The US has become an oligarchy run by the donor class and lobbyists for Big Capital for their own profit. The opinions of the population no longer count when almost every member of Congress is bought and paid for. Votes no longer count when continuity of agenda guarantees that the same policies will be pursued no matter who takes office. Only the branding changes. The SCOTUS decision in Citizens United declared political donations to be ‘speech’, meaning that they could not be regulated because that would constitute suppression of free speech. Of course the actual speech of ordinary people is being increasingly suppressed all the time, but the big players can do as they please. This means elections are now purchased, not legitimately won. Conflicts of interest are everywhere, and are allowed to persist. Industries write their own regulatory frameworks, and there is a revolving door between industry and government, ensuring maximum freedom for industries and maximum payoffs for the individuals supposedly charged with regulating them. The concept of ethics has been completely discarded.

One of the most influential lobbies is AIPAC, which pays off most of Congress, and will dump huge amounts of money into political races to ensure that the ‘right’ person is elected, namely someone who will prioritise the interests of Israel above those of their own constituents and their own country. This is why Benjamin Netanyahu, in mid-genocide, can visit the US and receive over 50 standing ovations in Congress. Official criticism of Israel is forbidden, no matter what it does. In some states, public employees are forced to sign a declaration of support for Israel and promise not to criticise or boycott it as a condition of employment. Support for the Palestinians is not only condemned, but frequently criminalised. Strong sanctions are applied to international critics, such as the members of the International Criminal Court who brought crimes against humanity charges against Netanyahu and his defence minister, and against UN human rights spokesperson Francesca Albanese. The people who voted for America first are now sorely disappointed, as the interests of their own country are fully subordinated.

The most egregious example of Israel first is clause 219 of the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA), which merges the US and Israeli militaries, enshrining the right of Israel to all US military technology. A further addition by Senator Tom Cotton, section 1217, would also grant Israel access to all American intelligence. This bill, which has just been approved by the House, legalises and institutionalises the actions of former Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, who stole military secrets and passed them on to Israel, which then sold them on to the Soviet Union. Pollard had been convicted to a long prison sentence for espionage, but was pardoned by Trump and allowed to return to Israel, where he was received as a national hero and is now running for a seat in the Knesset. The Senate will now vote on the NDAA, and is expected to pass it.

The American people have become increasingly aware of Israel’s genocidal activites, and have become increasingly opposed to supporting it. This makes it politically awkward for Congress to vote every year, or more often, to send more money and weapons to Israel. Section 219 of the NDAA gets around this by removing the need for a vote and instituting a presumption that the supply will continue. It nominates an executive agent to decide all issues relating to Israel, and this person can only be overruled by the President or the Secretary of Defence, both of whom currently are arch zionists. This has been described as treason by many informed commentators. The US is handing over its sovereignty on a silver platter. Unfortunately the US is not the country is once was. It has long since morphed into an empire and now under Trump a mafia state coveting the world’s resources, practicing global extortion, and attempting to exert monopoly control over the whole world as a rentier state. It steals and kills with impunity. This kind of rampant corruption, degradation, and degeneracy is characteristic of late stage empire. Once it finally falls to overreach, as empires always do eventually, the interregnem will be violent and chaotic. Hopefully humanity will survive the period.

After dropping the gold standard, the US maintained its position through dollar recycling, where it purchased from abroad and the dollars sent to pay were invested back into US stocks and bonds. The petrodollar system is the most well known mechanism. US securities became the backbone of the financial system, with foreign central banks and private entities supporting ballooning US debt. Having off-shored its industry and lost its creditor status, the US empire needs a new strategy, and that strategy is to become a rentier economy by obtaining monopoly control over critical aspect of the global economy and charging monopoly rents to everyone else. Essentially this is an attempted takeover of the global economy by a corrupt oligarchic mafia. It’s a bold gamble for a late stage empire facing the loss of its former supremacy as rivals rise and power is shifting eastwards. The plan is being implemented, but there is no guarantee of success. In fact failure is far more likely, and a failed attempt will impose an enormous cost on the entire world in terms of wanton destruction.

The empire is currently attempting to take control of oil globally. It attacked Iran, knowing that would result in the closure of the strait of Hormuz. In the process it cut off shipments to rising powers in Asia. It’s using its Ukranian proxy to destroy Russian oil infrastructure, first refineries and now shipping. It took over Venezuela, and now controls Venezuelan oil revenues, only allowing them to be invested in the US. It had planned to do the same to Iran, and also to use Iranian frozen assets to bail out American farmers harmed by Trump’s failed tariff regime. This has not worked out as intended. It almost certainly encouraged Saudi Arabia to bomb Sanaa airport in Yemen, prompting Ansarallah (the Houthis) to close the Bab-al-Mandab southern entrance to the Red Sea to Saudi shipping, further impacting oil exports. Isolating China is a major goal.

Despite signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that granted control of Hormuz to Iran, the US moved immediately to pressure Oman into allowing for a southern route through the strait, to be under de facto American control. Iran had proposed a small fee for transit through its northern route, but the US complained this would violate the law of the sea, although various routes through territorial waters (the Dardanelles, the Panama canal, the Suez canal) already charge. Trump then announced that the US would take full control of Hormuz and charge a fee 20 times the size of what Iran had proposed. He later changed this to a demand that the countries of the Gulf invest billions of dollars into US industry instead, and said that henceforth the US would be considered the guardian of Hormuz. This is very unlikely to succeed as the US lacks the military capacity to make it happen, and Iran has the military capacity to prevent it.

