The strait of Hormuz is partially open, but only for ships prepared to follow the new rules, and not for ships from hostile nations. If Israel continues its muder and destruction spree in the Lebanon, then even this level of passage will stop. Threats from both Israel and the US have not stopped, and threats are antithetical to real negotiations. Israel has said it will continue the slaughter. On the first day at the planned negotiations in Switzerland, Trump threated to assassinate the Iranian negotiation team before they could even leave the country if they didn’t agree to his demands. The Iranian team was about to leave, but the Saudi foreign minister told the Pakistanis not to let them leave, and that Saudi Arabia and Qatar would guarantee the return of the frozen Iranian assets themselves. Israel intended to assassinate the Pakistani mediation team, but was told in no uncertain terms that Israel would be erased from the map if it tried. None of this bodes well for a negotiated settlement.

Trump is panicking because he’s finally realised the situation with the global oil market, and that a global depression is coming, but the realisation has come too late to prevent a major crisis. When he panics he becomes even less able to behave like an adult, much less a leader. No one takes him seriously anymore, and the Iranians consult psychologists used to dealing with the mentally ill before engaging with what he says. The US has about two weeks of reserves left, and the crunch point for a price spike will be no later than the end of August. This will be political poison for Trump right before the midterms. If he loses he will be impeached and likely convicted this time, because the country can see what an utter disaster he’s been.

A fuel crunch can no longer be prevented. It was baked in the cake almost from the beginning of the war, and the time it will take to restore any semblance of normality grows longer the longer the conflict drags on. The war caused a major spike in demand for military jet fuel, but jet fuel is produced at the expense of diesel, so either the military stops flying sorties or trucks stop running at some point. Terms must be agreed and adhered to, but the positions of both sides are far apart. Trump cannot accept the inevitable surrender described in the MOU he signed, either politically or psychologically. Even if an agreement is somehow reached, mines must be cleared, trapped tankers need maintenance, oil cargos must be tested and perhaps blended, and those ships must then head to their destinations at approximately the speed of a bicycle. It will probably take a year, even if the conflict ends tomorrow. Trump needs the war to end immediately. In contrast, Netanyahu needs the conflict to continue for his political survival, and to keep him out of jail. The two malignant narcisists have opposite political imperatives, meaning that a positive way forward is very unlikely.

Iran and Pakistan are behaving like the adults in the room, and both are emerging as significant powers. Various Gulf countries are also acting behind the scenes in an attempt to prevent a catastrophy, as well as to devise a new security architecture for the region. The Saudi foreign minister has invited General Mounir, head of the army in Pakistan and chief mediator, to meet in Riyadh to discuss a military pact and security umbrella based on Pakistan’s nuclear capability. They recognise that American hegemony is coming to an end, and that Israel has over-reached and will collapse without US backing. They also recognise that Iran is now much more powerful than it was before the war, and is now a force to be respected and dealt with accordingly. Pakistan’s profile has also been raised significantly. Pakistan has acted to prevent Israel from assassinating Iranian leaders after the murder of Ali Larijani by hacking their AI targeting system. They have acted as a stabilising force wherever possible.

China is backing the new energing reality behind the scenes, with technical assitance and encouragment. They’re continuing to build out pipelines and railways to bypass maritime chokepoints controlled vy the US, so as to provide greater security of supply for themselves. Supporting stability in the Gulf is a major priority for them. That stability will require the exit of the US, which no longer has functional military bases there, and the subduing of the Israeli violence that has kept the region destabilised for decades. It remains to be seen how this will play out, but the world will be experiencing a form of trial by fire in the meantime.

The memorandum of understanding with Iran is extremely fragile. It amounts to an American surrender, but domestic pressure in the US is making it impossible for the regime to admit to the terms it recently signed. Trump’s style of deal-making, which may have worked in the New York City real estate world, is to appear to agree initially, but then hit the other side with extreme and unpredictable demands in order to create anxiety and intimidate the other party into making concessions. This does not work at all in the world of international relations. Trump is agreement incapable. He fails to remember what he agreed to and changes his mind constantly. There’s no consistency, no trust and no respect for the interests of the other side.

Trump is now saying that no fees will be paid by ships after the sixty day period of the negotiations. He’s also saying that unfrozen Iranian assets will be used to bail out American farmers, and that Iran has agreed to an IAEA inspection process for all of its nuclear sites. Iran has never agreed to any of that, and none of it is in the MOU. Iran never will agree to it. Nor will it agree to limit its missiles or give up its ability to enrich uranium for the purpose of power generation or the production of medical isotopes. Iran and Oman will be jointly managing Hormuz, with fees, after the 60 days, as it clearly says in the MOU. It lies entirely within their territorial waters, so this is reasonable. Turkey does the same with ships transiting the Bosphorus. Trump says that Hormuz is fully open, but this is untrue. Some ships have passed through, all of which are headed for China, India, and Singapore. It is not open for shipping from hostile nations, and attempts to transit without permission will be met with live fire.

