Covid was a bioweapon, designed in a lab and released to coincide with the repo crisis that was about to topple the global financial system. Covid provided the excuse to print trillions of dollars to bail out the system again. The measures introduced supposedly to halt the spread of covid were a compliance test, to see what the population would tolerate if sufficiently frightened by the constant fear porn. In order to make the fear porn effective, people had to be seen to die from the disease, but the disease was nowhere near as dangerous as the powers that be were suggesting. It did affect elderly people and those with multiple comorbidities disproportionately, and it did cause long covid in a number of people, because the spike protein is highly cytotoxic, but it did not kill, or even harm, most people with functioning immune systems. Children and young people were effectively immune, although a few with pre-existing comorbidities were affected.

The nurse interviewed in the segment posted above was present in the ICU during the height of covid. She saw what did kill her patients, and it wasn’t the disease. She’s by no means the only whistleblower. The courageous doctors and nurses of the Frontline Covid Critical Care Alliance ( FLCCC) and others around the world also sacrificed their careers to tell the truth and actually treat patients. Hospitals were the most dangerous places for the sick to be during covid. People were not dying at home or in the streets as one might have expected if the disease were lethal. They were dying in hospitals due to lack of treatment and wildly inappropriate treatment. Effective treatment protocols were rapidly developed outside of hospitals, but most of these were quickly banned and the practitioners who promoted them often lost their medical licences. Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and other effective treatments were ridiculed in the captured media.

Inappropriate tests were used to establish infection, specifically PCR, which its own inventor has said was not to be used as a diagnostic. He conveniently died shortly before the ‘pandemic’. PCR was being used at high cycles, meaning that the viral genome was being amplified to such as extent that almost anything would test positive. Any result obtained beyond about 25 cycles was meaningless, but 40 cycles were common. People were being quarantined on false pretenses, as a positive test did not mean the person was infected or contagious.

The hospital treatment regime was very different, and not only ineffective, but often lethal. Patients were generally told to stay at home with no treatment until they experienced breathing difficulties. When they came into hospital they were typically given very expensive remdesivir, which has a black box warning for causing severe kidney damage. At this point in the progression of the disease, the viral replication phase was over, so remdesivir – an antiviral which is intended to stop viral replication – would have been an inappropriate treatment in any case. Given that it was also a very dangerous drug made this ‘treatement’ extreme medical malpractice. Covid patients were drowning internally due to kidney damage from the drug, not the disease. Hospitals were paid specifically to administer this drug.

Early use of ventilators was also an extreme form of medical malpractice. The idea was to create a closed loop system so staff wouldn’t be exposed to the virus, but for the patients it was often a death sentence. 80% of people who were ventiliated subsequently died, because the ventilators blew out their lungs. The nurse being interviewed explains that patients were given sedative drugs like fentanyl, propathol and midazolam, but these suppressed breathing, making it impossible to wean people off ventilators. Hospitals were paid to use ventilators, and paid again when patients died. These payments were significant incentives to cause harm to patients.

If an older or disabled person came into hospital with some unrelated issue, they were not infrequently exposed to covid deliberately so they could be put on the covid pathway. A broken leg could ultimately lead to death supposedly from covid. Covid patients were deliberately placed in nursing homes so as infect additional vulnerable people. In the UK, ministers subsequently bragged about how much money they’d saved on pension payments. In addition, anyone (inappropriately) testing positive for covid would be classed as a covid death even if the actual cause of death was a gunshot wound or a traffic fatality. Many people may have died WITH covid, or at least having been exposed to it, but not FROM covid. This was used to pad the numbers in order to ramp up the fear porn.

The fear porn was intended not merely to induce compliance with measures like lockdowns, (useless) masking and arbitrary (and useless) social distancing rules, but also to generate demand for a vaccine. This is the Hegelian dialectic – create a problem, wait for a reaction, and generate a ‘solution’ that was what you wanted to do in the first place, but which would not have been acceptable without the perceived problem. It also plays into mass formation psychology (discussed in recent posts on this page). When a society is atomised, and has lost a sense of meaning in life, free floating anxiety and aggression develop. These can be given a focus, like the threat of a disease, that causes the free floating anxiety to crystallise around the threat. If a ‘solution’ is then proposed, people begin to focus on it to the exclusion of all else, becoming radically blind to everything including evidence against the proposed solution. It’s a form of collective hypnosis. The perception of fighting a common threat makes people feel connected again, easing the sense of atomisation and meaninglessness, but they aren’t actually connected to each other, only to an ideology. People in the grip of a mass formation also become radically intolerant of dissenters, regarding them as traitors to the common cause and abusing them as such. This dynamic was on full display during the covid era, as dissenters were excluded from society and told they should be refused any medical treatment, their children should be removed, they should be jailed, they should be forced to pay everyone else’s medical bills etc.

All the vaccine manufacturers choose the cytotoxic spike protein as the basis for their shots, which makes no sense if the goal was to reduce harm. Within a month of the rushed release of the shots, there was enough evidence of harm to have them withdrawn, but this did not happen. The evidence has mounted ever since, with a huge increase in disabilities and excess deaths. Every single global adverse events registry has been screaming a safety signal since early 2021, but these were ignored, and the adverse events registries widely ridiculed. The situation is actually worse than they indicate, as adverse events registries typically capture only a small percentage of harm done. They are often complicated and time consuming to fill out and reporting is not mandatory, so busy medical professionals generally don’t bother. The data was deliberately contaminated by the practice of not calling someone vaccinated until 14 days after their shot. This meant that any adverse events manifesting before that time, of which there were many, were put into the unvaccinated column.

The shots have caused an extremely wide array of harm, with some emerging immediately and other taking months to years to manifest. This has naturally caused confusion as to causation, but all the Bradford-Hill criteria for causation have been met. Pfizer itself released nine pages of potential adverse events, many serious. The shots were not tested to see if they prevented transmission of the virus, as Pfizer has admitted, meaning that the whole idea of preventing others from becoming ill by being vaccinated was known to be false from the beginning. The messaging was intended to tug at the heart strings, but it was nothing but disingenuous propaganda. Not only do the vaccines not prevent transmission, they also show negative efficacy, meaning that they make the recipient more likely to catch the virus, often multiple times. The effect increases with each dose, as the immune system is being progressively degraded. Multiple shots cause a shift in immune response from IgG3 to IgG4, meaning that the immune system goes from fighting a dangerous invader to ignoring it. An IgG4 reponse is what you would want if you were trying to desensitise from an allergy to something harmless, not when an extremely cytotoxic protein is circulating throughout the body. In addition, the shots damage the genes responsible for genomic vigilance that suppress nascent cancers. The resulting turbocancer wave is only just beginning.

