Cockroaches Against Toffs

Earth Forces Bulletin 26-7 lays out how most of the 8.3 billion or so people living on this planet are trapped in a war for our very lives, under relentless attack by a tiny minority that has come to consider itself a distinct class with a semi-divine right to rule the rest of us.

Adopting a bit of British English slang that really hits the mark, I call them Toffs.

Who are these Toffs?

A group of people whose connections and sense of common interest allow them to exert tremendous influence over core aspects of the world system that the rest of us have to take for granted. They stand in perpetual opposition to the true global majority, who go through life mostly just trying to get by.

Their goal? Making gobs of money, of course. They’re only human.

That isn’t bad per se, and not every rich person, even billionaire, is a Toff by definition. The problem is that the Toff collective controls the vast majority of the planet’s wealth and resources and treats the global economy like a gigantic casino rigged so that they almost never lose. Everybody else does instead.

To evade uncomfortable questions - like just how much wealth anyone should be allowed to control in a world where poverty afflicts millions, or why what amounts to a mass gambling addition repeatedly causes the economy everyone depends on to crash - the Toffs act as if they belong to a special class with special privileges.

They mostly see us as no better than insects.

In India, a country that seems fated to act as a harbinger for the world system at large, a recent mass uprising by a group of self-described “cockroaches” spawned a focused operation that, unlike most mass movements of its kind, actually achieved its core objective. The semi-satirical “People’s Cockroach Party” forced the resignation of a government minister who had overseen a serious bureaucratic screwup.

That may not seem like much, but it’s more than Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter ever achieved. And it sent a message that has reverberated across India’s billion-plus population, challenging the anti-Muslim Hindu nationalist parties that have kept corrupt old Narendra Modi in power for so long.

The term cockroach originated in this context thanks to another Team Modi public official in India deciding that it was appropriate and wise to say that unemployed young people in India must be lazy if they’re having problems. Though other toffs in different countries prefer other insults, the sentiment behind them all is identical.

Toffs sincerely consider themselves superior to everyone else by grace of standards only they are allowed to ever define. They’re a club in the truest sense, held together by a sense of common purpose, which boils down to keeping the rest of us subordinate and vulnerable to our wealth being siphoned away. In most of the world, media and education systems form the two main pillars of their power, ensuring that Toff ideals are perpetually pushed on students and the general public from multiple angles.

Where did the Toffs come from? Cliques like them have been around since agriculture allowed people to build cities, concentrating wealth in forms they could physically control. Today the term properly applies to a fairly small slice of the population, plus a far larger group full of people who hope they may one day climb the ladder of Toffdom and look down on other people too.

Their prevalence varies by country, but there are always some around. Ten thousand years ago, in at least some hunter-gatherer villages everywhere, several families would get together and declare that those wearing the less common furs got to set all the rules henceforth.

Modern Toffs are much like their British Victorian antecedents in outlook and character, but they evolved in response to the total collapse of the European imperial world system that had most of the planet in chains by the start of the twentieth century. Before burning itself right down across two world wars - oops. That’s what Toffs always do, though.

The late 1940s mark an incredibly important turning point in the history of the world system. All the horrors of the prior thirty years had culminated in a semi-peace that left most of the planet’s economic centers devastated. Mass starvation threatened many countries, and the portions of the planet that had been colonized by European empires were ready to demand freedom from empire. And the world’s population was then around only two billion.

Even as a new spring dawned on the shattered world system and it began to bounce back, fear of another crash haunted Toffs across the globe. Even in Germany and Japan many had survived and worked to protect their parochial concerns. Even though powerful types may fiercely compete, in doing so they develop a particular kind of language and sense of community. There are rules about how far the violence can go and who is eligible to suffer.

Most of the movers and shakers of the early Postwar period quite deliberately set out to build a world system that would protect core interests while not crashing too badly too quickly. They did it to ensure that their own petty interests were protected, as much from public pressure as direct rivals.

The proven power of mass movements gravely concerned them. Yet both the Axis Powers as well as the Soviet Union had demonstrated something unexpected about them: their susceptibility to structural manipulation.

As it turns out, if you bathe a human brain in self-reinforcing propaganda transmitted in multiple reinforcing modes, you can usually gain a strong degree of control over the subject’s behavior. Taking their cues from Joseph Goebbels, power interests everywhere began wielding advertising and other more subtle forms of cognitive attack to sell a picture of a world that worked in a very particular way.

Any who dared question the illusion from any angle was labeled deviant or worse. Like any good religion, the Toff faith paints any fully honest critique of itself as evidence of infection by evil forces. What is today called the Cold War saw two flavors of mutually-supporting Toff totalitarianism spread, with a bit of pushing and shoving at the margins but only a tiny risk of a true all-out fight.

