FOREST COMMENT

This is a brilliant analysis of why conflict is taking place in Iran... Defintion...  Entropy is a thermodynamic quantity representing the  unavailability  of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or  randomness  in the system. "the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always increases with time"     lack of order or   predictability ;   gradual   decline into disorder. "a marketplace where entropy reigns supreme" 'In the work of G. W. F. Hegel, history advances through what he called the “cunning of reason”: individuals pursue their own particular interests, yet unwittingly realise a broader rational process. Marx famously inverted this idea. For Marx, it is not Reason that guides history, but material conditions - especially the organisation of production - that assert themselves “behind the backs” of social actors. Thermoeconomics extends this inversion fur...

 ' The economic metabolism is a triple circuit; visualise it as a triple helix, perhaps. First, there is the material-energetic loop: energy is captured, deployed, transformed through supply chains into use values (goods, services, machinery, infrastructure etc.), and dissipated in reproduction and consumption - that is, validation. Second is the monetary-financial loop: endogenous credit creates exchange-value claims that mobilise resources today in anticipation of future use-value realisation. These two circuits must remain roughly aligned for the system to reproduce itself without debilitating rupture. A third circuit - information - intersects these and to some extent binds them together. Information itself is an energetic artifact, while also playing a key role in enabling each of the other circuits to work and to interact. When EROEI degrades - whether from geological depletion, geopolitical disruption, political retardation of enhancements or technological lock-in - the mate...

  We need to be careful of the idea that 'Bibby' controls the USA. The reality is that the USA has a well worked out strategy for continuing its global domination. What we have is a continuity of policy - Trump is just the latest version of it, as was Biden and ALL previous US presidents before that. Israel is the USA's aircraft carrier in the Middle East - a US client state. The tail does not wag the dog - despite the presence of a huge number of Zionists in the US administration. They get away with what they do because the USA fully supports them as its wiling servants.... The main strategic aim of the USA is the subjugation of China and the destruction of the current Russia/ China alliance to achieve this. Iran is the latest stage of that battle. 'There is a section of MAGA that have always attempted to sell Trump as an isolationist, who will end US involvement in foreign wars. Trump himself has never promised that – rather, he has consistently, and massively, ramped...

 

This is an important contribution. Protecting people with fuel subsidies is humane - BUT it will not solve the underlying problem of reliance on hydro-carbons. We have to tackle that....  'The account of seller’s inflation is a valuable contribution to understanding how concentrated capital transmits and amplifies upstream energy shocks. The proposed remedies are humane and, in the narrow sense, sensible. But they remain politically and thermodynamically inadequate to the scale of the challenge. They belong to a tradition that seeks to manage capitalism’s crises more fairly, not to reconstruct the energetic basis of social reproduction. Today, I suggest, that is not enough. We are not merely trying to get through another price spike. We are living through the exhaustion of a hydrocarbon-centred regime and the opening of a struggle over what comes next. In that setting, the priority should not be to subsidise fossil normality, even in softened form. It should be to use every availab...

21st March 2026 I must admit that prior to this conflict erupting I put myself in the place of the Russian and Chinese military leadership and contemplated whether or not the Great Satan would be so stupid as to get involved in an attack on Iran - it would suck its blood. After three weeks or so the war is not going well for the USA. If Trump retreats (the sensible thing to do) he will lose. If he trys to escalate, which looks likely, he will lose bigly. The tragedy is that such a loss will raise the possibility of Israel using nuclear weapons against Iran significantly. 'A striking datum of this war is how few attempts have been made at selling it, rhetorically dignifying it, morally arming it or situating it in some context of shared Western interests. While  the belligerati  rehearse exhausted arguments about armed liberation, Pete Hegseth waxes lyrical about ‘death and destruction from the sky all day long’; while they talk de-escalation, Trump demands ‘ UNCONDITIONAL SURR...

  The USA is losing legitimacy precisely because of its oppression and repression. 'The empire faces a fatal dilemma: tolerating dissent weakens its central authority and fragments its cohesion, while repression, though temporarily effective, destroys its remaining legitimacy. It radicalizes populations, alienates allies and partners, and causes human, economic, and moral costs to skyrocket. Duroselle’s central paradox is clear: the more an empire attempts to ward off its demise through force, the more it accelerates its decline. Legitimacy—the invisible cement of domination—once lost, cannot be restored through coercion. Any attempt at rescue risks aggravating the problem and bringing the empire to an end. Trump’s policy follows in the footsteps of his predecessors, but his style and excesses are undoubtedly hastening America's loss of credibility on the world stage.'

  This is a good article in Counterpunch that puts US Foreign Policy in context: it is NOT jusdt about Trump.... 'Also central to the weakening of the hegemon has been the deepening crisis of the global capitalist regime of which Washington has been the global policeman, the key manifestations of which are the deindustrialization of the United State and Europe, the financialization of the leading capitalist economies where speculation rather than production has become the investment of choice, the astounding rise in global income and wealth inequality, and the sharpening contradiction between planetary survival and the ever more intensive drive for profits. Trump’s rhetoric is aggressive, brazen, and full of bluster, but let’s not be fooled. His is a defensive imperialism, a fighting retreat, a response to the overextension of American economic and political power and the comprehensive failure of capitalism to respond to the needs of humanity and the planet. The only answer to Trum...

