"In the second half of the discussion, geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar focuses on explosive claims involving Pakistan, Israel, Iran, and the future of regional security in the Middle East. Escobar argues that growing tensions behind the scenes could reshape the geopolitical landscape at a time when concerns about a wider U.S.-Iran conflict remain high. A major topic is the allegation that Israeli intelligence sought to disrupt ongoing diplomatic efforts involving Pakistan and Iran. According to Escobar, Pakistani officials received intelligence warnings about potential threats targeting members of their delegation during sensitive negotiations. He claims these reports triggered strong reactions from Pakistan and raised fears that diplomatic channels could collapse if regional tensions continue escalating.
The conversation also explores the broader implications for Iran, the United States, and President Donald Trump. Escobar suggests that Washington and Tehran remain locked in a fragile standoff despite ongoing diplomatic efforts. Any breakdown in negotiations could increase the risk of military confrontation, with serious consequences for regional stability. Another key focus is the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's most important energy chokepoints. Escobar explains that any escalation involving Iran, the United States, or Israel could threaten shipping routes, global oil supplies, and international markets.
The discussion highlights how the Hormuz Strait remains central to Middle East security calculations and global economic stability. Throughout the interview, Escobar argues that the struggle over diplomacy, security alliances, and regional influence is entering a new phase. As tensions between Iran, Israel, and the United States continue to evolve, the stakes for the Middle East and the global economy remain extremely high. This analysis examines the latest developments surrounding Iran, Trump, regional security, and the growing uncertainty facing the Gulf region."
"The United Nations published a horrifying report detailing the wholesale slaughter of Palestinian children by the Israeli military. The numbers are shocking and the stories are a nightmare. You've been warned.
The report estimates that at least 20,000 children have been killed and 44,000 wounded between October 7, 2023 and October 7, 2025. This accounts for 30% of the Palestinian casualties, and the rate may be higher because of the estimated 5,160 children that are still "buried under the rubble."
The children that were wounded are often wounded for life and will require medical care that is not available in Gaza. The report says that they have suffered from what is medically known as "polytrauma," or "multiple traumas impacting multiple body parts at once, such as bone fractures, significant soft tissue damage, brain and spine injuries, nerve and organ damage and perforating wounds."
Doctors reported what they described as “clustering” of injuries, with children arriving on different days with similar wounds to specific body parts. One physician cited in the UN report said the pattern led him to conclude that some children appeared to have been deliberately targeted.
This is consistent with reporting by the BBC last year. “Based on the clustering of injuries and the targeted body parts, I assess that the Israeli soldiers have been deliberately shooting teenage boys in a game of target practice – a different body part being targeted on different days… There is a very clear pattern that suggest this is a deliberate aiming of different body parts [of children]," says a doctor who visited Gaza on medical mission. Other children are at risk for injury because at least 10 percent of the explosives sent into Gaza have not detonated.
When the United Nations asked Israel why it was in violation of the United Nations law to ensure children "all the rights of human beings, as well as rights held by them alone as children, including under article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR),10 which entitles them to special care, assistance and social protection, and under the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)," Israel "maintained its longstanding position that it does not have legal responsibility under the CRC for Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including Gaza."
Israel has signed and ratified the CRC, they are just choosing not to honor it. And the rest of us are watching our governments choose to do nothing about it."
“The essence of childhood has been destroyed”: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October 2023 Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel. Download the report here:
A Comment, and I don't give a damn who doesn't like it! Eternal shame and disgrace on America! YOU paid for every goddamned bullet, every tank, every artillery piece, every vehicle, every fighter/bomber plane, every single bomb and missile. YOUR hands are covered with blood the same as the psychopathically degenerate inbred Israeli monsters! And you sat your asses back and pretended you didn't see, didn't know, and it wasn't YOU doing it, right? $300 billion at least since 1947 supporting this horror!
And there's the proof of inbreeding monstrosity:
"Shocking Genetic Science Reveals Ashkenazi Jews
Suffer High Rates of Mental Illness Due To Inbreeding"
by Mike Adams
"We are facing a dire situation for humanity. Today, I reveal some of the elements that have led us to that, including shocking scientific evidence that studied the inbreeding common among Ashkenazi Jews (the dominant population worldwide) and found that centuries of inbreeding has produced widespread mental illness and schizophrenia. This is relevant because Netanyahu thinks God talks to him and tells him to mass murder people in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. He thinks he's hearing voices from God. It's actually a genetic mental illness caused by inbreeding.