This is true of the USA and countries beholden to it just as much as the Soviet Union. In the USA, the process of establishing the system’s new dogma took place right out in the open, as modern education curricula were developed and media companies built out infrastructure to take advantage of the new medium of television.

The history of the National Science Foundation in the USA is a highly illustrative case: today revered by most scholars as a vital lifeline for basic research, it was created explicitly to advance US national power and interests, not science. Academic fields or sub-fields that were seen to go against this objective were quite effectively starved of resources and thereby strangled, because academic publishing, like all publishing, is a popularity contest. People pay for the content they desire.

During the Postwar Era, a veritable galaxy of scholarly fields has formed, all of them constructing themselves and their heritage in such a way that they carefully avoid contradicting the official storyline. The hard sciences have mostly escaped the trap thanks to the real-world provability of their results, but social science fields take for granted absurd assumptions which have precious little if any actual material scientific grounding.

The academic curriculum in the United States - and thanks to all the money here, much of the rest of the world conforms to American standards - cannot help but be badly affected by the fact that the classes students can take and what they’re allowed to teach has always been as controlled as in China. Whole lines of inquiry in areas like politics, sociology, and economics are broadly ignored because asking certain questions automatically leads to some uncomfortable answers.

Stuff like: if international law is a thing, then how come only people from poor countries in Africa ever seem to get prosecuted under it? Or: if it’s bad for Iran to bomb Israel, then why is it not bad when Israel bombs Iran?

What we’re told to call “Western Civilization” is nothing other than a convenient excuse to call some group of outsiders bad and okay to kill because our supposed heritage is superior. Similarly, we’re taught that the USA is a real democracy only because the definition of democracy was set to make sure the USA of the 1950s qualified.

American political science is an academic discipline devoted to the notion that American politics is and must always be the most important thing in the entire world, the sun around which all other planets orbit. American economics is likewise determined to find the most efficient ways for the government and powerful economic agents in the USA to do what they will.

Science as apology is not a good look. That it’s so common today is a function of what happened during the formative years of the Postwar Era. A bunch of Toffs set out to establish a mirage of the true world that would make people easier to govern in their alienated societies. Not through anything as crude as raw propaganda, like what the Soviets pumped out, but a steady and relentless drumbeat of trash content. High fructose corn syrup for the brain. Before AI slop, there was media slop.

Close to a century later, the Toff con is finally coming apart at the seams. The two biggest reasons: a global population set to cross nine billion in a few years, and the unstoppable spread of decentralized communications. The two forces have intersected in a big way, and the Toffs have lost control.

When the Toffs were stripped of their effective monopoly over the free flow of information, people everywhere started to imagine a different kind of world. Different kinds of worlds, really - but that’s not a bad thing, because the planet is a big place, and there’s room for everybody somewhere.

The trouble is that the Toffs aren’t about to let go of what they have without a fight. To them, any serious change or reform is now the outright end of civilization. Keeping people under control by any means necessary is becoming a major obsession. Establishing cults is presently their favored game.

Everywhere, they’re pushing everybody they systematically oppress and extort to fight among themselves. When any group of people comes together and acts with sufficient discipline to demand something and get it, Toffs get afraid.

Deep down, most of us know their kind on sight and hold a healthy level of mistrust for them and all their works. Why else does almost every culture have a tradition of making fun of people whose heads get too big for their shoulders?

Unfortunately, Toffs like to cloak themselves in nice-sounding ideals they can slowly pervert to their will. Still, you can usually spot them by their ego.

The hell of the Toffs is that they aren’t a conspiracy, but a class - the only true class any more, really. You don’t need a conspiracy when members of the club always know what they should be doing when it really counts. The most dangerous Toffs are the ones who play-act like they’re normal joes. They’re the rank sociopaths.

Scariest thing about Toffs is that most know exactly what they’re doing. They truly see themselves as a species apart, increasingly so as the human population has grown. And they have precious little concern about whether everyone else lives or dies - in fact, deep down, they’re expecting a disaster. Presuming everyone to be just like themselves, they can’t see that most folks are, again, just trying to get by.

That’s why the Cockroach Janta Party is so brilliant. It tacitly accepts the bitter truth of the enemy’s ideological blinders and turns it around on them.

And yes, it is absolutely appropriate to call the Toffs enemies. We live in a world where there’s more than enough wealth floating around to make sure that famine and disease are vanquished everywhere. Kids die every minute of every day who don’t have to while people who say they care about kids pretend that they’re under threat from vaccines or terrorists.

