No Empire Wins a Fight with a Houthi Rebel

 The shit is going down hard in Yemen right now, and it's looking a lot like war. The Saudis are making major moves, kicking off the latest escalation with a foiled airstrike on the Sanaa International Airport in July that targeted a contingency of officials with the ruling Houthi rebels returning from the Ayatollah's funeral and then responding to the Houthis subsequent blockade earlier this month with hundreds of airstrikes across Yemen. 

The Houthis, also known as Ansar Allah, for their part are making major moves of their own. Making heavy gains on the ground in Yemen against long-entrenched, Saudi-backed militias and launching a wave of drone and missile strikes across southwest Arabia, doing significant damage to the Saudi's pipelines and setting all manner of oil infrastructure ablaze like a thousand candles in the desert.

America isn't just getting in on the action; they seem to be orchestrating much of it from the rafters, sending in hundreds of American military "advisors" to the Holy Land, not to mention essentially micromanaging Saudi Arabia's entire air force whose fleet of American made F-15's would be about as lethal as paperweights without careful American maintenance and refueling. America also appears to have provided the match that lit this fire, greenlighting the Sanaa hit job with some lame excuse about Iranian advisors hiding in the Houthi's luggage compartment.

So, everybody appears to be playing their chosen roles in what very much looks like the beginnings of another American sponsored forever war in the Middle East but everybody but Ansar Allah appears to be dragging their feet when they aren't busy desperately trying to the stomp out the fire they started. 

The Saudis seemed to spend weeks actively pretending like none of this was even fucking happening even with blood up to their tits. After launching 121 airstrikes on Houthi territory in Yemen in one day, Saudi officials made the absurd claim that their dickless proxies inside Yemen were behind those Top Gun attacks even though it's common knowledge that those Keystone fedayeen can't even operate a hot air balloon, and even with a third of their country in flames, Riyadh continues to try to downplay the rapidly expanding carnage in the international media when they acknowledge it all.

What's even more curious is the fact that the Saudis appeared to have attempted to walk back their own poorly flubbed assault on the Sanaa International Airport all summer with Bloomberg reporting on talks between the Saudis and the Houthis held through Oman as late as August. One would not be unwise to point the finger at the Saudis' sugar daddies back in Washington, especially considering that this latest escalation not only comes at a time in which Trump is running out of options in his increasingly humiliating duel with the Houthis' allies in Tehran, but also because it comes off the heels of an American agreement to help the Saudis to establish the kind of nuclear program that we allegedly killed the Ayatollah over.

But America seems to be stumbling over its own bombs to distance themselves from the war raging in Yemen as well, with Donald Trump recently claiming to have spoken with Ansar Allah on the phone well after they retaliated against our friends in the House of Saud and then suggesting that the ceasefire he signed with the Houthi regime in 2025 was still in effect. It has also been reported by Axios that Trump had declined to provide the Saudis with direct air support even after a besieged Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman begged him personally over the phone.

None of the people who started this war seem to be the least bit interested in being seen fighting it. Part of this likely has to do with the fact that none of them really has anything substantial to gain from the violence. Once again, we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position in which Pax-Americana and its various dependents are getting blown up or blowing shit up in a clusterfuck that only Israel stands to gain from. Lest we forget, Ansar Allah very effectively used their territorial position on the Bab el-Mandab Strait connecting the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea to put severe financial pressure on Israel and its sponsors over their genocidal operation in Gaza and Benjamin Netanyahu shows every sign of plotting to expand the Nakba to the Houthis' fellow Shiites in Lebanon and Syria in the near future.

However, I strongly suspect that America and Saudi Arabia's reluctance to publicly go to war with Ansar Allah is much bigger than Israel and Trump and Bibi and Jeffrey Epstein's corpse. The most powerful empire on the planet and one of their most depraved attack dogs in the Middle East appear to be afraid of a third world militia that governs a territory smaller than Massachusetts in the poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula. We are talking about Donald Trump and MBS here. A serial rapist and a psychopathic boy-king who takes apart his critics with power tools. What exactly are these monsters so afraid of? What is so goddamn terrifying about going toe to toe with a Houthi rebel?