The vaccine batches are not all created equal, meaning that good manufacturing practices were not employed. Some batches produced large numbers of adverse events, some produced a medium number, and other produced few. It’s likely that a saline placebo was also used for important people to be protected from harm, but these would obviously not show adverse events. Batch numbers can be looked up at ‘How bad is my batch?’. The shots were highly contaminated with DNA plasmids from the manufacturing process, and these plasmids contain an SV40 promoter. The function of this component is to facilitate the pseudo-mRNA (with pseudo-uridine substitued for uracil in order to prevent the body breaking it down) crossing the nuclear membrane and transfecting into the host genome. This process converts the body into a permanent spike protein factory. If this happens in the germ line, the result will be heritable. Given that the lipid nanoparticle delivery vectors accumulate in ovaries and testes, this is quite likely the case.

Those nanoparticles are problematic in many ways. They contain a black box warning for toxicity, and were designed for a single use to deliver anticancer drugs to the brain, because they cross the blood brain barrier (and every other lipid barrier in the body). Used multiple times, they punch holes in the blood brain barrier, leading to immune cell infiltration and chronic brain inflammation. This is the cause of brain fog. It also interferes with memory, by preventing the formation of new index neurons in the hypocampus. The nanoparticles are cationic, meaning positively charged, but out neruons require a negative charge across their cell membranes in order to function. No wonder neurological conditions are the most widely reported adverse events. The manufacturers were forced to admit to the cardic damage, but have yet to acknowledge neurological harm. General cognitive decline is likely the result, along with many specific conditions such as Parkinsons, alzheimers, CJD, ALS and others. Patients are being told they just have anxiety or that their symptoms are purely osychological. This is a travesty.

The vaccines were the real bioweapon. The disease was just pushed to generate demand for them. They’ve been responsible for millions of premature deaths worldwide, as well as millions of new disabilities, and have saved no lives, because they were never intended as a therapeutic. They were intended to cull the herd, and to create widespread infertility, which they have done. Virtually all pregnant women who took the shot in their first trimester lost their babies. Fetal demises have skyrocketed. Live births are down in every highly vaccinated country. Excess deaths among young children who haven’t been vaccinated for covid themselves, but their parents were, have shown a worrying increase. This would be the effect of spike production becoming hereditary.

The evil described by the nurse in the interview above is bad enough, but what was done to the 5.6 billion people who took the shots, many of whom were coerced, is far worse. This was a deliberate attempt to genocide billions of people, and the perpetrators are not planning to stop now. They’re now converting the childhood vaccine schedule to mRNA, pushing mRNA cancer vaccines, and trying to push fear porn around hantavirus. Interestingly, hantavirus infection is listed among Pfizer’s potential adverse events. The people who did this are also fomemting societal division and wars, one result of that being a coming famine, as described on this page in various other posts. They’re serious about reducing the global population in every way they can, and enslaving the survivors through their digital gulag system, which is also described here in other posts. Don’t fall for the fear porn or other propaganda. Health matters, and freedom matters. Build communities of like-minded people and work together to resist.

When it comes to following the money, there’s no one better than Simon Dixon. His work in this field is more than comprehensive. Every week he does a deep dive, and he does many interviews as well, like this one. Having said that, I don’t always agree with his predictions, because following the money is rational, but many aspects of the world are not, and humanity definitely is not. There is a differences between planned outcomes and actual eventualities, especially at times of extremely high tension. Wars can easily take on a life of their own, especially when conflicting religious imperatives are involved. Billions of humans becoming increasingly desperate, as food and fuel become increasingly expensive or scarce, can overwhelm the best laid plans of mice and men, so to speak.

Dixon believes that the war in the Gulf is performative, and intended to manage a transition to multipolarity as the centre of power shifts eastwards. I see it as the last gasp of a dying empire determined to cling to its former status is the primary global hegemon by trying to subdue a key node in the power shift. Iran is a critical energy producer in an extremely strategic location geopolitically. It’s a necessary transit country for trade routes of all kinds through Asia. Obliterating it, as Trump has promised to do if Iran chooses not to capitulate completely to unreasonable American demands, would prevent the growing Asian cohesion around finance and trade. This outcome is unlikely however, as the empire is ill-equiped to prevail against a foe it has desperately underestimated. Any renewed attacked would likely result instead in the destruction of the Gulf monarchies and Israel, which is already faltering. Its own armed forces are warning the leadership that its policy of aggression against all its neighbours is tearing the country apart. The Gulf monarchies have no desire to see their energy infrastructure destroyed either, as would happen if Iran is attacked again, and they have bought considerable influence over the empire. If World War Three breaks out it may be more likely to result from an escalation of the war in Ukraine rather than in West Asia.

I agree with Dixon that several parties stand to benefit from the continued closure of Hormuz. Oil exporters are benefitting from higher prices, and prices stand to increase as the futures market eventually converges with the spot price. The World Economic Forum (WEF) is achieving its goal of depriving the population of fossil fuels and material prosperity, and its ultimate goal of population reduction would naturally follow from this. The US empire technical industrial complex may get their chance to implement their surveillance panopticon and pre-crime police state once deprivation results in widespread civil unrest. The latter does depend on the continuation of the fragile AI bubble however, and the build out of 5000 extremely expensive unpopular data centres, for which no adequate energy supply currently exists, nor can one be established in any reasonable timeframe. Data centres are likely to be declared a national security imperative in order to circumvent objections and justify printing trillions to construct them, or to bail out the companies caught in the AI bubble’s circular firing squad.

