I was between 12 and 14 years old. Father and I had a deer lease down in a extremely small town called Fowlerton, Texas (Population, 27). Fowlerton is about 25 miles east of Cotulla, which is the LaSalle County seat. This is deep in the Texas Brush Country. Right on the Nueces River, which once formed the border between an independent Texas and Mexico. But that’s a whole ‘nother story as we say down here.

As I noted in my essay yesterday the Brush Country isn’t pretty land, nor is it welcoming to people: fields [are] full of prickly-pear cactus, desert yaupon, leather stem, purple three awn, goatbush, ceniza, mesquite, tasajillo, huajillo and the occasional desert olive. Not a one is friendly and it’s been fairly said about this part of Texas many times, “if it don’t sting stick or bite it ain’t down there.”

Father and I were down there deer hunting. It was the middle of the Golden Hour but gathering close to dusk as Dad drove me up to my deer blind. The blind was about 15 feet off the ground so I had to use the ladder.

I got to the top, my 1915 Lee–Enfield Mk III* strapped to my back. I climbed up. This particular gun was used in WWI by the Brits. It’s got one hell of a kick, too. It came with a flashguard and no scope, but well honed excellent sights. Why no scope?

I’m a bit of a freak. I shoot left handed but use my right eye: the perils of being ambidexterous, I suppose. But I’m a crack shot with a scopeless rifle.

But I digress . . .

You do need a gun to shoot deer—I’m no bow hunter, ambidexterous, remember—so strapped on my rifle was, enabling me to climb, and climb. Of course, no one had been to this blind in years, so the door was jammed. I pulled hard to get it open, too hard, in fact which left me off balance.

Stupidly off balance.

The moment the door came unjammed a huge Barn Owl, white, magnificent and terrifying flew right at my face and in my shock I let go of the door and fell all 15 feet to the ground. Like a dumbass I’d already chambered a round. Fun fact, the 1915 Lee–Enfield Mk III* was not noted for an effective safety mechanism. A shot rang off inches past my ear. Sheer, stupid, dumb luck saved my life once again. Otherwise brain matter would have been splattered alll about my landing site.

What might they have written on my Death Certificate: death by Barn Owl? At least he had clean underwear!

Embarrassing to say the least.

That was a hard lesson to learn, especially as it was a moderately sized prickly pear cactus patch that broke my fall. Had it not I would have been seriously injured. Instead I spent three fucking days with tweezers removing two to five milimeter sized glochids and large needles out of my backside. Talk about fuckery.

As for deer blinds, the elevated kind. I avoided them until I stopped hunting altogtether.

But owls, I’ve seen quite a few owls in my life since, but never another Barn Owl, nor do I wish to. And I no longer hunt. I’m Buddhist now and do my best to eschew the consumption of flesh. Not perfectly. But I try.

As for owls, I can still call in an Eastern Screech owl, but my mimicry ends there.

Got stories about owls? Or hunting? Please share in the comments. All are welcome.

It was hot by the time I pulled out of Hotel La Posada in downtown Laredo, but it’s always hot on the first of September. I took several lefts and rights and meandered through the rigid grid of one-way streets and then hit IH-35 North, put the car in fifth gear and sped off, leaving Starbucks, Palenque Taco, Target and Wal-mart behind for other dangers, like wind-shearing massive rigs on the interstate and hidden DPS officers.

About twenty miles north of Laredo I veered of west onto Highway 83—a road I’d never traveled on. I’d decided earlier at breakfast while looking at my road atlas (I don’t use google maps) to take 83 north towards Catarina and then Carrizo Springs, Crystal City and then take the farm roads on further north to Highway 90 into San Antonio. This is an area of Texas I know little about and most of which I had never been before.

The stretch of land between the Rio Grande and the Nueces River was named the Wild Horse Desert by the early Dominican and Franciscan padres who noted the abundance of wild horses while traveling up the King’s Highway to the missions at Bexar and beyond into East Texas and Nacogdoches. Even in 1821 when a heartbroken Mexican lieutenant passed through he noted “vast herds” in his diary. And while there may be no wild horses left in the area it resembles a desert in ever way.

As I speed up the road north there is little to see except blue skies, the occasional cloud, and fields full of prickly-pear cactus, desert yaupon, leather stem, purple three awn, goatbush, ceniza, mesquite, tasajillo, huajillo and the occasional desert olive. Not a one is friendly and it’s been fairly said about this part of Texas many times, “if it don’t sting stick or bite it ain’t down there.”

The plains down here roll and so there are long stretches where you are climbing slowly up and hit the crest of a hill and then vast stretches of the desert spread out before you. The desert is splotchy here, like a dog with early onset mange, portions of it are white, like caliche dirt, and others filled with the shrubs and brushes and sticker-burr like-plants aforementioned. Usually, there isn’t much else. But today at one such crest I stopped and counted the natural gas flares: 18 with the bare eye. Had I a pair of binoculars it would have been more. Had it been night I imagine I’d have seen three dozen wells flaring off natural gas, just to get rid of it because its uneconomical to transport.

But what’s most bizarre to me was the feeling of being in the middle of no where—no gas stations, no homes, no ranches, not a hint of sound from oncoming cars—and see multiple huge industrial enterprises out there in the desert. In effect they’ve poked a straw down into the earth and are slurping out the last of the hydrocarbons. It’s the last energy boom we’ll ever see on the planet and I had a front row seat.

A little while later I stopped in Catarina, a hamlet that has seen better days. I noted that the hotel here was built in 1926, at the tail end of the first great Texas oil boom. I wandered around the tight grid of streets and stumbled upon and old dance hall and hotel as well. Dilapidated and dangerous to walk through my curiosity got the best of me until a large Barn Owl in the rafters knocked some things about and scared the wits out of me as she swooped straight towards me and the exit. That was reason enough to leave Catarina for me. Besides, Barn Owls and I aren’t a good mix, but that’s a story for another day.

A few miles down the road I saw one of the new hotels for the oil field workers and took a photo. Each oil boom has left its own stamp on the region. The first one built places like the Catarina Hotel. The one in the fifties and sixties built small town Texas. And the present boom seems to be leaving nothing behind, except less water or poisoned water. It hasn’t done anything to improve life or business in Carrizo Springs, based on a quick glimpse of the dilapidated old town square.

I drive on past Carrizo into Crystal City. The landscape has changed now and so has the dirt. It’s no longer caliche but something approximating real dirt that can grow sustainable crops. There is a Del Monte plant in town. Big oil has given way to big ag, except when I cross over the Nueces River it’s empty. Ag has taken its portion, but you can be certain fracking has taken an equal if not larger amount. And I mean the river was bone dry. A few further miles down the farm to market road and I hit the Sabinal River. It too is bone dry for the same reason: drought, fracking and agriculture.

Fields are dust. Pecan orchards have died in the withering heat and drought, ongoing since at least 2009. One old boy was growing cotton, which as a crop is a notorious water hog, but it was a scrawny, mean looking yield he grew this year. And then I hit Highway 90, a road I know well, and made the dash home to San Antonio.

I’m not real sure what I was looking for today, but after reading “The Son” by Philipp Meyer a few weeks back it was pretty clear that the family at the center of his book found its origins somewhere in the barren, cactus-filled landscape of the Wild Horse Desert. I had it in mind they were a Carrizo Springs family but after passing through Asherton, which is ten miles before Carrizo, and seeing Bel-Asher I’m inclined to think this might be where the family that inspired Meyer. It certainly fits geographically speaking.

Of course, that’s why we read—to learn new things, ideas, and to hear old stories told in a new way. Maybe sometimes those old stories take on a life of their own when you wake up in Laredo, looking out across the river to Mexico and decide to take a new road home. New books and new roads. Someone ought to write something about that.

Originally written in September 2013

“So, where you from?” the bartender asked me.

“Texas, Austin, actually,” I replied.

“Welcome to Bursa,” he said, “call me Nick, it’s easier to pronounce than my Turkish name.”

“Pleasure meeting you, Nick,” I said.

“What’s your drink?” he asked.

“Rakı, sek,” I said.

He set down a warm orange potency swirling in the glass; a clear, syrupy sweet drink.

“What are you doing in Bursa,” he asked, “business or tourist?”

“A tourist,” I said, “although I like to think I am a writer.”

“From Austin, then, yes? So, do you like the blues,” he asked.

I sipped my drink, looked into a bar filled with smoke and Turkish men and smiled.

“Of course,” I said.

“Chicago Blues or Texas Blues?” he asked.

“I like them both, but Texas blues are in my blood. I grew up watching Stevie Ray Vaughn, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Chris Duarte, Eric Johnson and Ian Moore,” I said.

“What about Johnny Winters? ZZ Top? Bonnie Raitt?”

“Damn,” I exclaimed, “you do know your blues, don’t you?”

“I lived in Houston for a few years in my early twenties and fell in love with ‘em,” he replied.

“Curious, why the blues?” I asked, “What about Turkish music?”

“I love Turkish music,” he said enthusiastically. “I’m a Turk!”

“Another drink,” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said, “been in Eastern Anatolia too long.” Warm black-licorice seared my throat and cleared my sinuses.

“So, what is it you like about the blues?” I asked.

“It’s kind of like Turkish music, it shares a similar feeling, emotion, as you would say in English. The blacks in your country had good reason to create this music and its feeling still lives in its sounds. It’s a feeling we have in Turkish music too, we call it, ‘hüzün,‘” he said. “Do you know this word?”

“Melancholy,” I said. “A kind of worldly sadness.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Of course, Turkish music is very different from the blues but the essence is the same.”

I thought back to the long bus-rides across the epic landscapes of Anatolia. To buses filled with old matrons in headscarves, wiry gaunt-faced farmers, lemon cologne-scented air and the winsome sounds of Turkish ballads.

“Indeed, Nick, Turkish music is ‘hüzün’,“I said.

Any favorite songs, you want to hear?” He asked. “I have quite a catalog here at the bar.”

“Little Wing, by Stevie Ray Vaughn? Or maybe, better yet, Voodoo Child (Slight Return)?”

“Absolutement,” he said, smiled and walked over to the computer plugged into a monstrous sound system. The sugary opening licks of Voodoo Child dripped off the walls of the bar. I took another drink, feeling the fog clouding my better judgment, and sang along with the Nick.

“I didn’t mean to take up all your sweet time,” we yelled, “I’ll give it right back to you one of these days.” The other bar patrons gave us no notice, too busy watching Beşiktaş clobber Anakara in a futbol match, our singing drowned out by howls of “goooooooooooooooooaaaaaaall!”

“If I don’t see you no more in this world I’ll meet you up on the next,” we continued, “don’t be late! Don’t be late.”

We both laughed.

“Another drink,” Nick asked?

“Sure,” I said.

I sat for a while thinking about the last three weeks in Anatolia. An element of hüzün colored my reminisces. It had been an amazing journey. Just as moving and healing as Lake Toba, months before, but entirely different in temperament. Emotionally I felt more centered than at any time in the last three or four years. Actually, more so since 2002. A new sense of purpose is growing within me, too. I’m not the man I was three, four or five years ago. And I realized this sometime between Şanlıurfa and Sivas. This man is free of the past. And looks forward to the future, a future of his own making, free of old fetters and chains.

Equally important is the knowledge that sometime between Delhi and Diyarbakir the grieving process of my divorce ended. I don’t know when this occurred, but the anger and the sadness just drifted away. Maybe it was the muck of Delhi did it. Maybe it was the peace of Toba. Or maybe it was just time. I didn’t realize it had even happened, so subtle was the change, until a few days ago.

“Any other requests,” asked Nick, pulling me out of my reverie.

“How about you play something you like,” I told him.

“Tamam–(Turkish for okay),” he said. “I think you’ll like this one. It’s one of the best American songs about hüzün I can think of.”

Out of the speakers I could hear Bonnie Raitt’s voice say, “I’d like to bring out a friend of mine who wrote this next song, John Prine.”

A bigger smile has never crossed my face. The first time I heard Angel from Montgomery–the live duet with John Prine and Bonnie Raitt–was back in the summer of 1989 and its impact on me was immediate. I knew the old woman in the song, all dreams of thunder and a lightning of desire in her youth. But in the song she’s an middle-aged woman, looking back on her life with a rueful wisdom, wishing she were an angel who could fly away, but no matter how hard she tried “the years just rolled by like a broken down damn.”

Nick and I sang the chorus:

“Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery. Make me a poster of an old rodeo. Just give me one thing that I can hold on to, because believing in this living is such a hard way to go.”

Nick smiled, but there was a sadness in his clear, green eyes. “We all want to escape, don’t we?”

“Yes,” I said, nodding my head slowly.

“Maybe someday I will again,” he said.

