them out overnight and into early morning. I recently potted them on and so will put them into the ground in 2-3 weeks for fall crops. The leeks I planted in April are a bit stunted, but we should have plenty over winter. I have also started preparing some beds for kale, turnips, rutabagas, fall lettuces, mustard and black radishes. Now that it is the third week in August, we are getting some precipitation. The nice rain we had last night penetrated the ground up to the root zone (4-8 inches or 10-20 centimeters deep). It is interesting how the third week in August is also the time when I can slow down on irrigation AND the French tourists thin right out. Back to school soon.

The point of this article is to think in four seasons. There are many advantages to planting in the fall, not the least of which is to spread out the work. Articles like the one from CNBC should perk up your imagination to think creatively. The drought has become structural and you should prepare for another one in 2027. The heat waves have become structural. The fertilizer crisis has become structural. Reordering your planting routine should become structural as an adaptation and a paradigm shift.

I rejected this cultural aspect many, many years ago. I gave up participation in Amerikan culture because of my opposition to the Vietnam War. I gave up a career. I gave up having children. I gave up having a home in the traditional sense. Even when I bought land, shared it with others and built a cabin, it was a way-station more than a real home. I have more of a home now, because of the woman who has loved me and cared for me for over thirty years. But it is also because I am old and weak. I cannot sleep on the ground anymore. I need a building and a bed. I cannot walk long distances and carry big loads on my back. I have to use a car or an electric bicycle to get to the store. Strength and youth no longer provide me with alternatives. I have to have a home base, even though I am still the “other.” So I shifted my paradigm years ago and now put human capital into the soil via energy, intelligence and money. I continue to forge alternatives from a “sort of a homebase” orientation. But I am going to make a paradigm shift. I am going to take my own advice and detach.

Now, one may ask, is it the culture that failed the other people or is it the society? Yes it is the culture, because their shared beliefs and behaviors failed them. Culture, per my own definition, is “shared behaviors transmitted between generations.” (The astute reader will realize that between generations also means between individuals in the same generation.) This is the simplest formulation of culture I can make - concise, clear, objective. It flies in the face of the mainstream of anthropology which is far, far too wordy in an attempt to be comprehensive. But most anthropologists don’t grok that a simple phrase has many more interactions with the real world than a wordy “inclusive” attempt to define culture. Here are a couple of examples of what I mean.

From the Cambridge Dictionary online:

1. the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time:

• She’s studying modern Japanese language and culture.

• This is one of the most ancient cultures in the world.

2. the attitudes, behaviour, opinions, etc. of a particular group of people within society:

• The investigation found there was a culture of sexism and racism within the organization.

• popular/working-class culture

And here is an anthropological definition. And of course, every anthopologist has his/her own definition, which also changes through time. I simplified my defintion around 1985 for the reason I mentioned above and have kept it the same ever since.

From the Merrian Webster Dictionary online:

anthropology : the combined pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends on the transmission of knowledge to succeeding generations

Culture is a set of beliefs, practices, and symbols that are learned and shared. Together, they form an all-encompassing, integrated whole that binds people together and shapes their worldview and lifeways.—Katie Nelson and Lara Braff

NB: Nelson and Braff have an an online introductory course in anthropology through SUNY (State University of New York), if you are interested. Here is a link.
https://perspectives.pressbooks.sunycreate.cloud/chapter/introduction-to-anthropology/#:~:text=Several%20weeks%20later%2C%20I%20knew,people%20but%20no%20clear%20major.

All of these definitions are too wordy. They are too complex. They mirror the statist mindset of someone from a state-level society. I don’t recall in the ethnograpies I read over the years that the indigenous informants had a definition of culture in the same way the anthropologist studying them found necessary. So your definition of culture can be determined by your society. But then YOU the individual can change that, even though your society doesn’t. Which brings me back to society itself.

Society is the structure. The warp and woof upon which culture fills in the gaps with individual threads. Society sets the stage; for example the 4-part categorization of band, tribe, chiefdom and state-level society in human social organizaiton. Culture fills in the rest with its shared beliefs, meanings, rituals, etc. And don’t forget these “shared things” are transmitted between individuals. This means culture is based on the individual and proceeds to the group.

This individual/group dichotomy is still controversial in anthropology and sociology, by the way. To test the individual basis of culture, think of what happens when the last native speaker of a language dies. The language dies. The culture dies. Up to that moment of the individual’s death, the culture and language were still alive. Then they are gone - based on the individual. When Ishi, the last known member of the Native American Yahi people from the present-day state of California died in 1916, the Yahi died. The rest of the Yahi were killed in the California genocide in the 19th century, but Ishi carried the culture all by himself for decades.

And to extend this individual-based analysis further, this is where E.O. Wilson went wrong when he founded sociobiology. He followed Darwin’s bedrock idea that natural selection acts directly on the individual organism. But Wilson’s mechanism for behavioral adaptation was wrong. He suggested a large component of human behavior is determined by genes.

Edward Osborne Wilson was an entomologist and extrapolated human behavior from ant behavior. To be blunt and to push back against Wilson, ants and bees have society but not culture. Their behaviors are dictated by their genetics and not learned behavior through transmission from other generations or even from peers in their own generation. This is the nature vs nurture debate in a nutshell. Wilson’s breakthrough book on this topic was Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975). Wilson also had an influence on other areas in the sciences, most notably in biodiversity research. In addition to their direct criticism of sociobiology, Wilson’s critics point to his ill-fated support of psychologist J. Philippe Rushton, whose work on race and intelligence is widely regarded by the scientific community as deeply flawed and racist. The full extant of his support of Rushton was only revealed after Wilson’s death in 2021. But we should look at Wilson’s sociobiology on its own merits, rather than throwing out all his work because of Rushton. It is like using analysis of variance even though R.A. Fisher was a eugenicist. Or listening to Richard Wagner’s music, even though he was an anti-semite. Sometimes you just cannot wipe all the shit off.

Wilson popularized the term sociobiology as an attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviour such as altruism, aggression, and the nurturing of the young. It formed a position within the long-running nature vs nurture debate. The fundamental principle guiding sociobiology is that an organism’s evolutionary success is measured by the extent to which its genes are represented in the next generation. The first critics of this new paradigm pointed out its biological reductionism and determinism, as well as overlooking the importance of co-operative behavior. Since 1975 there has been a lot of water under the bridge and thousands of books and articles written either for or against sociobiology. I dismiss it myself and come down on the side of controlling error through a 50/50 split between nature and nurture. In other words, if the true percentage of the genetic basis of human behavior is found to be 30%, a 50% assumption is only 20% off, while an 80% assumption of the genetic component of human behavior is 50% off. Remember, sociobiology is a paradigm and not a law because we just don’t know for sure.

So when I attack state-level society as THE place where human societies went wrong, I am not attacking culture per se. I am attacking society. And in societal terms, humans do resemble ants. And for those of you already jumping to conclusions, this would mean that we could negate/reject society and return to a cultural basis. Get right back to the real nitty-gritty, so to speak. And here is Shirley Ellis singing her big hit from 1963.

Okay, there are many flaws in the culture I grew up in, even if I manage to break free from the shackles of Amerikan society. But even just pulling back from the societal level in order to operate at the cultural level is a significant paradigm shift. And then a person can make additional paradigm shifts from within the cultural level instead of through the smothering blanket of the societal structure. Getting out from under the warp and weft, as it were.

So what I am going to attempt is to detach from political analysis for a humanities and history orientation. I am returning to the lessons from history, such as the Bronze Age collapse. I also have a Virginia Woolf novel, To the Lighthouse (1927), that I am going to try and wade through.

Fun fact: My partner and I watched The Odyssey last week at the theater in Lavelanet. We saw the VO print, or version originale, with subtitles in French. I had mixed reactions but my partner condemned the scriptwriting. The howler of the movie was when Odysseus said at the end, “Our age of bronze is collapsing.” (As if the Mycenaeans thought of themselves as living in the Bronze Age and could see collapse happening around them. LOL) To be fair, there were some insights in this movie that were worthwhile. For example, the Sea Peoples were feared by reputation, even though no one knew where they came from. (Some of them came from Sardinia and we have been to their homeland and observed the megaliths of the Nuragic civilization from about 1800-238 BCE, before they were colonized by the Romans.) And Odysseus mentioned that Agamemnon coveted the trade routes controlled by the Trojans as his real reason for going to war. That was a trenchant insight.

Here are a couple of signs I saw for Mélenchon’s party La France Insoumise, or France Unbowed (LFI), recently on walks in my village. They were on the bulletin board in front of the church. Signs for the Rassemblement National, or National Rally (RN), pop up here too. The LFI and the RN are the two extremes of political parties in France that have substantial followings. The LFI is even to the left of the Parti communiste français, or French Communist Party (PCF), but not as far left as the Trotskyites, the Lutte Ouvrière or Workers’ Struggle (LO).

The translation into English for this sign is, “Three days without water and we’re dead. Let’s protect it!” Here is another one, which was right next to it.

The translation for this one is, “Capitalism is destroying the planet.” Now, how can you argue with either one of these sentiments? And what is the solution? The LFI says to vote for Jean-Luc Mélenchon on 18 April 2027, the date of the first round of the presidential elections. If no candidate secures over 50%, the second round is on 2 May 2027. There are 18 declared candidates right now. The far-right candidate is Marine Le Pen from the Rassemblement National, or National Rally (RN), but there is still some question if she can run, because of her embezzlement conviction. Her stand-in is Jordan Bardella. But voting for Mélenchon is for those who still believe in reform of the System. It is not a revolutionary act. Nor is it an alternative to the System. Keep that in mind as I discuss the pros and cons for Mélenchon and the LFI.

Now, let me be transparent. I like Mélenchon. He was born in Tangier and so has a North African background which gives him an insight into the Algerian “problem.” (My partner’s son-in-law is Algerian so we are sensitive to the way Algerians are treated in France.) Mélenchon was part of the May 1968 uprisings in France and so is simpatico with my own political insights from that time period. Mélenchon first ran for President in 2012 under the banner of Le Front de gauche, the Left Front, a coalition party. He came in fourth. He formed LFI in 2016 and ran again for President in 2017, again finishing fourth. In 2022, he came in third in the Presidential race and was instrumental in moving the left-of-center parties to Macron in order to keep Le Pen and the RN out of office. In both of Macron’s presidential bids, 2017 and 2022, Macron won because Mélenchon swung the Left in Macron’s favor to keep the RN from power. (The enemy of my enemy is my friend.) I thought it was a bad strategy both times. BUT it may work out for the best in the long-term because of the debacle of the 2024 General Assembly election.

Early in 2024, the RN did well in the European Parliament election. Macron freaked out and got some bad advice from a select coterie of close confidants. Based on the influence of this small circle of politicos and his own Jupiter complex, Macron dissolved the National Assembly (the lower house of the French Parliament) and called a snap election for 30 June and 7 July 2024. This was the opening both Mélenchon and Le Pen were looking for. Mélenchon put together a broad left-wing electoral alliance called the Nouveau Front populair, or New Popular Front (NFP), with centre-left, left and far-left factions. It was launched on 10 June 2024 and the Front stood in opposition to both Ensemble pour la République or Together for the Republic (EPR), the centrist coalition party of Emmanuel Macron, as well as the far-right National Rally (RN). The RN led in the first round, but in the second and decisive round, the National Front won 180 out of 577 seats, Macron’s Ensemble coalition won 159, the National Rally won 142, and the LR (Les Républicains - Nicolas Sarkozy’s old party) candidates won 39 seats. Since there was no ruling party, the National Assembly has largely been impotent ever since, unable to form a ruling coalition. This impotence is also evidenced by the seven (7!) Prime Ministers that President Macron has had in his time in power. Since the 5th Republic was formed in 1958, the old record was three Prime Ministers during one President’s time in office.

We shall see how France fares this winter. Right now about one-third of the nuclear power plants are partially shut down because of warmer water in the rivers and lakes to cool the reactors. Natural gas and fuel oil supplies for winter heating are iffy at best. BTW, this is one of the reasons we already have all our winter wood and may buy extra in October. If the French peasants are in dire straits by spring and can be wooed by the Left, Mélenchon’s time may come in 2027. If that happens, major changes would be in the offing for France and Europe as a whole. Right now, popular wisdom sees more power going to the authoritarian rightwingers, but that is not set in stone. France is notoriously against the grain in politics. The Socialists had their chance for lasting changes under François Hollande from 2012-17, but they blew it.

Recently, I read a very good review by David Todd in the 9 October 2025 issue of the London Review of Books. This a review of Now, the People! Revolution in the 21st Century (2025), David Broder’s translation of Faites mieux ! Vers la Révolution citoyenne by Jean-Luc Mélenchon (2024), his twentieth book I believe. David Todd (the reviewer) is a professor at the prestigious Sciences Po in Paris, or Paris Institute of Political Studies, as it’s known in English. David Broder (the translator) is Jacobin Magazine’s Europe editor and a historian of French and Italian communism. So there are multiple layers to this political analysis around the tipping point of France’s 2027 election.

In structural terms, France may set the stage for Europe’s future because of: 1) its agricultural base, 2) its increase in arms exports and space aviation products, and 3) its co-dominance in the euro. (As the two largest economies in the area using the euro, France and Germany have advantages that smaller countries like Greece and Portugal do not.) Spain may achieve more dominance in the EU in coming years because of its agricultural might AND its ability to grow its economy using immigrant labor. (See my article of 5 August on the Ceuta/Morocco kerfuffle for more on this topic.) Germany’s economic light is dimming precisely because it built its power on industrial manufacturing and the EU sanctions on cheap Russian fossil fuels cut that advantage off at the knees. Unlike France and Spain, Germany is not a net exporter of food and in fact, it is one of the largest food importers in the world. It has even been bandied about that Chancellor Friedrich Merz will be forced to resign soon.

Back to the aforementioned book review. Writing book reviews is an art; right up there with novels and essays. I read a lot of book reviews, not only to get the gist of the book and whether it is worth my time; but also for the writer’s style and how he/she leverages the book’s topic/intent and expands upon it. Broadly speaking, there are five key parts in a standard book review: 1) bibliographic information, 2) introduction, 3) a brief plot summary, 4) a critical analysis of strengths and weaknesses, and 5) a final conclusion and recommendation. How the reviewer does this is where the art comes in.

My main sources over the years have been the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review. I subscribed to the London Review of Books when we lived in Washington. I tried to subscribe here in France but the billing office in London is so goddamned inept they could not even take a subscription in euros without changing to dollars (not pounds sterling, but dollars!). Then they couldn’t even get that right. They still owe me money from my failed attempt to subscribe several years ago. Now I get copies from a friend in Lavelanet who still have their American subscription from when they lived in New York and get the copies sent over to France in a bundle. My partner gets the New York Review of Books, so I get to read that. I no longer subscribe to the New York Times because of their increasingly poor coverage of current wars, so I don’t read their Book Review. The New York Times is now in the same league as the Washington Post. (Not a compliment!)

In his review, Todd goes through the history of the Left in France after WW II. The communists dominated from 1945 to 1970 but then the socialists gained more prominence in the period 1980-2000 due to the ideological rigidity of the commies.

Sidebar: I know all about commie rigidity due to my experiences with the Minneapolis food co-ops in 1975-76. As I often say (even though I did not originate it), “The commies fought the anarchists and the liberals won.”

Then, on 21 April 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen (the original post-war French rightwing whacko and father of Marine) became the first leader of a far-right party to reach the runoff (second) stage of a French presidential election. The collective French Left held their noses and voted for the conservative Jacques Chirac. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And this is the pattern that exists today. The question is whether Mélenchon can win the endorsement of a Left coalition or if LFI can win outright.

The period when the socialists won the Presidency under Hollande 2012-2017 is explained by Todd as resulting from Nicolas Sarkozy’s “inefficacy” in 2007-2012. Let’s just call it what it was. Sarkozy was corrupt. He is out of prison now, but is still under home confinement. So Hollande provided a fresh breath of “sort of left” politics. But as I say, the socialists blew it. Even from the USA, I looked upon it with dismay.

In the main body of the review, Todd connects the seriousness of the environmental problems with the seriousness of the political problems in France and lends gravitas to Mélenchon’s call for change. Mélenchon says, “We have to make far-reaching changes within short deadlines. For the first time since the earliest critiques of capitalism, the debate between reform and revolution has been rendered obsolete.” Todd himself goes on to say, “Perhaps the most Trotskyist aspect of Mélenchon’s thought is his defence of constant rebellion against the capitalist order, a throwback to the notion of permanent revolution.” We should dwell on this for a moment.

The situation now in France, as well as in Europe in general, is that the multiple heatwaves which are clearly the result of climate change AND the rise of far-right authoritarian politicos seeking to turn physical distress to their advantage MAY have a mirroring effect enabling the Left to seize the initiative. It is not just that there are two distinct opportunities here, but that the political stresses are multiplied by the environmental stresses, not just added together. I am reminded of the famous quote from Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar.

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

Mélenchon seems to grasp this multiplication effect, as he breaks down the revolutionary process into instituent, destituent, et constituent. In English, this would be institute, remove from office, and constitute. As Todd points out, this triplet “closely mirrors the ternary sequence still instilled in French schoolchildren when they study this foundational phase of national history: Enlightenment in the 18th century, crisis of the Ancien Régime in the 1780s and emergence of the Constituent Assembly in 1789.” This is a brilliant insight from a researcher who also teaches undergraduate history courses at Sciences Po. (And if Todd got this insight directly from Mélenchon rather than making the link himself, it is still brilliant that he connects the dots.)

Further on, Todd points out the bet Mélenchon is making. “Mélenchon rather seems to be betting on the abrupt collapse of centrism that will leave his brand of radicalism as the sole non-racist alternative to right-wing nationalism. This makes him an authentic revolutionist, but it is a dangerous gamble.” This is a good point UNTIL one thinks in terms of risk management. Let’s break it down.

1. Is centrism about to collapse? It already has. Macron had to move further right in his Presidency and is hated even more for it. He also did a poor job as a centrist AND as a rightwinger shoving pension reform down the throats of the working class. Not to mention the rising debt to GDP ratio of France under his Presidency, from 97% in 2017 to 115.7% now. This is a rise of 19.2% in nine years. Incroyable!

2. Is it a gamble to think LFI and its program will stand tall above other Leftist programs? Of course it is! See the next question.

3. Is it a good gamble? In other words, is there a positive expectation in this gamble? Of course it/there is! The socialists blew it and have shown themselves willing to align with Macron and his new right-wing orientation rather than align with their fellow leftists to form a coalition in the National Assembly. And the Commies and the Greenies are waffling along with the Socialists. That leaves the LFI standing tall and proud, something the French peasant values highly. And make no mistake, the LFI has to take peasant votes from the RN. A big job.

4. Is there another element to this risk management idea? Oh yes. The LFI should be able to play to the bourgeoisie, but the real problem is the racist peasants. This is where the “non-racist alternative” comes in. Perhaps the bulk of the French peasantry and nouvelle bourgeoisie (new propertied classes) will still vote RN. Here is the real gamble. BUT there is no alternative BUT to gamble. In short, do the right thing and let the chips fall where they may. And if you get hit by a falling chip, you have STILL done the right thing. This is likely Mélenchon’s last run for office and even if he loses, he will likely leave the LFI stronger.

At the end of his review, Todd sees a counter-revolution as more probable than Mélenchon’s revolution in the system. It may be so. We will find out in the spring of 2027. However, Mélenchon and the LFI have made the connection between the heatwaves and the political shitstorm Macron stirred up through his arrogance, his stupidity, and his Jupiter complex in 2024. They see the opportunity. And the point of MY review of Todd’s review is that I am still not willing to come back into a political system. Both the French and Amerikan systems are irredeemably corrupt. A person wastes a lot of time trying to reform the System. Better to get as far away as possible before the inevitable collapse. Like at 500 meters altitude in a little village in the Pyreness with a garden, a stream and a bicycle.

So let’s think about YOU the reader. If you are working on reforms to the System, instead of detaching yourself, what can you learn from Mélenchon’s (and LFI’s) strategies and tactics?

1. Think outside the box. Mélenchon was an outsider from birth. He thus has an outsider’s worldview. For those not originally outsiders, this can be learned.

2. Learn from the streets. Mélenchon was a veteran of May 68 (Mai 68), a historic period of civil unrest, student protests, and a nationwide general strike in France that paralyzed the country and shook the government of President Charles de Gaulle in May and June 1968.

3. Use coalitions. Mélenchon first ran for President in 2012 as a coalition candidate and used a coalition to finesse the 2nd stage of Macron’s snap election in 2024. Macron used the Ensemble coalition to gain more seats than the National Rally in the second stage of the same election.

4. Integrate environmental and political topics. The two LFI campaign posters shown at the beginning of this article are good examples on how to do this.

5. Trumpet the connection. LFI are everywhere. They are motivated and hungry.

6. Stick to your guns. Mélenchon swung both elections for Macron because of a greater good. He understands the greater good. Now he (and LFI) are likely to stick to their radical program in this unique time in history.

But I expect the real changes to start
When I finally get my Cleveland Heart
They're made to take a bashin'
And never lose their passion

[Chorus]
They never break
They don't even beat
And they don't achе
They just plug in and shine
Don't make mistakеs
And they don't know defeat
Like my heart makes
Like this broken heart of mine

I have been listening to Jackson Browne since the early 1970s and I appreciate the work he has done supporting environmental and anti-nuclear causes. I have even used him as a foil in my satirical complaints about NGOs, with “their bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, earnest youngsters in their tastefully disheveled offices, with Jackson Browne’s music playing in the background.” I could just as well have said, “with Carole King’s music playing in the background.” I poke fun at other rock stars too, even though I listen to their music every day. I think Jackson and Joni and Carole can take it.

