Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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Not that there was much room for debate prior to the latest outbreak of fighting between Israel and Hamas, but this latest round has once again shown everyone just how supportive the USA has been towards Israelis……at least in ruling/elite circles.

At the same time, it is now undeniable that there are growing rifts between the USA and Israel over the latter’s refusal to engage in compromise that would result in a two-state solution. The most obvious rifts have been on university campuses where many of America’s future elites are being produced. Also noteworthy are the resignations in the foreign policy blob in protest at Biden’s handling of the conflict (but there has always been a faction of Israel-critical types there).

Israel’s ability to engage in a punitive campaign in Gaza is only possible due to the cover (and the weapons) that it receives from Uncle Sam. The US naval vessels parked in the Eastern Mediterranean have ensured that Hezbollah wouldn’t stream across Israel’s northern border, giving it a much freer hand in Gaza. Despite some interesting claims from certain Israeli nationalists who seek to end the generous subsidies that they receive from the USA in order to pursue a more independent and less restrained course of action, the American umbrella over Israel is a huge net benefit. This protection is not only physical, but diplomatic and economic as well.

And this is why the US-Israeli relationship is so important to the Israelis; a degradation of ties between the two would leave the latter exposed to a lot of the enemies along its borders (and beyond). What has been for decades a rock-solid relationship (whether you like it or not) is showing increasing signs of fraying at the edges. This does not mean that a wholesale re-evaluation of that relationship is going to happen any time soon, but it should be cause for concern for those who are pro-Israel (and a reason for hope for that that are anti-Zionist).

Foreign Affairs has published an essay that relies heavily on historic and recent polling data to illustrate this fraying, and there are some interesting bits in it that I would like to share with all of you:

Washington prides itself on its tradition of bipartisan support for Israel, but in reality a partisan gap has been growing for years. Many Democratic voters, and younger Americans generally, have become critical of Israel’s long-standing denial of Palestinian human rights and national self-determination. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s populist, illiberal policies and his theocratic governing-coalition allies have alienated them further. On the other hand, Republicans and many religious conservatives have seized on support for Israel—including unrestrained backing for right-wing Israeli governments—as an article of faith, and, increasingly, a political litmus test.

The increasingly partisan reading of the bilateral relationship isn’t only on the American side. Despite the Biden administration’s strong support for Israel after October 7 and through much of the war—and despite the fact that a large majority of American Jews have traditionally voted Democratic—Israelis show that they prefer Donald Trump to Joe Biden by a wide margin. Unlike in past decades, a majority of Israelis also approve of their leaders’ defying U.S. policy preferences. And it’s not clear that these Israelis are much concerned about a rupture in the U.S.-Israeli relationship or that Israeli defiance might one day jeopardize the extensive military aid on which Israel relies.

The growing friction between Israelis and Americans didn’t emerge with the current war in Gaza. Longer-term social and political trajectories in both countries suggest that the famous “shared values” that have for decades underpinned the relationship were already under pressure. But the war has brought this tension, and the partisan politics driving it, into full view. This does not mean that the countries are on a collision course, but it raises important questions about the nature of alliance for the years to come.

A Jewish friend of mine went to Israel to visit family back in 2009, and he told me that anti-Obama sentiment was incredibly high in the country. This initially surprised me, but then it began to make sense when I thought about it a bit more: Obama was viewed as being partial to the Islamic world, and he urged on the Arab Spring, something that inflamed Israeli paranoia.

The last point in the above excerpt is the most important one; that of the ebbing of ‘shard values’. Israel is an ethno-state by design (despite having a large Arab minority population within its internationally-recognized borders), and ethno-nationalism does not mesh well with trends in western liberal democracy. To western liberal democrats, Israel is anachronistic, or even an anathema.

For decades, Israelis viewed Democrat-run US Administrations positively, but this has changed since the Obama era:

But it’s not at all clear that these patterns hold true today. Despite Biden’s sweeping support for Israel after the October 7 attack and throughout the war, Israelis have shown only lukewarm approval. In November 2023 and January 2024, studies from the Israel Democracy Institute reminded Israeli respondents that Biden had offered unyielding support, and then asked them if Israel should meet some U.S. demands in return; in both surveys, a larger number (a plurality) of Israelis said that Israel should make its own decisions rather than coordinate with Washington. 

