The Post-Partisan Emporium

  No conspiracies please, we’re reality theorists By Chris Rea I cannot remember a time in my life when I was not crazy about the Beatles. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the first record that I listened to as a young child and even today it reverberates with the sensibility of early consciousness. I became fascinated by the extraordinary story of the Beatles’ achievements and accepted without question the orthodox narrative about their uniqueness, which was the answer to any nagging doubts I might have had about how exactly they became so good so quickly and so enormously – they were unique. They were just … the Beatles. The Beatles were above all the other groups and solo artists of the 1960s, a decade which produced some outstanding pop and rock music. Everything flowed from them. Their best songs, and there were very few duds in their catalogue, were imperishable achievements of popular musical culture which warranted the exceptional praise they received from music es

  A "massive cushion" of madness IRINA SLAV The Cambridge Dictionary  defines  madness as “stupid or dangerous behaviour”. It also lists a few dozen synonyms, featuring words such as “chaos”, “bedlam”, and “confusion”. All of these can and should be used to describe several recent updates from Camp Transition. In one of these, I’d go as far as to use the lovely set phrase “stark, raving mad” and it’s not the one you’re thinking of, namely the latest gift from the IEA. But let’s start with that gift. Earlier this week, the IEA made all the headlines in the world by  warning  of a looming oil supply excess— a horrible overhang (which the IEA called “a massive cushion”) of 8 million barrels daily that is to materialise before 2030 while demand growth slows down because the IEA said it would slow down, so there can be no question about it. The IEA itself, true to character, called the expected supply surplus, or rather the spare production  capacity  surplus, because that’s what

  TEOTWAWKI And I feel fine RADIO FAR SIDE On the 6th of June 1974, the Watergate scandal was in full bloom, the global economy was in the crapper, and I was anxiously awaiting my 13th birthday to become a full-fledged teenager. President Nixon had instituted a national 55mph speed limit, which essentially pissed off everyone who lived west of the Mississippi River. Japan was the China of the day and the Vietnam war was nearing the end of its decade-long stranglehold on Merkin culture. At that moment, Prince Fahd ibn Abdel Aziz and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were  sitting down to change the world  and create an empire. The Petrodollar Pact, among other things, forced the world to buy oil and gas in US dollars, and created Saudi Aramco, the single most powerful energy company ever. At the same time, Nixon had ended  the Bretton Woods agreement  and closed the gold window at the Federal Reserve Bank, thus severing US currency from its Constitutional link to precious metals. Th