One of the US empire’s goals of the war is to cut off China’s energy supply and prevent its rise, but this is unlikely to succeed. China has accumulated large reserves of many commodities, including energy, they have land access to energy from both Russia and Iran, and they’ve built out a great deal of ‘renewable’ energy infrastructure. Most of this isn’t actually renewable, as it requires non-renewable inputs, and the lifespan of these projects is limited, but for the time being their emphasis on electrification will be beneficial. China has developed AI very differently, and in a much more useful way, which is also very much cheaper. They apply it primarily to maximising the efficiency of the factory floor rather than encouraging the population to drive themselves into psychosis with it. China’s economy is not doing as well as generally perceived though. It’s real estate market, which represented some 25% of GDP, was structured as a ponzi scheme and now is collapsing. Unrest is growing rapidly in what is a highly authoritarian, low trust country with no state support systems and no means for people to change anything that isn’t working. Wages are going unpaid more and more frequently, adding to the stress on society.

China has already won the trade war with the American empire, due to its control over the supply of rare earth minerals. These are not actually rare, but the ability to refine them is, and China has a virtual monopoly on the process. Building out processing facilities elsewhere will take a long time, and without rare earths, the empire cannot replace the weaponry it’s using up in both Ukraine and the Gulf. Stocks of various missiles and interceptors are already substantially depleted. Power is inevitably moving eastwards, and the US empire appears increasingly to be caught in Thucydides Trap, as President Xi pointed out to Trump on his recent visit to Beijing. The old empire is in decline, but intends to fight that decline with everything it has left. This is a recipe for a very expensive failure, and one that will shred the fabric of American society.

The US is currently engaged in a massive wealthy transfer from the poor to the super-rich, aided by pervasive and obvious corruption by the ruling Epstein class. The shift from expansion to economic contraction always benefits the rich, as they buy up everyone else’s assets at distressed prices. Extraction from the population at large is proceeding rapidly and is going to accelerate until a breaking point is reached. Then either the population is locked down in a police state, or it overwhelmes the elites in a revolution. The ballroom that Trump is obsessing over is actually a bunker meant to protect him from the American people once unrest reaches fever pitch. This could happen sooner rather than later, given that interest rates are going to spike as a risk premium, adding greatly to the cost of debt servicing in a country already drowning in debt at every level. Federally, a mountain of debt originally borrowed under ZIRP conditions (zero interest rate policy) will now have to be rolled over at approximately 5%, which may precipitate a debt doom loop. Attempts to forestall this by pictching stablecoins to the rest of the world at retail level may fail due to the dependence on critical undersea internet cables running through the strait of Hormuz, which Iran is now claiming control over, and could destroy is attacked again.

So many subsystems of reality with global impact are approaching critical failure modes all at once. As boxer Mike Tyson used to say “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”. The plans for a relatively smooth transition to a multipolar world may get more than a metaphorical punch to the face. The result could be decades of chaos.

Most of the focus on the situation in the Gulf is on oil, for obvious reasons, but more attention needs to be paid to the consequences of the fertiliser deficit, many of which are already inevitable. The discussion in the headline video is around a new report called From Hormuz to Hunger: The Compound Cascade That Institutional Models Miss. While this report is based on the same mainstream data that other information sources are using, this one approaches the issue in greater depth, specifically looking at how different factors interact to compound the effects of each other, rather than addressing each in isolation. This is critical, as it reflects the ways that components of a predicament can amplify each other in feedback loops.

Prior to the war, there were already 650million food insecure people in the world, 10million of whom died of starvation yearly. Now the number of transits of the strait of Hormuz has fallen dramatically, from an average of 141/day to an average of 4/day. Both the energy and the fertiliser supplies are being heavily impacted, as 30% of fertiliser exports pass through the strait, including 67% of the urea fertiliser produced in the Gulf. A ten percent reduction in fertiliser use results in a yield loss of 25% or more. Sri Lanka discovered this the hard way a few years ago, and this time forty or more countries could find themselves in the same situation.

If the war stopped tomorrow, it would take 8-14 months to restore supply chains, meaning that some 25 million excess deaths are already a certainty. If it proceeds for longer then many countries will enter a sovereign debt doom loop, with crashing currencies and further catastrophic impacts. Fertiliser exports would stop, followed by food exports in a market fragmentation, as countries turn to self-sufficiency. August of 2026 appears to be the breaking point. If transits through Hormuz are not restored by then, consecutive crop seasons would be lost, guaranteeing a greater loss of life from both starvation and consequent vulnerability to disease. Mass migration and conflict would be inevitable.

Compounding the predicament, a record breaking El Niño appears to be forming, and this typically diverts monsoon rains as well as causing drought in east Africa and Latin America. The solar cycle is also moving into a much less active phase, associated with cooler and cloudier weather. When there’s less incident UV, the stratosphere cools and the polar vortex weakens, leading to long cold snaps in unusual places. Late spring frosts and early autumn frosts could significantly shorten the growing season. The Earth’s magnetic shield weakens, allowing the penetration of more cosmic rays, which in turn cause cloud formation and reduced solar radiation reaching the ground. More clouds can lead to flooding, and greater humidity can lead to a higher incidence of crop diseases. A weak solar cycle could cause these problems for the full eleven years, but if we are in fact approaching a grand solar minimum, as solar physics suggests, then the impact could last for decades. This is what happened during the period known as the Little Ice Age. The report assess various scenarios, assigning probabilities to each. The base case is for up to 200 million excess deaths.

Little Ice Age – Wikipedia

The entire agricultural system is about to be stress-tested, and may have to be substantially reorganised. Unfortunately, many more small farms will go out of business, and land ownership will consolidate in the hands of the already wealthy to a much greater extent. They are unlikely to consider the needs of the masses to be a priority, but their neglect of a mass of angry people with little left to lose could easily mark their own undoing, as has been the case before in history.

The global financial system is at the end of a major debt cycle, meaning that a reset is inevitable, and the planned reset is to be digital. All the major players agree on this point, due to the unprecendented degree of control over the population this would allow for. Elites know what happens to those in power during a period of extreme upheaval – they take the blame and maybe be violently punished by the governed. Naturally they wish to avoid this outcome, making the control features of digital finance extremely attractive. China already has such a system, with its social credit scores determining the extent to which citizens are permitted to participate in society, and this the system others are trying to emulate. What they can’t agree on is who should control it. Will this undermine or enhance American hegemony?