Iran will achieve peak leverage once global reserves have run out, which will likely be the case by the end of August or beginning of September. It is already being recognised in the region as a major power, although the US will never acknowledge this. The US has no viable military option, despite claims that it will take over Hormuz and run it for their own profit. Such claims are delusional. It’s the US that’s in a very poor negotiating position, having already depleted their weaponry in a war against a defensive fortress. Iran can handle a long seige. It can easily out-wait the US. Oil will not flow anything like normally for well into next year, even if the war does end soon. It will take months to clear mines, and no insurance will be available in the meantime. Ships may leave, but few will return to pick up cargoes while there’s a risk of becoming trapped.

Israel is determined to destroy the MOU. They will not accept the continued existence of Lebanon in general and Hezbollah in particular. Both Israel and the US insist that ending hostilities in Lebanon is not part of the MOU, but it clearly is. Israel has already said it will not comply, and it continues to murder civilians. However, the fighting in Lebanon is causing considerable consternation in Israel due to the high number of casualties, and the perception that the war is being fought to bolster Netanyahu’s electoral chances. Netanyahu needs the war to continue in order to win the election and keep himself out of jail, and he wants Trump’s endorsement. He also wants to visit America to oversee the bill that would fully blend the American and Israeli militaries. Trump needs the war to end for electoral reasons. Both men are ruthless and will say anything to get their own way. It remains to be seen who caves. In the meantime, Iran is doing well, and with its prospects steadily improving. If nuclear weapons stay in their silos, Iran will have definitively won. If nuclear weapons are unleashed then all hell will break loose globally, and the result will be everyone loses.

Trust is the most critical factor upon which societies’ functionality rests. Relationships of trust are foundational at all times. In small tribal groups, trust is personal because everyone knows everyone else. As societies scale up, personal trust is no longer possible, so trust tends to manifest in the set of rules by which the society is governed, and in leaders or other prominent people. In high trust societies, people are generally self-governing. They follow rules that make sense, and that they believe are in the best interests of all. They don’t need to be monitored or coerced.

It takes a long time of relative stability to create a high trust society, because trust takes a long time to build. Expanding trust is characteristic of expansionary times in general, when commerce is increasing across long distances, and people come to recognise common humanity in a wider range of others who are not exactly like them. Unfortunately, trust takes very little time to destroy once expansionary times come to an end and the wealth pie begins to shrink. In fact the erosion of trust typically begins well before actual contraction, because late stage expansion tends to be characterised by a loss of integrity in leadership and increasing corruption. Rules become increasingly nonsensical or contradictory, and move towards benefiting the few at the expense of the many. Trust disappears as these factors become increasingly obvious.

As the population becomes aware that elites are above the law, a tipping point is reached where the rule of law ceases to exist in most people’s minds. They don’t see why they should follow rules that are not in the general interest, and that tend to impose wildly disproportionate sanctions of those at the bottom of the financial food chain. Conceited elites look at the rest of the population as closer to livestock to be exploited than as fellow citizens. They may think of themselves as a different – and superior – species. At this point, the population ceases to be self-governing, and elites, who never trusted the masses, impose repressive surveillance and control mechanisms.

Elites know what typically happens to those in power during a substantial contraction. They want to remain safely unaccountable for their many transgressions, so they seek to control every aspect of the lives of everyone else as a means of self-preservation. Technology has unfortunately made this more feasible than ever before. The techbros of Silicon Valley have managed, through the criminal DOGE initiative, to steal everyone’s private data that was held by the government, and they already had access to people’s personal information and social connections through their social media accounts and other online presence. This allows them unprecedented control over people, through the social credit scores mediated by programmable digital finance that they’re busily developing.

However, extreme centralisation, especially at that level of resolution, requires a huge increase in socioeconomic complexity, and socioeconomic complexity is a function of surplus energy available to society. The energy available to society is currently being deliberately reduced through both the war in the Middle East and the war between Ukraine and Russia. In the Middle East, 20% of global oil supply, and 40% of the supply of oil for export, is mostly offline, although this is partially mitigated by pipelines, railways, road transport, and shipping deals with non-combatant countries. Countries are currently burning through their reserves, but those will be exhausted by approximately early September, and in some places much earlier. In the Russia/Ukraine war, energy infrastructure is being deliberately targeted by both sides, and Russian oil exports are being subjected to blockades and piracy. There is not going to be sufficient energy for a major increase in socioeconomic complexity. There won’t even be enough to maintain the current level. Elites do plan to prevent more than a bare minimum of energy access for most people, but even if they deprive the masses, they still won’t have sufficient energy for their plans to succeed, other than perhaps fleetingly. Compounding a lack of energy with the outright collapse of the trust horizon is a guarantee of failure.

China is the best example today of a very low trust society. Western elites envy the level of control the CCP has over the people and seek to emulate the highly repressive Chinese police state that developed as a consequence of the erosion of trust. People there are denied access to any information about negative happenings, in order to prevent them blaming their government. They are not allowed to criticise the government or oetition for change. The country is already slipping into an economic depression, led by the collapsing real estate sector, and people are becoming increasingly desperate as they may not be paid for months. There is no social safety net, and no help for people who are struggling with mental health as a result of the atomisation of society. When people snap, as they’re increasingly doing, they engage in revenge against society attacks, such as frequent incidents of deliberate vehicular manslaughter.