Toff refusal to move with all haste to build out fixes, even at the cost of their entire fortunes, condemns them as accomplices in effective murder. Full stop. Elon Musk, Bill Gates - if there was true justice in the world, people like that would be facing capital punishment right now. Because when you control billions of dollars worth of assets, it is materially possible to take on responsibilities that entire governments fail to manage. Giving a lot to charity or hiring workers to help you make more profits is a cop out. Ukrainians have proven how much can be accomplished on a budget hundreds of the world’s wealthiest could afford.

And then there’s the case of India. There, the Cockroach Janta Party movement’s target, India’s education minister, drew their ire because another dude’s jibe about young unemployed people being cockroaches mated with widespread anger over exam leaks that forced thousands of Indian prospective med school students to resit them. Some, so stressed by the ordeal, committed suicide.

One has to question the logic of a system that drives young people to take such a drastic, irreversible step. Around the world, standardized tests are used to ration access to education opportunities. It’s a dead giveaway of what school systems really are to the Toffs who built them and mandate attendance.

School for them has never been about opportunity, but control over how students look at the world. It’s one of the reasons curriculum changes are always controversial. Toffs survive by taking care that they’re never recognized for who and what they are. That means keeping a close watch on what ideas are gaining popularity and working to influence their impact. If there’s a single media outlet to review that encapsulates the Toff mentality in this regard, it’s The Atlantic, by the way. Never trust it. The editors know their real job.

India has what on the surface is a reasonable process involving prospective candidates sitting for a comprehensive exam testing subject matter knowledge before they go to medical school. Having consistent standards for evaluation isn’t a bad thing, the problem is educating to standards that don’t reflect the competencies professionals in the field actually need.

If the thing is so important thanks to the rewards of success, and competition for high scores therefore fierce, then wealthy students will pay for tutors, making qualification system a proxy for how much you can afford to pay. This guarantees that the test will deviate from the goal of effective evaluation of good future doctors.

On top of that there’s the natural corruption which stems from exam details becoming extremely valuable, because someone will always pay for a high score their brain couldn’t earn on its own. Then you get leaks. And cancelled exams when word spreads. And suicides.

Toffs don’t have to care, because this sort of thing is just a sad statistic. An outcome nobody in particular is responsible for. Unless someone is made to be. Enter the cockroaches, who turned out in the thousands to demand some accountability.

Seems only fair for the minister responsible for the latest exam leak to be sacked. That it took thousands of Indians turning out, many getting beat up by police, is a sign of who the Modi government actually serves, for all its talk of making India great or whatever.

Whose India? The Toff’s India - which is the same India as the old Raj, except the satraps are local now. But they still serve distant masters who see India as a resource to be exploited and drained.

Toffs get afraid when questions like these are asked too often, which is why they tend to invest in mindless nationalism despite the endless troubles it spawns for them down the line. Putin’s russia is a veritable Toff paradise, a shambling example of the end state of the zombie society they aim to build everywhere.

How do you know a Toff? Usually it isn’t hard to spot them, but the more self-aware ones can be a bit sly.

Still, all Toffs tend to be very publicly concerned with big fluffy sounding stuff like the future of civilization, humanity, democracy, or the climate, and they love to employ the royal “We” when talking about how folks who aren’t them should feel compelled to respond. Another tell: they nearly always portray themselves and the rest of us as being part of some ancient civilization - Romans and Greeks in the “West” - which never actually even bear that much resemblance to the original, but authenticity is not the point.

Most Toffs try embody the spirit of noblesse oblige, only instead of the widespread generosity that once entailed they twist it into a self-promotional commitment to a claimed greater cause. They pretend that there is some kind of big all-encompassing “us” or “we” that thinks and acts in a narrow way and has some responsibility for carrying on the alleged traditions of our supposed social order.

Most of which were invented or at least popularized less than a century ago, but the mythos is what matters. Toffs peddle a cheap, saccharine, hyper-simplified story of the world that just so happens to place them and things they care about at the center.

Ignored is an endless list of names of victims who couldn’t fit in to the illusion and were ground into the dust as a consequence. From so-called history they are actively erased, trope characters standing in their place. Toffs and their pseudoscience have infested and polluted even their victims’ ability to call them by their name and lay out their crimes. They carefully cultivate the bounds of what is considered acceptable policy to make sure that viable options which would set an uncomfortable precedent are never entertained.

Examples include:

• Solving homelessness by literally giving people simple homes to call their own, creating incentives to maintain and improve the structure and community over time. Not allowed because the whole point of having the category “homeless” is to create a latent threat to the rest of us, who fear sliding down the social ladder. There must be a visible homeless population to preserve the general sense of hazard, or else some other form of coercive awareness of the presence of the institution has to be devised.