The empire also wants control over information technology and the internet. It already has this to a large extent, with only China having its own independent versions of the big American platforms. A few others use the Chinese systems, but much of the world still uses American systems that allow for their populations to be propagandised, sometimes into colour revolutions and regime change if that suits the empire. Digital hygiene is very difficult for countries dependent on these platforms for much of their economic activity. The Silicon Valley techbro oligarchs are major global players, and they’ve already used their platforms to steal enormous amounts of people’s data, and have developed comprehensive surveillance and control technology that they plan to implement everywhere they can reach. Like China, they plan to impose a social credit score system for total control of the population.

The US is building out the data centres it needs for this level of control, but opposition is growing rapidly, due to the huge demand for energy and water, and the impact of noise, light and fumes. The increased demand is forcing up prices to the point where local residents cannot afford to live. One way out of this problem is for the US to partner with its vassal states in the Gulf, encouraging them to build the data centres and use their energy to run them instead of exporting it. Unfortunately for this strategy, those data centres have become targets in retaliation for the damage inflicted on Iran. The US appeared to believe its own propaganda that Iran had been defeated and would not be able to hit back, but as with control over Hormuz, Iran’s capabilities were drastically underestimated. Iran could also damage the internet cables that run through Hormuz, which would further hamper the plans of the empire to exert electronic control at a global level.

China is attempting to avoid the maritime choke points that the US empire is trying to control by building out land based connectivity in the form of railways and pipelines. These have then been bombed by the empire in its war on Iran, which is a critical hinge point in the Belt and Road initiative. The point is to prevent the formation if a coherent block of allies with the economic and military power to challenge the empire. Another American goal is to fully vassalise and then cannibalise as many of its former allies as possible, forcing them into win-lose trade and investment deals, and using their people to fight proxy wars. Dependency is to be locked in, and freedom to act in their own economic self-interest is to be a thing of the past. In earlier stages of vassalisation, some of the client states were allowed to benefit, but once they were fully captured this ended. The process is comparable to the ‘enshitification’ of electronic platforms, which only provided a good experience for users until they had become fully dependent, at which point the expeience was deliberately degraded in order to maximise profits from a captive user base. Europe, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and the Gulf monarchies have all been subjected to this to varying extents.

The era of free trade is over. It was only promoted while it was of benefit to the US, as it had previously been promoted because it was of benefit to the British empire. Now, as during the Great Depression, is increasingly an era of sanctions, trade wars, neo-mercantilism, and gunboat diplomacy. In the 1930s, this caused trade to collapse by 66% in two years. Now the globalised world is vastly more dependent on trade, and the complex supply chains that have developed. These have already been compromised by the war in the Gulf, and the situation will get very much sorse if the Red Sea is closed to more than just Saudi shipping, as fully 60% of global goods shipments take this route. The empire intends to control both the passage of goods and the flow of money in return by weaponising the financial system that it largely controls. It has the ability to throttle the economies of non-compliant countries, destroy their currencies, and wreck their banking systems. It already sanctions many countries, although this has sometimes acted to increase the development of self-sufficiency rather than achieving the empire’s desired behaviour change. Russia is a prime example of this, as is Iran to some extent.

There are many looming failure points in the empire’s strategy for global domination. It’s military is not the exceptionally powerful force it once was. It has not been on the winning side of a major war since WW2, which was primarily won by the Russians. It’s bullied many small countries since, but has not faced a peer competitor for a very long time. It consistently underestimates its adversaries, as it regards them as inherently inferior. The world can see that it has been humbled by Iran for exactly this reason. It lacks sufficient naval assets to control enough vital maritime chokepoints. It’s stockpile of missiles and interceptors is substantially depleted, and it lacks the surge capacity to produce more in time. It’s military industrial complex maximises profit rather than battlefield effectiveness, so it’s weaponry tends to be overly complex and too fragile. Its military mindset is outdated, and much of its equipment is obsolete as a result. One only needs to look to Russia and Ukraine to see how modern drone warfare operates, but the US has not learned these lessons.

The US is financially dominant, but also mired in $40 trillion of unrepayable debt. It’s attempting to address this through the issuance of stablecoins backed by US treasuries, pitched at the retail level worldwide. If this succeeded, it would destroy most other currencies, and the commercial banking system, and would distribute support for US debt to the entire population. Stablecoins would also be fully programmable, exactly like the central banks digital currencies (CBDCs) that people are beginning to understand and oppose. They would form a major part of the technological control framework that the techbro oligarchs have in mind, as they could be programmed in accordance with social credit scores, and could be turned off in order to punish dissent.

A financial reset is coming anyway, as the financial system is at the end of a credit cycle. The legal framework has been rewritten to confer super-priority in bankruptcy on the owners of derivatives contracts, which would deprive everyone else of financial assets. The planned asset tokenisation system is then intended to come for the physical assets as well. However, all of this requires a huge increase in complexity, and the ability to implement and maintain complexity is a function of surplus energy, and the global energy system is being destroyed. The empire believes it can conduct a controlled demolition of the global economy and end up the last man standing in control of everything that remains. However, wars are not controllable, and neither is the utter chaos that could easily result from collapsing supply chains. War and chaos are likely to take on a life of their own. No plan survives first contact with an enemy, and the plans of the empire rest on very shaky foundations and a great deal of hubris. The deliberate destruction currently underway will leave a much poorer and more disconnected world in its wake. Empires never die quietly, but this is the first time a failing empire has possessed such destructive capabilities. A dark period in human history is approaching.