Ah, but back to Cleveland. When I want some good medical advice, I go for the Cleveland Clinic or the Mayo Clinic websites on the Internet. So what is the medical issue today? Visceral fat, which I am in the process of reducing via my Sunday fasts. I have done 14 in a row so far and I am down to 90 kilos - 198 pounds. It is the first time I have been under 200 pounds in 34 years. My most-balanced weight in my 30s was between 170-180 pounds, and I kept it into my early 40s when I was still running a lot. But then I had to pick up stakes and move back to Minneapolis to take care of one of my previous lovers, who was dying of breast cancer. She lasted for another 5 months after I got there. In the end, she passed away peacefully, since she was in hospice and the doctors finally consented to give her morphine. I saw her the night before she died and she was already looking over the horizon. I put on 20 pounds in that time period, from a combination of factors. Here is what the Cleveland Clinic says about visceral fat, which is the particular health problem that bothers me the most.

What is visceral fat made of?

Visceral fat consists of adipocytes, or fat cells. The adipocytes in visceral fat are sensitive to hormones, chemical messenger molecules that your body uses. That can affect the way your body uses (metabolizes) and stores fat.

Metabolic syndrome conditions like diabetes often change how your body handles hormone signals. That might explain why having more visceral fat raises your risk of having cardiovascular disease.

What causes visceral fat?

Everyone has some amount of visceral fat. Genetics contribute to how much you have and where it is in your body. That’s part of what determines your body’s shape.

But environmental factors and your choices also influence how much visceral fat you have. For example, eating fatty foods and carbohydrates (sugars) can make your body form more visceral fat. And if you aren’t active enough, you’ll make more visceral fat than your body uses for energy.

While you might not realize it, stress can also play a role in visceral fat. One hormone that can affect visceral fat adipocytes is the stress hormone cortisol. It makes your body add to its store of visceral fat.

Conditions and Disorders

What are some conditions and disorders that affect visceral fat?

The most common conditions that affect visceral fat are obesity and related issues, including:

• Diabetes

• High cholesterol

• Circulatory system diseases, like atherosclerosis

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24147-visceral-fat

This is just a short blurb on visceral fat. There are plenty of videos about it on YouTube, where they explain the interaction of visceral fat, cortisol and insulin resistance. What I have noticed is that reducing my visceral fat has helped my GERD.

I have quite a genetic load from my Scandinavian peasant lineage, including bad teeth, a predisposition to diabetes, and a family history of heart disease. My particular heart problem is what’s called a branch bundle block, which is a delay in the electrical signals on one side of the heart. All of my brothers and sisters have heart problems. Most of them have myocardial valve problems. But MY chest pains come from GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease). It is basically heartburn on steroids.

Sidebar: Remember the movie War of the Roses (1989)? The character played by Michael Douglas has severe chest pains and calls an ambulance, thinking he is having a heart attack. It was just GERD, but the hurried will he scratches out on a slip of paper sets up the rest of the movie. I get the same severe chest pains occasionally and have had them for years. I went to the emergency room once at CHIVA (Centre Hospitalier Intercommunal des Vallées de l’Ariège) because the chest pains seemed to be different that time. They weren’t. The bastards left me on a hospital bed for 5 1/2 hours when they couldn’t find a heart problem. I was getting ready to pull the tubes out of both arms and leave when they finally came in and removed the tubes and let me go. Perhaps they intuited I had had enough. Next time I plan to just die in my bed. Or not. Maybe it will just be GERD again.

GERD is a behavioral problem. In other words, my bad eating habits over the last thirty years finally presented a bill. But it is manageable and I have even started a little bit of short running segments when I take a walk. My heart is not the problem. It is the GERD. I don’t need a Cleveland heart. I need to reduce my visceral fat.

In the above quote from the Cleveland Clinic, the last three conditions are red flags for me. I have high cholesterol and take a statin pill in the afternoon. Atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) is a worry with high cholesterol. My grandmother on my father’s side was a diabetic and my mother suffered from diabetes in her later years and had to have a leg amputated. So I have been reading a bit about visceral fat, cortisol and reduced insulin resistance. The key is to remove the stress - or at least reduce it dramatically. That is almost impossible in our modern world. And I am retired! But being a hyper, nervous person all my life means I still integrate a lot of stress into my daily life as a long-standing habit. The best remedy for me is fasting.

When I decided to go to grad school at the age of 48, I weighed 214 pounds (97 kilos). I was running on my lunches, after work and on the weekends. I quickly went up to 220 pounds because of the increased work load of reading so many books and articles and the downturn in my exercise regime. I had been “out of the field” of anthropology for some time and had to catch up. I did this by sleeping in a separate bedroom with a pile of books and articles around me on the bed. I read until I dropped off to sleep and then started reading again in the middle of the night. I managed to catch up in one quarter. Then I had to keep up with the literature, which is extensive in anthropology. After three years, when I had my master’s, I had ballooned up to 230 pounds (105 kilos). I was still relatively fit and still running sometimes at that weight. I credit my vegetarianism in my 20s for keeping my fitness into my 50s. The last run I went on was on my 60th birthday.

After the stress of grad school was gone in 2001, I went on a fasting routine and dropped back to 214 pounds quickly. The usual dogma says that losing weight through fasting loses more muscle than fat. That is untrue, at least in my case, and I say so because I tested it. Before grad school I had gotten a body fat measurement from a wellness practictioner when I weighed 214 and was running on my lunches. He used the caliper test. After I had gone up to 230 and then back down to 214 through fasting, I went back to the same guy and did the same caliper test. The resulting body fat percentage was the same. People who make the argument for reduced muscle mass when fasting don’t realize that you have to put on some muscle to carry around your increased weight. This is the muscle mass you lose.

Hippocrates famously said, “All disease starts in the gut.” This is not a hard-and-fast rule, but it is a paradigm shift for many people who think in disassociative terms about their health. This comes from the society around us, which wants to keep us on an individualistic focus, divided and conquered. Dissociation is a mental process that causes a lack of connection in a person’s thoughts, memory, feelings, actions, or sense of identity. People may feel detached from themselves OR the world around them as a way to cope with severe stress or trauma. Ah-ha! See the role of stress? The evil System WANTS you stressed. Then you have to do more things and make more money and buy more stuff as a coping mechanism. And this is a reinforcing feedback loop.

Now, everyone who reads my writings knows I am an existentialist. Doing is more important than being. Gotta do somethin’ to end the War and feed people and build alternatives - yada, yada, yada. But perhaps we can stand this doing vs being modus operandi on its head when we feel stressed. Perhaps when you are stressed you just need to give up. “Pshaw… Sounds too easy. You scoff, yet thousands of malcontents no different than yourself have done exactly that!” A shout-out to Rand Holmes (1942 -2002), famous Canadian cartoonist for this quote from his master creation The Collected Adventures of Harold Hedd (1973). The quote is on the back cover.

So, when I am particularly stressed out, I dig out some of my old comix and live vicariously through Harold Hedd’s bohemian lifestyle back in Vancouver in the 1960s-70s. Holmes worked as an illustrator from 1969 into the mid-1970s at The Georgia Straight, the underground newspaper in Vancouver, BC. His drawings were of extremely high quality and comparable to Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb. Here is what The Straight’s publisher, Dan McLeod, would later say of him:

Here was one of the greatest artists in the history of underground comics, living in our building and churning out major satirical work about those who were out to destroy us, turning them into buffoons. He was a sweet, gentle man who helped us to seize the moral high ground when we were feeling beaten.

If you want to see more of Holmes’ drawings you can just google Rand Holmes and follow the image links. You can buy an old copy of The Collected Adventures of Harold Hedd at Abe Books, but it will set you back $184.56 in USD, plus shipping.

So yesterday while I was fasting, I just lay about and read and listened to podcasts. I did get up and clean out my water cube for the garden and picked some cucumbers and tomatoes. But that didn’t take long. Per Harold Hedd, I feel calmer today.

Case study: The USA. In the development of the US to become a superpower and a global hegemon from 1991 to 2019, there were four main waves of immigration:

1. Colonial and Early National Era (17th Century to 1776)

• Main Groups: English, Scots-Irish, Germans, and enslaved Africans.

• Key Details: British Protestants made up the largest voluntary groups, while hundreds of thousands of Africans were forced into bondage in the Southern colonies. In other words, a large involuntary group.

2. First Great Wave (1820–1890)

• Main Groups: Irish, Germans, and early Chinese laborers.

• Key Details: Driven by the Irish Potato Famine (1845) and political unrest in Europe, for instance the Revolutions of 1848. Chinese workers arrived in the West for mining and railroad construction.

3. Second Great Wave (1880–1920)

• Main Groups: Italians, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, and Russian Jews.

• Key Details: Roughly 20 million Europeans entered through stations like Ellis Island to work in expanding industrial cities, leading to restrictive quotas in the 1920s. This dovetailed with the Anarchist/Socialist Scare, like the hatred of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies) from 1905-1920s and the Red Scare after the Russian Revolution in 1918. I met an old Wobbly once in Oregon in 1975. He had good stories and trenchant insights.

4. Contemporary Wave (1965–Present)

• Main Groups: Immigrants from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.

• Key Details: Triggered by the ⁠Immigration Act of 1965, which removed national origin quotas, shifting the primary source of newcomers from Europe to Asia and Latin America.

  [Fun Fact: One of my sources for the above categories was the NDLA, or the Norwegian Digital Learning Arena (Nasjonal digital læringsarena), a joint public enterprise run by Norwegian county councils that provides free, open-source digital learning resources. It offers internet-based educational content for upper secondary school subjects as an alternative or supplement to traditional textbooks. The info was in English too! My people came from Norway and Sweden in the 1830s and were part of the First Great Wave. At the time of the Irish Potato Famine (1845-49), there was a blight-driven famine in Norway too, but only about 50,000 Norwegians died, versus 1 million Irish. https://ndla.no/r/engelsk-2/immigration-to-the-united-states/e09b63defb]

In general terms, the white immigrants pushed out the Native Americans on the eastern seaboard of the Colonies first and then kept pushing west after the successful American Revolution of 1765–1789. (The actual Revolutionary War was 1775-1783.) This push westward was amplified by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Lewis & Clark Expedition of 1804-06. By the 1820s, immigrants from Europe were flooding in and the rise of the railroads induced Chinese immigrants to swarm into the western US. Signal achievements during this immigration wave were the invention of the steel moldboard plow by John Deere in 1837, the Homestead Act of 1862, and the Civil War of 1861-65, which released significant amounts of psychologically-damaged veterans onto the open lands of the Amerikan West after 1865 to both settle and wreak havoc on the indigenous inhabitants. Today we would probably diagnose these damaged veterans with PTSD and even worse ailments. Back then the West was a safety valve which also drained the eastern US of many citizens as well as providing opportunities for immigrants from abroad.

The “opening of the West” was a time of great ferment and tremendous opportunity. Unless you were a Native American, of course. For them it was just an ongoing genocide, worse than the current Palestinian genocide. Nevertheless, the Great Plains and Upper Midwest were producing enough wheat during the 1860s and 1870s, that US exports could surge past Black Sea and Ukrainian-Russian grain exports to Europe. This then led to a major financial crash in the key Ukrainian port of Odessa in 1872. An excellent book on this particular time period is Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World (2022) by Scott Reynolds Nelson. It should be noted that this book also provides a wonderful history of the origins of the wheat routes in Ukraine that built up Odessa in the first place.

By the time of the Second Great Wave of immigration to the US (1880–1920), the Second Part of the Industrial Revolution (1870–1914) had started. This was based on denser petroleum energy in addition to the coal energy that had spawned the First Part of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century. This new energy source enabled new mass production techniques, advanced materials and electrification. These improved methods did not require skilled workers; just bodies that could be taught simple tasks on the job. The large masses of immigrants fit right in.

Then came the First and Second World Wars. In both these wars, the US lost far fewer men than the countries in Europe and Asia, so there wasn’t a need for another great immigration wave. However, the Bracero Program was started in 1942 under the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement and this provided cheap but legal labor for the increasing wartime need in agriculture and the railroad industry. Soon however, illegal immigration increased and exploitation became rife in both industries. There are lots of anecdotes and studies about this program. Jack Kerouac mentions the exploitation of farm workers in California in On the Road (1957), taken from his own experiences in 1947. Phil Ochs had a song called “Bracero” on his Phil Ochs in Concert album (1966) that is quite a tear-jerker. And Edward R. Murrow made a famous documentary called Harvest of Shame in 1960, which detailed the plight of migrant workers in several US states. Fun Fact: When I watched this documentary in 1978, I got a bit of a shocker. In the documentary, the migrants were getting 5 cents per pound to pick cherries in the Central Valley in California. That year I had been picking cherries with my girlfriend in the Central Valley in California. Guess how much we were paid? 5 cents a pound. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The Bracero Program officially ended on the last day of 1964, due to widespread labor exploitation, pressure from labor unions, and increased farm mechanization. ⁠The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was supposed to overhaul US immigration by abolishing national-origin quotas (in-place since 1924), prioritizing family reunification, and valuing professional skills. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law on October 3, 1965, at the base of the Statue of Liberty. How dramatic!

So . . . lots of pomp and cirumstance in replacing the Bracero Program, but the unintended consequences were dire. For the first time, the law placed numerical limits on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, which previously had no caps. Since there was increasing demand for workers in agriculture and other industries due to rising levels of affluence in Amerika, restricting legal entry for neighbors inadvertently laid the groundwork for future undocumented border crossings. A cynic might say, “That was the plan all along.” But to quote Francis Urquhart (played by Ian Richardson) in the original 1990 BBC political drama trilogy House of Cards, “You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment.”

A little bit about the structural component of illegal immigration is in order. With illegal immigration, people gravitate to jobs that are unfilled - usually the shit jobs like picking vegetables and fruit. Later on, illegal immigrants moved into construction and slaughterhouse work.

Sidebar: Back in the 1960s in southern Minnesota where I grew up, a person could always get a job at the Turkey Plant. I forget the name of the corporation that ran it. It was always called the Turkey Plant. If you had one of the starting jobs, like pulling gizzards, you ended up with frostbitten fingers and structural damage to your hands. It makes picking cherries in the hot, blistering sun for 5 cents a pound look better doesn’t it?

The reality of a growing economy, like the US during the 1960s, is that the native-born citizens of a country can move up the labor ladder into increasing levels of skill and pay. This leaves a vacuum for the lower-paying jobs that the illegal immigrants fill. So rising levels of affluence, like in the 1960s in Amerika, creates a demand for low-paid agricultural workers. This takes some time to work itself out, of course. When I started as a migrant worker in 1974, most of my fellow laborers in northern Washington state were either locals or Okies from the Bakersfield area. (Okies is a pejorative term nowadays but back then it just referred to someone whose parents came from Oklahoma and Texas during the Dust Bowl years and settled in southern California around Bakersfield.) In 1975, when I started picking cherries and pears in Oregon, I could see the gradation from south to north of decreasing illegal immigrants. More in California, fewer in Washington. By the time I left the tramp in 1982, most of my fellow workers were illegal immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala. I saw the transition in action during those years.

So the Bracero program was exploitative and the lack of a program to replace it is exploitative - even now in 2026. BUT the farmers, slaughterhouse owners, and construction companies win because of cheap labor that does not cause trouble and cannot complain if they are cheated out of their wages. The government wins because of taxes paid into Social Security that will never be paid back to the recipients. The whole System wins because the illegals keep it running at its base level.

So here is a question for you. Why - WHY - are the rightwing whackos so goddamn stupid as to mess with this System? What could they possibly be thinking? They certainly don’t give a shit about human rights and human dignity. Just talk to them for a couple of minutes and you will be disabused of THAT notion. Why in the world are they so gung-ho for immigration enforcement that lowers their GDP per capita AND lowers their standard of living to boot? Surely they must have some sort of glimmer that the cheap food prices they used to have were BECAUSE of cheap illegal immigrant labor in California and elsewhere. Are these bozos just besotted with Trump and the other rightwing whacko politicians? Don’t they make the connection between increased immigration enforcement and increased food prices fer chrissakes?

Let us assume there is a giant collective brain fart among the people who are still MAGA clones. Let us further assume that Trump and Netanyahu and von Der Leyen and Merz and Macron and now Burnham are seizing the opportunity to pull the wool further over the eyes of the dummies who support them. Take Ceuta for example.

Ceuta is an autonomous city and a Spanish territory on the coast of North Africa abutting Morocco to the northeast. It was originally founded by the Phoenicians in the 1st millenium BCE and lies on the eastern end of the Strait of Gibraltar with access to both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. It is quite the strategic point and has been in dispute since its founding. It used to be a free port and the population now is ~84,000. In size, it is comparable to San Francisco, at 18.5 km², or 7 sq mi. Think of San Francisco and its strategic position on the West Coast of the US, but with only 10% of the population. So why can’t Spain just absorb 72,000 more immigrants from Morocco, you ask? Well, besides the logistics nightmare of nearly doubling a population without a buildup of supporting infrastructure, it is just not that simple because of the politics of the situation. Even with an estimated 70,000 immigrants having returned to Morocco in the last few days, the current societal infrastructure is stretched to the limit with just 2,000 Moroccans remaining.

Currently, Ceuta is part of the Western Sahara dispute between Morocco and Algeria, although the Western Sahara is on the Atlantic coast south of Morocco proper and is known as the Southern Province by Morocco. Democracy Now! has devoted several segments of their show to the Western Sahara conflict over the years and there were two mentions just last month. The latest is on the King of Morocco naming a highway after Donald Trump. Both the US and Israel are involved in this dispute. https://www.democracynow.org/2026/7/31/headlines/trump_thanks_moroccos_king_for_naming_highway_in_occupied_western_sahara_after_him

The Western Sahara brushfire war is an ongoing conflict between the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and the Kingdom of Morocco. It started in 1970 (a year of many struggles for justice around the world), but took off with an insurgency by the Polisario Front against Spanish colonial forces from 1973 to 1975. After Franco died in 1975, Spain made a major pivot to a democratic parliamentary monarchy. One of the early moves of the new government was to sign an agreement to give up administrative control of the Spanish Sahara, now known as the Western Sahara, to Morocco and Mauritania. Mauritania now shares a 1,564-kilometer border and a disputed “no man’s land” with Morocco on the southern border of the Western Sahara. Mauritania briefly occupied and claimed the southern part of Western Sahara from 1975 to 1979, but later withdrew from the conflict. Today, Mauritania maintains a strict policy of positive neutrality between Morocco and the Polisario Front.

In 1975, the Polisario Front got backing and support from Algeria and waged a 16-year-long war for independence against Mauritania and Morocco. From 1991, there was a ceasefire and the conflict was dominated by unarmed civil campaigns of the Polisario Front and their self-proclaimed SADR state to gain fully recognized independence for Western Sahara. The UN addressed the conflict via a resolution reaffirming the right to self-determination of the Sahrawi people but the 29-year ceasefire fell apart in 2020. Morocco still controls most of the territory with the ⁠Polisario Front controlling 20% to 30% of the eastern and southern edges. This area is called the “Free Zone” or “Liberated Territories”. Morocco controls the remaining 70% to 80% of the territory west of a large sand wall known as the Berm. This is starting to sound like a Hollywood movie isn’t it?

Now the area is back to low-intensity conflict and skirmishes. A brushfire war that is used as a pawn by other powerful interests around the world. Like the US and Israel.

During Barack Obama’s Presidency, his administration maintained the longstanding US bipartisan policy of supporting a peaceful, negotiated, and mutually acceptable political solution between Morocco and the Polisario Front under United Nations auspices. But, in October 2020, the Guerguerat Crisis started after Sahrawi activists and independence supporters blocked the primary highway through Al Guerguerat, the aforementioned “no man’s land” left over from Mauritania’s withdrawal in 1979. The Moroccan military launched an operation in November to clear out the protesters. In response, the Polisario Front declared the ceasefire null and void, effectively resuming armed conflict. In December, US President Donald Trump took the opportunity to issue a Proclamation on Recognizing The Sovereignty Of The Kingdom Of Morocco Over The Western Sahara. In this proclamation, “ . . . the United States recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara territory.” This proclamation was an executive order and not run through Congress. Also in December 2020, Morocco’s then-Prime Minister Saadeddine Othmani followed Trump’s lead and stated publicly that Ceuta is “as Moroccan as the Sahara.” This caused increased tension between Spain and Morocco and even raised some hackles in NATO because of Article 5. In his proclamation, Trump also promised a fully functioning physical US consulate in Dakhla but that never materialized. He also promised economic aid but didn’t follow through on that either. Until now.

In the last month, several developments have changed the game in North Africa and Europe. On March 26, 2026, the foreign ministers of Spain and Algeria held an official meeting in Algiers to mend the diplomatic rupture triggered by Spain’s 2022 endorsement of Morocco’s autonomy plan for Western Sahara. This 2026 meeting was prompted by Algeria’s outreach the year before. (Worried about Trump 2.0 no doubt.) It should be noted that Algeria has a 41 kilometer border with Western Sahara in the far northeastern corner of Western Sahara and it is controlled by the Polisario Front.

After the preliminary meetings in March between foreign ministers, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez visited Algeria on 20 July 2026. This trip marked his first visit to the country since diplomatic relations became strained in 2022. The focus of this meeting was mostly about Algeria’s natural gas exports to Spain, roughly 34% of Spain’s imports of this important commodity. The proposed 10-12% increase in pipeline gas from Algeria will allow Spain to reduce their dependence on US sea-borne LNG. But there was also a feeling of rapprochement and I suspect Algeria will come down on Spain’s side in the ongoing dispute over Spain’s territories in North Africa. Morocco and Algeria have been at odds over the Western Sahara for years and Algeria supports the Polisario Front and the SADR.

So now you have a widening split, with Spain and Algeria on one side and Morocco and the US on the other. And why does the US care about Morocco all of a sudden? Phosphorus. Morocco controls 70-75% of the world’s phosphate rock, which is used to make phosphorus fertilizer. And where is most of this phosphate rock? In the Western Sahara of course! And what has the closure of the Strait of Hormuz done to the production of phosphorus fertilizer for agriculture in the US and other nations? It has choked off ~20% of phosphate exports originating in the Persian Gulf AND ~44% of globally traded sulfur needed to convert phosphate rock into usable phosphorus fertilizer. Continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz means global shortages of an essential element, severely constrained food production, surging food costs worldwide, and eventually famine. Oops. No bueno.