Both forms of digital currency would be fully programmable, meaning they wouldn’t be money as we have known it, but closer to glorified food stamps. What you can buy would be controlled, and both when and where you can spend it would also be programmed. This allows for geofencing of the population through the financial system, as well as full spectrum surveillance through a digital panopticon. Social credit scores would also be programmed into either version, hence the end of privacy, free speech, and freedom of association.

The plan for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) originates with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) based in Geneva, which plans to elevate the global financial industrial complex to a position of global control. This would weaken the American position by undermining the dollar and its exorbitant privilege due to its status as the reserve currency. The American approach, based on private stablecoins, would have the opposite effect, providing ‘permanent’ captive demand for US treasuries, lowering the interest rate on treasuries, and cementing digital dollar dominance. The technical industrial complex centred in Silicon Valley is behind this version.

Under the Genius Act, stablecoins can be issued by private businesses, but must be backed one to one with cash or US treasury bills. Trump’s family has set up their own version – World Liberty Financial – which would profit them personally for every transaction made. There is nothing in the Act to prevent this level of corruption. The intention is to bid for the retail sector globally, promising convenience, and it would be convenient, but it’s also a trap, as well as a means to force the whole planet to funds US debts. The next step is the Clarity Act which allows for tokenisation of assets on a single ledger, the idea of which is to facilitate confiscation of those assets. This would also be a feature of the CBDC version.

Europe is attempting to fight off the bid by the US to effectively buy control of its retail sector with legislation aimed at Tether in particular. Tether has relocated to El Salvador in order to escape from any form of regulation, and refuses to comply with EU legislation (MiCA). Under the European rules, Tether is classified as an electronic money token demoninated in a non-EU currency, and as such would be required to hold 30% of its reserves in an EU credit institution. In addition, an issuer reaching a certain limit would be required to cease issuance. It remains to be seen if the EU legislation will be effective in restraining private American stablecoins, or if it will fail to be respected. European citizens buying into Tether would weaken the euro and support the USD, meaning Europe could lose its monetary sovereignty over time. This is why the battle will be fierce. The digital euro is all about owning the rails of tokenised finance before the American stablecoins can become dominant. The US is losing at the institutional level, but winning at the retail level. Regulatory conflict continues, and may lead to a major currency war.

The collective psychological phenomenon of mass formation is critical for understanding why society is behaving as it is, most notably in western countries. Professor Mattias Desmet is the foremost expert in this field. There is also a previous post on this topic from May 5th for those interested in more detail. Mass formations are cult-like collective obsessions that take hold of segements of societies. They have existed throught history, but only from the twentieth century have they reach sufficient scale to capture the machinery of entire states, typically with diastrous effect. The conditions for mass formation are loneliness for societal atomisation, a loss of meaning in life, and consequent free floating anxiety and aggression. These conditions have become ever more prevalent over time, and as the scale of societies have increased far beyond human scale. A mass formation occurs when a major threat is collectively perceived, and the free floating anxiety becomes focused on that threat. When a supposed solution is suggested, a large percentage of people gravitate towards it, becoming radically blind to almost anything else, including hard evidence that the ‘solution’ is in fact no solution at all. The threat can arise naturally, or it can be manufactured by bad actors attempting to drive a population in a particular direction. That direction may be metaphorically off a cliff.

A society in the grip of a hypnotic mass formation generally becomes totalitarian, like Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. This is fundamentally different from a dictatorship, where a powerful leader is imposing his will under threat of violence. Under totalitarianism, the nexus does not lie with a leader, but with the masses themselves. If a leader is removed, another similarly minded one will be elevated to take his place. Mass formation gains its grip by seeming to solve the problem of loneliness, as people come together to face the common threat, thereby feeling connected again. Unfortunately, they’re not connected to each other as individuals, but to a unifying and all-consuming ideology. The atomisation actually becomes more extreme. They typically develop performative, and often self-sacrificing, rituals to demonstrate their devotion to the ideology. Failure to perform these rituals is regarded as disloyalty to the point of treason, even if the rituals make no logical sense at all, or are self-destructive.

Generally some 20-30% of the population becomes fanatically devoted to enforcing uniformity of thought regarding the threat and its ‘solution’. They may become the secret police, reporting even friends and family members to the authorities for transgressions. A majority of the rest typically goes along to get along, while perhaps 10% of the population resists. The fanatics become radically intolerant of dissent, and if the mass formation proceeds to its logical conclusion, they come to regard eliminating the dissenters as a moral duty. However, if the dissenters keep speaking out, they may not be able to convince the rest, but they can disrupt the hypnotic effect sufficiently to avoid the mass formation reaching that final stage. Unfortunately, the highly educated are the most likely to fall into the grip of mass formation, since so much of modern education is about conformity with received wisdom.

The response to the threat of covid is an example of this phenomenon. The fear was whipped up by the media to the extent that most people complied with extreme restrictions on their freedom that were arbitrary and nonsensical. For instance, one could eat maskless in a restaurant, but had to wear a mask to walk to the bathroom. Band members wore masks with holes cut into them so they could play their instruments. People were restricted from going outside, even though that was the safest place to be. Small businesses were forced into bankruptcy by the restrictions, ruining a multitude of livelihoods. Children’s education was massively disrupted by forced online classes. People were coerced, on pain of job loss and exclusion from society, into taking an experimental vaccine that demonstrated enough adverse reactions that it should have been withdrawn from the market within a month of its release. Children were forced to take it even though they were at no risk from the condition. The threat posed by covid was highly exaggerated through fear-porn, and many of the deaths attributed to it were the result of failure to treat with proven medications, or highly inappropriate treatment with toxic medications such as remdesivir, which has a black box warning because it destroys the kidneys.

