Indrajit Samarajiva

1. How America's Military Is Falling Apart

Now that we've discussed why America's military is falling apart (getting older but not wiser). Let's discuss how. Specifically, which wheels are falling off. Planes, ships, and ground forces, it's all depreciating into dust.

What we've discussed is that the American military, like the American economy in general, is a Ponzi scheme. It pays off old liabilities with new growth. In this case, it keeps covering up failed wars with new failing wars. It keeps covering up horrendous procurement with more horrendous procurement. It's a shell game which can no longer manufacture shells reliably.

Now America's con wars are getting closer and closer together and bleeding into one. Whereas it took them 20 years to get kicked out of Afghanistan, Yemen has defeated them in a matter of months. Whereas once they were fighting the poorest people on Earth, now they have united China, Russia, and Iran against them, 'younger' militaries with far more resources and wealth than America. None of these people actually want to fight or take over the world, they just want to be left in peace, but America has chosen violence. But grandpa genocide just doesn't have the gumption anymore. The soulless are willing, but the body is weak. The old war machine can't handle it what's demanded of it. The wheels are coming off as we speak. If we consider the American war machine as a trishaw, the three wheels of air, naval, and land dominance are all deflated and the whole thing is just careening violently before the final destination: financial cliff.

Planes

Let's start with planes.

Antony Blinken—America's dead-eyed genocide whisperer—rides a custom Boeing 737. I include this in America's war fleet because Blinken sure as hell ain't making peace. Blinken's 737 has been grounded multiple times, once with an oxygen leak when meeting oligarchs in Davos, and again with 'mechanical problems' while meeting vassals in Europe. Blinken has had to drive and his staff had to—the horror—fly commercial, separated by only a curtain from the peasants. This is emblematic of the state of the American war machine in general.

America's military aircraft are not looking much better. A 2018 investigative report by Military Times found that "Accidents involving all of the military's manned fighter, bomber, helicopter and cargo warplanes rose nearly 40 percent from fiscal years 2013 to 2017. It's doubled for some aircraft, like the Navy and Marine Corps' F/A-18 Hornets and Super Hornets. At least 133 service members were killed in those fiscal year 2013-2017 mishaps, according to data obtained by Military Times."

In response to this report Defence Secretary (and Theranos board member) James Mattis sat in the hot seat and gave some order. He ordered 80% readiness for the F-35, F-22, F-16 and F-18 aircraft. That order went about as well as Theranos's blood testing machines. It didn't work at all.

In 2019, the vestigial Government Accountability Office said, "We found that none of these aircraft had achieved the 80 percent mission capable goal, when mission capable rate data are averaged for each day in fiscal year 2019." For 2021, the numbers for the F-35 and F-22 were 69% and 51%; worse and getting worser.

It's not that American airships crash which is, honestly, a good thing for the world. It's that America can't fight a war at a 60% readiness which quickly degrades to 0% in their own war games. Some of the maintenance requirements of American planes are just insane. Take the B-2 stealth bomber:

The B-2 requires 119 hours of maintenance for every hour flown. The B-1 and B-52 need just 60 and 53 hours, respectively. Adding to the B-2s cost further is the need for specialized, $5 million per unit, air-conditioned hangars (used to preserve the B2's stealth properties) that are large enough to accommodate the B2s 172-foot wingspan.

Is this a bomber or a prima donna? It's not just that the US military runs at a loss, it's that it's so fragile that it loses wars. That is also, of course, a good thing for the world. Even the mightiest power, that saw fit to reign down death with invisible impunity, gets laid low by its own hubris and sheer age. This is the great power of Allah in the end. They take everyone back in the end, without exception. Every being that lives must die, human or djinn (re: engine). Even if you're the world's biggest asshole, nothing but Allah can save you in the end. And America surely isn't on the side of God, it's the Great Shaytan, now with clipped wings.

Burning Ships

As part of their charade of giving a shit, America was building a pier in Gaza, but they can't even get ships across the Atlantic. Like their Red Sea Fleet that slunk away in defeat, the Gaza Flotilla caught fire before they even got there. The aptly named John P. Bobo caught fire and had to turn around. The Bessen had some issue and never made it past the Azores. The Wilson Wharf never made it past the Canary Islands. The Lopez slowed down, indicating some issue, but made it in the end. These are not isolated issues. The USNS Buttons (a sister ship to Bobo and Lopez) caught fire a few weeks ago. The US Navy is literally on fire.

Maintenance problems like this are not acts of God. They are the inactions of men. The hilariously useless US Government Accountability Office has reports on how fucked every department of the military is. This is what they say about the Navy:

GAO reviewed key sustainment metrics for 10 ship classes and found that from fiscal years 2011 through 2021, these classes faced persistent and worsening sustainment challenges. Specifically, the number of maintenance cannibalizations (working parts removed and reused elsewhere due to parts shortages), casualty reports (reports of events that impair ships' ability to do a primary mission), and days of maintenance delay (days beyond the scheduled end date for depot maintenance) have each increased, while steaming hours (the number of hours a ship is generally in an operating or training status) have decreased.

These seahorses are being ridden hard and put away wet. As an unnamed retired Army chief warrant officer said about the Bobo, Wilson Wharf, etc, "if those boats don't have multiple major mechanical failures—I mean 'dead in the water' mechanical failures—I will be shocked. They're horrendously maintained. I've got videos of these things falling apart."

I'm giving you anecdotal examples, but these are not anecdotal problems. According to another (2022) GAO report, the Navy both has a huge maintenance backlog and doesn't know/lies about how big the problem actually is. As that report says:

The Navy understated the amount of its ship deferred depot maintenance in its 2021 financial reports by about $1.6 billion. The Navy reported only about $181 million in unfunded ship deferred maintenance in its 2021 annual financial report even though estimates it prepared for GAO show a nearly $1.8 billion backlog.

What the US government calls 'understated' is of course fraud. If any company underreports their liabilities by $1.6 billion, that's fraud. Of course no one at the top gives a damn because they're in on it. It's all Ponzi, all the way up, as we've discussed. Just look at the physical liabilities piling up on the Navy's books, and remember that—like my old, neglected car—these liabilities compound over time.

Compounding liability means that ships get harder and harder to fix every year until finally it's impossible. Then you have to decommission ships early. Thus the US Navy goes from degraded capacity to none at all.

As the GAO points out, poorly maintained ships eventually have to be scrapped, and the US doesn't really make ships anymore, and what they do make is expensive, over-budget, delayed, and completely unadapted to whatever it emerges onto, like a bleary-eyed Rip Van Winkle striding onto a modern battlefield with breeches and a breech-loader.

Defeat In The Red Sea

The US's fleet is big, but so were dinosaurs. Things change and suddenly you're not so well adapted anymore. In today's world, big aircraft carriers are just sitting ducks for drone swarms and cheap missiles. These things are hard to sink, but they're also hard to repair, making them a net liability. The US tried to develop smaller, littoral ships to counter threats like Iran, but Iran evolved during the delays, and these ships are now basically useless. America still has some formidable air power, but when it comes to naval power, they've completely lost it. They've lost the Red Sea, which is their 'Suez Crisis' moment.

America is of course an Empire (so invisible I call it White Empire) and its military also includes vassal states like the UK, France, and Germany. Many countries pay the military tax to America they call NATO, and offer troops to the imperial army whenever called, including to back up the genocide of Gaza. I'll include their ships cause it's all the same shit, end of the day. This is the state of the imperial Navy, getting beat by brave non-states like Yemen, easily.

Before ever doing anything useful, the $3.7 billion HMS Queen Elizabeth died like the useless person it was named after, saying, "routine pre-sailing checks yesterday identified an issue with a coupling on@HMSQNLZ starboard propeller shaft. As such, the ship will not sail on Sunday." Elizabeth was unable to join the NATO war fleet to play. Its sister ship, the HMS Prince of Wales also could not keep its propeller on, and had broken down 18 months earlier. The UK and Europe in general are increasingly useless vassals. They're eager but completely useless.

The French FREMM frigate Alsace actually made it to the battlefield, but had to flee retreated from the Red Sea on April 4th. Tale betwixt legs to Toulon.

The commander of the ship stated that the Yemeni Armed Forces "do not hesitate to use drones and ballistic missiles in a very surprising and striking manner." He added, "It has been a long time since we dealt with this level of weapons and violence. The Houthis are perfecting their technique. The more they fire, the more accurate they become."

The Commander told Le Figaro: "All combat equipment was used on board the frigate, from the Aster missile to machine guns," noting that the cost of each Aster is $2 million. (Resistance News Network)

I am reminded of a possibly apocryphal tale about the Chinese nobility before Genghis Khan. The Jin became more and more obsessed with archery as an art form, shooting through silk and other effete bullshit. Then the Mongolians just rode hard and shot fast and defeated them. That's what I think about these colonial vassals, basically throwing Lamborghinis and Ferraris at rebellious peasants. They're completely outclassed and, frankly, their own worst enemy. They're too soft for this shit. It's not just the Alsace, the Danish Esbern Snare and the British destroyer HMS Richmond have also retreated. America tried to organize a colonizer reunion, but they couldn't organize a piss up in a brewery.

America just made things worse for themselves after launching Operation Prosperity Guardian. Their military objective was to open the sea for genocidal states, but now it's even more closed. Now 'Israeli' shipping is blocked from both the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, and all imperial shipping is badly constipated. Just look at the results:

If you look at the graph of transits, Yemen was only mildly affecting trade by targeting 'Israeli' ships, as is their duty under the genocide convention. Then the Americans turned the Red Sea into a war zone, made shipping worse for themselves, and had to give up and sue for peace. To which Yemen said no, until the genocide stops. Which leaves the Empire at a loss. They've got these expensive ships which are already falling apart, and which have to go all the way back to America to reload. And they can't get the brave and principled Yemenis to budge. America has lost the Red Sea because they wouldn't give up a genocide. That's how cheaply they threw away naval power.

Defeat On The Ground

The surest sign that America has been defeated on the ground is that they don't show up. They hide behind proxies and propaganda, but are simply two scared to put (official) boots on the ground themselves. This is a far-cry from the invading forces of just the early 2000s.