“I hope you do, Nick, I hope you do.”

I tried to pay the tab but Nick refused.

“One more drink for my honored guest,” he demanded?

“Sure,”

He poured two shots, lifted his glass and said, “to “hüzün!”

There was a tipping back and a setting down. We both gasped and grimaced and then said our goodbyes.

Outside Ulu Dag shouldered its way into view, lit by spectacular tendrils of lightning and then shuddered under dreams of thunder.

Drunk, I stumbled uphill into the rain.

Tue 19 May, 2009

One personal goal this year has been to read more of what scholars and academics would call, “primary sources;” what laymen call “books that make up books.” Some can be fascinating for their own sake, like Herodotus (my all time favorite) or Thucydides. Portions of Lucian are worth reading today for sheer irony and humor and then there is the whole sprawling magnificence of the ancient Greek playwrights. Later writers sound fascinating but prove a touch on the disappointing side, like Giovanni Boccaccio’s “Genealogy of the Pagan Gods.” I’m still reading this and have hopes for it. The book is full of hard to find but thought provoking stories; I mean, where and when did the Greco-Roman gods really emerge? It’s a question not likely to stimulate many, unless they’ve read their Hesiod. Other primary sources this year have included “The Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite,” which is a brief (mercifully so) history of the war between Byzantium and Persia from the perspective of an Edessene at the beginning of the 6th century. And most recently I’ve been quite taken by “Cyriac of Ancona, Later Travels.”

The volume in question is part of the i Tatti Renaissance Library published by Harvard University and covers his letters and diaries from 1443-49. As a 15th century Italian Cyriac was no doubt engaged in commerce. And he spent most of his life sailing around the tatterdemalion scraps of the Byzantine empire, setting up trade posts for the Genoese in the Black, Marmara and Aegean seas. It was with a certain relish and anticipation that I picked up his book. Some of it was good—like when he met the future Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror in Adrianople during an audience with his father Sultan Murad II. If only Cyriac had taken a moment to look more closely at little Çelebi, as Mehmet was then called, one wonders what he looked like at ten? Was he brooding and intense like he seems in the later histories, or gentle and serene as depicted in the miniature by Nakkaş Sinan Bey?

There are other missed opportunities, like when Cyriac goes hunting with Constantine Dragases—the last Constantine, he who died on the Theodosian Walls like a proper Roman and last Emperor. What was he like, there in the wilds of the Peloponnese? Did he foresee his doom even then? The end of his empire and the end of his line? If only Cyriac’s letters told us more about these men than his trade arrangements. Alas, the recording of history is nothing if not grief over missed opportunities like these.

Cyriac is mostly remembered today, if he is remembered at all, because he urged the preservation of the antique remains that littered and illumined his world. Rare is he who sees the treasure that has always stared him in the face. At one point Cyriac sounds like a cantankerous citizen at a city hall meeting fulminating against the lack of preservation and decay all around him. “One needs a more expansive genre in which to cry out against, despise, condemn and thoroughly curse such great negligence, slothfulness and lack of human culture on the part of our contemporaries,” he writes near the beginning of his letters. We owe a lot, as a culture, to Cyriac’s imprecations. That we value the past as we do, and have preserved much of it, we learned during the Renaissance, and it remains Cyriac’s forgotten legacy.

In July of 1444 Cyriac made his way from Constantinople to Perinthus (the modern Marmara Ereğlisi). Two thirds of the way there he stopped in Selymbria, now Silivri, to document the many inscriptions lying around. What must this have looked like? Cracked marble plinths, perhaps an architrave and columns lying higgledy-piggledy, used as a quarry for the more industrious of subjects and ignored by all the rest. The blue luciferase waters of the Marmara behind them. Here Cyriac found treasure.

Some inscriptions date back to the reign of Trajan—or at least this is my semi-educated guess, my Latin being rusty and my Greek woefully out of practice. What struck me was the span of human existence  there—as I had seen when I visited the region in 2008-2009—and how much their desire to leave something behind is still so very alive. It’s one of those qualities that binds us as humans, even if we don’t realize it.

And yet, sometimes when I am back here in the suburban post-modernity of the New World, thinking about or reading history I feel I live in a facsimile of reality and it’s only when I am back over there, when I can touch a two thousand year old marble inscription that I know the past is real, not green lights tumbling down a black screen.

Such was my state of mind a few weeks ago when I sat down in my favorite chair and began reading the inscriptions Cyriac noted in his diary between the 25th of July and 12th of August 1444. Some were interesting and in Latin: 

Good fortune. Emperor Caesar Trajan Hadrian Augustus,son of the divine Trajan, victor over the Parthians, grandson of the divine Nerva, consul for the third time. 

Others anodyne (and in Greek) in their attempt to honor a citizen ad aeternam:

Good fortune. The Council and the People honored Poplios Ailios Harpokration, also called Proklos who built the shrine of Tyche; the Alexandrians who do business in Perinthos set up a statue in his honor. 

But then I read this:

As I was leaving my eighteenth year and just beginning the study of rhetoric, a grievous illness overcame me in well-wooded Lesbos, and I had not yet reached the pleasant land of Ephesus. My brother, by a great deal of work, gave this sadness to be borne to my parents on a swift ship. I dwell in the holy houses of heroes, not in Acheron—for such is the end of life for the wise.

Seven lines carved on a marble plinth gut punched me. They shouted and smiled down at me while I lay on the floor collecting questions after reading a knock-out blow.

When was it written? Where was it found? Where is it now?

Who composed the lines? What did he die of? Did it take him quickly? Or was it a wasting disease? And just how did a dying eighteen year-old find the composure to write with such simple and powerful elegance?

Slaver the Greek word that begins the inscription around on your tongue for a moment. Listen to its alien beauty:

ohkto-kai-deka-toy.

Eight and ten.

Eighteen.

If the rest of Cyriac is dull, uninteresting and lifeless like the two former inscriptions, so be it, I thought in that moment, this inscription makes the entire book worth reading. It’s why I love the study of history and why I have disciplined myself to read primary sources this year instead of wasting time on Facebook or X and to share more on Substack. The sources are like mines of gold or silver, but the veins of metal are rare and hard to find. And to mix metaphors a little, sometimes the poetry of the past, as in these seven lines of Greek, cuts me down to size.

I’m fifty-five years-old now. What’s fifty five minus eighteen? It’s thirty-seven. I’ve had thirty seven more years of living than this eloquent young man who, but for a loving brother, would have vanished, would have been wiped clean by the forgetful waters of Lethe, and instead found himself in Elysium.

What have I done with my extra thirty seven years? I’m human and wasted much of the time whining and groaning about lost opportunities (I really don’t have any to be honest, because I took most of them, wisely or unwisely) and pissing and moaning about stupid mistakes (we all have those, me included, but most aren’t that stupid, although there have been a lot).

Let us add more to the scales. He was eighteen years-old and died. And here am I with a (thus far) well-lead life: sixty five countries visited, one great love and an ex-wife, a son, a career in finance (long), a career in software sales (short), a career as a writer (even shorter). A return to graduate school. I could go on but you get the idea.

I’ve had more huge chunks of plain old-fashioned obscene good luck than 99.9 percent of humanity and I have the gall to complain?

And then I read what this young man—no, this boy—composed while dying and I know any story I tell will never have the impact of his seven lines of poetry.

I feel good when I look out on the lake from my balcony. The morning greeted me with magnificent weather. I’m surrounded by blue skies, a few puffy white clouds and barely a ripple on the sapphire surface of the lake. Tropical fruit trees, flowers, terraced hills, villages and fishing nets.

The Batak people have an easy way about them–very hard workers, but at the same time, and very much unlike the Vietnamese, they enjoy the good life. And they know they are blessed by the lake.

Ifan asked me this morning, “what are your plans today?”

“Nothing,” I replied.

“Good plans,” he said with a smile. “We’re barbecuing a suckling pig tonight, will you join us?”

“Absolutely.”

Ifan runs the guest house I’m staying in. He’s here most of the day, although he leaves for a few hours in the afternoon to take the ferry to Parapat. He’ll wait until the buses from Medan arrive and disgorge the bewildered travelers. He approaches them, much as he did me, on the ferry to Samosir Island. He wasn’t pushy or annoying. The converse, actually, very soft spoken, with almost Caucasian features but skin as dark as any South Indian Dravidian.

He asked, “where do you come from?”

“America,” I replied, relieved for the first time in many years to be able to say it with pride.

“We don’t get many Americans here,” he said. “Why don’t more of you travel? You have so much money. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Two reasons,” I said, preparing a speech I’ve given many times over the years.

“First, American is a very big nation and there are so many beautiful places to see that many Americans spend most of their lives traveling in America. But the other reason is many Americans are simply afraid to visit a place like ‘Muslim’ Indonesia,” I said.

“Why afraid? We’re Christians here in Toba,” he said.

“Most Americans don’t know Toba exists, much less that the Batak people are Christian,” I told him.

“Unfortunate,” he said. He grew quiet, almost thoughtful for several minutes after that, as if he were pondering some deep mystery. The only sounds were the hum of the motors and the soft sounds of water as the ferry crossed the 8km channel between the mainland and Samosir Island.

“I have a small guest house on the island,” Ifan said, “it’s not much, but you can dive into the water from your balcony, if you like.”

“Do you have hot showers?” I asked, not willing to forgo this one luxury–mind you, I hadn’t showered in two days.

“Yes, we do,” he answered.

“And how much is the room?” I asked.

“50,000 rupiah–or a little less than $6,” he said.

“Sounds great.”

“Excellent,” he replied, “I think you will like it here.”

And he was right. The room is spartan, bare. But it sits over the water, has a mosquito net over a comfortable bed and a shower that does indeed spit out a decent trickle of hot water after a few minutes of waiting.

The restaurant serves a wonderfully light chicken curry–free range chickens, as well. They also serve a delicious fish from the lake; light, flaky white meat over a bed of rice and a tasty tomato, chili, garlic sauce. And the coffee? Wonderful in every way.

A Batak house juts into the water below me like the stern of a boat. Birds flitter back from the palm tree to the avocado tree. The lake is still. There is no breeze.

A lone figure across the cove walks onto a pier, sits in it and paddles off. A coconut falls from a palm tree making a terrific smack as it hits the paved walkway below. The sheer walls of Samosir Island watch over it all, deep gullies and ravines carved into their sides. Little rock is visible on the walls, most just a blinding green blur.

Another ferry knifes its ways across the the lake, leaving behind an ever widening ‘V’ in its wake. Soon the waves will meet the shore under me, adding to the melodious lapping that threatens to lull me back to sleep.

One if Ifan’s friends strums a Batak guitar meldoy on the veranda overhead. There are no cars here, only mopeds and the rare truck. Most people walk. One woman walks by with a large basin of rice balanced on her head, a bag of coffee beans in one hand and an infant in the other. Old men amble by with canes in a slow purposeful gait.

A small flock of birds chatter in the tree next to me. A dried leaf falls to the ground.

“More coffee,” asks Ifan, waking from my reverie.

“No thank you, I’m going for a walk now,” I reply.

“Where go you?,” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s a good place to go,” he smiles.

As I get up and grab my things a pair of white butterflies twist and circle around each other in a delicate aerial ballet over the surface of the lake.

All is silent–except for a whisper on the wind. I can’t make out the words.

Yet.

But I’m patient and will soon.

Fri 19 Dec, 2008

Why does İstanbul draw people in so? It’s not necessarily the physical beauty, though Istanbul has plenty despite the flood of cement that has obliterated much of its old character. When I look off the Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridge up the undulating turquoise Bosphorus, lined with brilliant white mansions below forested hills splashed with the pink of Judas trees, I often think, “when this view ceases to move me, it will be time to leave.”

These are things that draw people to the city, but what keeps them here is the inescapable warmth of the people (even if there are some we feel like strangling) and an ever-transforming, inexhaustible energy. It’s not always pleasant; a friend described Istanbul as a “city of near misses,” and it’s a good description. Everyday life can be a bit like watching the local neighborhood showoff throwing rocks at a hornet’s nest. Things could play out in lots of different ways, but you know something’s going to happen, and it will probably be interesting.

As I waxed lyrical in my head about Istanbul I considered the almost year long journey I’d been on.

Home, I realized somewhere between Singapore and Sivas, is where I choose to make it. Of course, the trite phrase, “where ever you go, there you are,” is all to true, but there is something about this city.