To put it succinctly, these bearded Arab bad men appear to be unbreakable. The United States and Saudi Arabia have been waging total war against these motherfuckers for decades and every bomb we drop just seems to make them stronger. For nearly seven years, between 2015 and 2022, America financed and facilitated a genocidal siege against Yemen and the Saudis systematically carried it out. Thousands of tons of American made ordinances battered the ancient hillside villages and tightly populated port cities of that tiny nation while a total blockade cut the survivors off from an outside world that stood by and watched it happen with their hands in their pockets. 

Somewhere between 230,000 and 380,000 people were killed. 150,000 of them from direct acts of violence, the rest from treatable disease and famine. 70% of the dead are believed to have been children under the age of 5.

But the Houthis didn't flinch. Even beneath a driving rain of relentless bombing, they kicked the shit out of the Saudis and the best mercenaries' oil can buy on the ground, rarely giving up more than an inch of territory before taking it back. Contrary to western propaganda, their exists very little evidence of Ansar Allah receiving anything in the way of significant funding from Iran or anyone else for that matter. Nearly every weapon they wield they either lifted from dead bodies and dead regimes, or they made themselves amongst the ruins from literal garbage and the bombs that dropped on their heads.

By the time Israel began its latest genocidal onslaught in the Gaza Strip, the Houthis were a well-honed guerrilla machine fully capable of going on the offensive. After launching a blockade of their own in the Red Sea in solidarity with fellow genocide victims, America decided to get involved directly, first with Biden's Operation Prosperity Garden in 2024 and then with a much more merciless bombing spree under Donald Trump. 

Another 250+ civilians were slaughtered, but the Houthis simply expanded the Red Sea blockade and shut the entire waterway down. Within months Trump was signing a ceasefire with these proud pirates even as they continued nail the Israeli targets we had supposedly been bombing Yemen to protect.

This winning streak has continued into the latest Saudi confrontation which the Houthis have merely used as an excuse to pick up more territory in the nation they run. Within a week of Saudi Arabia's first mass bombing spree since 2022, Ansar Allah has made significant gains in capturing what little of the Red Sea coastline they hadn't taken already, laying siege to the strategic port city of Mocha along with several islands in and around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. 

Seeing the writing on the temple walls written in the blood of cowards, Israel seems to be stepping up their involvement behind the scenes, but it can only get worse for them from here as they are already stretched far too thin killing other people's children closer to home and their MAGA golem is currently drowning in two feet of water in another strait one desert over.

So, what is it? What is the big secret that makes the Houthi rebels harder to kill than werewolves on angel dust? Simply put, they are not a state, they are a movement, a tribal culture defined by local resistance to global superpowers whose roots in their rugged region go back to antiquity. The modern Houthi movement is a Zaydi revivalist subculture formed by the Al-Houthi clan who can trace their lineage back to the foundation of that branch of Shia Islam which emerged in the 8th century to confront the rule of the massive Umayyad Caliphate.

Zaydism would go on to form the foundation of political and cultural life in the rugged northern highlands of Yemen for nearly a millennium with its imams fiercely resisting integration into the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Local tribal rule was only interrupted by the foundation of the northern Yemen Arab Republic in 1962 which very quickly became a hub for genocidal Salafi extremists and the western oilmen who love them, but the Zaydis persisted and under Houthi spiritual guidance, they crushed the local chapter of Al-Qaeda before overturning two Saudi/American backed dictators in a row. And the rest is history.

And history is the key to comprehending this movement, not politics. No empire, state or army can crush a movement whose history predates empires, states and armies. The Houthis cannot be removed from the land because they belong to the land and not vice versa. There's is a culture determined by localism and bioregional spirituality above praxis or dogma and that is how you survive an empire.