Sidebar: I don’t have a phosphorus problem at my small scale because of my use of rye and buckwheat cover crops, both of which convert the plentiful unavailable phosphorus found in most soils into available phosphorus which the plants can use. In industrial agriculture, sulfur is used to make superphosphates, the preferred phosphate compound. However, an unavoidable problem is created in this process by the traces of sulfur left over in the finished superphosphate, which causes the plants and microorganisms in the soil to need more nitrogen, which then becomes a reinforcing feedback loop of more phosphorus, more nitrogen, and on and on. Not to mention the buildup in the soil and the eutrophication effect when the excess phosphorus is washed off the land and into rivers and lakes. Rye and buckwheat are much better. Once again a smaller scale is key to the solution.

Rye and buckwheat acquire phosphorus (P) using different primary strategies: rye relies heavily on extensive root exploration and fibrous architecture, whereas buckwheat uses chemical root exudates (such as citric and oxalic acids) to actively solubilize tightly bound or recalcitrant phosphorus in the soil. Fun Fact: I have lots of trefle (wood sorrel or oxalis in English) that pops up every year and this plant has lots of oxalic acid, which is why it is called oxalis. Perhaps the trefle is doing the same thing the buckwheat does. (!)

Trump obviously hates Spain because it is the only European country to stand up to him so far. Here is a headline and subhead from the 13 May 2026 New Yorker. The article is by Ishaan Tharoor. It is behind a paywall so I cannot quote from it, but it succinctly expresses the reason Trump hates Sanchez.

Spain is part of NATO and the EU, so is perforce against Russia in the Ukraine War, but Spain has broken with the rest of the EU and most of the developed world in its stance on immigration. In January 2026, Spain announced a new regularization scheme that offered undocumented migrants a route to legal residence and work authorization. The scheme was finalized in April and applicants had until 1 June 2026 to apply. The plan offered a one-year, renewable residence permit if they had already spent five months living in the country and had a clean criminal record. The original scheme was for 500,000 applicants, but so far 1 million have applied before the deadline. Wow! This should give you an idea just how aware illegal immigrants are in their unique situations. This hyperawareness also makes them better workers, by the way. I certainly became a better fruit picker working alongside illegal migrants from 1974 to 1982.

How will this residency scheme play out in the sociopolitical economic climate of Spain and the EU? In a word it will be FABULOUS. Spain already produces most of the fruits and vegetables in Europe and is the world leader in olive oil. The greenhouses in Spain can be seen from space. Most of the vendors in the local markets we go to in southern France carry Spanish produce, especially early in the season before the local French produce is ripe. For you US readers, it is like living in Washington and getting your produce from Oregon. If you want to extend the analogy further, living in France and getting produce from Morocco, which is also featured in our local markets, is like living in Washington and getting your produce from California. The distances are small in Europe compared to the US.

So extending residency to illegal immigrants in Spain will allow Spain’s economy to grow even further and will have salutary effects on Spain, the rest of the EU and the UK. The UK is now suffering an incredible shortfall in its food production due to the current drought on top of the wet winter and spring. The UK needs more Spanish food, so Spain needs to produce more. Therefore, a path to residency in Spain benefits the UK. Of course, neither the Reform UK nor the Tory nitwits can grasp this, and probably neither can most of the Labour halfwits.

And how does this play in MAGA-land? You know, the good ‘ol US of A? The anti-immigration whackos have been alerted! They are mounting a coordinated campaign to lambaste Sanchez and his government. Not only are they “socialist,” but they are succeeding. They even won the World Cup fer chrissakes! So what’cha gonna do about it Trump? He and his toadies have a plan. It includes sabotage and double-dealing.

Here is what has happened over the last week or so.

• The United States and Morocco are deepening their partnership over Western Sahara, focusing on infrastructure, clean energy, and diplomacy.

• Morocco announced its new $1 billion Tiznit-Dakhla Expressway would be named after President Donald Trump, symbolizing appreciation for U.S. support. This road runs along the Atlantic coast and Dakhla is where Trump promised to put a US consulate.

• The U.S. approved its first federally backed investment in Western Sahara, signaling a move from diplomatic recognition to direct economic involvement.

• Trump reaffirmed U.S. recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara and outlined plans for broader economic and technological cooperation.

• The Trump administration leapt on the Ceuta crisis in a coordinated messaging barrage. 1) The State Department issued a statement blaming Spain’s government for “deliberate efforts to enable and facilitate mass illegal migration into Europe.” 2) Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, posted news footage of the Ceuta migrant wave on X and said it highlighted “radical left-wing globalist policies that have enabled the Invasion of the West.” Vance continued, “These images out of Spain are an unfortunate reminder of the consequences of mass migration.” 3) White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, a chief architect of Trump’s anti-migration crackdown, posted video of the Ceuta crisis and said: “Democrats will see your home trampled and stolen by invaders and they will rejoice.”

• It is likely Morocco facilitated the barrage of immigrants crossing over into Ceuta. Per the New York Times on 31 July 2026 in an article by Jonathan Wolfe, “Usually, Moroccan officials make it hard for migrants to get close to Ceuta, the Spanish exclave that neighbors Morocco. This week, several migrants said in interviews, police officers waved them through, allowing them to overwhelm Spain’s border fence with relative ease. That has led to suggestions that Morocco was seeking to pressure Spain for political reasons. Perhaps, analysts said, Morocco wanted to deter Spain from strengthening ties with Algeria, Morocco’s neighbor and rival. Mr. Sánchez visited Algeria in July, weeks after his foreign minister made a similar trip and spoke of importing more Algerian gas.”

• Some pundits have theorized this is just another political spat between Morocco and Spain. Sanchez’ recent visit to Algiers may have angered Morocco, just like in 2021, when more than 10,000 migrants reached Ceuta from Morocco over the course of two days during a diplomatic spat between the two countries.

• Some analysts have even gone so far as to bring up the United States and Israel in the context of the Ceuta events. Riccardo Fabiani, North Africa Director at the International Crisis Group, said that “by now we have enough elements to suggest that Rabat was involved in this crisis.” (The central government of Morocco is located in Rabat, the capital city.) Fabiani said that the events could have also served for “Morocco to earn some credit with two key allies, Israel and the US”, which he said were “gloating about this situation.” During the peak of the Ceuta influx, Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, noted on X Spain’s “state of emergency in Ceuta following the crisis over its immigration policy.” Danon added, “Maybe before it continues lecturing us, it’s time it explained to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in Africa.”

• Fabiani also believes “the US and Israeli right-wing officials and intellectuals incited Morocco to move onto Ceuta as a form of retaliation against Spain’s support for the Palestinians and its position during the Iran war.”

• US President Donald Trump had criticised Spain at a NATO summit last month for failing to help with the war that the US and Israel launched against Iran in late February. He whined, “They are not behaving nicely, but they will learn.” Haizam Amirah Fernandez, director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in Madrid, noted “the fact that a massive arrival of people in Ceuta came a few weeks after Trump said that made many in Spain make the link.” In other words, push the refugees out ahead of you to counter the enemy. This tactic is as old as Attila and probably even older.

• The EU is using this incident to beat up on Spain. For instance, Italy suspended free movement with Spain in the Schengen Area until Septemer 1st and said Spain should be suspended from the Schengen zone.

• The EU called an emergency meeting on the crisis for August 4th and the videoconference did little. It called for support for Madrid but tighter controls on immigration. In other words, more waffling but still allowing countries like Italy to impose temporary Schengen controls.

• Over the last few months Spain has reduced its diplomatic ties to Israel. It did not completely cut off all diplomatic ties, but severely downgraded its diplomatic relationship. The Spanish government permanently withdrew its ambassador to Israel, leaving the embassy in Tel Aviv under the leadership of a chargé d’affaires.

So . . . Spain is: 1) reducing dependence on the US in LNG, 2) has supported the Palestinians against Israel and 3) has dramatically reduced its diplomatic ties to Israel. It is seeking to 4) increase its diplomatic relationship to Algeria and 5) developed a residency regularization program to provide a more stable and secure workforce.

Morocco, on the other hand, has totally thrown its lot in with the US. The US is trying mightily to secure natural resources from Morocco, principally phosphate rock, in order to mitigate the effects of its failed war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

The EU is waffling about, still trying to make some headway without actually addressing energy and immigration issues. The EU is still reactive, while Spain is proactive. The responses, like Meloni’s, are largely posturing for the domestic audience because she is worried about a new rightwing movement in Italy, even more extreme than she is. As another example, Alice Weidel, the leader of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) claimed that the “likely destination” for most of those entering Ceuta was Germany. What rubbish! This is not only paranoia but extreme megalomania that is intended to play to the rightwing whackos in Germany in their signature anti-immigration stance.

So, it is clear the US and Israel are trying to sabotage Spain for two reasons: 1) support for the Palestinians and 2) providing a path to residency for illegal immigrants. Why are Spain’s actions detrimental to Israel? Israel is riven by civil strife. Indeed, the most cogent reason why Iran is not attacking Israel directly with its missiles and drones is because Israel is imploding and destroying the country faster than the Iranians could. And at no cost to Iran. Spain’s support for the Palestinians sharpens the picture of Israel as genocidal maniacs. Why are Spain’s actions detrimental to the US? Because it is actually dealing with illegal immigration in a positive manner that will help the Spanish economy grow. Everyone who can read a newspaper can see that the US economy is in a tailspin. Even the rightwing whackos will soon make the connection between cheap labor and cheap food prices. Then they will see that increased immigration enforcement leads to increased food costs. After the extremist nutjobs make this connection, they will then be able to see how another country dealt with illegal immigration in a manner that actually grew the economy.

But there is a collapse angle to this argument too. In establishing a residency program for illegal immigrants, Spain is cushioning itself against collapse. As I have said so many times over the last two years, Spain has a complex society and economic system that can simply contract and ride out recession, depression and collapse. The US and UK, on the other hand, are both hypercomplex in their societies and economic systems. They will not be able to contract and will just implode. Is the ability to assimilate new workers into the economy in a secure manner a hedge against recession because there are plenty of low-skilled workers that can work cheaply and get the jobs done? You bet your booties it is!

Is a residency program then a hedge against depression and collapse too? I think so. Depression will obviously be more stressful for a country than a recession, but the buffer against both recession and depression will be thicker if there are plenty of people to do the actual grunt work that keeps a society going. Selling apples on the street corner became an iconic symbol of the Great Depression in the US because a massive agricultural surplus was turned into a coordinated credit-relief program in 1930. Thousands of unemployed men bought crates of wholesale fruit on credit to hawk for a nickel apiece, creating an instant visual trope of fallen white-collar pride. But they still needed laborers to get the apples and other fruit off the trees didn’t they?

Bottom line: The rightwing whackos have figured out that Sanchez’ embrace of illegal immigration is: 1) the right thing to do to improve Spain’s status in the world, 2) has a beneficial effect on the economy, and 3) provides a buffer against hard times. They are not happy because their own countries are circling the toilet bowl AND will have to follow Spain’s leadership eventually. Well done Pedro! Did I mention that I had two vacations in Spain in the last year? And I am planning on at least one visit this winter? Gotta support the people who are doing positive things.

The Guardian is the “sorta socialist” rag from Fleet Street. I use it for headlines mostly, but I do read the occasional article if it piques my interest. I read a lot of stuff every day that I disagree with or that comes from my enemies. Even rightwing whacko nonsense! This article is worth a look for the occasional relevant snippet. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/02/britain-food-shortages-drought-continues-farmers

The problem in the UK is that the mild, yet wet, winter and spring delayed planting and then the summer came on unusually hot and dry. This is also the third drought year out of the last five, so there have been multiple bad harvests coupled with a debt problem. But . . . make no mistake. Farmers can adapt to wet weather followed by drought - a quite volatile swing in their fortunes - but they cannot adapt to increasing debt burdens without tricks that trap them long-term. And of course, the corporations and their government toadies encourage this trap through onerous policies forcing small farmers out of business so the land can be appropriated for pennies on the dollar. And it is not a conspiracy. They all just think the same. This is not good. I much prefer conspiracies rather than the groupthink so prevalent nowadays.

Debt is the real problem here, not adaptation by farmers. If you read my 27 July 2026 article, Shifting to the Drought Paradigm, you may recall that I postulated the Ancient Ones could deal with the megadrought around 800 CE (AD in the old parlance) and remained in place. What made them move to cliff dwellings around 1100 CE was the cannibalism and terrorism that came north into the area. [NB: Full faith and credit to Christy and Jacqueline Turner for this theory from their book Man Corn (1998).]

Humans are quite socially adaptable and the most adaptable are farmers. The adaptation of culture is far beyond physical adaptation and has allowed humans to go all over the planet. Within that social context of culture, hunter-gatherers are quite adaptable, for instance in optimal foraging strategy. But putting in labor BEFORE the harvest is a signal achievement in adaptation. And if you are one of those who think agriculture is bad and the root cause of all our problems - for instance if you are a Tom Murphy Do the Math fan - you can stop reading now. There is no hope for you.

How have farmers finessed the energy exchange problem? As I explained in some depth in my first book, if an office worker gets $20/hour in wages and then buys 5 pounds of potatoes for $1/pound = $5, then he/she has made a beneficial energy exchange of only 15 minutes of his/her time for the farmer’s 1 hour of time to grow 5 pounds of food. Now, why would the farmer take this deal? Because that 5 pounds of potatoes has an energy value of 350 kilocalories/pound (322 kilojoules/100 grams if you are using the metric system) and 5 pounds = 1750 kilocalories. The labor the farmer expended to produce the 5 pounds of food is about 125 kilocalories because farm labor is not ALL grunting and digging under the hot sun. (I have tested this baseline too.) And the labor of the office worker is regarded as the same as the farmer - 125 kcal/hr.

Sidebar: 5 pounds of food produced/hour is a good baseline for farm labor without fossil fuels. You can bump that up to 8 pounds/hour with a trickle of fossil fuels and mostly human labor. That is the basis of my sustainable ag program. Beyond that, you run into an energy deficit using fossil fuels to decrease labor. This is because of the extraordinary amount of energy it takes to replace labor inputs using fossil-fueled machinery. The 12-hour a day average of 125 kcal/hour, which includes ALL work, was first calculated by me and then tested with a heart monitor.

If we calculate these numbers together, using the concept of energy return on investment (EROI), we find the office worker gets a beneficial return, or EROI, of 4:1 and the farmer 1:4 where the ratio is output to input. Of course it is more beneficial to be an office worker and buy from farmers! Why would anybody want to do differently? Ah, but here’s the catch. The farmer is getting an EROI from nature of 14:1, with 1750 kcal of potatoes produced for an input of 125 labor kcal. So the farmer gets enough of a return on his energy investment that he can afford to give a good deal to the office worker. Multiplying the exchange between the office worker and the farmer together, we can see that the farmer is still ahead by an EROI of 3.5:1 when he sells his food. And this, my friends, is why we can have civilization. The farmer gets enough of an EROI from the physical environment that he can afford to provide cheap food to the office worker in the social environment. And why has this system worked so well over the last 5000 years? Because the office worker (or merchant or bureaucrat) has the money, which the farmer needs because of his debts! Oops. Was David Graeber right?

David Graeber wrote a book fifteen years ago called Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011). I haven’t read this book, but many people have and they enjoyed it and integrated it into their worldviews. In this book, he starts with the historical development of the idea of debt, starting from the first recorded debt systems in Sumer around 3500 BCE (BC in the old parlance). [Sidenote: Since Sumer was the first civilization, does this mean civilization is built on a foundation of debt and that debt itself is a prerequisite for civiliztion? Good question for another time]. According to Graeber and his research, even in this early form of borrowing and lending, farmers would often become so mired in debt their children would be forced into debt peonage. Because of the social tension that came with this enslavement of large parts of the population, kings periodically canceled all debts. This resulting amnesty came to be known as the Law of Jubilee, or just Jubilee. The idea of Jubilee is credited to the ancient Hebrews and it is a Hebrew word mentioned in the Book of Leviticus in the Bible. But economist Michael Hudson argues that the Hebrews got it from the Babylonian kings, but the Biblical formulation of the laws presented a significant advance in justice and the rights of the people. [Sidenote: The difference between Hebrews and Jews is chronological and developmental, representing early patriarchal origins (Hebrews) vs later national and religious survival (Jews). So . . . ancient Hebrews and modern Jews.]

Graeber argued that debt and credit historically appeared before money, which itself appeared before barter. This is the opposite of the narrative given in standard economics texts dating back to Adam Smith. Coinage came in around 800-600 BCE, in what is called the Axial Age, after the The Late Bronze Age Collapse, from the late 13th to early 12th century BCE. This collapse is the time period of the Trojan War and Eric Cline is the go-to scholar for videos and books on this. His videos are very interesting and provide many lessons for our own time, just as Christopher Nolan’s movie The Odyssey - in theaters now - is a parable about our time using the ancient story. The Late Bronze Age Collapse was sudden, violent, and culturally disruptive for many civilizations, creating a sharp decline for the region’s existing powers. Per Cline’s thesis, the Bronze Age civilizations were already weak when the Sea Peoples appeared and finished them off.

Clearly, debt is a problem now as it has been for all of civilization. And it will lead to collapse unless some sort of Jubilee is enacted that allows “the little people” to start over again with a clean slate - especially farmers. And the chances of that happening? Less than 5%. It is more likely that aliens will come and save us. So debt is making the situation for farmers worse all the time and the debt load of British farmers will hasten the collapse of Britain and maybe even the whole United Kingdom. If Northern Ireland can separate itself from the UK and join with the Republic of Ireland, it will likely survive. Also, if both Wales and Scotland could separate themselves from the UK and join the EU, they might survive. But the UK, especially England, is toast. The article in the Guardian shouts out the problem, but sticks with the “safe” narrative of climate change without even mentioning the debt problem that is driving UK collapse. The farmers are just the first ones to be affected. Then again, maybe the fishing industry will collapse first, but the same logic applies. Debt is the killer and the food producers bear an unjust share of the burden.

Back when I was a market gardener, I started a CSA program. CSA stands for community-supported agriculture and was originally meant to provide security for the farmer. The subscribers bought a share before planting and then got a share of the farm produce when the harvest started in the summer. Originally, the subscriber took on the risk and if the crops failed, the subscriber got nothing in return. But this quickly vanished and by the time I started my program, the farmer was the only one on the hook. That was not a problem for me and I usually had about 40% overage. Overage is what the customer/subscriber gets beyond the cash value of the product.

Fun fact. One of my subscribers moved away to Oregon (I forget the town) and then Austin, Texas, before returning to Washington after three years. He had a CSA subscription in both places. When he came back and subscribed to my program again, he commented on how much food he got from me versus the two other programs.

But the real value in a CSA program is cashflow and debt avoidance. In 2009 I got enough CSA subscriptions by the end of December that I could buy a new tiller for 2010. This improved my productivity AND I didn’t go into debt. I also had cashflow for seed and fertilizer BEFORE planting. What happens in industrial agriculture is that the farmer goes to the bank for a loan to buy seed, fertilizer, equipment and just to live on until harvest. When harvest comes he/she goes to the bank and pays off the loan. If the harvest is poor, the farmer may have to get the loan rolled over PLUS get another loan for the upcoming year on top. This process can rapidly spiral out of control with a couple of bad years. Notice that the bank has no risk. The farmer carries all the risk.

A CSA program stands this debt burden on its head and is a very good alternative for small-scale farmers who usually cannot get bank loans anyway because of their small scale. Banks and credit unions sometimes have programs for small-scale farmers to upgrade their farms but this is another trap. An increase in scale quickly requires more production, more labor, more fertilizer, more seed and - of course! - more machinery and fossil fuel use. It is a trap; a trap the industrial farmer knows well.

The Guardian article does not address the debt issue. There is a throwaway line about EU subsidies, but this is just part of the trap. Most small-scale farmers don’t qualify, something ARC 2020 is working on, but with little success. As I said at the beginning, farmers are the most adaptable segment of modern society. But if they are pinned down by debt, they cannot adapt and will go out of business. Then YOU will be unable to eat. Can this debt problem be fixed? Of course it can! Is there any likelihood it WILL be fixed? Of course not. As I said, it is more likely aliens will come and save us.

Organic eggs have worse impact on climate than eggs from caged chickens

Pretty darn provocative isn’t it? Is it just clickbait? Of course it is. Is it promoted via headline to cast doubt on organic egg production? Of course it does. Does it do a disservice to people who are trying to produce and promote healthy food? Of course it does. Is the Guardian a terrible newspaper for sinking to a new low? Of course it is.

Here is the article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/29/organic-eggs-climate-caged-chickens-carbon-emissions-environment

Why is this an exercise in spin, clickbait, and support for the evil System? Let me just give you a few critical points.

Let’s start with the subhead:

Adopting organic free-range model in UK could lead to greenhouse emissions equivalent to 2,316,000 tonnes of CO2, study suggests

First of all, adopting a monolithic “organic free-range model” is not doable and would require governmental control of ALL egg production to FORCE producters to move from one model to another. It just breeds paranoia for the unaware and simplistic thinkers. And it is “not bloody likely” besides. It is just clickbait.

Secondly, how many tonnes of CO2 are now produced with a mixed model? The article doesn’t say until the end. The number is 1,439,000 tCO2e, but we still don’t know the percentage of each system.

The article goes on to say, “According to the study, switching the UK’s entire egg production to an organic free-range model would lead to greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 2,316,000 tonnes of CO2 (tCO2e), while production through a fully caged system would emit 1,184,000 tCO2e.” The fully cages system would provide a reduction of 17.7% on the current mixed model. (1,439,000 - 1,184,000 = 255,000 difference in tCO2e. 255,000 / 1,439,000 = 17.7% reduction in tCO2e.) And is this a difference between NOW? Or is it based on the old data? And is it extrapolated from the model, which is used to extrapolate trends for the study and is based on old data?

The bottom line - stated upfront instead of at the end - is that the fully caged system is better, based on the study. The process here is to 1) suck you in by a provocative headline, 2) give you a supposedly objective teaser with some numbers, in order to 3) get you to read the article.