- Genetic studies on Ashkenazi Jews reveal mental disorders.
- Generations of inbreeding have produced mental illness defects.
- High levels of schizophrenia among "God's chosen people."
- Netanyahu thinks God is talking to him and telling him to commit genocide.
- Quotes from Jewish Rabbis calling for mass death of non-Jews.
- The U.S. has provided nuclear weapons to mentally ill sociopathic inbreds.
- Jewish inbreeding has also removed "mirror neurons" responsible for empathy and compassion.
- High risk of nuclear war that kills billions, due to Israel's insane genocide."
"What does the inside of a Russian Wholesale Market look like? What products are available as Russia faces the toughest sanctions in its history? Join me at Bukhta Market to find out how sanctions have affected Russia, and how workarounds have been found."
"This fantastic skyscape lies near the edge of NGC 2174 a star forming region about 6,400 light-years away in the nebula-rich constellation of Orion. It follows mountainous clouds of gas and dust carved by winds and radiation from the region's newborn stars, now found scattered in open star clusters embedded around the center of NGC 2174, off the top of the frame.
Though star formation continues within these dusty cosmic clouds they will likely be dispersed by the energetic newborn stars within a few million years. Recorded at infrared wavelengths by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014, the interstellar scene spans about 6 light-years. Scheduled for launch in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope is optimized for exploring the Universe at infrared wavelengths."
"Is your "laziness" actually exhaustion? Is your "need for control" actually a desperate search for safety? The traits you likely judge most harshly in yourself are often not defects - they are scars. We tend to believe that if we were "better" people, we would be more relaxed, more trusting, or more open. But psychology tells us a different story: these behaviors are not signs of a broken character; they are signs of a nervous system that has worked incredibly hard to keep you safe. In this deep dive, we look at the biology of survival. When you endure chronic stress or childhood instability, your brain - specifically the amygdala - rewires itself for hyper-vigilance. You become an expert at reading micro-expressions and anticipating danger, but you lose the ability to rest. This video explains why you feel like a car with the engine revving in neutral, why you might feel "numb" to survive, and why your high-functioning armor is so heavy to carry. It is time to understand the machinery under the hood so you can finally stop fighting your own biology.
This is for the person who has always been the "strong one." If you are the friend everyone calls in a crisis, if you were called an "old soul" as a child, or if you feel like you are constantly holding up the ceiling so it doesn't collapse on everyone else - this analysis is for you. It is for anyone who is tired of being resilient and just wants to be human. You are not broken. You are simply a survivor who is still wearing armor in a room where the war ended years ago."
“The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off.
All the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.
Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some intrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him for a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself.
Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone than at this very moment. I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer. Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, plunge it up to the hilt. And if rape were the order of the day then rape I would, and with a vengeance.
At this very moment, in the quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress? Had one single element of man’s nature been altered, vitally, fundamentally altered, by the incessant march of history? By what he calls the better part of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme limits of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage. When he finds God, as it were, he has been picked clean: he is a skeleton. One must burrow into life again in order to put on flesh. The word must become flesh; the soul thirsts.
On whatever crumb my eye fastens, I will pounce and devour. If to live is the paramount thing, then I will live, even if I must become a cannibal. Heretofore I have been trying to save my precious hide, trying to preserve the few pieces of meat that hid my bones. I am done with that. I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further. As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.”
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the cat.
"We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad." "How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the cat, "Or you wouldn't have come here." - Lewis Carroll,
"The essential, most often, has no weight. The essential there, was apparently nothing but a smile. A smile is often the essential. One is paid with a smile. One is rewarded by a smile. And the quality of a smile might make one die."
"My skin tightened. I waited for the shot, for this was the time of quick trials. But there was no shot. After a complete blank of a few seconds, during which the shifts at work appeared to dance in another universe - a kind of dream ballet - my anarchists, slightly nodding their heads, bid me precede them, and we set off, without hurry, across the lines of junction. The capture had been done in perfect silence, with an extraordinary economy of movement. It was like a game of creatures of the ocean bed.