As fear of covid waned, because its lack of lethality became obvious, the mass formation shifted its focus to the war in Ukraine and the demonisation of Russia. This was a major misunderstanding of the situation, but actual evidence is irrelevant in a mass formation. Any attempt to correct the record and stop the senseless killing was regarded as traitorous. The war was actually provoked by NATO, beginning in 2014. Russia was acting to ethnic Russians in the Donbass who had been under attack from Ukraininan forces for eight years, and had suffered some 14,000 casualties as a result. The war was almost orevented by peace treaty, but NATO representatives told Ukraine to fight instead. Now some two million Ukrainians are dead and their society is wrecked, all because NATO wanted to use them as a battering ram to weaken Russia so they could balkanise it and steal its resources. They were never supposed to win, just to be sacrificed for a geopolitical goal. Thankfully, Putin, who while not a ‘nice guy’ is also not a demon, has the patience of a Buddhist monk, and has resisted every provocation meant to cause him to over-react so a wider war could be justified.

The mass formation has now shifted its focus to threats against Israel and the consequent was againtst Iran. Israel has been conducting an obvious genocide for two and a half years, and has attacked multiple neighbours as well, but somehow it’s seen as a victim, and all attempts to defend the real victims are seen as anti-semitic, when really they’re merely anti-zionist. Zionism is a murderous totalitarian ideology separate from the religion of Judaism. For instance, there are more Christian zionists than all the Jews in the entire world. Iran has been mercilessly bombed despite posing no real threat to its aggressors, and the impact of the war on the global economy will be catastrophic, but those in the grip of mass formation are radically blind to all of it.

The only real solution is to restore genuine interpersonal connection, in order to cutail the epidemic of loneliness and meaninglessness that has created fertile ground for mass formation. Instead the world seem poised to convert oppressive over-bureaucratisation to even more oppressive technocracy and technofeudalism, with divide and rule as a major strategy to weaken opposition by preventing people from unifying against the idea of rule by algorithm for the benefit of the super-rich. This appears to be an example of hubris writ large though, and therefore destined to fail. The most likely scenario is war, leading to the collapse of existing socioeconomic complexity and societal scale. Given that overly large scale – a delarture from human scale – is a substantial contributing factor to the development of mass formations, this may eventually lead, in the long term, to distinct societies less prone to this form of collective madness.

Art Berman is a superb energy analyst, and Nate Hagens is an excellent big picture person. This interview is highly recommended in its entirety. This is a deep dive into much more than the just the consequences of the war in the Gulf, which they rightly describe as the biggest mistake in human history (worse than Napoleon invading Russia as they describe it). Exports through Hormuz are down by 21million barrels of oil a day, or roughly the entire consumption of the United States. About 10 million barrels a day are getting out by other means, but a huge deficit remains. About 11% of global supply is offline. Their estimate is that this oil shock will be approximately 100 times as bad as the oil shock of the 1970s, largely due to the abrupt nature of the shut off. The consequences have not yet been felt in the imperial centre as they already have been in the global periphery, but they are rapidly approaching. The strategic reserves are being run down and may be gone by July. When they’re fully depleted, the economic train will hit the buffers at high speed.

Many tankers remain trapped in the Persian Gulf. If the strait were to open tomorrow, it would take 2-3 months just to clear the queue to leave the strait, after mines have been cleared, which will take time, and once insurers are again confident enough to cover transits. This will be a long term process. Tankers would then have to reposition themselves around the world for the oil transport business to resume, which will also take a considerable amount of time for ships moving at approximately the rate of a bicycle. Production which has been shut in would have to be reopened, but this isn’t amatter of flicking a switch. It’s a process, and production may never return to the previous level due to damage to the fields in the interim. In the best case scenario, extreme disruption would last all year and into the next, but the best case scenario is unlikely. Continued imperial military build up in the gulf suggests that the war is by no means over, and restarting it would result in further catastrophic damage to energy infrastructure in retaliation, given that the gulf monarchies are complicit in the attack on Iran.

The futures market is being manipulated in order to keep the oil price down, but the spot market represents the physical reality, where prices are soaring. Once reserves are depleted, the two will converge at the spot price in what will amount to a major shock. Refineries need to be profitable, and if they must pay much more for inputs, then the prices for refined products will inevitably skyrocket as well. Refinery throughput may also be throttled back. This will affect the US to a great extent, since almost none of the built environment was designed with walking or cycling in mind, and public transport is largely lacking. The car dependency is going to bite people in the behind. Other places may be more heavily impacted in terms of price or availability of supply, but if they’re more compact, more walkable, or well equipped with public transport, the impact on people’s daily lives may be less severe in some ways.

The US is currently exporting its own strategic reserves of long chain hydrocarbons, which are the critical input for the production of diesel, jet fuel, and bunker fuel. While it remains a net exporter of energy overall, what it exports is short chain hydrocarbons, while it’s an importer of long chains. Its refineries absolutely require those long chain hydrocarbons, as do almost everyone else’s refineries. This is where the supply crunch will really bite, given how absolutely essential diesel is to modernity. Different form of energy are not interchangeable. One cannot simply substitute one for another in many processes. Each has its own destination in complex supply chains, and many if those supply chains are about to be substantially, and perhaps fatally, disrupted. Diesel is the lifeblood of all modern economies, required for trucks, ships, trains, mining equipment and agricultural machinery without it a great deal of activity will grind to a halt. Demand for diesel is inelastic, so insanely high prices can be expected.

Good luck with the electrification agenda if mining ceases to be possible. In addition say good-bye to many forms of so-called renewables, which are actually dependent on fossil fuels, concrete, rebar, and rare earths. The lifespan of wind and solar projects is limited, and they’re unlikely to be able to be replaced at end of life. In addition, the energy they produce is non-dispatchable, and so cannot be relied upon for supply, and these installations cannot provide for the essentials of grid stability – frequency control, voltage control, reactive power, blackstart etc. Steel, plastic, cement and ammonia are the four pillars of modern societies, and all are dependent on oil supply.

