The war is providing cover for the coming financial crisis, where the inverted debt pyramid, collateralised by a woefully small quantity of real assets, is very likely to collapse. This would trigger the Great Taking, and deflationary crash with asset confiscation by owners of the derivatives contracts, who’ve engineered the legal system to grant them ownership in the event of the bankruptcy of clearinghouses. The global elites are attempting to arrange for total control during the contraction, and they plan to weaponise resource access to do it.

The energy aspect is already manifesting, and potentially creating acute crises in many countries in the short term. A fertiliser crunch combined with fuel rationing is going to limit food production this years as well, as a large percentage of the fertiliser supply also travels through the Straits of Hormuz. Together these impacts will create desperate people, and will destabilise the bloated financial system. Massive demand destruction is coming, not because goods are not wanted, but because demand isn’t what you want, but what you can access and pay for. In a world of shortages, high prices for essentials, and sharply curtailed purchasing power, demand destruction is inevitable.

It’s necessary to point out that higher prices are not themselves inflation, but the result of inflation, which is a monetary phenomenon. High prices result from previous money printing combined with the coming shortages of essentials, which will likely be rationed by price, although rationing by quantity is also a possibility if the digital control grid is successfully installed. It remains to be seen if this is possible given the level of potential chaos in the short term. Even if prices fall over time, purchasing power is likely to fall much more quickly than price, meaning that affordability would be significantly worse even at lower prices. Affordability is what matters, because that represents prices in real terms.

Very few people currently understand the likely extent of the coming food crisis. Farmers cannot afford the diesel or the fertiliser, and may not even be able to get fertiliser at any price. The narrow planting window in the northern hemsphere is now, but many are simply not planting. This will lead to empty shelves. The powers that be may well be intending to use the acute shortages if food and fuel as leverage to force the population into digital ID, which is the gateway to the digital prison. This must be resisted if at all possible. If enough people resist, it won’t be possible to impose that digital slavery system.

This is an excellent summary of ways forward for New Zealand in the face of serious crisis. It’s extremely comprehensive and highly recommended.

American pronouncements about the war are all about market manipulation in order to facilitate insider trading on a massive scale. The Epstein class is profiting to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, and there’s zero accountability for widespread criminality. Nothing the regime says is credible.

Colonel Macgregor’s analysis is always worth your time. The man is a paragon of integrity. His description of this conflict as being the old means of war versus modern assymmetric war based on missiles, drones, cyberwarfare etc is accurate. So are the criticality of logistics, and the need for a sound plan grounded in a good understanding of the opponent and the situation, both of which the US regime appears not to understand. All of this is evident in the Ukrainian war, and the lesson is about to repeated in the Gulf.

The war over the Straits of Hormuz is about to amount to a repeat of the battle of Gallipoli from WW1. It could easily become a meatgrinder and an utter strategic disaster. Trump, the chancer, thought the US could win easily in a matter of days, and since he’s continually upped the rhetoric and the risk in the face of failure. A ground offensive would be the culmination of this course of action – an example of the Gambler’s Fallacy.

The Straits of Hormuz: America’s Gallipoli?

When a military operation becomes a suicide mission.

Trump is now bragging about expanding US territory into Greenland, Panama, Canada, Venezuela, Cuba, and much if the rest of the western hemisphere, under the so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine’. This is pure imperial colonialism. International law no longer exists, because the US empire prefers the law of the jungle, where might makes right and the empire can take anything they want from anyone unable to defend it. The current operation in Ecuador, set to spread to the rest if Latin America is called ‘Operation Total Extermination’. Brazil is set to be a target if particular interest since Brazil jailed Trump’s equally corrupt friend, Jair Bolsonaro, for attempting a coup. Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has recently been praising the European colonialist era and indicating that the American regime intends to emulate it rather than manage the decline of the West. Unfortunately for the US, that decline is irreversible. Empires rise and fall, and regaining ‘glory days’ is not an option.

The US is currently engaged in a grotesque episode of collective punishment against Cuba, which Trump claims he will have the ‘honour’ of taking soon. He says he will then be able to do whatever he wants with it. The island has been blockaded to the point where the entire electrical grid has collpased and society can no longer function. All the patients in the ICU in Havana have died due to the power cuts. The complete disregard for human life is sickening. Power and profit are the only motivating factors for the imperial regime.

