I do a lot of vague complaining about the military industrial complex. Sometimes it’s nice to dive in on some specifics. The Hudson Institute is one of the dumbest organizations out there, all 67 million dollars of annual revenue’s worth of it. In today’s episode, Ruairi and I look into the organization that keeps Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley fed.
In today’s Substack I zoom out a bit and describe some of the basics of the US think tank fantasy world.
Enthusiastically pro-war Tom Cotton is my least favorite Senator. He’s up for reelection in Arkansas this fall. He’s expected to win, but I don’t think he should. Here’s why…
This one was interesting. I had an idea for a couple historical comparison videos in light of Trump’s second term and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. My typical practice is to then spend months or weeks developing them before publishing a finished product. But I have too many of those projects already. So I figured I should just push this one and next week’s videos out in unproduced form without too much introspection or overthinking. It’s not as produced as I might like, but the ideas are out there. What do you think?
I’m very worried about war with Iran. But even I am getting sick of hearing myself say it. If you ask me today, I tend to think that the Trump administration is too busy with other stuff to manage an attack on Iran. But all it takes is a single stray missile landing in one of the US’s way-too-many bases across the Middle East. The worst thing can always happen. One selfish old man, Joe Biden, inflicted a completely unnecessary second Trump term on us. Nothing that strange has to occur to drop us into our next trillion dollar war. Join us as we talk through what that might look like, and how horrifically absurd it is that it’s a real prospect.
I am pretty angry. All of the Middle East’s recent deaths, the 1,400 Israelis, and the 11,000 Palestinians, were preventable. It probably won’t surprise anybody much that I think it all ties back to the US Military Industrial Complex. There’s plenty of horror to go around this month, but one aspect that I think people are missing, is the way that Israel and Palestine’s catastrophe has allowed the MIC to conquer another US president. Todays’ video covers Joe Biden’s fall, as well as most of the rest of the history of the 21st century. Let me know what you think…
Man, I’m really not a Libertarian anymore. I think this video makes it pretty clear. This video represents a lot of mental housecleaning on my part. I’m not entirely sure it is valuable, or even will make much sense to anybody else. I sure hope it does! Let me know. You may also notice a real stepping up in the amount of AI generated art I’m using. Not sure about the ethics of all that, but I do enjoy the creative possibilities…
I feel like I’m weirdly a lot more optimistic about American power today than most of the US media is. Today I lay out why I think that may be. The US is reacting to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as some inexplicable horror, another step back towards history’s chaos, and another sign that the American world order is falling to pieces. As more of a cynic, and a student of foreign relations, my sense is that the US world order has been falling apart since at least 2003. What Russia has done in Ukraine, is give us a second chance. By conclusively setting himself up as a more destructive and dangerous actor than the US government, Putin has given the US world order a new lease on life.
What’s vital in this moment is that we seize that opportunity. Europe is now back on our side in ways it hasn’t been for two decades. What we should do now, is try to win over the rest of the world by improving our relations with old enemies that no longer matter. To it’s credit, the Biden administration is already trying to do this with Iran and Venezuela. Unfortunately, they are being blocked by their efforts to do so, and not just by Republicans. I think it’s a failure of understanding. US government and media don’t understand just how bad the situation was, and how valuable a window Russia has given us. Today’s video is my attempt to explain the situation.
Nobody has any idea how history is going to go. But it’s fun to try to predict it. I have a hunch that this AUKUS agreement, deepening military ties between Australia, the UK and the US, is really bad news. But even if it is absolutely the right thing to do, it is a lot more significant than the amount of attention it is getting. It was momentarily a big topic of discussion among geopolitics nerds like myself, but quickly faded. This is weird, because even if everything I said in this video turns out to be wrong, AUKUS is definitely a bigger deal than the withdrawal from Afghanistan we spent weeks agonizing about. An Asian NATO is now a concrete reality, and we know a lot more about what the next few decades will look like in Asia than we did two weeks ago. It’s a big deal. Here’s my very pessimistic take on what it all means.
Mike Pompeo really pisses me off. He’s probably the worst Secretary of State we have ever had. He owes his meteoric rise to being better at Brown-nosing Trump than anybody else. And to top it all off, he spent four years betraying Donald Trump’s one good idea, to the detriment of the country and the world. Infuriatingly, this guy now seems to believe he’s a serious candidate for US president. Unsurprisingly he’s a favored candidate of the military industrial complex, which is why newspapers continue to take him seriously. He rarely makes it to 1% in polls for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Today’s video is an attempt to help keep it that way.
