Welcome to Applied Systems Thinking. I’m going to be posting here from now on, since all the controlled platforms have been getting worse and worse, and participation there is being strongly surveilled for reasons that are incompatible with personal freedom. I’ll link to facebook, at least for now, but it would be better to come here directly. Avoid the surveillance state. I’ll be covering a range of topics, posting mostly video discussions sith various experts in their fields and providing commentary as to why their information matters. Many fields need to be integrated in order to create the big picture.
There’s also a forum here, so ideas can be discussed. A link to Buy Me a Coffee will be installed, so if you want to help me to keep going, that would help immensely. I will be doing this as a job. Crisis is upon us globally. It will be my job to keep people informed as to how it’s playing out, what are the traps to avoid, which places are doing better or worse, and what you can do about it all. I’ll be integrating geopolitics, finance, energy, health, psychology, resource availability (especially food), and the plans of the elites to corner the market on everything that matters.
Neil McCoy-Ward covers many issues, primarily financial. Here he’s discussing critical resource shortages around the world as a result of the war, and the rationing systems being put in place. On a personal level, he’s been experiencing a ‘shoot the messenger’ effect, due to people’s fear of another lockdown, given how traumatic people found the covid era. Unfortunately another lockdown is very much on the cards, and it obviously doesn’t help to blame those who warned of this in advance. These are the global supply shares at risk:
The missing resources are all critical to various industries, and cannot be replaced. The global economy has been engineered for economic efficiency, meaning a global just-in-time system with highly integrated supply chains and very few stocks or reserves. This was the product of a high trust world (relatively speaking) at the top of a major financial cycle. That cycle is now ending, and trust is collapsing with economic contraction. All those interconnected supply chains are vulnerable, and many will fail. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, trade fell by 66% in two years, with trade wars, protectionism, neo-mercantilism, and gunboat diplomacy, followed by kinetic war. We’re looking at a similar breakdown today, but today we’re far more dependent on trade than we were then, and our newly brittle networks are vastly more complex. When a system such as ours goes into contraction, our economic efficiency turns into the straightest path to hell.
Countries are going to need to restore self-sufficiency, but how many citizens in many countries even know what their local reality would be in the absence of imports and exports? It’s going to be a steep learning curve, and it needs to be addressed as quickly as possible, beginning with working out where the essentials are going to come from. Anything non-essential can wait. Unfortunstely, the countries which benefitted disproportionately from globalisation can expect to suffer disproportionately from its demise, and this includes my own country of New Zealand, where we lie a long way from anywhere at the far end of supply chains.
“The closure of Hormuz has taken 34% of globally-traded crude oil, 12% of refined petroleum, 20% of LNG offline. It has taken 30% of urea and 25% of ammonia offline, putting the northern planting season at risk in the largest shock to food production in generations. Some 20% of aluminum production if offline too. In the chips supply chain, in addition to the LNG, 35% of helium, 60% of bromine, and 44% of sulphur are now offline.
Unless the war ends soon and Hormuz is reopened, this will be the single greatest stagflationary shock in the history of the modern world economy. And the costs are cumulative. The longer the war lasts, the greater the stagflationary shock and the more central banks must respond by monetary tightening.”
Professor Ted Postol is one of the foremost experts on nuclear technology and its effects. This is a very detailed, no-holds-barred presentation on what a nuclear strike on either Tehran or Tel Aviv would look like, and the the terrible effects it would have. The American regime has been comtemplating doing this, if not over a city then in an attempt to destroy Iran’s extensive underground infrastructure, some of which is 800m below ground. They appear to think that a nuclear war might be able to be contained, or might even be winable. This is not the case. There’s every reason to think this would escalate. Already, many states are considering building nuclear weapons, since it’s obvious that a nuclear deterrent is the only protection from abuse by imperial powers. The potential for the escalation ladder in any of several different conflicts, besides the existing ones, is enormous. The world has entered a war cycle, and those typically cost about a third of the population. This one could be much worse. Please listen to Professor Postol explain why.
This war of aggression, with the intent if not just regime change in iran but utter destruction of the country, is turning out to be an unmitigated disaster for the the US and Israel. They’ve entered a quagmire with no escape, and have repeatedly chosen to double down and escalate, but they have no clear goals, other than pure destruction, and no strategic vision, other than potentially to cripple China’s rise by curtailing its oil supply. Trump is flailing, knowing he’s caught in a trap and resorting to regular market manipulation in order to profit financially despite the disaster on the ground.
