When You're Hungry, No Worries

Just eat a gold brick

As the world approaches a month of war with Iran, each day brings the permanent collapse of civilization closer. The myriad elements of collapse driven by fundamental overshoot are left undiscussed, with climate change just the most obvious element of a far larger predicament presented in our near useless mainstream media at all.

This “war” on Iran is not a war. It’s an attack on a nation that did not attack America and posed no imminent threat. Like Iraq, there are no and never were any WMDs. Under the “rules” of the Geneva Conventions, the US and Israeli bombing of Iran is a war crime — an act of terrorism — as has been the ghastly, complete destruction of Gaza in which innocent civilians bear the brunt of death at the hands of psychopaths who no longer bother to hide their intent. For US citizens, the racist and fascist goals were there for all to study in the 922-page tome of Project 2025 and has lived in Israeli Zionism since the country’s creation.

I have a friend who didn’t vote in the last presidential election. I did, perhaps for selfish reasons. I didn’t want to spend my remaining years under a fascist regime that shortens my life. However, Kamala Harris didn’t feature a single Palestinian at her convention. US backing of Israel was to continue either way. I don’t see this illegal war as a tactic to bury the Epstein files, although that may be an effect. This war is an attempt to control dwindling world oil and LNG resources, with the Gaza much the same, additionally fueled by pure Zionist hatred.

As I wrote in Blind Faith, Blind Rage and Genocide:

The Mediterranean Sea contains vast gas deposits. Egypt and Israel have been producing gas in the eastern Mediterranean for years. Located roughly 81 miles west of Haifa, (130 kilometers) in waters 4,900 feet deep (1,500 meters), according to the US Geological Survey’s estimates the Levant Basin Province holds an estimated 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Located just 20 miles (30 kilometers) off the coast of Gaza, the Gaza Marine field holds just over 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, tiny by comparison. However, its proximity to the shore and lesser depth make it easier and less costly to extract. The net value of the Gaza Marine natural gas is estimated at $4.59 billion — energy and financial resources that could significantly address the poverty of the Palestinians.

However, Israel has worked steadfastly to prevent Palestinians from developing and benefiting from this resource in violation of international law since the early 2000s.

Iran holds the third-largest oil deposits in the world. Just four countries hold over half of the world’s proven oil reserves.

Graphic and article from the Visual Capitalist.

The elements of civilization collapse including the horror of nuclear escalation are dramatically increased by this war. Additionally, Apocalypse “prophesy,” exhibited in both Christian and Jewish thought provide an irrational motivation to end the world. Our future is not prophesy, it’s a matter of choice. Our choices have been poor — unrelentingly violence against our Earth — and each other. God has not forsaken this planet. Humans have. It bewilders me that mass murderers and those that destroy all creation think they are going to ascend to Heaven.

We were gifted a planet which is over 4.5 billion years old. Only in the last 300,000 did humanity rise and only through the benevolent conditions of the Holocene, a climate favorable to our physical survival and that of all our beautiful warm-blooded cousins that we murder for their skins and tusks. The environment that supports them also supports us. The arrogance to think we are wiser than the slow evolution of the Earth, imperceptible to short human life spans is farcical. We have witlessly destroyed Goldilocks conditions for us to thrive in.

Slowness is wisdom. Speed kills.

What we call civilization was a transition from what sustained human beings for the vast majority of our brief existence, hunter-gathering. When we transitioned to agrarian societies just 7,000 to 9,000 years ago depending on our location in the world supposed civilization was born. It gave rise to science, sophisticated arts and philosophy. It also gave rise to mass governance, standing armies and ever more powerful ways of destroying each other. Archeological evidence suggests we were causing extinction level events long before the Industrial Revolution. It shows Homo sapiens was capable of extinguishing megafauna through mere cooperative hunting, before settled societies. By the bronze age we were laying entire forests low. However, our destructive capability since the discovery of coal and oil sped our increasingly likely self-destruction exponentially. In less than 300 years we have undermined the essential workings of the planet and ecosystems that we and every other innocent creature depends on.