Every other generation or so, humans rediscover the magic of leverage, once the consequences of the last time have been forgotten. Leverage allows for outsized gains during expansion periods, but at the cost of increased risk, because it also creates outsized losses during contractions. Investors in the South Korean stock market are currently learning this the hard way, and they won’t be the only ones. As Andrei explains, in South Korea one is expected to have a good job and a house by a certain age, but house prices are now out of reach for young people. They’ve turned to the stock market – the Kospi – as their only option to accumulate wealth, and they’re employing a great deal of leverage to do it.

The South Korean market is highly concentrated in tech, with two companies – Samsung and SK Hynix – comprising 56% of the entire market. Until three weeks ago, it was the best performing market on the planet (up 200% in a year), driven upwards by enthusiastic, and highly leveraged, investors all taking the same bet – that AI spending would never fall. Then it occured to some people that AI spending MIGHT drop, which was enough to cause a crisis of confidence. As selling began, leveraged ETF accounts began to get margin calls, meaning that their margin debt was now too high in comparison with the value of their portfolio, so they would have to put up more cash or sell some assets. If they couldn’t put up cash, the broker would automatically sell assets at whatever price was available. As selling pushes down prices, more accounts get margin calls, which pushes prices down further. See the film ‘Margin Call’ to see how this works. The unwinding of leverage pushed the market down by 25%, and 10% of accounts were wiped out. The slide was only halted, probably temporarily, by the market being closed on a national holiday. There’s still a great deal of leverage left to unwind, and some contagion has already spread to other Asian markets. It could easily spread much further.

The US market has many of the same vulnerabilities. Traditional margin loans at brokerage accounts now represent 4.5% of GDP, which is the highest in history, although this greatly under estimates the true degree of leverage due to the many other forms of it available today. These are not tracked, so the true degree of leverage is unknowable. The top ten stocks of the S&P comprise 36% of the market, and they’re all tech-related companies taking the same side of the bet, as in South Korea. One company’s spending is another’s earnings in a giant loop of imaginary value. AI companies are spending like drunken sailors on chips, models, and data centres and being rewarded by investors for it, but these companies are all unprofitable. The mania will not continue forever, and once the confidence bubble is pricked the cascade of unwinding leverage will begin.

Peaks in margin debt are generally followed by a substantial crash. The hangover is proportional to the party that preceded it, and this has been the largest financial party in history. The market has become a gigantic casino. Now the insiders are looking for an exit strategy, which is what happens when they think the growth phase is over and they want to unload the remains on to an unsuspecting public. A record number of IPOs are planned, at skyhigh valuations that cannot be remotely justified. SpaceX managed to find its exit liquidity in the form of ordinary people’s pension funds, after rigging the rules of the NASDAQ, but the rest may not be so lucky. Watching for a fall in the capex of Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta could provide an early warning if the coming cascade.

Manias are not new. People become irrationally exuberent about a certain thing, as they did over railways in the late 1800s, or radio in the 1920s, they over-invest on hype, and then lose their shirts. The new technology that had been the focus does go on to shape the future, but the profits don’t go to those who built it. They go to those who built businesses around it after the crash. In this case though, that is unlikely to happen. The graphics cards in those data centres have a lifespan of very few years, then they need to be replaced. That means the expenditure would have to happen again and again. The data centres themselves are extremely controversial, as they blight the areas where they’re built with constant noise, fumes, and light pollution, as well as consuming so much power and water that people’s bills are skyrocketing. Continuing to build these enormous facilities is increasingly likely to lead to social unrest, which could halt the spending, and trigger the cascade. The moment of truth might not be that far in the future.

The UN has declared that the planet is in global water bankruptcy, or permanent depletion, and that this requires centralised governance at the global level. They want real time monitoring and control of all water sources, and all uses of water worldwide. Existing water rights are to be eliminated, and use is to be tracked and limited. All of this will be discussed at a major water conference in December, and a new bureaucratic system is to be introduced to manage a framework analogous to carbon credit trading. This is in keeping with moves to centralise control over all other resources, as the billionaire class has been trying to do for a long time. Previous attempts to grants rights to capital over people have been made before, with the failed MAI treaty (Multilateral Agreement on Investment) from twenty five years ago, and later attempted agreements like the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership). These were defeated, but this time the technology exists to enforce control at this level. What likely doesn’t exist is the energy necessary to run such a complex system, at least not for very long.

Fresh water availability is an important issue, especially when it comes to the overuse of ‘fossil water’, meaning acquifers that refill far more slowly than the rate at which they’re currently being drawn down. Scarcity of fresh water is definitely a problem in arid regions, and it’s a problem addressed with energy – energy to pump up ground water, energy to pump water from place to place, or energy to desalinate seawater. When both energy and fresh water become limited, mass migration may occur. This issue was discussed here in detail back in 2014.

Physical Limits to Food Security: Water and Climate – Applied Systems Thinking

In part one of this series, we looked at finance as a major causal factor in the development of food insecurity. The boom and bust cycles that result from over-financialisation are, however, only one aspect of a food crisis already present for many, and looming for many more in the years to come. Finance can, and does,

This attempt to seize control of a vital resource comes at the same time as a huge boom in the construction of the data centres neccesary for the technology to operate, and these data centres use huge quantities of both water and energy. Telling people that they must conserve every drop of water while allowing data centres to use and contaminate vast quantities of it is patently unreasonable, but the billionaire class has no interest in being reasonable. Their interest is in accumulating ever more wealth and power at the expense of the rest of the population. A water credit trading system, with tokenised water rights on a blockchain, would simply allow wealthy parties to buy up the water rights of the poor, who may have no choice but to sell theirs in order to afford other necessities. This would institutionalise inequality to a far greater extent than at present, and inequality is already worse than it was in the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century.