For Iran the situation is very different. While this is undoubtedly a crisis for them, as they’re losing many thousands of innocent citizens and important civilian infrastructure, it also represents an opportunity to reshape a great deal of the global economy in their favour. The US had controlled global oil flows and pricing for the decades since the 1974 advent of the petrodollar system, but that arrangement has now ended. America is being rapidly driven out of the Gulf entirely, with the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure – military bases, data centres, businesses, banks, universities etc. Iran is now in a position to take over that control in a seismic shift in global geopolitics.
Iran now controls the Straits of Hormuz completely. Ships need their permission to pass, and ships without that permission will be destroyed, as several already have been. Iran can mine the region at any time should they choose to do so. Already the shipping lane has been changed to lie much closer to the Iranian coast, so as to allow for visual inspection of shipping. Ships must prove that their cargos are contracted in yuan rather than dollars, and they must pay a toll determined by the Iranians. Ships have been paying two million dollars as a toll so far. Over time this will earn Iran enough to rebuild from the destruction of the war, so it amounts to involuntary reparations.
The flow of goods, not just oil, has now moved beyond the control of the US, and the situation is about to get worse for them since Ansar Allah (the Houthis in Yemen) are now planning to assist Iran by imposing conditions on passage through the Red Sea via the Bab-al-Mandab southern entrance. Control of volume and flow can confer pricing power, and undermine fatally dollar hegemony. The loss of dollar hegemony would be the equivalent of losing a major war, and in this case the US is likely to hit by both losing dollar hegemony and losing and majir war at the same time. The impact will be enormous. The petrodollar system generated the gargantuan money flows that allowed for the full financialisation of the US economy, at the expense of its real productive economy. Reversal of that trend, for an empire mired in forty trillion dollars of debt, evenbefore taking account of tens of trillions more in unfunded liabilities, will be catastrophic.
The situation is also catastrophic for Israel, which has drastically overreachedits potential in its zeal to create a Greater Israel encompassing most of the region. Their apparent belief was that the Iranian regime could be toppled easily, with no real price to pay. They underestimated Iran to an extent that is turning out to be tragic for them, as their citizens live in bunkers while the built environment takes terrible punishment. IDF generals are desperate. They’re running out of manpower and cannot recruit. They’re facing attacks from Ansar Allah in the south, a resurgent Hezbollah in the north, and both Iraq and Iran to the east. The country is small and indefensible now that the Iron Dome has essentially run out of interceptors. Moral is low and falling, although the blood lust remains and is increasing. The Knesset just passed a law allowing them to execute their Palestinian hostages, on trumped up charges in a court with over a 95% conviction rate. There are ten thousand such hostages, many of them children. They face hanging, often following years of horrendous abuse in Israeli jails.
War crimes and crimes against humanity are commonplace now, as international law, the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions have all been discarded in favour of the law of the jungle – might makes right. Unfortunately for those who consider themselves to be on the mighty side of the equation, they have over-estimsted their own capacity while drastically under-estimsting the capacity of their opponents. One of the latest terrible ideas has been attacking nuclear sites, which have always been off-limits before due to the potential for regional contamination.
Most recently, Trump has indicated that he might simply give up and go home without achieving a single one of his many stated goals, which change regularly. Crucially, the Straits of Hormuz would remain under Iranian control unless others do something about it. Trump had attempted to corral vassals states into taking the obvious and overwhelming risk of doing so, but comprehensively failed. Trump’s response has been to sulk, and to promote buying American oil instead.
If the US does decide to abandon the war, it’s extremely likely that Trump and his Secretary of War Crimes, Pete Hegseth, will do as much damage as possible on the way out, in order to punish Iran for its ability to resist. They may even resort to the use of nuclear weapons, unless prewarned that doing so would bring other nuclear states into the conflict, which may have happened behind the scenes.
Air power never was the be all and end off of war, despite the biased views of the airforce. Destruction is possible, but not victory.
