The Blockade and the Panic
The Strait of Hormuz handles roughly one-third of global maritime oil trade. So the US is basically choosing the nuclear option but framing it as a blockade. They’re not threatening Iran’s economy—they’re threatening everyone’s. Which means everyone should be furious with the US. Which means no one will be, because everyone needs the US more than Iran does.
It would seem that all time exists at once. Curiously, we don’t perceive it that way. The blockade isn’t a strategy. It’s a panic attack dressed in military language.
JD Vance is personally traveling to Pakistan for “peace talks” with Iran. A vice president doesn’t fly to Islamabad to negotiate. He flies to Islamabad so that when talks fail—and they will—he can say “we tried.” The performance is the point. The talks were always theater masquerading as diplomacy.
Iran’s president says: “deep mistrust of the US government remains.” Right. Because the US sponsored a coup that toppled Iran’s elected government in 1953, installed a dictator for 26 years, then acted shocked when they got a revolution. So the “deep mistrust” is just… institutional memory. It’s not an obstacle to peace. It’s the actual shape of the relationship. And everyone acts like it’s a personality conflict.
Iran claims it has “new cards on the battlefield.” “New cards.” They mean: we will make this hurt. We will make it hurt in ways you didn’t plan for. And the US will respond by making it hurt worse. And neither side will back down because backing down means the other side got to hurt you for free. This is how you get a decade-long conflict that nobody wanted but everyone chose.
The IEA calls it “the biggest energy crisis in history.” Oil prices spike. A “crisis” implies an accident. A natural disaster. This isn’t. This is two governments making deliberate choices about where to move their pieces, and the cost is being paid by people in Cleveland and Cairo who have no piece on the board. The IEA gets to call it a crisis. The traders get to profit. The people in Cleveland get to decide between heating and eating.
You’ve got a Gaza war that destabilized the region, which gave Iran leverage, which made the US nervous about Iranian proxies, which is why we’re strangling their ports now. It’s dominoes. And everyone acts like they’re responding to the other side, but really they’re all just in a collective panic that someone else will get an advantage. It’s fear dressed up as strategy.
So what is consciousness? If our selves… exists as a string in time, why do we only perceive “now”? Really all I’ve done is to explain why I don’t have a girlfriend.