I soon descended to a basement transformed into a guard post. Badly lit by a poor oil lamp, some other militia were dozing, their guns between their legs. They exchanged a few words, in a neutral voice, with the men of my patrol. One of them searched me.
"The dominant impression was that of boredom. Boredom and sleep. The power of concentration of these men seemed exhausted. I almost wished for a sign of hostility, as a human contact. But … they gazed at me without any reaction, as if they were looking at a Chinese fish in an aquarium.
(One has to wonder whether that desire for contact, whatever its nature or cost, might be a universality of the human condition - the same impulse that drives trolls to spew the venom of hostility as a desperate antidote to their own apathy and existential boredom. Aggression is, perhaps, the only form of contact of which they are capable, and yet it is contact they crave so compulsively.)
"In order to load myself with the weight of real presence, I felt a strange need to cry out something about myself, which would impose upon them the truth of my existence - my age for instance! That is impressive, the age of a man! That summarizes all his life. This maturity of his has taken a long time to achieve. It was grown through so many obstacles conquered, so many serious illnesses cured, so many griefs appeased, so many despairs overcome, so many dangers unconsciously passed. It has grown through so many desires, so many hopes, so many regrets, so many lapses, so much love. The age of a man, that represents a good load of experience and memories. In spite of decoys, jolts, and ruts, you have continued to plod like a horse drawing a cart."
"Then the miracle happened. Oh! a very discreet miracle. I had no cigarette. As one of my guards was smoking, I asked him, by gesture, showing the vestige of a smile, if he would give me one. The man first stretched himself, slowly passed his hand across his brow, raised his eyes, no longer to my tie but to my face, and, to my great astonishment, he also attempted a smile. It was like the dawning of the day.
This miracle did not conclude the tragedy, it removed it altogether, as light does shadow. There had been no tragedy. This miracle altered nothing visible. The feeble oil lamp, the table scattered with papers, the men propped against the wall, the colors, the smell, everything remained unchanged. Yet everything was transformed in its very substance. That smile saved me. It was a sign just as final, as obvious in its future consequences, as unchangeable as the rising of the sun. It marked the beginning of a new era. Nothing had changed, everything was changed. The table scattered with papers became alive. The oil lamp became alive. The walls were alive. The boredom dripping from every lifeless thing in that cellar grew lighter as if by magic. It seemed that an invisible stream of blood had started flowing again, connecting all things in the same body, and restoring to them their significance.
The men had not moved either, but, though a minute earlier they had seemed to be farther away from me than an antediluvian species, now they grew into contemporary life. I had an extraordinary feeling of presence. That is it: of presence. And I was aware of a connection.
The boy who had smiled at me, and who, until a few minutes before, had been nothing but a function, a tool, a kind of monstrous insect, appeared now rather awkward, almost shy, of a wonderful shyness - that terrorist! He was no less a brute than any other. But the revelation of the man in him shed such a light upon his vulnerable side! We men assume haughty airs, but within the depth of our hearts, we know hesitation, doubt, grief. Nothing had yet been said. Yet everything was resolved."
“Said a philosopher to a street sweeper, “I pity you. Yours is a hard and dirty task.” And the street sweeper said, “Thank you, sir. But tell me, what is your task?” And the philosopher answered saying, “I study man’s mind, his deeds and his desires.” Then the street sweeper went on with his sweeping and said with a smile, “I pity you, too.”
“Thank God, I’m Still Breathing” is a grateful, soul-deep Delta King’s Blues tune about surviving hard times, carrying scars, and appreciating every sunrise that still finds you here. A warm, weathered acoustic guitar moves slow and steady like footsteps that kept going through every storm. The harmonica sings soft and thankful, carrying memories of battles fought and blessings still standing. The groove rolls easy and reflective, built for quiet mornings, front porch thoughts, and hearts that know the value of one more day. This is blues about gratitude through the struggle."
"We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight. So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us. We conceal it from our sight, because it troubles us; and if it be delightful to us, we regret to see it pass away. We try to sustain it by the future, and think of arranging matters which are not in our power, for a time which we have no certainty of reaching. Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the past and the future. We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so."
"Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night: it’s spritely waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mull’d, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.”