As western countries watch trust evaporate, their revenge against society attacks tend to be mass shootings, especially in America where trust is disappearing at a very rapid rate due to obvious and overwhelming political corruption. All the countries that pushed the covid lies and coerced people into taking toxic shots, are following this trajectory. Europe, led by incompetent political zealots, is tearing itself apart in a self-inflicted horror show. Australia is becoming highly authoritarian. New Zealand is deliberately digging itself into a monstrous debt hole, so as to tax people out of their homes and hand the real estate to billionaires seeking to escape the consequences of their own actions.

More and more people are waking up to an understanding that the elites consider most of us to be ‘useless eaters’ and wasters of financial resources. The poor, disabled, and elderly are being particularly targeted for removal, amid a general depopulation drive. Even if their plans for societal control fail, as is very likely, they will still have created so much chaos in the attempt that population reduction will be inevitable. Major shortages of both energy and food are coming due to the impact of the wars, and conflict is likely to spread as trust decays further. Trust determines effective organisational scale, and as it collapses, political aggregations will fracture as the ‘us vs them’ dynamic reasserts itself. To be effective, work at community scale. Build and nurture relationships of trust before it’s too late, because those will be the bedrock people will need to rely on when the centralised life-support systems fail.

Trump signed the American surrender at Versailles, where Germany surrendered and agreed to pay reparations at the end of World War One. However, the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is already in trouble. Israel refuses to abide by it and has attacked Lebanon again, so Hormuz is closed again. In addition, Trump is already repudiating parts of what he himself recently signed after tremendous pushback from allies and donors at home. Among other things, he’s claiming that Iran will not be charging fees after the 60 day negotiation period, and that the US may charge fees. This is preposterous, and contrary to the MOU. The very idea that the US is any kind of guardian angel to the region is laughable, after having started the war and failed to protect any of its allies. Trump is once again trying to rewrite reality by fiat. Hormuz lies in Iranian and Omani territorial waters. They will retain control and charge for passage. The matter will not even be discussed with the US, which will have no role.

Trump had signed the MOU after being told that leaving Hormuz closed was leading to an economic catastrophy, which had been obvious to everyone else since the beginning of the war. He had been made aware, belatedly, that there were no further military options available, so ending the war was the only viable choice. Trump made it clear that his only real focus was the stock market, and that he thinks if the market goes up everything must be fine. He’s even on the record saying, in a jaw-dropping display of arrogance and hubris, that the stock market is more brilliant than everyone but himself. These are the terms officially agreed to:

And this is the comparison between the MOU and the previous JCPOA:

Trump appears to believe that the signing the MOU has avoided an energy crunch and financial catastrophy, but this is wildly incorrect. The ships trapped in the Gulf will need to queue up to leave, which will take weeks. Then they’ll need to head back to port for maintenance, for instance to be cleaned of barnacles. The oil they’re carrying will have degraded, so must be tested and perhaps blended before delivery, which will then take weeks before destination ports are reached. The energy crisis will last well in to next year, and likely longer, even if the agreement is fully adhered to, which is currently looking unlikely. It will be exacerbated by a demand spike as all countries will be wanting to build large reserves as insurance against further conflict and disruption. Supply will be lower than before, perhaps permanently due to damage to shut in fields and risk aversion leading to insurance problems. Lower supply combined with higher demand is a recipe for extremely high prices. This will inevitably lead to rationing and ordinary people being priced out of the market in many, if not most, places.

The energy crisis is going to lead to financial crisis as well, as explained here:

Turkey is selling gold, because it needs to buy diesel. It already sold its US treasuries, and is now selling off what it should most want to be keeping. It’s not doing this because it wants to, but because it has no choice. It needs the energy. Many other countries are about to find themselves in the same boat. The countries that are the most vulnerable are those which import most or all of their energy and which keep their reserves in dollars. High energy prices combined with dollar shortages are going to force them to sell whatever they can in order to buy what they must.

If vulnerable countries begin to sell US debt, it’s going to begin to look increasingly risky. Selling pushes down the price, meaning that early sellers benefit most. Selling feeds fear and fear in turn feeds more selling. The risk is a rapid cascade in the bond market. This would force the US to raise interest rates in order to attract buyers, but the interest rate on the ten year bond is already close to a dangerous limit. If it goes much higher, the US will enter a doom loop, where its enormous debt begins to compound on itself. If the interest rate on the debt is higher than the rate if growth of the economy, the US will enter an exploding debt scenario.

Turkey’s sell off of treasuries began in March when the spot price for oil was much lower, and they only began to sell gold after selling 90% of their treasury holdings. There are currently price cushions due to stored reserves, but those are rapidly depleting, notably in the US, which has been stabilising the price by exporting its strategic petroleum reserve. The US is doing this in order to prevent a cascade of selling in the bond market if many countries were forced to liquidate treasury holdings at once. However, once the heavily manipulated futures price and the spot price inevitably converge, as those reserves run out in a couple of weeks, oil prices will spike and that cascade becomes increasingly likely. The US could choose to default on its debt or to print money, and given that choice it will print and destroy the dollar. Already gold has replaced treasuries as the defacto reserve store of value, and this will become increasingly clear over time.

