There are many factors critical for the functioning of the global system, and the world has been approaching non-negotiable limits in several of them – energy, finance, fresh water, fertile soil etc – but what is happening now is acting as a tremendous accelerant. The result will be the equivalent of the global economy hitting a brick wall at 200 miles an hour. The key factor is energy in the form of oil – the life blood of the economy – which is now very heavily impacted by the war in the Gulf. Energy, or the lack thereof, will be the driver of every other impact, because energy is the capacity to do work.

A critical factor with regard to energy is energy returned over energy invested (EROEI). In the early days of the oil industry, one could expect a hundred units of energy for every one used in the process, for an EROEI of a hundred. Now even for the best energy sources the value is a small fraction of that, and alternative sources are typically lower still. The ability to create, or even maintain socioeconomic complexity is a function of surplus energy available to society, and at a low EROEI that surplus (above and beyond what has to be reinvested in energy production) is small and shrinking. Every society’s level of complexity rests on a minimum EROEI, and our society was flirting with that lower limit before the crisis in the Gulf erupted. Now the production level, which had been flat to falling since production peaked in 2018, has been cut drastically and all at once. Oil, LNG and refined products are all affected, and this will destroy a wide variety of global supply chains in unpredictable ways, given the insane level of supply chain complexity that defies accurate modelling.

A deal to end the war any time soon is very unlikely, as all parties are intransigent. Iran has established critical leverage that it isn’t going to give up voluntarily, and it can’t be forced to either, given how well defended the area is. Israel is determined to keep the war going until Iran is completely destroyed, and it will undermine any attempt at peace with false flag attacks if necessary. It can drag the US back to war to defend it at any time, considering the Israel-first attitude of virtually the entire Congress. The US is agreement incapable, because the administration is utterly corrupt, about as ill-informed as possible, and completely incompetent. Trump is a pathological liar whose words are merely to manipulate markets for the benefit of his friends. He repudiates every supposed deal he makes on a whim, and so can never be trusted. His ‘negotiators’ are ill-informed grifters who are also arch zionists and can also never be trusted. The US cannot, however, return to war more than very temporarily, due to their lack of armaments. It has used up a majority if its missiles and interceptors in Iran and Ukraine. The bloated and corrupt military industrial complex lacks the surge capacity to produce more in the relevant timeframe, and what it does produce is over-priced, not particularly effective, and often obsolete before it comes off the production line. This means the war will eventually end due to lack of capacity rather than a deal, and the postwar period will be chaotic.

What is predictable is that a serious famine is coming, not just due to the lack of energy for farming and distribution. But also due to the lack of fertiliser, which is also heavily impacted by the war. Approximately half of the nitrogen in living bodies comes from the artificial fixation of nitrogen through the Haber-Bosch process, using natural gas. Doing this allowed humanity to remove the nitrogen limit, which had been the limiting factor under Liebig’s law of the minimum. The result was the Green Revolution of the 1960s that led to a doubling of the human population in just a few decades. That process will now go into reverse, with catastrophic consequences for the food supply and the size of human population. The extremely rapid rate of change leaves no time for adaptation. A billion people could starve by the end of the year.

In addition to the looming energy crisis, the global financial system is at the end of a major debt cycle, meaning that some kind of reset is inevitable. The reset that the global elite have in mind is entirely digital. They want programmable money in order to be able to control the population precisely, and at the level of the individual, because they know what an uncontrolled population will otherwise do to them. There are many dependencies involved in doing this, energy and fresh water being major ones. Internet is another, and Iran has said it will take control of the undersea cables running through the strait of Hormuz. If conflict resumes, it could destroy them.