And in mid-March, an opinion survey for Israel’s News 12 network found that Israelis preferred Trump to Biden in the 2024 U.S. presidential election by 14 points: 44 percent for Trump, versus just 30 percent for Biden. This was well before the administration had announced the decision to withhold the weapons shipment and just before the administration said that it would sanction a small number of violent West Bank settlers. In May, the IDI found a similar preference for Trump over Biden, primarily among Israeli Jews.

As in the case of U.S. attitudes about Israel’s leadership, Israeli attitudes about U.S. administrations also align strongly with political affiliation: in the News 12 poll, nearly three-quarters of those who support Netanyahu’s coalition said that they preferred Trump, whereas 55 percent of those who support parties opposed to Netanyahu preferred Biden. In fact, this partisan divide reflects the culmination of social and political forces that have been underway in both Israel and the United States for years.

The right-ward trend among Israelis:

For at least 15 years, in-depth studies have shown firm right-wing trends among young Israeli Jews. There are two immediate explanations for this phenomenon. One is demographics: more young Israeli Jews are religious than was the case in earlier decades because religious families tend to have many children, and religious Jews are reliably more right-wing than less religious Jews in Israel. The second is the prevailing political environment in Israel during the past two decades: young Israelis today have grown up in the heavily nationalist right-wing era of Netanyahu. They carry no memories of any peace process and have plenty of experience of war, having grown up amid numerous rounds of fighting with Hamas, frequent rocket attacks, and waves of conflict-related violence.

In fact, the rightward tilt of younger Israeli voters has closely coincided with Netanyahu’s own efforts to make the U.S.-Israeli relationship more partisan. Shortly after Netanyahu returned to power in 2009, a plurality of Israelis held positive views of President Barack Obama, more than those who held negative views. But Netanyahu and his proxies began systematically attacking Obama—tellingly, for taking positions that were close to a policy consensus at the time, such as the president’s 2011 support for a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, the 1949 armistice lines, with adjustments. Netanyahu’s accusations ricocheted back to the United States, where Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for president in 2012, accused Obama of “throwing Israel under the bus.” 

In 2015, Netanyahu took an even bigger gamble: breaking a long-standing taboo, he delivered a speech in Congress at the unilateral invitation of Republican lawmakers, in which he made a broadside attack on the Obama administration’s efforts to secure a deal with Iran to rein in its nuclear program. Why did Netanyahu play roulette with Israel’s most essential ally? He was facing a cutthroat reelection bid at the time, and he wagered that his global statesmanship, even if it meant directly challenging a U.S. president (perhaps especially so) would actually help his campaign.

What makes this all the more interesting is that American Jews overwhelmingly vote Democrat, and that has put many of them on a collision course with their cousins in Israel.

more:

Yet Israelis are also tracking the growing partisan division of U.S. opinion toward Israel with alarm. They know well that Biden is watching polls showing how his positions on Israel and the war are viewed among critical constituencies in the American public during his difficult reelection campaign against Trump. Informally, many Israelis think that Biden has succumbed to pressure from the left, that American university students protesting the war in Gaza have been brainwashed, and that anti-Semitism has surged to dangerous levels.

It should be noted that continued divergence of American and Israeli public opinion is not the only possible near-term outcome of the current situation. If Trump succeeds in defeating Biden, and continues policies that favor the Israeli right, the current rift between the two countries, at least at the government level, may shift to a populist right-wing alignment. But it seems likely that in the years to come, the shifts that have already taken place among younger voters in both countries will continue, presenting a significant challenge for the two allies as they seek to agree on a common policy agenda.

This paragraph is a good overall summation:

The basis of the U.S.-Israeli relationship was once grounded in shared interests, but with a much-prized sense of values. In terms of interests, the geopolitics of the Cold War are long gone. But the two countries still have overlapping regional concerns. The question of shared values, however, is more complicated: do both countries continue to share a commitment to democracy, especially liberal democracy? Israel has been moving away from that identity, and the United States will decide its own path in November. 

We have all seen how countries have been transformed by US meddling to better reflect political/governance/social/etc. trends in America. The power of the Israeli Lobby in DC grants Israel quite a lot more room for freedom. At the same time, this “divergence of values” will have to be addressed at some point in the future. For now, it is not yet a critical matter for either side.

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During the first week of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a little over two years ago, a think tanker reinforced my take on the US position toward the conflict: “We’re gonna bleed them out. As long as Ukrainians are willing and able to fight the Russians, we will support them as this serves our goal in degrading Russian military capabilities”.

