Fuck it. Believe me or don’t.

I made a documentary that got C&Dd by Netflix. It was about Orson Welles and the final movie he made in '71 that didn’t get finished until 2021 (by Netflix).

In researching Welles, I discovered a rediculous amount of information about him that is not at all publically known.

His children?

One daughter lives in New York. Another in Sedona.

But there’s also the two he had out of wedlock in secret. (Both of which have documentaries about them)

And then I discovered his fifth child.

Sasha Welles. Who he had with his mistress Oja Kodar during the making of his last film. The kid is almost 100% his, but might not be Kodar’s as he basically had sex with her whole family.

But that’s not what this comment is about.

It’s about the movie he filmed but never finished editing, “The Otherside of the Wind” and starred Oja Kodar.

It’s now on Netflix, and while it did receive some nice critical reviews. Very few people came to look at it as close as I have. (And the others that have kinda sorta agree with what I’m about to say).

The closest (for the most part) was Peter Bogdonavich, who said the movie was a perfect book end for Welles career - a movie that matched his creativity with Citizen Kane.

But, the movie was actually much more than that. Much much more. (At least imo.)

Orson wanted this film to be finished more than anything. He even begged Peter Bognonovich to finish it in case he died. Something Bogdonavich actually tried to do well into the 2000’s!

The reason he wanted it finished? No one knows. But I have a theory, and that’s what my doc was about.

The theory:

Orson Welles created The Otherside of the Wind as a sequel / spiritual successor to Citizen Kane. Except instead of a story about a media magnate based off William Randolph Hearst, The Otherside of the Wind is about a filmmaker based off of Orson Welles.

Basically, Orson Welles made an autobiography of himself and his struggles to be the first Independant filmmaker in the style of his masterpiece Citizen Kane, and then died before telling anyone.

You can watch it on Netflix right now too. The Otherside of the Wind.

So. Every interview he gives about the movie. Literally every single one (I’ve seen 13 or so) he lies about the meaning of what the “Wind” in the title of the film means. In one interview, it’s about the duality of Men and Women. In another, it’s about art and commerce. In another, it just sounds good.

He was an artistic guy. And was known to tell lies and grandiose stories for attention. But at the end of his career, Orson was literally operating on another level. Want to know who coined the term “visual essay?” It was Orson Welles in his documentary F is for Fake. Where he basically makes the first YouTube video (in 1974) about art forgery and art. Which is what F is for Fake is about: faking art.

He has a monologue in that movie. One about a beautiful Church in England built in the old eclesiastic style. And one built by an anonymous architect over 20 years. He wonders at the thought of making something so grand, and never putting your name on it. Something those who appreciate architecture would love, even if they’re biased against the architect.

At this point in his career, Orson was making commercials and getting drunk while doing it. All to raise funds to finish his films. But despite being THE GUY who made Citizen Kane, Othello, Chimes at Midnight, etc, he just got an endless raft of shit from Hollywood for being in these commercials. In one of his many lunches with Bogdanovich, he muses about removing his name from his next movie, so Hollywood might appreciate it as a film instead of crapping on it because of his name.

So he makes Wind. People point out the story of the filmmaker in it kinda resembles him. He denies it. Eventually saying it’s inspired by him. And being a Welles movie, it also has a unique meta narrative. A movie within a movie. As it’s literally about a filmmaker trying to finish his last film, but he tragically passes before it’s completed. Which is what ended up literally happening to Welles and this movie. He died before he could make it. So his unfinished film due to his passing was about a filmmaker having an unfinished film due to his passing.

Great coincidence. And one that attracted me to this story. But it COULD just be a coincidence right? Maybe Otherside just HAPPENS to parralel Welles life through Kanes narrative structure.

Except what I discovered about the title of the film. He never gave a straight answer about it. And that bothered me. Anytime he played coy, it was for a reason.