This extremely well qualified woman is passionate about the lives of her fellow service members. She knows they are about to be sacrificed as cannon fodder in a war conducted at the behest of another country – Israel. They cannot hope to win. Their inevitable deaths are intended to spur the American population into support for a war they currently oppose. The American regime doesn’t care. In his last term, Trump refered to military personnel as “suckers and losers”, according to his own chief of staff. He has no understanding of honour or sacrifice. Soldiers are just pawns to be sacrificed, and not even for any real purpose, because there’s no strategic vision for this war, and no plan. Serious military people who disagreed with Trump and his psychopathic Crusader of a ‘Secretary of War’ have been purged, leaving only hubris and delusion at the helm. The consequences for the entire world are likely to be catastrophic.
The people of the Gulf live in a desert, but the population of the region far exceeds the natural carrying capacity. This has been possible due to the huge oil wealth of the area that’s allowed the various monarchies to build desalination plants to provide for adequate water supplies. They’ve also been building complex modern cities, along with ridiculous infrastructure like palm-shaped islands and indoor ski hills, allowing the population to live in an elevated state of luxury, with imported servants from all over the world, also sustained by the desalination plants. Now all that infrastructure is under threat, and the authoritatian monarchies are beginning to experience a rapid convergence with reality.
The Gulf countries are all vassals of the US empire, hosting huge American military bases, many luxury-loving western expats, data centres, American universities and more. Under the petrodollar system, they’ve invested heavily in American weaponry, not so much for anticipated use, but as tithe to the American military industrial complex. Now the region is at war – war begun by the US at the behest of Israel. The US is using the military infrastructure it built to conduct the war, but this is implicating the Gulf monarchies in the conflict, making them targets for retaliation. Some are more willing than others, and at least one – Qatar – has already said enough is enough, after their new $26 billion LNG plant took $20 billion of damage and will be offline for up to five years.
Israel, which has long coveted the land of the Arabs for lenbensraum, has a vested interest in keeping the conflict going, and specifically in encouraging Iran to retaliate against Gulf infrastructure. If the US appear reluctant to strike, Israel takes matters into its own hands in targeting Iranian infrastructure on a false flag basis. The intention is to provoke an internecine conflict between the Sunni monarchies and Shia Iran, in order to watch them destroy each other for Israel’s benefit.
Trump, who is likely being blackmailed as well as bribed to follow Israel’s lead, has been threatening to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure, notably its power grid, if a deal to open the Straits of Hormuz is not reached, but he’s building in progressive delays. Israel has stepped into the breach and begun to do what Trump threatened, including bombing Iran nuclear reactor at Bushehr multiple times. Iran is retaliating as promised, against both Israel and the Gulf countries, but so far in a measured way. The critical factor will be the desalination plants, upon which the Gulf is utterly dependent. Iran itself only uses desalination as a minor supplement to its water supply, but some Gulf countries are virtually 100% dependent on it, and all obtain the clear majority of their water in this way.
If the desalination plants are taken out, the result will be catastrophic. There is no alternative source that can be called upon for the millions of people living in the region. A lack of water in a desert is a death sentence in a matter of days, and it would be impossible to evacuate the region before a humanitarian catastrophe set in. The wealthy are already leaving the region if they can, although they mostly can’t expect any help from their own governments, and airports are being damaged. Others are simply trapped, hoping that their water supply survives. The depopulation of the Gulf is a distinct possibility at this point, but it isn’t Iran’s doomsday plan, it’s Israel’s.
The aggressors are not faring well in this war, even though they conceal or deny the damage they’re taking, and the consequences for the rest of the world are escalating. The energy supply impacts are bad enough – 20% of the world’s oil production offline – and states of emergency being declared in Asia. Other impacts may have a less immediate impact, but not less important to the global economyand the global population. 35% of the world’s fertiliser comes through the Straits of Hormuz, along with the sulphuric acid needed for chemical extraction in many industries, the helium required for the manufacture of computer chips in Taiwan, and many other commodities.
The cost and/or lack of availability of fertiliser is hitting the northern hemisphere exactly at planting time, guaranteeing that the window for planting will pass with much less planting done. Yields are very likely to be well down this year. The cost of agricultural fuel is also hitting farms very hard. In the southern hemisphere, expensive fuel and the looming potential for rationing, are affecting harvest season. This will all get much worse before it gets better, even if the war were to somehow end tomorrow, which is extremely unlikely.