This “steady-bleeding” is still the policy today, which is why the US-led West continues to raise the stakes bit-by-bit over time. The calls to allow the Ukrainians to use western-supplied weapons to hit targets within Russia is the latest example of how they are upping the ante in this war.

The big flaw in this strategy has been Russia’s main victory in this conflict: its ability to brush off the sanctions regimes placed on it. These sanctions were supposed to devastate the Russian economy and destroy its ability to engage in military action. What has in fact happened is quite the opposite; the Russians have not only weathered the sanctions, but they have also managed to reconstitute their armed forces, and much, much more rapidly than western intel and military officials assumed was possible.

DefenseNews reports on how the Russians managed to do this so successfully:

The Pentagon in March put a price tag on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Speaking in the officer’s club at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin read a list of costs the Kremlin had tallied over two years: More than 315,000 troops killed or wounded. Over $211 billion spent. Some 20 medium or large ships damaged or sunk in the Black Sea.

“Russia has paid a staggering cost for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s imperial dreams,” Austin said, speaking before a meeting of countries that gather each month in support of Ukraine.

By April, though, Austin’s tone had changed.

At a news conference, Austin and Gen. CQ Brown, America’s top military officer, again detailed Russia’s losses. But they added another trend: Russia’s recovery.

“Russia has ramped up its production,” Austin said. “All of their defense industry really answers directly to the state, so it’s easier for them to do that a bit quicker.”

Brown put it more simply: “Russia has aggressively reconstituted its military force.”

I don’t know anything about casualty figures, and I ignore them no matter which side they claims come from. The point here is the concession made about Russia’s military reconstitution.

The concern:

Indeed, if the Kremlin keeps rebuilding its forces faster than expected, it could present a longer-term and perhaps costlier problem for the NATO alliance. The U.S. government’s National Defense Strategy calls Russia an “acute threat,” second to the “pacing challenge” of China.

But Moscow’s own capacity may change that.

“They are doing better than we would have thought,” a senior U.S. defense official told Defense News on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive intelligence.

The first reason for its success:

Still, European and American defense officials, along with experts on the Russian military, told Defense News the Kremlin’s force is reconstituting faster than expected. They gave three main reasons why.

The first is the resilience of Moscow’s defense industry.

During the war, Russia has almost tripled its defense budget, according to Richard Connolly, an expert on the country’s economy at the London-based Royal United Services Institute think tank. Russia is set to spend somewhere between $130 billion and $140 billion on defense in 2024, which is about 6% of gross domestic product and a third of the government’s overall budget, Connolly approximated.

But because costs and wages are lower in Russia than in high-income countries, like many in NATO, the Kremlin’s defense fund buys much more than it would in the United States. When that conversion is taken into account, Russia’s 2024 defense budget falls between $360 billion to $390 billion, Connolly estimated.

The spending trend itself has raised salaries. Working in the defense industry was once a middling career in Russia; it’s now lucrative and attracting more workers. Based on official Russian figures, which Connolly noted may be inflated, the number of people working in the defense industry rose 20% during the war, from 2.5 million to about 3 million now.

Reason #2:

The second reason is Russia’s ability to dodge financial penalties.

In 2022, the Biden administration and European partners passed a raft of sanctions meant to sink the Russian economy. These ranged from banning the sale of high-tech materials, such as microchips, to a price cap on Russian oil sales.

These haven’t worked, multiple analysts told Defense News. That’s in large part because Moscow has been able to reroute its supply lines through friendly countries.

Chief among those partners is China. From 2022 to 2023, trade between Russia and China grew more than 26%, hitting an all-time high of $240 billion, according to a report by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

Beijing largely avoided sending weapons directly. Instead, Chinese companies became a vital supplier of the items Russia needed to build weapons itself — such as microchips and small electronics.

And the third and final reason:

This leads to the third point: Russia’s reconstitution has relied on surprising levels of support from other U.S. adversaries, who, unlike China, have directly provided military aid to Russia.

Since October, North Korea has sent Russia about 10,000 shipping containers, which could include up to 3 million artillery rounds, according to U.S. government figures. Russia has fired dozens of North Korean ballistic missiles since last fall, an American diplomat told the U.N. in March.

Iran has also provided materiel. Specifically, it’s sent a somewhat plodding attack drone known in Tehran as the Shahed-136 and in Moscow as the Geran-2. Russia has deployed swarms of these to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defenses, firing more than 3,700 Shahed drones, of which there are several variants, during the war as of December, according to the Ukrainian government.