Once countries run out of things to sell in order to get hold of dollars to buy oil or refined products, there will be massive unrest, and potentially revolutions. Sri Lanka is the poster child for this. In 2020 it lost its critical tourist revenue, and its crop yields fell off a cliff after an attempt at rapidly converting from conventional fertilisers to a fully organic system. It entered a polycrisis exacerbated by a dollar shortage, and this culminated in the leader being forced to flee the country after a period of tremendous unrest. Fertiliser will also be an issue this time, as much of this also comes from the Gulf and is also blocked. It’s orice will spike as well, and it may not be available at any price. If this dynamic was occuring simultaneously in many countries, as it very likely will be, there would be no one to come to the rescue this time. Crunch time is rapidly approaching. Brace for impact.

The US and Iran have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which could be described as a ‘concept of a plan’ as Trump previously described his non-existent plans for healthcare reform, but the tentative agreement remains problematic and fragile. The two main groups opposed to it are Israel and many Americans. Israel has already said it refuses to be bound by a ceasefire that requires them to stop their barbaric violence in Lebanon and leave the country. Israel is determined to sabotage the agreement, and has demonstrated this by increasing the level of their violence. Government minister Itamar Ben Gvir has stated that all of Lebanon must burn, and that the deaths if any of their invasion force must be responded to by slaughtering Lebanese at a ration of a thousand to one. Resistance to Israel’s barabrism is being treated as criminal. He’s also called for kidnapping and abusing Lebanese women and children with a view to intimidating Hezbollah. Iran reserves the right to target Israel without warning if this occurs.

The second group opposing the MOU is composed of Americans of both parties. Trump’s zionist donors and supporters are horrified. Many Democrats are also opposed, because they believe the false propaganda about Iran being an evil regime. They’re also trying to score political points against Trump by saying what they think people want to hear. The agreement does amount to an American surrender, and many ordinary Americans are wondering why so much money and so much bluster has led only to capitulation. Iran’s demands were actually quite reasonable, but very few Americans understand the situation at all, and so do not realise this. The domestic opposition to the MOU may well force Trump to abandon it, as he typically caves when confronted with pushback. He’s in a truly unenviable position, cast as having betrayed both the US and Israel, and he has no way out. The impending oil catastrophy that prompted him to make the deal will happen anyway, as the strategic reserve is virtually empty, and it will take months to restore passage through Hormuz even if the MOU holds, and that is looking unlikely.

Israel has lost the support of most Americans, especially young people of both sides of the political aisle. People are now openly talking about the attack on the USS Liberty and murder of many American military personnel by the Israelis under the Johnson adminstration. They are speculating about an Israeli role in the assassinations of JFK and Charlie Kirk, and potential involvement in the 911 attacks. Israel knows it will never have American backing for further military excursions once the next generation comes to power. Therefore they regard the present as their last chance to force through their Great Israel project, which thay cannot do without American support. However, it’s likely already too late, thankfully. Israel seeks security by destroying all its neighbours, taking their land and resources, and keeping them radically insecure. It should have faced vastly more international opposition than has, and the lack of pushback is a matter of considerably shame for the international community. The hypocrisy of the West’s erstwhile position on human rights has been fully revealed.

Trump’s chosen envoys – zionists Kushner and Witkoff – are also being blamed for their abject failure as they played at diplomacy with zero experience, and with personal enrichment as their top priority. The corruption they openly displayed was unprecedented. The most recent and blatant display of this has been Kushner’s attempt to to buy a strategic island from the extremely corrupt leader of Albania, situated at a choke point between the Adriatic and Ionian seas and fully equipped with military infrastructure including nuclear bunkers. Zionists, perceiving the threat to the territory of Israel, are now attempting to take over Cyprus and Albania as a Plan B. This is thankfully attracting considerable opposition.

The memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed today is a clear surrender by the US. Under the MOU, Iran would get almost everything it wanted, while the US gets no concessions. Sanctions are to be lifted, reparations are to be paid, Lebanon is to be included in the ceasefire, no nuclear material is to be handed over, and Iran retains control over the strait of Hormuz. Iran is now a major regional power, in a much stronger position than it was at the beginning of the war. Israel is, of course, absolutely livid. They have said they will not abide by the terms of the agreement. Anyone paying attention will be expecting them to sabotage it, perhaps with a false flag attack on an American asset. Netanyahui s set to lose the upcoming election, and his likely successor, Naftali Bennet, has promised to be Iran’s worst nightmare. Bennet is considerably more extreme than Netanyahu. Israel is not the only party that is appoplectic about the deal. Trump’s supporters are furious as well, as it repudiates everything Trump has been saying throughout the war. This does not bode well for the implementation of the MOU. Trump flip-flops constantly under pressure, and he will be experiencing more pressure than ever before during his presidency.

Given how desperately unpopular this deal is in much if the US, it’s suprising that Trump agreed to it. It appears to be that two parties sat him down for a talk. The first was the oil company executives, who pointed out that the US strategic oil reserve is virtually exhausted, and that this will lead to a huge price spike in oil, and then in everything else, as the manipulated futures prices meets the much higher spot price in the very near future. Trump appears to believe that allowing Hormuz to open now would avoid a global economic depression for which he would be blamed by the whole world.