And it got me looking at the name “The Otherside of the Wind” in a new way. What if the name wasn’t a metaphor at all? He was certainly known for them. (Cough Chimes at Midnight) But, what if this name that really sounded like a metaphor was just a literal, practical name?

The Otherside of the Wind has a movie within a movie. As you watch the film, the filmmaker in it screens his new movie to friends and execs to different results. Eventually you see parts of that movie. The ending to The Otherside of the Wind is also the ending of that movie.

It ends with a woman walking onto a dusty Hollywood set built in the desert. Props of flimsy buildings sway in the wind, as she wanders through them. Eventually the wind picks up and knocks over all the props.

“The Otherside of the Wind” ENDS with a strong WIND blowing down props in a dusty storm.

So if that’s the WIND part of the title, what would the OTHERSIDE of that BE?

Well, the very FIRST shot of Citizen Kane has a cold wind in a snow storm opening up the gates to Kanes mansion.

The otherside of that wind, is the wind in the final shot of “The Otherside of the Wind.”

The movie is named after the first shot in Citizen Kane. And is about literally being the final shot of Welles career.

One that will likely never be noticed, as he made sure to tell no one. Just to make sure they would watch that movie without a bias towards him. Instead the whole point of the movie basically got lost. Because by the time it was finished 50 years later, not many were left who could fit the pieces together.

In the interviews I did, I talked with many people who worked with him as part of VISTOW. A group that thanklessly helped Orson make his movies. Many who went on to have large careers in Hollywood or Academia.

VISTOW stands for “Volunteers in Service to Orson Welles.”

And I’ll be damned if I didn’t say I’m envious of those in that group. Despite the horror stories.

Consider this very condensed rant about this topic that probably only 5 other people on the planet know my service to Orson Welles.

The Otherside of the Wind needs to be looked at as follow up to Citizen Kane, not as the final movie in Welles career.

If you watch the movie on Netflix, I encourage you to do so through this lense. (But be warned, the first 10 minutes are rough, as intended).

Psychopathy. Movies, sensational articles, pop-culture, etc. give a completely distorted view of the disorder and its place in the world.

• There are primary and secondary psychopaths. Primary being that it is genetic, secondary that is developed. So yes, in a way you can be born “evil” (of course the problem is that some definitions of evil don’t make sense).
• We don’t want to judge people for things they can’t change about themselves. Well here you have somebody who has about zero empathy, no feelings of guilt, remorse, or shame, by definition, and they were born that way (as primary psychopath). The emotional palette is pretty bleak.
• To add more relevance, this along with other Dark Triad traits is very prevalent in the most powerful people.
• There is progress, but no real standardised lasting treatment yet, though there are cases like this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-it-possible-to-treat-psychopathy-before-it-starts/?rdt_cid=5647051055037794503
• Psychopathy isn’t in any manual to be diagnosed with. Instead people get diagnosed with AsPD (Antisocial personality disorder). 2/3 of AsPD don’t qualify as Psychopaths. There is interesting history about why this is. It’s willful.
• The Hare checklist is an acceptable way to test for signs of psychopathy. But he specifically said it should not be used to justify the death penalty, which they do anyway. People sue about it, but they don’t even get heard.

For someone who knows about nothing about psychopaths and hasn’t interacted with one, it is literally unfathomable how cruel they can be without blinking an eye. Which is why it’s so important for psychologists etc. to have a file of facts about them, at the least, to figure out what’s true and what not, as they generally don’t care about lying or manipulating people for their own gain and have had to do that most of their lives.

So yeah, take a fucked up justice system, shitty social cohesion and declining resources in health and the disorder causes so much trouble for everyone. Sensationalism only makes it worse.

Another link to back some of this stuff https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7236162/

In “The Andy Griffith” show intro with the whistling tune, little Opie throws a rock into the fishing pond. In reality, little Opie was not strong enough to throw that rock that far so there was a guy off-camera and behind a bush that watched Opie throw and timed his throw to match it. The rock hit the water and made a splash and it looked like little Opie threw it.