- Shakespeare, "Coriolanus"
“To ravage, to slaughter, to steal, this they give the false name
of empire; and where they create a desert, they call it peace.”
- Tacitus
"Long ago, but what seems like only yesterday, I didn’t go to the U.S. war against Vietnam but the war came to me. It was when my exile began. I am telling you this to try to shed some light on today’s wars and alarums since my tale is common for a small subset of Americans of my generation. We learned long ago that the USA was run by ruthless killers who reveled in war. Vietnam, the Phoenix Program, Cambodia, Indonesia, etc. Nothing was beyond them. We sensed that they would never stop and they haven’t. The genocide of Palestinians, the proxy war via Ukraine against Russia, the US/Israel/Turkey bloodbath in Syria and Lebanon led by our ruthless terrorists, and now war with Iran – it is all nightmarish, malevolent, utterly evil, and conjures up hell on earth. And it will get worse in the future.
The mainstream media claimed that the new savior of Syria is the terrorist “rebel” leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the founding leader of Al Qaeda in Syria, al-Nusra, and a former deputy to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
While there is truth in the view that the world has always been a butcher’s bench with wars, hatred, and strife being a common theme, “always” is meaningless to me. For I have never lived in “always.”
All this has been sustained by lies and propaganda that most Americans have swallowed. It is a deeply ingrained Yankee doodle dandy ethos joined with American exceptionalism and a self-induced false innocence.
Just this as it did during the Vietnam war, The New York Times spewed out lies about the events in Syria, calling the U.S.-backed jihadist terrorists (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham/Al Qaeda, et al.) “rebels” and the overthrow of the Assad government a “civil war.” In doing so, the paper is just doing what it has always done as an organ for U.S. foreign policy, seemingly forgetting that it was the Obama administration that in 2012 launched Operation Timber Sycamore, a CIA program to, under the guise of a civil war, overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as part of a larger effort to undercut Iran and Russia for U.S./Israel/Turkey/NATO control of the region.
It is propaganda about a much larger war well underway, as the presence of Ukrainian forces in Syria and the usual Israeli bombing attest. Like a mountain ridge wildfire, the winds whip wildly now, and whether the fire spreads next to Iran or somewhere else, it is sure to spread.
To paraphrase Thoreau, there is no need to care for a myriad of instances and applications, the only thing you need is to be acquainted with the principle, which in this case is the long-standing demonic nature of U.S. foreign policy which is synchronous with waging perpetual war. Yet most people don’t want to go past such lying headlines that are repeated by all the mainstream media. They never did, except when the issues concerned them personally, as when there was a military draft.
Yes, government and media propaganda have contributed mightily to it, but so many of the country’s war crimes have been committed out in the open and accompanied by the public’s cheering and flag waving that propaganda is only part of the explanation. The will to believe and self-delusion are a large part of it. And people seem to like war, if it is far away and the cheerleaders are on this side of the water. It lends excitement to life like a real murder mystery, a sex scandal, or an approaching hurricane.
Furthermore, it provides roots for the national myth, the mythic home, the mythic womb, wherein one can root for the home team as one stands with tens of thousands of team people and sing along with the words “bombs bursting in air” while feeling a stirring of patriotic pride. This desire to be patriotically conventional, to support the national team in war and peace, is very powerful. Why else the creation of the mammoth bureaucracy called Homeland Security, the un-American word homeland taken straight from Hitler’s 1934 Nuremberg rally. Root, root, root for the home team.
I know the patriotic feeling. It left me back in 1967 when my exile began. For the most part, it has not been apparent to outside observers, for there are places difficult to reach, and the one within is the most distant. My youthful “normalcy” received its first body blow with JFK’s assassination in 1963. By 1967 I had joined the Marines and then declared myself a conscientious objector as I realized the evil my country was committing in Vietnam. I was on my way away.
In the years that followed, as Malcom X, MLK, Jr. and RFK, were assassinated and Johnson and Nixon lied and brutalized Vietnam, my understanding of history and politics deepened. Families and friends called me a communist for being a C.O. and opposing the war and a lying government. It was laughable but relentless.
Many years have elapsed, and the charges have risen and fallen as the years have gone by. For years now, the name of abuse is a “conspiracy” theorist or Russian sympathizer for daring to say that Russia Gate was a Democratic conspiracy and the war against Russia in Ukraine has been a U.S. project from the start. There is much more.