Unfortunately for him, that eventuality is already guaranteed. Even if the strait is fully opened now, resuming production will take months to years, depending on the damage done. It will be months before tankers can deliver to their destinations. Trapped tankers will need to queue up to leave, then return to port for maintenance. They may or may not choose to return to the region, given the heightened level of risk. At least they would be expected to wait for weeks to see if hostilities actually do calm down. Insurance may or may not be available. Trump has already said that he may resume bombing if he doesn’t like Iran’s actions. By the time shipping resumes, assuming it does, supply chains will have fractured, industrial sectors may have ground to a halt, various modes of transport will no longer be operational, planting and harvests will have been missed, food distribution will be heavily impacted, and famine will have hit vulnerable regions.

The second group to bend his ear was the US military, which lacks the capacity to resume the conflict. Missiles and interceptors are in short supply and cannot be replaced quickly. The aircraft carriers are sitting ducks, unable to approach close enough to be useful. US military assets in the region have been very heavily damaged. 16 bases have been hit, all the radars have been eliminated, many aircraft have been lost, and the casualty numbers are much higher than has been admitted. The Gulf countries are no longer keen to allow their airspace to be used for attacks, as this has made them targets. The rest of their energy infrastructure would be destroyed if hostilities resumed. They no longer believe that the America can, or even wants to, protect them, so they may be rethinking their alliance with the US. The empire is being driven out of the region, although its Israeli outpost is still bristling with hostility and thinking itself capable of taking on its neighbours by itself. Israel has become consumed with hatred for all its neighbours, continues to covet their land, and may yet resort to its nuclear Samson option. Trump is caught between a rock and a hard place. He cannot resume the war, but will not be forgiven at home for failing to do so.

If oil does flow out of the Gulf again, demand will be very high, as every country will be wanting to build a substantial reserve supply. Given that supply will still be limited, this is a recipe for strictly rationing fuel use by the public, or perhaps preventing it altogether. There will be substantial demand destruction on behalf of ordinary people and industries crippled by shortages. This will reduce some of the upward price pressure, but higher prices can still be expected. As the world will be in a depression, unemployment will be very high, and purchasing power for ordinary people will have fallen off a cliff, making fuel and other essentials much less affordable whatever the nominal price. Bond markets around the world are signaling risk, hence interest rate hikes are likely, and in a world drowning in debt that will create a sovereign debt crisis, as well as a flood of bankruptcies.

The US appears to be oblivious to impending domestic disaster. It projects a 20% increase in energy demand for its datacentre build out, but it is not the energy self-sufficient superpower that it thinks it is. Only one fracked basin is not yet in decline. Drilling in the arctic would take years as the necessary infrastructure would have to be built first. Imports from Venzuela cannot materialise for years for the same reason. There is so far little interest in developing either of these sources. The datacentre boom is unlikely to continue, even if datacentres are allowed to co-opt energy supply from the population. That entire industry is in a massive bubble, which will eventually implode as all bubbles do. With luck this will derail elites plans for a technocratic police state and a transition to a digital finance gulag. These would require a huge increase in socioeconomic complexity, but complexity is a function of surplus energy, and that precondition will not be met. Huge global changes have been set in motion. Chaos is likely to ensue.

Farmers are in trouble worldwide, as the cost of both fuel and fertiliser are soaring, and in some places neither are available at any price. Even in Russia – a major energy producer – deliberate destruction of their energy infrastructure by NATO-controlled Ukraine has had a significant impact. Inputs needed in eastern Russia are being sent to cities in the west. Russian grain exports that typically feed many other countries will be well down. In Western Australia farmers are also losing out to cities, because governments don’t want people in the cities to riot over lack of fuel. People haven’t yet felt the much impact from the war because they are being shielded from those effects as countries reallocate resources from agriculture and burn through their stored reserves. There’s no general sense of crisis, so there has been little demand destruction. People are not feeling the need to conserve, but this simply means the real crisis will hit much sooner and harder than would otherwise have been the case. Our global elites want this to happen, because they want people desperate, and having a polycrisis it all at once is their chosen method for achieving this. It will be used to force the implementation of technocratic control over people and critically over the food supply.

What’s being planned is a hostile takeover of food production by the largest players in the agricultural sector. People are to be separated from the ability to feed themselves by themselves, and all decision-making is to be made top-down. All the major agricultural companies are connected to the WEF, and the WEF agenda is all about top-down control of every aspect of life. The food aspect of that agenda is to deprive ordinary people of nutrious natural food – especially meat, eggs, and dairy – and force unnatural and nutritionally deficient veganism, along with insect protein and fake meat made of toxic seed oils and starch. This is of course a recipe for weakening a population that they wish to reduce substantially.

The plan is to impose centrally controlled technocracy on the food supply system. However, the major players want to avoid liability for the terrible outcomes that are so predictable, so they’re setting up and funding small companies to do the dirty work for them, and to act as a liability shield. These ‘start ups’ are simply off-shoots of all the big players, staffed by them as well as finaced by them. They’re the parties that will be doing genetic modification, tampering with seeds, and creating the frankenfoods that people will be expected to eat. These people never waste a good crisis, and they’ll create one if necessary to force the scaling up that they want to achieve.

