Ummagumma

[ See all my Iran stuff. ] (11 a.m. Eastern Time) And then the whole mess started spilling over. Wars like to connect. Maybe they are drawn toward one another. If everyone's not careful this will escalate further in spite of the fact Iran's military is getting hammered. As I have said, whoever actually controls the Strait of Hormuz is winning the war . The Houthis have opened another maritime front in the Red Sea, attacking Saudi tankers and oil facilities while threatening shipping connected to Saudi ports. On July 20 they formalized it into a declared blockade against Saudi-linked vessels in the Red Sea. Tankers have changed course, disabled tracking equipment, and accepted higher insurance costs to move through waters that had already become dangerous. Saudi-backed forces have resumed attacks on Houthi positions in Yemen, threatening to restart a civil war that had been mostly dormant since the 2022 ceasefire.  Iran's regional war now reaches both of the great shipping...

The great Odysseus takes the long way home.   I saw Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey in IMAX on Friday. I am a Nolan fanboy, as my reviews on Memento , The Dark Knight , The Dark Knight Rises , Inception , Interstellar , Dunkirk , Tenet , and Oppenheimer attest. I went to the theater, the exact same theater I saw Oppenheimer in three years ago, ready to be surprised and amazed. I had my doubts, to be honest. I did not think the source material could be tamed into a watchable film. To some extent I was right, but not like I expected to be let down. And I was actually amazed at various parts of the film even if the whole thing didn't make me applaud in the end, which half the sold-out theater did. But I left the theater unwowed. It was raining and I rushed back to my car without feeling anything except I did not know how I felt. It wasn’t a bad film. The anti-woke controversy of casting a transgender warrior and a black Helen seemed ridiculous. They were both well-acted but...

I started my slow aging practice in the 1990s.  I did not call it a practice or really even think of it that way. The whole idea of cultivating your life by combining “practices” just wasn’t there holistically. Back then there was this rather nebulous idea that something called “ the Singularity” might happen about 4 decades in the future. 2032 was the year, supposedly . This Singularity was going to arises as a combination of different technologies and disciplines co-mingled into something larger. A kind of utopia was predicted by certain fringe scientists. Biotechnology and nanotechnology were converging into something that looked, from a distance, like it might rewrite what a human body could be. I had no evidence this would happen on any particular timeline, or at all. I was already in decent physical and mental shape in my mid-30’s. So the assumption was straightforward. Fine tune. Perpetuate. Back then there was a large school of thought that free radicals were the main cul...

[ See all my Iran stuff. ] An Iranian political activist recently described what Donald Trump had done to his country. "He was supposed to save us and help us get rid of this regime. But now he has left us with a wounded, wild, and deranged regime." (Source: War Fronts ) There it is. I have spent much of this war trying to understand what might restrain the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran is not simply the IRGC. There are civilian officials, clerics, business interests, regional governments, rival military organizations, and millions of Iranians who have no particular affection for the regime. I expected a regional powerplay to emerge after the first major round of fighting. Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates had reasons to pressure Iran. Iran's civilian government had reasons to seek a settlement. The clerical state had reasons to preserve itself by putting limits on the IRGC. The Guard had suffered enormous losses. Its naval forces were mauled....