I can't help but to feel like we can all learn from this example, like Ansar Allah is our era's equivalent to the Seminole Nation or the Zaporizhian Sich. This may not be traditional anarchism, but what exactly is traditional anarchism? Some one-horse union regurgitating the religiosity of a few dead white Russians? Give me an unbowed tribe with an inextinguishable fire over the campus flavor of the 19th century any day. I'm a Queer hillbilly. My people want justice in the holler right now and Zaydi Muslims are the only tribe getting it in 2026. 

Maybe it's time we all started fighting back like a Houthi rebel.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Stutter by Elastica

*  Raw Power by Iggy & the Stooges

*  Shove by L7

*  Dot Dash by Wire

*  Search & Destroy by Iggy & the Stooges

*  Waiting Room by Fugazi

*  The Boys are Back in Town by Thin Lizzy

*  Atmosphere by Joy Division

*  Son of a Gun by Nirvana

Trump May Indeed be the Worst President in American History and Maybe That's Not All Bad

 It has kind of become an exhausted trope at this point, the often-screeched mantra of "Donald Trump is the worst president in the history of mankind!" I've been hearing it ad nauseum from across the 9th aisle of hell going back well before that dayglow rapist was even elected for the first time in 2016. I'm not totally unsympathetic to the notion. Donald Trump is clearly a loathsome, bottom feeding, nepo-baby with a growing body count, but originally, the loudest complainers all seemed to be the last people on earth who should have been casting stones in any given direction- Neocon Never-Trumpers who mostly just seemed cheesed off that Trump preferred attempting to build casinos in Pyongyang to a Second Korean War and vain shitlibs who bitched about the concentration camps at the border six months after their hero, Barack Obama, built them.  

The most insulting thing to me during the Donald's turbulent first term in office was the fact that most of the loudest complaints from most of the loudest complainers seemed to be overwhelmingly cosmetic in nature. Centrist shills humiliated by a motor-mouthed neanderthal who made their precious empire look tacky with his self-indulgent hissy-fits and poorly planned political hooliganism, all ending in a diabetic boomer riot at the Capitol which Manuel Noriega could have planned better at the ass end of a Contra crack binge. The whole spectacle honestly felt like a really bad joke that Trump's more high-profile critics deserved to be the butt of, but then 2026 happened and the joke got scary.

Trump seems to be devoting his second term almost entirely to making every exhausted trope ever hurled in his general direction seem timid compared to the real thing. Unlike in 2016, this sick asshole seems to have come out of the gates with both an agenda and the institutional backing to make it happen. In less than two years he has affectively created his own poorly trained private paramilitario within the federal government vis a vis the Orange Guard that is now ICE, turned the genocide in Gaza into an internationally recognized conspiracy to build a Zionist Sandals resort on the Red Sea, and followed Netanyahu into a forever catastrophe in the Persian Gulf that seems to be spreading like VD in a Mar-a-Lago kiddie pool.

Now, you can say whatever the fuck you want about Hillary or Kamala but no half-sentient homosapien can roll their eyes at that screeched mantra anymore. "Donald Trump is the worst president in the history of mankind" now plays like something Merry Clayton should have howled after "Rape! Murder! It's just a shot away, it's just a shot away!!"

However, all increasingly based hysteria aside, is the Donald in fact the worst president in American history? He certainly seems to be breaking his back trying but there is some very stiff competition, and I'm not convinced that the majority of the navel gazing wonk class are using the proper criteria for judgement. When too many people talk about the worst president in American history, the focus always seems to veer heavily towards dysfunction and scandal. Nixon ransacking the Oval Office like a feral werepig gagging on a fist full of ludes while J. Edna lines up the dudes....

But all of this cracked reasoning negates the simple fact that what we seem to be asking for here is what amounts to a functional conductor for a killing machine. At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves the uncomfortable question of who really did more damage; a man like Nixon who inadvertently exposed American power for the sickness it has always been with his lecherous antics, or JFK who started many of the policies Nixon drove off a cliff and died looking like a sexy hero with his big brains all over the Grassy knoll doing so? 