One major aspect of the plan by the elites to control farming is to get farmers into debt, so that leverage can be used against them to force them to comply with the new agenda. Farm credit is to be expanded in order that farmers can purchase expensive new equipment (electrified machinery, drones, smart irrigation systems etc), genetically modified seeds with significant requirements for expensive inputs, and ‘bio-stimulants’ like nitrogen-fixing bacteria genetically engineered to have no off-switch. This is the economic hitman approach where loans are made with fancy promises of productivity, but when the promises prove hollow and the debt cannot be repaid then the farm is forfeit. For instance, self-driving electric tractors would be an extremely expensive and useless nightmare.

All food production is to be entered into a single registry, so that informal food production can also be centrally controlled in accordance with standards set by the big players, and enforced by them through various forms of leverage. The powers that be want to know who farms what, where, with what inouts and with what methods. This is all to be fed into a single database so control can be obtained over co-ops, communes, homesteads, and traditional farming. There are to be shared soil standards, forcing small farmers to comply with what the big players consider to be healthy soil, but is actually not healthy at all. This would prevent many vastly better systems, such as regenerative agriculture, and force the use things like bio-stimulants. Access to crop insurance can be made conditional on compliance sith ‘best practice’, as defined by the Big Ag companies. Guaranteed off-take of crops also boxes farmers in, as they would then have only one purchaser, which would then have all the bargaining power. The point is to eliminate family farms and independent farming busineses, turning them into “managed nodes in a blockchain supply chain”, as Christian Westbrook describes here. Comprehensive surveillance would be implemenented, which would facilitate insider trading by those with early access to crop information. The system would be an extractive and exploitative public private partnership.

Christian points out that Russia survived the collapse of the Soviet Union through decentralised food production. The centrally controlled collective farms failed, as uninformed centrally controlled systems tend to do, often catastrophically. People fed themselves by growing food wherever they could, often at their dachas (country cottage properties) if they had access to one, or on apartment balconies if necessary. 40% of the food supply came from these micro-farms, and most people made it through the crisis as a result. The opposite approach is to be implemented now, and it will be a disaster like that of the Soviet collective farms. Decentralised food production can create a sharing mindset with less emphasis on scarcity. When less fear permeates society, it changes how people relate to each other, very much for the better. The opposite would happen under the system being implemented by our selfish and benighted elites.

In the US, the warmongering company Palantir is now aligned with the US Department of Agriculture, and has been given permission to consolidate and control all agricultural data, under the pretext that farming is now a matter if national security. There is to be “one farmer, one file”, with complete surveillance by a company that is a bad actor with an anti-human agenda. This kind of attsmpt at total central control has had tragic consequences many times in the past. For instance, in the 1930s, farm collectivisation in the Soviet Union caused a famine that killed tens of millions of people. Similarly during China’s Great Leap Forward, Mao’s regime created a famine that killed at least 50 million people. The head of Palantir, Alex Carp, says “I need more data so my enemies wake up scared.” Today humanity is his enemy.

My country of New Zealand is at the far end of a long and vulnerable supply chain for imports, including for fertiliser. While New Zealand produces about a third of its nitrogen fertiliser demand domestically, from its Taranaki gas deposits, it remains heavily dependent on imports from the Gulf region, and those are no longer available. Prices will inevitably climb during high demand season, and usage is very likely to fall, with a corresponding impact on yields of crops and carrying capacity for pastures. The critically important dairy industry would be particularly badly affected. Given that one of the WEF priorities is the elimination of animal agriculture, this is likely of no concern to those who dictate policy to our government. What passes for leadership in this country has already considered importing foot and mouth disease from Indonesia, so as to have an excuse to cull cows, sheep, and pigs, and fearmongering around bird flu could provide an excuse to cull chickens and turkeys as well. New Zealand is so far following the same unfortunate path of war on farming as other western countries, and has been doing so quite enthusiastically. There seems to be no understanding of the impacts to come.

It’s possible that the elites behind the WEF may fail early in their attempts to impose technocracy, given that maintaining (let alone increasing) socioeconomic complexity is a function of surplus energy, and the world is looking at an energy deficit in comparison with previous demand. However, even if they ultimately fail, a great deal of damage will already have been done. Many countries, including New Zealand, will have to become as self-sufficient as possible as quickly as possible. Both imports and exports are likely to decrease drastically as supply chains fail for lack of energy. The potential good news is that if New Zeland and Australia no longer produce so many agricultural products for export, the carry capacity can be used instead to produce for the local population, and this could be far less fertiliser dependent. Of course the loss of imports and exports would also mean a major drop in material prosperity. Those who benefitted disproportionately from globalisation also suffer disproportionately as the globalised economy fragments, but what remains is a decent resource base. What will be required is the will to redevelop it in a very different and more localised form, and the ability to get expectations in line with what a new reality can hope to deliver.