Farms and rural homesteads would see their wells metered, and rainwater collection could be banned, as it already is in some arid areas like the American west. They would likely lose out to data centres in a bidding war for water credits. This could force rural people deprived of access to water into the 15 minute cities that the financial elite have long been planning. The cost of the necessary infrastructure is estimated at $6.5 trillion, and that cost is very likely to be imposed on those least able to pay.

The changes, although a global initiative, are being pushed through at the local level. Local politicians are much less likely to understand the big picture their actions are helping to create, and the public will not be expecting a devious global power grab to be implemented by their local council. Here in New Zealand, all this is being implemented through a scheme originally known as Three Waters, where control over water resources is being given to a new water bureaucracy, with a great deal of power accruing to local Iwis (Maori leadership groups). The cost for New Zealand alone is said to be $185 billion, for a country of 5 million people. This is on top of the huge debts out government incurred during covid ($65billion before covid even arrived in the country). We are now in a debt trap, and debt traps are used to seize control of the debtors’ resources in lieu of payment of unrepayable debts. Creditors take everything. If this is implemented, Kiwis will find themselves tenants in their own country, and the same pattern will play out in many other countries as well if the billionaires get their way. New Zealand is planned to be a hub for data centres, due to our renewable energy. This would then raise the cost of that energy for all local people in the area, as it has done everywhere data centres have been built. They would be positioned along the grid lines below.

Data centre concerns: Living next-door to NZ’s first hyperscale facility

New Zealand will soon build its first hyperscale data centre in Invercargill. The Datagrid project promises to bring new jobs to Southland, with efficient te…

This is part of the digital control system being planned by the billionaire oligarchs who aspire to total control of everything, especially the essentials of life. Ordinary people are supposed to own nothing, and be forced into subscriptions for access to anything at all. It begins with digital ID. Without that, the surveillance and control systems cannot work at the level of the individual. In other words, digital ID must be resisted at all costs. Those attempting to impose this are on a tight timetable, and they are already behind on implementation. If the energy system collapses due to the war, and supply chains go with it, the opportunity to introduce such complex measures may be lost, and this attempt at extreme centralisation may fail like its predecessors. It needs to fail, because extreme centralisation always causes massive destruction and loss of life. Unfortunately that is one of the goals of the oligarchs. We need to collectively prevent them from achieving it.

The US empire is fighting a war against the rise of multipolarism, because it desperately wants to cling to a supremacy that it’s already lost. If it can’t control the whole world, then it seems to have chosen to burn it all down and hope to be the last man standing. The general assumption is that the US wants the strait of Hormuz open, but everything it’s done suggests the opposite. It had to be known that closure of the strait would be the result of imperial aggression, then the insurance industry shut down passage, and finally a naval blockade was added in the Gulf of Oman. If actions are taken that will obviously have a certain impact, and that impact then occurs, one has to assume the result was intentional. Trump himself may be stupid enough not to realise that, but he’s merely a puppet of big capital, and they’re not that stupid.

The two wars going on are essentially part of the same conflict. The point of both is to weaken key members of the new power structure – a Russia, Iran, China axis at the core of BRICS. These are land powers attempting to create connectiviy corridors that avoid the maritime choke points potentially controlled by naval powers. The empire is now bombing those connectivity corridors as it tries to prevent these countries from gaining control of the heartland, as Halford Mackinder called it.

Energy is the key factor the empire is trying to control. NATO-controlled and NATO-armed Ukraine is methodically destroying Russia’s energy infrastructure with long range drone strikes. It’s hitting refineries, storage tanks, and tankers of the shadow fleet. These cannot reasonably be defended. Russia is returning the favour in Ukraine, but has not targeted the factories in Europe that are producing the missiles and drones given to Ukraine on behalf of the empire. So far it’s focused on power plants, nodes in the power grid, and gas stations in eastern Ukraine. Its caution is allowing its critical infrastructure to be attrited, but the alternative if it attacked NATO directly would be WW3. The Russian population is beginning to demand that their government finish the job. If Putin were somehow removed, his successor would likely do exactly that, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Iran is the key hinge point connecting Russia and China, and it has control over the strategic asset of Hormuz, hence it was always going to be a target of the empire. The US signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) apparently meant to end the war, but actually just to buy itself some time, and keep the oil price under control for a while longer with a promise of peace. The US never intended to honour the terms it agreed to, just as it never intended to honour the Minsk agreements with Russia. The empire has no honour or integrity, can never be trusted, and no longer cares who knows this.

The day after the MOU was signed, the US violated the first clause requiring Israel to end hostilities in Lebanon by signing a conflicting MOU with the Israel and the Lebanese puppet government allied with Israel. The second MOU allowed for Israel to remain in Lebanon indefinitely. The US has since violated every clause. The original MOU granted control over Hormuz to Iran, with the understanding that no transit fees would be charged during the 60 day negotiation period. Iran made it clear that ships must ask permission and must follow a specific route or there would be consequences. The US immediately started encouraging ships to use a different route outside of Iranian waters, and those ships were fired on. The US then used this as an excuse to begin bombing Iran again, saying that Iran violated the MOU when it had not. The US is now bombing civilian infrastructure and ports in the area around Hormuz, potentially with a view to a future ground incursion, although Trump has indicated that such an incursion would involve proxies rather than American troops. The empire likes to send proxies to their deaths, as it’s been doing in Ukraine for years now.