The first Trump administration was about as functional as a five-alarm zoo fire, but he seemed to do as much damage to America's totally undeserved reputation as he did to migrants and Muslims. Barack Obama on the other hand out-deported Trump hand over fist, killed way more fucking Muslims, and essentially built the drones and border camps that made the Oval Office the idiot-proofed death arcade that Trump recklessly molested in his first term like a drunken priest in a candy shop. 

The worst thing that Barack Obama achieved however, was making American power look like a friendly investment on the world stage again while he murdered teenagers in Yemen and validated neo-Nazis in the Donbass. Quite frankly, just like Kennedy, he made evil sexy.

With that being said, Trump's return seems to have taken the imperial experiment of executive theater to weird new depths of existential horror. Trump Two seems to be defined simultaneously by both Nixonian dysfunction and Camelot grade mass destruction. While the federal police state rapidly expands and flexes like Bane on Godzilla hormones, the imperial circus circles the drain with a pocket full of shells in the Strait of Hormuz beneath the looming shadow of Jeffrey Epstein's swinging corpse. 

The best explanation I can conjure up for such a cataclysmic display of vulgar power and abject nihilism is that in this terminal stage of the Spenglerian Kali Yuga, the elites themselves have become as desperate for salvation as the hicks out here in MAGA country.

China's military may still pale in comparison to the American juggernaut but no military on earth can stop the inevitable rise of the Eurasian Century. As Beijing competes with Pax Americana in markets across the developing world and hones its global infrastructure with its various Belt and Road projects, international surveys from Pew to the Council on Foreign Relations show China's favorability even among many traditional American allies growing while disenfranchisement with NATO's new cold war slowly creeps deeper and deeper into the Central European hinterlands. All while Washington's military might seems to be sinking in the quicksand of twelve too many forever wars.

The best hope for continued western hegemony in times of epic national debt and soul-crushing war fatigue seems to rest on the fearsome shoulders of Artificial Intelligence and this is precisely the industry that has given Donald Trump the institutional cache he lacked during his first term. AI Sith Lord Elon Musk essentially bought MAGA for about $300 million dollars in 2024 and while the pearl-clutching liberal atmosphere that still pervades sections of Silicon Valley has necessitated Musk to very publicly distance himself from his rented ginger Frankenstein, the funds keep going out unabated, with Elon's America Pac slated to shovel another 100 to $120 million dollars to the GOP for the 2026 midterm cycle alone. 

MAGA shares a similarly slight-of-hand relationship with Elon's mentor, tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who publicly distanced himself from Trump after hemorrhaging influence in California over his then unprecedented support for the ass in 2016 but has quietly entered the backdoor to Trump's inner circle regardless by pushing another one of his dauphins, ex-tech bro JD Vance, into the vice presidency. The evidence of this influence is written in dollar signs. Thiel's own personal Skynet, AI giant Palantir has received over $113 million dollars in contracts from the Trump Administration since 2024 even before being rewarded with a landmark 10-year/$10-billion-dollar software agreement with the Pentagon, all of which hinges upon the data-mining conglomerate consolidating America's bloated police-warfare state using the awesome powers of AI.

Our new tech overlords needed to bet on a lunatic like Trump to do this because their massive overhaul threatens to shrink the manpower of the deep state exponentially, but the arms industry can't afford not to be on board, however begrudgingly, what with China eyeing the same killer robots and the rise of cheap drone technology affording Shiite fedayeen the ability to punk American battleships like teenagers tipping over cattle in the boonies. Needless to say, all this is bad, but it gets worse before it gets better.

As America begins to look more and more like late-Weimar era Germany with every passing executive order, the tech bros behind Trump Two are making their long-term goals a matter of public record. Palantir has recently published a manifesto across social media, openly calling on Pax-Americana to use AI-enhanced weaponry to ensure the west's continued dominance across the globe and Thiel himself quite openly advocates for America to model itself after Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore and usher in the reign of a kind of techno-monarchy governed for efficiency over democracy and technology over humanity.