Now America is losing proxy wars in Palestine and Ukraine after pulling its last troops out of Afghanistan. It has never been able to field an army in open combat against the Russians, and it can't physically hold the Middle East anymore. It's even getting kicked out of Africa. This is a defeated army, in what I call a long retreat for decades now. They're throwing vassals in front of themselves—like the Nazi Germans with the Romanians—but America is in retreat, make no doubt about it. From Palestine, to Ukraine, to Taiwan, the Americans talk a lot of shit, but they don't show up. They have lost ground power entirely.

The problem starts in the 1970s, when Vietnam beat America's conscript army so bad they could never field one again. Now the Army is a 'volunteer' force, but all the debt slavery can't fill the ranks fast enough.

Pentagon officials have noted in recent years that the military recruiting environment is among the worst in U.S. history. Only about 23% of Americans between the ages of 17 to 24 qualify for military service, fewer than previous generations, according to Defense Department data. Among them, only about 9% has shown interest in the military, the data shows. (Stripes)

According to a Pentagon report, "77 percent of young Americans do not qualify for military service without a waiver due to being overweight, drug use, or mental or physical problems" (via). The US military has to face both physical depreciation and public unappreciation. Nobody wants to die for shareholders. Nobody wants to buy into the Ponzi anymore.

All that's left is whatever corrupted proxy will die for them, and chief amongst these is 'Israel'. 'Israel' is America's favored colony, the recipient of the most 'defense' money and the staging ground for human testing of weapons. The crown jewel of the crown jewel is 'Israel's' air defenses, which are the best the US has to offer. They communicate how the US is able to protect ground, and bomb whoever they want. But that equation is shattered now.

In its retaliatory attack on April 14th, Iran broke the most formidable air defenses in Empire, those around occupied Palestine. It was a surgical hit, meant to send a message, not killing people on purpose. My favorite bit was that Iran hitting the officers' swimming pool at Nevatim Air Base. "The message being: if you don't dial back, we can do serious damage" (The Cradle). The international equivalent of putting a horse's head in their bed. The natives are no longer deterred, and they have a younger, better military. The shell game is done.

Shelling Out

Artillery is the god of war, and America simply can't produce it anymore. They're running out of shells and missiles, AKA big bullets. There's a Chris Rock joke that goes, "You don't need no gun control. You know what you need? Bullet control. I think all bullets should cost $5000. You know why? If a bullet cost $5000 there'd be no more innocent bystanders." America has inadvertently created this situation on a global scale.

Look at the 2024 Department of War budget request. For all their big guns, they have a tiny amount of 'bullets'. In 2023, they produced 230 Patriot Missiles, 125 Standard Missiles, 40 Hellfire, and 34 Tomahawks. There's no more zeros after these numbers, that's it. They would run through their yearly production of most munitions within a few weeks of hot war. This is a joke.

America has emptied out all the imperial cupboards into the living room of Ukrainians. Americans say that they've degraded the Russian Army and 'got a good deal on it' (dead Ukrainians are worth nothing to them). However, like so much out of Empire, every accusation is a confession. Empire is running out of bullets itself, while Russia is a humming war economy. Russia can actually make shells, while America can just make pledges. America keeps printing money to chase non-existent resources, trying to avoid reality. They're outgunned and out-bulleted in Ukraine, and that's just one rebellion they're facing.

America's biggest guns of all are also firing blanks. America is still relying on 50-year-old Minuteman missiles for its ground nuclear deterrent, and it can't rely on them anymore. As Admiral Charles Richard, head of U.S. Strategic Command has said:

"We can't do it at all. ... That thing is so old that, in some cases, the drawings don't exist anymore [to guide upgrades]," Richard said in a Zoom conference sponsored by the Defense Writers Group. Where the drawings do exist, "they're like six generations behind the industry standard," he said, adding that there are also no technicians who fully understand them. "They're not alive anymore."

The Sentinel, the replacement for the Minuteman, is another case of made-up money chasing non-existent resources across unending delays. These newfangled missiles cost $162 million each, ballooning to a program cost of $131.5 billion (!), and they're not even close to existing. They're, in fact, closer to being cancelled. You can really appreciate America's massive depreciation problem here. They have to bankrupt themselves to not even break even. They have to spend trillions more to get less capacity. All of these programs would return them to less missile capability than they had 50 years ago. And they can't even do it.

The US military budget has long been a shell game where they hid decaying infrastructure under imaginary new shit, and now the jig is up. Like a human being at the end of their life, they incur the highest costs on care at the end, for the worst results. American hegemony is in hospice now.

Unauditable

America is extra fucked because they don't even know how fucked they are. The Pentagon has failed six audits in a row and the unaccountability flows downwards. "A full half of the Defense Department's assets still don't meet auditing standards." As I read the GAO reports, one of the things that stands out is what a total fraud the military is.

As the GAO says about the Navy, besides lying about its liabilities, "the Navy
is not fully or accurately tracking other metrics—operational availability and matériel availability—that the Department of Defense and the Navy have determined are key to assessing ship effectiveness despite a prior GAO recommendation to do so."

Sun Tzu said, "Know the enemy; know yourself, and you will meet with no danger in a hundred battles. If you do not know the enemy, but you know yourself, then you will win and lose by turns. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will lose every battle, certainly." America believes its propaganda about its enemies being weak and its propaganda about itself being strong. In truth, they can't survive an audit and they can't survive first contact with a real enemy. They're bound to lose.

The State Of The Union Army

The state of the union army is not good. Besides losing every war for decades, America's weapons are getting old and rusty and its young men are overweight or uninterested. Their ships are catching fire and their planes are crashing to the ground. And it all costs far more to replace than they can afford, and they'd need to rebuild it with a manufacturing base that doesn't exist anymore. America would literally need China's support to attack China. It's a non-starter. The mandate of heaven is withdrawn, because of massive accounting fraud. America's military is falling apart. It's just running on propaganda now.

2. Why America's Military Is Physically Falling Apart

Nothing to see here, just the wheels falling off

To understand the state of America's military, just look at their Secretary of State. Antony Blinken's custom Boeing has been grounded twice this year. Meanwhile, ships Joe Biden sent to Gaza have caught fire or broke down along the way. The US military loses every war, its equipment is falling apart, and its soldiers are killing themselves. They don't even know what anything costs because the Pentagon is unauditable, six times over. This is the state of late-stage Empire. It's physically falling apart.

General Fuckery

To understand how America can have both the most expensive and most useless military in the world, just behold US Congressman winner Mike Waltz asking the Air Force Secretary how much a bag of bushings costs. The answer is $90,000 for what should cost maybe $100. A bag of nuts and bolts. This gets to the nuts of bolts of the issue. The bloated US military budget isn't a measure of effectiveness. It's a measure of fraud.

Dwight Eisenhower—who left this turd on America's doorstep—said "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." This wasn't a warning in hindsight, it was a promise. The military industrial complex is not even that complex anymore. What was a competitive defense industry has condensed down to five cronies. These warlords corrupt think tanks, NGOs, media, and government itself to become an inoperable cancer on the body politic.

Ike also said, "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals." This really adds insult to injury. No one today would accuse Americans of being alert and knowledgeable. It's a nation of debt slaves, thinking they're philosopher kings because they get to give a Facebook thumbs up to the latest slaughter in the Cable TV Colosseum.

Insomuch as America ever had 'peaceful methods and goals', now their government just spreads chaos, using it as a ladder of bones. With Gaza or Ukraine, they don't care if the American people don't actually support these wars. They're still doing 'em. America's ruling elites are all about the money, everything else is just marketing. So the wars go on, one after another to cover up the fraud with more fraud. The insider traders in Congress get their cut, and some arms dealers in Bethesda get to remodel their kitchens.

Right now, the foxes are running the hen house and the future taxpayers (it's all debt) are getting plucked. The military industrial business model is the same as US private equity (or the mafia). They take over a 'company', load it up with debt, and then bleed the carcass dry. And everybody's in on it. Right now, a Raytheon board director (Lloyd Austin) is running the Defence (re: War) Department, and few US citizens are aware of this violent conflict of interest. The military industrial complex is running the whole show, under the command of General Fuckery.

Private Ponzi

The core reason America's military is the same reason my Toyota Vitz fell apart on the highway. Maintenance. America had a strong military generations ago, but those assets have long since depreciated and become liabilities. They keep covering this up by buying shiny new stuff, but that stuff doesn't even work and it's all depreciating into dust and fairy dust as we speak.

We'll get into it in detail, but for an example from just one theatre (Indo-Pacific), look at the difference between spending on new toys ('modernizing and strengthened presence') and maintenance ('improved logistics, maintenance capabilities, etc').

'Modernizing' gets $2.9 billion while maintenance gets only some fraction of $1.1 billion, lumped together with the other boring shit. Maintenance is fundamentally unsexy and nobody fucks with it.

Maintenance, however, is a compounding liability. The less you do it, the more you have to do. Just ask my old Vitz, which never went for regular service until it just melted on the highway and required a hideous engine rebuild. It cost me more than regular maintenance and I never trusted that car again. This is the basic rule of maintenance. You neglect it at your peril. As the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) says about not doing maintenance, "Over time this situation has resulted in worsening ship conditions and increased costs to repair and sustain ships." And it's not just ships, the entire 'capital' base of the US military is literally being cannibalized.

They say a stitch in time saves nine, but this was before fast fashion. Why make one stitch when you can just spin billions out of whole cloth?

The Growth Ponzi

The problem with American military infrastructure is the problem with American infrastructure in general. It's all supposed to be run by 'the market' and the market does not give a fuck about maintenance, repair, or anything long term. Why would it? It's algorithmically programmed to think in quarters and not the long term and, as Keynes said, in the long term we're all dead. If you can make a billion dollar sale now and the liability falls on someone else's head decades later, who gives a shit? This isn't the fault of individually evil people, though these are individually evil people. If they didn't do it the 'shareholders' would throw them out and install someone that did. They're just cogs in the capitalist machine, and war is peak capitalism. Making really expensive products and immediately exploding them? *Chef's kiss*.

