Just listened to this recent Eurodollar University pod this morning. It appears pressure cooker analogies are trending [02:19]:

Jeff Snider: It’s looking like things are really starting to really break here. Where it’s putting pressure on, not just China, but all of these other places around the world.

Brent Johnson: [...] I kind of feel like we are at a point with the dollar where everything is just kind of simmering. It’s like the pot, and it’s bubbling and bubbling, and if the dollar doesn’t turn lower soon then the lid is going to blow off the pot.

Jeff Snider: I think that’s the way I look at it. We have all these places that have enormous problems to begin with. Then the dollar comes along and it’s just one more thing too many. So you have Korea, as you mentioned, Syria, there’s a bunch of other ones, Brazil is another one. [...] Brazil’s Real has just uterly crashed causing all sorts financial chaos.

It’s not that the dollar caused it, but the dollar was like a pressure cooker, turning up the pressure so much that it leads to all of these other negative consequences. They don’t just showup, but it seems like they just showup if you are not really paying attention to what is going on.

I can confirm that here in Vietnam most days feel like pressure cooker days in one way or another. Everything ends up being just one thing too many. It’s non stop some days. It’s happening right now as I write this. It’s been happening all morning!

And some people really like the pressure cooker. In fact a big contingent actively use the pressure cooker as leverage to control others. Their lives are simple enough that the pressure cooker doesn’t affect them as much.

Still looks like I managed to write this post anyway :)

I’m still after several months trying to place the Rest is History podcast. Rory and Alistair claim to be from the right and left respectively but after listening for a while the cognitive disonance of that simplistic view is too much to bear. Rory is very often more left wing than Alistair, giving out scathing criticism and distortions at anything a micron to the right of center, which is no doubt why he gets on so well with Alistair.

It’s almost as if he’s a mole sent in from the Conservatives to try and teach the left wingers how to do their jobs. It’s like his main thing is to brand everyone as extreme right just so he can pull them back into the center.

Having said that, his analysis is very good. I’d recommend all right wingers to listen to the show, even if they disagree with much of what is said to get an idea of how they are being painted.

I’m also finding it somewhat interesting listenning to Alistair’s views soften somewhat. He’s still very left wing but he’s open to ideas when him and his bum chum haven’t scared the wits out of each other with ghost stories. And to be honest some of their ghost stories do have grains of truth and insightfulness to them. Worth remembering whichever side you are on, the US is playing offense. And that’s okay. They might have good reason to.

All that to say, today’s show was great, worth a listen, especially if you are right leaning:

Starmer vs Musk: Why the richest man in the world turned against the prime minister

While I remember, why don’t Rory and Alistair go on Rogan’s pod? I think that would be spectacular.

Oh and one more thing, and I had to go digging to get this, having to trawl through nearly the entire episode, to find the following quote from Alistair, which I think is perhaps the most important thing said in the entire episode [44:29]:

"By the way though Rory, though I agree with you that it’s not just you and me talking about mushy idealistic values, I still do think that one of the challenges of all non-extreme parties, which includes extreme left and extreme right, is how we do build a sense of excitement and optimism about things that we believe."

This is the real challenge. It’s easy for the left and right to fight. Much harder to build together. Zoom out and realise that at the minute it’s 99% fighting, and one meager, lonely, starved of life sentence, of building together. The fact is that if we don’t do something to start growth, we are going to fucking die. We’re not able to build anything together at the minute because we only fight, so the only thing left is beatings. And then everyone complains about the beatings, because yeah beatings suck, but there’s no other way...unless of course we find a way to work together.