But my point about internal exile is that I had to adopt the motions of normalcy in everyday life – to create a pleasant persona – to get through the days. My teaching and writing continued as hard-hitting as before, but family, friends, academic colleagues, and acquaintances didn’t take my courses or read my writing, which they made sure to avoid.
These days, many more people have been forced to discover the twofold life where they can’t talk to the people in their lives about many issues – politics, wars, Covid, etc. Something has broken. Almost everything.
To accept the conclusion that the country is run by a bunch of ruthless warmongering imperialists is a step too far for most people. They must mean well or just make mistakes, for their hearts are in the right place, runs through so many minds. At least they assume that about the leaders they support.
A key way the endless wars roll on is the deadly political game of the lesser of two evils. If it is one’s political party waging the foreign wars, there are always many reasons to still find it better than the other party’s wars. “My leader may be a warmonger but he’s better than your warmonger” is the unspoken implication.
This neat trick is supported by a host of mitigating excuses to justify the delusion that one is for peace even as these wars occur non-stop throughout the decades as the Democratic and Republican leaders switch highchairs. Rather than dismiss the lot of them, the desire to feel that patriot heart-pump, however dim, and to reject the “extremist” conclusion that war is the life blood of the country, remains.
Throughout the 62 years of my adult life, the U.S. has been continuously waging wars, hot and cold, small and large, openly and secretly, all across the world, and its economy has increasingly become a military-industrial-national-security complex so vast and intricately linked to daily life that the country would collapse without it. Simply put: Beneath daily life lies a death cult, a river of blood. If that sounds too strong for you, give me another name for it.
It seems to me very clear that most Americans are today suffering from some sort of traumatic mental sickness, trying desperately to deny it in a multitude of ways. Scratch the surface of an everyday conversation or a greeting on the street and there’s the rolling of the eyes and the looks that say, “Let’s not go there, it’s all too crazy!” Something has broken, and people seem like walking desperadoes with the flag planted like a dagger in their hearts.
Even the alternative media, those writers with whom I share wishes for a peaceful world, have for a good while let their hopes trump realty by claiming the American empire is doomed, as is Israel and the neo-liberal, neo-con agenda. For many months now, I have noticed something amiss with these claims. Too much wishful thinking. Too little appreciation for the machinations of the CIA, M-16, Mossad, Turkish conspiracies. To think these devils would accept defeat without bringing the world down is naïve. I don’t relish saying all this. It is depressing. But I think it is true.
Some people who know me call me an extremist and claim I make no room for the middle ground. When it comes to U.S. war-waging, I say there is none. It is endless and integral to U.S. foreign policy no matter which party is in office. And the foreign policy is integral to the domestic policy. Without it, the country would be so different. Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump – to buy their lies is to be a fool.
To realize the difference between power and innocence is to come to understand the demonic nature of America’s Forever Wars. When in 2014 President Obama stood at West Point and said, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” he was revealing, consciously or not, a hard truth, just as when he received the Nobel Peace Prize and told the world he believed in war. But he smiled. For war is the lifeblood of this “exceptional” country. But if you keep repeating that, don’t expect smiles to come your way."
"Over 2 million vehicles have been returned in the last 18 months, and it raises a serious question: what happened to quality? From expensive repairs and recurring defects to massive recalls and growing consumer frustration, today's vehicles are costing more than ever while delivering less reliability. Many drivers are discovering that a $50,000 car isn't the dependable investment it once was. In this video, I break down the growing wave of vehicle returns, the rise in lemon law claims, recent recalls from major manufacturers, and why consumers are increasingly dissatisfied with new cars. We'll also discuss your rights as a car owner, what to watch out for before buying a vehicle, and why so many people are holding onto older cars instead of taking on another expensive payment."
"While the US certainly suffered some reputational damage and significant economic costs from its unprovoked attack on Iran, the United Arab Emirates may really be the big loser. Let’s focus on Dubai.