I'll take the long way around to explain this Ponzi concept because it's essential. So let's start with that other American war crime, the car-driven suburb. Charles Marohn of Strong Towns calls this phenomenon 'Growth Ponzi Scheme'. All of America's old, decaying infrastructure are unfunded liabilities, the maintenance barely covered by new schemes. A classic Ponzi.

America has built more roads than it can possibly maintain, using new loans to pay off the old ones. This is actually how most Americans live, using one credit card to pay off another. Marohn says that "American cities have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance." I argue that this same phenomenon applies to the American Empire itself. As Marohn says about suburbs:

The great American experiment in suburban development entices communities to take on long-term liabilities in exchange for near-term cash advantages (see Part 1). But as those liabilities cost the community more than the development creates in overall wealth, the approach ultimately results in insolvency (see Part 2). To forestall the day of reckoning, more growth is induced, setting up a Ponzi scheme scenario where revenue from new development is used to pay liabilities associated with old development (see Part 3). This is unsustainable, but that has not kept us from trying desperately to keep it all going.

This is a textbook Ponzi—paying for the old suckers off with the new suckers money—and America is literally built on a Ponzi scheme. This is how they fund their roads and bridges! No wonder they're falling apart. Their military collapsing is just a consequence of the deep accounting fraud at the heart of their everything.

As Marohn details in one simple case study:

Rural Road

A small, rural road is paved, with the costs of the surfacing project split evenly between the property owners and the city. We asked a simple question: Based on the taxes being paid by the property owners along this road, how long will it take the city to recoup its 50% contribution. The answer: 37 years. Of course, the road is only expected to last 20 to 25 years. Who pays the difference?

The generalizable point here is that the federal government gives (basically just creates) money to pay for some infrastructure, but then the state (or town) is liable for the maintenance. But the state doesn't actually have the tax base to pay for it (as Marohn shows in multiple case studies). That money was just created out of nowhere by the federal government. And so the state cannot actually pay for the maintenance, unless they get more cashflow from the federal spigot, for a new project. Then they can use a bit of that fresh cash to do some half-assed maintenance. It's a fugazi, a fugazy, a whatsy, a whoosy. As Matthew McConaughey says in Wolf Of Wall Street:

You have a client who bought stock at 8 and later announced it's at 16 and he's all happy he wants to cash in, liquidate, take his book, take his money and run home. You don't let him do that, okay, 'cause that would make it real, right? No. What do you do? You get another brilliant idea, a special idea, another situation, another stock to reinvest his earnings and entice him, and he will, every single time, 'cause they're addicted. You just keep doing this again and again and again. Meanwhile, he thinks he's getting rich (which he is, on paper), but you and me, the brokers, we're taking home cold hard cash via commission.

And then McConaughey makes a humping motion. Which is what's happening. Wolf Of Wall Street is quite an allegory. It's not that Ponzi schemes are some aberrations within the American economy. The entire American economy is a Ponzi. Especially their war machine. That's the most pernicious Ponzi in human history. A pungent combination of fraud and blood money.

The Grotesque Ponzi

The American war Ponzi is the perverse inverse of their domestic one. At home, they defraud money by at least building infrastructure. Abroad, they make money by destroying it.

This is the great innovation of American Empire. Figuring out that there's more money in losing wars than winning them. Only America attacks other places to loot their own treasury. They spent an absolutely soulless $2.3 trillion destroying Afghanistan and didn't 'get' anything much in return. So what do you do when you're running a Ponzi and one scheme goes belly up? You have to get the sucker into a new con, quickly. As that Wolf Of Wall Street said:

You get another brilliant idea, a special idea, another situation, another stock to reinvest his earnings and entice him, and he will, every single time, 'cause they're addicted.

To cover up the loss of Afghanistan America invaded Iraq. When that went screwy they invaded Libya, then Syria. That wasn't enough so they went even bigger, provoking Russia by corrupting Ukraine. The Ponzi Empire leaves a trail of destruction wherever they go, but the jig is only up if they stop. So they never stop. This is a big reason America keeps starting war after war after war. They've got to keep the scam going. As Marohn says, "like any Ponzi scheme, as soon as the rate of growth slows, it all goes bad very quickly." Which is the point we're getting to now. America is pushing up against countries like China, Russia, and Iran that it cannot actually intimidate like the innocent civilians and weddings it's used to bombing from afar. We have finally reached the end of this fatal Ponzi. The scams are getting closer and closer together and running into each other. People are beginning to see, and soon they'll start withdrawing their money.

The American Military (Is Too) Complex

The American military is obviously not good anymore. It's definitely big, and it's definitely expensive, but these are both liabilities, not assets. America has a bunch of aging matériel and a bunch of men who are too unhealthy, unwilling, and simply not required to serve. Crumbling military infrastructure is just an offshoot of America's long experiment in short-term thinking. Just as Boeing is crashing because they tried to cannibalize a 1960s airframe down to the bone, America is crashing for the same reason.

Just as Boeing is still flying the 737 airframe some 80 years later, the American military is still flying B52s and 1960s era designs. Those are the designs that work best, in fact. The old technology still worked into the early 2000s, but it's already been depreciated and yet they're still using it. The American military is simply getting old and dying and should retire and stop embarrassing itself.

America is now facing younger 'threats' like China and Russia and Iran just as America's military is getting old and falling apart. In truth, none of those countries are a threat, they'd all be happy to trade. But America chose violence and so here we are. America was really strong once, but any living being is stronger when they're younger. Eventually your body becomes a liability and drags you down. In fact, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

All beings are young and strong for a while, old and powerful, and then aged and falling apart. It's important to understand that every being—artificial or natural—must eventually peace out. This is just the way of things. This is simply what's happened to the US military. We all return to Allah, human and genie, humanity and engineering.

We'll go through the decay of the American military limb by limb, but that's the general principle. America is falling apart because it's old and didn't take care of itself. You know how it goes. This is really the nature of existence, and you can feel it in your own bones.

Are you still here? Here's Part Two: How America's Military Is Falling Apart. This goes into more detail about how, precisely, they're fucked.

3. America's Long Retreat

As the anthropologist Wade Davis said, the United States never stood down after World War II. He said, "The United States, virtually a demilitarized nation on the eve of the Second World War, never stood down in the wake of victory. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not once gone to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace."

WWII

In truth, World War II didn't end in 1945, it just ended in Europe. World War II kept going from 1939-1991 and the Nazis won in the end. They just merged with the western allies, like McDonnell Douglas and Boeing. Nazis went on to command NATO, to build weapons for the Americans, and to run West Germany and now the EU. If you read Mein Kampf, Hitler's main enemy was always communists and Slavs, and America took up his cause, along with a lot of his crew.

The western allies, in fact, finished Hitler's program of getting Jews out of Europe by dumping them (and white guilt) onto Palestine. As Sneha Krishnan said, "The displacement of European guilt for the Holocaust onto the Palestinian people is maybe the most significant imperial sleight of hand in our times. Real antisemites sit safe in their whiteness, pointing fingers at a population being genocided, egging on another atrocity." The only thing I'd add is that this is the second most significant sleight of hand. The greatest sleight of hand was hiding the American Empire entirely, and pretending like they occupied and invaded places benignly. The truth is that World War II continued for colored people, and the white supremacists that inspired the Nazis won in the end.

'After' World War II, France massacred Algerians and Vietnamese, the UK put Kenyans in concentration camps, and the Europeans kept doing Nazi shit, absolved now because Hitler died for their sins. America—a tax evasion scheme for slave-holders—came to the rescue of the 'old world' as the arch imperialist Churchill predicted. America took up the mantle of killing communists so fervently that Hitler would be thrilled. The truth is that Hitler really wasn't a European anomaly. He was just the last honest European. As Aimé Césaire said, "At bottom, what [white men] cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself … it is the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the n — of Africa." But I digress.

'After' World War II, America took over Western Europe (the worst Europe), its foreign bases and colonies, and even its wars, like the French oppression of Vietnam, and the Nazi fight against communism. Zionists became honorary White people, so long as they largely left Europe, genocided someone else, and guarded their gas. Every nation that tried to raise their head got couped and attacked mercilessly until they became permanently sanctioned or capital colonized again. They called this phase of literally world war the 'Cold' War because that's how they feel about colored people. But southern blood ran hot and red.

After World War II finally ended in 1991—when the USSR fell quite peacefully—the US took credit and declared victory for themselves. Francis Fukuyama said it was the 'end of history'. He said, "The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism." Or as the Wicked Witch of the West said about capitalism, "there is no alternative." And, indeed, this seemed entirely plausible. Just a few mopping up operations, and then blue jeans and rock music into the flying car future.

Commies

For a while America filled the mop bucket with the blood of its own sons, but after student protests they had to end the draft. After Vietnam, America could no longer just field a large army whenever they wanted to. Increasingly, like the British Empire, they had to rely on local proxies and pawns. So the CIA-heavy military outsourced conquest and chaos to corrupt local elites, or created them from whole cloth like the 'Israelis'. It was classic divide and conquer, using bribes, manipulation, threats, and coups to corrupt governments and destabilize regions. This was all disguised as 'peacemaking', but as the Quran told and foretold, "When they are told, 'Do not cause corruption in the land,' they say, 'We are only promoters of peace."

As the cold wars froze, America left a trail of divided countries and ruined hopes. Nations just lifting their head from under European colonialism were brutally smashed down by America, and entire nations like 'Israel' were created to keep their regions divided. New boss, same as the old boss. As America began running out of imperial energy, the world froze into a divided Korea, a divided Palestine, a divided USSR, and a (slightly) divided China. These are still the fault lines of White Empire to this day. This is what they broke, and this is where it breaks. Just look around. As Mao Tse-Tung said then, "Imperialism is afraid of China and of the Arabs. Israel and Formosa [Taiwan] are bases of imperialism in Asia. You are the front gate of the great continent, and we are the rear. They created Israel for you, and Formosa for us." Mao is long dead, but This is still happening.