The situation in China is not what so many commentators suggest. It is not the new shining city on the hill, although it does remain a manufacturing powerhouse, at least for now. Many western politicians wax lyrical about following China’s example, obviously without understanding what that means. China is a land of glitzy urban façades, but it has not lifted millions of its people out of poverty. Poverty and homelessness are endemic in a country with no social safety net. It has hit a demographic wall, where the population – already considerably overstated due to attempts to hide the impact of the long one child policy – is shrinking at an accelerating rate. The society is rapidly aging and youth unployment is skyrocketing, but each young person is responsible for four grandparents due to the lack of a retirement system. The middle class is being hollowed out in a spiral of downward mobility. This is a system destined to break, and it’s already breaking its people.

The ‘flexible worker’ sector of the economy is growing rapidly – from 280 million people in 2025 to a projected 320million in 2026. That’s half the workforce with no stablity, and there’s an increasing number of highly educated people with no choice but to enter the gig economy. Some sectors of that are already saturated, meaning it’s becoming more and more difficult for each individual to earn a survivable income. At least half of the flexible workers are significantly under-employed. The wage gap between blue and white collar workers is shrinking, but not because blue collar workers are doing better. White collar workers are being forced out of stable employment as the economy enters a crunch. The turning point was 2019, with the forced shutdown of much of the economy. Employers became very risk averse around hiring, and many smaller businesses died, at the same time as ever more graduates were turned out to compete for fewer stable jobs. More and more people are being forced into an extremely precarious position. Even people with jobs are not necessarily being paid, and may be forced to live on savings for months. Complaining to employers achieves nothing, so there’s an epidemic of disgruntled workers burning down their places of employment.

In formal employment, people tend to become more valuable over time, as they gain skills and experience, and build networks. In contrast, in the flexible economy there is no career progression, no adding of skills or experience, and no ability to save. Career capital is destroyed, and no cushion can be created for old age. Such employment is essentially the draining of a human battery. The significant costs of working this way mean that the actual net income is barely enough to survive, and people must work all hours. There is no such thing as work life balance, and no time or resources for raising a family. This is exaccerbating China’s steep demographic decline.

The longer a person works in the informal economy, the harder it is to transition to, or back to, formal employment. China is following in Japan’s footsteps in this regard, although under much less advantageous circumstances. After the crash of its bubble in 1989 and subsequent economic stagnation, Japan a large chunk of Japan’s workforce entered an employment ‘ice age’ from 1993-2004. Career progression either never properly began or stalled out for many, and most have never recovered earning power, despite attempts by the government to assist them. In Japan’s case this cohort was comprised of about 18 million people. In China the same dynamic is setting up, as its bubble has also burst, and it’s looking at about a hundred times as many people affected.

Japan had significant advantages over China’s current position. It was already rich before it hit the wall. It had stable institutions, strong corporations, savings, and a social safety net. China hit the wall before becoming rich. Even by official figures, the average earnings per year are only about $18,000, and the cost of living is rising. The property sector, in which the majority of citizens placed multigenerational savings, was structured as a ponzi scheme and is collapsing. Local governments, which had been financing themselves through development fees, are now deep in bad debt in in comsiderable trouble. Many people, notably the flexible workers, earn very much less than the average wage, and there is no safety net. Savings are depleted as workers are not paid. Neither coporations nor government are at all responsive to the needs of the population. There are also no services to assist people broken by the system, so these people are increasingly engaging in revenge against society attacks. The most common forms of this are knife attacks on young children or vehicular manslaughter. Such events occur regularly. Unlike Japan, China is a very low trust society, where people have been trained to look after number one and cheat wherever possible to gain personal advantage. This is not a recipe for social cohesion, especially during a period of economic stagnation which will shortly morph into outright contraction. Conversely, it’s a recipe for a social explosion.

Those unable to find work in the city cannot simply return to the countryside and become subsistence farmers. The agricultural system has been industrialised, and they lack the necessary skills. There’s essentially no other employment in rural areas. As China climbed the ladder of progress, it effectively kicked out each lower rung as it ascended, so there’s no way back down that doesn’t involve societal upheaval. The government refuses to loosen its bureaucratic and highly authoritarian control over people through reform, for fear of weakening the state to the point of potential failure, as arguably happened to the Soviet Union. The system remains rigid and therefore brittle. This will not end well.

Today was Trump’s birthday, and he wanted a blockbuster announcement to celebrate it. He was also desperate to forestall Iranian retaliation for Israel’s latest attack on Lebanon. For these reasons he has announced agreement on a memorandum of understanding (MOU), which one could also describe as a ‘concept of a plan’ in Trumpian terms, to be signed on June 19th. Iran then stood down its planned retaliation and published the terms of the MOU. The American side has said nothing about the terms, likely because they’re entirely favourable to Iran, unfavourable to the US, and catastrophic for Benjamin Netanyahu.