Think of Dubai as the World’s most expensive adult theme park that has no emergency exit. For decades, Dubai sold itself to the world as what would happen if Las Vegas and Disney World had a child together, raised it on sovereign wealth, and sent it to finishing school in Monaco. The result was a city of genuinely staggering audacity - an indoor ski slope in the desert, a hotel shaped like a sail that awards itself seven stars because five simply wasn’t enough, palm-shaped islands visible from space that are slowly sinking back into the sea from which they were so expensively extracted. It was, by any measure, the greatest theme park ever built for people who found actual theme parks insufficiently gilded and too puritanical.
The supposed genius of the Dubai proposition was always its geographical logic: i.e., it sits at the crossroads of global trade, pumps enough oil to build the infrastructure, and then gradually replace the oil revenue with everything else - tourism, finance, real estate, the inscrutable business of being a place where very wealthy people park very large amounts of money while asking no inconvenient questions. Oh, did I mention money laundering and hookers?
The Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, named after the ruler of Abu Dhabi because Dubai ran out of money halfway through construction and needed a bailout, stands as perhaps the most honest monument in human history: a gleaming advertisement for ambition funded by someone else. The formula worked brilliantly as long as one variable held constant: the Strait of Hormuz remained open. The US and Israeli attack on Iran turned this assumption inside out.
Disney World works because it controls its environment entirely. Inside the berm, reality is suspended. Outside the berm, Florida continues to be Florida, which, as I can testify, is its own form of unreality but in a less curated direction. Dubai’s version of the berm was always the strait - twenty-one miles of water that kept the global economy flowing through the neighborhood and made Dubai’s position as the region’s entrepôt, logistics hub, financial center, and luxury destination not merely plausible but geometrically inevitable.
When Iran mined the strait in March 2026, Dubai discovered that its berm had a gap in it roughly twenty-one miles wide. The cruise ships left first - or rather, they tried to. Six of them were trapped inside the Gulf like very large, very expensive rubber ducks in a bathtub whose drain had been plugged by a theocracy. Fifteen thousand passengers discovered that the all-inclusive package they had purchased did not, in the fine print, include Iranian mine-clearance operations as an amenity. The ships eventually got out during a brief window in April when Iran and the US simultaneously claimed the strait was open, which gave the ships a brief opening to make a run to safety. The passengers disembarked elsewhere and appear to have decided that the Arabian Gulf cruise experience had delivered sufficient excitement for one lifetime.
Las Vegas, Dubai’s other spiritual progenitor, is built on the foundational promise that geography is irrelevant - that a city in the middle of a desert can become the center of the world through sheer force of neon and human appetite. Dubai took this lesson and applied it at sovereign scale. If Las Vegas could conjure a city from nothing in Nevada, Dubai could conjure a global financial center from nothing in a desert on the edge of a historically significant but economically peripheral body of water.
The difference is that Las Vegas sits in the middle of a continent. Its supply chains are inconvenienced by traffic on I-15, not Iranian frigates. When something goes wrong in Nevada, the problem is human-scale. When something goes wrong in the Strait of Hormuz, the problem is civilizational-scale, which is a somewhat different category of operational risk.
Dubai’s ports - Jebel Ali, the largest in the Middle East - discovered that being the region’s premier logistics hub is an extraordinary competitive advantage right up until the moment the region becomes inaccessible. The container ships stopped coming. The tankers that hadn’t already been stranded inside the Gulf diverted around Africa, adding two weeks to their journeys and entirely bypassing the hub that had been so carefully constructed to serve them. The cargo kept moving; it simply moved around Dubai rather than through it, in the manner of a river that encounters a spectacular dam and quietly reroutes rather than admiring the engineering.
What Dubai is experiencing is the particular agony of a city built for maximum throughput discovering that throughput has somewhere else to be. The restaurants remain excellent. The hotel pools remain temperature-controlled to a degree that can only be described as a philosophical statement about the relationship between mankind and climate. The brunches - Dubai’s most characteristically Dubai institution, a Friday afternoon event that begins at noon, ends somewhere around consciousness, and costs roughly what a semester of community college costs in Ohio - continue to be held, though with fewer attendees from the European finance sector, which is dealing with its own energy crisis and has temporarily reduced its appetite for unlimited wagyu and proximity to other people’s wealth.
