Becoming less interested in politics at times ...

First, it took me four years later than Mark Lause, but I too have reached the point that I see the Green Party nationally being past its best-by date. I was already having doubts in 2016 over Stein's second run; the nature of her recount only increased that.

Then, Hawkins 2020 actually got Russia more than half correct, angering some Greens. But, he went totally Aaron Maté, or should I say, totally Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, on Xi Jinping's China, and I just couldn't vote for him.

In Texas, that's followed by 2022 Green gubernatorial candidate Delilah Barrios being a Second Amendment absolutist and also playing footsie with COVID antivaxxers, and I saw more than enough antivaxxer footsie out of Stein.

Add in Twitter on politics becoming ever more #BlueAnon bullshit vs #MAGAts bullshit and I get tired of that.

Meanwhile, related to the first three paragraphs, or especially the second? Twitter is also ever more populated by non-skeptical leftists, or maybe we should just call them pseudoleftists. They sign blank checks for Xi on the Uyghur workers' camps, on the Chinese version of Coca-colonialism with the Belt and Road Initiative and more. Like Hawkins, Flowers and Zeese, they either can't, or won't, step out of the twosiderism box and accept that one can criticize both the US and China. Per LBJ on Jerry Ford, it's really no harder that farting and chewing gum, or farting and walking, at the same time.

That said, I suspect that some of the pseudoleftists on Twitter are paid to not step outside of the twosiderism box on China.

Whether paid shills or not, the one other problem I have is that there is just about NEVER any nuance with China. It's not that China is less wrong, or even a lot less wrong than the US says it is, or than the US is itself. It's that China is NEVER wrong. Of course, among the religion of Marxism, doctrinaire absolutism is part of the game. of course, doctrinaire Marxism is pseudoscience. Hegelian dialectic is crappy as a philosophy and by definition pseudoscientific when used as the basis of any scientific theory, especially economics, arguably in both Marx's time and ours the least scientific of the social sciences. (The replication problem and cheating in behavioral economics only underscore that.)

Add in that, in early August every year, non-skeptical lefists repeat the canard on August 6 and 9 that we dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just as a warning shot across Stalin's bow. Surprisingly, neither city trended on Twitter this year. Maybe those willful lies or idiocies are starting to fade.

I'll still participate in snarking on Twitter, but, I'm working to move away from electoral and quasi-electoral politics to broader issues. And, that said, Twitter's infosec allegedly sucks donkey dongs.

Is post-peak America now here?

The perceptive Michael Klare, who writes on energy and national security issues for The Nation and elsewhere, argues that the greedy clusterfucks at Goldman Sachs, AIG, et al, leading to the economic crack-up that has the dollar in the crapper have brought 2025 15 years closer.

And, while the American public will have to deal with lesser American power, and the continued attempts by G. Sachs et al, and its bipartisan supporters to shit on them, ultimately, G. Sachs won’t come out on the high side either.

Of the four BRIC countries of Brazil, China, India and Russia, the Chinese dictatorship and the cult of Putin have no room for Sachs. Neither do the Russian Mafia. Brazil, as a Latin American nation, will retain its skepticism of American banks. India likely will have at least some of that.

And, the EU, with a Eurozone larger than the U.S. and dedicated to tougher regulatory reform, will be no homeland for it either.

So, way to go, greedy American financial clusterfucks — you pulled your own house down on your own head.

America is worth … 498 billion barrels of oil

According to Scott Burns, the United States’ entire net worth is equivalent to that much oil, at $120/bbl.

That’s a smidgeon more than the proven reserves of only three Middle Eastern countries, Saudi Arabia (260 billion barrels), Iraq (115 billion barrels) and Iran (105 billion barrels).

At about 36 times its 1970 price, oil has outstripped the value created by a full working generation of Americans in a period of dramatic technological change and innovation. During the same time, the value of American business shares, as measured by the S&P 500 index, has risen to only 15 times its 1970 level.

A chart at Burns’ website shows much our economy has shrunk, vis-à-vis oil, since 1970, before the first oil embargo:

The Value of America, in Barrels
This table takes the net worth of American households and nonprofit organizations as measured by the Federal Reserve and divides by the price of oil to find how many barrels of oil it would take to buy the country.
Year	Household Net Worth (in billions)	Price of Oil	Barrels to Buy America (in billions)
1970	$3,418.5	$ 3.18	1,075.0
1975	$5,141.5	$7.67	670.3
1980	$9,468.6	$21.59	438.6
1985	$14,206.6	$24.09	589.7
1990	$20.249.9	$20.03	1,112.0
1995	$27,732.4	$14.62	1,896.9
1998	$37,369.7	$11.18	3,342.6
2004	$48,092.8	$42.00	1,145.1
2007	$57,718.0	$120.00	481.0
Sources: Federal Reserve, Bloomberg

“Either oil is too expensive or America is too cheap,” Burns concludes.

But Burns is a better financial analyst columnist than that.

He didn’t offer Option No. 3:

The stock called America, Inc. has been overpriced for years, and now investors are driving it down.

Maybe George Soros will even make a run on the dollar, like on Asian currencies in 1998.