Iran will be setting the timetable for the conflict, because they have escalation dominance. They have set conditions for the end of the war that the US will be unwilling to meet, so hostilities will continue. Declaring a false victory and going home will not be an option for America this time. Trump is trapped, and will take the blame for all of it when it turns into a complete disaster, which it will. Those who talked him into it, or blackmailed him into it, may escape accountability unfortunately.
Iran has 270 degree fire control over the Straits of Hormuz. They still have air defence, and many sea defences, despite lacking a conventional airforce or navy. They have huge numbers of the drones that have been so pivotal in the Ukraine war, and yet to use their most modern missiles. They have home field advantage over very challenging terrain. They are very unlikely to lose, even if carpet bombed with nuclear weapons. It’s very difficult to defeat a people who prize martyrdom and refuse to run even when their street gatherings are bombed.
In the meantime, the Straits of Hormuz now operate a tollgate system, requiring visual inspection to weed out vessels from hostile countries, a substantial toll paid in yuan, and evidence that the cargo has been purchased in yuan. This will generate billions of dollars per year for the Iranian economy, and will hasten the establishment of the petroyuan and the demise of the petrodollar.
Israel cleaerly wants the complete destruction of Iran as a state, so any attempt at an off-ramp is likely to be undermined by false flag attacks. Israel is already attacking infrastructure in the Gulf states with a view to starting a civil war between the Sunni and the Shia, so that they might destroy each other. Israel isn’t interested in regime change in Iran because that wouldn’t go far enough. They want the country bombed into the stone age, and balkanised into ethnic regions. Persians are just over 60% of the population, which also includes Kurds, Azeris, Baluchis, Arabs, Zoroastrians, Bahais, Jews, and Christians, all of whom have lived together for centuries. Some may prefer independence, but most do not. Israel will try to divide and rule as best it can.
It’s profoundly sad that Jews around the world who have nothing to do with this, and generally oppose it vehemently, will nevertheless face a major backlash for the actions of the fascistic zionists, a majority of whom are not even Jewish. That majority are imperial colonialists of European descent. All the hysteria about anti-semitism now is manufactured, but in the future it will almost certainly be real.
Trump gave Iran 48 hours to open the Straits of Hormuz, then extended it by five days (to allow for ground forces to arrive in the region), then extended it an extra ten, but Israel took matters into its own hands and bombed Iran’s steel plants. Iran has already said that bombing such infrastructure would be met with the destruction of energy and desalination infrastructure across the Gulf. This is exactly what Israel wants. The war must comtinue, and the various Muslim states must be encouraged to destroy each other. So far Iran has not engaged in mass retaliation. Their responses have always been measured so far, with responses in kind, but not escalation. It remains to be seen if the Israeli attacks continue to provoke regional destruction, and if America can withstand the carnage that’s likely to occur as a result of boots on the ground. At some point, the US may be forced to abandon Israel and the region, at which point Israel may cease to exist. Both aggressor countries appear to have bitten off more than they can chew.
Chris Hedges is absolutely right, and this speech is a tour de force. He discusses the return of overt psychopathy in leadership, where rules exist only for the weak, and the strong take whatever they want in whatever way they want. He calls what’s begun in Gaza and Iran as “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction geared for preparing the world for the winners of globalisation minus the inconvenient noise of the losers”. Ethnocentricism and eugenics are on the rise, with a view to clearing away “human contaminants” through the use of indiscriminant lethal force if necessary. Israel is the prime example of this mentality at the moment, but the US is set to follow suit under the present regime which is increasingly white supremacist. Under such a system, all complexity and nuance are lost, values such as compassion and empathy are pathologised and despised, and brutality is prized.
When Israel says “never again”, they’ve made it clear that never again refers only to Jewish people, and although they don’t say so, neither liberal-minded Jews nor the ultra-orthodox would likely qualify, as neither generally support the fascist apartheid state.
Hedges mentions Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose malign influence has seen a rapid resurgence in Israel. He regarded violence as a Jewish virtue, and considered that ‘subhumans’ were the embodiment of evil and must be eliminated as a condition for the arrival of the Messiah. This train of thought had been suppressed for some time, but is now back in full force. For more on the views of the man, this excellent essay (below) by Sarah Kendzior paints the full picture.
The No World Order
Meir Kahane, Netanyahu, Trump, and the war beyond Iran.
Journalist Katie Halper, who is Jewish herself, also calls out the growing fascism in Israel.