Enormous data centres are being constructed, and they will consume as much energy, and cooling water, as large cities. Considering that many are being built in arid regions and where electricity is already expensive, operation may not be possible for long even if the local population is entirely deprived of what they need to survive there. Owners are attempting to install on-site generation, but this takes time, capital, and fuel availability. The data centres are so unpopular that owners are already concerned that people might take matters into their own hands and destroy them with drones, so they want the buildings defended militarily. The entire AI industry is in a financial bubble of epic proportions, and even designating it as a matter of national security and trying to bail it out may not work.

The planned digital programmable money could take the form of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) comtrolled by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) or could be introduced as private sector stablecoins. Much if the world has chosen the former route and the US has chosen the latter. The two factions are now in competition for dominance over global finance. The US is attempting to pitch its stablecoins to the global population at the retail level, which would render currencies other than the dollar irrelevant, and would create a situation where the global population would be supporting America’s gargantuan national debt. However, both approaches depend on not merely maintaining socioeconomic complexity, but increasing it substantially, and the ability to do so depends on the availability of sufficient energy at a high enough EROEI. This dependency will ultimately not be met, meaning that these plans will fail at some point. As many people as possible need to remain independent enough of the planned digital gulag to accelerate its failure, but remaining independent will likely come with a hefty price in terms of exclusion from society. The further the plans get before failure, the harder it will be to remain independent.

The unpredictable factors are the timing of the failure, and the extent of the damage that will have occurred in the attempt. If the war ended tomorrow, and the process of restoring global energy flows resumed immediately, the damage in many places would still be catastrophic. Restoring flows is no simple matter. Queues out of the Gulf must be cleared and shut in production restarted, both of which are time comsuming processes. Neither production nor transport may ever return to their previous levels, as fields will have been damaged and ongoing risk perception will raise the costs of doing business in the Gulf substantially. As global flows are very unlikely to be restored at any level any time soon, the damage to global supply chains will continue, and the human cost will increase exponentially.

Given that one of the goals of the global elites is population reduction, they will be successful on this one parameter, but at huge cost to themselves as well as to everyone else. They fail to understand that their own prosperity is completely dependent on the layers of the societal pyramid beneath them, from which they cream off the surpluses that have made them wealthy. It takes energy to push something ‘uphill’ against its concentration gradient, and wealth is no exception. The result will be a collapse of modern living standards for all, destitution for many, and a failure to survive at all for many more. Elites will be rightly blamed for this, and are going to find their continued existence uncomfortable and probably short. Chaos will reign for a while, until some form of order can be restored, but that will depend on rebuilding trust. As trust determines organisational scale, and trust rebuilds very slowly, order at scale will take a long time to resurrect. People need to be as resilient as possible, and absolutely must get their expectations in line with what reality can hope to deliver. The necessary adaptation must come from the bottom up, as all top down initiatives are very likely to be ill-informed and counter-productive. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

The US is behaving as many declining empires have done before – over-reaching in multiple military adventures in a vain attempt to prevent the rise of competitors and regain past supremacy. It wants full spectrum dominance, and if it can’t have that then it will wreck everything for everyone and hope to be the last man standing. The US has engaged primarily in economic warfare for a long time, given that those are far more popular at home than kinetic warfare. It’s dominant position in global finance has allowed to to weaponise the reserve currency, sanctioning countries that do not sufficiently subordinate themselves to rules devised by the US for its own benefit. They plan to extend this dominance greatly through the issuance of stablcoins, as discussed in the last post here.

In addition to financial repression, the US is now attempting to blockade its rivals, with a view to preventing them from trading. It has already done this with Venezuela, and now Iran. Its European vassal states are busy turning the Baltic Sea into a NATO lake so as to blockade Russia. The Iran blockade also targets Asia, as many Asian countries rely on energy impkrts from the Gulf. The ultimate target is China, which is the rising power the US most wants to weaken. Not only are vessels bound for China being disrupted, but the US is also bombing aspects of the belt and road initiative and pipelines, as these are meant to bypass the shipping lanes that the US is attempting to control. These include not only Hormuz, but also the Strait of Malacca, the Taiwan Strait and others. Malacca is particularly vital, and the US is working on a deal with Indonesia to establish a military presence there. The US marine corps has essentially been forged into an anti-shipping force.