• Guaranteeing universal access to appropriate healthcare by training more doctors and nurses and investing in direct competition to pharmaceutical companies to drive down prices. Unacceptable to Toffs, because the only way to keep health care costs down without cutting profits is to ration care, which means leaving poorer people to die more frequently. Cutting access to care in economically vulnerable areas is another favored tactic.

• Making military forces actually effective in terms of costs and impacts by leveraging technology and eliminating traditional practices that no longer serve a real purpose. This would upset a whole legion of lucrative apple carts operated by entrepreneurs who presently capitalize on the average person knowing next to nothing about security affairs. Just worship designated heroes, bury them when they come home in boxes, and don’t question where all that tax money goes, civilians.

• Limiting everyone’s exposure to increased energy demand thanks to stuff like data centers by building renewable energy facilities at the rate they could actually be going up and guaranteeing community ownership of facilities. The latter helps buffer communities everywhere against inflation and energy shortages, while the former is a build it, they will come situation. More energy equals cheaper energy on average equals more attractive investment climate. Not rocket science, but energy monopolies are super lucrative.

• Streamlining and improving education by letting students choose what they need to learn to achieve their goals, and school is merely a place where they get tutoring and other forms of support as needed throughout one’s life. Aside from throwing about fifty percent of today’s tenured faculty out of a job, the four years most students spend at university is fertile ground for instilling Toff ideals. After another two to six in graduate school, the propaganda will have seeped in or the student will have evacuated the ivory tower.

If you have even a bit of formal training in policy studies, it’s basically child’s play to generate a list of good ideas that would make things better for people. I’m not trying to show off here or anything. Solutions are everywhere. They just get ruled out by ideology. A hidden ideology that is rarely if ever named.

It’s not as simple as 99% against 1%. Marxist talk about the proletariat, bourgeoisie, and capital is outdated. Toffs aren’t 1% of the population, or even .01%. Toffness is a state of mind, not a material condition. It’s an attempt to weaponize people’s natural anxiety about the complexities of the world and convince them to join a pyramid scam that promises benefits only the founders and their friends will ever enjoy.

The worst fear of the Toff is the idea that a democratic movement can come together and go after their government on some aspect of policy in a meaningful way. Much effort has been spent in richer countries like the USA politizicing any and all actions, assigning people to teams that keep them divided instead of finding common ground.

So when a group of Indians or Ukrainians get together and launch a focused protest with a specific objective and demand of politicians, this resonates in ways that standard general protests fail to. Toffs everywhere take notice. And worry.

Here’s the key lesson folks everywhere should take to heart: there is a model favored by many activists that promotes constant engagement, of never letting conversation about an issue die down. This is very wrong. It is the antithesis of true strategy - and hallmark of the sort of behavior that Toffs rely on covert allies to push to destroy movements that oppose them.

What they fear is true coordination: an opposition capable of choosing when and where to land a punch. The Toffs are terrified of anything that they can’t control and will always seek to develop an understanding, a deal that prevents them getting sucked into an open-ended fight not on their terms. So you form up, pick a target, hit them, then withdraw - not persistently engage.

One of the most important things to keep in mind about the Toffs is that they are utterly convinced that the world’s population has gone too high to avoid a global catastrophe in the near future. They are, as a class, intentionally and ruthlessly looting whatever they can crack open and lying to the general public about what’s going on in the world.

Costs for a great many things are set to rise, on average, for a generation to come. All this talk of an AI revolution or singularity or whatever is a con, an excuse for big companies which have heretofore held staff counts as a proxy for success and attractiveness to investors to shift models. Instead of large numbers of fresh college grads doing makework, tech companies want algorithms they can monetize by charging for the processing power they use answering people’s random questions about whatever.

And when the economy comes crashing down again, as it always does eventually, they’ll be out there demanding that everyone’s tax dollars be handed over to them or else there will be a new Great Depression. This is the scam. Just like back in the spring of 2020 so many of them got together to push the outright lie that society faced a simple choice between economic calamity and accepting the death of up to 1% of the population once Covid-19 controls went away.

Truth was, a more disciplined approach that was both more and less restrictive, conditioned on conditions and forecasts, could have saved a lot of lives. But the Toffs falsely pushed the idea across every channel that it was safety or the economy, and so condemned millions to an early grave.

What’s a cockroach to do in this mad mad world? Simple: don’t fall for anyone’s trite bullshit. Get together with like-minded friends and throw punches at the system where appropriate and when the situation demands it. That’s not a call for violence, by the way, but a metaphor. Though I am not condemning violence when appropriate and necessary. Self-defense and protection of others is not a right, but an obligation.

