Blind Giant

and some rice bowls

Two things I can’t prove, but that seem to be the emerging shape of the world.

First, everything is a scam. We had twenty years of war in Afghanistan for what turned out to be no apparent purpose, then that stopped, then a big new war started. Wars cost lots of money, and who has time to account for it all in the heat of the fighting? It feels like we’re going to always need to have a war going on, because it’s useful. We’re starting to see the faintest outlines, through the manufactured fog, of a money-laundering operation in Ukraine, as FTX collapses but only after the midterms. That failed company had really weak corporate controls, by the way, and no one can say where all the money went. What an unfortunate and surprising failure — just billions and billions of dollars that no one will ever trace or find. We’re so disappointed that all that lamb can’t be tracked, the fat wolves say.

The AP factcheckers offer a warning today that conspiracy theorists are spinning baseless claims about FTX and the Ukrainian laundromat, so mark that one down as “probably true.” War is a racket, the pandemic is a shockingly lucrative racket, a bunch of insiders are getting paid, government officials have offshore accounts, and the news is a cover story. Policy is about 90% pretext. Anyway, that’s my current mood, and I’m pretty confident it’s widely shared. Here’s some dangerous extremism:

Second, the WEF-lite G20 meeting in Bali this week ended with an agreement in principle to impose vaccine passports on the world, a chilling example of the growing centralization of power, but booster uptake remains parked at 8%. So the performance of technocratic domination is increasingly met with a shrug; the self-declared Masters of the Universe are mostly perceived as a circle jerk on a life raft, out to sea but too busy with their mutual onanism to notice.

So the trajectory looks to me like an increasing performance of centralized power on paper, against the reality of national populations that mostly check out and wander away. Digital money and travel controls will be real forms of power, so it’s not clear who wins in the end, but the pretense to power has natural checks and balances in a world of normal human beings. I see what they intend, but I struggle to feel authentically frightened of these people:

We’ll see.