The Post-Partisan Emporium

  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  surpl...

  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 lin...

The Summer of Living Dangerously PEPE ESCOBAR The plutocracy believes that afterwards they can buy the whole thing for a pittance while flies are still laying eggs in European carcasses. So Le Petit Roi in Paris was predictably crushed in the European polls. He has called parliamentary snap elections, dissolving the Assemblée Nationale in an act of blind, puerile revenge on French citizens, de facto attacking French institutional democracy. That doesn’t mean much anyway, because the lineaments of “liberty, equality, fraternity” have long been usurped by a crass oligarchy. The second round of these fresh French elections will be on July 7 – nearly coinciding with the British snap elections on July 11, and only a few days before the slow-burning urban catastrophe which will be the Olympics in Paris. Paris salons are ablaze with intrigue on why the little Rothschild stooge with a Napoleon complex is throwing all his toys out of the pram now because he’s not getting what he wants. After al...

  Complaints about Hamas using 'human shields' are the worst kind of bad faith By celebrating the carnage in Gaza to free four Israeli captives, western politicians and media are treating Palestinians as sub-human – and enabling the genocide to continue JONATHAN COOK Western politicians and journalists have hurried to dismiss the murder and maiming of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the Nuseirat refugee camp on Saturday in a savage joint Israeli-US military operation to free four Israeli captives. Not just that, they have suggested that the bloodshed was inevitable and justified given that the hostages were being held in a residential neighbourhood of Gaza. For example, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor,  observed  of the massacre that was actively assisted by the US: "The Palestinian people are going through sheer hell in this conflict because Hamas is operating in a way that puts them in the crossfire, that holds hostages right in the heart of crowde...