The electric siren was not invented to warn of air raids, but instead to warn volunteer firefighters that a fire call is in progress and to report to the station ASAP. Before the development of the electric siren between 1905-1910, fire departments relied on air horns, steam whistles, tires, or bells. These all had their own major drawbacks: Horns and whistles rely on an external source of air/steam that must be recharged periodically, and a leak can lower the volume or outright silence it if it goes unnoticed. Fire bells, on the other hand, could easily be confused with church bells. Clearly a better solution was needed.

The electric siren was first developed by a man named William A. Box, and his “Denver” electric sirens quickly became popular and replaced the aforementioned warning devices. The siren’s ability to start reliably and rapidly at the push of a button proved valuable and saved precious time, and it costed only a few cents to run in terms of electricity costs. The sound of the siren was distinct, could not be mistaken for anything else, and could be heard even in neighbouring towns. By the mid-1910s and early 1920s, there was already a huge booming market for fire sirens. Companies like the Federal Electric Company (still around as Federal Signal Corp), Sterling Siren Fire Alarm Co (now Sentry Siren Inc.) and Decot Machine Works all competed fiercely to outdo one another.

While far less common nowadays thanks to pagers taking over this role, fire sirens are still fairly common in the U.S., especially on the East Coast. In fact, several 100 year old sirens are still in service today because they’re just that well-built and reliable!

Here’s a video of a roughly 100 year old Denver siren, still operational.

I gained 150 pounds since covid because I learned how to cook and frequently overate on my own cooking due to cooking too much, so I did a lot of research.

Once you reach 400 pounds (differs from body to body) your body starts to store fat within bones, making them brittle instead of stronger. If you break a bone at this weight you’re very likely to become close to immobile. Visiting the gym does not combat this.

I have approximate knowledge of a lot of things.

If you want to design and build large-scale industrial plant infrastructure like pressure vessels, piping, pumps, turbines, etc., most of the codes and standards you have to meet cost money to even see -and they are NOT cheap (in the tens of thousands of dollars for a full set).

In several jurisdictions, the standards are incorporated into law by reference. Most people think that you should have free access to read the text of the law that you’re beholden to, but what happens when a copyrighted work is incorporated into the law?

archive.org asserted the law should be free to access. However, they lost a copyright lawsuit brought by the American society of mechanical engineers because they were hosting copies of these standards.

So, to read the law you are beholden to in this sector of manufacturing, you must either pay a private organization ($$$) or memorize it (impossible); you cannot make copies for yourself to reference at your leisure

Taxing buildings and other improvements to land, is bad for cities. A split-rate tax zone where land is taxed higher and buildings are taxed less, would get rid of a lot of urban blight (vacant buildings, empty lots) in downtown areas.

Here’s another: the hot-rod/car-racing field is CRAMMED with snake-oil, & the best information is sooo shoddily converted into book-form, that is nearly useless.

David Vizard’s books, & the related books on the domain, are important-to-study, but DEAR G-D is there a RIPE market for anybody who wants to convert all that shit-publishing into quality publishing…

That’s a contributing-factor to why the entire internal-combustion-engine aftermarket is mostly snake-oil bullshit, unfortunately.

I bet the entire internal-combustion-engine industry could have made their engines 10% more efficient, average, had they studied what the inventors/racers had published, & used that information competently…

sigh

the same is true for the general-aviation industry, as a whole.

Notice that the 2 absolute innovators in these 2 domains, were Smokey Yunick & Burt Rutan: anarchists who did more research-engineering than … pretty-much the entire rest of the industry.

