Waking Up from Illusions
Confronting Thanatos and deep concern about the Samson Option
Trump and fellow “Christian” Nazis blew up this post intended for last Saturday when we learned they were blowing up Iran. In reaction, I wrote Hey! I Know! Let’s Bomb Iran!, dripping with sarcasm. This criminal war isn’t about protecting America, it’s about hegemony over the world and recognition that oil is running out, its own danger without a plan and subject I have touched on numerous times in researching climate change. It’s all distressing, and I appreciate you being here. Should we survive the heightened danger of nuclear conflict, climate change remains our other immediate existential peril. BTW, I have been warned this article is likely too long for email.
We are living through profoundly frightening times. Evil has never walked more openly in our lives than with the genocide of the people of Gaza and the unhinged attack of Iran, threatening to end our brief existence on Earth. The Epstein files are throwing light on the depth of depravity governing our lives. Sadists are in charge. The Gaza genocide continues as do genocides around the world, largely unspoken of, a constant feature of human behavior, not an aberration.
Sigmund Freud called this death drive Thanatos after the mythological Greek god, a behavior characterized by destruction directed against the external world and other organisms. Freud believed that aggression stemming from the death instinct must be repressed for civilization to exist. With our weapons of mass destruction and deadly assault on nature, this has never been more apparent.
In America, we raised that behavior to an art form, born of the genetics of British empire, steeped in the blood of Native Americans and built on the whipped backs of kidnapped African slaves. In high school history our violence was sanitized under terms like Manifest Destiny as we swept west, destroying all in our path. We threw off King George III, but retained English psychopathic violence. The founding fathers who spoke of freedom and equality were slaveholders.
In empires if you don’t participate you perish. As a graphic designer and consumer — even as a relatively modest one in my previous life — I played a role.
300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens arose, gifted an ever slowly evolving Earth perfect for us to thrive. 300,000 years, a muffled whisper of existence floating in the silence of an incomprehensible cosmos both in scale and time. Should we extinguish ourselves, no one will come to ponder our disappearance or care. The nearest star after our sun is Alpha Centauri 4.2 light years away. It will be as if we never existed. Our tiny hopes, fears, love and hate, our edifices of arrogance from the great pyramids to the tallest skyscrapers will disappear into the crust of the planet.
Why can we not see and feel in the roots of our being how precious this is? Why are we driven by the shallowest and falsest of values, ownership? We cannot own the Earth and have no right to own each other.
Over four years, ago when I started writing about climate change it was with the hope that my voice alongside others could raise a chorus and affect the future for the better. I thought surely at this moment given the existential threats we face summing up to no less than extinction, we will change our path forward. Instead, we ghoul our way to a self-made hell, systemic evil enabled by ignorance, both divorced from reality.
Our removal from reality was built on a fever dream, fossil fuels, a finite orgy of hallucinatory energy, soon-to-be gas pump vapors as they rapidly run out. Don’t take my word for it. The evidence lies in experts in the field such as decades experienced oil geologist Art Berman and natural resource “investors” responsible for cold-eyed analysis such as Goehring & Rozencwajg, articles here and here. Industry evidence itself tells the story. Fracking is far more energy-intensive than conventional oil drilling. If conventional oil was available, that’s where the rigs would be.
The Hubbert curve predicted the end of oil. Fracking will end, too. We saw this eventuality and did nothing about it. Tragically, we found enough coal and oil to turn the planet against us before harvesting it is no longer possible.
Never mind Trump killing so-called renewables. That was a “green” lie. Thanks, liberals. Without diesel fuel to power heavy equipment rock and minerals can’t be mined or processed. We have around 50 years of economically viable crude left, and similar constraints exist on previously prosaic materials well-illustrated by a copper shortage exacerbated by the massive build out of AI data centers. These data centers and AI further imperil our future living as human beings and physical safety from egregious energy and water use. I touched on this in Artificial Intelligence is Hot. In addition to copper other critical metals face the same EROI problems as oil, with the easy deposits already exploited.
BTW, whether it’s vast solar fields destroying desert ecosystems or mountain tops blasted flat for wind turbines, these technologies need serious replacement or refurbishment in about 25 years. Solar arrays lose their efficiency and 6000 pound wind turbine blades abrade. Motors wear out. These technologies are in no way green and feed overshoot of which climate change is just one component.
A renewable energy economy was a naive promise by politicians hearing what they want to hear from corporate lobbyists at best or a cynical reelection lie at worst. The public doesn’t want to hear hard truths. We’re headed for a low-energy world akin to pre-industrial society. We’re too late for controversial nuclear to have an impact and fusion continues to be a dangled carrot. Either comes back to the great limiter, oil, particularly diesel enabling their construction.