At this point, you might notice my bent towards communism, or at least lack of animus. I don't posit two evil empires in the White and Red, no, I like communism and think the bad guys won in the end. It's indeed not coincidental that most anti-colonial movements were either socialist or had socialisty policies (I'm using the terms 'socialism' and 'communism' interchangeably here). For many countries, home-brewed communism was the way out of colonialism. Capitalism just meant being rented rather than owned by western capitalists, who literally had all the capital. Communism let colonized people seize the means of production, and rapidly industrialize like no other system, ever. As Branko Milanovic said, "Communism was a system that enabled poor and colonized, or quasi colonized countries to effect a social revolution– break the power of landlords, impose equality of genders– & create conditions for the development of autochthonous or domestic capitalism."

What Milanovic calls 'autochthonous or domestic capitalism,' however, such countries would just call 'socialism with [local] characteristics'. As Deng Xiaoping (Mao's successor) said, "It is wrong to maintain that a market economy exists only in capitalist society and that there is only [a] "capitalist" market economy. Why can't we develop a market economy under socialism? Developing a market economy does not mean practising capitalism. While maintaining a planned economy as the mainstay of our economic system, we are also introducing a market economy. But it is a socialist market economy." But I digress.

The point is that what America called 'the free world' or 'free markets' was really colonization in new rhetorical dress. Joining this 'trade' and 'security' network was really agreeing to be exploited, and to pay for your own occupation (re: especially Australia). Vassals (now called 'allies') were integrated into the Empire's economic agenda as suppliers of resources and labor, and paid imperial tribute by buying US currency and treasuries. As fancy French inequality mansplainer Thomas Piketty said recently, "Bottom line: rich countries pretend to be in favour of fair & open markets, devlopment for all etc. but in practice the way financial markets are organized & regulated leads to an enormous income transfer from global South to global North, year after year & growing over time."

This has long been obvious and spoken about by people in the Dirty South since the beginning. That giant sucking sound draining our human and natural resources was the same sound we've heard for centuries, which is why I call it one differentiated White Empire. The capital just changes capitals and flags and keeps profiteering. Under different lying ideologies, but always the same stealing, and killing at the center of it. What they called Christendom just became secular HumanRights™ and Freedom©, none of which they actually believe in. The snake just changed state religions like skins and kept slithering. Same shit, different day, as my historical thesis ends and begins.

Because America could not field its own (large) armies after Vietnam, they had to resort to CIA corruption and skulduggery. They learned how to game the 'liberal democracy' the British left us as a Trojan Horse to ensure constant instability of governance, so capital could reign. They trapped former colonies in IMF/World Bank enforced debt traps, paper chains that bound all the same. And this was all enforced by sieges (the correct word for unilateral sanctions), enforced by 'international' bodies (colonization by committee), and constant wars (the correct word for interventions), ideally fought by local proxies. It was all at arms length, just 'show me the money.'

This was all covered up by the rhetorical tricks I've just discussed, among many others. The 'free world', the 'rules-based order', the 'international community', the 'developed world'. Or the latest incantation, 'democracies vs authoritarians.' That which must never be named has so many names. To paraphrase Keyzer Soze, the greatest trick the white devil ever pulled was convincing the world it didn't exist. But then, just like that (historically speaking), it was gone.

9/11

I honestly don't know what the fuck happened on 9/11, but America got kicked in two of its three testicles in the middle of the schoolyard. It got hit in its financial (World Trade Center), military (Pentagon), and almost its political (the Capitol, reportedly) jewels. After this very public humiliation, America had to re-establish dominance, by finding someone smaller and throwing them against a wall. So they invaded Afghanistan. Then they invaded unrelated Iraq for good measure, just to show everyone they could do whatever the fuck they wanted. And yet they met their fate on the path taken to avoid, even faster for their eagerness. America responded to getting symbolically blown up on 9/11 by blowing themselves up even more. With the souls of dead millions and displaced tens of millions on their conscience, if they had one. All these wars exploded in their face, just on a delayed fuse.

America lost Afghanistan and had to humiliatingly retreat. They lost Iraq and, after being told to leave, are getting being shown the door with increasing violence (shout out PMF). All the wars they waged to establish dominance have been lost, and now it's all coming together. They're getting kicked out of Niger and Ukraine as we speak. They're being exposed as weak and genocidal in 'Israel' and have completely lost naval supremacy in the Red Sea. If you fight wars to establish dominance and lose those wars, you've lost dominance. If not A, then not B. The signal is taking a while to reach the imperial brain. but historically speaking, it's quite plain. The capital of White Empire was sacked in 2001, and the rest of the century was just a lot of violent flailing on the way to the historical dustbin.

You can see the decline in our times because American troops have simply stopped showing up. They scream and yell about how X or Y is the next Hitler, but never put their military where their mouth is. This is new. It changed in my lifetime. In Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s, America was still able to field armies. In fact, for a brief moment they could fund wars without conscription or raising taxes, basically a blank check which they used exclusively to commit atrocities. 9/11 made recruiting possible and the general debt slavery of their population made it necessary.

For a brief period after 9/11, the 'faith and credit' of the then unipolar Empire was good. They could get UN resolutions and fund the dissolution of nations on debt that other countries happily bought up, even at near zero interest rates. Imperial credit was still good. America also, immediately after 9/11, had the faith of most of the world. Their relentless post-World War II propaganda about being the 'good guys' still worked. As I said, America's faith and credit was good, and the war machine could execute their wildest imaginations. Which were unfortunately just nightmares thought up by draft dodgers that never sacrificed anything themselves.

In the early 2000s, America was able to move massive amounts of men and matériel thousands of miles away, for the most flimsy reasons. As someone Reddited, "The most terrifying capability of the United States military remains the capacity to deploy a fully operational Burger King to any terrestrial theater of operations in under 24 hours." In the those gory days, America could still organize a bang-up murder tour of the Orient on short notice, and the old colonial crew were all invited. Early late America was definitely able to project power, and Bush II felt confident enough to declare 'Mission Accomplished.' This was, however, a premature ejaculation. They had just blown their load spectacularly.

Casio

As the Taliban told the Americans, "you may have the watches, but we have the time." After 20 years of fighting and trillions of dollars in self-looting, all the kings horsepower and all the kings men replaced the Taliban with the Taliban and called it a win. Post 9/11, America wanted to wage a decisive war to reestablish dominance and they lost in Afghanistan. They tried to cover it up by starting another war in Iraq and lost that too. Then they tried to cover that up by starting another war in Syria, and another war in Ukraine, and then across Africa, and now in Palestine. And now they're losing all over the place. The cover-up has exceeded the crime most tragically and dramatically.

The Americans fled Afghanistan in ignominious defeat, stealing the country's foreign reserves and starving its children on the way out. They're being kicked out of Iraq now, by the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). America didn't get regime change in Syria. They made Russia stronger and destroyed democracy in Ukraine, which doesn't even have elections now. They're being kicked out of Niger. And, in the pièce de résistance, they're destroying any vestige of legitimacy with the imperial genocide of Gaza. Nobody connects these dots because you're not supposed to. The entire western propaganda system is based on the 'end of history'. The news is just a bunch of disconnected events, like why are these people mad at us? let's bomb them, over and over again. Nobody says the Empire has no clothes, but I'll say it. If 9/11 marked the symbolic defeat of America, Afghanistan marked their military defeat. What we're witnessing now is their long retreat, leaving scorched earth as far as the eye can see.

The Long Retreat

This is the final incarnation of White Empire, rage, raging against the dying of the white. Impotent, blinded, raging like Odyssey's wounded cyclops, screaming 'do you know who my father is?' America today cannot field its own troops, it cannot make enough munitions, it is by all historical accounts a spend force. But that doesn't stop it from trying to repeat the old gory days, this time as a farce.

Early late America cannot stand on its own anymore, it has to hide behind corrupt proxies. Thus they're fighting to the last Ukrainian against Russia, the last 'Israeli' against Arabs and Muslims, and Taiwanese are next on the chopping block. America keep throwing 'allies' in front of them because their own ass is too weak now. The American Empire is actually in full-blown retreat, disguised as a world tour.

You wouldn't know this from the western media, but consider the source. As I've said, the western media is based upon the philosophical premise of the 'end of history', so everything happening now is just a bunch of disconnected events. If you just think through a brief history and your own memory, however, you can see that America could barely field troops in World War II, could not win in Asia, and has now had to abandon the Middle East and even Europe. We saw them enter Afghanistan in stealth bombers and then get kicked out by guys in Toyota Hiluxes. We saw them threaten to sanction and wunderwaffen Russia into submission, only for Russia to get even stronger.

After seeing imperial proxies beaten everywhere, especially in Ukraine, the actual strength of White Empire is becoming plain. They're not strong at all. They're weak. It's not that they don't want to fight, it's that they can't. To invert Teddy Roosevelt, they are speaking loudly and carrying a small stick. It's not just that White Empire is in decline, it's in full-assed retreat.

4. Missile Defenseless

Missile defense is a fascinating idea — that you can shoot down arrows with other arrows — and it sorta works. Until it doesn't, and until you get the bill. Missile defense is not some magic shield that allows you to be a total asshole and avoid all consequences. You literally pay for it. Just look at 'Israel', blowing nearly 10% of its yearly IDF budget in one night of ignominy.

After 'Israel' bombed their consulate, Iran threw maybe $100 million in the air and 'Israel' threw $1.3 billion after it. It was literally good money after bad. It's like if someone threw a brick at your house, and you threw your TV at the brick. It's like smashing a roach with a Rolex. It's like preventing broken windows by throwing your own glassware out the window. 'Israeli' missile defense is the definition of Pyrrhic victory. They're lighting their own money on fire and crowing about how bright it is.

A big part of attritional war is depleting the enemy's ammo, and this ammo depletes itself. If any enemy throws enough cheap munitions in the air, the ammunition will come out and destroy itself. You don't need to even target the enemy's ammo dumps, they'll target your missiles and run into them! Depleting the enemy's munitions at a 1:12 (cost) ratio is in itself is a tactical victory. If your enemy runs out of munitions in two weeks, that's strategic defeat. And if 16% of missiles breach the defenses on day one, that's just embarrassing.