The report questions the ability of the Russians to sustain this pace of growth:

Such attacks raise another question: How long can Russia sustain its operations?

Aside from drones, much of its wartime output has relied on vast warehouses of Soviet-era weapons. To reconstitute materiel lost in battle, Russia is emptying these, repairing the equipment and then sending it all to the front lines — one reason the estimates of Russia’s industrial capacity vary so widely.

“A lot of people are reading some headline figures and then assuming that it’s all new production,” Connolly said.

Here’s the funny bit:

Sitting in the British Embassy, Radakin said it would probably take about a decade for Russia to seriously threaten NATO again. Despite Russia’s refreshed troop levels, its invasion of Ukraine will eventually collapse, though he would not guess at that timeline.

“I don’t think it is sustainable,” he said. “But I don’t know at which point it becomes unsustainable.”

If anything, US policy planners must be taking a long, hard look at how their sanctions strategy completely failed them this time around.

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If you’re in any type of business, you know all about “bottlenecks” and “choke points”, and how they can devastate your company’s performance (or make your company, if you can find a way to resolve them).

I have a fondness for process mapping, and have been doing it instinctively since I was a little boy drawing charts and diagrams (when I wasn’t creating maps or tabulating sports statistics). Because of this quirk, I am always looking out for bottlenecks and choke points in pretty much all facets of life. Doing so helps me understand why things are the way they are.

…..which leads me to the AI Arms Race. AI is all the rage in Silicon Valley these days, and for obvious reasons; whoever gets into pole position stands to make heaps of money while transforming economics and society as a whole. Like everything, AI also faces challenges in the form of bottlenecks and choke points. For this booming sector, the challenge is access to computing power, whether through semi-conductors (chips) or data centres:

Artificial intelligence comes in many flavors, but what sets modern systems apart is their dependence on large amounts of computing power. Take large language models. By predicting text sequences from large corpora of training data, systems like ChatGPT not only discover the rules of natural language, but also learn common sense reasoning and other forms of abstract thought. There’s only one catch: the computing cost required to train a model grows exponentially with its raw capability.¹

ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, one of only a handful of compa­nies with the technical talent and data centers (courtesy of Microsoft) needed to train frontier models—best-in-class language, image, and audio models that developers can then build apps on through an applica­tion programming interface (API). Yet if you want to disparage a start-up founder, just call their new application a “wrapper on GPT-4.” Developers can only get so rich building appendages on a technology that someone else controls. Like a remora fish attached to the underbelly of a basking shark, where goes the API, so goes your company. You have no moat. You are, in a word, replaceable.

SCARCITY!

Futurists have long dreamt of AI ushering in a “post-scarcity” world, but such a thing does not exist. Even in a world where most labor is automated, value will continue to flow to what remains scarce: the capital. For AI, that means the owners of large data centers and leading chip makers.

Demand for semiconductors already vastly outstrips supply, par­ticularly for the specialized hardware needed to efficiently train and run the most advanced models. The top chip designer, Nvidia, controls 80–95 percent of the market for the most advanced AI chip designs and has thus seen its stock price rise over 400 percent in just the past five years. With an interconnect bandwidth of nine hundred gigabytes per second (the rate individual chips share information with their supercomputing neighbors), Nvidia’s flagship H100 tensor core GPU is a technological marvel—surpassed only by the company’s newest chip family, Blackwell, which can pack a petaflop of computing power into a single GPU. Nvidia’s GPUs are also the result of one of the most complex and closely guarded design and manufacturing processes in human history—in other words, a moat.

Nvidia just designs the chips and the software to run them. The actual fabrication occurs at TSMC—a factory whose literal moat, the Taiwan Strait, provides only 110 miles of separation from mainland China. With an AI transformation on the horizon, access to advanced chips has thus taken on the crushing gravity of geopolitics.

Taiwan is indeed a very, very important place strategically for this very reason.

Screwing China:

As if to buy time, the U.S. government, in concert with Japan and the Netherlands, followed up the chips Act by imposing sweeping export controls on the sale of advanced AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China. The message is clear: if AI is the ultimate winner-take-all technology, anything that stymies China’s access to the most advanced chips—and bolsters our own—is imperative to U.S. national security.

Nationalization as an answer for access to computing power in the West?