This is a giant step backwards from the point of view of global stability, and it will result in major increases in military spending by any party that can afford it, along with a high likelihood of nuclear proliferation. Non-western populations are referred to as barbarians, just as European colonialists did for centuries. This can only lead to crashing trust, neo-mercantilism, piracy, and the collapse of the supply chains of the highly integrated global economy. Everyone suffers when trust is destroyed, but those who prepetrate it think they’re above consequences. Unfortunately for them, and everyone else, it won’t work out that way.

It might not get this bad, but the possibility clearly exists. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst if you can. You need to be as independent of centralised life support systems and government as you pssibly can be, because any form of dependence can be weaponised against you in order to get you under control. If you have even a small cushion of the essentials, the odds of you seeing your discount rate skyrocket will bemuch reduced. The discountrate is the extent to which you value the present compared to the future. If you have no resources, all that will matter to you is where your next meal comes from. The future will not exist, which means you would be stuck in state of permanent crisis management under duress, and in such a state people do not think clearly. People in this state tend to look like deer in the headlights, or like headless chickens running around and wrecking things. A cushion if essentials prepared in advance allows you to keep your discount rate under control, so you’re better able to keep a cool head and a constructive mindset under pressure. That can make you part of the solution rather than part of the problem, but it requires action in advance. Your time to act is right now.

Food security rests on many critical supports. The most obvious ones are energy, water, and fertile soil, but while those factors allow food to be produced, much more is required for distribution. Much of the network is now digital, and progress in that direction is accelerating, likely with increasing incorporation of AI. Unfortunately this introduces new and extensive vulnerabilities in a crisis. Hacking and cyber attacks are very real threats, as an American omoany recently discovered (discussed in the video above). They weren’t held for ransom, instead they were digitally deleted completely, and this attack was described as merely a warning of capability. Much larger and more critical entities could be subjected to the same kind of attack, and that could paralyse the entire food distribution network.

The powers that be are trying to create a digital control grid for the dual purposes of imposing an escape-proof rationing system for scarce resources and engineering a full-blown surveillance and control state to essentially enslave humanity in service of the Epstein class. They need leverage in order to force people to accept such a system, which would necessarily begin with digital ID. Limiting access to the essentials of existence, and allowing access only on acceptance of digital personhood would be the most effective way to onboard people quickly, as it would be very difficult for anyone with any kind of dependency on centralised life support systems to resist.

The rationing aspect is understandable. Limits to growth (energy, fresh water, arable land, soil fertility, carrying capacity etc) are non-negotiable, but people will not voluntarily limit consumption, so the powers that be have decided to force the issue. Of course they don’t intend for such limitations to apply to themselves, which undermines the rationale and renders the digital control system profoundly unacceptable to the rest of humanity. It would amount to a plutocracy, with the super-wealthy Epstein class ruling over a gigantic proletariate living at subsistence level.

The even darker side of this initiative is that of population control. Under such a system, only those with some kind of value to the elites would be worth preserving, while the rest would be comsidered ‘useles eaters’. A smaller population would also be more easily subjected to digital control. The obvious way forward for the elites would be to unleash all four horsemen of the apocalypse (so to speak) on the population. We’ve already been subjected to biowarfare with covid and the toxic shots that followed, which have now killed millions worldwide and permanently disabled far more. Covid was also a trial run for population compliance with severe control measures. Now comes war, with the the effect of severely limiting the availability of energy and other resources, combined with digital attacks on the systems required for distribution of remaining resources. It’s also very likely that ‘surplus population’ will be treated as cannon fodder for resource wars. A combination of famine, disease, and war, is exactly what our psychopathic elites have in mind. You might want to read Ayn Rand’s book ‘Atlas Shrugged’ for a fictional look at wealthy members of society shrugging off the rest as a burden.

America is exhibiting typical late stage empire corruption and perfidiousness. The pronouncements emanating from Washington cannot be believed. Every time statements are made they’re later revealed to have been either a market manipulation strategy, to further enrich American oligarchs, or cover for a planned attack. Trust is entirely gone.

