FOREST COMMENT

 

It appalls me that so many pro-Israel Zionists are in the Labour Party. The electorate is becoming increasingly aware of what this means - uncritical support for racist Israel in its endless ethnic cleansing and murder. How has the Labour Party come to this?

  This is a serious article by someone who has a deep understanding of diplomacy as part of great-power politics. The USA's decline in its diplomatic reach and seriousness is indicative of its decline as a great power. Trumps rhetoric  'is not incidental. It amplifies structural decline'. The idea's of MAGA (Make America Great Again) that there is a Deep State that has consciously wrecked their plans means that the very notion of the state is suspect. Once this is accepted, its reliability on the international scale is questioned because it can no longer be accepted as a given by other powers. International treaties, like the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action limiting nuclear developments in Iran) can simply be torn up. This is what Trump did - and it led to the war with Iran. Some on 'the Left' use the term 'Deep State' too as if it is a conspiracy that has distorted US policy and behaviour. It may be a useful debating point to alert people not ...

 This is a good article on current developments ....

  ' It does not matter how many lies uttered by Trump are meticulously documented. It does not matter that Trump has used the presidency to enrich himself by an estimated $1.4 billion over the last year,  according to  Forbes. It does not matter that he is inept, lazy and ignorant. It does not matter that he stumbles from one disaster to the next, from tariffs, to the war on Iran. The traditional establishment, whose credibility has been destroyed because of its betrayal of the working class and subservience to the billionaire class and corporations, has little power over Trump’s supporters. Their vitriol only increases his popularity. Political cults are the bastard children of a failed liberalism. Trump’s approval rating may be at around 40 percent, as of April 20 —  according to  an average of multiple polls collated by The New York Times — but his base remains unmovable'.

 This is horrific.  'In 2025, Alex Karp, the CEO of government and military tech contractor Palantir, published The New York Times best-seller,  The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West .  The Wall Street Journal  praised the book as a  cri de coeur , a passionate appeal “that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies,” while  Wired  praised the book as a “readable polemic that skewers Silicon Valley for insufficient patriotism.”.... Israel utilized Palantir in its September 2024 attacks in Lebanon, employing exploding electronic pagers that resulted in numerous fatalities and injuries, writes  AFSC’s Investigate . In addition to its collaboration with the Israeli military, Palantir also provides the Gaza Civil-Military Coordination Center with its services. This center is located at the US military compound in Kiryat Gat, which was established in October...

Warwick Powell lays down the reality of the Iran war. We have a politically and strategically illiterate US leadership of zealots sucked into a fight it cannot win. Prior to this erupting I had hypothesised this possibility and concluded that a war in Iran would be a Russian or Chinese General's wet dream....no matter what the USA does, it will be weakened even if (and it is unlikely) it could win the war. 'The open question, therefore, is temporal and I restate it:   can material reality force rationality faster than zealotry can prolong the interval?   If the blockade’s economic ripple effects, the visible drawdown of precision stocks, and the sustained Iranian counter-pressure concentrate minds in Washington toward a grand bargain, the United States may yet extract a face-saving exit before the trap fully snaps shut. If hubris and shame aversion prevail, the decent interval becomes a longer, costlier demonstration of why Pape’s warning has proven durable across decades of c...

  This short essay by Warwick Powell is crucial reading to understand what the future may be... 'There are moments when a society stops merely adapting to history and begins, instead, to make history in a new way. It does not just respond to inherited constraints; it reorganises the material conditions of life so that new possibilities become thinkable, practical and eventually normal. My proposition is that China, especially over the past decade and a half, has been doing precisely this. It has been building the future in plain sight. I do not mean “the future” in the glossy, trivial sense of gadget fetishism or techno-utopian fantasy. I mean something more grounded and more consequential: the patient construction of a new energetic basis for economic life. In the language I have developed in my book, China has increasingly behaved as a thermodynamic state. That is to say, it has approached development not simply as a matter of GDP growth or industrial output, but as a long-term p...

 

 

  This has some useful arguments in it - and will be dismissed as Stalinist!!

  Some think that the US will be OK if there is a global collapse and that it is part of a bigger strategy to once again maintain global US domination...

 The chaos is approaching: stock up and get ready for a bumpy ride. It will be a sacrifice worth making.

If you know anything about history and Iran, and war, you will understand that - Trump aside - the USA is making every mistake in the book.   ' The “wars of choice” in the Middle East are being fought with 21st-century technology but 20th-century mistakes. We learn that history is not a straight line, but a cycle driven by hubris and the measurement of the wrong variables. McNamara’s tragedy was that he realized his errors thirty years too late. It seems the US is destined to relearn the lessons of Vietnam all over again in the sands of the Middle East.'

As electrification intensifies and copper becomes harder to obtain, graphine becomes an obvious alternative....this is 'politics'. Graphene was 'invented' by academics at Manchester University - but now China leads the way. Yet another example of British discovery not being properly nurtured. China actually plans - Britain leaves it up to 'the market'....  

  In any future military conflict these weapons will be important...

 '........ the rapid democratization of firepower, of which I have spoken for some time, has revolutionized the geopolitical and military dynamics of the world. There are no easy wars left to fight. The Americans and their largely impotent allies can talk tough about making war against Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea — but if they actually attempt it, it will end   catastrophically   for them. Then we’ll really have a dangerous situation on our hands.'

This is an interesting and necessary argument to have.  

 ' Blair is the model that proves there is no price in the West to be paid for selling one’s soul, for engineering mass slaughter in the service of a western empire.'

Roger Boyd does a fine job in exposing the nonsense that imperial propaganda spews out about the oppression of women - at the very, very least their propaganda is 'selective'. They also (of course) deplore China where the revolution liberated millions of women. It is depicted as a 'tyranny'...

  As the price of LNG spirals up, there will come a point when it sparks a crisis. The crisis will spark a broader economic conflict. China's approach to alternatives is well under way.  'In March 2026, Iranian strikes on Qatar’s Ras Laffan and Mesaieed facilities triggered force majeure, halting roughly 17% of global LNG capacity for an estimated 3–5 years. The immediate beneficiary is obviously American liquefied natural gas exporters. U.S. terminals redirected flexible cargoes to premium European and Asian markets, driving spot prices higher and delivering windfall revenues to operators such as Cheniere, ExxonMobil and Venture Global. Yet this financial boon, measured in exchange-value terms - stock prices, export earnings, and GDP contributions - masks a deeper biophysical reality: the secular decline in Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) across U.S. shale gas plays that underpin LNG. As reserves deplete and production shifts to lower-quality rock, the “stock” of gas...