The strangely hopeful thing about the brave new world we’re all blundering into is that the subordination of political and social dynamics to economic is in many ways deeply liberating. The market is anarchy, even if some powerful interests will always try to rig it in their favor and sometimes get away with it. But all manner of individuals and groups are as well placed to take advantage of emerging technological tools and out-compete the Toffs at every turn.

It only takes a little creativity, imagination, and refusal to tolerate bullshit. Mistrust of advertising is also justified.

The Toffs’ essential weakness is dependence on an illusion of the world and people’s relationships that doesn’t correspond to the lived reality of the majority. The answer to the question who will rule the world? is almost certain to be no one at all.

But Toffs will try.

The next world system is set to more resemble an ecosystem sprawling across a complex landscape than a Venn diagram. Toffs are addled by the need to exert control on everything they can to protect their investments. Yet he who defends everywhere defends nowhere, as an old German who was pretty good at war once said.

Regional Geopolitical Developments - July 2026

That concludes the more esoteric portion of this month’s Bulletin. The remainder will offer a quick overview of where geopolitical matters presently stand.

Europe

Well, a russian cruise missile flew 100km into Poland last night without the Poles shooting it down. Not a great look, but with Europe, appearances are often deceiving. For the most part, the past month has seen European support for Ukraine firm up and even expand.

It has been genuinely impressive how European support for Ukraine has weathered both Trump’s shenanigans and russia’s useful idiots on the continent and beyond. And this ongoing spat with Poland over history. As if both Poles and Ukrainians don’t have traumatic memories and people who did terrible things a century ago.

European governments are these days largely acting as if they understand the stakes of the game, finally. There will always be operational problems aplenty to cope with when coordinating a couple dozen countries, but the general consensus across Europe looks to be that Ukraine has to at least fight the russians to a hard draw, if not roll them back, at any cost short of Europe going to war.

The money is there to keep Ukraine going, and Ukrainian technology is advancing at a dizzying pace. So Europe is on track to get through the world system collapse looking stronger than it did before.

With respect to Ukraine’s strategic position: if most of Europe is on your side, that’s a superpower level of economic commitment, which at this point in the war will eventually prove decisive. Moscow’s resource base is under attack, nobody believes the nuclear arsenal is ever actually going to be used, and China allowing sales of stuff to russia is not at all the same as active military support.

Putin’s war has an expiration date now. While the russians may throw bodies at the Drone Wall long into 2027, it isn’t going to make a difference, because the killzone is now too wide to be operationally breached by infantry infiltration. If Putin somehow managed to capture urban Donbas eventually, another million casualties and two years from now, it would remain a burnt-out ruin haunted by Ukrainian drones - and so would the rest of the line of contact with Ukraine.

Incidentally, Iran threatened to fire missiles at Ukraine in response to Ukraine blowing up a ship carrying cargo, probably military, between Iran and russia. Odd that the Iranians don’t seem aware that Ukraine has missiles with substantial range too, and fewer reservations than Trump about going through with dropping a heavy warhead on a power plant. Also, the Ukrainians aren’t apt to be cowed by a one-off missile strike. They deal with those every night.

Some Iranian propaganda is funny. Some of it is so unsophisticated it’s a compliment to call it dumb. Stick with humiliating the USA, guys.

Beyond the Ukraine War, the Europeans have made it through recent Trump encounters without too many more threats to take Greenland, mostly just whining about Europe doing nothing to help with Iran - even though Europe supposedly has no military power and is totally reliant on the US or whatever. Is nice to see the Europeans no longer kowtowing to him. No need.

Look, the USA is reportedly holding less than a thousand Patriot missiles capable of taking down ballistic missiles. Two thirds of the inventory is gone and will take years to replace. The USA can no longer defend bases in missile range of Iran, China, North Korea, or russia from attack, which means US airpower is crippled. So the USA isn’t fighting a real war any time soon, at least not of its own volition.

Indo-Med

As most folks are probably aware, the Iran War flared up again in July, Team Trump deciding to take another shot at bombing Iran into submission. While this might seem to contradict my prior forecast of the worst being over, in fact during this wave both sides were far more circumspect in their targeting. US attacks have focused on the coast, not the interior of the country, and Iran is hitting US bases more than infrastructure in the Gulf. Barrages are smaller, too.

That’s what makes it all the more frustrating and frankly absurd that the US lost four more killed in action this month, three when an Iranian missile hit their barracks in Jordan and another during a supposedly “controlled detonation” of a downed Shahed in Iraq. The Iranians weren’t even trying all that hard, yet still got through. Multiple times, actually. Other bases in Bahrain and Kuwait are hit almost routinely.