There was recently a meeting between the Trump and Xi, but this achieved virtually nothing. China undertands the position of the US, and even warned Trump about the danger of falling into Thucydides Trap, where a declining power beats itself to death against a rising power. America doesn’t engage in real diplomacy. It uses performative meetings as a distraction, or as cover for a surprise attack, but never engages in any informed or realistic compromise. It also never recognises any other parties interests as valid. Other countries may send trained and experienced diplomats with extensive documentation to talks, but the US sends unqualified, inexperienced, and biased grifters like Kushner and Witkoff. China, Russia, and Iran will be polite to them, but will not take them seriously.

The US knows that its window for attempting to reassert primacy is short, so it’s not going to curtail its efforts at destruction and destabilisation, but it does want to manage the process by not pushing so hard that the rest of the world unites to defeat it. It wants to comtinue fighting a global dirty war against everyone else. It wants to create energy dependency on its supplies in order to have leverage over more countries, particularly in Asia, so they can be vassalised as Europe has already been. Leverage could potentially be used to force these countries to act against their own interests, for instance cutting trade with China. The US wants its adversaries fighting each other, and it wants its vassals to fight proxy wars on its behalf. Needless to say, it places no value on the lives of the outsiders used in this way. The Gulf monarchies have already discovered that hosting an American presence and allowing the US to use their airspace in the conflict with Iran has not protected them, but has made them a target. They’ve paid a heavy price in destroyed infrastructure, and may yet pay an even higher one. Two million Ukrainians have already died fighting NATO’s war against Russia, and western Europeans will likely be next. Similarly, the US wants Japan, South Korea, the Phillippines, Taiwan and possibly Australia to sacrifice themselves against China at some point.

America’s incestuous relationship with Israel is particularly harmful to any prospect for world peace. Israel is at war with all its neighbours, and insists that it can only feel safe if none of its neighbours ever can. It’s goading the US into ever more violence. If there were ever a peace settlement, Israel could destroy it at any time with a false flag event, or an overt attack that would draw the US in deeper to protect it. Virtually the entire US government appears to have an Israel first attitude, thanks to the huge bribes Israel pays to each of them. Israel has morphed into a barbaric apartheid state determined to engage in genocide in service of its greater Israel project, but this appalling behaviour is rarely mentioned in the supine American media.

The war in the Gulf is effectively disarming the US, and likely accelerating its bankruptcy. Israel is determined to force hostilities to continue until Iran is completely destroyed, but this may not be possible given the lack of armaments. The US military industrial complex is bloated, corrupt, slow, over-priced, and produces weaponry that may already be obsolete once manufactured. Trump has delusions of grandeur regarding golden domes and fancy new planes and ships, but war has moved on. None of those would be effective in the era of drones and hypersonic missiles. The delusions are simply a characteristic of late stage empire.

An epic financial battle is taking place behind the scenes over control of the global financial system. The end of a major debt cycle has been reached, making a reset inevitable. The battle is over what form that reset takes and who becomes the dominant player. There has been growing public awareness of the concept of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and consequent pushback as people begin to realise what living with programmable currency would be like. There would be no privacy. Every spending decision would be subject to approval based on factors such as carbon footprint or compliance with goverment dictats, and the digital money could be programmed to only work in certain areas. People could easily be financially geofenced. The surveillance and control would be all encompassing. People are less familiar with stablecoins, but these have all the disadvantages of CBDCs, but are even less transparent or accountable since they are private sector.