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IF you want to become competent in sailboat-design, THEN you NEED:

• “The Principles of Yacht Design”, get the most-recent edition of it.
• ALL of Dave Gerr’s books.
• Fossatti’s Aero-Hydrodynamics of Sailing, or whatever that book is called
• probably Nigel Calder’s books, to understand what makes a lifelong sailor value a design-decision
• Tom Cunliffe’s books, to understand the difference between excellent captaining vs “good enough”, & the implications of that, on the design
• a book on windvanes, if you intend to impliment one, on your design ( for cruisers )
• “The Rigger’s Apprentice”, by Brion Toss
• “The Sailmaker’s Apprentice” or something like that, can’t remember, right now…
• the North Sails book on sails/sail-design/sailmaking
• look up the Sharrow propeller, on yt, for power-boats ( annular-box-wing prop, for outboards: no cavitation! )
• Harry Riblett’s book on General Aviation airfoils, available at the Experimental Aviation Association, if you are going to do ANYthing interesting with hydrofoiling ( he nailed the ATR-72 icing problem last-century, & that airfoil’s problem killed an airliner in 2024, with NASA still not admitting the truth about that foil )
• Julia, the programming-language, for doing your math: better than spreadsheets, can use real math symbols, & you aren’t touching any part of the code that you aren’t working-on ( in a spreadsheet, a stray typo can distort the entire sheet, & you can’t find what it is that is skewing everything unless you’re seeing the whole sheet’s equations: it’s the wrong paradigm: error-accumulation, instead of error-eradication. Julia has a learning-track on Exercism, & has a few good books. )

Getting that set of knowledge into one, will save you thousands of wasted dollars, chasing “wild geese”.

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For aircraft-design, I’d say begin with Snorri Gudmundsson’s book, NOT Raymer’s.

( Raymer is careless, & you will save yourself much frustration if you avoid his books. Snorri’s is on its 2nd edition, so I’m presuming it to be the go-to book for the industry, nowadays: I can’t afford it, & may not ever, but I wish I’d got Gudmundsson’s book, instead of Raymers, now )

You’ll need Harry Riblett’s book on airfoils, as mentioned above. https://www.kitplanes.com/the-airfoil-adventures-of-harry-riblett/ Notice that the Bearhawk has his foil on it, and its reputation is awesome.

You’ll need this video-playlist, in order to understand just how AWEFUL the interference-drag is, on normal designs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZhyjYE4Le0&list=PLO-XZZWFTH5ELMG3CECqMPZoEFREgwkPn

( I think it was 67HP & 250mph, in level flight, for one of Mike Arnold’s birds. )

Once these things by Mike Arnold & Harry Riblett sink-in, then the normal designs you see in general-aviation … become unconscionable: all that wasted-opportunity, all the needless drag-inefficiency.

Harry Riblett was using Eppler’s simple software, simple simulations, & nowadays you’d HAVE TO use OpenFOAM to do your simulations, XFoil mis-represents stall-onset, apparently, & XFoil is vastly better than what Riblett was using, years ago.

You NEED to understand both Bernoulli’s principle & the Reynolds number, in aircraft-design.

There are sites with video-training for OpenFOAM: CFD/Computational-Fluid-Dynamics’s complicated, & I’d recommend that.

It is entirely possible to design an aircraft, nowadays, on your own, using X-Plane, OpenFOAM, & the choicest study-materials, & YEARS of thinking on it, until your own unconscious-mind groks that-specific-component in the problem, then get digging on the next one…

Further, IF you take into consideration what Riblett & Arnold gave us, THEN you can do better than what most of the new designs in general-aviation are doing.

There is a video, which I now can’t find, on changing Burt Rutan’s Vari-EZ or Long-EZ aircraft to have blended canards, & it noticeably reduced the drag.

That is exactly the sort of thing that Mike Arnold instinctively understood, & if you begin with that kind of instinct, then you … don’t waste the opportunity that the normal aircraft-designers are enforcing.

You need to consider Prandtl wings, too, as that’s beginning to become significant in modern designs.