Right now the ferries are skating across a sheet of blue marble. Sunlight dances about the whitecaps ploughed up in the wake of a bulk freighter lumbering downstream to the Dardanelles. The trees wear the ‘dress-greens’ of Spring, leaves rippling in the breeze. Dry cleaners press shirts in silence. Laughter spills out of barber shops. Tea houses rumble with the din of a hundred conversations, jokes and laments. Istanbul has thrown off the cloak of its hüzün. The whole place has fountained into a rollicking cascade of life and light. Lovers cuddle on benches. An old man walks deliberately down the seashore, hands clasped behind his back holding prayer-beads. The Turkish flag snaps and claps in the breeze. And the sun taps on my temples, neck and forearms, not harsh, nor fierce, just warm. The horizon out across the Marmara is a thin ribbon of opposing blues. It is, in short, one of those days of incomparable Spring joy.

When I look out on this view I don’t ever want to leave. My heart starts scheming the moment I cast my gaze elsewhere, like a jealous lover. “Get a job here,” it screams. “You can teach. You could write here. If ever there was a muse, aren’t I she? You could work for a bank, asset management, anything! Something! How can you possibly consider leaving this place?”

I do, so love this city. Every crooked cobble, every misstep, every ‘near miss.’ Every gray-bearded imam and slick-suited young yuppie. Every gang of smiling, unemployed young men. Every scarved-matron waddling to the bread store to feed her pious, conservative husband. Every rude American tourist, and each genteel waiter who serves her. Every crooked taxi driver and the other twenty honest ones. All the shoe-shine boys. And all the gypsies. The insane drivers. The incomplete and incoherent infrastructure. The rain. The sun. The snow. The clouds. An uskumru sandwich on the Eminonu Docks. The burning singe of Raki and a mellow sip of tea from a delicate tulip-shaped glass. The martyred-Greeks, the persecuted Armenians and the invisible Kurds. The clean streets and the dirty alleyways. The green gardens and the concrete playgrounds. The crush and throng of the Grand Bazaar and the Holy silences of the Imperial Mosques. The austere antiquity of the Hagia Sophia and the outrageous Baroque decadence of Ortakoy and Dolmabahce. The permanent solidity of the Theodosian Walls and the slippery transience of the Bosporus current. And forever and ever the inexhaustible ‘azan’ blasting out from a thousand minarets five times each day.

I can work myself up into mountains of sacred rapture only to fall the very next day into profound depths of depression.

And though I might complain a little, it never lasts long.

True love is like that.

Thu 21 May, 2009

Mamallapuram was a dusty little seaside town with naught but ten or fifteen cross streets. One half of the town is dedicated to tourism and travelers, for both are here in equal measure. Othavadai and Othavadai Cross Streets are where you’ll find the tourist haunts, places like the Sea Breeze Café, Siva’s Guest House, and the Hotel Ramakrishna litter the place. Most are pretty clean and the food is good, especially the seafood. I had fresh Marlin the other night with a bit of curry sauce on the side that was delish!

The Shore Temple was a wonderful and elegant treat. So were the birds, especially the Hoopoe and the Bee Eater. The Indian Tree Pie that I saw near Arjuna’s Penance, a massive yet understated rock carving on the West Side of town, was impressive too, even if he was a member of the crow family.

It amazes me that India, what with its billion plus people, has so much wildlife and such diversity. Perhaps it is because almost half the people in the country are vegetarians, unlike the Chinese and Cambodians who will eat anything. Or, maybe it’s because the landscape of Southern India resembles a strange cross between the Coastal Plains of South Texas, the Brush Country in the South West and the Hill Country in the center. Toss them all together in a blender, add some cotton, some corn, lots of rice paddies and elephants and you’ve got Southern India. And here my ‘eye’ for game, wildlife, birds, everything, works. I’m not fighting an intense three-dimensional kaleidoscopically green jungle. Here a simple scan for movement on the horizon bears fruit almost every time, like today’s bus ride from Mamallapuram to Trichy. Alas, I’m getting ahead of myself: back to Mamallpuram.

There are two families of gypsies in town—both harmless, if inveterate beggars and touts. One hangs out across the street from the small bookshop on Othavadai Street where I purchased my “Birds of India,” book. There are about a dozen of them. I reckon two husbands, two wives and the rest children ranging from the age of three to ten. The older children are given trinkets to hawk about the streets all day long. But the younger ones either run about naked, or nearly so, howling about in a giant sandpit where both families congregate at the end of the day to make there way home to their village, several kilometers from here. They are all very dark and quite handsome. They are Dravidians, speaking a tongue many believe is linked to the ancient Elamites of Biblical lore. The women have large, golden circular nose rings and stringy, sun lightened black hair. The colors they wear vary from sumptuous greens to bright oranges to almost iridescent blues, which makes a wonderful contrast to their almost night black skin.

When the Dravidians first arrived in Tamil Nadu is suggested by scholars around 1800BC, perhaps after the fall of the Harrappan Civilization of the Indus Valley. The Dravidians have, as I mentioned, almost coal black skin—although shades exist from night black to creamy chocolate. They also have very Caucasoid features. If one were to remove the pigment from their skin their small ears, small noses and bewitching eyes would look much like a Northern European. Such are the oddities of human migration. They are, as I said, a handsome people—as a matter of fact, one afternoon I saw an absolutely stunning young woman of about twenty-five. Her skin was the color of Hershey’s Dark Chocolate. She had long, silky black hair, green eyes wearing a shocking blue sari that clung to her curvaceous Hindu figure.

But I digress. Unlike the East Asians, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thais and Vietnamese who shun the sun—preferring skin as milky as possible—the Dravidians seem to revel in the sunlight.

If the Dravidians are the first immigrants to this land—after all, are we not all of Africa—there are more recent immigrants here too. Take Gulam, for example, the Kashmiri shopkeeper next to my hotel.

“I fled Srinigar many years ago. I am not liking the violence there, although I miss the mountain air in the Spring. I like the ocean. I am making good business here in Mamallapuram too, unlike life in Kashmir, which once was rich but is now poor and unhappy. I can send money home to my old parents and they can live in peace, without worries,” he told me the other night.

Gulam is Muslim, “but,” as he says, “that does not matter here. We are all Indians. Christians. Muslims. Hindus. No one kills for stupid reasons here. Like yesterday when they had the peaceful strike in sympathy for the Tamils. (It was a General Strike and everything was closed.) I participated in the strike too. I prefer it that way.”

“Besides,” he adds, “the only person here in Mamallapuram who bothers me is that nasty old, half-crazy one-legged Sadhu. I always smile at him and drop a few rupees in his bowl.”

It was well after dusk when I left Gulam and the mosquito brigands were out in force. Clouds of them descending on those foolish enough to stop moving for a few moments, dive bombing into fleshy white and black skin alike. And just as there are many mosquitoes in Mamallapuram, there are many gods too. One sees Mosques dedicated to the worship of Allah, the Crucifix more frequently and a pantheon of multi-colored, strange faced and many armed Hindu deities all about the town.

The other family of gypsies hang out, as far as I can tell, solely on the beach. There are about a dozen of them too, although one is clearly the grandmother and matriarch. The children are just as loud as the others, but more fluent in their English, Running about, telling beggar riddles and jokes much like the young Uzbek girl I adored in Bukhara in 2003, Saltinoi. Now she was a character.

I’m not sure what it is about India this time around, perhaps it is mostly because I am different, different attitude, different state of mind, more open, loose, travel hardened and a bit inured to the filth and squalor about me . . .

I’m not under any kind of pressure this either. No wife to return home to. No assets to manage. No quotas to meet. No time constraints. All, including illness, weighed heavy on me the first two times I visited India and it showed. I hated the place. I couldn’t deal with the filth, the beggars, the immensity and intensity of what entails India. But now? Not so.

Every day the worries of the world fade further into the background. Every day I wake up with a bigger grin than that which I fell asleep with. Saturdays have turned into Wednesdays and Tuesdays into Sundays.

Time is become fluid, free and relaxed.

I keep having this thought that I should be revolted or something, that I should not be enjoying myself. But truth be told, the insanity of this place is infectious. Sure, my patience gets tried frequently. India is, quite simply, the most illogical, chaotic, intense and unique place on the planet. Step outside my room and look around. Then return and do it again twenty minutes later. Everything has changed.

In India every day is literally a new lifetime.

The drive from Malatya to Sivas was rather boring. Most of the landscape between Malatya and Sivas is high, averaging around 800-1,000 meters and semi-arid. It’s mostly an up-and-down, up-and-down journey climbing one pass after another. The aridity is broken up only by rocky alpine streams lined with toothpick straight cypress trees. They look much like aspens in Colorado and make a similar pop-corn crack in the wind. I lost count of the snow-blanketed ranges in the background. It was and felt like a very far off Central Asian landscape. I understand why the Turks feel so at home here. It’s in their nomadic blood.

Sivas is much dryer and higher than Malatya as well. The weather has been fantastic, 75-80* with few clouds, just enough to break up the piercing high altitude glare. Looking out on the way the light falls on the buildings and people here is wonderful. The light enhances the pastels so common to Anatolia. But when I’m out in it, it’s harsh and dry.

I stepped off the bus the day before yesterday, dropped off my bags at a hotel, wolfed down lunch and walked into town. My first stop was the Ulu Cami of Sivas. The mosque itself was a typical Damascene rectangle. It’s been heavily restored and nothing of the original remains, except for a tall, leaning minaret on the northern corner. It’s constructed of dirt red bricks with two narrow bands of turquoise tiles.

I then walked to the Gok Medresse. The name, “gok,” means sky blue. John Freely writes that the Gok Medresse has the most splendid facade in Seljuk architecture. Naturally, I was excited to see it. I’d been reading about it for a few days and my expectations were high. But upon arrival I discovered it to be under restoration–and hideously disfigured, grossly overwrought restoration work it is. I can deal with scaffolding. But what they are doing here is a crime. The portions that have not survived the ravages of time are being replaced with new carvings designed to fit perfectly with the old. Needless to say much of the skill set required for such exacting work has been lost. Thus, the replacements look like a man wearing a brand new suit top and old, threadbare pants. They were even replacing the tile work in the minarets with new iznik tiles. Just awful.

I swallowed my disappointment and walked uphill to Sivas’ three remaining Seljuk works. Along the way I stopped to figure out how to rent a car. Super easy, although I really hated to have to use the guy’s google translator to make myself understood. It will be much easier to communicate in Istanbul. Although, it does surprise me that so few Turks actually speak English. It’s one of the few countries in the world with a significant language barrier. Not anything close to Russia or China, but still. Miming, hand signals and about 20 words of basic Turkish vocabulary are pretty much a necessity. And I really cannot speak Turkish. I love the sounds of the language, but I cannot, in any way, get my tongue to make them. It’s just not going to happen. Russian? I can do that. Chinese? Sure, my Mandarin is passable. Hell, I was even getting good with Bahasa Indonesia at Lake Toba. But this? No can do.

Sivas is a relatively prosperous town of about 280,000 souls. It sits on a set of hills overlooking the Kizilirmak–Red River–and was the site of the Turkish Republic’s founding by Mustafa Kemal in the early twenties. Narrow cobbled streets are flanked by six and seven story apartment buildings. Schoolyards filled with the laughter of children and alleyways musty with dust and the soft thud of women beating carpets are found at every turn. The downtown area has a nice pedestrian shopping area of about six or seven blocks. For a small city it has an almost urban feel to it.

In the meydan–the city square–sit three Seljuk medresses–actually the reamins of one, one fully extant and a third which is a darussifa, or hospital that was in use as such until 1917. It is now being restored, as well. I wasn’t allowed in, but after flashing my ‘Press Card’ the workers admitted me and I had the place to myself. The workers even showed me the tomb of Keykavus I, himself, for whom the complex was constructed. The tile work was very striking, blues and red. I hadn’t seen red done in this manner in tiling, ever, so seeing this compensated for the let down of the Gok Medrresse. Sure, I’d seen orangish bricks inlaid amongst blue tiles, but this was novel.

The Cifte Minarets were, like the Gok Medresse, undergoing restoration, but I was allowed to wander freely around the foundations and got lots of good photos. I was surprised to see fluted half towers here. I didn’t know they existed outside of India and they have a very curvaceous, Indian-houri, Qutb Minaret feel to them. I then sat down in the medresse that was open to the public, there is a wonderful tea house inside it and proceeded to write for a few hours. Then it grew dark, I returned to the hotel and prepared for sleep.

I was excited to be taking a drive and thus awoke early, like a child on Christmas morning. The drive was stupendous and easily took an hour longer than need be due to constant stops to snap shots. As I climbed the last pass–1,950 meters–I thought to myself, “who settles in a place like this? And where the hell am I going? If Divrigi is all the way up here, wow!”