The real estate market, which has spent twenty years as a reliable indicator of how much money the world needs to quietly relocate, is experiencing what agents describe as a period of recalibration and what everyone else describes as a crash. Property values in Dubai are denominated in confidence as much as dirhams, and confidence requires that the fundamental premise of Dubai - the crossroads theory, the inevitability of the location - remains legible. A crossroads from which one of the roads has been temporarily mined is a different proposition.
But the Hormuz crisis has stripped away, at least temporarily, the comfortable fiction that Dubai’s position was natural rather than constructed, inevitable rather than contingent. Las Vegas exists because Americans wanted somewhere to gamble without legal consequence. Disney World exists because Walt Disney wanted to control the parking. Dubai exists because the global economy needed a node at a specific geographic location, and someone had the audacity and the capital to build one there.
All three are, at their core, exercises in the proposition that if you build it extravagantly enough, they will come. Two of them don’t have to worry about what happens if someone mines the entrance. But there also is a dark side to the UAE in general and Dubai in particular - it is a center for money laundering and foreign intelligence activities. A friend, who is a business/energy consultant in the Persian Gulf summarizes the situation as follows:
"The UAE now operates as a Zionist/Israeli-linked Gulf security platform with annex-like and fledgling-colony characteristics. Zionist/Israeli and Israel-linked security, cyber, surveillance, defense, and intelligence-adjacent systems have permeated core state capability to the point of effective strategic control over key security and technology layers. That penetration creates strategic exposure across the UAE military establishment, internal-security architecture, technology stack, logistics system, financial channels, and monetary confidence base.
The money-flow thesis has also changed. Dubai and the broader UAE have long served as high-liquidity routing environments for offshore capital, sanctions-sensitive money, criminal syndicate proceeds, and illicit flows connected to Africa, gold, real estate, trade, luxury assets, and corporate structuring. The war-risk and security-integration shock has damaged that flow. Capital that depends on opacity, stability, and uninterrupted confidence becomes unstable when the host jurisdiction is visibly embedded in a conflict architecture.
The state is assessed as structurally aligned with the US-Israel security architecture and operationally dependent on Israel-linked security and technology capabilities. The exposure is not merely diplomatic. The UAE security apparatus, technology apparatus, military establishment, cyber-defense layer, and monetary confidence system are assessed as deeply permeated by Zionist/Israeli and Israel-linked systems, vendors, intelligence-adjacent relationships, and defense cooperation. Money flows that used the UAE for opacity, liquidity, asset conversion, gold, corporate layering, luxury consumption, trade routing, and real-estate placement are now exposed to war-risk repricing, sanctions scrutiny, intelligence attention, and capital-flight pressure."
So guess whose uncle is a weekly visitor to the UAE carrying bags of cash? If you guessed Volodimir Zelensky you are correct. Zelensky’s uncle, according to my source, deposits the money in local banks. The money is then used to purchase property that it then subsequently sold. The proceeds from that sale are then sent to banks in Israel… All cleaned up. From there, some of the money makes its way back to members of the US Congress as a way of thanking them for their support of Ukraine.
Will the UAE return to its previous garish glory? Perhaps. One immediate consequence of the US/Israeli attack on Iran is that much of the big money stored in the UAE banks decided that Singapore was more secure, which produced a significant capital flight from Dubai. The de facto expulsion of the US from the Persian Gulf, coupled with Chinese and Russian initiatives to create a new security architecture in the Gulf, is causing the Emiratis to reassess their past relationships. It is not clear what path they will choose to follow going forward, but the UAE emirs did send a delegation to Tehran on June 9. Is Dubai considering a future without wealthy foreigners with an appetite for alcohol and prostitutes? Maybe."
London, England - "Alan Greenspan, RIP. We knew. He knew. We knew he knew. And - the final turn of the screw - he knew that we knew. Yet the man sat there mum as a carp, his lips sealed. The surest way to keep a reputation for wisdom is to say nothing that can ever be checked.
We had got him into our office in Baltimore - Dan Denning, David Stockman, and your correspondent - to put the question to him plainly. He was past ninety. The honors were all banked, the pensions all drawing interest, the obituaries already set in type somewhere in a drawer at the Times. A man so situated has no earthly reason to dissemble. He has outlived every motive for the lie. It was the hour, we reckoned, for the confession.