All the stuff I’ve realized in both these domains is affects patentability, & therefore I’ll not give you that: I want to be able to create a not-for-profit keiretsu which makes both sailboats & aircraft ( a keiretsu is like Panasonic: an organism made of companies, not a single-company ), someday, & patent-protection’s required to break the for-profit monopoly in both industries.

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Sorry I’m not just giving you a bunch of answers, instead pointing you at competent-learning-means…

but the world really is better when you learn your-own way, & others learn their-own way, & the results are more … exploring-evolution’s-potential.

Both of these domains will take you under a decade to get from beginning-learning to where you’re really knowing-what-you’re-doing enough to become able to begin competently inventing.

Don’t expect to get to that stage in less than 7y, though.

It took me 8, before everything suddenly fell-into-place, & the different fluid-dynamics-interactions fit together, for different kinds of design, etc…

But I’d rather the world have other-people doing it, … than me knowing, but not doing it, & others thinking that university-courses is the only valid way.

LibreTexts.org iirc is also a place with some good information on it, in the aircraft-design space…

Whatever: IF anybody cares to earn competence in either domain, THEN I hope this boosts you into it, more efficiently.

If not, then just ignore this.

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in the open source multiplayer game Space Station 14, you can swab pollen from cannabis plants to egg-plants (as in, plants that grow eggs, distinct from eggplant) and have a chance to grow eggs full of pure THC

In a related vein, the Washington Post was hot garbage long before it was acquired by Bezos. They gained their reputation by chance during the Watergate scandal because they received classified docs which put them on the same level as larger media outlets.

But when imperialism ended, it was basically a mess. Jews vs Arabs. Christians vs Sunnis. Arabs vs Persians. Jews vs Shias. Arabs vs Kurds. Alawis vs Sunnis. To this day, many of them have this tribal mindset.

Expanding on this, this was mainly exploited by the weakening British empire to create states that would be friendly in geopolitics and trade. Even the Pan Arab flag that many middle eastern countries share is actually a British design given to different uprising groups against the weakening Ottoman empire a couple of centuries prior.

Having a lot of resources is a curse. Countries that have natural ressources (Iran, Algeria, Nigeria, Russia) tend to be highly corrupt and exploited by a small elite.

Jokes on you, Pakistan has a ton of natural resources that the small elite chooses to shoot people for attempting to harvest/refine/sell, which is why they import literally everything on IMF loan money and simultaneously invest jack into education and science outside a few high level military projects which gave them the nuclear bomb.

Okay, so, there’s this Canadian children’s book author, Paulette Bourgeois, right? She wrote the Franklin books ( the one about the turtle ) that later got adapted into 2 different cartoons.

But little fun fact that I doubt many people know is the fact that in an interview, she admitted that the first book, the one where Franklin deals with fear of the dark in his shell at night, was inspired by an episode of MASH ( cannot format the title properly ). Specifically the episode where the 4077th have to move operations into a nearby cave. If I remember correctly, she was a fresh first time parent when watching that episode one night with her baby, but it’s been a while since I read this, so take it with a grain of salt.

going to disagree with most of your takes on the media/journos. that entire industry is mostly corrupt for the past 20 years because the barriers to entry are so high that you have to be part of the elite to become a journalist, hence why journalism has become increasingly irrelevant and seems completely out of touch to anyone who isn’t part of the elite. Also i feel like a lot of your political claims are way over simplified and exaggerated, but there is some truth to what you are saying. I stopped reading most ‘elite’ publications because they really started showing their detachment from any greater reality around the late 2000s, and it got far worse in the mid 2010s.

I spent a decade studying/working/teaching philosophy, history, and political theory. Hardly anyone knows anything about these things… and often when you see them on media… the takes are horrible ignorant/bad/wrong and vastly oversimplified. So are the takes by most consumers of philosophy the podcasts/books/etc about them. And it’s sad frustrating how people think they know everything there is to know about Plato’s views because they listened to a 45m podcast about The Cave or read one of his books once. And the people who do know about these things? totally ignored both mainstream media and the social media types… but their insights when they are given the time/effort to shine is truly wonderful and insightful.