The empire is attempting to throttle energy supply to Asia with their Iran war, specifically to halt the rise of China, although it’s also gaining leverage over energy-importing countries in the region. It will try to use that leverage to turn these countries against China, and may try to use some of them to fight new proxy wars. The Philippines, South Korea, and Japan have all been vassalised for decades already, and Taiwan is a point of contention, largely due to its monopoly on the production of the most advanced computer chips. The US wants that production to relocate to Arizona, but this is proving problematic. Cutting off Hormuz deprives Taiwan of helium and liquified natural gas (LNG), both of which are essential for chip production, possibly intended to incentivise the move to the US.

The empire knows it cannot control the world as it once did, but it will not decline gracefully. The US appears to believe it’s an energy super power, and that it can deprive its rivals and become a global supplier to those its trying to control. This is, however, delusional. The US is a net importer of oil, specifically it’s dependent on imports of the longer chain hydrocarbons necessary for the production of diesel, aviation fuel and bunker fuel. It’s already reaching tank bottom after selling off its strategic reserve in an attempt to keep fuel prices down before the midterm elections. Fuel prices are about to spike, and the US cannot prevent this.

It’s possible that those on the side of multipolarity are taking the advice of Sun Tzu to never interrupt you enemy when he’s making a mistake. They may be deliberately allowing the US to overreach itself, exploiting its mistaken belief in its own omnipotence. The US is mired in Thucydides Trap, as China pointed out to Trump when he recently visited. The strategy for China, Russia, and Iran may be to simply wait out the empire until it collapses under the weight if its own debt and delusions of grandeur. Russia and Iran are largely self-sufficient, and China has enormous stockpiles of essential commodities. China also controls the rare earths that the US would require to produce more weapons, and it’s banned their export.

The world is in a very precarious position, with nuclear powers each feeling that they find themselves facing an existential threat. The US, or its attack dog Israel, would be the most likely to escalate to the point of using nuclear weapons. Israel refers to this as the Samson option. They’ve said since the time of Golda Meir that if Israel is about to fall, it will take the world with it. The US has a first strike doctrine, and thinks it can win a nuclear war. Russia has the dead hand system, that would fire everything they have if the government were eliminated or they faced strategic defeat. China may have a similar doctrine, although they haven’t said so. The odds of events continuing in a very dangerous direction are growing by the day. No failing empire has ever had the ability to take down the world before.

The US is now bombing bridges in Iran, specifically those close to the strait of Hormuz. This is an attempt to wreck Iran’s logistics around the strait in order to impair its ability to manage passage. The US wants to control the strait itself, and may be preparing for some kind of ground invasion in the area. This would, of course, be an absolute disaster. The US is also bombing ships docked at Kharg Island, presumably to destroy Iran’s capacity for floating storage of oil. In return, Iran is bombing American assets in Qatar and Bahrain, and exhausting the remaining supply of US interceptors in the process. Iran has demonstrated the capacity for precision strikes, including having managed to take out a mobile HIMARS system.

Both Iran and Iraqi militias are trolling Trump after the Israelis warned him about assassination attempts. An Israeli warning suggests that Israel is planning to take him out themselves as a false flag to blame on Iran. Alternatively, his health is very poor, so they could be simply waiting for a natural end which they could pretend was an assassination. Trump has become absolutely paranoid as a result. For some reason, Iran is playing along with this by providing information on his location to would-be assassins. The Iraqi militia has also put a $10million bounty on his head. Considering that the US and Israel have made a habit of political assassinations, it’s not suprising that their enemies would try to return the favour.

Public anger in Iran is off the charts. Red flags calling for revenge were everywhere at Ayatollah Khamenei’s recent funeral. President Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Araghchi were both booed by their own people at that event for having negotiated the MOU with the Americans when it was obvious the US never had any intention of meeting its terms. Western countries have a long history of using negotiations as cover for buying time, for surprise attacks, or for political assassination, including of the negotiators on the other side. For this reason, they are widely seen as agreement incapable, especially since Trump changes his rhetoric and his mind constantly. Iran has now said there will be no more negotiations. The reformist/Atlanticist faction in Iran has lost credibility, and the hardliners have gained it. The new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, did not agree with the MOU and has been proven right. He’s likely more hardline than his father, especially after an American airstrike killed his parents, his wife, and his small daughter, as well as wounding the man himself. He may reverse his father’s religious fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons.

Trump’s regime never had anything resembling strategy, and barely has comprehensible tactics. Their negotiating team is a couple of biased zionist grifters with no experience and no understanding of diplomacy, combined with a Vice President who’s being hung out to dry by his own side so Trump can destroy his chances of reaching the presidency. Trump is setting JD Vance and Marco Rubio against each other in order to ruin both of them politically. He wants a dynasty, so anyone not named Trump must be undermined. The odds of achieving a dynasty are low due to the extent to which the Trump name has come to be so widely hated, both at home and abroad. It will be much more hated once the inevitable oil shock hits. So far the manipulative narrative that the US is somehow winning, backed up by market manipulation, has kept prices relatively low, and that has meant little to no demand destruction. This means the limit will be reached sooner than would otherwise have been the case. It means there will be a sudden price shock once reaching tank bottom becomes undeniable. Then the demand destruction will happen all at once, with howls of protest from an unsuspecting public, likely in the run up to the midterm elections.