Trump recently set an ultimatum – 48 hours to open the Straits of Hormuz or he would reduce Iran’s energy sector to rubble. Iran replied that this would result in retaliation amounting to the destruction of energy and desalination infrastructure in the Gulf countries, which have essentially joined the war on the American side, despite denying it. Before Trump’s deadline expired, he TACOed (ie Trump Always Chickens Out), saying that talks with Iran were productive and that he was giving them an additional five days. Israel then promptly began bombing Iran’s energy infrastructure, with American weapons and covert American support. Iran made it clear that there had never been any talks.

Trump’s wealthy friends made a killing on the resulting market movements in both directions.

Iran has now begun its response, and it won’t be pretty.

Israel is trying to generate maximum conflict between the Sunni Muslim Gulf states and Shia Muslim Iran, in an attempt to get them to destroy each other for Israel’s benefit. The sectarian conflict is reminiscent of the European strife between Catholics and Protestants several hundred years ago. Israel is seeking to depopulate the region of Muslims of all kinds, but lacks the capacity to do it by themselves, hence the need to foment internecine conflict. Israel has also bombed Britain’s Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean, the British base in Cyprus, and oil infrastructure in Oman, trying to blame Iran for each attack. These are false flag attempts to widen the war. Iran lacks missiles that could reach Diego Garcia, but the false flag attack has been used to convince Europeans that Iran has the long range capacity to attack them, with a view to generating public support for the war in Europe. Additional false flags events may well be planned for the US, where support for the war is very low.

Geopolitical analyst Patrick Henningsen was in Iran during the recent protests which were initially peaceful, but then infiltrated by foreign instigators of extreme violence (Mossad, CIA, and MI6). The idea was to prompt the Iranian population to overthrow their own government, but it backfired. The foreign interference was noted by the people, and the result of the violence was much greater unity in the country behind the government. Henningsen’s account of that time should bear much more weight than the propaganda issued by western states trying to paint an entirely false picture of Iran in order to demonise the country and generate support for war. The Trump regime is losing support at a rapid rate and is becoming desperate.

Trump has issued delusional conditions for the end of hostilities:

Israeli media have leaked the 14 points the Trump administration has sent to Iran to end the war. They are laughable. They are the following…

1. Iran must dismantle its existing nuclear capabilities.
2. Iran must commit never to pursue nuclear weapons.
3. There will be no uranium enrichment on Iranian territory.
4. Iran must hand its stockpile of some 450 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent to the International Atomic Energy Agency in the near future, in a timetable to be agreed.
5. The Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordo nuclear facilities must be dismantled.
6. The IAEA, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, must be granted full access, transparency, and oversight inside Iran.
7. Iran must abandon its regional proxy “paradigm.”
8. Iran must cease the funding, direction, and arming of its regional proxies.
9. The Strait of Hormuz must remain open and function as a free maritime corridor.
10. Iran’s missile program must be limited in both range and quantity, with specific thresholds to be determined at a later stage.
11. Any future use of missiles would be restricted to self-defense.

In return, Iran would benefit as follows:

12. Iran would receive a full lifting of sanctions imposed by the international community.
13. The US would assist Iran in advancing its civilian nuclear program, including electricity generation at the Bushehr nuclear plant.
14. The so-called “snapback” mechanism, which allows for the automatic reimposition of sanctions if Iran fails to comply, would be removed.

In public comments, Iranian officials have dismissed the idea that Trump is genuine about diplomacy and have described his comments as an effort to manipulate global oil prices, a view that was reaffirmed on Tuesday by Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who the US is reportedly seeking to hold talks with that would be led by Vice President JD Vance.

America has created a new Libyan model. Nations like Iran will never sit with the United States again. But I’m not surprised. This was all predictable.

Needless to say, none of this will be happening. In response, Israel claimed that the conclusion of the conflict would be an internal military decision not to be dictated by Washington. In their view, regime change is insufficient. They want Iran to be completely destroyed, like Syria, so it can be balkanised and controlled by Greater Israel. This is the goal, but this is exceptionally unlikely.

Iran has now laid out its own conditions for the end of the conflict:

The six conditions outlined by the Iranian official represent a comprehensive restructuring of the conflict’s political and security framework.