Currently, oil supply is not a problem (unless one considers climate change to be a problem)! Capitalism is a failed model which I wrote of in Capitalism is Dead. Neoliberal capitalism which I wrote of in The Economy We Need to Save Ourselves through corporate consolidation and military backed violence has created a deluded, grotesquely wealthy elite. They consume the vast majority of the planet’s resources, impoverish the rest of us and are responsible for the deaths of millions from the installation of Pinochet’s Chile to the missile that killed 165 Iranian school girls being buried in a mass grave. They believe our deaths are not only justified, but desirable.
In a world of dwindling resources more for them.
The current oil glut will not last forever. Energy, food and housing costs have soared, so oil demand in the consumer economy has flattened, but ultimately every drop that is economically feasible to extract will be. The bastards in charge love their money and power even more. Enough of us perishing solves a lot of problems in their minds.
The oil glut will not last because the search for energy is forever. The oil left will be used to extract rock and minerals in Greenland fated to melt completely and the Arctic, already tipped into a GHG emitter.
The Iran War: weapons depletion and the Samson Doctrine
The attack on Iran is an oil war — a resource war — for the resource that governs the world economy even as it simultaneously destroys an inhabitable planet.
Ever since the OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s, control of Middle East oil has been an obsession of the CIA and Israel’s equivalent, Mossad. One could argue with justifiable suspicion the creation of Israel in Palestine by the Allies after WWII, primarily the US and Britain, was a strategic decision to exert control over Arab oil, not about biblical justice for Jews dating back thousands of years. Additionally, the Israeli hardliners — Zionists have from day one desired Israeli hegemony over the Middle East.
In America, AIPAC (the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) may be the most powerful lobby in Washington. It’s support or lack thereof in political and financial backing determines elections. The money (corruption) is boggling. AIPAC was formerly known as the American Zionist Public Affairs Committee. It’s telling that the word Zionist was dropped. AIPAC funded politicians can easily be tracked at Track AIPAC. These people must be voted out. Do you hear me Chuck Schumer?
Supposed liberals (mostly a dead species) are beholden to AIPAC, and they’re not pissed that Trump is bombing Iran, they’re pissed that Trump started this war without their permission.
Democratic Party leaders are not opposed to attacking Iran — they are opposed to attacking Iran without being consulted. Two dozen Democrats lept to their feet and applauded every time Trump threatened Iran, or lauded Israel, in his State of the Union address. The Biden administration and Democratic Party leadership made no effort to reinstate Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement. It focused instead on sustaining the genocide in Gaza.
Reminder to these dipshits, they subverted the Constitution when they voted to give George W. Bush unilateral power to declare war, leading to the Iraq debacle. Now they want to be consulted?
Iran ain’t no Iraq. Iraq fired a total of 42 SCUD missiles at Israel during the Gulf War, a war knowingly predicated on non-existent WMDs. UN inspection teams had proven this which included American Scott Ritter who feels we don’t have enough ammo to “win” this illegal attack.
Iran possesses at least 1500 missiles, very likely more, not mere dozens that are far more capable than Iraqi SCUDs from decades ago. However, claims they can hit US mainland soil by the worst of the right-wing are fearmongering lies. Known as Persia until 1935, Iran’s civilization is thousands of years old. When the Iranian Revolution took place resulting in American hostages in 1979, it was the long result of the 1953 CIA installation of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavia, a brutal and corrupt dictator. Glad to do Washington’s bidding, his CIA trained “secret” police force the SAVAK tortured and disappeared citizens as he simultaneously enriched himself. Sounds similar to a certain government I’m thinking of now, doesn’t it?
Since 1979 Iran has endured nearly 50 years of US vilification and harsh economic sanctions while being depicted as a crazy, violent terrorist state. As by far the biggest weapons supplier to the world, 42 percent, could the US be considered a terrorist state? Iran weapons production is barely a blip.
The US is short on weapons
Depleted by years of supplying weapons to Ukraine and genocide enabling weapons to Israel, US and Israeli missiles appear to be in short supply. US weapons systems are highly complex and expensive, designed to deter or go toe-to-toe with China and Russia, not fight a small, agile adversary. Replacing them is slow and wildly expensive. Iran’s weapons by comparison are incredibly cheap. $30,000 drones wiping out $4 million missiles is not sustainable.