This all happened to 'Israel' under the best possible conditions, with weeks of warning and all the imperial bitches (Jordan, France, UK) barking. All the kings horses and all the kings men, can't put 'Israeli' deterrence back together again. They can propagandize their own people, but the military people know what's happened on April 14th. As does anyone with a calculator and a bit of common sense. Like October 7th, it was a tactical, strategic defeat. They got hit at high cost and can't sustain this model without blowing through their entire budget in a matter of weeks.

This model of air defence is literally throwing gold at tin. The payload of a Patriot missile is worth more than its weight in gold (a 90 kg payload on a $6-10m missile), and they fling them at cheap ballistics or even drones. This obviously can't go on forever, as you could see with the IOF's air defenses buckling in one night, letting multiple hits in. Imagine how much worse it could be if these weren't just warning shots, and if the hits kept coming. Missile defense against the consequences of your own actions is very expensive, while simply not being an asshole is free. But this is of course incomprehensible to capitalists.

This is the same fate US warships faced in the Red Sea. They were shooting million dollar missiles at thousand dollar drones from Yemen and crowing about it, but now they've had to retreat and beg for peace. Their fancy missile defenses (mostly) worked at protecting their own warships, but they couldn't secure imperial shipping at all. And it's not that the Yemen couldn't damage American warships, they have superior weaponry (hypersonics) in reserve and at any point they could just swarm the Carbon Crusaders. It's just that, as Napoleon said, when your enemy is defeating themselves, why interrupt? If they want to literally explode their money, let them. The US can't reload its missile batteries at sea, so after a little battering, they have to just leave. Thus one of the poorest countries in the world has defeated the world's richest navy, by exploiting its profligacy.

This is the fate of American Empire in general. They pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty in 2002 and thought they could hide behind anti-ballistic missile defenses, bombing whoever they pleased, selling expensive 'defense' systems to the vassals they put in the firing line in the first place. But now Russia, Iran, and even Yemen have hypersonic missiles that can take fast, unpredictable paths, effectively under most missile defenses. Everybody has drones that can overwhelm defenses with sheer quantity. America has developed defenses against the ballistic missiles of last century, but anything not taking a basic parabolic arc is a diabolical problem to them.

Missile defense will undoubtably evolve in response to these new threats, but when Russia can turn old, 'dumb' bombs into glide missiles with cheap attachments, they can simply overwhelm them with quantity. When wedding drones can be weaponized (in revenge for all the weddings Empire bombed), expensive air defenses actually become a liability. The best missile defense is actually diplomacy, which is incomprehensible to Empire these days. They still believe in a technological solution to their own illogical terrorism. It's like someone who builds more and more elaborate bear-protection suits, and never once considers not poking bears in the first place.

This is the state of modern missile defense, which is really nothing new. As my historical thesis goes, same shit, different day. Offense and defense have always co-evolved in competition; a stronger sword begets a stronger shield, a longer bow begets a higher wall, missiles beget missile defence in general. Offensive weapons evolve with defensive weapons in a constant mating dance of death. The long history of humans fucking themselves is fertile ground for the reproduction of weapons. But it is all ultimately folly.

The best defense is not being offensive in the first place. This is something the White Empire simply cannot understand, having gotten away with it for so long. But now the natives have rockets and rocket launchers, and all the missile defenses in the world can't protect their hegemony. All that's left is hubris, which is not at all the same thing. They're throwing gold after tin, while slaughtering defenseless children. This is simply the pride before the fall, as the worst missile offenders become missile defenseless.

5. The Genocidal Gerontocracy

I was in the car with my parents and kids and my kids were like "who's in charge here?" It's a good question, though they just wanted to resolve some inane point of order like 'whose feather is this?' The best rationale we could settle on for self-governance was averageness. We added up the ages of everyone in the car (6, 7, 41, 70, 72) and divided by 5, giving about 40. AKA me. This seems obvious enough in a car, but not in any political cartography. That's one reason the whole clown car they call the 'rules-based order' is crashing.

If you look at the vehicle of state, the dying White Empire is driven by a visibly dying octogenarian, as are many 'liberal' democracies. These 'democracies' are actually naturally conservative. Rulers fail upwards forever and pass on power to their children. There are lower age limits on civic rights but no upper, so people literally die in their seats, thinking they can take it all with them. And so they actually do. This ending generation is ending the world with them, leaving everybody else with the consequences.

In Foundation, Isaac Asimov (and the new show runners) imagined this demographic problem quite graphically. He posited one ruler, composed of three identical clones, decanted at different times. Brother Dawn, Brother Dusk, and Brother Day. Brother Day rules the day to day, with advice from Dusk (the old ruler) and with Dawn in training (the next in line). They each took turns, and the Galactic Empire rules (ruled?) for centuries. It was the reign of Cleon, the clone king. The middle-aged Cleon is always in charge, which is of course science fiction.

The White Empire we live in is ruled by some rounding error (pick a Vice-President for Obama that doesn't scare white people!) who is 81 years old and cannot physically climb stairs, but who can mount a good old-fashioned genocide. The alternative is 77 years old, probably humps chairs, and is also down for an old-fashioned genocide. WTF are we even doing? If we were on a road trip, would we put these embarrassing grandfathers in charge? No way. But that's who's steering the ship of state. They're good representatives, I guess. The White Empire is visibly dying. It's a global gerontocracy.

Globally, people who—with all due respect—can't pee straight, are expected to rule the fate of millions, if not billions. I can certainly understand on an advisory level, but executive? They're literally losing executive function. And Allah knows governing is just tiring. Old people should honestly just chill and be with their grandchildren. I can't even understand the motive for clinging to power until you die. What's the point of the thing? The lord dies clutching power, and it's just a one-way ticket to hell, guaranteed. Best to repent while you can, and let someone younger take the lead (and the blame).

Anyways, getting out of the car, we decided to go for a river bath and then my mother started getting swept away by the current. My daughter screamed 'Achchi's drowning' and it quickly dawned on me that this was not her usual bullshit screaming about inanities. This was an actual auntie emergency. My father was sitting there frozen, thankfully, else I'd have two problems. I pushed across the current and got my mother to the other side. Then we waited around for some people to help her get back across, while my children got devoured by sand flies lol.

It makes you think, doesn't it? I'm definitely not the smartest person in the family, but I'm the least physically and mentally retarded, for lack of a better word. I learn slower than my kids and know less than my parents, but I am simply average enough to be the most useful for most situations. My parents have more brains than me and my children have more heart, but my body simply works better. I literally bow to my parents and serve my children, but I am undoubtably the most competent of the lot, just by the law of averages. This is of course no match for the law of compounding interest, which largely explains the unequal and old state of the world we're in.

The great problem of this era is that our parents' generation will, on average, always be richer (and thus more powerful) than us. It's simply the power of compounding interest. It's like Fry in Futurama who had $0.93 in his savings account in 1999 and $4.3 billion in 2999, when he woke up. You can't beat compounding interest. Time is money, and older people simply have more of it 'saved' up. In bank accounts, investments, property, or education. All of this stuff used to be affordable and now it's largely unattainable assets.

The only real wealth transfer happening during the White Empire is when rich peoples kids literally inherit the wealth, or have their parents buy them a home, or an education that costs as much as a home, or fund their first, second, and third businesses until they can be 'self-made'. Modern soothsayers with spreadsheets (economists) ignore the one economic rule that survived the bronze ages (regular debt jubilees) to our collective ruin. As they knew in the Bronze Ages (re: Michael Hudson), a society without debt jubilees just ends up in debt slavery and collapse. The entire experiment of modern White Empire, carrying over from the Romans, is seeing what would happen if interest compounded forever, which is a mathematical impossibility (re: Sessi's chessboard)., But Ponzi schemes are good fun unless you're holding the bag. And if you've died before the music stops, all the better. You literally got away with it. That seems to be the plan.

My friend once told me the most revolutionary thing you could do would be to kill your grandparents, and the thought makes me shiver, but it makes sense. The trouble is that the people who have the least actually invested in the future have the most investments. The people that have the least stake in the future won't give up control without a stake through their hearts. They're really trying to live forever, and take it all with them when they go. The Empire is run by gerontocrats, people that should be playing with their grandchildren and not burying children in rubble. But here we are.

I don't mean my grandparents or your grandparents, my God, obviously other other grandparents. I mean that inchoate gerontocracy of reruns that runs the Empire at the heart of it all. I'm not saying younger people would run Empire better—it's a dumpster fire by design—but they certainly couldn't run it worse. They might park the bus rather than driving it off a cliff. It's not that 'adults' are more advanced than the elderly or the young, they're just—on average—a bit less retarded. Which is the best you can hope for in this reign of clone Emperors literally decomposing in front of us, taking the world with them when they go.

6. The Impact Of Iran's Hits On 'Israel'

The point of Iran's hits on 'Israel' wasn't carnage. It was communication. They told the enemy they were going to hit them, let them get ready, and then hit them anyways. The point of these hits wasn't mayhem. It was to send a message. The message is that Iran can hit 'Israel'. 'Israel's' air defenses are not impregnable. This was all rumored and reported, but now Iran has proven it. 'Israel's' entire existence depends on deterrence and Iran was not deterred. This, for 'Israel', is an existential problem. The point is not that buildings were blown up. It's that the whole security architecture surrounding 'Israel' is gone.

Power Projection

What Iran has just done is project power. For decades 'Israel' has bombed whoever they want in the region and everybody had to just take it. Now Iran has bombed 'Israel' itself, in the first real instance of 'what goes around, comes around'. Iran has told 'Israel' that 'we can hit you wherever we want, whenever we want, and Daddy Yankee can't do anything about it.' If the Al Aqsa Flood of October 7th lit the fire, April 14th was the 'gasolina'.

As Major General Salami (of Iran) said:

"Our information on all of the hits is not complete yet but on that part of the hits that we have accurate, documented and field-related reports show that this operation has been carried out with a success that exceeded the expectation," said Salami.

