"...at what point does responsibility stop sitting solely with those in power, and begin, however reluctantly, to extend further outwards? When do repeated political choices begin to reshape how a nation itself is perceived—fairly or not? " – Peter Bach @lyst.bsky.social

A long update posted to @liznangel3.bsky.social's appeal for us, about our efforts to settle ashore, repair Wrack, find regular income, and overcome the risk not just of being homeless but shelterless. Please read and if you can, help us. The appeal closes soon. www.gofundme.com/f/a-voyage-i...

"Europe may now be exposed: dependent on seaborne energy and limited in naval capacity, it is vulnerable to prolonged disruption. Hormuz becomes not an incident but a pressure point—a place where, quietly, other outcomes are decided. 'We live as we dream—alone,' Conrad writes, and so too do states."

"A willingness to weaponise chokepoints, insurance markets, and energy flows raises uncomfortable questions. The implications are not merely strategic but moral. Recall Conrad again: 'A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.'" – Peter Bach (@lyst.bsky.social)

"...wars did not become less consequential simply because the world had begun to look elsewhere. Long after wars fade from headlines, this quieter work goes on." Via @counterpunchmedia.bsky.social

"What did it mean for a society when large numbers of people returned from war carrying injuries that could not always be seen? How did communities prepare themselves...to live with the long emotional aftershocks that conflict leaves behind?" – Peter Bach (@lyst.bsky.social)

Bunch of us rubes read it during a mountaineering phase.

I enjoyed writing this for CP+ on Kerouac. www.counterpunch.org/2026/03/15/k...

"Stronger enemies could often be worn down through distance, manoeuvre, and patience...survival itself could count as success."

"Foreign powers have underestimated Iran for more than twenty-five centuries—and repeatedly discovered that Iranian states possess a stubborn capacity to endure, adapt, and outlast stronger enemies." – Peter Bach (lyst.bsky.social), on how Iran has so often survived terrible conflicts.

"I still think about those selfishly gleeful departures from Kabul—the mountains rising beyond the runway as the aircraft climbed southwest towards the Gulf. Impending Dubai was always a place where the war could not quite reach you. "In reality, it was only ever a missile away."

"'...a place where the war couldn’t get at you for a while.'” Peter Bach — @lyst.bsky.social — recalls his several furloughs to Dubai as "a one-person filmmaker with special access working out of Kabul" during Operation Enduring Freedom and the NATO mission in Afghanistan.

The mountains always felt close when the aircraft lifted out of Kabul. During the Afghanistan war, Dubai became a strange airlock between two worlds—where the conflict seemed, briefly, to stop. www.counterpunch.org/2026/03/10/t...

A poem from the Iran-Iraq war from award-winning Iranian poet Ali Asadollahi, author of six Persian poetry books. Me, a rotten sofa in the rain. You, an outlying soldier with a bullet in the flank. How late                                 we found each other.

"For years the border has simmered—tense, theatrical, contained within the oddly fetching grammar of skirmish and denial. That grammar now seems broken." – Peter Bach, @lyst.bsky.social, on a history of suspicion and conflict along the disputed Afghanistan/Pakistan border.

The Afghan–Pakistani escalation and the American and Israeli strikes on Iran are not separate dramas but adjacent pressures within the very same political geography. www.counterpunch.org/2026/03/02/e...

Hammering a dent out of a bucket a woodpecker answers from the woods —Gary Snyder

On Manchester and immigrants: "Burgess once reminded us that 'language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.' "That, perhaps, is the deeper city beat. Not a story of threat, but the restless, unfinished work of belonging itself." – Peter Bach @lyst.bsky.social

If you think about it, the world’s not that wide. It only feels that way on maps. It gets pretty narrow at key pressure points like the thin ribbon of water called the Strait of Hormuz. www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/25/i...

You could almost hear that Manchester refrain: “How does it feel?”—not triumph, not Dylan, but the question New Order keep raising beneath the long groove of Blue Monday. www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/18/p...

