The Iran-y of It All

0:00Hey, everybody. That was not a loud one. That's okay. It's it's fine. It is wooded. It's early too, by the way. Let's just go ahead and tell people for the for reference purposes in case the entire world blows up after we're done recording. We're doing this early on Thursday because it's in ZWA tournament day. Of course. It's it's my personal Christmas neck. Okay. It's my high holy days. It is what it is. All right. I'm listen. I'm I'm kind of right there with you. Certainly basketball, you know, compelling storylines, intense pressure. We love it. We we love it. And Wisconsin is good this year. So we're rooting for Nick. We're hoping good things happen there. No, but they gave us the dreaded fifth seed. They gave you the fifth seed. It's going to be all right, everybody. I listen. I am so excited about this. But I'm also I'm excited to talk about the world exploding. Nick, people who want to be in the historic moment. Welcome to it. We are here. It's the Weekender Edition

1:00on Craig podcast. I'm Joe J. Jackson. Nick Houseman. A reminder, if you listen the preview, we need your help. We need your support. Head over to patreon.com. slash one Craig podcast become a patron gain full access to the Weekender editions, but also live shows, special shows, but also support us. We need it more than ever. Nick, fun stuff. We are still in a war with Iran with absolutely no off ramp in sight. We'll talk more about that in a second. But in the past couple days, we've seen an escalation of strikes on oil refineries, which wouldn't be a problem, except for that the modern world runs on. Let me check my notes. Oil. Capital. Oh. Capital. Oh, Texas tea. Black gold. We have reached the point. We saw Israel hit the south parts field, which is the largest. Trump had lost his mind as now threatening to absolutely destroy it if there's retaliation. And even more fun than that, Nick, it appears that the market is finally recognizing that this is a problem and that we are speed

2:02running toward absolute economic collapse. This is great. We're even talking about taking sanctions off of Iranian oil, which, hold on, let me check my notes again. Oh, shit, we're at war with them. So we got a situation on our hands. Is it possible? I don't know. I'm just I'm just spitballing here, but is it possible that if you are aware of decisions inside the government, you could make money off of this information? Can you even imagine how much money is being made off of this? The absolute destruction of everything right now. How many people are not just getting they're already rich. They're getting filthy, obscenely rich at this. Yeah. And last I checked, it doesn't matter what direction the market goes with options that you could actually leverage all of this stuff. So, you know, it's the argument that the markets are manipulated has always been there. And people there are people with the beautiful minds who think it's, you know, a hundred-year cycles that are just predetermined from a couple hundred years ago.

3:04But this doesn't do any favors if you want to argue against that. This looks completely manipulated you know, at their flow of information. And certainly the incompetence of this. Let's just go through this again. Remind me, Jared, because it's not clear to me, you know, what are the possible goals here that the United States would have policy-wise in Iran? It would stop the stated goals are to stop them from having nuclear weapons, which I was told that they were only a couple of weeks away from having. But you were also told that they were completely obliterated their nuclear program, I'm sure. Okay. So, okay. So, and there are people who are plugged into the intelligence community that have information that would indicate that Iran was not that close to a nuclear bomb. Is that possible? I would say that everybody in the intelligence community said that they were definitely not that close to it, which we'll talk more about a little bit. Yeah. Okay. Great. So, I just want to make that clear. So, there's that element. Are there any other reasons or any other, you know, goals perhaps that we would have as American foreign policy

4:11in Iran? You mean absolute fealty to Israel and whatever they do? Is that what we're giving to here? I mean, I'm actually just looking forward in that even snark aside. Okay. Like, like, I suppose they want to take over the oil. Is that what they want to probably do? I mean, there is the idea of taking out Iran and bringing their oil production basically in under the Venezuelan model. Sure. That I'm sure that I'm sure when Donald Trump was his adult milky mind was moving between being in the Oval Office and remembering a vanity fair party, he went to a 1984. Any thought, you know, that maybe he had a chance with like Miss America. Like, I assume maybe that occurred to him. Yes. Now, would there be any other possible goals for doing this kind of a thing and dismantling the Iranian state? Pure and utter profit by the people who make the weapons and by the people who control the markets? Yes. Because what we haven't mentioned is like,