The Pentagon is so embarrassed by this utterly humiliating inability to protect personnel that anyone serving in the Middle East is reportedly about to have their cellphone confiscated. Because if it weren’t for US troops uploading footage, so Pentagon corporatethink goes, Iran would have no way of knowing that it had blown something up at all. US bases don’t, y’know, usually have a legion of locals working in the laundry or whatever, and are never, ever near a populated area where a civilian might have a fiber optic line US jamming can’t touch. There aren’t commercial satellites not under US control that can take nice pictures, either.

Good grief, this is a real for fuck’s sake kind of moment. Good to know the Pentagon hasn’t changed in decades. Especially the Army, whose officers fixated so hard on IED, rocket, and car bomb threats that they done forgot that some bad guys use other stuff, like missiles and drones. That’s only been going on in Ukraine for, oh, what, four and a half years now on a mass scale.

Nice learning curve. Better be glad the US military hasn’t had to fight a war like the one in Ukraine. Never, ever underestimate the ability of someone who came out of the West Point machine to act like a careerist robot. If attacked in a way they can’t immediately apply a textbook label to or by something that won’t wait thirty-six hours for them to run a full check-every-bureaucratic-box planning cycle, they’re dumbfounded.

Then layer on that utter moron Hegseth Trump is letting run the Pentagon, and is it any wonder the place is acting like it’s 1976 again?

Though I almost can’t even get mad at Trump and his goons any more - even when the US military yanks most people from bases in Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait, that still isn’t enough to protect them. So say goodbye to calling loved ones to check on them, deployed personnel in CENTCOMland, because your masters in Florida are really tired of the pesky media getting wind of just how badly the military is performing in this vapid and hopeless war with Iran.

As to the actual geopolitics of it all, right now Iran is visibly determined to impose as many costs on the USA as it can short of forcing an all-out US aerial assault that makes good on all Trump’s bluster about ending Iran’s civilization. Sensible strategy, though I guess I shouldn’t say so, with the Pentagon now down to accusing open source intelligence community of effectively supporting Iran by posting footage of US failures. Wonder how long it is until any analysis which doesn’t insist that the evil Iranians are doomed to fall to the might of American power is illegal…

Anyway, this month the Houthis of northern Yemen got into the fray, threatening to close another maritime chokepoint on Iran’s behalf and actually moving to block Saudi ships passing through. That sent oil prices back to the $100 range again. Get used to swings like that for years to come, I’m afraid. Takes a while to establish new pipelines that bypass endangered areas.

The Saudis are also bombing Iraqi militias now, while dutifully avoiding going hard after Iran despite periodic Iranian attacks on airbases used by US forces. The Gulf States have all made it known that they can’t afford an all-out war. They’ll launch a tit-for-tat strike here and there, but that’s it. So long as Iran sticks to mostly going after US forces.

Things could take a turn for the ugly, but eventually Iran and the USA are heading towards a stalemate, which is an effective defeat for D.C. Geography and time are Iran’s most powerful weapons, as neither favor Trump’s misadventure now.

US air power can’t completely suppress Iran’s air defenses or missile launches, while Iran can’t quite get at US ships enforcing a blockade. Iran, however, can send ships directly into Pakistani waters, with the maritime border close enough to Iranian missile and drone launch sites that the US can only safely launch air strikes on vessels trying to get to the Pakistani side from Iranian waters.

And every day the fighting simmers the risk of it expanding laterally and out of control grow. The new Houthi-Saudi side of the conflict is very concerning, particularly if talk of a Saudi ground operation becomes more than rumor. Didn’t work well the last time, and assistance from US forces isn’t likely to help as much as some may hope.

In the end, the most probable outcome of the Iran War is starting to look like a more or less permanent state of not-quite-war, not-quite-peace, with some level of tacit acceptance of Iranian sway over Hormuz and a slow reduction in US forces assigned to the region. Which is, I suppose, about as good an outcome as could be hoped for. Awfully far from freeing Iran, though.

In a rare example of a component of the world system working as it was designed to, the international push to release oil reserves when the Iran War broke out has managed to avert the worst-case scenario of $200 barrels of oil, ~4x higher than before the war. This would have triggered a global recession, full stop.

What happened? The market was able to shuffle demand around thanks to reserves appearing. When macroeconomic factors are in play, countries can and will still make serious moves. They may not solve political or social problems, but economic ones grab their attention. Trump spending so much energy trying to game the oil futures markets during the war is a great example.

However, the impacts of the disruptions to the world oil system cannot be evaded forever - those reserves are now drained. Because the fighting hasn’t been brought to a visible close for months, everyone now has to move to the assumption that it will probably break out now and again at a low level for years. This adds a substantial premium to the price of oil going forward on top of the increased demand associated with having to refill inventories, and that will be a serious drag on a global economy already not in great material shape thanks to AI speculation cannibalizing so much investment capital.