  Big Serge is the best military historian there is - and this is his analysis of the war on Iran so far. As a tangential point he fails to mention the global impacts of the attacks on Iran. One of the reasons that the NATO block doesn't want to get involved is that they think the war on Iran by Israel and the USA will not be successful and will draw attention away from Ukraine which is their No 1 priority. If the initial attack on Iran had 'worked' they would be fully behind damning the 'terrorist regime' (sic). But is has so-far failed. Serge is absolutely right in my view in maintaining that they key thing for the USA and Israel neo-fascists is the crippling of Iran so that it has massively reduced influence. How Iran reacts to this is the key thing. Will it seek closer links with Russia and China? One can only hope so. Will it go for a nuclear weapon? This is logical. Will it begin to assassinate political enemies in Isael and the USA? What (after all) is the di...

Warwick Powell developes ideas that identify energy as being the key to understanding sustainable systems of production....and thereby reconnect political economy with material reality. ' .....the usual explanations - geopolitics, ideology, personalities, or “decoupling” - miss the foundational story. The turbulence we are living through is fundamentally energetic and thermodynamic; it is grounded the materiality of our existence. That is why I wrote  Thermoeconomics in a Time of Monsters ..... Thermoeconomics reconnects political economy with material reality and gives us a language to discuss what is actually at stake. 'In the end, every functional society still faces the same ancient requirement: food for people and fuel for machines. Everything else - finance, technology and geopolitics - must serve that metabolic imperative or eventually fail.  Thermoeconomics in a Time of Monsters  is my attempt to remind us of that truth and to offer a conceptual toolkit for naviga...

  You would be unlikely to ever read an article like this in the UK were we 'at war' with Iran. This is one of the curious things about Israel - a country that is dominated by ruthless barbarity. This is an excellent article written by Gidon Lev - himself, like Larijani, a philosopher for Haaretz....

    'In a time of monsters, understanding energy as the foundation of order separates those who renew from those who decay. The West Asia crisis does not invalidate fossil fuels overnight, but it exposes the fragility of regimes whose reproduction still depends heavily on geographically concentrated, geopolitically vulnerable and thermodynamically mature energy sources. Declining EROEI in those sources was already a long-term headwind. Geopolitical disruption turns that headwind into a gale. None of this is deterministic. Societies can still choose renewal. But renewal requires recognising the material reality: energy is not just another input; it is the substance of value. EROEI is not merely an engineering metric; it is the calculus of entropy or negentropy. When returns fall, the system must either find new sources of surplus energy or accept accelerating disorder. The monsters Gramsci warned about thrive in exactly these moments of interregnum - when the old energetic-inst...

  F oreign Policy is a US 'front' periodical. Even it sees Iran as a confused debacle... ' Trump  is thus on the horns of a dilemma, having to judge whether Washington should deal with short but limited political costs now or more protracted and more uncertain political costs later.   There is no golden off-ramp, one that increases the political benefits for Washington. Every option now carries political costs and risks; the initial strike may have solved a tactical problem, but it created a strategic one. Given these realities, the wisest choice may well be for the United States to accept a limited loss now rather than risk compounding losses later. The strikes that have killed Iran’s leadership demonstrated tactical mastery. Tactical mastery, however, is not strategy. Iran’s retaliation—geographically broad, economically disruptive, and politically calibrated—aims to reshape the conflict’s structure. By widening the theater and prolonging the war, Tehran is shifting the...

  In this article Warwick Powell explains where fusion is and what the impact will be on proudtion... 'In the waning days of 2025, as the world grapples with escalating energy demands and the inexorable march toward net-zero emissions, China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) has delivered a seismic shift in the fusion landscape. By shattering the Greenwald limit - a longstanding barrier to stable, high-density plasma - Chinese scientists have not merely advanced physics; they’ve ignited a pathway to redefine systemic Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI), the critical metric that underpins sustainable economic growth.

 Now is the age of opposition to US Imperialism....Russia is crucial to it.

  Iran will conduct a defence of attrition against the USA and Israel . This is how the Vietnames defeated the USA. For the sake of the world, let us support them and hope they are successful.

  This is a brilliantly written article that outlines the Chinese approah to development and diplomacy...it is bottled common-sense. Which is why China will avoid unnecessary conflict... '....Thucydides’   History   is ultimately a study in statecraft. It is a study in how leaders make decisions, how states navigate conflict, and how the interplay of power, perception, and judgment shapes outcomes. Far from being a crude realist manifesto, his work is deeply concerned with the role of   phronesis   (practical wisdom) in governance and the consequences of moral and strategic misjudgment........ While Western strategic thought, especially as filtered through recent interpretations of Thucydides, often frames power transitions as inherently conflictual, Chinese statecraft draws from a very different historical and philosophical tradition. China’s leadership today approaches international relations with a perspective shaped by its long history of dynastic cycles, in...