Energy security will now be front and centre of all countries minds, so as soon as possible they’ll be accelerating exploration and drilling, and wanting to build reserves. New fields tend to be very small compared to the giant fields found decades ago, upon which the world still largely depends. Exploration and drilling are very costly upfront in energy terms, now that the easy to reach supplies have already been depleted. The regions now being explored therefore have a lower EROEI (energy returned over energy invested). The combination of larger amount of energy required for energy production, higher demand due to the attempt to build reserves, and much lower supply overall, is a recipe for extremely high prices, to the point where ordinary people may be priced out of the market entirely. High prices do not necessarily result in more production if there are few fields left to be found, and the technology is already at a level where most useful sites have already been discovered. Even if new fields are found, it would take years to develop them for production, especially in infrastructure-poor regions like the arctic, so the upfront energy investment would take years to pay off while the energy crunch would continue. This will inevitably amount to a major acceleration of the great simplification of society, given that socioeconomic complexity is a function of energy surplus.

Above ground factors will be more determinative for outcomes than the underlying geology. Human reactions, and typically over-reactions, to predicaments such as this drive circumstances in a feedback loop. Humans fight like cats in a sack when the economic pie is shrinking. The psychology of contraction set in, meaning that the dark side of human nature is in the ascendancy – suspicion, envy, possessiveness, exclusion, risk avoidance, blame – and this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy to the downside. Trust is rapidly lost, and trust is what hold societies together. Without it, effective organisation scale decreases dramatically, leading to the break up of political aggregations, often violently, as an ‘us vs them’ mentality sets in. Globalisation is over, and with it will go the complex supply chains developed over decades. Confidence in the Gulf as a place to do business has been lost, and confidence takes a very long time to rebuild. In the meantime, a risk premium will be applied to the region as a whole, meaning even higher prices.

People naturally want a better world, but are generally unprepared, or unable, to pay for it, or to reduce their expectations in line with what reality can hope to deliver. The era of papering over problems with debt is coming to an end, since it isn’t possible to print commodities as one can with currency. Globalisation was about reaching out spatially to exploit the resources of the whole world, while debt was stealing from the future. Peter Turchin’s work is important for understanding how this situation developed. At small scale supluses can be looted from individuals or villages. At large scale they can be looted from whole societies through imperial conquest. As Turchin says, agriculture provides the calories, weapons set the pace, bureaucracy turns energy and war into lasting power, and religion made it easier for people to accept. Looting through warfare has been the driver of growth for centuries.

Humans cooperate within what they perceive to be their tribe, but compete ruthlessly for resources with other tribes, as humanity as a whole is driven by the maximum power principle – groups that burn through resources fastest outcompete and take over those that conserve. This has been referred to as the inevitable collision between a genetic imperative and thermodynamic reality – the thermogene collision. The coming future will involve much less energy density, and likely many fewer people, given that the fertiliser shortage, aggravated by high diesel prices, is set to reverse the green revolution. Humanity will be functioning in smaller numbers, at smaller scale, and in simpler societies after the cascading system failure that’s rapidly approaching. Large scale creates terrible predicaments for humanity as a whole, even as, driven by a fossil fuel inheritance, it has elevated subsets of people beyond the dreams of avarice. The future will operate more closely to human scale, albeit at a much lower level of material prosperity. This future belongs to the adaptable.

The stock markets around the world have been reaching for the sky since the beginning of the war. This is a classic blow-off top, and these always end in tears, but market participants seem to be in the grip of FOMO (fear of missing out) and ignoring the obvious tsunami of inevitable negative consequences of the war for the global economy. They’re anticipating massive money printing, which is definitely underway already and destined to go much further, and which is acting as market jet fuel for the time being. They’re also betting extremely heavily on the AI race, despite obvious signs of a bubble grounded in serious fraud. None of this will end well.

If AI were to somehow succeed in meeting its hype, there would be massive layoffs, leaving the unemployed far too poor to buy the products created. There would also cease to be a pipeline to senior level jobs in various sectors, as AI would replace the junior levels, leaving no humans to gain necessary experience. This would destroy many professions. Data centres would come to consume vast quantities of energy and cooling water, depriving the population of access to critical resources and further impoverishing them. Energy supply is about to be sharply curtailed in any case, and many data centres have been built in quite arid regions, so commandeering the available resources for a huge data centre, and they are mind-bogglingly large, could leave whole areas uninhabitable.

However, it’s highly unlikely that this scenario will play out to its logical conclusion. The AI bubble is going to burst. The circular investment strategy between companies is an obvious fraud and will be revealed as such. AI is unreliable. It halucinates, and does so confidently enough to fool people. It’s halucinations then become part of the training data it scrapes from the internet, so errors compound over time. People are treating it as infallible, almost godlike, when it’s anything but that. It can induce psychosis in people by leading them down pointless rabbit holes as it encourages their every wild idea. People are even falling in love with their AI chatbots. The influence is far from positive.

The earlier bubbles in railways, radio, the internet etc ruined the early investors, but left behind useful infrastructure that became the foundation for many successful businesses. Those technologies did become the future. This will not happen with AI. The gargantuan number of GPUs involved have a limited lifespan. They would need to be continually replaced, but there’s no established business case that would justify the cost. There isn’t even the concept of a viable plan. Chances are there won’t be sufficient energy either, given the extent if disruption and destruction in the Gulf, and horrendous consequences in store for the global economy as a result. Global energy supply was already on the verge of decline before the war, and that decline will now be substantially accelerated. Building out extreme energy hog infrastructure on top of the contractionary hardships already baked in will go over like a lead balloon. The control grid meant to prevent ordinary people from reacting to this as they normally would is not yet in place, and is behind schedule.

The future will be one of massive demand destruction, which is how all debt cycles and bubbles end. That which cannot continue will not. There is no such thing as a new permanently high plateau, as Irving Fisher mistakenly believed in 1929 at the peak of the market, right before the collapse into the Great Depression. Depressions are deflationary, meaning the money supply contracts relative to available goods and services, and this drives a sharp contraction in the real economy. This doesn’t necessarily mean that prices will fall though. It means that whatever the nominal price, affordability will be much worse in real terms. Some prices will likely fall as people try to unload goods to raise money for essentials, but the price of essentials will go through the roof, even as people’s purchasing power will be evaporating. The credit that constitutes the vast majority of the money supply is going to disappear, and the remainder will be competing desperately for food, fuel, and other necessities. Given how far we have to fall from our lofty economic perch, this is a recipe for chaos.