First, Iran demands binding guarantees that war will not be repeated, signaling a rejection of temporary or symbolic ceasefire arrangements.

Second, Tehran calls for the closure of US military bases across the region, a demand that directly challenges the broader American military presence in West Asia.

Third, Iran insists that the aggressors pay compensation for damages inflicted during the war.

Fourth, it calls for an end to all ongoing wars across regional fronts, positioning the current confrontation within a wider regional context rather than an isolated conflict.

Fifth, Tehran seeks the establishment of a new legal regime governing the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global energy artery over which Iran holds strategic influence.

Sixth, the Iranian demand extends into the media sphere, calling for the prosecution and extradition of individuals affiliated with what it describes as hostile media operations targeting Iran.

Taken together, these conditions go far beyond conventional ceasefire terms, reflecting an attempt to redefine not only the outcome of the current war but also the regional order that underpins it.

There is clearly no overlap between positions of the beligerents, meaning that this war is likely to continue for a prolonged period. Iran is vastly better positioned for a long war of attrition. All it has to do is not to lose, whereas the US/Israeli forces need an overwhelming victory. Considering that their air defence capability is virtually exhausted even before Iran begins to use its most advanced weaponry, and boots on the ground can only result in enormous casualties, such a victory is exceptionally unlikely.

When countries begin to behave in lockstep, as they did during covid, one needs to ask questions. Fuel rationing, moving on to lock downs, is an extremely likely scenario. This would, of course, fit the Agenda 2030 priorities, namely extreme localisation and very limited access to resources. However, imposition of a digital control grid of the kind the WEF has in mind seems too neat and tidy an outcome for the war that’s currently raging in the Middle East. It seems much more likely that the situation will get out of hand in ways which are difficult to predict, but potentially catastrophic for many regions with a high dependency on fuel and goods passing through the Straits of Hormuz. South-east Asia is one such region, and Oceania, which gets its fuel from south-east Asia is another.

Australia and New Zealand both have little fuel in storage, and significant distances to cover. Both countries have seen major housing bubbles, exponential increases in property taxes (rates), and a substantial rise in the overall cost of living. Many families are already living paycheck to paycheck, if they’re lucky enough to have a paycheck. Some are already living in the cars. A fuel crisis is the last thing the country needed, but one was predictable ever since the closure of New Zealand’s last refinery. Australia too has greatly limited its refinery capacity. Both countries now have a structural dependency on fuel imports, with New Zealand 100% dependent. Tankers are supposedly on their way, but they will go to the highest bidder, meaning they’re likely to head to where there are deeper pockets. Rationing is an inevitability, and price concerns may well give way to a lack of availability at any price.

NZ fuel supply directly threatened by Hormuz crisis – Wise Response

3 March 2026 – The Wise Response Society iswarning that the military conflict now disrupting the Strait of Hormuzposes a direct and immediate threat to New Zealand’s fuel supply, and iscalling on the government to be transparent with the public about theseverity of our exposure and to take concrete steps to prepare for whatmay be a prolonged disruption.

South Korea – New Zealand’s primary supplier – just instituted mandatory fuel rationing. They will not be exporting to New Zealand. Tankers headed this way may well accept higher offers from other locations.

Well, that’s IT for New Zealand

We have 34 days of diesel in the country – after that NOTHING

Listen to Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, seen here at a shareholders’ meeting. This is not normal, but then Palantir is not a normal company. It’s the most substantial part of the Silicon Valley take over of the US government. An entire posse of tech billionaires funded the second Trump administration and received pride of place at the inauguration. This was followed in the early days of the new regime by Elon Musk’s DOGE rampage through government departments, staffed by a small group of Musk acolytes barely out of their teens. The putative goal was to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, but this is not what happened. The result was a slash and burn campaign which saved virtually nothing, but succeeded in stealing virtually all of citizens private data. This critical information is now part of Palantir, and it can and will be used for high resolution surveillance and control of the population. This is the foundation of the digital gulag planned by the former Pay Pal Mafia who are now the new deep state.