5:12this would be like arguing that we stormed Normandy for the oil, right? That's why we went into World War II. Just because, oh, we can get rich off of this. Do you want to hear something wild, though? No, no. If you actually want to sit with it long enough and you actually want to dive deeply enough, you can say that we storm Normandy for oil. You could make that argument. All right. Well, I like to pretend that there was a humanitarian effort going on. Well, that's arrested up for sure. I mean, the problem was that Nazi Germany was taking over our block, which is colonial imperialism. Yeah. Yeah. But we don't want to ignore the Holocaust aspect of this where we put it stuff to that. Finally, although, listen, Roosevelt did ignore it for a long time. Sure. No. Okay. So that's not even part of the calculation here, you know, because people in Iran have been suffering under sanctions for decades and decades. It's not a great place to live. And then also just the government itself is oppressive. So, you know, you don't hear one word about any of that really. I do feel like at one point, there was a notion that

6:14Trump said, well, you know, let's they should rise up now. And the intelligence community of which he doesn't want to listen to said, yeah, if they were to take the streets right now, they would be slaughtered. And they would and the government would be just I think the just the I think when we had how many people were slaughtered during the original a few months ago during their protests? Estimates are 50 to 60,000. Right. And I have to imagine that there's a lot more people of processing. So there might have even been slight, even the slightest bit of like maybe we shouldn't be slaughtering everybody right now. Like I think the military might have had that feeling. But now in the middle of the war, I don't think they're yeah, there wouldn't be any anything holding them back. This would be a complete another destruction of since civilians. So that ain't going to work. But it's frustrating because this is why we're doing this, especially in a sense that, you know, the vanity fair party in 1984 is a really good imagery because United States pumps more oil than anybody these days. We have more oil than we need. We don't we don't have to rely on the oil coming out from the Middle East anymore to do this.

7:17We're going to find out real soon. Right. We had no reserves anymore. That's the problem. I'm glad that you approached it this way because and it's a it's a weekend in addition to my great podcast, right? So here let's let's let's let's go a little bit deeper in the weeds than we usually would. Are you ready? Yeah. Okay. I'm going to start with just a conversation between me and my friend Nick. Nick, have you ever had a stretch of your life where you looked up and you were like, I don't really know why I'm doing what I'm doing. Sure. Yeah. You mean job wise or just anything? Job wise, relationship wise, life wise, right? Yeah. How did I get here? This is not my beautiful house, right? And all of a sudden, you're like, I'm not really sure what's happening here. You know what I'm saying? And then you have a moment where you're like, I need to reassess and I need to figure out what it is that's driving me. Well, really quickly. So this is how the difference between you and I, when you say, how do we get here? You referenced talking heads.

8:17When you when I hear that, I think Frank Drebden at the end of the sidewalk in naked gun. Oh, yeah. That's a great that's a great pull. That's actually a great moment. It looks around these just in the middle of nowhere. That's a great moment. But yeah, Nick, when it really comes down to it, you know, one of the things that we talk about is we talk about deep politics where it's like, oh, here's the story that everybody tells you about why things are happening. Let's actually talk about the motivations here. We are in right now. It's almost like the black hole. You have ever seen a movie where like you go into the black hole and it's crunching all matter up and things don't make sense in the same way anymore. Yeah, sure. I guess we have arrived at the event horizon of modern history. There are so many different things happening right now that are illogical. And let me tell you one of the big things that I'm thinking about. Nick, we've talked for years, but not just on this show, but just as a as a country and as people who are interested in politics. It's like, when are we going to kick oil? Right? This is a finite substance. There's

9:19only so much of it. It's also destroying the world. It's also leading to one war and instability and corruption and greed all over the place. You've been listening to the free part of this episode. If you'd like to hear the rest of this great conversation, head over to patreon.com slash muckrake podcast and subscribe for lots more additional content including a discord server and live shows. We'd really appreciate it if you could give it a try. We know you'll love it and come back for more.