Of course the global elites who are currently driving the markets to the moon are going to try to implement their control grid, which has been discussed here in other posts. Doing so will require a huge increase in complexity, but socioeconomic compexity is a function of surplus energy, and that is obviously going to be problematic. Attempts at extreme centralisation have never worked in the past, other than temporarily, and this is the most extreme attempt ever made, by far. The coming chaos caused by the consequences of the war could easily take on an uncontrollable life of its own, upsetting the delusions of grandeur of our arrogant and over-confident elites. Brace for impact.

Alistair Crooke is a former diplomat with deep ties to West Asia (ie the Middle East), and a fluent Arabic speaker married to a fluent Hebrew speaker. His analysis of the situation is always worth your time. It appears that the war with Iran is about to resume, as the US has moved a large quantity of military assets into the region, and Trump is behaving even more belligerently than usual. He says that Iran has not been punished enough for what he supposes they’ve done to others over the last 47 years, only what he think they’ve done is complete fantasy. Trump is obsessed with winning at all costs, and is psychologically incapable of backing down, no matter the odds against him. He believed that Iran could be handled like Venezuela, but now he’s trapped in a web of his own making. The Iranian people are more united than ever, especially the young, who are now filled with revolutionary fervour. For them this has been a form of rebirth of their civilisation, and they’re determined to escape once and for all from the prison of sanctions imposed on them for decades by their tormentors. They intend to drive the US from the Gulf region.

The greatest sponsor of violence against its neighbours has actually been Israel, and Israel’s goal in this war is the utter destruction of Iran, as it’s already destroyed Gaza and is now destroying southern Lebanon. It believes that security for itself can only be achieved by rendering all its neighbours radically and permenently insecure. It will keep undermining peace talks, and assassinating negotiators where possible, in order to keep the war going and keep the US engaged in it. The fractures in society are wide and growing though, and the IDF, undertanding its own limitations, is sounding the alarm about being over-extended.

The US is losing badly, as it’s unprepared for modern assymmetric warfare. Even staunch warmongers like Robert Kagan, writing in The Atlantic, are beginning to acknowledge the strategic defeat.

America specialises in over-complicated and expensive equipment, designed primarily with the profits of the military industrial complex in mind. Much of it is now obsolete in the era of missile and drone warfare. Aircraft carriers in particular are now just very expensive sitting ducks. A swarm of cheap drones could easily put one out of action just by damaging the flight deck, and a well placed missile could sink one. Their vulnerability means that they can’t get close to their intended target, meaning the distance is great enough that multiple refuelings of the fighter jets would be necessary for them to reach far enough to engage. The US is also running very low on inventories of its own missiles and interceptors. Restarting the war would be a disaster for all concerned, but it appears to be inevitable.

Already the consequences of the war will amount to a global disaster of epic proportions due to the loss of energy supplies and the imminent collapse of many other supply chains, notably for fertiliser. The longer the hostilities go on, the deeper the resulting global economic depression will be. Iran can wait it out, being largely self-sufficient and committed to fight to the end, but the US and Israel cannot. The US will shortly be experiencing an unprecedented price shock for fuel that will have a huge impact domestically, with political consequences. Israel’s economy has been ravaged by physical destruction, but also by emigration, and by reservists being kept from their jobs for prolonged periods.

Israel is in deep trouble. Civil war may be the result. In David Ben Gurion’s time, he made it clear that Israel would only be able to have a reserve army, and would need to remain within defensible borders. This has since been forgotten, and Israel has now been fighting with all its neighbours in an attempt to take posession of most of the the region for itself, as the Greater Israel project. The blue bars on the Israeli flag represent the Nile and the Euphrates, indicating the land claimed. Israeli soldiers wear patches with Greater Israel outlined on their uniforms. This would include all of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and portions of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Thinking that this might be possible is delusional.

Israel is in the grip of extreme messianic bloodlust, with the vast majority of the population supporting the extermination of their perceived enemies. The current inhabitants of the target countries are considered to be subhuman, as many flavours of Amalek, worthy only of being destroyed in their entirety. The zionists genuinely believe that others possess only two thirds of a soul, and that only they, as the ‘chosen people’, are fully human. As such they consider themselves above the law, and consider it permissible to do anything they like to their prisoners. Torture is common, and mass execution of prisoners is coming. This kind of collective taking leave of the senses damages the soul of a nation over the long term.

Iran will be controlling traffic through the Strait of Hormuz for the long haul, and is likely to become a great power in the region. If the war is restarted, much if the infrastructure of the Gulf countries is likely to be destroyed, rendering the region uninhabitable if the desalination plants are taken out. They are complicit due to hosting American bases and allowing their airspace to be used for attacks. Iran can hold hostage not only surface traffic, but also the numerous undersea cables that run through the area. It holds all the cards.

This post is somewhat unusual, since I don’t entirely agree with the commentator. He does, however, provide very important information on the scale of the coming financial totalitarianism. I’m not personally a fan of bitcoin, although I acknowledge that it does have some significant uses, such as transferring purchasing power held outside the financial system across international borders. Precious metals are generally a much better bet for purchasing power outside of the system, but carrying them around internationally is very risky. To my mind, bitcoin was designed as a way to get people used to digital currencies backed by nothing at all. Contrast that with gold, which has been money for thousands of years, and which has no dependence on electricity or the internet, both of which could be problematic in the future.

Of course gold isn’t necessarily a panacea either. Too many people who hold gold also have debt, have no emergency cash on hand, and no control over the essentials of their own existence. All of those things shouldbe addressed first, before buying gold. Gold purchases are tracked, and gold will very likely be confiscated in the coming economic depression, as it was in the last one. If the powers that be know where it is, that becomes easier. In addition, using gold for its purchsing power during times when it’s become illegal to own it means dealing in black markets, and black marketeers might just follow you home to see if there’s any more where that came from. Using such a concentrated store of value becomes dangerous, and the value is inversely proportionate to the desperation of the seller. The lesson is to do your best to make sure you’re never forced to sell at distressed prices. This is why those others factors should be addressed first, because having done so you’d be far less likely to end up desperate. Gold is something that should ideally be put away until the situation stabilises, when it will be worth its full purchasing power in terms of real goods. This might take quite some time. Silver may well be a better bet, as it’s a less concentrated store of value.