This group has connections to the Jeffrey Epstein network, and is now in a position to replace Epstein in terms of providing Kompromat on anyone who needs to be controlled. The company is international, having embedded itself deep into the functions of multiple states. Palantir is now the industrial memory of the national security state. It’s fused with unreliable AI decision-making and, as a private entity, it is completely unaccountable. Surveillance is supposed to confir safety, but it actually creates a digital prison meant to form the foundation for the coming digital currency reset required by the elites due to their debt timebomb.

The AI decision process has already been rolled out with deadly effect in Gaza, where Palantir’s technology has been used to target specific people, even those with the slightest and most tangential connection to Hamas. And it didn’t just target the person on the AI hit list. The strikes were timed for when the individual was at home with their family, ensuring that whole families, and often their neighbours, were killed together. Often entire tower blocks were demolished with no warning, ultimately burying tens of thousands of people, most of whom were women and children, under rubble.

This technology has already been used to identify undocumented inhabitants for deportation in the US. Far from seeking out the worst of the worst for removal, financially-backed quotas have been set for individuals picked up, and criminals are much harder to locate than ordinary working people, many of whom had been productive members of society paying taxes for years. Families have been violently separated, and proof of citizenship too often not recognised for the sake of claiming a bounty, even if the person was later released. Racial profiling has been rampant. Ever-expanding detention facilities are filthy, food is unfit for consumption, no privacy is available, lights are kept on at all times, detainees sleep on the floor in overcrowded rooms, and necessary medical care is not provided. Most of the detainees are undocumented residents, but some are innocent tourists. In the future, these private for-profit facilities will be used to warehouse citizen dissidents, identified by Palantir’s AI. The US is no longer a state providing any guarantee of freedom, very much including freedom of speech. Under the current tech-oligarch-controlled regime, it is becoming a fascist hellscape, but so far the national nightmare has only just begun.

Donald Trump’s dementia is increasingly on display in posts to Truth Social which are departing further and further from reality. In his mind this was to be a short war to flatten a weak enemy, over within a few days. He considers it already won and is rapidly losing interest. Many in the leadership are dead, and he emphasises the destruction if the navy and airforce, but these factors are nowhere near as significant as he believes, and certainly not grounds for Iran to surrender in what is for them an existential fight.

Iran never really had a blue water navy, but it does have armed speedboats, submarines, manouverable underwater drones, and torpedos fired underwater from shore. Its airforce was was much less significant than its enormous arsenal of missiles and drones. It always had the capacity to close the critical Straits of Hormuz and keep them closed for as long as it wants to.

Trump is proposing two strategies to reopen the Straits, neither of which will work, and a third possibility not yet discussed. First he’s demanded that NATO countries send their ships to open the Straits, which a French General has compared to buying a ticket on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. The allies declined, but agreed after Trump berated them as ‘cowards’, in his usual insulting manner. Perhaps he has some unknown form if leverage over them, likely financial. Secondly he proposes American boots on the ground. Thirdly, an attack inside Iran may be contemplated.

The Europeans do have much better minsweeper ships than the US, but there is as yet no evidence that the Straits have been mined, although they could be in the future. Iran doesn’t need to mine the Straits, since they can easily be controlled due to being in firing range from the shore. Any ships entering the Straits would be destroyed, and the allies know this. Trump is asking others to die for the sake of his misadventures, in which the allies did not start and were not involved. They weren’t even told it was going to happen. Trump is in the habit of making messes and leaving others to clean them up, but in this case there is no way for the allies to do so, and they know it.

Iran is proposing a toll system for passage through the Straits, using a different channel than previously – one closer to the shore in order to permit visual inspection. Tankers and other cargo ships would have to demonstrate that their contracts were denominated in yuan. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent scoffs at this, saying that he can control all the necessary bank accounts. Bessent, who is a habitual dissembler, cannot prevent this. His constant nervousness while making public statements is evidence that he’s knows what he says is not true. Friendly ships will be given permission to pass, but ships without such permission will be targeted.

Trump is sending some 5000 marines to the region so far. There are two possibilities that could be planned, both of which would be disastrous. He could be planning to land them on Karg Island, which is Iran’s manin export terminal in the Gulf. They would simply be killed, if they could even get there. By ship they would have to pass through the Straits, and by air their planes would be shot down. Alternatively, the plan may be to attempt a landing on the north shore of the Straits, with a view to controlling the shore and preventing Iran from targeting vessels. This would face the same obstacles in terms of being able to get them there alive, but the operation would also require vastly more men than have been sent. The coast is long (some 1900 miles), with artillery based in the mountains behind.