One gets the sense that this is only the start. As the main currency in a post-AI economy, the future will be determined by those with access to large computing clusters and the energy needed to power them. Those clusters will ideally be located in the West, but with the monopoly risk looming in the background, it may not suffice to cede control to purely private hands. The power unleashed by future AI models will challenge our basic governance structures to their core, busting through decadent procedures and driving demands for new controls over the distribution of compute—if not outright public ownership.

Nationalization is certainly one answer to AI’s monopoly problem. On our current trajectory, it may even be a likely one. Yet Nvidia, for its part, has no interest in becoming a national champion, as China represents an enormous market for its GPUs. Shortly after export controls were introduced on the high-bandwidth GPUs used for train­ing large AI models, Nvidia unveiled new chip designs—the A800 and H800—tailored for China, with specs tweaked to fall just under the line. A year later, the Bureau of Industry and Security (the home of the U.S. Export Enforcement Office within the Department of Commerce) was forced to update the controls to retroactively account for Nvidia’s workaround. The latest controls are incredibly strict, including a new “performance density threshold” that is essentially impossible to game.

“US compute strategy”:

If there is any one major blind spot in the U.S. compute strategy, it is an excessive focus on the highest-value-added technologies. Since 2020, SMIC has announced four new facilities for fabricating the sorts of humdrum chips that go into cars, televisions, and tanks.¹⁹ And despite being banned or restricted in the United States, Canada, and most of Europe, Huawei products have only deepened their penetration into telecom infrastructure worldwide thanks to China’s digital Belt and Road Initiative.²⁰ China’s strong market position in legacy chips and telecommunications equipment reflects the same playbook they’ve exe­cuted for solar panels and electric vehicles: drive down prices in mature technology categories and then flood cost-sensitive emerging markets. Thus, even if the United States wins the race to AGI, the ubiquitous nature of Chinese networking infrastructure throughout Africa and Asia could give China indirect control over how—or whether—frontier AI models get deployed.

This is a very well-written essay that provides a lot of food for thought. Click here to read the rest.

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There is a notion held by some these days that “wokeness has peaked”. I find this to be absurd, as the DEI Industrial Complex continues to expand through the public and private sectors, despite a few minor setbacks. The Critical Theory School still dominates academia, and continues to influence legislation that impacts all Americans, and by extension, much of the rest of the world.

A prime example of this trend’s continued persistence is California’s Racial Justice Act of 2020. Heather Mac Donald of City Journal explains to us just how revolutionary this law threatens to be:

California is about to demonstrate what a world constructed from the tenets of critical race studies looks like. The sentencing reversal in California v. Windom is the result of a recent law that will likely bring the state’s criminal-justice system to its knees. The Racial Justice Act, passed in 2020 without meaningful public review, turns long-standing academic tropes about implicit bias and white privilege into potent legal tools. And the floodgates are about to open. Starting this year, the RJA allows anyone serving time in a California prison or jail for a felony to challenge his conviction and sentencing retroactively on the ground of systemic racial bias.

The Racial Justice Act operationalizes the proposition that every aspect of the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks. But according to the act’s legislative authors, it’s too hard to prove such bias in the case of individual arrests and prosecutions. Therefore, the act does away with the concept of individual fault and individual proof. From now on, statistics about past convictions are sufficient to invalidate a present trial or sentence.

Will it unfold as she describes? I’m not a jurist, so I don’t know. For those of you with informed opinions, please leave a comment.

more:

The RJA explicitly repudiates a key Supreme Court precedent that had governed bias challenges in criminal trials. The plaintiff in McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), Warren McCleskey, a black man, was facing the death penalty for murdering a white police officer in Fulton County, Georgia. McCleskey presented a study purportedly showing that killers of all races in Georgia were more likely to be sentenced to death if their victim was white. Blacks who killed whites were at greatest risk of capital punishment. That alleged historical disparity in sentencing invalidated his own death sentence, argued McCleskey. The Court, in a 5–4 decision, disagreed.

Defendants must show that criminal-justice decision-makers were purposefully biased against them, in order to throw out a conviction or a sentence under the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court ruled. Statistics purporting to show a historical pattern of bias are not enough to support the requisite showing of individual discriminatory purpose against a particular defendant.

Thanks to the RJA, McCleskey no longer governs bias challenges in California. From now on in California, statistics purporting to show a pattern of bias in the past are enough to invalidate a current arrest, criminal charge, or judicial sentence.