Really? Does the newspaper have to be so deceitful and manipulate the reader right away? This approach is really reprehensible. And it gets worse.

Now to the article. The first sentence is not WHO the authors of the study are, or WHO commissioned it, or WHAT the methodology was, or WHAT the measurements were, or WHEN the measurements were taken, or how many farms were involved, or anything else that normally starts a scientific paper. It is another provocation instead. “Organic eggs are twice as bad for the climate as eggs from chickens living in cages, research suggests.” So the reader is hit over the head with provocation three times in a row right from the start (headline, subhead, first sentence). This is poor writing, at the very least. It is also a bludgeon instead of a scalpel. And the necessary who, what, when, where is given later instead of upfront. As I say, reprehensible.

So, on to the study itself, rather than how the newspaper presents it.

This study used data from 2009-2010. Isn’t there any updated data? Somehow I think there is, since the field of organics (as well as commercial industrial agriculture) has gone through significant changes since 2010. Back in 2010, I was still doing a CSA program in the US and hadn’t even decided to move to France OR retire. I was still a runner too, going on my last long-distance run on my birthday in 2010. A lot of water under the bridge since then. Here is the relevant paragraph from the article. As far as I am concerned, this sinks the study.

However, the study used data from 2009-2010, which the researchers acknowledged as a limitation as it did not capture more recent developments in egg production. The research also did not take into account other environmental impacts such as pesticides or biodiversity.

So I reject the study based on how old the data is. But let us continue to dissect the problems, just for “shits and grins.” Just who is funding this research? The chief author of the study, Dr Harriet Bartlett, is at Oxford University’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. The Smith School ⁠was established in 2008 through a foundational donation from Sir Martin Smith, Lady Elise Smith, and their family of financiers. Major funding comes from the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group and here is a list of donors.

Aviva Investors, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Banco Santander, Bank of America, Barclays, Brunel Pensions Partnership, BNP Paribas Asset Management, Bunge, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, ClimateWorks, Endowment Challenge Fund (University of Oxford), Energy Foundation China, Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council, EU Horizon 2020, European Climate Foundation, Generation Foundation, German Environment Agency, Growald Family Fund, HSBC, IKEA Foundation, INSPIRE, Inter-American Development Bank, Ivey Foundation, John Ellerman Foundation, KPMG, KR Foundation, Lloyd’s of London, Lombard Odier, Mava Foundation, MFS, Mistra, Natural Environment Research Council, Norges Bank Investment Management, Oak Foundation, Oxford Martin School, Persefoni, Pool Fund for International Energy, Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts, Sergey Brin Family Foundation, Standard Chartered, Tellus Mater Foundation, Temasek, The Leverhulme Trust, The Luc Hoffmann Institute, The Rothschild Foundation, The Sunrise Project, The Woodchester Trust, UBS, UK Department for Business and Trade (DBT), UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), UK Research & Innovation, Wallace Global Fund, Wells Fargo, Willis Towers Watson, Winton Capital, WWF-UK.

Notice how many banks are involved with the Finance Group and the Smith School. I am suspicious of their influence on ANY scientific study. Let it be known that I get no funding from any organization or bank or think tank for my own research on crop landraces. Therefore, you don’t have to worry about vested interests in MY research. But you sure as hell have to worry about research from this financier-funded school!

The researchers used “ . . . data from UK poultry farms to calculate environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions, land use and types of pollution. They also looked at welfare indicators such as mortality and the number of hens needed to produce a given number of eggs.” How many farms? Don’t know. What was the mix? Don’t know. Why is “number of hens needed to produce a given number of eggs” a welfare indicator rather than a yield indicator? Don’t know. Would I be able to answer these questions if I went to the original study and read it in depth? Maybe. But I am still left with a provocative article in the popular lamestream media that is INTENDED to raise hackles all over the world and provide AMMUNITION for all the anti-organic folks out there who are suddenly back in favor because of Donald Trump and the nihilism of the USA in destroying everything good and true and beautiful.

SEE? I can write provocatively too. But I am not trying to make money by spreading nonsense everywhere disguised as reputable science. And make no mistake, if you are funded by financiers and banks, you are NOT reputable. This negates a lot of so-called “science.”

Next is the modeling meme.

“Then we did some some modelling to work out these environmental and welfare outcomes,” she said.

“We found an important trade-off,” Bartlett added. “It’s that, the types of farms that are generally regarded as being better for animal welfare, like organic and free-range, can actually require more birds to produce the same amount of eggs because they’re less efficient and they can have higher environmental impacts.”

As everyone should know by now, I regard computer modeling as crap. Not only does it have complexity and scale issues, but the necessity of reducing variables down to a much smaller number than are working in real life negates any value it may have in producing insights. In other words, the insights are generated from false assumptions.

Notice how Bartlett passes off a subjective assessment as a limiting factor in analysis in the above quote. “Generally regard as being better for animal welfare.” Then she conflates the subjective with the objective, “ . . . can actually require more birds to produce the same amount of eggs . . . . ” And then she conflates a dodgy assessment that comes out of nowhere in order to make her point. “ . . . less efficient and they can have higher environmental impacts.” How is “less efficient” measured? In my research, I model efficiency by input/output analysis, thermodynamic measurement, and EROI (energy return on investment). How is Bartlett measuring efficiency? We don’t know. And as for the statement, “ . . . they can have higher environmental impacts,” how in the hell is she measuring this? We don’t know. Is there any sort of thermodynamic assessment of accumulated heat in the laying sheds vs free-range housing? Is there any thermodynamic assessment of transport costs, electricity for fans to cool the laying sheds, machines to deliver the feed and water, etc.? We don’t know. [Sidebar: I worked nights and Saturdays in high school candling eggs from 1965 to 1968. One job was in a small-scale egg merchant. The other job was in a large laying shed. I know a little about the business.]

The Guardian article does throw a bone to critics with the following:

However, Bartlett said the research did not show the whole picture regarding factory farming. “Organic could come out better on pesticide toxicity, maybe biodiversity on farm as well,” she said.

Lee Holdstock, the head of regulatory and trade affairs at Soil Association Certification, who was not involved in the study, said the research “highlights some important trade-offs” but gave an “incomplete picture of environmental impact”.

“While intensive systems can have lower emissions per unit of output because birds use feed more efficiently, this reflects only one part of the picture,” Holdstock said. “A truly sustainable food system must also consider impacts on nature, soil health, water quality, the use of synthetic inputs, and animal welfare.”

This is just not enough. There is no critical thinking here. Just another argument from authority by a lone dissenting voice, Lee Holdstock. And even he has a naive view of feed efficiency and uses the qualifier “can.” It certainly does not rise to the level of countering the manipulation of the article throughout, with its specious data and specious assumptions and specious methodology and specious conclusions.

This is really an awful article from an awful newspaper. I can just see all the rightwing whackos using it to club organic growers in private, public and online discussions.

Over two decades ago I read Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (1986), and it was quite the sobering exposé. It is a history of the struggle to control water in the American West and “ . . . a tale of rivers diverted and damned, political corruption and intrigue, billion-dollar battles over water rights, and economic and ecological disaster,” per the Amazon webpage. I couldn’t describe it better and I heartily recommend the book. Few people understand how the lack of water will collapse the American Southwest and then the rest of the US, since so much food comes from irrigated land in Arizona and California. There is also a smaller problem with loss of electricity generated from hydropower, which allowed cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas to grow far beyond reasonable population limits.

Since I spent years living in dry, dry Colorado and north central Washington, which is even dryer and hotter, I have a feel for the vagaries of living in an arid land. Few people living in Europe have a grasp on how arid the American West really is. I was bicycling across the southwest one time in July and ran into an Irish cyclist crossing the US from Georgia to California. I ran into him at a truck stop in Arizona and he looked like warmed-over death. I bought him some Gatorade, since it was obvious he didn’t realize his electrolytes were dangerously low. It perked him right up. (At the time, your choices were Gatorade or Powerade. Now there are all kinds of electrolyte drinks available in convenience stores at truck stops.)

Here is another story to drive the point home. During 1984, I was a student at the University of Colorado and so lived in Boulder. The Coors Classic was still the pre-eminent US bicycle race at the time and some foreign teams were using it as a warm-up for the Olympics held in Los Angeles that year. I knew a couple of guys on the English team and so touched base with them at the Coors Classic when it came through Boulder. They were woefully unprepared for just how arid Colorado and the whole American Southwest really is. Once again, I proselytized for electrolyte sports drinks since they obviously hadn’t grokked how to adapt in an arid climate. People from a maritime climate have a different baseline and psychology of nutrition. And now we are in a new era too. It should be noted that one of the reasons Tadej Pogacar just broke Marco Pantani’s 1995 record for climbing L’Alpe d’Huez in this year’s Tour de France was because the science of carbohydrate and electrolyte loading has progressed exponentially since then. And Pantani was doping too, so Pogacar’s feat is astounding. It is not just faster bikes. Nutrition is better too. But the drought effects around this year’s Tour cast a worrying shadow on the future. Like the riders themselves, I would like Tour stages to start at 8 AM instead of 2 PM next year.

I listened to an interesting podcast yesterday on the current very low levels of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, both reservoirs on the Colorado River, which runs from Colorado to Mexico and passes through seven states on its way to the Gulf of California. The two main dams are the Glen Canyon Dam, which backs up Lake Powell, and the Hoover Dam, which backs up Lake Mead. Both of these reservoirs are running dangerously low and the penstock intakes (the closed pipes or sluice gates that carry and pressurize water to the turbines for hydropower generation) are still below water but hovering at the critical mark. At Lake Powell (Glen Canyon Dam), the penstock intakes sit at an elevation of 3,470 feet, just below the minimum power pool threshold of 3,490 feet. So still under the surface, but just barely. At Lake Mead (Hoover Dam), the penstock intake structures are built high up on the face of the dam and are still submerged, though low levels threaten efficient water pressure for power generation. It should be noted that 40 million people in the Southwest depend on the Colorado River for their water (personal, agricultural and industrial), but these two dams also produce electricity for the regional grid. Although the share of electricity for the region is low, only 1%-2%, the hydropower acts as a flexible peaking resource for the Western Area Power Administration grid across several western states rather than being a baseline provider. (US electrical grids are notoriously vulnerable to demand fluctuations and the managers have to plan for that.) The main danger in Lake Powell and Lake Mead dropping even lower is the irrigation requirements, especially Arizona and California. Between 52%-79% of the Colorado River water goes to irrigation and provides irrigation water for about 15% of the total food supply in the US. This is a significant share, considering the size of the US. The river also provides irrigation for ~90% of US winter vegetables.

It is certainly true that Amerikan agriculture wastes a lot of water, especially in producing alfalfa in the desert to feed horses kept in Los Angles and Phoenix as luxury status items. One can go online and find any number of other examples of wasteful practices. And it has been accepted for decades that 80% of the water usage in the West is used for agriculture - 90% in California. This puts the lie to Jerry Brown’s campaign for shorter showers back when he was governor. It really made no difference compared to water waste in Californian industrial agriculture. Hose pipe bans, yes. Shorter showers, no bueno. It was if Governor Brown went out of his way to spread false information and spin in order to piss people off at a gut level.

California’s Central Valley produces about 8% of the US food supply, but is irrigated from the Northern and Central California watersheds, primarily the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, which run down from the Sierra Nevada. Adding these two together, nearly one-fourth of US food production comes from irrigation in the Southwest and California. This is huge. So as human-caused climate change increases temperature and drought, a dramatic reduction in the ability to feed people in the US has become a fact of life. This is not good and the same problems are rising in the rest of the world. In Europe, the temperature rise and the drought are making wildfires worse. The two current crises are in the areas around Bordeaux and Madrid. But that is right now. Next month it will be somewhere else.

There are two confounding factors in the Colorado River Problem, and the same conditions are likely confounding the crises in the Alps, the Dolomites, the Pyrenees and other regions around the world that depend on snow pack for the water in their rivers. The first is drought that drys out the soil. The second confounding problem is the drawdown of the aquifers in the area. Because of the drought in the American Southwest of the last twenty-six years, the soil in the mountains is very dry. It is also dry along the whole length of the Colorado River and its tributaries. Normal conditions are like a wet sponge after a snowy winter. As the snow melts, some water percolates downwards but most of it runs off into the nearest stream. Then it is aggregated into larger and larger streams and rivers as it runs to the sea. But when the soil is continually parched in the Rocky Mountains and the Sierras because of drought, much of the water is absorbed by the soil before it can fill the rivers. Like a gigantic dry sponge that is not only wide but deep.

And once the soil is so dry the snowpack cannot produce enough water in the streams, more and more people in the Colorado River watershed rely on pumped water from the aquifers underneath them. And because of burgeoning population growth and burgeoning irrigation for crops, the aquifers are being drawn down at an alarming rate. For those of you familiar with the Oglalla Aquifer which underlies the southern Great Plains, you have probably heard it is on its way to collapse. This aquifer cannot be replenished readily because it is drawing down ancient water that filled it up thousands of years ago, but in the Colorado Rive watershed, some does filter through underground. So this drop in recharging amplifies the main problem of the parched soil in the Rockies and all along the Colorado River and its tributaries.

For example, the Phoenix Active Management Area (Phoenix and its environs - 5,646 square miles and 4.6 million people) pumps out between 600,000 and 1.1 million acre-feet of groundwater annually. The net drawdown deficit used to be 114,400 acre-feet of groundwater per year, but aggressive countermeasures, like recharging the aquifers with surface water, stormwater, and treated wastewater, has dropped that down to a net deficit of 40,000 acre-feet per year. This is a deficit of 2833 gallons per capita per year, or 10,726 liters. In US terms at 100 gallons per person per day, this represents a deficit of 8% of use, while in European terms this represents a deficit of 20%. (US consumption at 100 gallons/day and European consumption at 150 liters/day.)

Sidebar: An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover one acre (43,560 square feet) with one foot of water. One acre-foot is equal to 325,851 gallons of water, enough to cover a football field with a foot of water. This would be 1.233e+6 liters, or 1233 cubic meter water cubes for all you folks using the metric system.

The problem arises form man-made causes. Fossil fuel heat and emissions are making the climate hotter, creating hotter summers and more droughts every year. The southwestern US has been in an ongoing megadrought since 2000. This drought is the driest multi-decade period the region has seen since at least 800 CE. (Base on tree-ring dating, or dendrochronology.) The megadrought has prompted the water shortage at Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, and climate change models project drier conditions in the region through the end of the 21st century. Not good. And keep in mind that the reason the ancient cliff-dwellers in the Four Corners region (where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet) disappeared is because of a megadrought from 1276 to 1299 CE. We know this because of dendrochronology again, and it is backed up by oral traditions of the modern Pueblo, Hopi, and Zuni tribes - the direct descendants of those people. (Anasazi is the outdated term for the Ancient Ones, but the modern tribes don’t like it because it meant “ancient enemy” in Navaho. Ancient Ones is better. You can also call them the Ancestral Puebloans.)

Sidenote: The Ancient Ones didn’t really disappear. They moved out into more hospitable environments and became Pueblo People. The cliff-dwelling lifestyle just didn’t fit anymore. I have been to lots of cliff dwellings in the Southwest and my favorites are Mesa Verde and Hovenweep. Hovenweep is ~70 kilometers, or 43 miles, west-north-west of Mesa Verde. (Longer if you are driving.) My own personal theory about Hovenweep is that it was a monastery outlier for other cliff-dwelling communities because of the view of Sleeping Ute Mountain. There are many dwellings at the site (now a National Monument) that are cubicle-sized, with doors facing the mountain. You can sit in the doorway and meditate on the human form. Notice how the Sleeping Ute (named after a modern tribe in the area) is in the dead or corpse pose (Savasana or Mritasana). If you are using one of the various sitting postures in the doorway, you are further up the chain towards the human condition, between earth and sky. (A little bit of trivia for all you yoga aficionados.)

The Ancient Ones, or Ancestral Puebloans, first emerged as a culture around 700 BCE. They lived mostly in pit houses in the early years which remained popular throughout their culture, especially in higher elevations. Later, they began to build the pueblo room blocks, which were made of stones. There was another cultural complex in the area from ~0-1300 CE called the Fremont culture or Fremont complex, as it seems to be an amalgam of multiple cultures. They were mostly semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers with some domestic crops. The dividing lines between the Ancestral Pueblans and the Fremont people is not a bright line, but the Fremont people seem not to have done as much pueblo building and later cliff dwellings.

The cliff dwellings, many built into precarious rock overhangs sometimes hundreds of feet above the canyon floor, are the most famous of the sites in the area, but they were only built and inhabited in the last 100 years of occupation. The question is, “Why bother?” It is likely that before the Ancestral Pueblans developed their cliff-dwelling lifestyle, they had already successfully weathered droughts many times. As noted, there was a major drought around 800 CE and the earliest cliff dwellings date to around 1100 CE. It must be something different and the theory here is “man corn.”

Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest by Christy G. Turner II and Jacqueline A. Turner was published in 1998. Before then, Christy Turner had done a lot of research applying evidence from teeth (like winging) and language similarities to the peopling of the Americas and postulated several waves of immigration from North Asia. This made him unpopular in anthropological circles at the time. I read several of his articles on this in grad school, as well as his articles on cannibalism. Turner followed the evidence and came up with his Man Corn Theory. “Man corn” comes from an Aztec word (tlacatlaolli ) for a ritual meal of human meat cooked with corn. (For all you Europeans, corn in the US means maize, not barley or wheat.) The Turners argued that ritual cannibalism and extreme violence were widespread among the ancient Ancestral Puebloan people of the American Southwest, and may have been introduced by invaders from Mesoamerica (like the Toltecs). Importing terrorism right along with maize it seems. I did a paper on cannibalism in the southwest in grad school, using Tim White’s book Prehistoric Cannibalism at Mancos 5MTUMR-2346 (1992) and some of Turner’s articles. Mancos was a specific site in southwestern Colorado and it revealed that nearly thirty men, women, and children were butchered and cooked there around A.D. 1100. Their bones were fractured for marrow, and the remains discarded in several rooms of the pueblo.

Sidenote: To put this into a time perspective, this was about the time period that the Ancestral Pueblans moved into cliff dwellings, which were much more secure because of the terrain. It took ladders to get to some of the dwellings and there are cases of chipped stone footholds and handholds that cannot be climbed without knowing the proper sequence and which hand/foot to start with. Clever!

White analyzed evidence for skinning, dismembering, cooking, and fracturing to infer that cannibalism took place at Mancos. I was especially intrigued by his tests for “pot polish” - the shininess on the bones from stirring them around in a pot for making soup. White also evaluated claims for cannibalism in ethnographic and archaeological contexts worldwide and describes how cultural biases often distort the interpretation of scientific data. He used anatomical, taphonomic, zooarchaeological, and forensic methods in his investigation and comes to the conclusion, “We don’t know how much was ritual and how much was for food value. But we do know it happened.” White’s study is a more detailed look at a single site versus the Turners’ investigation of multiple sites, but they are real investigations and cannot be just discarded by pearl-clutching, fainting types. Indeed, there are multiple instances of human coprolites (fossilized feces) in the Southwest and Great Basin that reveal human DNA in their structure. Someone pooped out DNA from another person in their stools.

Why did some groups move to cliff dwellings? The answer has proven elusive and it was not a complete shift. During the Cliff Dwelling Phase pueblos on the mesa tops continued as well. They are all over the place and may have served as sacrifice zones and buffers for the people hidden below. (Grow a bunch more food to keep the bandits satisfied.) It was also necessary to grow your corn and squash and beans on the tops of the mesas too. Cliff dwellings proved popular, with over 600 in what is now Mesa Verde National Park alone. So defense is only one theory on the movement of people around 1100-1300 CE. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Mancos, Colorado is on the flats below the Mesa Verde uplift. AND if you wanted to “run for the hills” after your parents and uncles got eaten, you didn’t have to go far. We only have conjectures, especially as modern-day archaeologists have the latest high-tech tools but only low-tech brains stuck in statist thinking and academic folderol. And I can make that claim because I started in archaeology in 1968 and have seen many changes in the field. For instance, if you mention Lewis Binford to a young post-processualist at university, you might get a blank look and a “Who?”

So let’s postulate that the Ancestral Pueblans were able to adapt to drought and even soul-crushing terrorism. To put this into a modern context, it is awful enough to see Israeli soldiers shooting your children, but if they were to eat them too, that would amp up Israel’s terrorism to another terrible level. What would we do? What will the Palestinians do? The drought got extreme in the late 12th century, so the Ancestral Pueblans had to make yet another adaptation. Can we do the same? I think so.

IS THIS THE END FOR LAKE POWELL?
Some environmental groups have decided Lake Powell has got to go. It took more than 17 years for Lake Powell to reach its full elevation of 3,700 feet (1,100 m) above sea level, which it crossed in 1980. One of the main reasons for this slow rise, in addition to the need to meet obligations to the Lower Basin, was the leakage of vast amounts of water into the porous Navajo Sandstone aquifer. Between 1963 and 1969, as much as 655,000 acre-feet (0.808 km³) leaked into the reservoir banks each year. Conversely, some of this “bank storage” flows back into the reservoir as springs and seeps when Lake Powell is low. Exactly how much of this water has potential to return to the reservoir, and how much “disappears” into the ground, is subject to debate. But we already have a recharge mechanism operating in the watershed. There are two minds about the demise of Lake Powell. Just ignore it for another few years and try to ration water. Or decommission the dam and take control of the problem. For instance the Glen Canyon Institute (GCI) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to the restoration of Glen Canyon and a free flowing Colorado River through Grand Canyon. Here is one of their FAQs.

Does restoring Glen Canyon mean completely removing Glen Canyon Dam?