Controlling it would likely require not thousands of men, but hundreds of thousands, and the US cannot field a force that size, with or without the help of allies. They would need to institute a draft, which they’re likely planning, but odds are this would spark a civil war. Sailors on the Gerald R Ford aircraft carrier have already been sabotaging their own ship to avoid dying in a pointless war serving exactly no US interests. First they blocked the toilets and more recently set fire to the laundry room, burning over a hundred bunks. The Ford is now in Greece for repairs. Would draftees be any keener to fight and die?

The third possibility is that the US may be planning to attempt a boots on the ground attack at one of Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites, likely Isfahan, following comprehensive bombing. An evacuation order by the belligerents has gone out for the area, and for a considerable distance around it. They may believe that Iran’s enriched uranium is hidden there. Such an attack would also be very unlikely to succeed.

The American media has been an utter disgrace during this war. They’ve comprehensively failed to inform the public of the actual situation, chosing instead to spew regime-friendly propaganda for fear of being excluded from the White House press pool. They never mention that the US bombed (with a double tap strike no less) an elementary school and incinerated 180 children and their teachers. Trump blamed Iran although even the Pentagon has admitted the US was responsible. Considering the strike was in the initial phase of the attack, before Iran could possibly have responded, Trump’s position is ridiculous. The media instead condemns Iran retaliation for being attacked, in an act of pure propaganda. They are completely servile. Members of Trump’s cabinet, even those with a substantial anti-war background like DNI Tulsi Gabard, have also caved humiliatingly, destroying their own repuations for the sake of a Mad King who ignores the advice of his own miltary and intelligence services because he feels omnipotent.

It’s clear that this war began at the behest of Israel, and serves only the nightmare plans of the oppsychopathic Bibi Netanyahu, who’s been waiting forty years for an American President stupid enough, or blackmailable enough, to do his bidding. Israel has already committed an obvious genocide in Gaza, is violently dispossessing Palestinians in the West Bank, and is now flattening Lebanon. Israel intends to take all of Lebanon by force, esepcially the portion up to the Litani River, in order to control the water supply. It has now invaded in order to do so, but reckoned without a resurgent Hezbollah, which is now bombing Haifa and tackling Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. Netanyahu recently compared Jesus unfavourably to Ghengis Khan, which is unlikely to endear him to the American Christian zionists he depends on to support his regional wars.

Israel has already realised that the plan of regime change in Iran has failed. However, it was never only regime change that they had in mind. The goal was complete destruction of the country, and they are still holding on to that goal. This suggests that they plan to use nuclear weapons, which they have in abundance despite never admitting to it. The US might also resort to nuclear weapons in order to destroy hardened underground sites. Some of these sites are 500m metres below ground, so success would not be guaranteed. The use of nuclear weapons on a non-nuclear state would firmly cement the position of the US and Israel as pariah states, and the US as a rogue hegemon, lashing out in its death throes.

The BRICS countries will be the beneficiaries, despite the recent defection of India, which sided with Israeli due to Narendra Modi’s personal hatred of Muslims. India may now be rethinking its position, since the price it now pays for Russian oil to replace what it’s lost from the Gulf has now virtually doubled, and it’s lost its claim to leadership of the global south. The ‘I’ in BRICS may now refer to Iran rather than India.

Europe is desperately trying to purchase Russian arctic LNG, despite having said it would swear off supplies from Russia. Russia may decide not to sell it to them, since Europe has been insulting Russia for years, supporting NATOs war in Ukraine with money and weapons, and also attacking the tankers of Russia’s shadow fleet. This would leave Europe up a creek without a paddle.