But then I plunged downward and eastwards, back and forth, back and forth, switchback after switchback, hairpin curves for at least ten kilometers. Then I saw the Tiphrik Valley. Verdant, warm–it was actually hot, close to 90*, much like Malatya: a narrow, exuberant concave valley, about the third the size. The Çaltı Çayı is a rushing green freshet pouring into the Euphrates 80 kilometers from here–it rips and roars through the valley below, audible even at the Divrigi Mosque. The town of Divrigi (population 12,000) climbs and clambers up the hillsides. Of course, I drove 200 kilometers to see the mosque, not the view.

There are only three buildings I’ve ever walked into and literally said, “wow!’ This wasn’t one, but it was close. The vaulting was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. It’s complexity was beguiling. A display of impetuous virtuosity if I’ve ever seen one. The intended effect here, unlike say, the Hagia Sophia, isn’t to provide light. It’s the builder saying, “hey, look at what I can do!”

Here follows a long digression on Islamic art. Skip it if too boring.

V. Jairazbhoy writes of the Divrigi Mosque that the carving style appeared “suddenly” in Anatolia, implying in a sense it came from no where. After seeing it myself and looking at the photos multiple times I not only concur with his judgment but feel compelled to elaborate on it. Before I do I need to add that the vaulting, as I said before, is the most amazing vaulting I’ve ever seen. The vault of the second bay is a four pointed star the likes of which I was very surprised to see here, much less even attempted. Sure, I’ve seen vaulting do similar things, in the Isfahani Friday Mosque for example. But nothing approaching this scale. The thickness of the ribs, as you can see in the photo, immediately brought to mind vaulting seen in Gothic Cathedrals, not a mosque in the middle of Anatolia. (There is a reason for this, which I will get to shortly–a kind of architectural whodunit.) But it was the four pointed star vault in the hospital wing of the mosque that really stupfies. What is so amazing about this work of art–and that is exactly what it is–is how it is actually two melded vaults, one a four pointed star and the other semi-hemishperical. It’s like a groined vault that gives off the sensation of the sun rising and falling from left to right. At every angle of viewing there is some new complication, enhancing the sense of movement until you want to whirl off in circles like a dervish.

Now, about the portal facades: the main north portal, the West and the Hospital facade each differ in style and treament. This is what makes the whole complex and its provenance so interesting, not only intellectually, but aesthetically. Most complexes of this sort have a unanimity of design spirit. Rarely are they a hodge podge merger of vastly different influences. As a matter of fact, most buildings of any sort that throw stylistic elements from different artistic eras or traditions fail. They’re ugly and don’t cohere into a unified whole. I’m reminded of the Gostinitsa Moskva in Moscow. The architect who designed it presented Stalin with two different sets of plans. One was in the soi disant Russian Gothic–which is actually well represented in the Seven Sisters of Moscow, the other in High Communist Realism. Stalin, to the terror of the architect, approved both designs. And hence was born a hideous square block of a hotel adjancet Red Square, overlooking the Statue of Zhukov. Two facades are in High Communist relief, the other two are Russian Gothic. Last time I was in Moscow (2003) both facades had been razed and were being replaced with something more unifying. Laugh out loud at that–the Russians under Putin couldn’t pour piss out of their boots if the instructions were on the soles. Which is a terrible shame, as Russian art has much to offer. But that’s another discussion for another day. Suffice it to say that Russian art is far to underappreciated in the West.

But the Divrigi facades, disparate as they are–semi-Hindu, classical Seljuk, and a Muslim-Christian-cum-Gothic fusion, actually cohere. The West portal does look Hindu. Very reminiscent stylistically of the Qutb Minar. There is no record of who carved this portal. The Seljuk portal is amazing in the refinement of its ornament. It’s as if the artist jumped ahead two hundred years. The floral reliefs almost make it look like they were glued or mortared on, as opposed to being carved. And the ornament is huge, almost super-life like. The Hospital Entrance portal if it were stripped of its Muslim ornament and replaced with gargoyles and kings would look exactly like the facade of a medieval cathedral. The twin piers supporting the double recessed pointed arch? Dead ringer for Gothic. But who designed it? Who built it? Jairozabhoy cites several sources that claim prisoner’s of war from the Knights of Saint John, a Crusading Order based on the island of Rhodes were pressed into its consctruction to earn back their freedom. There are also two crusader looking cross vaults–the vaults literally have crosses built into them–that support this conclusion.

Taken in its particulars the complex is a wild romp through the architectural trends of the day, stretching from the Indus River Valley in the East to the North Sea in the West. The Seljuks did have a whole world of art to draw on, as Turkish tribes of one sort or the other ruled at the time from the shores of the Adriatic to the Jamuna River Valley near Delhi. Taken as a whole, the Divrigi Mosque works aesthetically, too–it’s more than just an intellectual curiosity.

Before I trudged downhill for lunch I was given a real acoustic treat. I sat on the porch, next to these two old guys, when the muezzin belted out the azan, or Muslim call to prayer. He wasn’t finished with the first chorus of “Allahu Akbar” before the melancholy song ricocheted of the mountain walls twenty kilometers distant, racing back in a mezmerizing echo. Now, I’ve heard azans from Xi’an in China to Muscat in Oman, from the southernmost Indian Cape of Comorin all the way north to Skopje in Macedonia and they are always wonderful. But this one? I sat there, still as I could be and closed my eyes for the full effect.

Time unanchored.

Then the azan ended, I smiled and walked down the hill to eat lunch.

On the return journey to Sivas I turned off an old dirt road to nohwere. I drove for twenty or thirty kilometers just breathing in the scenery. Who ever said scenery was breathtaking was no Buddhist. Breathing is pure essence of life.

And so, I stopped the car, got out, sat on the hood breathing deep draughts of Anatolian air. The only sounds were birds chirping and a high keening wind.

The dome of the sky settled over me like light linen in a summer breeze. Green pastures rolled off in the distance. Mountains rose like smoke signals on a windless day. White clouds and snow-dusted peaks merged imperceptibly into each other.

At last, the jabbing and counter-thrusts of thought crawled to a stop.

I breathed again and life slowed almost to a halt. I let out the deep breath, as my Buddhist master taught me to, and became the clouds, the grass, the dust-devils whilrling down the road.

As I inhaled the world dissolved.

It was a wild place. We drove for about forty minutes out of Sanliurfa to the northeast of town. We passed through a narrow gap in the hills and drove up the cleft of a valley. We crossed a tributary of the Euphrates along the way and the water was just indecent. It looked liked water in a pool back home it was so clear and blue.

Then we passed through a village and there were these children. I’m writing this on the fly and haven’t put much thought into it okay, but they all had this wild, windswept look about them. Little girls’ hair frilling about out of their head scarves, little boys with wind-blown afros. And the wind did blow! Out of the east at about 20-25mph. They were all dark skinned little kids with impossibly blue eyes. They looked feral, unkempt, and most of them were herding goats or sheep and they were all beautiful. If they were chocolate I would have taken them all home for my little sister. My she loves chocolate.

Finally we started up into the hills. My driver was probably 70 years old, if a day younger, and he drove like a madman, all coughs and wheezes! “Allah khorosun,” indeed.

So, we’re switching back and forth along a beat up old dirt road and I’m thinking, “where the fuck are we going? And can we please NOT get there!”

It was gorgeous. You know there is a cliché about wheat fields waving in the wind and all that–and damned if I wasn’t living in the cliché. (And I’m too fucking lazy right now to come up with some metaphor, or analogy or simile so deal with it.)

I asked Huseyn the driver to stop the car–he speaks Russian, Turkish and Kurdish, so I spoke Russian too–and just laid down in one of the wheat fields looking up at the sky. That’s when I took the photo of the sky at the end of this story.

Huseyn thought I was nuts. Smiling at me with hardly five teeth in his mouth, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

“Are you crazy, just laying down in the field like that?” He asked when I got back into the car.

I smirked at him and said, “eto vso ravno,” in Russian, which basically, in the context of our conversation means, “yeah, I’m nuts.”

“You’re the first American I’ve ever met,” he said. “Are they all like you?”

“Hell no. THEY’RE WORSE!” I shouted over the din of the wind and the engine.

He smiled, the car swerved almost into a ditch (and I was wearing no seat belt–walking on the wild side this one!) and a fat-tailed lamb missed us by three inches. That’s what Huseyn said.

“He was lucky,” the old stinker winked at me.

“He should not be in road,” he roared and gunned the old Fiat up the hill.

So we drove on. We finally arrived at the summit. It wasn’t but about 800 meters above sea level but what a view! I tried hard to imagine what the place looked like 11,500 years ago, all gazelles running in fields of wild wheat, apricot groves, creeks and rivers running hither, tither and yon. Maybe a lion or two lurking in the valley below, leopards in olive trees eating their daily kill. And then I imagined this troupe of hunter-gatherers hiking up to the hill, all scraggly looking, wearing animal skins with that same wild wind swept look about them the kids in the valley had, all carrying offerings to unnamed spirits.

I have seen ancient landscapes before, but none so vivid, as if I carried a genetic marker for this scene in my own DNA.

Wednesday May 6, 2009

The contemporary illicit fentanyl trade is frequently compared to the 19th-century Opium Wars because both involve vast international supply chains, widespread societal addiction, and intense geopolitical friction between China and a Western power. However, while the structural damage to society is similar, the historical context, the degree of government involvement, and the logistics of the modern drug trade represent a complete role reversal.

Compare and contrast, shall we?

Historical Similarities

• Geopolitical Blame and Tensions: In the 1830s, the Chinese Qing Dynasty blamed the British Empire for destabilizing its society with opium. Today, United States officials frequently hold the Chinese government responsible for failing to stop the flow of chemicals fueling the American opioid crisis.

• Devastating Public Health Toll: Both crises involve a mass addiction epidemic. During the 19th century, an estimated one-third of the Chinese population suffered from opium addiction. Today, fentanyl and synthetic opioids have become the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45, claiming tens of thousands of lives annually.

• Weaponization of Free Trade: British merchants used the banner of “free trade” to justify smuggling opium into China against local laws. Today, illicit actors exploit globalized shipping, small postal parcels, and e-commerce loopholes to seamlessly move chemicals across borders.

Core Differences

A direct comparison highlights how the modern trade operates under completely different political and technological rules:

The British began the Opium Wars to fix a massive balance of payments issue.

The British public was buying Chinese made products at a ridiculously fast clip: porcealain, ie. China, silk, Chinese tea, especially Chinese tea, led to enermous trade deficits. The Brits had to come up with a solution and a devilish one they did. By 1839 the Brit were fed up watching the gold go one way: to China. So, they packed up boats loaded with opium and forced their way into the interior markets. The results were a rapid change in the balance of payments, gold started flowing back West to London and mass immesseration in China.

The Balance of Payments Issue Is Non Existent Today And The “Reverse Opium War” Narrative Falls Flat

The term “Reverse Opium War” is often invoked by political commentators to suggest that China is intentionally allowing the fentanyl trade as historical retribution for its “Century of Humiliation”—the period starting with the Opium Wars when Western powers fractured the country.

However, international security and defense researchers note that the reality is grounded more in cold geopolitics and regulatory challenges than active state-sponsored revenge. While Beijing heavily polices drugs within its own borders, it historically uses counter-narcotics cooperation as a diplomatic bargaining chip with Washington, scaling enforcement up or down depending on the state of broader U.S.-China trade and political relations.

In essence, it’s not quite a perfect historical analogy. But if the Straits of Hormuz don’t open fast, the opiod epidemic in the US could get a lot worse. Analogy or not.

The Chinese rail network now carries 23 million passengers a day. Multiply that by 365 and it carries 8.365 billion passengers a year. And that does not account for the increase in passengers during major holidays.

Now consider these two facts. First, India’s rail network carries 23 million passengers a day also. However, it took the Brits and Indians 172 years to build out a rail network spanning the Sub-Continent.

China did it in under 30 years.

Second: California voted in 2008 to build a high speed rail network between Los Angeles and San Francisco with a completion date of 2022. Operations are projected to start in 2030 now.

Ponder that for a moment and then puke. The future does not happen in America anymore.

Nota bene: This comment reminded me of something I saw in China many years ago. It was the summer of 2003. After the first big SARs outbreak. I was in far west China trying to get to India. At the time there was zero high speed rail to Tibet.

Understand? Zero.

To get to Tibet and then Nepal and finally India I had to travel across Qinghai, starting in Goldmud where I ended up in Lhasa, Tibet.

If you’ll allow an old backpacking traveller a brag, I’d be grateful. At the time, every backpacker I ever met considered the Golmud to Lhasa bus trip the sine qua non of the complete backpacker/traveller. You could not consider yourself a true traveller if you had never made this journey. 40 hours above 10,000 ft. (3,050 meters), often times as high as 14,000 feet (4,267 meters) on a sleeper bus, in which every passenger has altitude sickness of one degree or another. Puke in the aisles. No clean up. Restroom breaks rare, maybe five the entire journey. It is a badge of honor I wear with pride to this day.