I also taught coursework in these areas… most of my students were not dumb or idiots… but only 5% actually gave a shit about learning. Most just wanted to be entertained or validated in their delusions and pre-existing beliefs about the world, and they got very frustrated when the course didn’t do that for them. At least when I taught 15 years ago they were not prone to violence, threats, and intimidation, like they are now.

Now I work in tech…and it’s astounding how horrible ignorant most technological ‘smart’ people are… and how much of their ‘intelligence’ is just… a quasi religious belief set. I think because tech is ‘mysterious’ to the general population the ‘techies’ now considered themselves the high priests of society… saw this going on 20 years ago and now we are reading the point where the corruption, idiocy, and delusions of grandeur have really started to show. I’m not a huge expert in most tech… but the amount of sheer ignorance perpetuated by overconfident idiots in the tech sector is just… mind blowing… and most ‘techies’ i know legit seem to feel an innate sense of superiority to non tech workers and if you challenge them they throw temper tantrums like children.

You left-out the critical resource of https://www.semiaccurate.com/ btw…

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What a generally … outright-awesome post.

The Guardian changed-ownership recently, & cut their journalism-staff, savagely, ttbomk, AND they are now purged from DuckDuckGo??

searching for

kremlin papers trump site:theguardian.com

produces NOTHING at DuckDuckGo, now, & for the last few weeks, at-least?

& I’ve seen that FT definitely has anti-viability strategy in its pushing of distortion, in its stuff…

fscking-idiot webmastering at TheGuardian… WHERE’S THE SEARCH-FUNCTION??

https://www.theguardian.com/index/subjects/a

THAT page has a search-function.

??

WHEN I search on the keywords

kremlin papers

only-in-title, only-in-English, then click the button, then I get

https://www.google.co.uk/search?as_q=kremlin+papers&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=lang_en&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=www.theguardian.com&as_occt=title&as_filetype=&tbs=

So, TheGuardian IS BLOCKING DuckDuckGo for sake of kickbacks for Google-exclusivity??

Looks like it…

“Those who are ignorant of history, are damned to re-enact its disasters.” is true for our entire world, & especially true in the domain of journalism!

IF you keep disappearing historical key-information ( as for-profit, & for-institutional-status/importance, “journalisms” both do ), THEN you’re garrotting OUR WORLD’s viability!!

Scum…

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The highest quality science-news is https://www.science.org/news

whereas the highest quantity of science-news is probably https://phys.org/latest-news/

( you have to fight with phys.org, as it keeps trying to prove one is just a bot, if one keeps digging into archives )

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Salut, Namaste, Kaizen, & Gratitude for making this post!

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Having a lot of resources is a curse. Countries that have natural ressources (Iran, Algeria, Nigeria, Russia) tend to be highly corrupt and exploited by a small elite. It’s simple. The elite can take control of the oil fields, the gas fields, the mines. Just sell ressources. Shoot protesters. No need to invest in anything else. It’s much better to live a country with limited resources (Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland). Lack of resources force the elites to invest in science and education. The most unlucky country in Africa is Congo. It’s full of diamonds, forests, oil, gas, lithium, cobalt, rare earth. So Congo has suffered horribly because of that. In fact, it’s still being looted.

This isn’t actually true. You can look at the Nordic countries which are very oil rich and owe a lot of their prosperity to that. The United States is pretty resource rich as well. What is a curse is imperialism, and having lots of resources attracts lots of imperialists. The “oil curse” or “resource curse” is a myth made up to whitewash imperialists and absolve them of guilt.