Australia and New Zealand have both ceded any semblance of energy sovereignty in major way, notably in the closure of refineries, but also in the shuttering of productive wells on the spurious grounds of a non-existent climate emergency. Both are now highly dependent on imports, with New Zealand’s dependency at 100%, and both are about to discover the vulnerability inherent in such dependency. New Zealand gets its liauid fuels from refineries in South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore, but they get the raw material through the Straits of Hormuz. None of these countries hold substantial reserves themselves, making exports of what remains very unlikely. Some oil is now passing through the Straits, but only on a case by case basis, and only where the ship is not owned by a party to the war on Iran, only if the cargo is paid for in Chinese yuan, and only if a significant toll is paid. Asian nations will likely be forced to comply, which would be difficult for countries which have ceded much or all of their sovereignty to the American empire, such as South Korea and Japan. Oceania can expect shortages for a long time.
At the moment, fuel in New Zealand is being rationed by price, but soon it will be rationed by quantity, and by intended use under. Traffic light system reminiscent of the covid era. This is not a coincidence, as the pointless and destructive covid lockdowns were a practice run for the imposition of the planned digital control grid. Government will decide what uses of fuel merit access, with emergency services having priority of course. Leisure travel of all kinds would be a thing of the past if the fuel scarcity continues, which seems extremely likely, and freedom of association would go with it.
Unfortunately, use for farming may not receive the priority it deserves, and farmers are likely to be told to restrict their use of machinery. This would amount to a continuation of the ongoing war on farming, particularly animal husbandry. The climate zealots have wanted to eliminate animal products from the food chain in favour of nutritionally deficient veganism for a long time. They may make an exception for Klaus Schwab’s insect products however, and Bill Gates’ inedible and extremely unhealthy fake meat may also be allowed. The World Economic Forum, which dictates policy to our national managers, intends to separate people from the land in order to facilitate surveillance and micro-management of the population in 15 minute cities. Curtailing access to fuel would be a powerful tool to achieve this, which suggests that fuel scarcity may continue beyond the point where it would be necessary.
It would be a very good idea for people to work out carpooling arrangements, and to make sure they have a workable bicycle. Public transport may be available in cities, but service may be reduced. Air travel is likely to disappear entirely, as the WEF has been planning to phase it out for a long time. A lot more thought will have to go into any plans for travel, and any other uses for liquid fuel.
The war is providing cover for the coming financial crisis, where the inverted debt pyramid, collateralised by a woefully small quantity of real assets, is very likely to collapse. This would trigger the Great Taking, and deflationary crash with asset confiscation by owners of the derivatives contracts, who’ve engineered the legal system to grant them ownership in the event of the bankruptcy of clearinghouses. The global elites are attempting to arrange for total control during the contraction, and they plan to weaponise resource access to do it.
The energy aspect is already manifesting, and potentially creating acute crises in many countries in the short term. A fertiliser crunch combined with fuel rationing is going to limit food production this years as well, as a large percentage of the fertiliser supply also travels through the Straits of Hormuz. Together these impacts will create desperate people, and will destabilise the bloated financial system. Massive demand destruction is coming, not because goods are not wanted, but because demand isn’t what you want, but what you can access and pay for. In a world of shortages, high prices for essentials, and sharply curtailed purchasing power, demand destruction is inevitable.
It’s necessary to point out that higher prices are not themselves inflation, but the result of inflation, which is a monetary phenomenon. High prices result from previous money printing combined with the coming shortages of essentials, which will likely be rationed by price, although rationing by quantity is also a possibility if the digital control grid is successfully installed. It remains to be seen if this is possible given the level of potential chaos in the short term. Even if prices fall over time, purchasing power is likely to fall much more quickly than price, meaning that affordability would be significantly worse even at lower prices. Affordability is what matters, because that represents prices in real terms.
Very few people currently understand the likely extent of the coming food crisis. Farmers cannot afford the diesel or the fertiliser, and may not even be able to get fertiliser at any price. The narrow planting window in the northern hemsphere is now, but many are simply not planting. This will lead to empty shelves. The powers that be may well be intending to use the acute shortages if food and fuel as leverage to force the population into digital ID, which is the gateway to the digital prison. This must be resisted if at all possible. If enough people resist, it won’t be possible to impose that digital slavery system.