The decision by Israel to attack Iran’s South Pars gas field, with American kmowledge and support, is a disaster of global proportions. South Pars, which serves the domestic Iranian population, is a field shared with Qatar, which has been supporting the war of aggression. In return, Iran bombed Qatar’s LNG production facility, that had cost $26billion only two years ago. Damzge is extimated at $20 billion. Repairs require specialised steel and will take an extimated five years. The global LNG market will bevery heavily impacted, especially since this may be only the beginning of energy infrastructure destruction. Qatar’s 20% of the global LNG market is now offline. Apparently, Trump’s son in law, Jared Kushner, is angry because much of his personal wealth is tied to Qatar. Trump the denied US American foreknowledge or responsibility, but this was immediately repudiated. Iran also retaliated by bombing Israel’s major refinery at Haifa, causing massive damage. Accountability for the coming disaster cannot be avoided forever.

The shit is about to hit the fan spectacularly, as energy and finance are extremely co-dependent, and finance has been over-extended for years to decades. The coming massive energy shock will reveal all the systemic fraud, and crush finance back to a grim reality. What’s happening is a liquidation event, deliberately caused with foreknowledge of what at least the inital effects would be, but insufficient understanding that events like this can get out of hand very quickly. What starts as attempt at controlled demand destruction meant to lead the world’s population into a digital control grid (ie an involuntary rationing system for resources about to become very scarce) can escalate unbelievably quickly into a wave of unprecedented physical destruction. Control is an illusion. The global system cannot be centrally controlled. Attempts to do so will fail, but at horrendous cost. The analysis posted above discusses this in detail.

We’re about to see an almighty bidding war for oil resources outside of the Straits of Hormuz. As that oil is still priced in dollars, that means a dollar liquidity squeeze. Assets will be sold to raise dollars, and good assets are much easier to sell than dodgy ones. This could turn into a bloodbath of asset sales at lower and lower prices, with margin calls aggravating the process considerably. This can unfold very quickly. Watch the film Margin Call if you need to understand how this takes on a life of its own. Finance is virtual, so the time in which it can change is very short. It then becomes a powerful driver for impacts all across the physical world. This is exactly what I’ve been predicting the endgame would look like for the last twenty years.

The US is a dying rogue hegemon. China has been the empire in the ascendancy, but much of its rise has been financed by bad debt, and the rush to build anything and everything has resulted in extremely poor constuction (ie tofu dreg in the local parlance), a massive real estate ponzi scheme, and over-production of just about everything in the absence of a sufficient domestic market. They’ve been following in Japan’s state-driven development and export model, but on steroids. The Japanese bubble resulted in (so far) over 25 years of relative economic stagnation, mitigated by the ability to export into a booming global market (even though that market was largely artificial, being propped up by by gambling and massive fraud). China is heading for the same fate, but without the same global market, since cascading system failure is about to destroy demand on a huge scale. In an attempt to save the day, President Xi has decided to grab the exorbitant privilege accorded to the holder of the global reserve currency, so China’s debts could be financed by the rest of the world as America’s have been for so long. It’s a very risky bet under current circumstances.

Global liquidity crunch is coming, leading to large scale deleveraging, which is deflationary The mountian of bad debt is massively under-collateralised. The powers that be are attempting to address this by tokenising all assets on a single centrally controlled ledger, in order to make illiquid assets liquid, thereby making them accessible to markets for instantaneous settlement. This is nothing but yet another attempt to kick the can down the road, and it’s destined to fail in an energy-constrained environment, given the tremendous energy costs of digital control. Even the neeeds of data centres are prioritised over people, as they inevitably will be, there won’t be the power (or the water) to run them, and replacing all the GPUs every three years is a non-starter.

Inflation and deflation are always and everywhere monetary phenomena. Price movements are a consequence of changes in the money supply relative to available good and services, complicated by factors such as global wage arbitrage or scarcity of essentials. Price movements typically follow as a lagging indicator, hence prices continue to rise for a while even after an inflationary impulse is spent. One might expect prices to fall in a deflation, and many prices will, with a time lag, but a shorter one than in the case of inflation, as deflation is driven by fear, and fear is a very powerful driver. Prices for disposable non-essentials are especially vulnerable, so selling off accumulated crap will not be an option for people to raise liquidity. People will be selling not what they want to sell, but what they can sell, which will be the good assets that they would rather have kept.

