The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Deindustrial Warfare: A First Reconaissance January 31, 2024 John Michael Greer Leave a comment This January has five Wednesdays, and in the usual way of this blog, the fifth Wednesday gets an essay on whatever topic the readers select by vote. As usual, it was a lively contest, but this time one of the perennial underdogs—warfare in the deindustrial age—came out on top. That didn’t surprise me greatly.  The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have been on many minds recently, not least because neither of them has been working out the way that our politicians and pundits insisted they would. A genuine revolution in military affairs is taking place right now, and no, it’s not the one that was so loudly ballyhooed in intellectual circles a couple of decades back. The claim in the 1990s was that computer technology had opened the way to a new kind of war, in which information would flow from the battlefield to headquarters and back, giving commanders total control over hypercomplex, hug

  How Yemen’s 'Asabiyya' Is Reshaping Geopolitics PEPE ESCOBAR The Arabic word Asabiyya, or ‘social solidarity,’ is a soundbite in the west, but taken very seriously by the globe’s new contenders China, Russia, and Iran. It is Yemen, however, that is mainstreaming the idea, by sacrificing everything for the world’s collective morality in a bid to end the genocide in Gaza. When there is a general change of conditions, It is as if the entire creation had changed and the whole world been altered, as if it were a new and repeated creation, a world brought into existence anew. — Ibn Khaldun Yemen’s Ansarallah resistance forces have made it very clear, right from the start, that they set up a blockade in the Bab el-Mandeb and the southern Red Sea only against Israeli-owned or destined shipping vessels. Their single objective was and remains to stop the Gaza genocide perpetrated by the  Israeli biblical psychopathy . As a response to a morally-based call to end a human genocide, the U

 Thanks to Saint Jimmy (Russian American) for recommending this article... 2024: Too Many Things Going Wrong by   Gail Tverberg It will be an interesting year. We know that the age of peak performance for humans varies, depending upon the activity. Peak performance for an athlete tends to come between ages 20 and 30, while peak performance for a person writing academic papers seems to come between  ages 40 and 50 years . By the time people are 80 years old, they have a strong suspicion that health and other aspects of performance will deteriorate in the next 20 years. Economies, in physics terms, are similar to human beings. Both are dissipative structures. They require energy of the appropriate kinds to keep their systems growing and operating normally. For humans, the main source of this energy is food. For an economy, it is a mixture of energy that the economy is specifically adapted to. Today’s economy requires a certain mixture of energy directly from the sun, plus energy from fos