He said that the IRGC was capable of carrying out a large operation against Israel but it opted for a more restricted and limited one to hit Israeli resources that had been used for an airstrike on an Iranian consulate in Syria earlier this month which killed senior Iranian military commanders.

Iran has shown that they could have destroyed Nazi Knesset, they could have killed Netanyahu hiding in a billionaire's bunker, they could have blown up hospitals, if they were deranged enough to think of such things. They didn't do any of these things because they're disciplined and strategic, unlike 'Israel', which is following America's post-WWII strategy of carpet bombing, ie state terrorism. Iran did not blanket 'Israel' in bombs, but hit the very places that hit them on April 1st, proportionally, strategically, and telegraphed well in advance to avoid casualties. This is what deterrence actually looks like. It's a message, not a massacre.

As Iran's deputy foreign minister Ali Bagheri said, "Israel needs to know that in case of another mistake, they will not have 12 days, the response will be given in matter of seconds not in days or hours." This is a fundamental change in the balance of power in the region. For decades Empire has been bombing everyone and saying "what the fuck are you going to do about it?" Iran has finally said "something."

The New Balance Of Power

Empire has already lost the seas to the Yemenis and the land to Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. Air supremacy was all they had left, and now that bubble is rapidly deflating. All the kings horses and all the kings men cannot put Humpty together again. Of all the Empire's outposts, 'Israel' has the most air defenses, and even that plus the combined air forces of the US, UK, France, and Jordan couldn't overcome the world's largest drone swarm followed by missiles. And these weren't even Iran's best, newest weapons. Iran has gotten a lot of information about its enemy, while its enemy has got nothing. As A7 Mira puts it, "this was not the maximum offensive power of Iran, but this was the maximum defensive power of 'Israel'".

Iran targeted the most protected locations in Empire—Nevatim and Ramon Air Bases and Air Force Intelligence HQ—and hit them directly. As Scott Ritter said, "Iran put five medium range ballistic missiles on target in Nevatim air base. Nevatim is the most heavily defended spot in the world from the threat of ballistic missiles. Defenses that were optimized to defeat Iranian missiles. And yet five got through."

'Israel' claims '99% shot down' but they just spent over a billion dollars to shoot down a few million worth of decoys, that was just an L given a press release. The entire paradigm of imperial air superiority has been that they can shoot almost anything down, but what's been revealed in Yemen and now over 'Israel' is that their enemy has to send million dollar missiles to shoot down cheap drones. One way of winning a war is depleting your enemy's matériel, and expensive air missiles vs. cheap drones is just a rapid method of Pyrrhicizing yourself.

Adversaries are learning that they can simply inundate western defenses. Yemen, Iran, and Russia are proving it. They have lost naval supremacy in the Red Sea, land supremacy over rump Europe, and air supremacy over 'Israel'. The point of good defenses are that you don't have to use them, people are too scared. Now that illusion is shattered. As Master Sun said,

"winning a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the best possible outcome. Best is to subdue the enemy's troops without ever engaging them on the battlefield."

What the White Empire is doing everywhere isn't art of war, it's amateur hour. They're getting embarrassingly clobbered everywhere, and clobbering innocents. After six months of watching children being murdered, even their privatized propaganda can't contain the horseshit. And so the final air defense is collapsing, their command of the airwaves.

On top of air defense, the White Empire always ran media air cover, legitimizing their illegitimacy. They were able to explain that they were self-defending themselves against people thousands of miles away, and that their genocidal colony 'Israel' was just trying to survive amidst savage natives. This somehow worked for a while, but not anymore. Now 'Israel' is openly massacring hospitals, while the supposed Axis of Evil is being imminently reasonable and hitting military targets. People can see what's going on and—worst of all for Empire's privatized propaganda—they can see that the western media is lying to them. The Empire has no clothes and is obviously tooting its own horn.

Hence David Cameron—the unelected Foreign Minister of the unelected Prime Minister of an unelected head of State—just looks like a nonce when he says Iran is doing a 'reckless and dangerous thing' and then, in the next breath says the UK would take 'very strong action' if its own consulate was flattened. These are the people 'defending democracy', they can't even get their lies straight. Democracy™ was obviously a Trojan horse left by colonial oligarchs, and now everyone can see it's just a pile of colonizers under an even bigger pile of horseshit.

What happened on April 14th was that Iran responded to a clear attack with clear legitimacy, given that the rabid 'Israeli's' bombed a consulate on April 1st. The 'Israelis' violated a diplomatic convention that goes back thousands of years, and the world can see this. Furtherfuthermore, the whole world has seen 'Israel' and the whole White Empire relentlessly massacring civilians for six months now, and Iran honestly has a duty to protect, as do all (actually) free countries. The West is still throwing up propaganda about Iran's response being 'unprovoked' and 'destabilizing the region', but their media power is collapsing along with their air defenses. They're still launching million dollar morons into the airwaves, but everybody can see the reality on the ground.

The End

Land, naval, and air supremacy were how White Empire enforced white supremacy, how they made it seem like a fait accompli. But all of those supremacies are shattered now, and all that's left is naked violence against innocent men, women, and children. All that's left is a lot of pointless killing on the way to their own funeral. The best Empire can hope for now is a nuclear murder-suicide. Their days of conquest are done.

What we are thus living through is the final denouement of White Empire, imploding at home and overextended abroad. We're lucky to 'live' through it, because thousands are still dying under the rubble, and millions if not billions more are fated to go. White supremacist empires sure go down ugly, and this is the ugliest of all. The comparatively short and tame Nazi Empire killed more people after WWII was obviously lost (in Stalingrad) than while they were winning. In the same way, the German's inspiration and heirs in America seem determined to go down the same way, rage, raging against the dying of the White (to massacre Dylan Thomas).

The legacy of the centuries-old totalitarian racist slave state of America has not been reconciliation or reparations, it has been exporting its genocidal violence across the globe while superficially diversifying its 1%. Now it is going out the way it came in, with genocidal violence and mass atrocities. Appealing to the conscience of this unconscionable abomination is pointless, the only language White Empire understands is resistance, including armed. That's the message that Iran has sent in a quite disciplined way, that it too can speak, and that Empire's days of disciplining the region are done. Coupled with body blows on multiple fronts, the impact of Iran on Empire is profound. Gone are the days of fucking around, raining death from above like gods. This is the age of finding out.

7. How The White Empire Is Going White Dwarf

This is a long, extended metaphor comparing the sunsetting of American (re: White) Empire to the sunsetting of, well, the sun. Our sun, like America, is a violent superpower that will at some point implode. Before that point, however, it will expand in a toxic bubble of firepower; precisely what's happening to America now.

The White Dwarf

Our sun, like any star, actually gets brighter as it's dying. The balance between fusion (pushing out) and gravity (pushing in) means that more and more hydrogen gets cronched in the center even as there's less and less of it. The sun gets brighter precisely as it's burning out. In about 5 billion years, the inner core will run out of hydrogen and suck in H from the outer core, allowing it a penultimate gasp of growth. This great greedy gobble will toss Venus and probably Earth in the oven, though life life here would have been already been air-fried 4 billion years before. At this point, the Sun will be a red giant, and have the deserted Earth for dessert.

After another 2 billion years, this red giant will run out of H for reals, but switch it for the celestial equivalent of fentanyl, helium. The sun will then contract down once again start giving off 10x as much energy. Better to burn out than to fade away, as the poets say. This last high will last about 500 million years, until the same cannibalization process plays out again. Gravity will suck in any last helium from its outer layers, and the sun will expand again, roasting everything in its plume. The Earth, then, will surely be subsumed.

When there's finally no more H and no more He, that'll be the end of our fiery deity. The sun that drifted together from solar dust will return whence it came. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. All that will be left is a hot and cooling ball of carbon at the center of what used to be it all. A white dwarf.

The White Empire

In the same way, America is doomed to implode, but not before it incinerates all its satellites. I call America the White Empire because, to the people on the boot end of Europeans and their colonies, what's the difference? The White Empire began by sucking resources from the solar rich to the solar poor peninsula of Europe. This was the first point of fusion, swirling slaves, molasses, and rum into a Satanic alchemy of avarice. Europeans incarnated their greed as corporations and let those djinns run riot over entire continents, sucking energy back to the imperial core. This fusion of 'renewable' energy was highly potent and it burned brighter every year. They called this the 'age of discovery' but it was just destruction deferred.

This first wave of colonization went on and on for hundreds of years and yet it somehow wasn't enough. As much as ships drew in resources from the rest of the world and radiated manufactured goods out, it was never, ever enough, even as populations within the imperial core remained generally impoverished. The spoilt grandchildren of one Queen began fighting over the spoils and nearly spoiled it all in World War I. That violent explosion ended with Germany being run out of resources and deep into debt, into an energy deficit. Soon enough they responded like any dying star, by cannibalizing the vicinity.

Germans got the bright idea of colonizing Europe. Hitler saw that all the good global resources were gone and thought he'd grab what he could where he could, while it was possible. Nazism is presented as some unique evil but it wasn't, much worse had been happening to colored people for centuries and, indeed, continues to this day. All that happened in World War II was that White Empire burned hot enough to fuse the outer imperial core itself, with Germany pulling in nations like France, Czechoslovakia, etc. Better to burn out than to fade away, you know the refrain.

America won World War II in the sense that it conquered Europe (beware of Americans saying they 'liberated' anything), assimilated the Nazis, and continued Hitler's main priority of fighting communists and Slavs. In truth WWII continued for decades after from Korea to South America to the Cold War, but they stopped calling it 'war' because it was not amongst white people. And so the dying star of White Empire expanded again, becoming a red giant devouring the world, paradoxically by fighting actual 'reds'. The colonial project of America continued the general colonial project, pulling in even more resources from the Middle East, from debt-enslaved Africa, from constantly couped South America, from all over the world. White Empire briefly enveloped the entire Earth, and has sucked away the Earth's climate in the process.