Late at night about 24 hours into the journey we drove in to a traffic jam of epic proportions. A crazed, disorganized, enormous collassal mess of drivers screaming, fighting and no police on a dirt road 10,000 feet in altitude somewhere between Golmud and Lhasa. Himalayan Plateau meet insanity. It took an hour—at least—to get through. But what I saw mezmerized me like nothing else and I will never forget it. The Chinese, busy at Buddha knows what hour, building a High Speed Rail Link between Golmud and Lhasa, much constructed on damn near permafrost conditions.

Look it up if you disbeleive me.

They did it. It’s a first class wonder, the new rail link, complete with oxygen bars, etc. . .

But me, I’m glad I did it the hard way. It has more meaning.

Lamentatio finalis: Our mad rush to adopt technology in every aspect of our lives has robbed us of many beautiful and rare experiences, many of which are gone forever. I’ll leave you with one example. In 2008 I took the ferry from Penang, Malaysia across the Straits of Malacca. It was a leisurely six hour ride from Penang to Medan, Sumatra. While making the crossing I saw just how strategic a waterway it was: the sheer mass of container ships was mind boggling.

When I returned to Malaysia in 2011 specifically to share with my father the experience of the ferry ride acrosss the Straits, the ferry had been shuttered by low cost airlines flying from Penang to Medan. To me that is a loss equivalent to someone torching a Rembrandt in a Dutch museum.

Irrevocable.

Gone forever.

This post is for a Russian friend of mine. Руфина Сергеевна Гашева, Rufina Sergeyevna Gasheva was born 14 October 1921. Ruffik, as she asked me to call her--was proud to have a young American friend. I have a stack of letters to prove it.

I met Ruffik back in 1997. I was in Moscow with my soon to be wife and her best friend, Nastya (diminutive of Anastasia). Nastya dearly wanted to see her babushka, which was the last thing I wanted to do. Hear stories from some old lady? Good grief. But I went to keep my wife-to-be happy. One of the best decisions I ever made. After meeting Cpl. Ed Neidermeir of the 42 Division (aka: Rainbow Division) who saw his first action on 16 June 1918, meeting Ruffik and hearing her stories--I made it a point to visit her the next time I was in Moscow to hear more--was the single most serendipitous event of my life.

Ruffik was an educator her entire life and appreciated my historical knowledge. That’s probably why we hit it off. An hour or so after we had tea and had listened more eagerly after each anecdote she hobbled out of the room, down the hall and dug into a closet. She brought back a box and asked me to open it.

I gasped. I held in my hands a Герой Советского Союза (Geroi Sovietskovo Sayuza - Hero of the Soviet Union) the literal equivalent of a Congressional Medal of Honor. Speechless, I pulled a very heavy gold star on a red ribbon from the box. The Diameter of the star was 30 mm, and it weighed 33.04 grams.

So what did this affable and garralous octogenarian do to win such an incredible honor. First, she volunteered in September of 1941. She very quickly mastered the Po-2 Kukuruznik (the mule); an all weather, Soviet multi-role biplane. Its first flight was 24 June 1927, a year later the first hundred of an estimated 30,000 Po-2 entered service. In 1941 some wiseacre decided it would make an excellent light night bomber. It was fitted with a machine gun for the navigator and each wing was fitted with either two 50kg bomb carriers or one 100kg bomb carrier. The renamed U2-vs Войсковая серия - (voyskovaya seriya) was born just in time for Ruffik’s graduation in February 1942.

Her first posting was in Engels, on the Volga River, with the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. Her baptism by fire was in May 1942 in the Battle of the Kavkaz (the Caucasus). She went on to fight in every major battle on the Eastern Front, all with the 588th, which as an all female regiment was soon called the Night Witches by the Nazis.

Wikipedia explains the 588th’s effects on the enemy quite well:

The material effects of these missions may be regarded as minor, but the psychological effect on German troops was noticeable. They typically attacked by surprise in the middle of the night, denying German troops sleep and keeping them on their guard, contributing to the already high stress of combat on the Eastern front. The usual tactic involved flying only a few meters above the ground, climbing for the final approach, throttling back the engine and making a gliding bombing run, leaving the targeted troops with only the eerie whistling of the wind in the wings’ bracing-wires as an indication of the impending attack. Luftwaffe fighters found it extremely hard to shoot down the Kukuruznik because of two main factors: the pilots flew at treetop level where they were hard to see or engage and the stall speed of both the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 was similar to the U-2s maximum speed, making it difficult for the fighters to keep a Po-2 in weapons range for an adequate period of time.

By the end of the war she flew an insane 848 combat missions. It was in December of 1944 after her 823rd sortie that she was nominated for the Hero of the Soviet Union. She recieved it on 23 February, 1945. Ruffik lived a long, happy life, she was 91 years old on May 1, 2012, the day she died.

I bring Ruffik, this remarkable woman, to your attention because of Trump’s most recent utterly disrespectful and ignorant comments about the United States of America’s role in World Wars One and Two. Trump said about both wars: “nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance” in both world wars, and that “we did more than any other country, by far, in producing a victorious result in World War II.”

Two rebuttals. First, give this eloquent young woman a listen. She knows of what she speaks.

Second, if I’ve given anyone the idea that the USA was just sitting in therapy circles farting The White Album a few facts are in order: it is indisputable that the United States built and gave away (most to the Soviet Union) an enormous amount of trucks and other non-lethal industrial goods, including food. We also beat the snot out of the Japanese in the Pacific single-handedly.

The Chinese and Japanese slugged it out on the mainland with a level of brutality that was only superceded by our nuking of them. Simultaneously we rebuilt Britain’s Atlantic destroyer fleet--necessary to hunt submarines. We also fed Britain to a large degree and did what we could for France until it fell. Anyone stupid enough laugh at and poke fun at the French for their performance in World War Two doesn’t understand fuck all about the losses France endured in World War One. On a per capita basis they lost more to war and disease than the Soviets did during World War Two. Moreover, we liberated Algeria, Tunis, Libya, Sicily, Italy and France at the cost of 407,316 dead.

But . . .

First, let’s discuss Soviet fighting and German deaths for a moment. In 1942 during El Alamein, Montgomery faced 4 1/2 divisions of the Wehrmacht (76,000 soldiers). At the same time 190 German divisions (3,230,000 soldiers) were slugging it out with the Soviets across the entire Western face of the Soviet Union. From Leningrad to Stalingrad and right up to the Caucasus Mountains Übermensch transcended traditional Western morality and killed untermenschen for sport. (Too bad they shot back!)

Second, when we landed on Normandy on 6 June 1944, 93% of ALL German casualties were on the Eastern Front.

Finally, by the time we got to the Rhine 2/3’s of all German soldiers had been felled by the Red Army. We may have been the arsenal but as John Mearsheimer describes it better than any other commentator I’ve ever heard: The Soviets paid the blood price.

All 27,000,000 of them.

Of all the things I have done in life the one I most identify with and take pride in is my education as an historian. Unlike the hard sciences, such as physics, where men and women have their best ideas in their late 20s and early 30s, historians do not achieve success or notoriety until at least their mid-50s, early 60s. This is because history is a cumulative art: it takes years to acquire and synthesize hundreds of anecdotes, data points, and quotes, from friend and foe alike, winnowing out rumor from fact after reading a hundred letters to and from the object of your study. It requires a staggering amount of knowledge to judge the past in its own context and to do so with an historian’s sentiment.

But we’re not here to talk about historical reasoning. We’re here to talk about math. I know. I know.

What did algebra every do for you?

More than you know.

Anyhoo . . .

The really great thing about getting two master’s degrees is you get to take a lot of electives. Physics, did it. Calculus, knocked it out of the park. Cosmology? You betcha. Quantum mechanics? Course damn near broke me. Foundation of mathematics? In essences this was a philosophy of mathematics course, at its heart and it blew me away. Not to mention inspired a wild adventure that would end in the deserts of Central Asia.

First, my fascination began with Euclid and how he systematized and synthesized Egyptian and Babylonian ideas into a coherent structure of elements that led to modern plane geometry. The dude took the wisdom of the pyramid and ziggurat builders and discovered a way of looking at the world to build in new ways. That takes a hell of a mind, one I can appreciate, even at this distance in time. As I studied Euclid I learned that Babylonia used a base-sixty numerical system. While the Egyptians used a base-ten system. The Egyptians were the first to utilize fractions around 1000 BC. Then, in the 5th century BC the Indians in an attempt to square the circle calculated the square root of two correctly to five decimal places. Then around 300 BC the Indians used Brahmi numerals to further refine the true ancestor to our base-ten system. At the same time the Babylonians invented the abacus.

The poor Romans didn’t do diddly for mathematics. Imagine complex calculations with Roman numerals? How would one even begin solving for N?

Screw that.

But they excelled at using applied mathematics to survey and build straight roads, among other things. So, kudos!

At lot of stuff happened between the Romans and the next big development. A lot of stuff I am skipping because I’m trying to get to a simple point without using two thousand words to do so.

Something truly remarkable happened in India in 628 AD. Brahmagupta wrote a book that clearly explained and delineated, with formulas, the role of zero placed in a proto-Hindu Arabic script. This was positively revolutionary. He is the clear discoverer of the modern place value system of numbers, as well. Well, natural numbers, that is.

And now the scientific knowledge begins to compound.

In 810 the House of Wisdom is built in Baghdad for the express purpose of translating Greek and Sanskrit mathematical and philosophical texts. Ten years later, in 820 a Persian from Khwarazm—the delta where the Oxus River once flowed into the Aral Sea—discovered a way to solve linear and quadratic equations. His name was al-Khwarizmi and his book was called Al Jabr—which was Europeanized into algebra. His book, once it reached Europe three and a half centuries later introduced the Hindu-Arabic numeral system that was adopted wholesale by the nascent scientific community emerging in the earliest European universities. Universities also have a Muslim Golden Age pedigree, coming from the great Persian vizier to the Seljuk Sultan of Central Asia Malik Shah, Nizam al-Mulk. His Nizamiyyas, now known as madrassas, were built all over the Seljuk realm and were the earliest versions of universities, where men came from all over to learn many different topics. Sadly, the madrassas fell into stagnation when al-Ghazali closed the gates of ijtihad1 (open questioning) in 1091 with his book The Incoherence of the Philosophers. The Muslim Golden Age ended that year.

Now, between the foundation of the earliest European universities and Isaac Newton, a lot of essential groundwork was laid for Sir Newton’s work. I seek not to diminish any of that. But Newton begat not one, not two, not three but four revolutions in science: optics, mathematics, mechanics and gravity. His discovery of infinitesimal calculus is literally the base for modern rocket science as he used it to calculate and predict with stunning accuracy the movements of heavenly bodies, with was hitherto impossible. Newton is simply the single greatest mind in the history of human science. He stands on the shoulders of some mighty tall fellows, but his accomplishments are of the ages.

Now, I come to the point.

In this essay I have used a very specific word for each mathematical advance discussed. That word is “discovered.” I have purposefully eschewed the use of “invented.” And I have done so for a damn good reason. I am what you call a ‘mathematical Platonist.’ Said theory is defined by Wikipedia as “the form of realism that suggests mathematical entities are abstract, have no spatiotemporal or causal properties, and are eternal and unchanging.” Thus, as the Brits would say, ‘maths’ are discovered. They exist outside of our reality in eternal, unchangable forms that Plato enumerated most eloquently in his dialogue Phaedrus and in the Allegory of the Cave in his Republic. In Phaedrus Plato’s forms exist as elemental, essential but not spatially referenceable blueprints to be discovered by mankind.

Mathematical Platonism does not exist without opposition. Its rival is known as mathematical nominalism, which has its own merits. It is defined as “the philosophical view that abstract mathematical objects like numbers, sets, and functions do not exist in reality, or at least do not exist as abstract entities independent of concrete things or the mind.” Thus as we Yanks say, they be invented.

So why did I write this essay?

Because this discussion on the merits of the two theories is utterly fascinating to me. And if you have ten minutes and a solid high school foundation in mathematics you will most certainly understand and appreciate it. The interview engrossed me from question one.

One final note: Ms. Jonas, the philosopher of math being interviewed says that she is 87% certain mathematical Platonism is correct, I’ll add my confidence level as about 59%. Why? Because there are some set theory ideas, like Russell’s Paradox (don’t even ask!) I simply cannot wrap my danged head around—I reckon my grey matter isn’t as big or maybe as sophisticated as it once was. I licked logic in college with an A+ but this set theory stuff. Good grief. The paradoxes drive me wonko! (If you get the reference add ten bonus points to your final grade.)