On stats:

And what statistics they are! The Antioch Racial Justice Act case, California v. Windom, exemplifies the analyses that pass muster under the act. Through discovery requests to the district attorney’s office, defense counsel assembled a database of 89 defendants who had been charged with gang murder in Contra Costa County from 2015 to 2022. Forty-eight of those defendants were black. There were 41 defendants in the comparison pool, made up of any nonblack race the defendants could get their hands on, since white gang-murder defendants in Contra Costa County were virtually nonexistent. Sixty-two percent of the black gang murderers (30) got a sentence of life without parole because of the egregiousness of their killings. It was that so-called LWOP sentence that the four defendants in Windom were challenging. A little over 53 percent of the nonblack gang murderers (24) got a sentence of life without parole. The defense expert, University of California–Irvine criminologist Richard McCleary, used fancy statistical footwork to massage those small differences in an already-small sample size into larger significance. That was the least of the analysis’s problems, however. The real deficiency was that McCleary discarded the rule of comparing like with like. He made no effort to determine the criminal histories of the defendants in the various comparison pools to see if those defendants really were similarly situated. He made no effort to determine how heinous were the murders committed by members of the various comparison pools.

Oops:

After the judge had ruled in California v. Windom, a Contra Costa prosecutor commissioned his own study of the data. It turned out that the black gang members in the life-without-parole pool had committed more heinous murders than the nonblack gang members, as measured by the special circumstances in their cases. Once that difference was considered, there was no racial difference in the likelihood that a defendant would get life without parole. The district attorney’s office chose not to publicize the study and has not made it publicly available.

And now, based on a statistically inadequate analysis, not only are the four defendants in Windom entitled to resentencing, but all 30 black gang convicts in the historical pool who had received life without parole can now sue to reopen their sentences, thanks to the RJA’s retroactivity provision. How could criminal history, so central to the practice of criminal law, be deemed irrelevant to Racial Justice Act comparisons? Because the RJA is based not on real-world facts but on academic conceits about a totalizing system of white supremacy. The act establishes an infinite regress of bias from which no escape is possible. If a prosecutor tries to offer what the act calls “race-neutral reasons” (such as criminal history) for either past prosecutions or the current one, those reasons can be challenged, in the words of the statute, as the product of “systemic and institutional racial bias, racial profiling, and historical patterns of racially biased policing and prosecution.”

“The bill is a ticking time bomb. Kalra’s colleagues ‘did not understand how significant the RJA was,’ he said. ‘Maybe now they do.’ ”

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We end this weekend’s SCR with the story of how “outlaw chemists and wizard alchemists” dosed with the world with LSD:

The early history of LSD has often been framed within the underground as a kind of Edenic narrative. The first crystal versions of lysergic acid represent almost divine substances, praised for their purity, which then become debased by bad chemistry, venal commodification, and the wayward drift of druggy hedonism – a story that itself stands in for the dissipation of the revolutionary energies of the 1960s into the compromises of the 1970s and beyond. In their book Acid Dreams (1985), Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain give us this view, outlining a decline they claim was already well underway by the late 1960s:

So many people were getting high that the identification of drug use with the sharper forms of cultural and political deviance weakened considerably. Instead of being weapons in a generational war, marijuana and LSD often served as pleasure props, accoutrements of the good life that included water beds, tape decks, golden roach clips, and a host of leisure items. High-school kids were popping tabs of acid every weekend as if they were gum-drops. And much of the LSD was like candy – full of additives and impurities. The physical contamination of street acid symbolised what was happening throughout the culture.

This narrative arc is crucial to keep in mind as we unfold the story of blotter. Though LSD was sometimes passed around in the 1960s on actual blotting paper, sheets of perforated (‘perfed’) and printed LSD paper do not come to dominate the acid trade until the late 1970s, reaching a long golden age in the 1980s and ’90s. As such, the rise of blotter mirrors, mediates and challenges the mythopoetic story of LSD’s spiritual decline. For even as LSD lost the millennialist charge of the 1960s, it continued to foster spiritual discovery, social critique, tribal bonds and aesthetic enrichment. During the blotter age, the quality of the molecule also improved significantly, its white sculptured crystals sometimes reaching and maybe surpassing the purity levels of yore. Many of the people who produced and sold this material remained idealists, or at least pragmatic idealists, with a taste for beautiful craft and an outlaw humour reflected in the design of many blotters, which sometimes poked fun at the scene and ironically riffed on the fact that the paper sacraments also served as ‘commercial tokens’.

Click here to read the rest.

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