No. The process of decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam would not involve removing the dam. Glen Canyon Dam is quickly becoming a relic of the past. While there may be too much concrete to fully remove the dam, it will eventually need to be re-engineered in order to preserve the remaining biological integrity of Grand Canyon and the Colorado River. The likely process of bypassing Glen Canyon Dam would involve lowering reservoir levels to what is known as the ‘dead pool’ level (237 feet) and drilling bypass tunnels around the base of the dam, allowing the mobilization of any remaining water and sediment. The dam site will eventually become a major tourist attraction in the region.

https://glencanyon.org/faq/

Here is another take on the fate of the Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, if you want more information. https://www.circleofblue.org/2026/supply/glen-canyon-dam-faces-its-existential-moment/

As the organization Circle of Blue puts it, “Glen Canyon Dam Faces Its Existential Moment: Iconic structure becomes Colorado River’s biggest water chokepoint.” And we all know how important choke points have become in the polycrisis. Not just the Strait of Hormuz. Not just the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb. Not just the Strait of Malacca. Now Glen Canyon Dam is a choke point that has a direct bearing on how much food the US can produce and consume. The Trumpian nonsense around Iran is not just about grabbing Iran’s oil under the guise of a nuclear threat. It has become a real threat to Amerika’s ability to eat. The Colorado River problem amplifies Trump’s stupidity.

https://www.circleofblue.org/2026/supply/glen-canyon-dam-faces-its-existential-moment/

Back to Sumer. The Fertile Crescent didn’t start out using irrigation to grow grain and expand its population, thus ushering in what is called the Neolithic Revolution. It took several thousand years for states, urbanism and civilization to develop. But irrigation played a big part in the last 5000 years. The resulting salinization of so much irrigation played a decisive role in the collapse of many states in the region. It looks to me like we are going to repeat that mistake too. The Central Valley of California is a case in point. Consider this.

Salinity in the Central Valley: A Critical Problem
Excess salinity poses a growing threat to food production, drinking water quality and public health. Salts increase the cost of urban drinking water and wastewater treatment, which are paid for by residents and businesses.
https://www.watereducation.org/post/salinity-central-valley-critical-problem

As someone who has done irrigation in my market gardens and retirement garden for many years, I worry about salinization - and I only have a 22-year timeline! Whether you get the water from your own well, like I did in Washington state, or if it comes from the river, like in France, there are salts and minerals that accumulate. It is not just H₂0. Rain water is much better because it has been “scrubbed.” It is “softer.” But it doesn’t rain enough here in France and back in Washington it rained very little during the summer. One year we had 100 days without rain. So . . . What’cha gonna do about it?

My plan is to use irrigation wisely on a cost/benefit basis. Right now I am irrigating a lot to keep my soil at a nutrient-, microorganism- and root-friendly basis. In other words, I am willing to use more water from the river because the benefits for my soil outweigh the excess level of minerals I am putting into the soil from irrigation. I can see the damage from the drought every day and it is critical because I eat the food I grow. If I was still selling food for market I might reconsider my paradigm. But right now I am in a drought paradigm. At some time in the future I might have to shift further into an aridification paradigm, similar to the paradigm of the Ancestral Pueblans. We shall see how it goes.

Not only is this good advice; it fits into the flow and anticipates synchronicity.

There is historical precedent for this kind of thinking. In The History of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), Thucydides mentions the Siege of Melos by Athens in 416 BC. Melos was neutral in this war but had ancestral ties to Sparta. The Melians resisted and were eventually conquered and enslaved. This incident is chiefly remembered for the Melian Dialogue, wherein the Athenians offer the Melians an ultimatum: surrender and pay tribute to Athens or be destroyed. When the Melians point out their neutrality, the Athenians do not bother arguing over the morality of the situation and simply state, “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Another version is, “The strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must.” In our modern world this becomes, “The rich do what they want and the poor suffer what they must.” The Melian Dialogue is taught as an advocation of imperialism at the expense of other states, but it applies to the elites as well. The little people - me and thee - must perforce develop our capacity for resilience in suffering.

“Fix what you can, adapt to the rest, and suffer what you must,” also slips the argument over whether we have problems or predicaments - something I have discussed many times, on many platforms, and argued about with many people. (See how this three thing works? I frame the subject in a triplet.) It does not matter which side you come down on in this argument because we are on a different level. And neither does it matter if you see the structural level as a super- or sub-level.

If you come from a peasant background, you should already know all about resilience in suffering. A basic part of your interior core - your psyche - should already be the resignation of “What’cha gonna do about it?” And this breeds long-standing resentment of course, which then results in a pronounced coarseness and low-yield revenge on others who are weaker. The schism then becomes whether you can rise above your pettiness or not. And this is where religion comes in as the “opiate of the masses.” It provides you a state-approved way of transcending your despair through ritual and scripture. Whether or not they adopt a religious stance, some peasants are successful in transcending pettiness. Most are not.

There are other relevant aspects of the peasant background, like the ability to stand on principle; to let the chips fall where they may because you don’t have much anyway. This is decidedly different from the middle-class stance of compromise because they have more to lose economically. The middle class stands on principal, not principle.

Our situation now is not as dire as that of Melos. [Sidenote: Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, in theaters now, is another commentary on current events using Greek history.] In each of our situations, we are not residents of a prosperous city-state with the Athenians on our doorstep and triremes in the harbor. We have some cover because we live individual lives in states that are so much larger and so much more expansive the elites cannot keep track of us all - yet. As long as we don’t rock the boat we can have some relief while the state looks for other states to conquer and other resources to seize. Siege and seize. The way of the world nowadays.

But what happens when the natural resources that keep the System going start to degrade in more significant ways? Not just higher gas prices, but gas rationing - first by price and then by state policy. Not just higher prices at the grocery store, but empty shelves. Some pundits paint August as the dire month when all this comes to a head. My response is the same, whether the shit hits the fan moment (SHTF) is August 2026 or August 2030. Fix what you can, adapt to the rest, and suffer what you must.

In a very real sense, SHTF happens every day. Similar to, “It’s a recession if you lost your job, but it’s a depression if I lose my job,” so too the individual can have a dire SHTF moment when all the others around you do not. Two of my friends are in hospital right now and it is certainly possible that one or even both of them will not leave alive. They are each having their own SHTF moment.

FIX WHAT YOU CAN
If you have some power, whether in your job or in your community, you should be trying to fix the polycrisis problems in front of you. That is not only the “right thing to do,” it is just common sense. The short-term economic tradeoffs are King of the Roost no longer. We are rapidly compressing the short-term into the mid-term into the long-term. The current heat waves in Europe are just one example. Reducing fossil fuel heat and emissions is something we should have been doing for the last 50 years. But that required long-term thinking, of which most people were incapable. And of course no one listened to us “dirty hippie commie pinkos” back then. Even building alternatives that one could easily step into, like food co-ops, didn’t get much traction. Back in 1980, I started saying, “If YOU would have listened to US ten years ago, WE wouldn’t be in trouble NOW.” Every five years since then I have updated the number. Now I say, “If YOU would have listened to US fifty-five years ago, WE wouldn’t be in trouble NOW.” But now it is not long-term thinking. It is short-, mid- AND long-term.

In Europe, RIGHT NOW, it is necessary to dramatically reduce fossil fuel use because we are assured of more heat, more drought, more fires and more deaths due to climate change. Even with dramatic reductions, we will still have to endure higher temps and more drought BUT we can stop the acceleration of the acceleration of the heat and drought. (The infamous third derivative.) This might be a difficult concept to grasp. It is not that reducing fossil fuel use will have an immediate effect of lowering future temps. What it will do however, is to stop or slow down the increase in temps. This is what mitigation means and it is all about picking the least bad alternative. To be very clear and graphic, reducing fossil fuel use RIGHT NOW - and therefore the heat and gases expended into the atmosphere - will keep the top temps from rising to 45° Celsius in France as the new normal.

40° C has become the new summer normal in France and it happened THIS YEAR. And if bumping that up to 45° C doesn’t scare you, consider that the heatwave (canicule in French) killed more than 5,000 people in France between 22 and 28 June with a high of 40° C. The official estimate is 5,764 excess mortality deaths recorded between June 17 and July 2. Between 24 and 26 June the temperature hit 40°C (104° F). Then there was only a short break between the second and third canicules. We are still in the third canicule, although it may be ending as I write this. When the Tour de France passed in front of our house on July 7th, the temp was 40° C and I canceled our Tour party because of the heat. There was also some concern on that stage that riders or team staff might suffer heatstroke. During the second and third canicules of the year (first one was in May), I stayed indoors a lot and watched my garden go downhill, even though I irrigate every day from the river at the bottom of our property. This is the new normal, but we don NOT have to continue to accelerate the acceleration of the destruction of the environment. Therefore, if you have any power at all in your business or in your community, the most sensible thing to do is press hard to dramatically reduce fossil fuel use. This is mitigation, pure and simple. There is nothing airy-fairy or progressive about it. We are in dire straits already. If we can keep the heat waves at the 40° level we can adapt.

ADAPT TO THE REST
Like most French residents, we have no air conditioning, but we do have thick stone walls that don’t heat up as rapidly as thin, timber-framed walls. We also have gotten savvy on using fans, as well as adopting Spanish-style sleeping and eating habits. When I was a migrant worker in my 20s, I regularly picked cherries, peaches and pears in 100° F (38° C) temps in California, Oregon and Washington. My partner is not quite so physiologically adapted, so she drives to the lake for a swim 2-3 times a week, depending on her schedule. If we weren’t retired, it would be a different story. Keep that in mind as you build up your adaptations. You are going to have to adapt to your own unique situation.

My one-day Sunday fasts also help me. I have dropped some weight and it is just psychologically less stressful because I have killed off a large segment of my food obsession. And to be clear, part of that is re-balancing my metabolism, not just re-wiring my brain. From the economic angle, fasting one day a week reduces my food cost by one-seventh, or 14%. But if you factor in a lighter meal on Saturday night and an overall decline in the volume of my meals on non-fast days, the benefit in reduced food costs is closer to 20% per week. This is significant. In my long years of advocating reduced consumption and growing your own food, I often asked people to reduce their consumption by 20%. Fasting one day a week achieves this in the food cost realm.

I am sure you the reader can think of many ways you can adapt to reduced energy usage in all areas of your life, not just food or driving your car. There are cost efficiencies at work and in the home that provide a start, as well as reducing your online obsessions. If you were to have an epiphany and stop reading ALL online content, including my articles, I would say, “Bravo. Well done!” At some point I may do the same, which is one reason I don’t accept contributions from kindly readers. So fix what you can and adapt to the rest.

SUFFER WHAT YOU MUST
Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and bear it. And if it only gets to the level of teeth-gritting, consider yourself lucky. There are times when you are just trapped in a Monty Python movie. I am thinking of the line from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983): “Life’s a piece of shit / When you look at it.” So . . . “Always look on the bright side of life.” (From the same scene and song.)

All laughing and philosophizing aside, there will be times when you can hardly bear it. I am of two minds on this. I hold grudges and I try to transcend. These are not mutually exclusive. The bridge between the two is the Iron Law of Karma. And of course since I almost died twice in my life and have been taking punches since I was a small child, I have confidence in my own ability to pick myself back up when I have been knocked flat. It is not fun, but it is doable.

Other people have their own rules for suffering. And I encourage everyone to find out what their own rules actually are. Sometimes they are well hidden. You would be surprised at the amount of fortitude you have once you are forced to confront: 1) not only the devil in front of you, but 2) your own dangerous character. Scary ain’t it? As I have been promoting in my third book (Paradigms for Adaptation) and throughout my writings on Substack, no one knows your own situation as well as you do. So you are going to have to do the work of “suffering what you must.”

I have faith in you.

As Trump and his toadies tear down the global economic system, the little people - me and thee - are going to pay more for food. The obvious solution for everyone, whether you are growing your own food or not, is to make changes at the retail level, then work backwards. There is precedent for this as demonstrated by the food co-ops in the early 1970s in the US. And if you don’t want to jump into all the trials and tribulations of a storefront, there is the buying club alternative, which is even easier. Here is some of my own history on how it can be done.

By 1969, it was obvious the US had become a fascist state and the best bet was to get as far away from the madness as possible. At the time, I was part of two different groups; the artsy-fartsy group centered on my roommates who were students at the Minneapolis School of Art, and the student radical group who were students at the University of Minnesota like myself. This reflected the schism at the time between the hippies and the radicals. As an example, one of my roommates in 1968 said to me, “Why worry so much about the War? In ten years, everyone will be like us.” [A bit too much Marshall McLuhan at the Art School perhaps?] I was part of the synthesis early on that metastisized into the nationwide general strike in 1970 on college campuses after the Invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State/Jackson State murders.

In both groups, we made moves to get out of the city (Minneapolis) and rented farms to live on out in the country. In both cases we were kicked off after a couple of months because we were “dirty hippies.” One landlord was honest with us at least. “My banker said he was going to foreclose on both the place you rented and my home place if I don’t kick you off.” By that time in our lives, discrimination was just a fact of life. So both groups made accommodation. The artsy-fartsy group moved back to the home town a couple of us had grown up in and lived on rented land for some years and then moved to Alaska, where they still live. The student radical group was the one I settled on and we got involved in the Co-op Movement. Later on we bought raw land in northern Minnesota and homesteaded on individual acreage.

In 1970, the first co-op started in St. Paul, called the Selby Co-op. In Minneapolis, a food-buying club started just off the University of Minnesota campus called the Ecology Co-op. Another distribution center started in Minneapolis and was called People’s Pantry. They bought food in bulk, like brown rice, and sold it in small lots for the individual consumer at the wholesale price. I was involved in the Ecology Co-op, collating purchase orders and distribution, bagging up orders, etc. Me and my roommates also bought food at People’s Pantry, where you could buy a pound of brown rice for 12 cents. (!) This focus on retail allowed us “dirty hippies” to survive on the pittance we earned or were able to scrape together day-to-day. I had a head shop at the time (a long story) and was the distributor for Hundred Flowers, the local underground newspaper in Minneapolis. [Let a hundred flowers bloom. Let a hundred schools of thought contend. - Mao, 1956] I also sold underground newspapers on campus in 1969 and 1970. I had several newspapers from all over the country that arrived by mail each week, like the L.A. Free Press, Seattle Helix, Chicago Seed, Portland Willamette Bridge, etc. As I have often said over the years, I learned my politics from selling underground newspapers - and reading them!

In the fall of 1970, a whole bunch of radical lefties, including one of my roommates and I, started working on starting a food co-op in Minneapolis. The People’s Pantry group were heavily committed to this new venture. North Country Co-op opened in the spring of 1971 and was an instant hit. I also worked over the winter in an office to earn enough money to buy land, as did some of my other friends in our loose collective, and we fled the city in May, 1971. I kept up my involvement in North Country Co-op until about 1976-77, when I relocated my adventurous spirit to the Pacific Northwest. This was when I worked on a circus in 1973-74 and became a fruit tramp (migrant worker) in 1974. Later on, I became a ski bum in Colorado.

There were a lot of lessons to be learned in starting and running a food co-op. I will discuss some of them.

THE ROCHDALE PRINCIPLES
The Minneapolis co-ops started with the Rochdale Principles. This is from the Wikipedia entry: The Rochdale Principles are a set of ideals for the operation of cooperatives. They were first set out in 1844 by the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in Rochdale, England, and have formed the basis for the principles on which co-operatives around the world continue to operate. The implications of the Rochdale Principles are a focus of study in co-operative economics. Here are the key principles from the same webpage:

Original version (adopted 1937)

1. Open membership.

2. Democratic control (one person, one vote).

3. Distribution of surplus in proportion to trade.

4. Payment of limited interest on capital.

5. Political and religious neutrality.

6. Cash trading (no credit extended).

7. Promotion of education.

ICA revision (1966)
At the 1963 Bournemouth Congress of the ICA [International Cooperative Alliance], attendees appointed a second commission on the Rochdale principles, composed of one representative each from Great Britain, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, United States, and India. D.G. Karve, the representative from India, chaired the commission.

1. Open, voluntary membership.

2. Democratic governance.

3. Limited return on equity.

4. Surplus belongs to members.

5. Education of members and public in cooperative principles.

6. Cooperation between cooperatives.

Notice some of the changes that were made from the 1930s to the 1960s, accurately reflecting the changing zeitgeist. As an example, I was at a general meeting of North Country Co-op one time in the early 1970s (I forget what year) and there was an endless discussion of whether or not the co-op should sell white flour and white sugar. After a while listening to the nonsense back and forth, I piped up with “Why don’t we just vote on it?” Dead silence in the room. Finally, one of my friends sitting next to me who was working at the co-op as a Coordinator, leaned over and said to me, “We don’t vote on things anymore. We come to a consensus.” I got up and left. I have never had much time for bullshit and the whole idea of consensus seems like crap to me. Others hold differing views on consensus of course. Perhaps you do too.

When I lived in Bozeman, Montana, a couple of decades later, I got involved in the local co-op until I found out they operated under what is called “managed consensus.” I could not even bring up a concern I had at a membership meeting because an item had to first be approved by the people who were on the board. To be clear, consensus favors the dogged rhetorician who can bully with words and doesn’t know (or care!) when to stop pressing. Managed consensus is even worse, as it levels up the word bullies to gatekeeper status. One member, one vote allows the perspicacious person to have his/her say and then go along with the majority as the committed, loyal opposition. “I don’t like it, but I will still do it because I value the organization.” Consensus just purveys a false sense of total agreement and leads to calcification.

A related problem in the co-ops in those first years was the “bossy problem.” The wage for a Coordinator was the princely sum of $25 per week. Even in 1971, that was a piss-poor wage. Of COURSE the committed people would default to keeping their fingers in everything going on in THEIR store. They got little compensation and had to live poor, even with a full-time job. Of COURSE their egos would compensate. I was never a Coordinator and just volunteered a lot, especially at the register in the early days when a math background was a big plus. So I never felt the need to be so “overpowering” on policies and the like. But I sure saw it in the flesh. This problem later had a significant impact on the “Co-op Wars,” which I will mention shortly.

GETTING THE ACTUAL WORK DONE
The original store near Augsburg College that became North Country Co-op was a wreck and we had to put in a new floor in the first year. We did this by volunteers who donated time and money. There were a couple of people who knew construction and led the effort. This is an example of one of my signature concepts from the 1960s, leaders vs legitimizers. A leader has proven himself/herself in a field of expertise but is then given the lead on other areas where he/she may be deficient. A legitimizer, on the other hand, steps forward from the mass of people (volunteers or paid - makes no difference) and leads on the project. Then he/she folds back into the mass when the project is done. Simple, elegant, works like a charm.

This episode was also where I learned about cash flow. In order to put in the new floor, the Co-op had to borrow money to close. In other words, the business had become dependent on money coming in every day to pay bills, pay workers, etc. This is not a new thing for those of you who have businesses of your own. But it was new to me in 1971. My little head shop was not making any money, had items on consignment, and only paid for for the underground newspapers after they were sold. [Sidebar: The business model of underground newspapers was to “front” the vendor 25 copies when they walked into the office. When they returned with the cash for the previous copies, you fronted them 25 more. That allowed the poor hippie street urchin to have something to sell and be able to buy something to eat right away. I did the same thing when I distributed Hundred Flowers in 1970. I only got burned once.] So the actual logistics of cash flow in order to close the store for repairs was a good lesson.

COOPERATION IN GENERAL
The co-ops were a lesson in survival. One time I was standing in North Country talking to a friend and he pointed out two guys rummaging around in a food bin, buying rice or something like that. “See those two guys? They’re heroin addicts. Without the co-op, they’d be dead right now.” This kind of thinking is NOT something to sneeze at. The co-ops had a real impact on starving people who only had pennies to their name. Example: I could sell one copy of an underground newspaper for 25 cents, pay the cost to the distributor or the paper itself of 15 cents, and still have 10 cents leftover as my share. I could then go down to People’s Pantry or the Co-op and buy 10 cents worth of brown rice (didn’t need to buy a whole pound). Then I could go back to the squat and boil the rice on a hot plate with some salt and be fed for a day. You cannot beat this for simplicity, especially when you are in your 20s and don’t want to sell your soul to the System murdering innocent Vietnamese villagers.

Another lesson in cooperation is being on the same page as the rest of your comrades. When North Country started, there were people who wanted to make and sell yogurt from home. The Minneapolis Health Department would not allow this. In other words, you must source yogurt from big corporations that have giant facilities. The workaround here was to make and sell Yogurt Cat Food. The label said, “This yogurt is not for human consumption. It is cat food. BUT since we love your cat, we use only the finest organic milk and yogurt culture and we sterilize all our jars and utensils scrupulously. We hope your cat enjoys it.” Brilliant! And everyone was in on the joke.

Yet another example. In the basement of North Country Co-op were a couple of sofas and a hot plate and various teas and snacks for people taking breaks. Over the sink was a sign. “Did you wash your cup? Good. Wash one more.” This was a paradigm shift of major proportions and codified what most of us “dirty hippie commie pinkos” were doing anyway. We were working against the War and working to provide food security because it was the right thing to do. And it was soooo simple. Wash one more.

STARTING WITH RETAIL
The Co-op Movement in Minneapolis and St. Paul went along merrily for several years and gained a lot of ground. By 1975 there were at least a dozen co-ops, a co-op farm, a co-op hardware store, a People’s Warehouse, and a trucking collective that did a triangular leg from the western states to the Upper Midwest. There were links with other co-ops around the country too. When a bunch of us went to Mexico in 1974, we stayed a couple of days in a co-op house in Austin, Texas.

The key here was that we started from the retail end instead of the producer end because we HAD NO CAPITAL. Several activists at the time criticized us for not following the lead of the Finnish Co-ops in northern Minnesota in the 1930s. But the Finns had land and capital. So there wasn’t much choice. But then the next steps were to work backwards to the producer end. First a retail store, then a bakery, then more retail stores, then a warehouse, then a trucking collective, then a farm to produce food. All of these ventures were leveraged from the ones that went before. This was a good lesson.