Thirty-two years ago on my first trip overseas I visited Verdun in France. Specifically to see the battlefield of Verdun, where von Falkenhayn sought to bleed the French white. From 21 February 1916 to 18 December 1916, 9 months, 3 weeks and 6 days the Boche--the term the French used for the Germans--did exactly that. I’d written my senior’s honor thesis in history on Verdun and felt it was right to visit.

I’m not going to go into too much detail. You can read about it in its fullness here. I only want to add a few things. First, this was the first time any general attempted a strategy of attrition. Some of what Grant did during the Wilderness and the siege of Fredricksburg is semi-attritional, but it wasn’t Grant’s spoken intent as it was the explicit aim of the Cheif of the German General Staff Erich von Falkenhayn’s. He knew he could not break through the ring of forts surrounding the Meuse Heights and the medieval city of Verdun. His aim was to take the heights and dig in and then take the strategic defensive, forcing France to regain her honor at any cost. 50 German divisions squared off against 75 French. von Falkenhayn succeeded in forcing France’s hand, certainly. In the end his strategy was a failure and he was dismissed by the Kaiser and replaced by Ludendorff and Hindenburg, who quickly established a military dictatorship over the Second Reich for the remainder of the war. Needless to say that over a million men--French and German--died fighting in the trenches along and up the heights and into the forts Douamont and Vaux trading them back several times.

If the Miracle on the Marne was the most important battle of the 20th century--and it was we ought paraphrase Churchill and call it France’s finest hour. That being so makes the Battle of Verdun one the finest last stands in the annals of human endeavor. To a man the good, stolid French poilus stood and died in the mud, the filth, the lice, the decaying bodies and the artillery shells shattering overhead all day long, every day for almost a year.

When I visited in 1994 I walked from the city of Verdun all the way up the heights along the single supply route the French called the “voie sacrée” - the sacred way. It was ten miles there and ten miles back. A long day. I walked through trenches, both forts Douamont and Vaux and at the end of the day I walked, rather solemnly through the hallowed arches of the Ossuary, which holds the bones of over 130,000 unidentified French and German soldiers. There was no entrance fee for anything and I was free to roam just about anywhere I wished, except when I saw signs that declared, “Non! Munitions non explosées!” Unexploded ordnance, still active almost a hundred years after being fired.

So this morning I watched a video made by a young French woman of the battlefield and its environs. A lot has changed. There is a new, modern museum, and to walk the grounds and see the museum cost about $20. The young woman does an admirable job of guiding the viewer through the most important parts of what I now guess is a monument park of sorts called Mémorial de Verdun Champ de bataille. She’s tactful, sincere, respectful and cognizant of the sacrifice the men made for her. She honors them in her own way. I was pleased to see their sacrifice is still remembered and revered. (As some of you may recall, I had the good fortune to befriend an American WWI veteran in the 1990s before he passed away. So, WWI is important to me, I carry the memory of one of the last American soldiers to fight in the war and I cherish that memory.) She also pays her respects to the Germans who fell during the battle (part of the site was re-dedicated in the 50’s after the Franco-German rapproachment after WWII). She even visited the graves of our doughboys who fought in the area in 1918.

In all honesty, I can’t say I would have enjoyed walking through the museum. Of course seeing the uniforms and the kit of the poilus was fascinating, but there was a rich, chilling awe of gravitas to my imagination that day as I walked through the empty echoing halls of forts Douamont and Vaux. There were no wax figures as there are now. Only a haunting silence. If I listened closely enough I could almost hear the distant echoes of incoming artillery. The shots of mausers. The cracks of the countering French Berthiers. And the loud pops and booms of French and German grenades.

Sometimes less is more.

Regardless, it was an unforgetable experience.

My mother and I got into it yesterday about writing.

Now, I adore my mother: she’s fantastic; most of the time.

Yesterday, however, she took issue with my word usage.

Preface: Mom is Catholic. Went to Catholic high school and university. She knows her St. Thomas Aquinas, Grotius, Pascal, and a good smattering of just war theory. She’s good coming heavy with the ethics when I screw up, Buddhist or not. When she aims, she doesn’t miss.

So in an email yesterday we were discussing Catholic and Buddhist ethics. Mom wanted to know specifically how Buddhists view the Three Soures of Catholic Morality. I resisted a flashback to Sister Agnes and the 12 inch wood ruler with which she routinely slapped my hand. Transgression, unknown. She was a sadist but I learned my Latin declensions perfectly.

I digress. . .

“In Catholicism,” my Mom wrote, “for an action to be morally good the object, the intent and the circumstance must all be morally sound or the action is corrupted.”

“Interesting that there are three sources in Catholicism, because in Buddhism ethics are rooted in the Noble Eightfold Path through three main components: right speech, right action, right livelihood,” I replied. “However, to achieve merit and harmony in Buddhism one is not required to act in a supererogatory manner, whereas some Catholic actions imply it.”

She laid into me in the next email. “See, you’re grandstanding with your words again,” she said. “What does that even mean? It sounds like something out of the Kama Sutra!”

“First, the Kama Sutra is Hindu. Second, what did I say?” I replied.

“You’re a word snob. Supererogatory is what you wrote. What does that even mean?”

“Mom, it’s actually a Catholic concept,” I replied. “It’s something that is morally good, but not required to be done; it is to go above and beyond what is morally or ethically required.”

“Why didn’t you just say that?” She said.

“Why use eleven words when one gets the job done?”

And then I mouthed off to her, like a dumb-ass.

“How hard is it to use a dictionary app on your iPhone?”

“If you weren’t an adult I’d beat you, right now.”

“I know, Mom, but still. I’m a logophile, a verbivore. I can’t help myself.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“I love you too.”

Diplomacy is the politics of anarchy.¹ Grand strategy begins with diplomacy, but in failure, as Clausewitz instructs us, ends in war.

I wave this semaphore to avoid confusion by opening a discussion on Russian grand strategy with an overview of recent diplomatic history. But a précis is necessary.

No longer a superpower, the United States finds itself in a new position as one of a handful of a great powers, although it remains primus inter pares. No longer able to dictate the politics of anarchy the risk of general warfare among great powers is something the US needs to learn to avoid—Iran clearly hasn’t taught us a thing. And challenging China is a pipe-dream now as they have superseded the United States in all but two or three of the most important measures of economic and military power.

More importantly, we occupy a revolutionary diplomatic moment. The global diplomatic order created by Kissinger and Zhou En-lai with the Shanghai Communiqué in 1972 is terminally ill. America’s misguided abandonment of the Triangular diplomacy that kept the then Soviet Union and its successor state the Russian Federation and China closer to the US than to each other, has further eroded Americas ability to shape events. Add to these two failures the abandonment of the American grand strategy of the 20th century—prevent any single power or coalition of hostile powers from dominating the Eurasian landmass—and we’re left with a 21st century foreign policy of cobbled together, ill-thought out and impulsive moves engineered by small-minded think tank ideologues and the little men of domestic politics hoping to ‘make America great again.’ I doubt three out of hundred Americans understand how seriously we torpedoed our own power by abandoning our grand strategy in favor of limited ideals like the “dual containment” of rogue states or the policy to fight “two and a half wars” simultaneously as Madeleine Albright’s “indispensable nation” during the Unipolar Moment of the 1990s.

Great power wars within the Westphalian system run in hundred year cycles.∅ The end of the Thirty-Years War in 1648 inaugurated the Westphalian world. Our world of theoretically equal nation states with invioable borders and the right to govern themselves as they see fit. At least that’s what the diplomats in 1648 agreed to.

Roughly a hundred years later the War of Austrian Succession begat the Seven-Years War, the first truly global war. In 1763 the Treaties of Paris and Hubertusburg were signed but left open more questions than the wars resolved.

Open diplomatic questions, like revanchism, how to finance a hard won victory, or pay reparations for a loss, have a nasty tendency towards reigniting wars. Such were the misunderstood results of the 1763 peace, such as the American struggle for Independence that arose out of England’s near bankruptcy and need to refilll its coffers. Add to that the Colonies feeling their oats, a reinvigorated French naval challenge to England, plus powerful domestic forces unleashed by French support of American independence all combined to attenuate the usual hundred-year gap between Great Power wars and lit the French Revolutionary fuse that burned from 1789 to 1815. A renewed hundred-year gap followed, but ended with the Miracle on the Marne in September 1914. The Guns of August opened what was in reality a Second Thirty-Years War, fought, once again, to settle Germany’s place in Mitteleuropa. This epoch ended in 1945.

So, taking the end of WWII in 1945 and subtracting the present year 2024 gives us an interval of 21 years in which American power will ineluctably erode in favor of our foes, perceived and real.

The balance of power is not some recondite or esoteric concept. It is the singular gauge of power relations in an anarchic system. It combines hard power and soft power and is the sine qua non of who’s on first and who’s on top, to smash up a metaphor and use Latin gratuitously in the process.

But the balance of power is a lagging indicator. Indeed, when wars end or significant diplomatic denouements (e.g. the reordering of the European alliance system after the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756 or the combined effects of the Nixon-shocks that unraveled the post-WWII financial settlement of Bretton Woods in August 1971 and the subsequent rearrangement of the global order with the Shanghai Communiqué in February 1972) are achieved their results confirm what existed beforehand. The diplomatic démarche or war ratify pre-existing facts on the ground, not as most believe, create new ones.

Need I remind anyone of Dick Cheney’s Deluze-like post-modern comment on the Iraq war when he said, “we make the reality.”

No, Dick, actually you did not. The US was unable to impose its political will on Mesopotamia and we lost. Dick horizons remained terribly short-sighted, as he could not conceive the politics of war are older than humanity itself.

Indeed, our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees—not bonobos— play at politics identically. “[Primatologists have] concluded that rather than changing the social relationships, [chimpanzee] fights [and wars] tended to reflect changes that had already taken place,” remarks Lawrence Freedman in his book Strategy.”† A brilliant, if depressing, observation on the human condition. We are war and war is us.

Enough background, onwards to Russia!

Russian grand-strategy under Putin’s twenty-five year tenure has been quadripartite in nature. First, quash any and all separatist movements or insurgencies within the internationally recognized borders of the Russian Federation—to prevent a Soviet style dissolution of the entirety of Eurasia. Second, place all of Russia’s vast resources under the umbrella of state control. Third, subject to the completion of aim number two, Russia sought neocolonial controlling stakes over the vast majority of resources within the previous borders of the USSR—know as the Near Abroad. Putin’s fourth aim is to secure a non-NATO buffer zone, or sphere of influence, to the south and west large enough to keep Russia safe from invasion from those two cardinal points.

Of course, nuclear weapons form a part of Russian grand strategy best understood within the context of the late 20th century arms control regime created by Nixon and Brezhnev, affirmed by Reagan and Gorbachev, and enlarged by Bush the Elder and Clinton with Yeltsin and its unraveling under Bush II and trump.

For now, we’ll proceed under the precondition that any war Russia fights will be conventional, that is until its existential interests have been directly breached. Adjacent threats are not direct, but there can be no denying (not-so) covert NATO, sorry, I mean Ukrainian attacks against Russian ballistic missile early warning radars and strategic bomberes are provocative in extremis. The Ukraine is not a nuclear power and without need or interest in destroying such radars or bombers. That was NATOs doing.

Full stop.

Shrewd Putin shows more restraint than any contemporary Western leader possesses.² Just look at Macron flailing wildly about France fighting Russia—its historical ally! Or Polish President Andrzej Duda agitating direct NATO war against Russia. Sure, its lunacy but rational lunacy in a Polish context. But, with every new report of NATO, so sorry, I mean Ukrainian, skullduggery my sphincter tightens and I look to build a bomb shelter.

PHASE ONE

On 9 August 1999 Russian President Boris Yeltsin named then unknown Vladimir Putin as his prime minister. In September a series of apartment bombings, attributed to Chechen separatists, in Moscow and Volgodonsk killed over 300 people.‡ Most observers, including myself, believe this was a false-flag operation. Whatever the case, it succeeded in galvanizing the Russian people in advance of the Second Chechen War. Putin quickly eclipsed Yeltsin as president of the Russian Federation on December 31, 1999 and subsequently ordered the bombing of Grozny. Putin pursued the Second Chechen War with ruthlessness right up to its official non-official ending in 2009. For ten years Russia showed no mercy, raining destruction and death on Chechen town and village, combatant and civilian alike.