The US is taking the stablecoin route, and trying to make an end run around the faction pushing CBDCs by targeting retail usage directly. Trump has been bragging that they will cement American dominance of global finance. The plan is to maintain the reserve currency status of the US dollar while establishing a permanent market for US debt, given that stablecoins are backed by ownership of US treasuries. The US currently dominates the digital currency market to the tune of 98-99%, and other countries are waking up to the fact that they could be about to lose monetary sovereignty. American stablecoins are a trojan horse for digital dollarisation. If the US succeeds in capturing the global retail market for digital currency, other currencies would become irrelevant. Europe has passed MiCA legislation to regulate stablecoins, which Circle (USDC) has complied with and Tether (USDT) has not.

The UK is warning of risks associated with a potential run on a stablecoin. When Silicon Valley Bank failed, there was a brief decoupling of USDC (ie Circle) from the dollar, and there’s a concern that this may happen again. Under the Genius Act, a seven day redemption period is allowed during periods of market stress. In contrast in the UK settlement is on demand, by the end of a business day. Under conditions of stress where holders of American stablecoins would be unable to redeem quickly, they would have to route through an exchange, but if the exchange were also experiencing liqudity problems then there may be a decoupling. Holders may then panic and dump their holdings on to the secondary market. Capital would flood overwhelmingly into better regulated sectors. Weak American regulation of stablecoins creates systemic risk.

The UK seeks to be a crypto hub and remain a world leading financial centre, so it’s developing regulations meant to inspire confidence. They naturally want sterling to lie at the heart of it. If American stablecoins grow in dominance, transactions would bypass SWIFT, sterling, and UK clearing banks. Several other western countries are now developing their own stablecoins backed by their own currencies, but they may be too late to challenge American dominance. Bigger challenges come from China, with the digital yuan, and the cross-border CBDC mBridge system. Countries will be forced to take a side as digital systems compete for users, and geopolitical factions compete for dominance.

Decades ago, at roughly the same time as Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, ownership of securities was altered, with the effect of depriving investors in financial assets of their direct ownership rights and confering instead a beneficial interest under trust law. The actual legal ownership resides with the Depository Trust Company (DTC), which legally owns $100trillion of securities and keeps track of which investors are associated with which financial assets. DTC is part of the Federal Reserve system, and was initially run by a CIA operative. This is what allowed for the creation of today’s quadrillion dollar derivatives complex, the mortgage backed securities debacle and other financial ‘creativity’, where creativity essentially means fraud. Securities can be used without the knowledge of the beneficial owner. In a crisis, these assets could be confiscated and used to prop up failing financial institutions, and a crisis is coming. Casino capitalism is reaching its maximum extent and a crash is inevitable at some point. Considering the consequences to come from the war in the Gulf, that crash might not be too far off.

Japan is the largest holder of US treasuries, but this situation is unlikely to continue. For a very long time, Japan’s own bonds paid almost nothing in yield, so investors sought higher yields elsewhere, especially in the US. Now however, Japan is being forced to defend the yen, and their own interest rates are rising. This dynamic is very likely to continue, as the oil shock will force up prices and the government will want to stimulate the economy. More and more Japanese investors are likely to choose to bring their money home to invest in their own bond market, where they would be free of currency risk. The yen carrytrade could unwind chaotically as well.

Bond markets are in trouble in many countries, as yields are rising to reflect increased risk. The US is in particular trouble due to its $40trillion of debt. The yield on the 30 year is the highest since 2007, but in 2007, the debt was only $8trillion. The interest bill already exceeds the ridiculously high defence expenditure, and yields will continue to rise with risk. The US will also be competing for capital with the corporate bond market. At some point the US will enter a doom loop, with interest skyrocketing while economic growth collapses. That point might not be far off.

This is of course why the US is pushing stablecoins at the global retail level. Stablecoins are backed with US treasuries, so if enough people could be convinced to covert to those, there would be captive demand for treasuries that would allow the US to support its huge debt. Stablecoins depend on electricity and internet though, and those might not be consistently available in so many places in the future.

It’s increasingly likely that investors will switch to gold as the reserve asset, when trust in US sovereign debt has fully evaporated.

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.