In wealthy western nations, particularly the US as the premier empire since WWII, reality to our dependence on the Earth has been sublimated, perhaps by ignorance at first, but certainly by growing avarice shortly after. The giddiness of defeating Hitler led Americans to believe there were no limits to the future. After two world wars and the Great Depression people were starved for better lives and that hunger filled dreams. WWII turned America into an industrial powerhouse never before seen. Her wealth helped rebuild a broken Europe with the Marshall Plan and marked the end of British empire. Formation of the United Nations, the Nuremberg trials and Geneva Conventions seemed to point to a more just world. However, the war also resulted in NATO, the cynical and ill-fated formation of Israel, and shunning of the Soviet Union, without whose brutal sacrifice, 27 million dead, we would not have won the war.

Yes, Stalin was a mass murderer and the Siberian gulags infamous and horrifying. Dissidents were arrested in their sleep and disappeared without witness. Torture was employed, and Soviet citizens compelled through fear to turn one and other in on the weakest of suspicions of resistance against the state. I was never able to get through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, but read enough.

Chillingly, this is the path America is currently on.

Playing nice with a mass murderer is questionable, but a country founded on theft, genocide and slavery is hardly in the position to make moral judgments. America could have easily provided a homeland for the survivors of the Holocaust in spacious California at the time. However, there was all that Middle Eastern oil to be controlled, and so rose the military industrial complex Eisenhower urgently warned of in 1961. We had our enemy, the Soviet Union, and we had our Middle East projection of power, Israel, sympathy for which was natural with the devastating images of walking skeletons and mountains of bodies hastily bulldozed into mass graves as Nazis attempted to conceal their gruesome crimes.

Bergen-Belsen mass grave.

The end of WWII was an opportunity to unite the world. Instead, we drew lines in Middle Eastern sands, carving up countries and inventing new ones, regardless of consequences. As for the Soviet Union, exclusion made her both hazardous and wildly profitable.

Now the US military budget approaches $1 trillion, the iron fist, a violent tool used to impose economic world domination under the cloak of “bringing Democracy to other nations.” Since Nixon and Kissinger’s CIA fomented proxy wars in South America, Chile the first victim in 1973, the scourge of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School neoliberal economics has rolled virtually every nation on the planet. It allowed British economic dominance of South Africa even after Apartheid fell. It doomed Poland’s labor movement under eventual president Lech Wałęsa and infiltrated Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. Yeltsin appointed Putin and Russian oligarchy has thrived since. Naomi Klein’s remarkable book The Shock Doctrine (PDF here) thoroughly documents these crimes spanning over 50 years.

Capitalism was an unsustainable model on this finite planet. Neoliberal capitalism has been an even more virulent, destructive offspring. Both were made lethal by fossil fuels which have released incomprehensible amounts of heat into the atmosphere largely absorbed by our oceans. Without their absorption, we would already be dead, and they are near complete saturation.

Nature teaches redundancy, diversity and overlapping systems are resilience. Human attempts at domination reduce everything from forests to entire cultures to barren, fragile monocultures. The war on Iran may be our final act of ignorance.

The Iran War is about debt, not just oil

The US national debt is speeding towards $40 trillion. Check out this real time debt counter. For decades our manufacturing base has shrunk as we have been turned into a “service” economy. We create little of tangible value and what has been created is the result of fossil fuels which will become impossible to harvest for shrinking EROI. There is no plan for this guaranteed near eventuality. War is a way of creating a temporary economic “boost” financed by taxpayers who are now mostly insolvent. That boost goes to military industrial complex and the one percent who strangle our lives and promote fatal environmental destruction.

This war is so incredibly stupid it defies belief. For decades, it’s been known the Strait of Hormuz is a critical choke point for 20 percent of world energy supplies. The casualties include the Haber-Bosch process that synthesizes nitrogen fertilizer using natural gas bringing food to our tables. Disrupted LNG supplies halts fertilizer plant production and raises prices to unaffordability for already stressed farmers. Reduced fertilizers now will result in lower, less nutritious crop yields by fall. Shutting down oil and LNG infrastructure due to lack of storage and movement through the Strait of Hormuz will take months to restore, possibly years for facilities like Iran’s South Pars gas field, already damaged by Israel and now threatened by Trump. Even if this war ends tomorrow, the economic shocks will continue.

This is what happens when foul subhumans like Pete Hegseth are elevated to power, idiots driven by sycophancy, ideology and ignorance. This war guaranties increased food insecurity, additional famine, and across sector inflation which could result in a worldwide depression.

But fortunately, we can always eat a gold brick.