Why? Because the consequences of failure were so grim, not just for the Russian Federation, but for the world. Herein lies a significant failure of American imagination. Try and visualize the chaos of a rump Russian state ending at the Ob River and a dozen more sovereignties existing across Eurasia. The resulting power vacuum and disruption to the balance of power would have made the Balkans look like a Sunday picnic. Make no mistake, this is the terminal goal of former Undersecretary of State for Revolution and Chaos, Victoria Nuland, wife of neocon éminence grise Robert Kagan, should the Ukraine prevail. It’s insanity equivalent to opening a can of baby sand-worms from Arrakis in the Gobi Desert just to see what happens. Neocons, like Nuland, suffer from what I call khaophilia, from the ancient Greek meaning love of chaos. They are rubberneckers on the interstate whose stupidity cause mass pileups. Or as my Turkish buddy Murat said one gorgeous spring day of a young ne’er do well on the streets of İstanbul, “he has an uncontrollable desire to throw rocks at hornet’s nests and watch what happens.” Think Libya.

But I digress.

PHASE TWO

The second arc of Putin’s grand strategy was complete within four years of his accession and election to the Russian presidency. By 2003 he had dissolved every independent media outlet and stripped all but the most dangerous of oligarchs of their power and assets, exiling many. He reserved the most severe punishment for his most serious and worthy opponent, Mikhail Khodorkosky. At the time Khodorkovsky was worth an estimated $15 billion USD and was CEO of Yukos, Russia’s largest oil and gas company. Putin had his assets seized by and incorporated into the state oil company Rosneft. Khodorkovsky was jailed on trumped up charges of tax evasion and convicted in 2005. Russia’s vast national resources were now under the control of the государство—the state.

PHASE THREE

The third goal of his grand strategy was decidedly neocolonial and took longer to achieve. However, by 2016 when I visited all but one of the Central Asia republics (Tajikistan) the resources of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, a goodly portion of those in Kazakhstan (reliably pro-Russian), and Kyrgyzstan appeared under the control of the Russian Federation. Russian TV news was on in the hotels and airports and every ATMs but one dispensed rubles not dollars.⊕ Only Azerbaijan gained a measure of independence, but it came at an enormous cost.

From 1991 forward Russia supported Armenia’s land-grab in Nagorno-Karabakh, a de jure part of Azerbaijan, but soon under de facto Armenian control. Following the first Nagorno-Karabakh War’s end in 1994 Armenia encouraged its citizens to populate the newly conquered territory, á la Israeli settlers gobbling up the West Bank. Russia’s aim to keep Azerbaijan divided and preoccupied had salutary second order effects, like limiting the interests of western oil companies in Azerbaijan. Not until 2023, after Turkey—infuriated by Russian attacks on its jets, soldiers and interests in Syrian Kurdistan—up-armed the Azeris with modern NATO armaments, were the Armenians summarily tossed out of Azeri territory. Claims of a second Armenian genocide are without merit. The Azeris committed no crimes against humanity. They waged war against an aggressor and ejected the occupier. Hyperbole is wasted on reality.

To Russia’s satisfaction the Transcaucasian nations remain divided. Azerbaijan, a Shi’ite nation, schizophrenically looks to both Iran and the US for guidance.

Armenia, unwilling to accept defeat, choses selective outrage. Meanwhile an economic and demographic time bomb of its own making prepares to detonate.

Then there is poor benighted Orthodox Christian Georgia. I recall sitting in Alex Rondeli’s Tbilisi office in 2003 discussing the future of Georgia and the possibility of joining NATO. This was in the immediate aftermath of Sheverdnadze’s ouster, the Rose Revolution, and Columbia University educated Mikhail Saakashvili’s presidency. Rondeli, to his credit, percolated ambivalence about NATO and American power. I perceived him as much more the pragmatist than romantic, as such terms relate to power politics. But his associate, one Timur Iakobashvili, was a strident true believer. He waxed poetic about America’s invasion of Iraq. He hectored and lectured me about American success at expeditionary warfare—the insurgency had yet to begin. And he was certain NATO would come calling.

“No, it won’t,” I said adding in French, “souvenez-vous de la perfide Albion. America will betray you the moment we lose interest in your part of the world.”◊ I fancy I got the last word but Iakobashvili got the Ambassadorship to the US.

Regardless, Abkhazia and Ossetia were shaved off of Georgia in the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. Georgia, divided still, demonstrates that the principle of divide and rule is as effective now as it was when the Hittites disastrously invaded Assyria in 1237 BC. Fortunately, most Georgian citizens have begrudgingly accepted this modus vivendi with the Russian Federation, much as Mexico accepts the giant of el Norte. Sometimes there is no choice. Sometimes you have to make the best bad choice. That’s the national interest in an anarchic world. Obviously, this suits Russia just fine, having the added benefit of a divided Georgia aligning with Russia’s interest in preventing NATO accession.

PHASE FOUR

That brings us to the present moment. Putin’s fourth and final grand strategic aim: carve out a large enough buffer between NATO and the Russian Federation that makes the costs of invasion from the south or west prohibitive. As I have shown, the Russian way of war is predicated on three easily comprehensible strategies. First, scorched earth tactics and the suffering of the Russian people.° Second, the ability to ‘spin up,’ recognize and promote learning generals while under distressing clouds of бардак—messiness.ƒ Finally, what has been left unsaid but demonstrated clearly in the three wars cited in my previous essay, is the Parthian, or steppe way of war: strategically trading space for time.

The Scythians first did this to Darius I of Persia in 513 BC, luring him ever deeper into the Pontic Steppe. The Parthians destroyed Crassus and his legions in 53 BC at Carrhae by trading space for time, suckering him down from the watered hills around Edessa onto the parched plains of Mesopotamia. The Seljuk Turks conquered half a world with such tactics first at the Battle of Dandanaqan in 1040 AD against the Ghaznavids, then at Manzikert in 1071 against the Byzantines. The Mongols won the greatest empire humanity has ever known on the backs of their horses, deep in the steppe, firing recurved bows. Even Tamerlane, scion of the Chingissid line and first of the gunpowder kings, defeated the Ottoman Sultan Yıldırım—the Lightningbolt—Bayezit at the Battle of Angora, leaving him to dash his brains out in a gilded cage as the Great Emir trudged back to Samarkand. Grant and his Sherman would call it the strategic defensive. This, combined with scorched earth tactics gives Russia enough time to marshal all her resources to mount a successful counter-offensive, as she did at Poltava, Borodino, and Stalingrad. The Ukraine (and Belarus) is simply the space Russia will trade for time.

It is important to recall that all Russia asked of the Ukraine, before the war began, was neutrality. But the Brits suckered the Ukraine’s Comedian-in-Chief into fighting against Russia as a cat’s paw for NATO. Whiskey tango foxtrot!

So now Russia destroys the eastern part of Ukraine, not to conquer, but simply preserve a large enough buffer so that any would-be invader can be met in Russian time, not invader time, and thereby be destroyed.

Space for time has been and will remain the single most important and historically relevant aspect of her grand strategy, barring a nuclear exchange and even then, who really knows? Russian Eurasia is vast. Space for time is a vital interest to Russia. Victorious, she will dictate the peace, annex all Ukrainian territories in a line from Sumi in the north through Poltava, Dnipro on the east bank of the Dnieper River, Zaporizhzhiya, then south across to Kherson, Mikolaiv and finally the entire Oblast of Odessa. What will remain is a landlocked rump, near-failed Ukrainian state ruled by a corrupt Comedian-cum-Dictator, dependent on Russian good-will.

Sovereign neutrality versus suzerainty? I know what I would have chosen.

“что делать?”ξ What happens after Russia defeats the Ukraine? What of her increasingly tight-knit energy for cash rapprochement with China? The Russians have clearly entered one of their “Russians are an Asiatic people” phases that cycle through the Russian intelligentsia every few decades like a recurrent case of giardiasis. Does this mean we are we looking at an Asiatic version of the pre-WWI Антанта (entente)?

I confess my crystal ball is getting a bit foggy.

What will an emboldened, potentially revanchist Russian grand strategy look like? What kind of forward actions might it take? Will it revive its navy and utilize the harbors of Syria to pressure Israel and project power into the greater Middle East? If so, the results might be beneficial to peace in the region. At the very least it will piss the Israelis off. Will it revive its relationship with Egypt, Nasser-like, displacing American influence and subsidies? At risk of a two front conflict against Iran and Egypt? That might chasten the Israelis into some kind of acceptance of international norms. At the very least it’ll sober ‘em up from their decades long binge of oppression against the Palestinians. Will Russia super charge its submarine fleet in the North Atlantic? Threatening NATOs key re-supply line? Will it find a unique way to avoid war but pressure the Baltics into leaving NATO for a pre-World War One Belgian-like guaranteed neutrality? Will it support a Chinese invasion of Taiwan? There is a non-zero chance that each and all of these might happen and more. Russia has regained a decent share of the stature it lost globally when the USSR dissolved. Not all of it, however, and so she is a spoiler on the international stage, albeit a big one. Nor should she be underestimated.

And yet . . .

Of course, the majority fault lies with America. Presidents Bush the Younger, Obama, Trump and Biden foolishly drove a heavyweight continental power, former and potentially future ally into the arms of our biggest international competitor, China.

I don’t know about you, but I would have preferred Russia on our side fighting the land war if the big show against China begins in earnest. With the right coalition, one including a Russian threat to China’s rear, the Middle Kingdom might be defeated.

Sadly, the march of folly begun with the abrogation of the ABM Treaty by Bush the Younger in 2002, accelerated with the abeyance of the INF Treaty in 2018 by Trump, leaving the nuclear arms control regime began by Nixon and Brezhnev, solidified by Reagan and Gorbachev and expanded under Bush the Elder and Clinton, in tatters.

We world citizens are left to live, once again, at very real risk of nuclear annihilation.

What a shame small minds presided over such potential.

Obviously the horizons of American diplomats have never been very far or wide. Certainly not enlightened enough to embrace or understand men of foresight like Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, and James A. Baker, III. After all, banality of banalities, the business of America is business. Let’s have featherweight Warren Christopher be our Secretary of State! How about Madeleine Albright or even cage-match Condi? Anthony wet-Blanket anyone? Such choices leave me disgusted.

What’s even more dangerous is American worship at the ‘Church of the Divine Belief in the Steadfastness of Our International Friends’.

Does it have a pope? How many brigades does he have?

Alas, nothing is sillier or more dangerous than such blind adherence. Our European allies are freeloaders, sipping their cafe au lait under an America tax-payer financed security umbrella while the sun sets on Western Civilization. Don’t misunderstand me, I get Europe’s reluctance to rearm and/or countenance war of any kind after the catastrophe of the early 20th century.

But, folks, let’s get real for a moment and recognize truth.

No nation has steadfast friends. Nations have only implacable, insatiable interests. When those interests align, you get harmony. When they do not, you get conflict, revolution or war. This is the way of the Westphalian system, established in 1648 and now global in scope. We fool ourselves trusting the panacea of international law and/or a rules based order.

In Westphalia there is only anarchy, self-interest and impermanent security. For if one nation has absolute security, then all others are absolutely insecure.

¹: In the Westphalian order there is no mutually agreed upon global government or mechanism with a monopoly on violence to enforce peace. There is a word for this: anarchy.

§: The Wikipedia entry on Triangular diplomacy is 85% rubbish and 15% cherry-picked quotes. The concept behind triangular diplomacy is simple, to paraphrase Kissinger: keep relations with our peer competitors closer to us than they are to each other. The Wikipedia entry is a self-fellating perversion of the original concept. Donald Trump wouldn’t know triangular diplomacy from a parallelogram, nor would Anthony Blinken.

∇: The Thucydides trap, a phrase coined by scholar Graham Allison, pertains to the challenge of a rising power opposing the defender of the status quo and the resultant breakdown of diplomacy, then almost universally followed by great power general warfare. For example, Athens rising, Sparta status quo. United Kingdom status quo, Germany rising. Dozens of other examples exist throughout history.

∅: It is crucial to note that I am discussing warfare and grand strategy within the Westphalian system, a system that now dominates the globe. There were plenty of devastating wars all over the world between 1648 and 1900. But, generalized global warfare under the Westphalian system is materially different and not all state actors were apart of the Westphalian system until the 20th century.

†: Freedman, 2013, p.4. I’d further highlight that chimpanzees and bonobos are the Yin and Yang of mankind’s warring sides.

²: this essay was written before NATO forces, French, Polish and Ukrainian made their incursion into the Kursk Oblast of Russia, which makes my comments even more appropriate and predictive.

‡: It’s September of 1999, I don’t recall the exact date, but it was around 11:30 pm or so, I was sitting in the original Moscow McDonald’s on the corner of Bronnaya and Tverskaya ulitsas. In 1999 McDonalds was still a status symbol to Russians so I humored my business associate, Volodya, with a Биг Мак. The moment we sat a boom rang out, followed by rattling windows and the soft shaking of the building. An earthquake in Moscow? Everyone except me hit the floor. The immediate danger gone, we all went outside looking up and down Tverskaya ulitsa. To the southeast a column of smoke rose, barely visible behind the Kremlin floodlights atop the Trinity tower. Volodya turned to me and said in Russian, “those fucking Chechens are all going to die now.” He was not far off the mark.