Prices for essentials like food and fuel are not going to fall, even in a deflation. Scarcity will make sure of that. The result will not be inflation, as price rises are not inflation but the result of it. It will be a crisis of affordability. Whatever the nominal prices, the prices in real terms will be very high compared to purchasing power, which will be falling off a cliff. This is what an economic seizure looks like, and it will lead directly into a global depression of unprecedented magnitude. The powers that be will be using energy scarcity and financial penury to herd people into the 15 minute cities they’ve been planning, and put everyone on UBI at a subsistence level. They want complete dependence on government, so that they can dictate terms of continued existence to their populations.

Diet, medications, living space, ability to associate with others, and permitted opinions are all meant to be controlled under this system, mediated through programmable digital currency. It will fail eventually, but perhaps not immediately, and it will wreak havoc in the meantime. For instance, expect widespread capital gains tax on unrealised gains. This has already begun. If your home has increased in value due to the housing bubble, as all of them have, you get a tax bill for the difference, similarly as if you’d received it as income. You would probably have to sell the asset to pay the tax bill. Combined with skyhigh property taxes and the cost of insurance, this would be an effective way to separate people from their assets, notably their homes, but also precious metals and other appreciating assets. Thisnis another driver towards consolidating the population in small enclaves. The rest of the land would belong to the Epstein class.

This is beginning with manufactured energy crisis. Passage through the Straits of Hormuz requires prior permission and payment in Chinese yuan. This will, over time, help China to claim reserve currency status. In the shorter term, China has substantial reserves, and so does Japan. Other south east Asian countries do not, and those countries are the source of fuel for Australia and New Zealand. Europe’s energy supply from both north and south has been cut off. The US would like to be the global supplier, at extortionate prices, but they don’t seem to realise that their fracking industry is coming to an end. The US is not energy self-sufficient and cannot supply the rest of the world. Europe is finished as a result. All western countries will suffer the most, due to high debt loads, high expectations, vassalisation to the US, and therefore status as beligerents towards oil suppliers. China and Russia will both benefit, with Russia in the best position in the world as it’s self-sufficient in energy and other resources, and is receiving high prices for its oil exports now.

Since little oil can leave the Gulf, storage is full, meaning that production must shut down. The absence of flow leads to gumming up the pipes, and this would take months to resolve, even if the Straits were opened tomorrow. Oil grabs are therefore guaranteed, through leverage, threats, piracy on the high seas or likely many other methods. Possession is 9/10ths of the law. Oil is already leaving fungibility behind, as prices for supplies no dependent on the Gulf diverge from those that are, but all oil lrices will rise, and availability will become increasingly patchy. Ordinary people can expect energy lockdowns far more severe and long-lasting than covid lockdowns.

The systemic fraud will be revealed and driven out if the financial sytem. Unfortunately in such crashes, the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. First bad debt fails, then higher and higher quality debt as trust disappears. Higher and higher quality assets get sold off at firesale prices. This, from the Great Depression, is what that looks like:

Prior electrification can provide a temporary energy cushion, as it allows for coal to be used indirectly where oil is scarce, but electric infrastructure is complex, and socioeconomic complexity cannot be maintained in an energy constrained environment. We are losing the highest EROEI (energy returned over energy invested) energy sources, and those cannot be replaced by low EROEI energy sources. Coal will work, but so-called renewables will not, at least not for long. They are not renewable, since the components of the generating sets (concrete, rebar, rare earths etc) are not renewable. They also have a short lifespan and and require liquid fuel to be rebuilt at the end of that time. They typically have a very low EROEI, and are not dispatchable to the grid, meaning that they can never function to maintain grid operation (frequency control, voltage control, reactive power, blackstart etc etc). China has built out renewables on a huge scale, the benefit of that investement will be short term. It will help them to ride out the oil crisis for the time being, but not provide an energy future. In addition, their electric cars are very poor quality, with an unfortunate tendency to catch fire, incinerating the occupants because the electric doors don’t open in a thermal runaway situation. They can also blow themselves twenty feet into the air in a explosion.

The best energy investments now would be in modular thorium reactors, which are passively safe, meaning that they neither explode like Chernobyl, nor melt down like Fukushima. Being relatively small, they can be constructed much more quickly than large uranium reactors, but time is of the essence due to how quickly the crisis is unfolding.

People need to wake up right now and address coping strategies for an uncertain future, or the consequences of continued complacency will be dire.