The problem, for which purchasing power outside of the system is a potential solution, is that the financial system is at the end of a major debt cycle, and at times like these central authorities attempt to concentrate all the wealth they can get their hands on in their own hands. The wealth concentration typical of the peak of a bubble, which is already almost unbearable for the masses, gets significantly worse once the rich buy up everyone else’s assets at distressed prices once people are sufficiently desperate to sell. The powers that be are currently engineering exactly the circumstances that will lead to that level of desperation. The legal framework for this, focusing on Europe as it leads the way, is the topic of the headline video.

Clips from the World Economic Forum meeting make it clear that the intentions are to create a global asset register and to confiscate purchasing power through taxation. The asset register is intended to make it clear who owns what, where it is, and what money is being spent on. This is of course a prelude to an involuntary change of ownership over time. Assets are to be tokenised, and can then be traded fractionally. Misbehave (by government standards) and you can be fined a percentage of your home, with no right of appeal. Ownership becomes a conditional privilege, not a right, and the conditions will be set (unaccountably and non-transparently) by those at the top of the financial food chain, in order to implement their own agenda of continued control. Money will no longer be money, but will become glorified food stamps, with constraints on what can be purchased and also where, since digital currency will be fully programmable. Most people will end up on universal basic income (UBI) once the coming economic depression devastates the job market, and this is intended to be held at subsistence level, with no ability to save. The goal is total dependence on government for the majority of the population, because if one’s continued existence depends on government, obedience to the whims of the masters is far more likely. Say good-bye to privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of action etc.

The ongoing wars are one way to generate desperation, as they’re devastating the energy supply. On the way up, energy supply and GDP are extremely closely correlated, but on the way down, a substantial contraction in the energy supply will have an outsized impact due to the effect of fractured supply chains. The war has already reduced supply, both through disruption of transport and destruction of infrastructure. The latter guarantees that the reduction in energy supply will last for years, and may well be permanent. The inevitable price shock will price many people out of the market entirely. This is why the proposed 15 minute cities mean 15 minutes by foot. Sadly another rationale for war is getting rid of many military age males who might otherwise ’cause trouble’. Many countries are already talking seriously about conscription, especially in Europe where Russia is constantly, and erroneously, demonised as an invasion threat. Fewer mouths to feed in a depression is definitely a goal of the elites.

Other means to generate desperation are financial. Property taxes (ie rates) are skyrocketing, as is the cost of insurance, and the cost of living in general. Increasingly people on fixed incomes can no longer afford to live in their homes, even if the home is fully paid off. The next step is capital gains tax on unrealised gains, which can be applied even to a primary residence. Capital appreciation can be taxed even when the asset has not been sold in order to realise the gain. This will likely force assets, including homes, to be sold to pay the tax bill. This has already passed in the Netherlands, and will spread throughout Europe. Canada is also talking about introducing it. Red-zoning is another means of destroying value in order to force home sales. All governments have to do is to declare an area too risky to live in, and it becomes impossible to sell, rent, renovate, or insure a property, which of course collapses its value. Risks could be real (eg earthquakes, volcanos, floods etc) or imagined (eg sea level rise). The ability to mitigate or protect against the risk may not be taken into account.

One of the nastiest control mechanisms will be famine, which is inevitable due to the impact on fertiliser supplies, but will be unevenly distributed. 70% of American farmers cannot afford fertiliser, and may not be able to afford fuel soon either. The planting window is being missed by many, and those who do plant may find yields well down, or may not be able to afford to harvest. Food distribution also relies very heavily on diesel, and diesel will be in very short supply worldwide. In addition, fresh water may well be a problem in some places. If the war in the Gulf results in the destruction of desalination plants, millions in the region could die of thirst quite quickly. The American west is also short of water, with river flows drastically reduced and reservoirs at very low levels.

A very sharp contraction is coming, leading quickly to an economic depression. The best way forward is to be as independent of government as possible for as long as possible, and to wrap your head around the idea of living as simply as you can. The less leverage they have over you, the less chance they have to compell you to comply. Getting your expectations in line with what a curtailed reality can hope to deliver is important, because the right mindset is half the battle. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst. The future belongs to the adaptable.

One major pillar of the coming digital financial system is tokenisation of assets. The idea is to centralise control of assets on a single ledger. Each asset would have a digital twin which would be ‘owned’ fractionally, but ‘ownership’ would not longer be a solid property right. The actual asset itself would be centrally owned, and managed non-transparantly and unaccountably, by the Epstein class. The person ‘owning’ a portion of the digital twin could get a dividend from their ‘investment’, but that would be conditional on whether or not the rules set by the actual owners were followed. Those rules could be anything, and they could change over time without warning. In the video above, Christian goes through a number of potential examples. For instance, compliance with various factors could be enforced, such carbon footprints, vaccination status, optimum health as defined arbitrarily, ESG score, a tidy neighbourhood, meat consumption limits, limits of free speech and freedom of association etc etc.

This approach is the Great Reset combined with the Great Taking. The intention is to impose the most concentrated form of global asets ownership in human history. The effect will also be to render illiquid assets, such as real estate, into liquid assets that can be traded fractionally and instantaneously. This allows a wider range of assets to function as collateral for the enormous pile of bad debts accumulated under casino capitalism. Extreme centralisation projects have a poor track record though, and this one would increase complexity by orders of magnitude at a time when the energy necessary to maintain socioeconomic complexity is unlikely to be sufficiently available at any price. This proposed system is also likely insufficient to collateralise enough of the bad debts.

It comes across as a ‘Hail Mary pass’ by elites desperate to avoid the consequences of their actions, which would normally be to be blamed (probably violently) by the rest of the population for the economic depression that their actions have caused and are continuing to accelerate. If they manage to push it through, they may well be unable to maintain it for long under the conditions of chaos that their actions are rapidly leading us towards. Humanity has never faced an energy crisis like the one that’s coming. It’s impossible to predict how this will play out, other than in the broadest terms. Chaos and hardship are coming, but the actual impact will vary significantly with location. People would be well advised to look into what their local reality might look like in the absence of imports and exports once supply chains are fully impacted.