THE CO-OP WARS
In 1975-76, a schism developed in the Co-op Movement in Minneapolis-St. Paul. At the time it was a struggle for power between the anarchists who wanted to keep the loosey-goosey nature of the organization going and the commies, the CO, or Co-op Organization, who wanted to transform the co-ops into a revolutionary force. The CO seized some co-ops and the People’s Warehouse. Then they proceeded to run them into the ground through bad business practices and alienating everybody. It all came to a head when we had a meeting at North Country and it was decided to call the police because of the proposed seizure of the “mother ship” that night. I was at that meeting and I came down on the side of letting the police handle it rather than some pitched battle with lots of injuries. The cops would have showed up anyway. The Minneapolis Police Department actually were very professional about it and the CO types just melted away. Since the precedent had been set, there were no further confrontations and seizure of stores. (At least that I know of.) What was brilliant during this period was that the committed activists, like the “business majors from Oberlin,” just set about building a new warehouse and new distribution networks. A creative solution out of nowhere. I was mighty impressed. Then after a couple of years, when the CO dissolved, the new warehouse took back the old warehouse and paid off its debts. This was a good lesson in creative solutions and short-, mid-, and long-term thinking. Did I mention I got a lot of good ideas from the Co-op Movement?

Some blamed the new hardline revolutionary direction of the CO on the end of the Vietnam War. The logic was a little obtuse but I will repeat it anyway. Supposedly, the activists who started the co-ops were propped up and encouraged in their efforts and ideology because of their Anti-War origins. When the War ended on 30 April 1975, the big-city, high-profile activists felt a void. A vacuum. They needed another cause. Ergo, change the co-ops into a Marxist revolutionary force to continue the fight against the System. Unfortunately, this didn’t go as planned - for anyone.

I don’t buy this argument, but many did at the time. My take on the schism was the inability to handle success and the impatience of having so many changes to STILL make in Amerika. I have a tattoo on my shoulder of an omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet. This was the symbol of the Draft Resistance. I got it in June 1975 for the following reason: Just because the War is over doesn’t mean there aren’t STILL things to resist. I still look at it every day. And there are STILL things to resist; right here, right now, even in France.

So this is the real cautionary tale of this article. As one wag put it years later, “In the Co-op Movement, the anarchists fought the communists and the liberals won.” This last bit explicates what was happening in the Co-op Movement because of its success. We were attracting “business majors from Oberlin,” who saw the co-ops as a bridge to a larger reform movement. Not an alternative social structure, like us anarchists foresaw, but as a reform movement, preserving the best things of the System. So named after one of my friends who was a committed activist and actually WAS a business major from Oberlin. And the liberals won. Look at today’s co-ops.

Here is a little segment from History of North Country Co-op that should inform you of what kind of problems you may encounter if you are actually successful in your efforts. The link is: https://www.cominnesota.coop/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/History-of-North-Country-co-op.pdf

The "co-op wars" had a shattering effect on many co-ops, including North Country Co-op. The violence, controversy, and intensity of the political rhetoric scared away casual shoppers and divided the co-op movement between those who felt that a co-op's purpose was to provide wholesome, natural food and those who felt that co-ops should provide products that appeal to the "working class" at prices cheaper than conventional supermarkets and at the same time deliver a message of revolution. People who stayed within the movement became suspicious of radical politics, preferring to keep the focus on food. At the same time, others had been forced to reexamine what they were trying to do with the co-op, how the co-op was organized, and who they wanted the co-op to serve. As North Country Co-op pulled itself together after 1976 it reorganized its bookkeeping practices and revised its food policy to include canned goods, white bread, and for a short time, refined white sugar. The co-op maintained its collective management practices; decisions were still to be made by consensus of store coordinators, volunteers, and involved community members.

Keep in mind that we didn’t call the confrontations and store seizures “co-op wars.” That term was invented by a group of filmmakers who did a short film on the struggle years later. You can rent the film from Vimeo. The Co-op Wars was released in 2021.

There is another source for info on the Co-op Movement in Minneapolis-St. Paul in the archives of the Minnesota Historical Society. Here is the link: https://www.cominnesota.coop/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/MINNESOTA-FOOD-COOPERATIVES-Finding-Aids-MNHS.ORG_.pdf

Okay. If you are having a hard time with the increasing prices of food at the grocery store, perhaps starting a food co-op is your ticket to sanity and security. But there are a lot of caveats and obstructions along the way. And I didn’t even mention the HUGE obstacles the Minneapolis Health Department threw in our way! So maybe you should start with a buying club. That’s what I did. I started with the Ecology Co-op in 1970 and it was a good experience. Go to the distribution point, use your organizational expertise to sort out orders, put them into bags for the members, pick up your order, go home and cook supper. Pretty simple. But here’s the catch. You have to have a gatekeeper; someone who keeps the orders flowing and gets the orders paid and picks up slack as needed. It is no small feat to be a good gatekeeper.

There are all kinds of food wholesalers who have a regular route and will drop off an order for you at a convenient spot where the truck can get in and out without hassle. The main thing is to get going on it AND find a responsible gatekeeper. Here is a website that should give you encouragement to begin your search for your own co-op alternative. https://startabuyingclub.com/

Good luck!

For those who don’t appreciate the difference between political economy and its poor stepchild economics, political economy studies the relationships between individuals, society, and markets, while economics focuses on the efficient use of scarce resources under different market environments. From the general to the specific, as it were. The end point of economics is the “elegant equation,” and it should be noted that, as a social scientist, I see more value in the interrelationships of political economy. To be blunt, political economy is a social science. Economics is not. It is just blather with math. If you listen to the podcast, you should be able to see the difference, especially in the interrelationships of Brexit to UK politics, UK society and UK economics. One of the things NOT addressed was the fourth leg of the polycrisis, the UK environment.

Sidebar: For those of you who need a brushup, we face a multiplicity of crises. I simplify these crises into four main categories: 1) environment, 2) economy, 3) society and 4) politics. These crises are all interactive variables. For example, if you try to fix an environmental problem, you run into another problem with society and politics and the economics. So besides the problems themselves, there are the interactions of the problems (variables). If you assign a letter to each category - a, b, c and d - there are 14 iterations. I have mapped them below.

a, b, c, d, ab, ac, ad, bc, bd, cd, abc, abd, bcd, abcd

So, for instance, if all categories are present in the problem it is abcd. And most problems are abcd. The term polycrisis, or metacrisis, portrays this interactive nature. Now if you want to be even more precise, there is a difference between polycrisis and metacrisis. Polycrisis refers to the entanglement of interconnected global crises that intensify one another, the interactive nature of the crises. Metacrisis focuses on the foundational conditions that generate these crises. There is even a website for this kind of thing. https://polycrisis.org/

Political Economy draws on a range of economic thinking and ideas to apply different lenses – i.e. class, gender, race etc – to analyze the economy and the big issues that impact it. Which is why I categorize it as encompassing a wider sphere. Early on in the interview the professor mentioned the importance of the finance growth model that the UK (especially London) had depended on for many years (because of the excesses of Thatcherism), and how finance got “punched in the face” by the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008. He also made the assertion that the lack of growth in Britain for two decades before Brexit was the REAL story, not Brexit.

Brexit was a rather naive panacea that came up because of the rise of nationalism around the world. I agree with this assessment. (And of course if the UK had never embraced Thatcherism, it would not have gotten into a pickle.) Blyth’s example of Preston vs London after the demise of regional policy is illustrative. Thatcher got rid of regional policy in favor of national policy with redistribution of funds. This worked well when London was booming, but when austerity in London raised its ugly head, Preston had to adapt to austerity too. As Blyth says, “If you’re London and you lose a third of your budget, you just close down a few art centers. If you’re Preston and you lose a third of your budget, it’s a massive [problem].” This kind of thing is what created the backlash that melded with nationalism and populism to fuel the Brexit movement.

It is at this point in the interview (11:43) where Blyth says, “ . . . a huge part of British politics now as it is here and in other places has been written on the terrain of where culture and economics meet.” Now, think back to the trend of human evolution. Humans evolved in the ecotones, where forest and savannah meet. When I was an archaeologist, we didn’t find village sites on the scenic ridges where you could see for miles, whether for game or for enemies. We found them in the floodplains of river valleys. (Floodplains are ecotones.) Now my partner and I live in an ecotone, where the floodplain provides good soil for growing crops and the river provides irrigation. Plus we have wooded hills for firewood to heat the house. Of course modern societies find greater sustenance where culture and economics meet.

And of course the immigration issue has not been resolved, even ten years after the Brexit vote and six years after actually leaving the EU. The UK kicked out its EU immigrants (or made it not worth their time staying) and then had to fill in its labor needs by immigrants from non-EU countries, like Nigeria and India. In point of fact, immigration into the UK is higher now than before Brexit. Here is what the European Parliament said about it.

The sharp rise in the number of regular migrants can be attributed to the liberalisation of migration laws, making it easier for non-EU migrants to work in the UK, a campaign aimed at attracting more foreign students, and the high number of visas granted to people from Ukraine and Hong Kong on humanitarian grounds. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/772910/EPRS_BRI(2025)772910_EN.pdf

So these are a couple of different takes on the immigration issue. Here is my take on it. The UK NEEDS immigrants, just like the US and other developed countries, to do the shit work the “natives” have gotten used to NOT doing. When you constantly tell a child to “Follow their dreams” instead of “Root hog or die,” you raise expectations to a high level that is extremely susceptible to any downturns in the economy. But if you have a constant flow of immigration (whether legal or illegal), you mitigate the downturns, flatten the curve, and regress to the mean. Pick your soundbite. Because of Thatcher, then Brexit, and now the failed immigration accommodation, the UK is in deep shit. And thus Reform UK has much more power than they did before. Oops.

The alternative to this dilemma - where a developed country NEEDS immigration but the nationalists condemn it - is Spain. Under Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, Spain is providing a path to residency for 500,000 illegal immigrants. And Spain currently has better GDP growth than Germany, France or Italy. I see this as a paradigm shift that will be accepted - sooner or later; probably later - in other EU countries. We can watch this experiment in action over the coming years. We can also go back to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s actions welcoming 1 million refugees into Germany in 2015-2016. It is NO coincidence that Germany’s economy improved in those years. (Nowadays a 2.2% increase for 2016 and a 2.8% increase for 2017 are good numbers.) But immigrants are “bad.” Just ask the AfD. What happens in the news cycle is that the immigrants become convenient scapegoats for bad times. Even though they help to produce good times and are beneficial to the economy overall.

In this podcast, Mark Blyth adds another dimension. That is, the need for a growth story. Amerika’s growth story is AI. As he says at (20:11 ff), “We have no idea if this thing is going to actually pay. We have no idea what it’ll ultimately do. We have no idea if it will result in a giant financial bust. We have no idea if it really works out as the tech lords think and one third of us are now permanently unemployed. What that’ll do to American society. We’ve got all the data center problems, electricity, water, etc. But we have a growth story.” The UK doesn’t have a growth story. Perhaps the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, will come up with one. Blyth hopes so.

In formulating a growth story, what can the UK build on? Finance is out because, “London’s a bunch of American banks that are doing for foreign exchange trading, right? And then a few niche players.” So much for London as still being the center of world finance! (Of course, London is STILL one of the centers of the universe in Jason Bourne movies and Netflix TV series. Along with Paris, Berlin and New York.)

So what does the UK have? Per Blyth, the strategic internationally competitive sectors are 1) biotech, 2) defense and 3) higher education. Plus a couple of niche sectors, like designing interiors of cruise ships. Now, think of Starmer’s embrace of military Keynesianism in order to profit off the Ukraine War, as I mentioned in my earlier article Military Keynesianism, from 16 July 2026. The UK can sell arms PLUS use its involvement in the Ukraine War to justify a bloated defense budget. Diabolical!

Towards the end of the podcast, Blyth also mentions improving the housing sector through cutting regulations and building houses for the working and middle classes. But this is just a throwaway line that is always trotted out. Given the scrapping of clean water regulations as an example that just makes things worse, this is not realistic. So the UK has some alternatives, one of which is military Keynesianism. And I suspect the new PM will basically just go along to get along, like Starmer. No bold moves for localization, or clean food, or clean water, or actually engaging with immigrants and providing them with opportunities, like Spain. And so the UK will continue to decline and disintegrate - when they SHOULD integrate. As I have been saying for over a year now, the UK is hypercomplex and will not be able to contract its economy. It will just collapse. Just like the US and probably before the US.

A look at the world through the lens of economics cannot provide the depth and breadth of political economy. This is one reason social science is so important. You don’t have to be an anthropologist to appreciate the migrants from other countries.

It should not be hard to understand the proposition that Amerikan society is muddled, dazed and confused. It is not that Amerikan society is basically good but has unfortunately gone astray. I reject that formulation and regard Amerikan society as rotten to the core. BUT, if you buy into either: a) gone astray or b) rotten to the core, there is still c) the muddled nature of its projection on the world stage. On the other hand, if you think: a) Amerika is still doing great, b) does great things, c) is the “shining city on the hill,” and d) the rest of the world is deluded about Amerika, you will find no value in this essay. I come from a family of Nixon supporters and I stopped trying to talk sense to rightwingers long ago.

The ideal of achieving a clear, rational state of mind has obviously been around since people could articulate what a clear, rational mind is. In short, it has intrinsic value. But in the 1950s, a fellow named L. Ron Hubbard started promoting the idea of “going clear” in his study of Dianetics and his founding of Scientology. His idea was that his followers could attain the status of Clear when they become free of the influence of engrams – supposed unwanted emotions or painful traumas that Scientology claims are not readily available to the conscious mind. There is more going on here of course, such as the status in the organization one attains upon getting clear. But there is a “clear” program that is delineated and that can be acted on. Whether one can attain the “status” of clear is not guaranteed, of course, but that is part of any organization. This is unlike the Christian idea, for example, that the “desired state” is bestowed upon the individual through God’s grace. One can work on getting clear in Scientology. It should not be hard to understand why this is popular to so many people, especially the artsy-fartsy Hollywood types. In that context, Lawrence Wright wrote a book titled Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief (2013). It was a finalist for the National Book Awards for Nonfiction that year but lost out to The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, by George Packer. This little blurb from the National Book Foundation is relevant to why The Unwinding won and why it is so prescient to the polycrisis. But keep in mind that both books just describe an aspect of the polycrisis. Scientology is still popular because it offers a path forward.

The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packer’s novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date.

Judges Citation:
Combining novelistic storytelling and rigorous reporting, George Packer exposes tattering seams in the national tapestry. In an account of economic decline that traverses large cities and small towns, he casts a discerning eye on banks and Wall Street while tracing the painful dissolution of much of our economic infrastructure. His compelling profiles of struggling, ordinary workers, amid snapshots of wealthy, ambitious, and even notorious celebrities, dramatize the widening gulf between rich Americans and everybody else.

In our own personal struggles and the work we do to: 1) solve problems, 2) manage outcomes, 3) adapt to what we can, and 4) suffer what we must, we can gain an edge by “getting clear.” And we don’t need a phoney-baloney concept like engrams, or a rotating cast of Presidential villains to blame. As everyone knows, I blame Bill Clinton for the expansion of NATO, George W. Bush for forever wars, Joe Biden for destroying global confidence in the US bond/treasury markets and Barack Obama for the rise of the Tea Party and Donald Trump, who is a mentally ill, narcissistic nihilist currently accelerating the collapse of western civilization. It is the System itself that is the problem, thus my disparaging conclusions on state-level society itself as the pivotal point where it all went wrong. And to be “clear,” it is not that I favor the demise of western civilization; it is that I see it as inevitable and so we must prepare for it.

So what was “clear” about the note and article I read this morning? Here is a quote.

The profound sense of dread, the withdrawal of energy (‘malaise’), and the refusal to participate (‘depression’) that define our modern era are not biological malfunctions. They are accurate telemetry. The human nervous system is a predictive engine. It is registering the accumulation of systemic entropy and signalling that the current behavioural loops are no longer viable. It is an immune response—an antibody attacking a terminal condition.

What I liked about this quote is that “withdrawal of energy” or malaise and “the refusal to participate” or depression are ALREADY HAPPENING. Further, they do not have to be “features” of the system because they are already “features” of us humans. (I assume my readers have already realized so-called “malfunctions” in human culture and society can be features of a system rather than bugs.)

If malaise and depression are already features of the System, whether built-in or an aggregation of 8.3 billion humans, we should be able to “anticipate” how they will play out. We should be able to spot the flow. (For more on this, see my article Anticipating the Flow When There Is No Strategy, 6 July 2026.) Here is the original article which prompted the article you are now reading. I encourage you to read it.

The Ultimate Avatar of Balance

The Telemetry of Collapse: Sentience, Extraction, and the Immune Response to a Dying Machine

In this essay: Why the sea squirt digests its own brain, why your depression might be an accurate immune response, and why ‘doing nothing’ might be the only ethical action left…

Read more

2 months ago · 35 likes · 11 comments · Steven J. Newbury

Okay, for the aggregation aspect of the effects of malaise and depression causing western civilization to collapse; many articles and books have been written about the individual psychology at play. We can look at how this individual psychology creates jobs for social workers and the police. We can look at how society is FORCED to adapt to its suffering members. We can also theorize that we are still hunter-gatherers in our psychology and so are not equipped to handle large-scale societies, states and civilizations. The research in this field is comprehensive.

But there is another layer - the System layer. If malaise and depression of the System itself is built in, what does this look like? We know all about the periodic recessions and depressions built into the modern capitalistic system. I am reading a couple of books now titled The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918 (1954) by A. J. P. Taylor and 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World (2026) by Liaquat Ahamed. Both of these books are background for reviving an old theory of mine. In a nutshell, unfettered capitalism in the US got a huge boost from fossil fuels and immigration around the 1870s-1880s. This continued unchecked until the late 1920s when it collapsed into the Great Depression. There is NO way to fix this and return to the earlier iteration of capitalism. It is finished. All the US can do is continue in the same wartime economy it has been utilizing since 1940. Thus the concern about military Keynesianism and the folly of European countries and Canada going down this road. The natural question of course is to ask, “So what have these other countries been doing since the Great Depression, if they are just now opting for military Keynesianism?” Answer: Going along to get along with the US. In other words, riding on the coattails of the dominant superpower and picking up scraps. From this perspective, Macron’s and Merz’ move towards military Keynesianism is a bold move that “could” provide some independence from the USA. But it is still bad, as I discussed in my Military Keynesianism article on 16 July 2026.

Based on the end of capitalism in the Great Depression, we can postulate that the wartime economy since 1940 in the US is an interregnum, just as the Holocene is an interregnum in the Pleistocene. (The ice-free life of the last 12,000 years is the blip, not the coming return of the Ice Age when the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) slows down dramatically. We have known about this since 1987 at least. The US Army and climate scientists have been worried about this since 2004.)

So what happens when we consider that recessions and depressions are features of the System and not just blips in our blissful, wasteful existence in the sunny uplands of affluent US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe? Well, it depends. I foresee economic contraction in continental Europe and Canada. (The Ice Age returns.) I see economic collapse in the US and UK. (The Ice Age returns with a vengeance.) I have no clue for Australia and New Zealand. The news on the Web does not look good though. So how do we get through it, in whatever country you happen to be in? Well, perhaps you are going to have to make your metaphors work harder. If you get through your own malaise and depression through pulling in your horns, sleeping more, going out less, reducing social ties to only trusted people and organizations; perhaps you can apply those paradigmatic actions to the System at large. But there is a time factor. As Chris Hedges recently asked one of his guests on a podcast, “How much time do we have before the economy craters?”

Getting clear about what you are doing should be Job #1.

Here is a list of what Carney got for Canada in the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey.

• He announced that Canada hit NATO’s 2% defence spending target for the first time in our history, with a clear runway to 5% by 2035.

• Signed the largest defence procurement in Canadian history — a submarine fleet with Germany and Norway — days before he even landed, then walked it into the summit as delivered proof, not a promise.

• Locked in Kongsberg joint-strike missiles for our future F-35s.

• Opened negotiations to join NATO’s Innovation Sub-Fund.

• Agreed to host the 2027 NATO Industry Forum.

• Extended our troop commitment in Latvia to 2031 and our training mission in Ukraine to 2029.

• Launched talks toward a full Canada-Germany Strategic Partnership Agreement.

• Managed South Korea’s disappointment over the lost submarine bid in the same breath — pivoting straight into AI and tech cooperation instead of letting the relationship rot.

For those critical of my extrapolation of the term to Canada’s new military agreements in and around the latest NATO summit, let me remind you that de facto is a Latin term that means “in reality, even though not established formally.” In other words, Carney might object to my use of the term as NOT official policy, but that is what he is doing. In fact, he is now aping (mimicing) the USA’s use of the military and defense budget to pump up the economy after previously resisting the urge to do. In this respect, he is now following the lead of Macron, Merz, Tusk and other European leaders.

Military Keynesianism is one of the current memes du jour. It is very popular and has become normalized and even weaponized. Here is the opening paragraph on the Wikipedia webpage for the term. The references in the article date the term back to 2009-2012. Before then, we knew what it was but didn’t have a spiffy name for it.

Military Keynesianism is an economic policy based on the position that government should raise military spending to boost economic growth. It is a fiscal stimulus policy as advocated by John Maynard Keynes. But where Keynes advocated increasing public spending on socially useful items (infrastructure in particular), additional public spending is allocated to the arms industry, the area of defense being that over which the executive exercises greater discretionary power. This type of economy is linked to the interdependence between welfare and warfare states, in which the latter feeds the former, in a potentially unlimited spiral. The term is often used pejoratively to refer to politicians who apparently reject Keynesian economics, but use Keynesian arguments in support of excessive military spending.

Notice the sentence, “ . . . where Keynes advocated increasing public spending on socially useful items (infrastructure in particular), additional public spending is allocated to the arms industry, the area of defense being that over which the executive exercises greater discretionary power.” [Emphasis added.] This is what makes it military Keynesianism. Also note that because the military is under the executive branch, rather than the legislative or judicial branches, this allows the executive to pump up the economy directly.