Historically, this is the kind of setup that leads to tears. Mostly in the country at the center of the speculative boom.

Consumers everywhere will bear the brunt of the costs, though, while producers of energy will rake in massive profits. They won’t pay the risk premium, the rest of us will. Never has there been a more obvious case for more renewable energy and fuel production done more locally. It’s the only way to claw back power from the energy Toffs.

This round of tit-for-tat exchanges between Iran and the USA definitely pushed the edge of a return to full-scale war, but the limits on what the US can hope to achieve without a ground invasion of southern Iran - and the blood price attached to any attempt - mean that bombing the Iranians can only accomplish so much. The geography of the region and each side’s prior bets on what military technology would prevail locked in the outcome from the get-go.

Anyone who ever claimed that the USA and Israel would swiftly bomb Iran’s missile forces into submission should never be allowed to live down such a stupidly ignorant call. They ignored all historical evidence as well as basic military reality.

The judgement call anyone with an iota of sense should have made back in February was that missiles would keep raining down for weeks on end, making interceptor stocks absolutely critical. And in the great math game of missile defense, Iran won, in no small part because nobody in the western Military-Industrial-Media complex thought hard enough about day 2 of the war and fired off gobs of expensive interceptors with little fire discrimination because even if an Iranian weapon was going to hit open desert, any impact looked bad so had to be prevented.

So: Iran can keep shooting, the USA can’t protect its stuff or allies, and that’s it. Game, set, match.

At this point, the US should just pull everyone from the Middle East and go home forever. Leave the region to Europe and China. I almost have to wonder if Trump, after the latest casualties and failed effort to make Iran behave, isn’t starting to lean in this direction. The more he issues threats, the less likely he is to follow through so far.

Still, this is the kind of situation where ego and misperception may fuse to spawn calamity at any time. All it takes is one IRGC hardliner in control of several dozen long-range missiles to overwhelm US base defenses somewhere and kill dozens of service members. Possibly, they could hit a warship if they really tried. And Trump’s casualty tolerance might suddenly be reset, with policy consequences to follow.

Pentagon types calling a failed five-missile attack on Jordan after the US decided to pause the latest bombing round for a couple days due to lack of success a “sneak attack” could mean some jackasses in uniform are trying to cover their asses by manipulating Trump into bombing more. There are reports of another two-week campaign going after new targets in the works. Huh, wonder if this was what it felt like during bombing campaigns in Vietnam? Team Trump just flashing back to the 1960s?

Isn’t it just great for the USA to be in a situation where Iran can set the pace and intensity of the fight? And there’s only two possible ways out of the trap now that Trump has bluffed so many times: go nuclear (possibly literally, only way to crack Pickaxe Mountain), or bite the bullet, cut losses, and retreat. First might not even work, and would very probably backfire. Second is a better option. I doubt Iran’s ability to carry out a terror attack on US soil way more than I do Iranian ballistic missiles and drones in Southwest Asia.

Not much news coming from the simmering fights beyond the central Middle East. Pakistan-Afghanistan, Pakistan-India, Israel-designated enemy of the week - no big changes. Everyone is kind of holding their breath to see what the Iran War breaks next. And no doubt preparing a move for when the dust settles. Or maybe even if it never does.

Pacific

On this side of the planet, geopolitics more and more revolves around how to avoid fighting China or unduly upsetting the USA. On the whole, the Ukraine and Iran Wars seem to be substantially reducing the risk of a conflict in the Pacific. Though confrontations between Chinese maritime militia boats and those of everybody else in the South China Sea never seem to stop.

China can draw a lot of exceptionally useful and on the whole encouraging lessons from both Iran and Ukraine. First off, the big-bad USA is visibly stagnant as a world power, military theoretically well-equipped but led by World War 2 cosplayers - or in Hegseth’s case, Iraq War 2. The USA can neither set and achieve meaningful strategic nor even operational goals. China has no need to fear a US attack: China has become much too strong.

It might sound paranoid, but this has always been a core concern for Chinese leaders, and was once a real threat. No more. China is now in the envious position of being able to gain geopolitical standing merely by not making waves as its rivals largely defeat themselves. There’s no real foreign threat to China for the first time in hundreds of years.

Another lesson from Ukraine and Iran that China may benefit from is that, to the extent that there really is a technological arms race underway, China is primed to win it. The Chinese are investing in the stuff that’s proving most fundamental to a modern war effort. And they embrace low-cost open architecture stuff faster than rivals, even it it’s hard for the regime to police.

As soon as a US AI company releases a fancy new expensive proprietary model, a Chinese developer publishes something totally open source, cheaper, and nearly as effective. China’s government, for all its obsessive control over society, tolerates an astounding amount of open innovation. Beijing more and more accepts the tradeoff of less direct control over things it would otherwise like to carefully regulate to enjoy the benefits of the world being awed by Chinese products.