Tonight Trump made a speech about non-existent election fraud from 2020, while presenting documentation that undermined his own case. He’s trying to distract from his disastrous wars. He still cannot accept that he lost the 2020 election, as he obviously did. However, his speech was intended to undermine confidence in the upcoming midterm elections more than to relitigate 2020. He claims fraud and rigging every time he loses anything, and he wants to sow as much doubt as possible about the election he knows he’ll lose if the techbros don’t rig it for him. His polling is the worst in presidential history, so a victory would not be accepted as legitimate by the public, but a loss would not be accepted by Trump. This could easily lead to violence within the US, as the country is already primed for civil unrest, if not for civil war.

The US violated every term of the MOU from day one, while Iran continued to follow the terms until now. They have now declared it null and void, and have said there will be no further discussions with an agreement-incapable US run by a profoundly ignorant and demented mad man. Apart from failing to rein in Israel’s barbarism in Lebanon, and setting up a conflicting MOU with the Lebanese puppet regime, the US was also encouraging ships to bypass Iran’s control over Hormuz by skirting the coast of Oman. Iran warned shipping that to do so would mean being fired upon, which is exactly what happened, and what they had a right to do under the MOU, as it granted them control over the strait. The US retaliated by striking Iranian civilian infrastructure and land-based connection points with Iran’s neighbours. Iran responded by bombing American bases in the region. Israel told Trump the Iranians were going to assassinate him, and he foolishly believed them as he always does, even though any assassination would almost certainly be an Israeli false flag. Another possibility is that Trump’s health is now so poor that a natural death could be spun as assassination to produce a causus belli. Trump is now completely paranoid, and is back to threatening to anihilate Iran. There is no obvious end to where the escalation ladder could lead.

The US cannot reach Iran’s strategic assets, as they’re all deep underground. In contrast, Iran can very easily and cheaply inflict considerable damage on American assets and on those of the Gulf countries which have made themselves co-beligerents. Those assets are above ground, and essentially undefended, due to the abject failure of American air defence (as discussed here in a post two days ago). Iran has a massive geographical advantage, which they have improved over many years to create what is now an impregnable defensive fortress. No amount of bombing will prevent Iran from continuing to control Hormuz, and now Ansar Allah (the Houthis) are planning to close the Bab-al-Mandab strait at the southern entrance to the Red Sea, due to an attack on their airport at Sanaa. This appeared to be a Saudi attack, but could well be a false flag, since the attack was not in Saudi interests. Closing access to the Red Sea would very significantly compound the negative effects of the war on the global economy. The US is now reimposing its ineffective naval blockade, and Hormuz is closed once again.

Last week, the US secretary of state was declaring that Hormuz is international waters, and that no one had the right to charge a fee for passage. He is incorrect. Hormuz lies entirely within Iranian and Omani territorial waters. They are entitled to charge for access, as Turkey does for passage through the Dardanelles. Iran was proposing a 1-2% administrative fee, in lieu of reparations for all the damage inflicted upon them in this illegal war of aggression. This week, Trump has declared that the US will call itself the Guradian of Hormuz, and will charge a 20% fee, as a protection racket. This is not going to happen as the US is incapable of protecting shipping or its allies in the region, and this is widely known. Trump’s ignorant pronouncements are simply making the US look foolish. He has on occasion, even claimed that Hormuz should be renamed the Strait of Trump. Whatever mental faculties he may once have possessed have deserted him.

The consequences for the global economy have not yet manifested in earnest, but they are coming, some sooner than others. The first order effects are predictable, but supply chains are so complex that there will inevitably be severe impacts that could hit with no warning. Global energy supply will hit a wall once reserves are fully depleted. Prices have been kept low through manipulation in the paper market by the US, but this has encouraged shorting, on the mistaken belief that peace is right around the corner, as Trump keeps saying it is. This cannot continue forever. Once reserves are gone, the futures price will converge with the spot price at a much higher level. The shorts will then have to cover, driving prices even higher in a short squeeze. Diesel, aviation fuel, and bunker fuel will be in very short supply due to a lack of the longer chain hydrocarbons necessary to produce them.

As a result, expect rationing, with the public being at the bottom of the heap. Expect considerable difficulties with distribution of goods and services, and for air travel to be almost entirely curtailed as aviation fuel becomes reserved for the military. High energy prices will feed through into everything else, leading to large scale demand destruction from the public and a global depression. If oil begins to flow again at some point, demand from countries seeking to replenish and increase reserves will be enormous, likely keeping energy prices out of reach for ordinary people. Travel in any mechanised form will become problematic at best, and may be impossible for all but the super-rich. As goods may not be able to move, people will have to rely on their local reality, but few even know what this looks like, as they’re so used to a globalised world. Adaptation takes time, but what’s coming will be a rug-pull. Those who’ve taken no steps to prepare in advance are going to find trying to do so belatedly very difficult. Even those who have prepared will likely be hit with unpleasant surprises.

Other essentials that are now supply-constrained include liquified natural gas (LNG), fertiliser, aluminum, helium, and sulphuric acid. Much of Asia relies on LNG, and Europe is also increasingly dependent. Natural gas is neccessary to produce nitrogen fertiliser through the Haber-Bosch process, which is extremely energy intensive due to the need to crack the triple bond between the two atoms in atmospheric nitrogen. Phosphate fertiliser relies on supplies of sulphuric acid to extract the resource from phosphate rock. Without fertiliser, crop yields will plummet. Some regions are already hard hit, because their planting window has been missed. Others will lack the energy to run the machinery they need for harvesting, or both the energy and fertiliser they need formplanting next year. Famine is now inevitable. This war has signed the death certificates of potentially hundreds of millions of people.