Analysts such as Joe Costa, the director of the Forward Defense Program at the Atlantic Council think tank points out the US military is expending a significant amount of resources (major understatement), including Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and Patriot interceptors, the Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM), and ship-launched missiles such as SM-2, SM-3 and SM-6.
Costa says in regard to depletion:
“Timelines are difficult without perfect information, but you’re talking weeks, not months.”
This article from Politico expresses much the same. Weapon shortages put our soldiers at risk in this violation of the Geneva Conventions, a war desired for decades.
Meanwhile, Iran has had success in hitting regional US military bases, inflicting billions of dollars in damage and crippling critical communication systems such as radomes on which modern warfare depends.
According to The Hindu, as of March 2 US bases attacked include Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates, Ali Al-Salem Air Base, Kuwait, NSA Bahrain, Muwaffaq Al-Salti Air Base, Jordan, Ain Al-Asad Air Base, Iraq, and Erbil Air Base, Iraq. If you prefer an American source, try this.
In the Age of AI and Corporate Disinformation, separating fact from fiction becomes more difficult every day.
Iranian missiles have also hit Arab oil infrastructure with remarkable accuracy, damaging but not destroying the function of the facilities as a warning to vassals harboring US military bases.
The Strait of Hormuz remains technically open, a critical choke point that accounts for the passage of about 20 percent of global oil supply. However, it is effectively at a standstill as oil shippers and traders have suspended shipments due to safety concerns and prohibitive insurance costs amid Iranian attacks on oil tankers in the region.
Marine insurers are canceling war risk coverage and oil shipping rates are surging. The price of Brent crude has jumped 35 percent in one week, now approaching $100. Qatar’s energy minister believes $150 a barrel is possible. Gulf oil production could shut down in days.
Furthermore, Israel’s Iron Dome defense system appears to be proving ineffective, overwhelmed by the quantity of missiles and decoys with Tel Aviv incurring substantial damage and casualties which brings us to the Samson Option.
The Samson “Option”
There exists a doctrine within the Israeli strategic playbook that is as feared as it is misunderstood —a doctrine veiled in ambiguity and born from the nation’s darkest fears. Known as the Samson Option, it refers to Israel’s implied readiness to resort to nuclear weapons if it were ever facing the prospect of annihilation.
The Samson Option is a strategy of massive retaliation as a last resort against any country whose military has invaded and or destroyed much of Israel. Netanyahu is an unhinged psychopath as is Trump. Coupled with biblical prophesy predicting the end of the world, these factors can’t be ignored and addled, delusional Trump is being led to believe he is instrumental in ushering the second coming of Christ by fringe evangelists and podcasters. Could the situation be any more insane than this?
I can’t claim to have any crystal ball. From years of research from solid sources I know climate change and overshoot are real. This war in addition to being yet more human tragedy, delays and in fact increases our peril from an overheated planet.
Oil as the governing resource for the world economy has created countless deaths through formal military war and corporate hired mercenary violence, with the Global South the primary victim. This has been remarkably hidden by Western media, and the average citizen has been seduced by unsustainable consumption, actually a form of slavery in which every dollar funds our demise.
Trump calls upon the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government. This would be good advice for Americans at this point. Instead, predictably Iranians are banding together against those who are raining death from the sky.
This war should we avoid a nuclear event is a loss for America, signaling the end of its hegemony over the world, a good outcome. It’s also a loss for the world, at the very least economic chaos which will cost lives beyond direct military victims. It’s an insane sideshow as the health of the planet that sustains us fails. We must stop funding this with our stolen tax dollars and voluntary purchases and subscriptions enriching the billionaires. The twelve richest men in the world own more wealth than half of humanity.
This is not what we voted for, liberal or conservative. We voted for jobs, healthcare, a safe environment and a shot at retirement when we’re too old to work, not a criminal war. Get mad. Get brave. Take action.
Very detailed analysis, thank you! Yes, this war of choice and hubris is illegal in many ways, and will not bring the results the Pedo-Pres desires, and should be the end of the Outlaw Empire. But yes, the nuclear threat from the deranged zionist settler colony increases daily.
Thanks for putting this all down in outline. Dark times indeed. I too was on the front end of activists warning about climate change, and I too, am heartbroken that humanity has been too addicted and willfully ignorant to act. I agree with you and have also written about the billionaire class hegemony. Today, I posted a piece surmising how humanity (and the rest of nature) might have fared had we not discovered petroleum. Hard to see a healthy way through this at this point. https://cylviahayes.substack.com/p/what-would-we-be-without-oil. Thanks for your work.