Strap in and let me tell you about my special interest, Iranian history. In the 1800s, before the discovery of oil, Iran was ruled by an extremely corrupt line of shahs who sold out every part of the impoverished country to fund their lavish lifestyles and massive harems - to the point that other countries had to step in and say that they weren’t allowed to sell out that much of the country. But the Iranian people were upset by this state of affairs, and staged a massive boycott, which set the stage for a mass movement in 1905 that established a democratic parliament and a constitution, with the support of an overwhelming majority, including the clergy (a fatwa was actually issued declaring violating the boycott to be haram). Iran was well on it’s way to becoming a peaceful, prosperous, democratic society - but then the Fire Nation attacked, in the form of the British and Russian Empires moving in, shelling the parliament building and dividing the nation between themselves, like a pack of wolves.

The Iranian people suffered tremendously in the following years, with major plagues, famines, and genocide conducted by the Ottoman Empire. Of course, the Russian Empire collapsed, the British took the opportunity to unify the country, propping up a shah of a new dynasty as their puppet. That shah proved uncooperative during WWII, and the Allies invaded to set up supply lines between the Eastern and Western fronts and to secure the Iranian oil (which had now been discovered), and the shah was forced to abdicate to his son, who the British found more amenable.

The British technically owned the rights to Iran’s oil, but the deal they had made was with the previous dynasty (Qajar). The one that had been selling out their country to an absurd degree, the one that had been overthrown by the people precisely because they were selling out the country, and so naturally the deal they had struck with the British regarding oil (which had been made before oil had even been discovered in Iran) gave them extremely lucrative terms. But it actually didn’t matter how lucrative the terms were because the British were just straight up stealing it. They falsified their records and forbid any kind of inspection of their facilities.

This led the Iranian people to once again mobilize in support of democracy and self-rule. As outrage over the exploitation grew, the shah, who had previously rubber-stamped anyone the British picked, began to fear his own people more than the British and appointed democratic reformer Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister. After the Iranians had watched the British stonewall them for decades, Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry with overwhelming public support. Iran was once again on track to becoming a peaceful, democratic, independent country.

But the British set up a naval blockade that crippled their economy. Iranians, at this point, had a neutral to positive view of the US, and hoped that it would live up to its stated ideals and support them against the British. The British, meanwhile, expected the Americans to back up their “property rights.” President Truman threw up his hands in frustration, seeing both sides as intransigent. But Churchill simply waited him out, and offered his successor Eisenhower British support in Korea and NATO in exchange for the CIA launching a coup, and so Iran was passed around like a bargaining chip. Mossadegh’s commitment to democratic ideals allowed the CIA free reign, he didn’t crack down on the press despite the CIA controlling virtually all the newspapers, he didn’t crack down on protests while the CIA was hiring protesters on both sides, etc. Naturally, he was ousted (although the CIA denied it/covered it up for decades), and the shah was given much more power (which he used to hunt down and exterminate the Iranian left) and the oil kept flowing.

But after a few decades, once again, outrage over the exploitation came to a head, and the shah, seeking to appease his people, participated in a multinational oil boycott. But as a result, his foreign support was withdrawn, which set the stage for the Islamic Revolution. President Carter, against the advice of his state department, allowed the shah to take refuge in the US. Naturally, this outraged the Iranians, because the US had previously staged a coup to install the very same man as a dictator. In retaliation, some of the revolutionaries seized the US embassy and took hostages. This of course led to a breakdown in relations between the US and Iran.

And so, Iran is often held up as an example of this supposed “resource curse” that leads to political instability (not to mention the old line about “Islam is incompatible with democracy”), but the reality is that the country had multiple times in its history where it could’ve become stable, peaceful, democratic, and independent, but those chances were destroyed, not by Iranians, but by foreign imperialists, the vile colonial empires of the British and Americans. Had they simply been left alone, they would not have suffered from this supposed “resource curse.” If you look into the history of any similar country, you will find a similar story. But the history of these countries are simply not taught and not known in the imperial core, and so other explanations are invented.