Twenty years ago, China was not your destination for high tech, whether that was justified or not. Now it is. Neither russia nor Ukraine could fight on without China. Ironically, the USA couldn’t keep bombing Iran without access to the raw materials supply chain.

Yet around the world, experts and leaders keep talking about the threat posed by China. Interesting, huh? That’s the Toff con in a nutshell.

China is indeed a threat. Because China is powerful. Power is a material quantity translating to capacity to do harm, and is a factor everyone in range of China has to take into consideration.

But the character of the threat posed by China is distorted, manipulated, twisted into a justification for Toff tyranny in other countries. Plenty of Toffs are Chinese, and Toffs prefer to do business with Toffs. Toffness transcends nationality: nationality is a tool invented by Toffs to secure their power. To western Toffs, all the hype about the danger of China is a useful distraction from what they’re doing to their own domain.

China has certainly learned from watching Ukraine and Iran that Toffs in the west don’t really mean what they say about clashing civilizations and all that. Both Chinese and western Toffs are in the same essential position of only pretending to be defending some unique and ancient society, when everything was built up quite intentionally from the ruins left after the World Wars. National myths were reconstructed then too.

Deep down, both sides in this fake new Cold War so many Toffs are trying to push are only after extorting their domestic populations to the maximum extent possible. Any actual conflict will only happen by pure accident, or be carefully controlled, essentially scripted in the way reality TV is, the only true unknowns being just how many ships and jets each side will lose before pundits argue how big their side won.

It is to be hoped that before anything can happen in the Pacific both groups of Toffs have fully embraced drones. Casualties stand to be lower, if drone defenses get done right. Unfortunately, those hoping that Taiwan can save itself by relying on drone swarms are missing a big chunk of the curriculum being taught by Ukraine.

Mass matters, and so goes geography. A drone-based blockade is as plausible for China to enforce as a drone-based defense of Taiwan would be in stopping an all-out invasion. And as Ukraine is showing in Crimea, if you can cut off logistics, you can win the long game. So why invade at all? Ever, anywhere?

Stupid cost to pay for what you can get by apply pressure in other dimensions. As Sun Tzu would have advised.

Americas

No US invasion of Cuba to report yet, and likely won’t be at this point. What happened in Venezuela is looking in retrospect even more like an inside job than it did back the Maduro got grabbed.

Cuba is a different country, and close enough to the USA that even a small number of dedicated Cubans with drones could do some wicked damage. A risk I really doubt Trump will take. Mar-A-Lago is in Florida.

Trump’s political situation is now very bad. The recent sudden shift to embrace Ukraine is a sign of of a politician trying to associate with something, anything strong that he can. Trump is getting the intelligence that says Ukraine is moving closer to victory, and as with Biden’s people back when constantly talking up how Ukraine was about to be hit by an overwhelming invasion, that’s a president trying to look like a sage.

Going after Cuba remains a remote possibility, yet some kind of covert deal seems more likely given the risk of another screwup. Trump talks a big game about stuff to apply pressure and see what shakes out. It means almost nothing.

The same applies to his deliberate flirtations with throwing the Constitution out the window after an election he doesn’t like. Trump hasn’t the stomach for dictatorship, he’s just playing games to rile up the media, which riles up his base, which maximizes his odds of winding up with a House majority at his back again.

Low already, if oil prices are still pushing $100 a barrel after Labor Day, the odds of that shrink to just about zero. Even if the Democrats do manage to run a bunch of insipid “democratic socialist” types (not actually a real thing in the USA, unlike Europe because of how the federal system works) who lose winnable seats because the midterm electorate skews older and socialist has an irredeemably negative connotation with too many demographics.

Of course, since their only approved Team Blue alternative is apparently some milquetoast pro-Israel centrist from the Northeast or a bearded dude posing as a moderate from a rust belt state who speaks MAGA, not much hope from this lot. A party of cockroaches capable of setting limited, clearly defined goals then mobilizing people to achieve them and go home until the next fight, now…

But that’s not the model of political engagement your college professor who marched in the 1960s likes. So it isn’t taught. And sane people lose.

Conclusion

Seems like a fine enough note to end the July edition! Next month, looks like I’ll be introducing some changes, but I’ll save that for then.

Until August! Thanks for reading. Stay cool, if your hemisphere is in the middle of a record-setting El Nino summer.

Oh, and the Special Kherson Cat community is doing another fundraiser for Ukraine. Strongly recommend if you’re looking to help protect people from russian attacks. I will treasure my patches (and postcards) forever.