The only good news here is perhaps the most obvious. These sick fucks are betting the farm on a belligerent child molester who now seems to embody everybody's definition of the worst president in American history. These new elites and the old ones they conspire with are in a mad rush to save a sinking ship with dangerously new and unstable technology. The amount of data centers they are practically tripping over each other's jackboots to build, which represent only a fraction of the raw power it will take to essentially automize the biggest empire in human history, is quite simply unsustainable. 

In an era of dwindling reservoirs and rolling blackouts, when these mega machines suck the last aquafer dry, they will literally melt and take the whole fucking grid down with them.

So, this is how it ends, dearest motherfuckers, but this is also how it begins because when the last Ceasar chokes to death on the ashes of charred microchips and child pornography, those of us who have prepared ourselves and are preparing ourselves for a stateless, post-civilization existence will be there to build something new and old on the ruins. It won't be easy but that doesn't mean that it can't be fun. Afterall, here's where we get the opportunity to make it right.

And round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away towards a new horizon....

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Chosen to Deserve by Wednesday

*  Beef Bologna by Fear

*  Birth in Reverse by St. Vincent

*  Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

*  Say Something by James

*  Lump by Presidents of the United States

*  Rebel Rebel by David Bowie

*  Bulls On Parade by Rage Against the Machine

*  Aneurysm by Nirvana

*  Frank Sinatra by Cake

The Nuclear Family is a Weapon of Mass Destruction

 It's hard to believe but it's coming on three years now since I recovered the last tranche of horrific trauma memories stored in my subconscious from a childhood held hostage by the Catholic Church. It took a dedicated team of dissociative identities just to keep that story a secret for thirty years and it took embracing those identities and the gender identity that they concealed to survive the whole truth and the whole truth is that I was a terrified five-year-old trans girl whose parents were too busy hustling for the American dream to hear her dysphoric outbursts. They chose to pawn me off to a local Catholic preschool instead where a pair of priests used my desperate confusion as an opportunity to have a good time before convincing me that all the adults were in on it.

My tumultuous gender transition coupled with parts work therapy broke the story, but once it was out, there was no going back. Every week is still a struggle laden with violent flashbacks, chronic exhaustion, and multiple personalities dealing with the existential tragedy of a life lived in the shadows of more lies than the five of us can count. We barely survived the last thirty-six months, and we may not have if we didn't find a way to turn all this trauma into something constructive. The alters and I have done this by reaching out to other Queer kids trying to survive the same conservative rural community that nearly killed me. So, when I'm not busy writing, switching or bushwacking through hours of trauma therapy, I facilitate a Queer youth group at a local volunteer bookstore.

The kids that I work with have saved my life in more ways than I can count but they have also brought my trauma into the perspective of a big picture that is quite abominable both in its nature and its magnitude. The despicable truth is that at least two-thirds of these kids have been abused too. At least half of that lot have been molested and in nearly every single case the culprit was the supposedly sacred nuclear family. Far from the popular notion of the Queer as a threat to traditional family values, "traditional family values" serve Queer kids up to sexual predators like a short order cook at a cannibal cafe.

The story generally goes that the parents never listen. They get burned out trying to go it alone in the petty hierarchy of suburban monotony. Things fall apart and some stepparent is introduced to maintain the illusion of domestic normalcy or maybe the unhappy couple stick it out in misery and stick their kid with some uncle or some neighbor or some priest. Some trusted figure who they barely know through the white picket cell of the American nightmare. 

The Queer kids stick out on the predatory radar because we don't fit into this Norman Rockwell menagerie of strict gender norms and heteronormative expectations and that scares us before we even understand why. The parents work too hard to notice we're terrified. Someone close by does however and we become some sadistic straight man's broken toy.

I see it over and over and over again and it's fucking infuriating. The only thing worse than this suburban assembly line of sexual degradation is "the parents." Not just yours and mine but the entire reactionary peanut gallery who adopts that identity to justify their dominion over the convoluted construct that they have turned childhood into. "The parents" want "the children", theirs and yours, to be sheltered from all knowledge about their rapidly changing bodies. "The parents" who think they know more about those bodies than "the children" who live in them... "The parents" who want "the children" to be shrink-wrapped in some charade of biblical innocence, kept docile and quiet and clean, like anatomically correct Kewpie dolls... 