So, when Eisenhower made the decision to take over the oppression of Vietnam from the French after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, he could do so without interference from Congress. And of course this required a military buildup, which “coincidentally” helped the US economy after the Armistice Agreement froze the Korean War on 27 July 1953, six months after Eisenhower’s inauguration. The Vietnam “problem” was also an opportunity. What gripes my ass about Eisenhower is that he gained a lot of undeserved fame warning about the “Military-Industrial Complex” AFTER he left office, while doing his best to “pump it up” while IN office. He also set the Bay of Pigs debacle into motion for Kennedy, was President when Mossadegh was overthrown by MI6 and the CIA in 1953, as well as during Árbenz’ overthrow in Guatemala in 1954. Not really the kindly grandpa of his popular image.

When I worked with a circus in 1973, one of my fellow roustabouts was a fellow named Barry, who had been studying the Korean War while in college. He could go on for hours about Truman, Eisenhower and the governmental excesses of the 1950s. I wonder what happened to him. Probably got a job selling color TVs and lives in a suburban tract home in Tarzana. Or maybe he is already in assisted living.

For those who don’t know what Keynesianism is, John Maynard Keynes was a famous English economist who challenged neoclassical economics and the free market mechanism during the 1930s. His overriding contribution was to advocate the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. He was a pivotal figure in the creation of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944, which set up the global financial system based on the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, among other policies. His influence was so widespread that Milton Friedman, another famous economist, once said, “We are all Keynesians now.” So Keynesianism is the government injecting liquidity into the economy to keep it from stalling out or crashing.

By 1968, the idea of using US military spending to keep the economy pumped up and the gravy train for The Affluent Society (after the book by John Kenneth Galbraith published in 1958) percolating along like those awful coffee makers of the era, was out in the open. [Sidebar: When I was on an archaeological dig in Colstrip, Montana, we lived in town in trailers. Every evening before bed, Gene - the crew boss - would fill up the giant percolator with water and put coffee in the top basket. Then he could just turn it on in the morning. The coffee stayed damp from condensation all night long. My god it was awful! How percolators got popular in the first place is beyond me.]

One reason the lid had been blown - at least in the counterculture - on what would later be called military Keynesianism was a fake book from 1967, Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace by Leonard C. Lewin. (And for those of you who immediately think of Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book by Maxine Hong Kinston (1989), YOU get a gold star. Well done. Another paean to the 1960s.)

The Wikipedia blurb for this book says it better than I can.

The Report from Iron Mountain is a 1967 anti-war satire written by Leonard C. Lewin. The book purports to be a leaked report authored by a Special Study Group tasked by the Kennedy Administration with planning the transition from a wartime economy and assessing the potential social impacts of a “condition of general world peace.” It details the group’s analyses, which concludes that world peace could cause the United States to collapse; war, or some alternative external threat, is necessary for social stability, the Study Group finds, and recommends the establishment of “a permanent War/Peace Research Agency” to improve “the effectiveness of [war’s] major stabilizing functions” and to plan substitutes for war should “a viable general peace” emerge. The book became a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into fifteen languages.

John Kenneth Galbraith, famous Harvard economist, diplomat and public intellectual noted above, was involved in the writing of the book with Lewin and even wrote a favorable fake review under the pseudonym Herschel McLandress, a fictional character from one of Galbraith’s earlier books (a satire too). Victor Navasky, editor and publisher from 1978-2005 of The Nation, a left-leaning magazine I used to read, was also involved in Report from Iron Mountain. The book is a good read and you can get a PDF copy here: https://archive.org/details/reportfromironmo00spec

The upshot here is that the US has been in a wartime economy since 1940, when Roosevelt started ramping up military production after the overthrow of France by Nazi Germany. The US continued in a wartime economy after the end of WW II.

One of the criticisms of Report from Iron Mountain is that rightwing groups used it as a focus for their own anti-government agendas. This eventually resulted in Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today by Phil Tinline (2025). I haven’t read this book yet so I cannot comment except to say it seems to be another example of how the libertarians and rightwingers got all their good ideas from us lefties. I first discovered this in 1973, when I read How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World: A Handbook for Personal Liberty by Harry E. Browne (1973). The book was full of warmed-over ideology spun off from the counterculture. Nevertheless, Harry Browne became a leading figure in the Libertarian Party and became their presidential nominee in the U.S. elections of 1996 and 2000. Per the Ghosts of Iron Mountain book, it is helpful to remember - as I say so often, “It’s not a conspiracy. They all just think the same.”

But what about the core themes of Report from Iron Mountain? You have to read the book to get the mechanism and logistics. Wars and a huge Defense Department budget serve as a balance wheel for the US economy. They provide jobs and allow greater control of the economy by the federal government. As the book mentions, this could be achieved by greater welfare spending (which includes healthcare and unemployment insurance under the greater rubric of taking care of the welfare of the US public). But the problem then would be that people would become used to a greater social safety net, thus reducing the control and the accordion effect of the federal government being able to increase or decrease appropriations and contracts at will. As I say, this was a fake book, BUT it explains the bloated Defense Department budget over the years better than any other rationale. Thus its narrative power. It is no surprise that the simplistic thinking of the rightwingers would get it wrong.

In military Keynesianism, one doesn’t need to use the Defense budget as a balance wheel. It is simpler than that. You just flood the economy with cash through the Defense budget AND its ancillary budgets, hiding appropriations under various categories. Developing the Internet through the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now called DARPA) and promoting increased computer chip usage for phones by building more complicated missile technology are just two effects of how flooding the defense industry with money has a beneficial effect on the economy. The money just percolates through the economy like terrible suburban coffee. This is one of the reasons I have maintained for almost sixty years that YOU support US wars of imperialism when YOU participate in the US economy. Since walking away from the evil System is damn near impossible (I tried), the solution is to disenfranchise yourself from the System as much as you can. In other words, reduce your involvement in it.

Now it is possible to use military Keynesianism without even having a war. You can just flummox the public with a plethora of paranoia. That is what Macron, Merz, Tusk, Starmer, Von der Leyen and other European leaders are doing right now. Make no mistake, there are not enough willing soldiers in the whole of the EU plus the UK to fight a war against Russia. Preparing for a war “sometime” in the future is pure, unadulterated bullshit. Germany cannot sell enough cars to keep its economy going, so it is shifting to making weapons of war which they can sell to other countries. Ukraine and Israel are both willing customers and the financing (especially in Ukraine’s case) is a minor problem. The key is to put people to work making weapons. Other countries are following suit - especially Canada, which is the impetus for this article. Remember when Canada stood up to the USA and willingly took in US Draft resisters in the 1960s? What a difference now. Carney has completed a 180 degree turn and is now a warmonger.

Emmanuel Macron started the European trend towards military Keynesianism when he became President of France in 2017. The first thing he did in his presidency was to lower taxes on the rich, just like Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump. It was clear he was aping the US in this policy shift. France is now in the US range of debt-to-GDP ratio too. (US debt-to-GDP ratio was 121.50% in 2025 versus 115.6% for France.) Since Macron was a banker and perspicacious enough to see the opportunity to win the presidency by forming his own party in 2017, it is not far-fetched to think he understood military Keynesianism and its benefits. And under Macron, France is now the 2nd-largest military arms exporter in the world, vaulting over Russia during Macron's two terms.

Sidebar: One may make the argument that Russia slipped downwards in the rankings since 2017 because of the Ukraine War, but that is a thin argument. It is true Russian large weapons exports fell 47% between 2022 and 2024, while the broader trend reveals a 64% decline comparing the 2015-19 period to 2020-24; in short, the descent began before the invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s share of global arms sales fell from 21% in 2016-20 to 6.8% in 2021-25. (Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) 9 March 2026.) It is entirely possible Russian arms exports fell sharply because of Covid and supply chain issues. The default would be to consider multiple drivers in Russia’s reduced arms sales. Indeed, again per SIPRI and an update to December 2025, Israel has vaulted into 3rd-place, with South Korea now in 4th-place and Russia now down to 5th-place. The rankings are not necessarily changing because of reductions in one or more countries. It could just be because of a general increase in arms sales overall, with some countries not rising as fast as others. It is a booming business after all.

Germany is in a bind. It got a huge boost to its economy from cheap Russian oil and gas and from its position as the largest economy in the Eurozone. (As a general rule, the largest economies benefit disproportionately in a common currency system vis-a-vis the smaller countries. France and Germany do well BECAUSE of the euro; Greece and Portugal do not.) Now it is in deep shit and has to adopt a warmonger policy in order to keep itself alive. For some real numbers, consider that Germany’s GDP in 2025 was $5.05 trillion (converted from euros) while the projection for 2026 is $5.45 trillion. This is a 7.9% increase in GDP in a year, with a nominal GDP growth rate of only 0.24%. (Source: IMF data via Worldometer website.) You may ask yourself, “How in the hell are they pulling this off?” The answer is military Keynesianism.

Never forget that Friedrich Merz, current German Chancellor, used to sit on the Board of BlackRock, by far the largest financial asset manager in the world. He knows all about this kind of thing. Donald Tusk, current Prime Minister of Poland, used to be President of the European Council from 2014 to 2019, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was Governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013 and Governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020. These guys were all heavily involved in finance. In the UK, Keir Starmer was not a banker, but a human rights lawyer before he became Prime Minister. Perhaps that is why he has failed in his attempts to adopt military Keynesianism in the UK as quickly as France, Germany, Poland and Canada. Starmer has resigned and Andy Burnham will take his place on July 20th or thereabouts. But Burnham is no banker and so we will see if he can wield military Keynesianism and stop the implosion of the UK’s hypercomplex society. I doubt it.

The abject, horrific criminality of rescuing a country’s economy by making items of death and destruction is not moral, nor even sane. Per my original comment on a Substack article that started this whole discussion, “So military Keynesianism is a good thing? Are you insane?” Clearly, there is something else going on here. Why are so many countries defaulting to making weapons of war to keep people working and keep their economies moving? And remember, you don’t have to actually fight a war. The EU and the UK are NOT going to fight Russia. They would be riven by a far superior military force AND suffer riots in the streets of Paris, London and Berlin. At some point, the missiles and artillery and drones could be just dumped into the sea after their manufacture. The effect would be the same on the economy.

The fly in the ointment in use of military Keynesianism is the shift towards drone warfare. Drones are sooooo cheap you cannot waste enough money making them. (This goes right along with my paradigm that soldiers are the ultimate consumers. There is no leverage or synchronicity towards new products and services if you are just blowing shit up and killing people.) This is probably why the US did not adopt a drone program after inventing them in the 1970s. Keep in mind that in Report from Iron Mountain, it was important to waste huge sums of money to keep the economy going. The moon program did not waste enough money. The welfare system would have wasted enough money but the gubbmint would lose control once healthcare and other benefits became normalized. So if drones actually put aircraft carriers and bomber aircraft out of business in favor of cheap drones and somewhat cheaper missiles, the Defense budgets might have to come down. Oops. Can’t have that!

So, the US, UK and EU are on a path towards greater use of military Keynesianism. Once could say that Russia has gone down this path too, since the increased arms production needed for the Ukraine War has raised wages and living standards in Russia. Israel has certainly embraced military Keynesianism and you could make the argument Israel has been doing this since 1948. Iran gets benefits from this policy too. Now they are fast becoming the fourth regional hegemony, to use Robert Pape’s argument. All because the US needed a war to keep the economy pumped up.

All of this stinks in the nostrils doesn’t it? So whatcha gonna do about it? For me, the advice is the same advice I have been giving and living for nearly 60 years. Detach from the evil System as much as you can. Grow your own food. Build community.

I thought about The March of Folly because of my latest run-ins with degrowthers. They are “full o’folly.” I have gotten into quite a few arguments over the years with the degrowther crowd. What I have noticed is their general nastiness and lack of a coherent program. Their strategy seems to be: 1) play on the public’s confusion about the growth paradigm, 2) conflate economic contraction with the nonsense term “degrowth,” 3) adopt an arrogant attitude at all times, and 4) attack, attack, attack.

So why is degrowth a nonsense term? Simply put, it is not needed AND cannot exist without growth. It is like postmodernism. It is no coincidence that the original use of degrowth was a postmodern construction. The original term was décroissance (degrowth in English) and invented by the Austrian-born, naturalized French social philosopher André Gorz, who asked (in English translation): “Is the earth’s balance, for which no-growth – or even degrowth – of material production is a necessary condition, compatible with the survival of the capitalist system?” This throwaway line was then seized on by the new postmodernism of the late 1960s/early 1970s as a counterpoint to the growth paradigm developed after World War II in Amerika.

Without accepting the grand narrative of modernism, postmodernism cannot exist. Oops. This is what is called a “logic bomb.” It requires you to hold on tightly to Subject A in one hand while you argue for Subject B in the other hand. This should be familiar to critics of Marxism, because Marx defined capitalism in a certain way and then proposed an alternative. The one could not exist without the other. As Cory Doctorow, astute social critic and author of the “enshittification” meme, said recently on a podcast, “Marx and Engels LOVED capitalism. They just wanted to seize the means of production.” [Sidebar: The reason I have been dismissing Marxism since 1968, when I first looked into it, was because of the way Marx kinked the argument by setting it up for only one conclusion. This is stinky cheese.]

The opposite of growth is contraction. Other antonyms to growth are decrease, decline, downsizing and reduction. These all have their own specific meanings. But these words do NOT have to start from a condition of growth. They can all start from a condition of stasis. The degrowthers start from an economic system in motion, i.e. a growing economy. It seems that degrowth still incorporates economic growth, just a different kind. Contraction, decrease, decline, downsizing and reduction do not.

One hilarious aspect to the whole degrowth debate is that if you look up degrowth on Wikipedia, it says right on the top of the Webpage, “Not to be confused with downsizing or shrinkage.” This gave me a good laugh when I first saw it. In other words, the authors and monitors of the term on Wikipedia are careful to make a distinction between degrowth and downsizing/shrinkage/contraction. I see this as a tactic, related to Number 2) - conflation - in my second paragraph above. The degrowthers want the casual observer to just accept the “degrowth” term as synonymous to other anti-growth terms, but when you investigate further they provide more distinction. Conflate first, discriminate later. I see this all the time. People looking for answers to the real problem of “infinite growth on a finite planet” become seduced by conflation of terms. This sets the stage for the degrowth agenda as the unsuspecting searcher is already hooked and halfway landed into the boat. As I say, stinky cheese.

So let’s dive further into degrowth. There are many, many Web articles available. One that I recommend as a starting point is A History Of Degrowth at https://degrowth.info/en/history This short article mentions many of the early authors and propagators of the term. You can do your own research on the history of the term by starting with the article. So instead of repeating the article, let’s cut to the chase, using the Degrowth entry on Wikipedia previously mentioned.

Degrowth is an academic and social movement, predominantly in Europe, and aimed at the planned reduction of production and consumption as a solution to social-ecological crises. [Okay, simple description. That’s fine.] Policy goals include reducing the environmental impact of human activities, redistributing income and wealth within and between countries, and encouraging a shift from materialistic values to a convivial and participatory society. [Sounds a bit airy-fairy doesn’t it?]

The policy goals of degrowth start with a doable goal (reducing environmental impact) and then proceed through redistributing wealth (less than 5% chance of happening) to shifting values in society (i.e. fighting against the core values of state-level societies - an impossible task). [The continuum is from a doable solution right through to something doomed to fail. What is called “capitalism” and a “growth economy” is much simpler. Make as much money as you can using capital instead of labor. Keep growing the economy. Forget about society at large. Is it any wonder capitalism and growth wins out?]

Degrowth is critical of the concept of growth in gross domestic product as a measure of human and economic development. [Commendable. So am I.] It argues that modern capitalism’s unitary focus on growth causes widespread ecological damage and is unnecessary for the further increase of human living standards. [This is a bit dodgy and is where degrowth starts its path o’spin.] Degrowth theorists posit that degrowth would increase human living standards and ecological preservation even as GDP growth slows or reverses. [Now they are in fantasy land fer sure.]

My analysis: The integral thought that degrowthers seem to miss en masse is that we ONLY have affluent lifestyles because of fossil fuels. You would NOT be able to live the modern Amerikan and western European lifestyle of 24/7 electricity and convenience stores and on-demand entertainment and cushy jobs in air-conditioned offices without fossil fuels. This can be quantified in kilojoules, kilocalories, and kilowatt hours. Many authors, podcasters and movie makers have pointed this out. I have done so myself in three books, many Substack articles and lots and lots of arguments over the last fifty-six years. Other authors have pointed out the same thing: Nate Hagens, Ian Morris, William Catton, Joseph Tainter and others.

Unlike the degrowthers, I am right upfront about the reality of reduced fossil fuel use. IF you want a cleaner and more just world, you are going to have to embrace a much reduced lifestyle. There is NO possibility of maintaining a phoney-baloney affluent society without a continuing increase in fossil fuel use. Not just a steady-state economy, so beloved of the ecological economists. A continuing increase in the growth of the economy. This is why our political overlords keep reinforcing and supporting the growth economy paradigm. Keep in mind that even China, which is the world leader in development of renewables, has had to continue to increase their use of coal and other fossil fuels in order to develop and grow. [Sidebar: China presently uses one-half the amount of energy per capita - most of which comes from fossil fuels - than the US. But it used to be one-fifth twenty years ago. France, where I live, is only 10% more than China in energy use per capita, so half of the US. Source: Our World in Data.] The only two times in the recent past when there was a worldwide downturn in emissions was 2009 and 2020. This was because of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) - sometimes called the Great Recession - of 2008 and the lockdown of global supply chains in reaction to the Covid pandemic in 2020. In other words, a catastrophe has to happen to shock the socio/political/economic system enough to reduce fossil fuel use in order to reduce chemicals, thermal heat and gas emissions into the environment.

The idea of decoupling is where the rubber meets the road for degrowthers. The concept of decoupling means splitting off economic growth from the use of natural resources and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The usual measurements of growth are GDP (gross domestic product) or GNI (gross national income). GDP measures the aggregate amount of domestic product sales and wages, while GNI measures total aggregate income of citizens both domestically and abroad. Two different measures, but both are crap quantitative tools. As an example, neither of them provide a value for housework, even though Dick usually cannot bring in the paycheck unless Jane raises the kids and does the necessary work to keep the household running. Plug in your own genders, names, two-income perturbations, etc. if you like. You get my point. Support services are not counted if they do not generate income.

There are two divisions in this decoupling idea. Absolute decoupling refers to GDP growth coinciding with a reduction in natural resource use and GHG emissions, while relative decoupling describes an increase in resource use and GHG emissions lower than the increase in GDP growth. The degrowth movement heavily critiques this idea and argues that absolute decoupling is only possible for short periods or specific locations, or with small mitigation rates. There is also the problem of scale, as “There is no empirical evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures on anywhere near the scale needed to deal with environmental breakdown.” [For reference, see the original European Environmental Bureau report here: https://eeb.org/en/library/decoupling-debunked/ AND a secondary analysis of the report here: https://www.exploring-economics.org/de/entdecken/decoupling-debunked-evidence-and-arguments-agai/ ] The same report uses relative decoupling as a default term for temporary, local instances of eco-economic decoupling that do not constitute absolute decoupling.

Degrowthers have also pointed out the time factor, as absolute decoupling is highly unlikely to be achieved fast enough to prevent global warming over 1.5°C or 2°C, even under optimistic policy conditions. So . . . economic growth cannot be decoupled from increasing energy use and instances of this phenomenon will be only local and temporary. There is also the pressing issues of scale and time. Bummer.

The answer to the decoupling problem, according to degrowthers, is better resource allocation. This is essentially “better management,” a concept honored more in the breach than reality. Just work in an office for a week if you don’t believe me. One signal policy change for degrowthers is the abandonment of the current growth model, relocalizing and abandoning the global economy. In the Global South this would allow people to become more self-sufficient and would end the overconsumption and exploitation of Southern resources by the North. Ah, but the devil is in the details. As an example, when the UK voted to leave the European Union in 2016 and finally severed ties in 2020, this would have been a wonderful opportunity to relocalize British manufacturing and agriculture to test out a degrowth policy. But did it even rise to a level of prominence among policy makers? Of course not. The attempted policies post-Brexit were based on buying and selling to different markets in the same old growth economy and the failure was spectacular.

It should be noted that critics of degrowth describe it as a vague concept that fails to offer an effective strategy for reducing environmental harm, ignores rebound effects, and has little social or political support. Critics also describe degrowth research as largely normative opinions rather than analysis, with most proposals lacking precision, depth, and concrete policy design, rarely using quantitative or qualitative data, formal modelling, or representative samples, while empirical and system-wide analyses remain scarce. Whew, that was a mouthful! I don’t write like that, of course, and the criticism is right from the Degrowth article on Wikipedia. To their credit, the degrowthers who maintain the webpage are passing on some criticism.

A 2025 review of research literature on degrowth concluded that degrowth scholars are skeptical of the feasibility of achieving an equitable economic slowdown within a capitalist framework. [Yep, they are right on this one.] This skepticism stems from the structural reliance of capitalism on continuous growth driven by competition. [In other words, capitalism and growth are dependent on each other. Correctomundo.] As a result, degrowth advocates argue for a deliberate and democratically guided overhaul of the economic system. [Certainly a laudable goal.]

As noted earlier, degrowth is an academic and social movement. That means reform. And if you are committed to reform of the System, you are not planning on collapse of the System. This is where the degrowthers and myself part ways. I see collapse as inevitable and I also see attempts at reform as wasting time, energy and money that should be going to preparations for the post-collapse world. In economics, this is called opportunity cost, the value of the next best alternative you give up when a choice is made, showing the benefits forgone in choosing one option over another. It is largely a specious concept and I only use it when I am criticizing people like Nate Hagens who use to work for a high-ranking securities firm and still talks like that.

However, wasting time, energy and money trying to fix the System is a real problem. Spending your time canvassing for Bernie or AOC or whoever is the hip progressive du jour instead of digging your potatoes is a gigantic disconnect. Likewise, spending your mental capital thinking up cool ways to save the world when they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding, is poor management of your time and energy. And you can eat the potatoes.

