Okay, so at some point very soon the existing stocks of global oil will be depleted and ther rest of the world will begin to wonder if any of that knowledge the Cubans built up in surviving US embargo conditions survived -- after, of course, Marco Rubio destroys Cuba. We will wonder those things because we will be experiencing those embargo conditions, only there will be no embargo.

The pundits on YouTube are starting to babble about how long this current phase of the war against Iran will last. Here's a thought: it will never end, in the same sense in which the Korean War never ended. Remember that? There was no peace treaty ending the Korean War -- only an armistice. Only, unlike the Korean War, this war will be a continual live war, because the West has repeatedly shown that it cannot be trusted with armistices.

If anything, this is a vast underestimate of what will happen from here on in. Historians will, in a couple of years, chart a Golden Age of Capitalism, from 1945 to 2026.

I recently finished writing a book review of William I. Robinson's Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism. Its well-substantiated argument:

Capitalism has managed to weather one crisis after another in its centuries-long existence, proving more resilient than its doomsday forecaster. But the current crisis is like no other. We appear to be arriving at the historic exhaustion of the conditions for capitalist renewal. (7)

So, yeah, we're not going to swing back to some great renewal, some Second Golden Age of Capitalism. This one is it.

Two things to consider as you comb the Internet for war reporting. One important contour would be in the Iranian strategy. As Moon of Alabama says:

Iran responded by attacking U.S. military installations in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates with hundreds of drones and shorter range missiles. A long range U.S. radar in Qatar was hit as were U.S. Navy fuel depots in Bahrain. Several salvos of tens of medium range missiles were fired against U.S positions in Jordan as well as against Israel.

These first salvos with older, less accurate missiles are intended to draw out U.S. air-defenses and to entice them to expend their limited missiles supplies. There have been reports of several explosions in various places in the Middle East but it is too early to assess if these are the consequences of falling debris or real intended results.

As Professor Marandi pointed out on one of those podcasts, they won't just close the Straits of Hormuz but, rather, they will hit production facilities. I'm already seeing videos of this. And Moon of Alabama's notion of only 60 children being killed in a US strike is a vast underestimate.

When I was out on the street (such as it is) yesterday, I was waving a "no war with Iran" sign.

I was approached by this younger man who tried to persuade me that the Iranian regime was purely evil. He said "you don't believe that they've killed 100,000 people" and I said "no." It wasn't much of an interaction -- I mostly wait for these people to exhaust their hubris. But I gather that the people arguing for this war have more or less worked effectively to make sure that it's a war of extermination, that everyone who devoutly believes in this war has been appropriately propagandized. The Iranians know this and have planned accordingly.

Second thing is that, now that this thing has begun, it will not stop until one side or the other is completely obliterated. Iraq, Libya, and Syria set the tone: nation-states which once had productive existences but which no longer do, simply because the advance strategy was to obliterate them. The Iranians know this, and they know that this is the advance strategy for their country as well. This is why all sorts of Iranians who hate the regime are also against the war to destroy it. The Iranian goal is to make the price too high, in which case they survive. Eventually they will find it useful to destroy Israel, before Israel sets off its nuclear arsenal. They might not make it.

In parenthesis, already the stenographers of power are claiming the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei, which the Iranians deny, but even if Donald Trump went on the tee-vee and claimed victory tonight, the war would not stop. Here one recalls the lack of any point in negotiating with the West.

No escalation control? Organize your communities, folks. Hard times are ahead.