Helium is essential for the production of computer chips, and much of the supply came from the Gulf. China, which was also a large producer, has now banned exports. The AI bubble is already very fragile, as there’s no business case that could make the industry profitable in its current form. A shortage of chips would seal its fate, with trillions in potential losses. This will, of course, aggravate the coming depression. So will the on-going destruction of infrastructure, both in the Gulf and in Russia, which is now an energy importer due to NATO-backed destruction of refineries and shipping. The loss of aluminum smelting in the Gulf will also have a major impact. The process is extremely energy-intensive, so there are relatively few places where it can be done. The energy required must be both plentiful and cheap, and that is increasingly unlikely.

Even if the war were to end tomorrow, which it won’t, it would take years to restore supply chains for many things. The pre-war level of oil production will never be restored, due to damage to shut in fields. LNG infrastructure in Qatar, which was a major exporter, has been badly damaged and will take 3-5 years to repair. The world is looking at a depression much more severe than the 1930s, and potentially longer lasting due to physical constraints that were not present back then. In the 1930s, the shortage was of the money required to connect producers and consumers, or buyers and sellers. It was a depression that occurred while surrounded by a virgin continent’s worth of resources due a the collapse of a human system – finance.

This time resource constraints will be very real, although demand destruction will have dropped demand by the public very substantially. Most people will be living in a very different world than they had anticipated, and for them depression conditions could last for the rest of their lives. Working together and pooling resources among extended families and communities will be essential. While material prosperity will likely be a thing of the past, people may well rediscover the genuine human connection that has largely been missing for a long time. Life at a basic level of material wealth need not be the end of the world, even though the adjustment will be difficult. Build relationships of trust now, before people start to panic and cease to be functional. Preparation, both physical and social, is the best antidote to losing one’s mind when adverse events hit, and also the best way to make a fulfilling life from whatever circumstances prevail after the dust settles.

It’s been obvious for a very long time that the US has been sliding into fascism, and that religious extremists have been gaining power. The extent to which this has occurred is still shocking. The trend existed well before Trump, but under Trump it has accelerated dramtically. Trump himself is not remotely religious, but he depends on those who are, as they form a significant fraction of his political base. He has elevated white Christian nationalists to positions of considerable power in his administration. The ideas stem from the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) propagated by dominionists. Some of these are obvious, like Pete Hegseth, who is attempting to turn the entire military into a religious organisation engaged in a new Crusade. He is also purging women and minorities from the ranks. The pastor he brings in, Doug Wilson, is even more extreme than Hegseth himself. The man would remove women’s right to vote, and also the votes of non-Christians. Others are less visible but hold powerful positions behind the scenes, notably Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget, whose nickname is The Grim Reaper.

The plan is for blasphemy laws and religious ‘purity tests’, meaning that only churches conforming to a fire and brimestone version of Christianity would be considered true Christians, and those who do not conform could be arrested for blasphemy and their church property seized. While extremeist church leaders speak openly about their plans, they tell their subordinates not to talk about it because “Americans aren’t ready”. They intend to introduce ‘sabbath laws’, which would prevent people from doing anything but attending church on Sundays, and then socially enforcing church attendance. They want to consolidate their hold on power before stepping out from behind the curtain. Political candidates at all levels are coached to hide their extremism.

The rest of the population doesn’t understand the nature and extent of the threat. They don’t realise that opposition to the agenda is intended to see them classified as domestic terrorists, because disagreement is considered violence. Religious liberty is defined as them being able to live as they choose, while forcing the same views and lifestyle on everyone else. The kind of views that are considered to be blasphemy include female equality, marriage equality, gay rights, bodily autonomy and even environmental laws. All of these are held to be intimidation and coercion of the ‘righteous’, meaning themselves.

The intention is to create a ‘Christian constitution’, and increasingly force compliance. Attendance would be monitored, with sanctions on those who didn’t come frequently enough, and wages would be forceably garnished on behalf of the church. Every non-Christian, or insufficiently extremist Christian, would be deprived of civil rights.

The US is fond of describing other countries, like Iran, as theocracies, and calling their leaders crazy religious extremists. Under the proposed Christian constitution, the US would become far more theocratic than Iran is today. While Iran was strongly theocratic after the revolution that overthrew the repressive Shah, installed as a western puppet after the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s elected leader, it is not repressively theocratic now. Women are no longer required to cover up for instance, and they are encouraged to be highly educated. Positions in public life are fully accessible to them, as are leadership roles. A US run by people like Doug Wilson would steal far more freedom from much of the population than Iran does, and would resemble the Iran of about 1980.

Spain followed a similar path at the end of its hegemonic period. It went from an outward looking society to one that descended into inward looking religious repression. This was the era of the Inquisition, when religious conformity was enforced under threat of torture or being burned at the stake. Other historical periods have followed the same pattern, notably resulting in literal witch hunts that saw millions of women falsely accused and murdered. The closest the US has previously come to this kind of mob rule within living memory would be the secular Red Scare under Senator Joseph McCarthy, where there was a moral panic over so-called communists, or ‘reds under the bed’ as they were described at the time. Innocent people were executed. This was one of the more shameful periods in American history. What the white Christian nationalists want this time would be very much worse. It remains to be seen if they can achieve their vision, or if enough people will realise where their agenda is headed and prevent it taking hold. Vigilance is necessary, as is standing up for true liberty. Church and state are separate under the constitution for very good reasons.