"...Ai Weiwei’s relationship with censorship shapes his work, his movements, even the limits imposed on his body. Censorship is the force he pushes against, and the material he works with..." Peter Bach @lyst.bsky.social reminds us why the work — and presence — of artist Ai Weiwei matters.

"...the Chinese authorities censored his exhibitions, erased his online presence, demolished his studio, confiscated his passport for years, and detained him...As the artist has said himself: “Censorship is saying: ‘I’m the one who says the last sentence. Whatever you say, the conclusion is mine.’”

A reminder that volume is not the same as force—and that sometimes the most subversive act is simply to speak, and to keep speaking, where history and the bully expect silence. www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/11/m...

In other words, we are both looking for a 'home' without any sense of place, or belonging. [from the latest update to @liznangel3.bsky.social's long-running @gofundme.com appeal for us, soon to close] www.gofundme.com/f/a-voyage-i...

On Thursday 26 February 2026, the Gorton and Denton by-election could introduce to UK politics a register of despair not heard in Manchester since Joy Division first turned urban dislocation into sound. www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/04/a...

"The time has come to stop, to stay in one place: if not a home, then at least a long-term refuge or bolt-hole, and shape a different sort of life — no longer peripatetic but persistently still." Our latest update to @liznangel3.bsky.social's long-running appeal. www.gofundme.com/f/a-voyage-i...

Every so often a bright orange fish would leap clear of the glass, flapping in front of us with its fake aches and pains. Horror is the genre everyone is producing. www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/02/d...

Sophisticated employers are increasingly turning to technology and analytics to shape negotiations over pay and conditions—confirming Michel Foucault’s warning that power often operates most effectively when it is quiet, technical, and difficult to see. www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/29/b...

Adorable film. #NouvelleVague

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste, An' weary winter comin fast, An' cozie here, beneath the blast, Thou thought to dwell - Till crash! the cruel coulter past Out thro' thy cell. — Robert Burns

“There is no peace, I’m sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.” – Kurt Vonnegut Quoted by a weary Peter Bach, @lyst.bsky.social, at the end of another week of Europe and UK trying to reconcile their corroded realpolitik with a mad king's ravings and incontinence.

Here’s Thomas Wolfe on mountains: “They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.” www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/23/d...

"The danger appears not that South Sudan has been forgotten because no one cares. It is that care was never properly organised into pressure. South Sudan’s tragedy is not invisibility so much as displacement." – Peter Bach @lyst.bsky.social [via @counterpunchmedia.bsky.social]

As one expert on the region told me only last week, “It is time we help deliver the promises of independence to the people of South Sudan.” www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/21/s...

"At the end of the day, this is not about bacteria, it is about whether the basic assumptions of modern life can still be trusted... I wish we all knew when to trust the intelligence that remains, even as the systems around us fray." – Peter Bach, @lyst.bsky.social, on our muliplying uncertainties.

PTSD entered the medical lexicon in 1980, though the condition long preceded it. From Vietnam came post-Vietnam syndrome. Earlier still, combat fatigue, battle exhaustion, shell shock. I once saw a young soldier medivacked with it out of Helmand Province. www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/16/d...

"Surveys suggested a significant minority in Iran preferred Western powers not intervene at all, seeing the movement as an internal struggle. Some also noted the irony of American authorities shooting their own citizens while condemning Iran for doing likewise." – Peter Bach, @lyst.bsky.social

Do not expect a celebratory shot of Aalborg Akvavit at the meeting. Danish officials see the move as further erosion of respect for sovereignty and it is unlikely to unfold in a convivial spirit. www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/07/i...

"One life was never quite enough for what I had in mind." Every artist — in every medium — should read Seymour Krim's extraordinary essay, To My Brothers And Sisters In The Failure Business. And if you don't know who he was, change that. [scroll down to p. 577] archive.org/stream/Phill...

"At what point, in such strained circumstances, does an American military presence here risk being misread by a minority as a form of occupation?" Peter Bach's weekly column for @counterpunchmedia.bsky.social has become something of a personal diary of these strange, dangerous, topsy-turvy times.

The first thing you notice when you exit London is the silence. The city’s noise becomes an abstract memory. www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/01/t...