"The parents" who prep "the children" for rape with this crap. "The parents" who refuse to believe "the children" when they tell them what Uncle Ned or Neighbor Ted did. "The Parents" who disown "the children" when they change pronouns and attempt to define themselves outside of their parents' stifling expectations. "The parents" who think that I'm the fucking groomer because I am the one adult who believes their children and arms them with the kind of knowledge that can save them from becoming just another grim statistic. 

Frankly, with all due respect, fuck "the parents." There are days when I wish I could round them all up, tie them together to the same tree, and beat their lizard brains out with an aluminum baseball bat.

I am so fucking tired of hearing self-proclaimed conservatives bitch and moan about the threat people like me pose to the nuclear family. What is so fucking sacred about the nuclear fucking family? This is a totally modern construct devoid of anything even remotely resembling traditional family values. The notion of family as two married adults with two children in one house in the suburbs is actually a violent and relatively recent break from thousands of years of multi-generational village life in which small, tight knit, rural communities raised their children collectively. 

In fact, the nuclear family as we currently understand it is largely a construct of early twentieth century progressive academia who saw suburbia as the model for a carefully planned society built on the backs of economically efficient prisoners, with the nuclear family serving largely as the perfect means to organize each three-bedroom jail cell.

The notion of the single-parent household or the stepparent household as some kind of deviation from this mold is also false. These are generally attempts by people fractured beneath the pressure of suburban nuclear family imprisonment to rebuild something resembling that ideal of a self-contained, heteronormative, mandatory monogamous existence even after being battered by this abusive lifestyle, as is the contrivance of the two-father/two-mother gay household. The nuclear family itself is the problem, regardless of who plays the roles. 

Frankly, the very notion that any four people should be going it alone on a quarter-acre plot, isolated from any legitimate form of community greater than mass on Sunday or Uncle Ned babysitting on date night is a very modern sickness that begs for a cure.

Child abuse very rarely comes in the form of some snaggle-toothed drifter in a rusty white panel van on the edge of town. One-third of all recorded child sex abuse cases involve a family member and another 59% involve a close family acquaintance. However, it is also widely accepted among those who study such abuse that the massive majority of the abused never tell another living soul and we know from those who have that one of the main reasons they didn't tell sooner is the fear of being isolated from an already socioeconomically isolated family.

We also know that multiple studies have shown us that Queer kids who don't fit into the suburban nuclear ideal, especially trans kids, are far more likely to be the victims of sexual abuse. In cases like the Catholic Church, these statistics become something of a macabre cottage industry. In a sense, western society has affectively turned compulsory conformity into a vehicle for sexual trafficking. Well, enough is enough.

The more radical fragments of the Queer community have the right idea. We are recreating our own version of the traditional tribal village with multi-household, multi-generational, found families in which kids have the choice between a dozen elders for advice and overworked and under-fucked couples have the option of taking on a third or a fourth partner to share the burden. Where children aren't just raised by entire communities but are afforded the ability to participate in them as equals. Where every loose Uncle Ned has at least six genderqueer aunties to answer to. That is what truly conservative family values look like.

With that being said, I'm an anarchist and I don't believe in enforcing my lifestyle on anyone else. So, by all means, go ahead and practice your creepy, rape-vibe, nuclear family. Just keep it the hell away from my kids.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

This post is dedicated in loving memory to Wendell Berry. Not just one of the 'good ones' but one of the best ones and a straight cis-dude who taught me how to be a rebel in the sticks.

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Home by David Byrne & Brian Eno

*  Victim of Love by Erasure

*  Big Empty by Stone Temple Pilots

*  I Kill Children by Dead Kennedys

*  Floyd the Barber by Nirvana

*  Cake and Sodomy by Marilyn Manson

*  Minor Threat by Minor Threat

*  Say Something by James

*  Been a Son by Nirvana

*  Chains of Love by Erasure

*  Baby's on Fire by Brian Eno