Ted Postol is an expert weapons analyst. Here he’s discussing the abject failure of the Patriot missile defence system, and the development of missile and drone systems that can render all forms of air defence obsolete. Postol analysed the success rate of PAC2 interceptors during the old Gulf war, and found it to be essentially zero. The PAC3 was an upgrade, but very expensive at $4million each, and requiring the participation of some 400 factories. They cannot be produced in large quantities, and definitely not quickly. Two interceptors are fired at an incoming threat, but that threat may be a $20K-$50K drone. The financial disparity is ruinous.

To succeed, the PAC3 must hit an incoming warhead head on, causing the warhead to explode in midair. If it doesn’t hit precisely, the warhead will detatch and continue on to the ground where it will explode. It’s approximately like trying to hit a bullet with another bullet. As it turns out the success rate is approximately 2%, and only against non-hypersonic missiles following an entirely predictable trajectory. Unfortunately for air defence, missile development is preceding rapidly. There are now many hypersonic missiles, and many that are manouverable in flight. There are also missiles that spit out multiple decoys mimicking the actual warhead, making it impossible to intercept the right one.

Patriot systems depend on a single radar, unlike the Russian S-series which use multiple ones, and that radar is very vulnerable, even to simple drones. If the extremely expensive radar is destroyed, the system is useless. This has happened many times in both the Ukraine and Gulf wars, but Patriot systems are still sought after due to the propaganda as to their success rate from the contractors who build them. It is rapidly becoming impossible to defend against missile and drone attacks. Patriot systems are very effective against aircarft, which are much slower, but if they can be taken out by missiles and drones, then there would be no protection against aircraft either. This would create airpower dominance, allowing the much larger explosive devices carried by aircraft to be deployed with impunity. The Russians have used their FAB glide-bombs to great effect in Ukraine. They have everything from FAB250-FAB3000, refering to the weight of the bomb in kilograms. These are capable of massive destruction.

Israel’s Iron Dome is no more effective than the Patriot system, so Israel has suffered a great deal of damage from Iranian and Hezbollah missiles strikes. The damage is concealed and never discussed in the media. Similarly, the American bases in the Gulf have been virtually destroyed. Radars costing up to half a billion dollars were taken out at the beginning of the war, leaving the bases and Israel blind as to incoming threats.

The Russian air defence systems are less vulnerable and more effective, but even these are unlikely to win in the arms race between measures and counter-measures given the speed of missile development and the ubiquitous presence of cheap drones. The future of air defence in general is bleak.

Have you heard of the White Helmets? They’re touted as first responders, and as an aid organisation, but that’s not at all what they really are. They’re a construct of western intelligence services, and their role is to subvert the role of existing essential services in targeted countries, as well as being able to create media impressions around certain events in order to bolster western government narratives. Their most notorious actions were undertaken in Syria, where they were involved in staging a supposed chemical weapons attack that was then blamed on Bashar al Assad’s government. When you’re in a location before anyone else, you can plant or hide evidence, and create a narrative façade that suits your masters. These people are now being deployed to Venezuela, ostensibly to help with the aftermath of the earthquakes, but their real mission will be to undermine what’s left of Venezuelan sovereignty. The US has called Venezuela a basket case for years, without ever bothering to mention that its was primarily US sanctions that caused their situation. Of course there was corruption, but the sanctions regime has far more negative impact.

Covert missions like this will be deployed in many states that the dying empires wishes to co-opt for its own benefit. The approach is far more subtle than older forms of imperialism, but far more effective in the battle of competing narratives that increasingly drive public opinion, both in the imperial centre and in the target country. Manufactured public opinion is then used to justify more aggressive actions against countries the empire targets for their resources or strategic location. The empire also wants plenty of proxies to fight its wars to maintain supremacy, as Ukraine is currently being used to fight to the last Ukrainian in an unwinnable war to weaken Russia. The European vassal states are now sending back Ukrainian men who had escaped, often at great cost, so they can die for the empire. Next will be Europeans themselves, as their pathetic governments (chosen for that characteristic by the international powers that dictate the policies they’re to follow) are talking themselves into war with Russia despite massive public opposition. Russia is taking the threat seriously, and may feel forced to stage pre-emptive strikes, which would then be used to paint them as the aggressors when NATO has been the aggressive party against them for the last twelve years.

The mask of empire has been entirely discarded under the massively corrupt and infinitely blackmailable Trump. He’s a puppet controlled by kompromat who no longer possesses the mental faculties to understand his own situation or the extremely dangerous one that his prompted actions are creating for the rest of the world. The wars are going to merge and spread, accompanied by energy crisis, financial crisis, and famine simultaneously. It’s possible that this will be the last gasp of an empire caught in Thucydides trap, and that the power that’s shifting inexorably eastwards will continue to rise. However, it’s also possible the the coming polycrisis will destroy modernity entirely, given how many crucial commodities are affected, and how much worse this could get. Once broken, supply chains take a very long time to re-establish, and can only do so if sufficient trust and energy resources exist. International trust takes years to decades to establish, and energy supplies are never going to reach their pre-war level. Relocalising resilience will be essential, but very difficult in a low trust environment where people will struggle to be able to work together. Brace for impact.