If these terms stand then the MOU amounts to a complete capitulation by the American side. Iran will have achieved virtually everything it had been asking for – control over the strait of Hormuz, the right to charge fees for passage, the end of sanctions, the release of frozen funds, and substantial reparations for damage caused. All of these are things Trump has previously said he would never agree to, and all of them would put him in very hot water with his donors and supporters. This means the likelihood of him walking this back tomorrow is very high. Israel has already said it would not abid by the terms of the deal, so it’s almost certain to fail in any case. Trump has constantly flip-flopped on every pronouncement he’s made, careening wildly from extreme threats to conciliatory remarks from one day to the next. There’s no reason to expect consistency from him this time.

Trumpmis caught between a rock and a hard place. Whether or not this agreement goes ahead, the US has lost the war. All Iran had to do to win was survive until the US exhausted its capacity to continue the war (and Trump’s attention span), and it has done so remarkably well. Trump can accept an obvious and humiliating defeat now, or he can act to keep the war going, which will exacerbate the coming energy crisis exponentially the longer it continues. This will have drastic domestic political implications for him, beginning in the relatively near future, as the US strategic petroleum reserve will be depleted in approximately three weeks. At that point it will no longer be possible to manipulate the futures price in order to pretend all is well, and the futures price will converge with the much higher spot price. A global economic depression is already inevitable, and Trump will be blamed for all of it, and not just in the US, but globally. The longer the war continues, the greater the humanitarian disaster will become. Already the situation has probably signed death warrants for millions of people in Asia and especially the global south. Given Trump’s extremely poor health, he may not live to see the consequences of his actions, which will likely be the implosion of American hegemony globally and civil war domestically. Unfortunately, a human tragedy of epic proportions lies directly ahead.

The US, Iran, and the mediator -Pakistan – have all said that some kind of agreement is close. This is the first time all have agreed. Usually such statements come only from Trump and are merely for the purpose of market manipulation. However, there are significant caveats. What is being proposed is not actually a deal, but merely a memorandum of understanding (MOU). There are still huge differences in the public stance of both the US and Iran, and Israel has said it won’t agree to anything. The MOU is meant to be phase one of an agreement, involving a sixty day ceasefire during which further details are to be negotiate, leading to phase two.

Iran has said that their conditions for an MOU are that the ceasefire must be total, in other words it must include Lebanon and Gaza, and that Israel must retreat from these areas completely. In addition, frozen assets must be released, and sanctions on their energy sector must be lifted. The US has categorically refused to the latter two conditions, and Israel has indicated that it has no intention of withdrawing from occupied territory, nor will it cease its ethnic cleansing of either Gaza or southern Lebanon. Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that his conditions are a handover of all enriched uranium, the destruction of all enrichment equipment, a strict limit on Iran’s missile arsenal and cessation of assitance to Iranian ‘proxies’ (actually merely allies) in the region. In addition, Trump insists that the strait of Hormuz be open to all for free passage. This is also not going to happen. Hormuz lies in Iranian and Omani territorial waters and they will not be surrendering control of it. Ships will pay a fee to pass, and ships from hostile nations will not get permission to transit. None of the US or Israeli conditions will ever be accepted by Iran.

Israel has a long history of violating ceasefires it has agreed to, and it doesn’t even agree to this one. Under the circumstances, it seems unlikely that any meeting of minds is possible. Even if somehow the US and Iran could find a way to move forward, it’s extremely likely that Israel would sabotage the attempt, given that their goal is the utter destruction of Iran, and they want to the US to do it for them. They’re fond of false flag attacks, and could plan something that would lead Iran to retaliate against them. This would almost certainly drag the US back into conflict to defend them. The difficulty with that from the American perspective is that they lack the capacity to defeat Iran. The war in Ukraine, the previous twelve day war, and the current conflict have depleted American stocks of missiles and interceptors, and it lacks the surge capacity to replace them quickly. It has glide bombs, but these require aircraft to face Iranian air defence, which has not been destroyed as the US has claimed. The US has also run out of reachable military targets, and even dual use targets. The targets it would like to hit lie deep beneath mountains and are impervious even to nuclear strikes. Hitting more purely civilian targets would destroy America’s reputation to an even greater extent than is already the case.

The empire has lost this war, while Iran has emerged far more united and powerful than it previously was. Trump’s extreme narcissism will not allow him to admit this, hence his continued beligerence and refusal to acknowledge any aspect of the reality on the ground, including accurate casualty figures and the extent of damage to American military assets in the region. The casualty figures will be much higher than admitted, and the damage to all US bases in the region is extensive. Most will not be useable again. The losses are easily in the billions of dollars. It’s unlikely that any attempt to rebuild them would be allowed by the host monarchies, given that the US has failed to protect them. In fact the US has angered allies further afield (as far away as South Korea), since it’s reclaimed military hardware from them in order to hand it over to Israel. It’s become clear to US vassal states that bases on their territory were never for their protection, but evidence of their subjugation.

China, which prioritises stability, has likely been pressuring Iran through Pakistan to find a way to end the conflict, although it likely recognises that the current US regime is agreement incapable due to Trump’s extreme emotional reactivity. Iran may be prepared to agree to phase one in order to present themselves as peacemakers, knowing that the other side will not honour it anyway, so phase two will not happen, and the empire will eventually be forced into a humiliating defeat from the entire region. Trump’s days are numbered, either due to his failing physical and mental health, or politically due to his disastrous handling of both foreign and domestic policies.