For here was a fellow who ‘wrote the book’ on how counterfeit money picks the pocket of the honest. He understood - none better - that to run the printing press is to file silently away at the savings of the thrifty and to hand the clipped shavings, gratis, to the spendthrift and the speculator. He knew the trick cold.
So we asked him: knowing it, why in the name of sanity did you do it? You, of all the men alive, held the lever. Why let the engine scream off its rails? And the old conjurer gave us the mumbly-fumbly - that fog of subordinate clauses and qualified retractions that bamboozled a whole generation of congressmen and made him the high priest of American financial claptrap.
But man, the most ingenious of the animals, is also the most artfully self-deceiving. Each of us schemes after his own idol. One sweats at the gymnasium to flex a bicep; another marshals ranks of armed men to impose his will upon the map; a third hoards dollars, a fourth chases skirts, a fifth merely wants to be thought the cleverest fellow in the room. But under every one of these appetites runs the same buried river: the craving to stand out, to be reckoned worthy, to matter.
In the old brute days, a man fought for the right to breed…or even to exist. The modern article connives instead - and as a conniver there has never lived a finer specimen than Alan Greenspan.
The draft board turned him down in WWII for “a spot on his lung.” Whatever the spot was, it did not hinder him from blowing a creditable clarinet and saxophone, nor from outlasting the doctors by some eighty-two years. At such an age there is no need to ask the cause of death, but the Times, supplies one anyway: the complications of Parkinson’s.
In the 1950s his first wife led him to the feet of Ayn Rand, and he was promptly baptized in the cold waters of “objectivism” and the Austrian creed. The doctrine is simple and, so far as it goes, sound: that whenever the politicians lay their meddling fingers upon the delicate machinery of a real economy - fixing a price here, printing a banknote there, taxing, tariffing - they corrupt the whole apparatus and turn honest exchange into a swindle.
Tampering with the money was the cardinal sin. Greenspan thought it grave enough to write a tract upon, in 1966, under the title “Gold and Economic Freedom.” He pronounced the printing of money to be precisely what it is: “a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth.” Rand was in raptures when her smooth disciple was summoned to Washington. Now, she crowed, she had ‘her man’ at the Fed.
She did not have him long. Principles are cheap furniture for a struggling philosopher or a journeyman saxophonist; he may keep them about the parlor all his life and dust them fondly. But the Chairmanship of the Federal Reserve calls for principles of another make. Volcker had wrestled the inflationary beast to the floor, now the politicians could spend and borrow more freely. But they needed THEIR man at the Fed.
There lay Greenspan’s true historic office. The famous “Greenspan put” was nothing grander than this: he stood ready to catch every gambler who flung himself off the ledge - and so, he presided over the largest carnival of phony prosperity the world has ever staged.
Handre: "From August 1987 to January 2006 Greenspan sat atop the Federal Reserve and did the opposite of everything his essay defended. After the 1987 crash he flooded the banks with liquidity and taught a generation of traders that the central bank would catch them every time they fell. They named the reflex after him: the Greenspan put.
He cut the federal funds rate to 1 percent by June 2003 and held it there, and you watched housing prices detach from any sane relationship to income. Mortgage credit gushed. He went on television in February 2004 and suggested Americans consider adjustable-rate mortgages, roughly eighteen months before he started hiking rates into those very borrowers. The man who warned in 1966 about the hidden confiscation of wealth engineered the largest credit distortion in postwar history."
Beneath the notice of his death on Facebook there are gathered dozens of mourners, heads bowed around the coffin, in a posture of reverence. A “great economist,” sighs one. He “helped us through a crisis,” murmurs another - the crisis being, of course, the one he himself had manufactured. A third lays a wreath upon the long years of “public service.” The Times joins the chorus and out-gushes them all: "At the peak of his fame, as the economy boomed in the late 1990s, his merest phrase could send the markets sharply up or down, and his face, behind thick glasses, was as familiar as any movie star’s."
So, the old scalawag got what he was after. The applause, the awe, the oracle’s mystery preserved intact…Alleluia, even unto the grave. Requiescat."
You know, sometimes you stumble upon a little gem on YouTube you'd completely forgotten about, like this song from 1968, and that made me think, OMG, 58 years ago?! Is that possible? I remember it well, really liked it then, and now it makes me smile and shake my head in wonder. What a long strange trip it's been...lol - CP