And so here America is, with no more easy resources to burn. They've already consumed their own continent and are fracking their last vein of fossil fuels. The only solution is to start enough hot wars to fuse 'heavier' elements, to get that old spark of World War back again, for one more violent expansion before the slow burn into irrelevance. So now America has consumed Germany again, and is trying to drag Japan out of pacifism. They're getting the old genocidal band back together, because they're on a mission from Satan. America has blown up Germany's pipeline and economy and made the Japanese PM bow before the people that nuked them. They'll let 'Israel' bring on the actual apocalypse with red heifers and child sacrifice before giving up an inch of imperial ambitions. Anything, anything for a few more moments in the sun.

So as it dies, Empire is burning brighter than before. American Empire is outgassing to incinerate its satellites in Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific. It has sucked in all available firepower to Ukraine, while cutting its vassals off from cheap energy and leaving them to shrivel on the vine. America is making its 'allies' look like diplomatic degenerates to defend their most violent vassal, 'Israel'. It's forcing aircraft carriers like Australia to cut themselves off from their main trading partner (China) and pay for their own occupation. The Empire is dying from the provinces first, as empires go. As Tyson Yunkaporta says, "Civilisations are cultures that create cities, communities that consume everything around them and then themselves."

The cannibalization of Europe (and Japan and South Korea, if they allow it) gives America a last burst of gas, but they're simply running out of steam at home. America has been printing fake money to paper over real problems since at least 2008 and funny money can only delay serious tragedy so long. America's resources are increasingly consumed on dead people abroad, old people at home, and old debts. They're the definition of an old and dying star. There's this vain idea that, as a reserve currency, America can just keep printing resources forever, but everything runs out of reserves at some point. Even stars. When it finally implodes and burns out all that will be left is a shit stain of carbon in the fossil record, and hopefully not too much radioactivity, inshallah.

White Heat

White Empires, white dwarfs, it is—as my historical thesis goes—same shit different day. Metaphors work not just because they're easy for humans to understand, they're also the signs Allah leaves along the way. The apocalyptic faiths are all surely right in the end, the sun does consume us in fire and the world ends well before then. You can 'know' this scientifically and yet people still don't believe. In eschatological as well as geological timescales, the end of the world is not a speculation, it's a certainty. And on our immediate political timescale, the end of this world is an extremely high probability. I honestly thought it would take decades, but Americans are speed-running collapse, like they do everything. America could actually implode in a relatively chill way like the Soviets, but that's not how they be. America was the evil empire and God knows they're going down ugly.

What we're seeing now is not America making itself great again, but its great undoing. Paradoxically—like a dying star—that means it burns even brighter as it bleeds. America is cannibalizing allies, genociding innocents, and violently impaling itself against enemies. They rage, rage, against the dying of the White, they do not go gentle into that good night. Its rich will keep getting richer till the very end, but without doing anything productive. They simply don't have the energy. And so it ends, inshallah without ending everything. As Oasis said, "Someday you will find me caught beneath the landslide, In a champagne supernova, a champagne supernova in the sky."

8. The Power Of Blood Sacrifice

I think of Jesus often. I think of how the Romans and their Jewish client state thought they defeated Jesus by killing him. Not just defeated him, but humiliated him, left him out there to be publicly tortured, mocked, and shamed. They crucified him like a slave. But look at the world now. Rome's dominion is gone and we live in Anno Domini. Allah turned the greatest L into the greatest W. Jesus triumphed over death and left that Empire in the dust. I think about that today.

Today, America and their Jewish client state think they can defeat Palestinians by genociding them. Not merely killing them, but starving them to death, making them suffer and die without food, water, medicine, or sanitation. As the cowardly Yoav Gallant said, announcing the whole thing, "No electricity, no food, no fuel, no water. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly." The concentration camp became an extermination camp after the inmates dared rebel.

Six months later, the 'Israeli's are still trying to genocide the entire civilian population of Gaza, burying masses under rubble, condemning them to a slow, painful death, and letting famine and disease take the rest. As Giora Eiland quite openly published, "severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers." 'Israel's' other goal, presented as a 'moderate' solution by casual colonizers like Yuval Noah Harari, is ethnic cleansing the women and children to the desert and slaughtering the men. The bloodlust is quite common across the 'Israeli' population, its 'left' and 'right' are really just left and right boots, stomping on a human face forever.

The point of it all is re-establishing the deterrence that was lost after the brave rebellion of October 7th, much like the Romans crucified all of a man's slaves if one dared slay their master. When Pedanius Secondus was slain (seemingly with good reason), all of his 400 slaves were publicly put to death, men, women, and children. Can you not hear the refrain, in the slavery of our times? It is, as my historical thesis goes, same shit, different day. The American Senate acts now as the Roman Senate did then. Just hear Tacitus explain:

While no one member ventured to controvert the opinion of Cassius, he was answered by a din of voices, expressing pity for the numbers, the age, or the sex of the victims, and for the undoubted innocence of the majority. In spite of all, the party advocating execution prevailed; but the decision could not be complied with, as a dense crowd gathered and threatened to resort to stones and firebrands. The Caesar then reprimanded the populace by edict, and lined the whole length of road, by which the condemned were being marched to punishment, with detachments of soldiers.

Today American Senators can't go anywhere without attracting angry constituents, but they're all so legally corrupt that it doesn't matter. The President reprimands the populace as 'antisemites' while lining the whole Middle East with aircraft carriers. The collective punishment of Gaza has been televised and live-streamed for six months now, like a drawn out crucifixion. The cruelty is the point. They want the upstart slaves to suffer and they want us all to see, to stop any other slaves from upstarting. As Gaius Cassius argued in 61 AD (not knowing how time would be measured):

Now that our households comprise nations — with customs the reverse of our own, with foreign cults or with none, you will never coerce such a medley of humanity except by terror. — 'But some innocent lives will be lost!' — Even so; for when every tenth man of the routed army drops beneath the club,​ the lot falls on the brave as well. All great examples carry with them something of injustice — injustice compensated, as against individual suffering, by the advantage of the community.

The Romans were at least an honest empire, whereas the American pretend like they don't have one at all. "Aw shucks, just helping out". To get truth from the Americans you have to hold a mirror up to their lies, because everything is inverted. Every accusation is, in fact, a confession. America's 'War On Terror' is in fact a genocidal Terror War, meant to 'coerce a medley of humanity by terror.' Most of the people they call terrorists are in fact just terroirists, defending their land from carbon crusaders. 'Israel' is just Terror Jr., a traumatized population that Europeans rejected and literally deported, given the copyright to colonization as reparations. And they have taken their master's policy to the point of historical absurdity. The contradictions are now too much, and in projecting such cruel power, they are in fact losing it all.

Like a public, drawn-out crucifixion—where the cruelty and humiliation is the point—'Israel' has drawn out its atrocities against the Palestinian public for so long that even the liberal imperial core is having indigestion now. People have watched the precious child Hind surviving amidst the slaughter of her family in a car, while 'Israel' attacked the rescue workers, before finally being murdered herself, terrifying hours later. People have watched the Al Shifa Hospital being attacked not once but twice, as part of 'Israel's' general policy of medical massacres.

All of these war crimes are not mere executions, they are public torture and a vile attempt at humiliation, like a crucifixion. Of course, the imperial core can watch crucifixions all day long, it's the main programming in the Cable-TV Colosseum. Every week a rotating cast of migrants, Muslims, Russians, and Chinese are trotted out to be hated and attacked, each episode going into reruns for decades now. But you can't show the same crucifixion for six months in a row. That gets boring and, after a point, embarrassing.

What finally changed things for this celebrity obsessed culture was a celebrity chef's crew being bombed not once but thrice, hunted through a supposedly safe zone like prey. You can bomb hospitals and refugee camps, but you can't fuck with the Washington elites dinner reservations! That's a red line for these people. Injustice was fine when it was against slaves and subhumans, but once it started messing with the "advantage of the community", that's when it had to stop. And now the western media's tune has changed. The killers are losing the imperial core and, worst of all, even more 'slaves' are in open rebellion.

Rebellion has only spread across 'the unity of the fields', from Yemen to Lebanon to Iran to Iraq to Syria to even Jordan. Hamas and its allies like Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, etc are still resisting bravely, and televising that too. It's as if the crucified had RPGs and were lighting up centurions. This is not the message they were trying to send at all! They meet their fate on the road they took to avoid it. Deterrence doesn't work if the people are undeterred. Then the cruelty just appears pointless, and the people executing it look weaker rather than stronger. Then, rather than humiliated slaves, there's imperial blood in the water and, indeed, 'Israel' and America have lost the whole Red Sea entirely.

At this point, the suffering of the Palestinian people has become what the Resistance frequently calls 'an epic'. As the PFLP said: "In response to all this, our people have decisively replied that resistance is the means to deter the occupation, restore our legitimate rights, and the Al-Aqsa Flood epic constitutes one of the advanced and shining stations of our people's struggle, which history will inscribe in golden letters." Or as Hamas leader Osama Hamdan said, "the Nazi enemy has failed to break the will and steadfastness of our great people rooted in their land and has been unable to diminish the strength and resolve of the Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, Saraya Al-Quds, and the Palestinian resistance, who have inscribed an epic of heroism, dignity, and pride for our people and nation."

Even as the children and grandchildren of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh were killed in another cowardly 'Israeli' airstrike, this is what he had to say:

I thank Allah for this honor that He bestowed upon us through the martyrdom of my three sons and grandchildren. With this pain and blood, we create hope, a future, and freedom for our people, our cause, and our nation. My martyred sons attained the honor of the time, the honor of the place, and the honor of the conclusion. My children stayed with our people in the Gaza Strip and did not leave the Strip.

All our people and all the families of Gaza residents have paid a heavy price with the blood of their children, and I am one of them. Nearly 60 members of my family ascended as martyrs, like all the Palestinian people, and there is no difference between them. The occupation believes that by targeting the sons of leaders, it will break the resolve of our people. We say to the occupation that this blood will only make us more steadfast in our principles and adherence to our land.

The enemy will not succeed in their goals and the castles will not fall. What the enemy failed to extract through killing, destruction, and genocide, they will not take in negotiations. The enemy is delusional if they think that by killing my sons we will change our positions. The blood of my sons is not more precious than the blood of our martyred people in Gaza, for they are all my sons.