I usually regard degrowth as just green growth in a different dress. And green growth is just a phoney-baloney concept of having an affluent lifestyle without environmental cost. But here is a more precise view from “Degrowth vs. Green Growth. A computational review and interdisciplinary research agenda,” by Max Polewsky, et al, on the Science Direct website: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800923003300#:~:text=Using%20a%20comparative%20analysis%20of,theory%2Ddriven%2C%20focuses%20on%20the

Abstract (selections)
The concepts of Green Growth and Degrowth represent two major narratives in the public and academic debate on socio-ecological transformation. . . Using a comparative analysis of the two research fields, we confirm several findings from previous reviews, including that Green Growth research is highly policy oriented, focuses on practical implementation and builds on empirical research methods, while Degrowth research is highly theory-driven, focuses on the analysis of complex human-nature interrelationships and builds on a sound theoretical and conceptual foundation. Our analysis further reveals that Green Growth and Degrowth are two rather isolated fields of research with little exchange and mutual reference on related topics. However, the topic of social change and transition represents an intersecting and promising future research area. . . .

Notice that Green Growth is policy-driven and Degrowth is theory-driven. This distinction is important but the authors feel there can be a synthesis. Well, shucks. I guess my simplistic formulation of green growth, degrowth, eco-modernism, astro-turfing and bright green lies all being the same is not discerning enough. Okay.

But here is the bottom line. Do you want to save the System that is killing you? Nope. Do you want to ensconce yourself in a theory-driven, eco-social transformation that has little hope of succeeding, especially as the capitalists own the banks, have all the guns AND own the gun factories to boot? Nope. Wouldn’t it be better just to reduce your lifestyle and prepare yourself for the coming contraction and collapse? Yep.

Contraction, reduction, downsizing are all individualistic and local. They do not require laws and organizing and getting everybody on the same page to fight against a System that is rigged. You can just reduce your lifestyle and build community. So the ultimate question about degrowth vs. reduction/contraction boils down to what you can do right now.

Me? I am digging potatoes and harvesting black radish seed. I write articles when it is too hot to work outside. I am not watching TV because the Tour de France has a rest day today and the France/Spain quarter-final is not until tomorrow night.

The 4th alternative is a network state, which is how professor/analyst Andreas Krieg describes Iran’s state after 47 years of sanctions and trials by fire. Obviously, given Iran’s ability to adapt and gain power in real time against the US and Israel’s attacks, its new structure has worked. Krieg’s characteristics of a network state is its mosaic defense and decentralization, which allow its commanders and administrators to make decisions without a sign-off from the top governmental leaders in Tehran, whether they be theocrats or bureacrats. This decentralization is key to the difference between a network state and a conventional state. Conventional states are built on centralised control over a defined territory. Network states operate as decentralised, voluntary associations of individuals and groups connected by shared ideology rather than just location. [Sidebar: Does location degrade patriotic spirit by superseding it? In other words, does “defending the USA” push down defending the “American Way?” Another question for another time.]

Of course the IRGC, for example, has considerable power beyond a “voluntary association,” but the sense of a strict hierarchy is missing. Local commanders make decisions, rather than waiting for orders from Central Headquarters, like in the US and other conventional states. Krieg also sees this decentralization in other areas of the Iranian system and has observed the importance of non-state actors. This is a new perspective for me on the issues of state collapse and how it can be managed. Indeed, a network state could mitigate collapse, essentially slowing down the rate of collapse, while the conventional states around it implode.

Andreas Krieg is currently teaching at King’s College, London. Here is his biography from the King’s College website.

Dr Andreas Krieg is a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London, Royal College of Defence Studies and fellow at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies. He has spent more than ten years living, studying and working across the MENA region. Andreas was able to complement his years in the Levant, i.e. Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Palestine, with four years in Qatar where he was involved in delivering a strategic contract between the State of Qatar, the UK Ministry of Defence and King’s College London.

In his research Andreas has focused on a variety of different subjects relating to the academic discipline of Security Studies in the geographic context of the MENA region. In particular, Andreas looks at violent non-state actors in the MENA region and their competition with state authority to provide communal resilience. In so doing, he has looked at assemblages between state and non-state actors across North Africa and the Levant in his work on surrogate warfare, and at the nexus between security provision and socio-politics in the Arab world in his work on the Arab Spring. From his research on the Gulf Divide, sprung the idea of his current project looking at the internal and external weaponization of narratives in the Middle East, which has not only distorted civil-societal discourse in the region but also the academic debate on where the region is going.

MENA stands for Middle East North Africa and people who live in this region may object to the term. I would. Here is a little blurb on the network state from one of Krieg’s articles a year ago, on 5 July 2025, and the weblink.
https://www.andreaskrieg.com/post/the-limits-of-israel-s-degradation-strategy-against-iran-s-network-state

The “12 Day War” between Israel and Iran is the peak of a five-decade long conflict between a military-centric hierarchy of the Israeli state and the dispersed mosaic defence infrastructure of the Islamic Republic as a network state. Israel has been scoring several pyrrhic military wins against Iran’s network of networks in the region over the last year. Yet, while Israel’s degradation strategy bought the Jewish state breathing space, Iran’s network both within and across the region remains intact. Iran is not a state in the traditional sense, vulnerable to top-down regime change or decapitation. It is a mosaic network state – an adaptive, self-organizing, and ideologically resilient structure that has proven to be able to absorb external shocks without collapsing.

I, like many others, did not even hear of the “mosaic defense” until the US and Israel started bombing Iran on 28 February 2026. Now, we can see - in real time as opposed to hindsight - how it favors resilience. Once again, I must note that the Iranian system has worked out a defense and administrative structure that proved its worth through 47 years of US sanctions, extreme deprivations, and an 8-year war with Iraq. To be blunt, it works well. One cannot say the same of the top-down US hierarchical system, which does not work and is collapsing. Israel’s top-down system is collapsing too. Part of the reason that Netanyahu and Trump thought Iran would be so easy to conquer was they do not understand what a network state is; PLUS they are both unable to think in non-state terms. In other words, they are both trapped in statist thinking. (I take credit for this term and have mentioned it on several websites.) One can also say that an evolutionary perspective would have been helpful to restrain them from their foolhardy actions, since one can easily transition from a paradigm of natural selection on animal/plant populations and apply it to societies under stress.

How Is the Network State Impacting Washington and Tel Aviv?

It is axiomatic that the warmonger neocons in the US are stupid and waaaaayyyy behind the times. If you were formed during the Cold War, recruited by a US government agency or think tank during the Cold War, AND actually got some money and prestige because of the Cold War, it is understandable you cannot pivot to the post-Cold War reality. But I still have no sympathy for you. You are stuck in a box that has little relevance, like Condoleeza Rice, Zbigniew Brzezinski (now deceased), or the current fan favorite, Fiona Hill. You are doomed to be blind to the new reality.

There is now a schism in the US political landscape that is typified by MAGA vs Israel, isolationism vs interventionism, and the Israel Lobby vs the Gulf Lobby. All of this hinges on oil and specifically West Asian oil, chemicals and minerals. (It is no longer just oil that is restrained by the on-again, off-again closure of the Strait of Hormuz. It is fertilizer, helium, and other commodities.)

By prioritizing West Asia over NATO expansion, the Ukrainian War, and China, Donald Trump has done far greater damage to US hegemony than any of us quasi-revolutionaries from the 1960s could ever have dreamed of doing. (Quasi-revolutionary means you haven’t committed to revolution but are still stuck in reform or counter-culture alternatives. It is not necessarily a derogatory term.)

What academic luminaries like John Mearsheimer, Stephen Cohen (now deceased), Jeffrey Sachs, Robert Pape and others have been warning about since the end of the Cold War are legion, but they fall into three main categories: 1) the folly of NATO expansion, 2) the Israel lobby, and 3) the escalation trap.

NATO Expansion

The folly of NATO expansion has been well-publicized since 1997, when George F. Kennan called NATO expansion a “fateful error.” (New York Times, 5 February 1997) But there were domestic repercussions as early as 1993 and a “feeding frenzy” among Defense contractors, known as the “Last Supper.” Here is a blurb from an article by Andrew Cockburn in Harper’s Magazine in 2015 and the link to his article. https://harpers.org/archive/2015/01/game-on/

For the defense industry, this was a matter of urgency. By the early 1990s, research and procurement contracts had fallen to about half what they’d been in the previous decade. Part of the industry’s response was to circle the wagons, reorganize, and prepare for better days. In 1993, William Perry, installed as deputy defense secretary in the Clinton Administration, summoned a group of industry titans to an event that came to be known as the Last Supper. At this meeting he informed them that ongoing budget cuts mandated drastic consolidation and that some of them would shortly be out of business.

Perry’s warning sparked a feeding frenzy of mergers and takeovers, lubricated by generous subsidies at taxpayer expense in the form of Pentagon reimbursements for “restructuring costs.” Thus Northrop bought Grumman, Raytheon bought E-Systems, Boeing bought Rockwell’s defense division, and the Lockheed Corporation bought the jet-fighter division of General Dynamics. In 1995 came the biggest and most consequential deal of all, in which Martin-Marietta merged with Lockheed.

The end of the Cold War proved to be a dilemma for the Defense Industry in Amerika, They could have adopted a rapprochement with Gorbachev’s weakened Russia (something Jeffrey Sachs tried to implement as an economic advisor), but that would mean taking a cut to corporate earnings. Oops. Cannot do that, as it would not fly in the boardroom. So the Grand Poobahs of the Clinton Administration and the neocons had to figure out something quick to spend more money on defense. The Bipartisan Solution? Expand NATO. This then led to all kinds of problems and resulted in George W. Bush’s promise to include Ukraine in NATO in 2008, Barack Obama’s coup in Ukraine in 2014, Russia’s seizure of Crimea the same year, and the expansion of the Aegis Missile System from a submarine-based defensive system into an offensive on-land system, slated to be complete in 2022, with a base in Redzikowo, Poland.

Redzikowo is only 100 miles from Russian territory and 800 miles from Moscow. These new missiles have an effective range of 1500 miles and were a significantly greater threat than the next closest NATO base, Mihail Kogalniceanu Airbase (MKAB), on the Black Sea in Romania. This US base had been established in 1999 and the Russians did not regard it as a high risk. But when the Redzikowo, Poland, base was slated to be fully functional in 2022, Vladimir Putin was moved to action, especially after a video summit with US President Joe Biden in December 2021. In this summit, Biden unwisely threatened Putin with sanctions and military action.

During the meeting, the first conversation between the leaders since July, Biden told Putin that “we would provide additional defensve material to the Ukrainians, above and beyond that which we are already providing” and that the United States “would fortify our NATO allies on the eastern flank, with additional capabilities in response to such an escalation.” [ABC News 8 December, 2021]

This threat was widely reported - it was even on a lamestream news channel. Coupled with news of the slated completion of the Aegis On-Land System at Redzikowo in 2022, it was clear the US was moving forward to challenge Russia through Ukraine. Putin’s action was hardly “unprovoked.” I thought at the time that the Russians would just build up on the Ukrainian border, but I was wrong. Lack of information, lack of expertise, lack of forward thinking, lack of appreciation for the Russian viewpoint.

Clearly, the US expanded NATO until the Russians felt they had to respond to a “clear and present danger,” to use a hackneyed phrase. Now the US is in deep shit and Ukraine is a shattered rump state that cannot exist without US and EU support.

The Israel Lobby

Another country that cannot exist without US and EU support is Israel and Israel has a keen appreciation for its predicament. That is why the Israel Lobby spends so much time and money lobbying the US government, buying US legislators, and targeting primary opponents who do not support their genocide in Gaza and the Palestine and Lebanese land grabs. The current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been playing the power game with the US and his neighbors for decades. He is quite savvy.

What Netanyahu is not, is smart and forward-looking. He cannot see that the Israel Lobby is losing out to the Gulf Lobby. The Gulf Lobby is the catch-all term for the countries of the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) who have realized the opportunity provided by the excesses of the Israel Lobby and the vacuum created by the horrific actions of the Israeli Government and its soldiers. Because of their oil resources, they have money to invest in other countries. There is a Saudi lobby, an Emirati lobby, a Qatari lobby, etc. and these individual lobbies band together when they are moving in the same direction. Again, this is a networked effort, rather than a top-down centralized effort like the Israel Lobby.

One way to differentiate these two lobbying efforts is to contrast lobbying by confrontation (Israel Lobby) vs. lobbying by consensus (Gulf Lobby). This contrast mirrors the structural aspects of the US “grand strategy” vs. the China “grand strategy”. The US grand strategy is to act like a bully and bomb the shit out of countries that it disagrees with. There is also an element of forever wars with boots on the ground, as well as plentiful covert operations. China, on the other hand, brings a mercantile element into their grand strategy, like the Belt and Road Initiative. China provides loans, technology and skilled workers to build up a country that is struggling - sometimes because of the US! Then it can dominate later because of the economic dependence of the smaller country on China. This can lead to negative results if the infrastructure buildout fails and the smaller country needs to sell off their natural resources at bargain basement prices. Many of the neocons in Washington regard this as a more nefarious geopolitical strategy than first bombing the shit out of smaller countries like the US. But as I said, they are stupid. Anyone with half a brain would prefer being dominated by the Belt and Road Initiative after getting something from China than bombed into oblivion by the US. The upshot of these two approaches is confrontation (US) vs. consensus (China), just like the Israel Lobby vs. the Gulf Lobby.

If you are interested in the excesses of the Israel Lobby, the go-to book on this subject is The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt (2007). I have this book but have not started it yet, but I am a big fan of both Mearsheimer and Walt, based on their video appearances on YouTube and their astute analyses. They are both esteemed academics and easy to follow in their online videos.

The Escalation Trap

Robert Pape is the go-to guy for understanding the escalation trap. The term “escalation ladder” is well-known and has been applied to both the US and Israel’s actions over the last several decades. The significant feature of the escalation ladder is that the escalating country, usually Israel, does not believe their opponents can match them in escalation. This is a valid point IF the escalating country has nuclear weapons as their endgame AND the other country is willing to stay on the escalation ladder as programmed by the escalatory power, usually Israel. Where this strategy gang aft agley - often goes wrong - is that the opponent country does NOT have to stay on the same ladder as the escalatory power, like the US or Israel. The example is Iran, which Pape asserts has countered with a horizontal move based on asymmetry. Refusing to escalate in the same manner as Israel and finessing the nuclear card with the Strait of Hormuz card is what Pape means by asymmetry.

So . . . Iran bombs the shit out of US military bases instead of replying tit-for-tat against Israeli targets when Israel and the US bomb Iran. Since the US and Israel have a nasty habit of bombing civilians and targeting children, this reluctance to sink to the US/Israel level also gives Iran more sociopolitical capital in the race to spin the narrative in the worldwide press. An important aspect of Iran’s bombing of US military bases in the Gulf is to destroy radar and other intelligence-gathering facilities upon which the US and Israel depend. This degrades further US and Israeli actions. Taking out a billion dollar high-tech early warning radar facility in Qatar with a cheap drone that could have been shot down with a machine gun is just one example.

The best example of the asymmetry strategy is to close the Strait of Hormuz. Iran doesn’t even need a nuclear weapon if it can make the whole world suffer for the US/Israeli warmongering. One can even say the Iranians have jumped over the Israelis on the escalation ladder and rendered null Israel’s nuclear option. Oops. But Pape favors the horizontal aspect and so we will leave him to his terminology.

Pape goes on further to predict Iran will rise to the level of the fourth regional hegemon, alongside the US, Russia and China. I tentatively agree, but my agreement is based on the ability of Iran to function as a network state in a collapsing world. As I said on another website recently:

A network state is different from a conventional state in its decentralized focus, less emphasis on territory, and more emphasis on associations. Ergo network. [And to prevent misunderstanding, conventional states are always looking for more territory. Staying within your own country’s frontiers is going against the grain. The incursions of Iran into Iraq are more about the Shia association than just a land grab, like Israel.] The sterling example of a network state is Iran, which had to pivot in its society post-Shah and because of the heavy sanctions laid on it. The response has been to become a network state and the sterling example of this sterling example is the mosaic defense of the IRGC, which made its own localized decisions in responding to US/Israeli attacks. Where to attack, who to attack, when to attack, how long to keep up the barrage, etc. Quite unlike the Amerikans and Israelis, who have a topdown hierarchical command structure.

What Does This Mean for Us in a Collapsing World?

As hypercomplex states break down, they will likely just crumble into a Mad Max dystopia. This is what I see for the UK, the US and Israel. As complex states break down, they have several options: 1) contraction into smaller regional states, like Occitan, Gascony, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, etc. in what is now France, 2) neo-feudalism in even smaller polities, 3) hybrid chiefdom/states based on authoritarianism and constant wars to expand territory, or 4) the network state. There is historical precedent for the first three alternatives, but Number 4 is new. This is a new direction in my long-running study of state-level society. I look forward to seeing where it leads. Here is a YouTube link to one of Krieg’s videos.

These wars were based on a strategy. And underneath the strategy is a structure. The underlying structure in the US is to base foreign policy upon the needs of domestic policy, something George F. Kennan started complaining about in the 1930s.

Sidebar: I read Kennan’s two-volume autobiography many years ago and this was one of his many complaints. I have no respect for Kennan, by the way, as he was a racist; examples are his comments about Russians and Mexicans. I also despise him because he was the architect of the Cold War through his containment policy, which was embraced by President Truman. But Kennan was right about: 1) US domestic policy driving foreign policy, 2) the Vietnam War was a huge mistake, and 3) NATO expansion was a “fateful error.” (New York Times, 5 February 1997)

The strategy, nested under the overall structure of US foreign policy, is based upon the particular president and his advisors. Bill Clinton’s strategy was to pump up the US economy by NATO expansion, like a retrograde reversion to the Vietnam War era. (I am being intentionally redundant, by the way, in order to magnify the stupidity of recasting Vietnam era policy in the 1990s instead of striking out in a bold new direction.) George W. Bush’s strategy was to seize Iraq’s oil. Barack Obama’s strategy was to sow chaos in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) and a pivot to Asia. Joe Biden’s strategy was to try to dismantle Russia and support Israel for protecting US interests in the Mideast. Donald Trump has no strategy. He just cannot be bothered. And making as much money as you can through the power of the Presidency to manipulate governments and markets is NOT a strategy. It is just grift.

I am not the only one who asserts Donald Trump has no strategy. Take a look at this Glenn Diesen podcast with Douglas Macgregor, a retired military Colonel and former advisor to the US Defense Deparment. Notice his comments around 13:45ff.

So . . . If there is no strategy, how in the hell do we plan and prepare when the people in power don’t have a strategy and are just winging it? The stock market just makes a false assumption that the economy will keep growing. This strategy has a 100% chance of not ending well. It is just a question of when. This year? Next year? Two years from now? What the stock traders are betting on is not whether the market will turn bearish. What they are betting on is that they can spot the crash and get out in time, leaving other suckers to hold the bag. This is playing out in the private equity market right now. One can also see this calculation in the turn to IPOs for SpaceX, Anthropic and Open AI. In order to replace the cash no longer available from venture capitalists and the private equity market, they are now turning to IPOs to get retail investors to “hold the bag.”

The stock market is the “point man” for embracing infinite growth on a finite planet in the nuts and bolts of everyday trading. The corporations - and even mom-and-pop stores - make the false assumption that they can always get the necessary goods for their products and services, with price as the only determinant. The AI nitwits make the false assumption that electricity will be there when needed. But since we (me and thee and other thinking people) are not satisfied with fanciful assumptions based on the past affluence of a world hegemon, we need to anticipate a downturn. In other words we need to anticipate something different.

Note well: There is a real difference between a negative strategy of getting out in time and leaving other “suckers” holding the bag versus embracing a positive strategy of going along with a flow that is determinitive. Lyn Alden coined the phrase, “Nothing stops this train.” She was speaking about fiscal dominance and its after-effects, but her solution is still to get far back from the implosion/explosion. Not as deleterious as the market mavens actively conning retail investors, but it is still self-preservation rather than a forward-looking strategy.

The real differentiation is between having a strategy - whether positive or negative - versus having no strategy at all. So let us consider the real nuts and bolts of having no strategy. One question is, “Is it possible that the real “flow” of demographic synchronicity will pop up on our radar once we have dropped the idea of a strategy?” In essence, once the mask of a strategy is removed, the real face, the real flow of the universe is revealed - the demographics of everyday life. Then we can spot the patterns and even synchronize ourselves with this demographic flow. Open the door to the cottage, see the loom and sit down to continue the weaving. (And yes, I realize this is similar to the famous line from Bruce Lee’s film Enter the Dragon (1973), where the quote is, “You can call it the art of fighting without fighting.” In this case I am strategizing in the presence of no strategy.) As for Donald Trump, he is not doing a “strategy of no strategy.” He is not some sort of perverted Shaolin monk. He is just incompetent. But we are not. As I said in one of my books, “Time to be cosmic and competent again.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the scene in the film just mentioned, here is the clip. It is quite amusing. You may have to triple-click on it.

Okay, let us try dropping the mask and see what is there. Can’t see anything? But there must be “something” there. The catchy phrase du jour, “There is no there there,” is applied to humans, not the whole universe. Otherwise, there would be no material world nor society nor energy nor culture. Oops. Maybe we have to anticipate what is there - anticipate the flow. But take heed. Our anticipation will be rooted in our own particular cultural baggage. That should be obvious. And your cultural baggage will be different from my cultural baggage. But cultural baggage actually has a usage. How would you be able to carry clean underwear and socks without baggage? So don’t worry about your cultural baggage and just use it. Now comes the hard part. YOU are going to have to put this into practice. Anticipating the demographic flow of the universe so that you can embrace it - meld with it - align with it.

I am confident in my powers of anticipation in spotting the demographic (cosmic) flow because I have past successes in doing so. Perhaps you do too. Think back a little in your own history. Are there times when you were able to see what was likely to happen? Of course there are. So use these memories as a starting point and try to re-imagine the context during those experiences. Then look for the definitive crux of the context and the moment.

Final remark. As Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” This is a good assessment of the problem. You have a plan to find the flow. But if you cannot, perhaps you have to adapt to getting punched in the face. In that case, it is good to be able to take a punch too - a beneficial addition to your skill set. The last time I got punched in the face was at the age of 70. It was no big deal. And the encounter revealed something very useful.