⊕: The sole holdout was an ATM in Osh, Kyrgyzstan that spit out Chinese Yuan. What do you think that presages?

◊: La perfide Albion, French for Perfidious Albion refers to the diplomatic treachery of England. And yes, I really said this to him. I would also note Scott Ritter made virtually identical comments about Georgia in a podcast yesterday. Fast forward to the last seven minutes.

°: “Shonik, don’t worry about us,” my Russian ex-wife used to say, “we’re used to it. We’ll endure.”

ƒ: Thank you reader ‘j’ for this wonderful concept.

ξ: “What is to be done?” Vladimir Lenin, Saint Petersburg, 1902.

In the two hundred years before the American Civil War there were more than 250 slave revolts involving more than 50 slaves. Most involved between 50-150, but some we larger.

So what do slave rebellions have to do with the our Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms?

In short: they had everything to do with slavery, and nothing to do with holding our government accountable. Seriously, do you honestly think a couple thousand Texans with AR-15s could out fight an armored brigade?

Please.

The Second Amendment was inserted into the Bill Of Rights as a sop to white southern slave holders—that said white slave holders had enough firepower in the form of yeoman farmer militias—to put down any serious slave rebellion. Look what they did to Gabriel Prosser in 1800? Or Andry’s Rebellion in 1811? Bet you never heard of either, have ya?

Here is another fun fact: I have one BA, one MS, and an MA for good measure, and no teacher or professor in any of my classes ever discussed slave revolts in the United States. Yes, François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture was lionized. But he was Haitian revolting against the French.

I have 20 years of primary, secondary and tertiary education and no one, not even once, ever mentioned a slave revolt in the United States. They talked about how well slaves were treated--which is balderdash--but never mentioned slave revolts. Maybe that’s because I was mostly educated in Texas, a kind of sort of part of the South, but really just home to a bunch of loudmouth assholes and dipshits who think they are better than everyone else in the United States because Texas was its own country for nine years.

What’s that joke about bullshit and Texans?

Texas begged to be let into the Union every chance it got.

Last but not least, the aura of slavery lingers on in the institution of the Senate in general, which is first and foremost the most undemocratic insitution in the United States, and in particular the filibuster, which to this day is used the vast majority of the time by Southern Senators to derail any real progress in the United States.

So, now you know.

To be read while listening to the Beastie Boys, Sabotage, at full tilt. Speakers, not earbuds you nit-wit.

In the beginning, circa 1989-93ish, post-modernism was out of step with mainstream academia. Derrida was a curiosity. Baudrillard was simply too dense to understand. (Confession: Baudrillard’s book, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” is actually damned profound and prescient once you get past the kind of syntax that would make Yoda blush.) And Foucault, poor Michel (already dead by the time I attended university) was still dismissed as a fad—although of all the post-moderns Foucault’s work has aged the best and is worthy of respect. His discourses on the body, knowledge and the aggrandizement of power over all three by public institutions presaged neoliberalism. Credit where credit is due.

Sed tamen aberro . . .

Regardless, to the overworked and underpaid graduate students the post-moderns had the frisson of transgression. And nothing attracts the mediocre like a charlatan wrapped in the mantle of authenticity.

Eventually, those grad students became instructors, adjuncts and associate professors all over the country. Chipping away at the old ways by introducing Lyotard’s “incredulity towards meta-narratives” and Roland Barthes declaration that “the author was dead” both invalidating authorial intent and empowering the reader’s (usually baseless) interpretation, Derrida’s rejection of common sense and objective interpretations (known as ‘Deconstruction’) was the perfect mortar for the worst possible innovation.

It was probably Foucault, as his education included a substantial grounding in the history of science, who connected the dots leading from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, aka the observer effect, and grafted the concept onto his own thinking on the fluid and relative nature between institutions and power.

Then, in 1975 he took LSD. The experience changed everything according to Foucault. He completely revamped his work on human sexuality and its was here that sex took on the aspect of a social construct, to be negotiated. Sex was no longer an issue of pleasure, but of truth. (And thus our sexual identity politics were born.) Foucault’s popular discourse took on a life of its own, especially after his premature death in 1984.

The post-moderns soon expropriated wholesale the ‘observer effect.’ Unfortunately they abandoned rigorous analysis at the same time and like the good mediocre minds they were, adopted a pose I call, “la pose de Sarte.”*

With a highly dubious interpretation of science in one hand and quasi-erotic mojo in another students flocked to their lectures in droves. The ladies showed up for you. The men showed up for the ladies. And everyone ate up the half-baked but dangerously sexy contrarian theories on race, gender, and the negotiation of sexual identity.

Sometime between 2002 and 2014 when I returned to academia the entire coterie of post-moderns had infected all the humanities. And the observer effect acted like leprosy rotting the academy from every which way at once.

But the classes were full. Administrators took note. Professors got grants.

“Whoa, this grift is working?” They thought.

“Nicely done, Waldo.”

Now they’re wearing Zegna shoes and hand-woven black woolen Irish turtlenecks. Undergrad coeds hop in and out of their beds like Mae West on meth.

Soon they get published in peer reviewed journals by overworked and underpaid peers who just don’t give two fucks because university administrators have proliferated while tenured jobs have declined in nominal and real terms.

Big time college sports gobble up what is left of the academic budget, so universities start hiring half-assed adjunct professors and pay them slave wages.

And still, the post-moderns strike le pose, claiming their bullshit truth is equally as true as 2+2=4, when in actuality said theory is the the square root of wildebeest horns multiplied by baboon asses, divided by the Pyramid of Giza plus the Sphinx.

Making any sense yet?

It should not. It should boggle the mind, as not one iota of the post-moderns nonsense theorizing is scientifically provable or falsifiable. It’s bunkum. A weak attempt to prove there is no such thing as objective reality to anyone but the observer.

While working on my second masters I signed up for a seminar on the history of human sexuality. This was 2015 and we deconstructed the biological focus of traditional theories of sexuality. Now there was a masterclass of freeway rubbernecking idiocy. After that nonesense, we discussed Foucault, Jameson and finally Deluze, who more than any other post-modern flagrantly conflated science and mathematics to justify nothingness and subjectivity’s role on the observer’s effect, especially on sexual identity.

Give you one guess what conclusion we arrived at: sex is a social construct.

To be fair, gender is a social construct. The Thai’s have three genders, masculine, feminine and khathoey, or ‘Lady Boy.’ Kathoey are fully integrated and accepted into mainstream Thai, Cambodian and Laotian society. But sex, sex is not a construct.

I can prove the objective reality of sex’s falsifiability as a social construct.

Question: can you have an orgasm? Answer: yes. Then you are male or female.

Answer: no. Well, I respect your commitment, snip-snip, but you are neither male nor female.

Why would the professor care about any of this? He has tenure and his agenda. Besides, he’s getting laid more than Hank Moody in Californication.

Meanwhile the students grow stupider yet simultaneously more arrogant as they adopt le pose.

A vicious cycles ensues and we now find ourselves in the present moment, slaves to time’s relentless arrow.

It was time to put up or shut up. Yes, I know how to be a good suck up of a student and get high marks!

So, I wrote my research paper on the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy and his catamite. I got an ‘A’ but the course, well, to be generous, it was a shit show of moral degeneracy and complete intellectual absurdity.

I’d have been better off in Amsterdam’s Red Light District. At least I’d have had more fun.

————————

*Sarte: French existentialist philosopher of high regard and mortal enemy of Foucault.

** you asked for this. And thank you for the graphic!

I’ve spoken to a handful of nuclear weapons and arms control analysts/experts and all pretty much agree that the Oreshnik, while a terrifying weapon, is actually a very positive development in regards to making nuclear weapons obsolete. Here’s why: prior to the successful deployment of the Oreshnik, there were only two weapon systems capable of bunker busting crucial enemy C³ nodes: thermobaric weapons, like the US MOAB fuel-air explosive bombs and the Russian Tosochka-2 and Tos-3 Drakon missiles. These weapons are useful for eliminating hardened C³ bunkers/nodes just behind the front lines but aren’t capable of striking hardened intermediate range targets. The only weapon capable of eliminating hardened C³ bunkers deep behind the lines are intermediate range city-busting nukes. Think a nuke that can take out Cheyenne Mt. or its Russian equivalent, or perhaps the NATO C³ bunker in Brussels.

Enter the Oreshnik.

The Oreshnik rarely carries an explosive load. It derives its destructive power from kinetics; physics; sir Isaac Newton’s laws at work. The Oreshnik moves so fast when it releases its MIRVed warheads that it is enveloped in plasma from friction with the air molecules.

Its warheads separate and move at such a stupendous speed that when they fall out of the sky it resembles a lighting strike. When they strike their target the speed and force is so immense they penetrate up to 150 meters. They leave no impact crater, but the reactive metal they are made of—a Russian state secret to be sure—for all intents and purposes becomes lava, shattering the bedrock, steel, liquifying concrete and discharges a shockwave that eviscerates everything within 300 meters or more.

After this cataclysmic ruination a molten material bubbles up through the point of entry, like a volcano bleeding liquids that were once solid. Such a scene was attested by onlookers in the Ukraine after a 2025 Oreshnik strike on a covert-NATO-Ukraine C³ bunker near Lviv.

It is the Oreshnik’s ability to accurately strike an intermediate range target—accurate to within 100 meters, +/- a small margin of error—that obviates the needs for city-busting nukes.

Why destroy an entire city to wreck a single C³ bunker when you can preserve the lives and assets of an entire city whilst destroying the C³ bunker with ease?

That’s not to say the Oreshnik is ushering in some new golden age of nuclear arms control.

That’s absurd.

But, it does eliminate a great deal of risk.

And that’s not a bad thing, if you ask me.

Recent headline news chronicles our triumphant, record-breaking petroleum exports: 6.4 million barrels a day. The highest weekly figure ever recorded. On the surface, it appears America may just make up in exports what the closure of the Straits of Hormuz prevents.

On the surface.

The reality of our domestic petroleum situation is more dire. The same week America exported record amounts of crude it quietly drew down its strategic reserve to the tune of 7.1 million barrels a day same week ending April 24. This represents the largest drawdown since 2022.

Let’s do some simple arithmetic: drawdown strategic reserves by 7.1 mln and export 6.4 mln. Subtract and you get 700,000 barrels a week for domestic refining. This is called the ‘burn rate’ of crude oil.

It’s not slack, like they’ll tell you on CNBC.

It’s gone.

Adding insult to injury, Morgan Stanley reports that gasoline inventories are at their lowest level since well, ever.

Yes, ever.

By August gasoline reserves will freefall to 198 million barrels.

The hard reality is this: America is facing an unsustainable crude oil burn rate coupled with a completely unsustainable draw down in gasoline reserves. These drawdowns are occurring in the face of perilously high petroleum and gasoline prices.

“But,” the naysayers shout, “domestic petroleum production, and refining capacity will make up the difference!

What part of unsustainable did you not understand?

For example, the oil refinery on Corpus Christi Bay here in South Texas is effectively off-line because it has no water source. Lake Corpus Christi is dry.

No water, no refinery, no gasoline.

To make matters worse, domestic crude production is trending flat to down, even as WTI spot prices are in the $102 range.

Permian Basin rig counts, a leading indicator of what future crude production will look like, are down 15.33% YoY. Oklahoma rig counts are down from 55 last April to 43 today. That’s a -21% decline YoY. New Mexico dropped 3 rigs and Wyoming dumped 1.

What about Eagle Ford shale oil you ask? At $102 a barrel shale has to be profitable. True, but there hasn’t been a drilling permit issued in the Eagle Ford basin in three years. None have been filed with the state since the crisis with Iran began. There’s a reason for this. WTI spot prices are $102 a barrel, as I previously noted. Those are spot prices for oil deliverable right this minute. But if you go 12 months out on the contract curve to May 2027, the price of WTI Falls to $73 a barrel. At that price shale oil isn’t, in the word of Billy Bob Thornton, “in the sweet spot.”

Moreover, the May 2027 prices are telling policy makers, factory owners, grocery store managers, freight shippers and the like, in bright red flashing lights, that a deflationary spiral is a real possibility.

Here’s where the rubber hits the road: the petroleum and gasoline burn rate will force the Fed’s hand and compel a rate increase to prevent a massive inflationary spike.

But what is the Fed to do six months to a year from now when the looming credit crisis, and housing collapse reach critical mass and unravel, popping the AI bubble in a market blowoff?

We’re literally exporting our seed corn.

And you can’t reap what you don’t sow.