The blood of my sons is a sacrifice on the path to liberating Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa. We will not hesitate and will not retreat, and we will continue on our way to liberate Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa...

How do you fight this? Morally, politically, militarily, the Empire has just lost. These people are righteous and the Empire is just wrong. The latest incarnation of White Empire has tried to impose power through blood, but all they have done here is unleash the greater power of blood sacrifice against themselves, and it cannot be contained now. As an Empire which nominally claims to follow Christ the lamb, they should know what an awesome power this is. Martyrs live forever and blood sacrifice can topple the greatest powers. And America isn't even great anymore. Their Navy has lost to Yemen, their Army has lost to Afghanistan, and while their Air Force is still winning against poor people without air defenses, this is a Pyrrhic victory and a moral abomination. Meanwhile, economically, they're begging China 'please Hammer, don't hurt 'em' and have sanctioned themselves into a corner. They're taking L after L and their only Ws come from beating up children. They're not projecting power at this point, they're just projecting.

Human sacrifice—blood sacrifice—is a terrible force, a powerful force since time immemorial. Empires can play with blood if they win (and thus write the history), but if they do it and lose, well then, those empires get written out of history entirely. That's where we are now. At the end of 'Israel', at the end of America, at the end of the continuous White Empire that has oppressed us for so long, in so many contiguous forms. The end will be a beggar's breakfast because they've ruined the entire planet, but the fever dream will break before too long, inshallah. History is being written as we speak, in the only ink that seems indelible. In the human sacrifice of innocents, in the murder of martyrs, in the red red ink of blood.

9. Stupid Cat And Great God

I left a chicken to thaw in the sink, covered with a cutting board, and went to sleep. I wondered why the cat didn't come to bed, but at least nobody was pouncing on my feet. Turns out that the maid had removed the board and the cat was downstairs, having a fancy feast…

"A cat in Dragonese is called 'miaowla'. Dragonese is the languge dragons speak," by Luna. "10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 blast off! The cat zoomed into space! He zoomed past the planets, and he zoomed past the stars and the sun! He cept on zooming and zooming thru space," by Miro. Excuse me, I'm single-parenting the kids for the moment and they've taken over. As I was saying,

The cat had dragged the chicken—weighing nearly as much itself—all the way across the room and onto the rug, which is where I found it in the morning. The cat had just ripped through the bag and was happily chawing on a wing. Luckily he hadn't gotten any further. Is this chicken halal anymore? Was it now, technically, carrion? And what do I do with this cat? He's unhygienic, ungrateful, and constantly getting into trouble. In a very small way, this must be how Allah feels. They're trying to help humans and we're just stupid and dirty and ungrateful about it.

I think, then, of the Garden of Eden, and our own garden. We let the cat wander around the garden on the condition that he stays there, because outside are cars and canines and death and injury. But the cat doesn't listen, and I don't know how to communicate to him. How do I explain anything? I'm not saying I'm on a higher level than the cat, if anything animals are closer to God. I'm just pointing out the differences in communication between different types of beings.

One point against religion is that it's not literally true but what does that mean? Why would the truth of the universe fit into the grunts and scribbles of apes? Is the number 7 'true'? Is 'apple' an apple? When I say "aaaah!" to the cat when it jumps on the stove is that literally true? No, it would be more like "rwwaooow" in cat language, and even that is just a symbolic representation of the pain I want the creature to be avoiding.

Science posits its truth as superior because it's accurate, but at what level? If you get down to the quantum or universal level it's all fuzzy again. Science is really like a child who found his father's gun and brought it to school, which is not good for actual learning. Science thinks it's great because it can split the atom, but then uses this power for the basest things. Melting the flesh off human bones and powering toaster ovens for a few years at the price of toxic waste for aeons. How much thinking are we doing without understanding? How much doing without even a thought to our undoing? What's the point of getting the details right and missing the bigger picture entirely?

Science and modernity look down on stories and poetry and feelings, but does this not speak to a higher truth, which is more than the sum of its parts? If God was looking at us creatures—who live in stories and dreams and imaginings—how else would They explain things? Would explaining the scientific structure and creation of the universe A) make sense to people and B) be wise to tell them? In short, would it help or be helpful? This was a core question the Buddha asked himself, and some questions he simply didn't answer. Not necessarily because he didn't know, but because we didn't need to. This is an entirely foreign concept to western philosophy, which insists on jamming its finger into every socket, like a toddler with nuclear weapons and a God complex.

The fact is that for the most important questions in life, science has no good answers. You can see people today trying to cobble diet and parenting and 'mental health' out of science and it's just exhausting. And then you can see science digging up every grave on earth, lighting bodies on fire, and incinerating the climate. And its only answer is to dig up other stuff and kill everyone a bit slower and thus 'renewably'. People say that science 'just works', but does it? To invert the saying, what is works without faith? Just a monkey with a switchblade, let loose across the face of God's creation. Or like a cat with a chicken on the living room floor.

What I see in the cat is gaps in perception, and the difficulty of communicating across them. I also get the urge to just smite everybody and be done with it. How do you keep someone you care for in the garden? How do you protect them when they leave? How do I get the cat and dog to not fight each other, though it's really in their own best interests? You might be a 'higher' power, but you still have to 'lower' yourself to communicate on their level, and they have to reach out to you first. Meow and you shall receive. But the cat is, of course, an ancient god and takes no notice of me at all.

I just clean up the mess and try to get some praying and writing in before the children wake up which, as you can see in the intro, I failed at. There truly are signs everywhere, though we speed past them in our haste to get nowhere quickly. With children, with the pets, with all my duties of care, I can feel the caring presence of God. Of course, like most humans, I usually reject these messages in my arrogance and haste.

God gives us more than enough but we insist on dragging chickens out of the sink to eat them on the rug like ingrates. We insist on dragging every animal out of creation and ever mineral out of the earth and our reckoning is surely more than getting sprayed with a water bottle. There's a literal flood coming, and I'm not cleaning that up. The arc of history is long and it bends towards arks. We've been given the message enough. Now God is taking things quite literally.

10. The Illusion Of Control

When I wake up the cat follows me downstairs and I let the dog in and they both get into some form of chaos while I'm trying to pray. If I'm lucky, no one's destroyed the tissue boxes or taken a sneaky shit. On a good day, they just chase each other around and under me while I'm trying to prostrate. One should be so blessed, really. It's a curse to take yourself seriously.

Then I see the old man, 94-years old now, with the great-grandchildren crawling all over him. They have no idea 'who' he is at all, and don't care. He's had a long and well-respected career, but it ends like this, surrounded by rodents demanding cheese. In old age the greatest reward is not reputation among your (disappearing) peers, but the mere presence of the next generation, who will love you even if you have only a tin of biscuits and a kind heart left to your name. I should be so lucky, some day, inshallah.

I think then, of our assassinated uncle, honestly the best uncle, and how he won't see his own grandchildren. How is that fair? He did so much good for so many people, and—in the true spirit of giving—not mindlessly but mindfully. He could see when people were in need and he helped them without being asked, and generously, like he was giving to himself. I think then of the Quran, the Bible, or any message from God, which clearly says store your treasure in heaven, through kindness to other beings. When They 'roll up the heavens like a scroll of parchment' surely Din Anna's deeds will be written there, and given to his right hand. Though still grieving, this I believe.

The entire way of the world is thinking that we can have our way with the world, that if we have the right mindset or set of products or sheer wealth and power we can have control, and thus relief. But this is wholly illusory. It never works, as hard as people work at it. It's not just that wealth and power are illusory, but that the self that we try to 'create the best version' of is, in fact, illusory as well. The self is a collection of aggregates, a bunch of references to other states, to other people, to other times, a not very special relativity. Being selfish is literally nihilism. There's nothing there at the center, just a furious spinning. It's literally building castles out of sand, and calling ourselves philosopher kings. Every day brings waves of erosion, until it's all finally swept away.

Control, ie attachment, is actually the root cause of suffering. The illusion that we can sustain the illusion is what causes so much pain. As the Quran says, "there are indeed signs for people who use their reason," the rains, the plants, the destruction of every single city and person before us. The flowers rotting at the feet of the Buddha. Christ himself on the cross. Control is the mother of all illusions, and clinging is the very cause of loss.

You don't have to be a monk or experience the sublime to know this. You can have children or even pets, creatures that just don't care at all, the sages of obliviousness. In their unknowing they know more than the wisest of us all. Right now, for example, the cat is putting his paws on the keyboard while the dog explores a room, looking for trouble most certainly, which I will have to clean up. We think these creatures are dumb, but perhaps animals don't talk because there's nothing to say. Indeed, the core injunction of meditation is just shutting up. We prattle on and call it progress, until the hot air literally kills everyone.

We feel bad because we're not rich or famous, but just look at those people. They look miserable. Are they any happier than a man with a tin of biscuits and grandchildren? There's just a point of diminishing returns, and honestly it starts from the first moment of attachment. And yet in every connection there's a moment of detachment, where you think about somebody/something else. And this release from the self is where we seem to find the most meaning and indeed happiness. Nobody sits on their deathbed counting their money or newspaper clippings. They think about relationships.

And yet, in life, we're always putting those relationships off to do 'more important' stuff. As the Buddha said, "Viewing the non-essential as the essential and the essential as the non-essential they—nourished on false thinking—do not arrive at the essential." And so we all arrive at our final destination, firmly rooted in ignorance, confusing interruptions with the main program.

I think of this as I'm playing with dinosaur toys, or cleaning shit off the rug. No, actually I don't. I'm just thinking of it now. I'm as firmly engrossed in the illusion of control as anybody else, but every now and then some of the lesser philosophers of the world will interrupt to teach me something, though I'd rather be on my phone. This world cannot be controlled and, indeed, should not be controlled. That way lies grasping, and losing, and suffering, no matter what you hold. But if you let other things hold you, you can—even if just for an instant—be carried like a leaf on a stream, not in fear and trembling every moment, but just going.