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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Trump regime is high on their own supply. Iran is not Venezuela, where an insider could be pursuaded to betray the leader, meaning a quick in and out operation was possible. Having fallen into a huge geopolitical trap, they are now trying to lie their way out of it in every possible way, but the lying is incoherent. The narrative is constantly shifting in contradictory ways. They can’t even agree on whether or not this is a war, which it clearly is, but they’re trying to paper over the constitutional violation it entailes. Not that they respect the constitution, or the rule of law, at all, but they’re trying to pretend they do. They’re also trying to pretend that what passes for their strategy is working, when it’s been a disastrous failure from the beginning.

The empire looks down on those they’ve dehumanised to such an extent that they constantly underestimate their adversaries in their hubris. Most of what has been destroyed in Iran has been decoys and empty buildings. The people and anything of value in those buildings was removed beforehand. In contrast, US bases in the region have been heavily damaged or destroyed (see the recent photos in the Washington Post). The obliterated radar systems alone cost billions. This has already been a $200 billion war, despite the attempt to proclaim a much lower figure, and the empire has achieved exactly none of its objectives. There is in fact no path for those objectives to be achieved. There never was. The situation is very significantly worse for everyone than when the war began.

The American attempt at a wider blockade of the Iranian blockade has failed, as tankers and cargo ships can simply hug the shoreline, which the US ships cannot approach. The proposal that US warships could guide or escort other vessels through the strait died almost immediately, after arab states, which were not consulted, refused to cooperate. Insurance companies wouldn’t have cooperated either, given that the normal route through the strait is randomly mined, the location of these mines is unknown, and Iran has said it will attack ships attempting to pass through without permission.

The US has nowhere near enough naval assets to mount a blockade, and is also running very low on missiles, which it lacks the surge capacity to produce in quanitity. Besides this lack, missile production also requires rare earths, and China has refused to provide them. The US has threatened to use hypersonic missiles, but it only has eight of them and they’ve never been tested operationally. Each one cost $41 million. In any case, they’re no match for the missiles Iran possesses. This leaves the imperial army as a paper tiger, and once the perception of power dissipates, challenges to that power multiply, and increasingly succeed.

The Trump regime has made a few pathetic attempts to pretend it’s negotiating an end to the war in good faith, but this is merely a facade conducted for domestic propaganda purposes, to paint the Iranian side as disorganised and recalcitrant, while the opposite is true. It’s about buying time while Trump tries to find a way to declare victory and leave without the humiliation of the US being too obvious internationally. This is not likely to be possible, given that Iran holds all the cards. It can easily defend the strait, and its military capapcity remains largely intact. They never depended on a conventional navy or airforce. Their strength is in missiles, drones, fast and manouverable small gunships, manouverable torpedos, submarines, and other equipment of modern warfare. In contrast, the US military is still living in the 1990s. It’s still ordering new aircraft carriers which will be obsolete before completion. The ones they already have are obsolete now. One drone or missile to the flight deck and the carrier is disabled, and the carriers are running out of interceptors to prevent this.

The other reason for buying time is the continuous market manipulation that has been making billions of dollars in insider trading for Trump and his billionaire friends. Trump regularly makes negative statements on Fridays and positive ones on Mondays. His friends play the markets accordingly, often placing bets mere minutes before announcements that move the markets. Given that Congress is also addicted to insider trading, they will do nothing to hold anyone accountable for this.

Iran has now established the Persian Gulf Strait Authority to manage traffic through its new maritime tollbooth. This will be permanent, meaning an end to free passage through the strait. The system will eventually be jointly managed by Iran and Oman, as the strait is part of the territorial waters of both countries. Iran is on the verge of becoming a major power, and it will be looking towards the east. The elected government, previously Atlanticist in orientation, has learned that it would never be treated with respect by western powers, and that those powers are agreement incapable. Trump never stands by agreements he makes, and frequently changes them from day to day, or on a whim. As a result of this war, the US will be driven out of the Gulf permanently.

Because Trump always takes credit for military decisions, he will be the one to take the blame for the consequences, even though this catastrophy actually has many authors. As corrupt, ill-informed, and hubristic as Trump undoubtedly is, the blame should be widely shared. Trump is deliberately being allowed to overreach and make a fool of himself in order to make sure he’s the face of the war. His actions have likely doomed his presidency. Whether the donor class engineers his removal or his poor health finally catches up with him first is anyone’s guess, but in either case he’s unlikely to finish his term, and may be gone before the end of the year. The donor class wants Vance, as he’s the mole planted by the technical industrial complex, which is trying to bring about global technofeudalism. They also want the devastation that this war is causing, because they want people desperate and violent enough that they beg for order, which would be the cue to implment their police state. They may get what they want and leave Trump to take the fall for all of it.

Europe has been occupied by the US since WW2, and by now has been fully vassalised into dependency. The EU was an American imperial project from the start, a big business cartel fully intertwined with NATO, and intended to undermine and finally destroy European democracy and distinct national identities. As such it needed fixed exchange rates or a common currency. European integration followed a fundamentally flawed path, beginning with a monetary union that functioned during expansionary times, when the lack of a unified bond market didn’t matter and no shock absorbers were necessary, but couldn’t handle the contraction that set in after the 2008 financial crisis. The situation has now become so toxic that the very idea of further European integration has become anathema to most of the population. Nationalism is rising again as a result, and is being suppressed for the time being, but cannot be contained forever by a weakening centre. When it finally breaks out, it may well take a very unfortunate form, as it has done in the past.

American military bases are all over the place in European countries, not for protection against Russia as Europeans are told, but for control. There is no threat from Russia, so the protection narrative made no sense. European leadership benefited from this as it kept them in power, even as they became less and less competent or attuned to the needs of their own citizenry. Subservience allowed elites to maintain their fiefdoms and privileges while imposing austerity on their own citizens. Europe’s ubiquitous technology platforms are all American, meaning its citizens pay cloud rent to use them, and are propagandised. Palantir is worming its way into European governance structures, notably the British NHS, to steal the data and implement technological control.

The cheap energy supply from Russia that had allowed European manufacturing to thrive, and Germany to be the driving force at the heart of it, was destroyed by a US that wanted to isolate Russia and to sell Europe over-priced American LNG instead. A German-Russian alliance could have controlled the Eurasian heartland, and the US would not allow this to happen. This new level of imperial control was then used to subjugate Europe explicitly through a one-sided and exploitative trade ‘deal’, where promises that cannot even be kept were made in desperation by an unelected and extremely unpopular European leader. Europe is now effectively owned by the American mafia state to which it pays ‘protection money’.

Europe is stagnating and deindustrialising due to its energy predicament, now exacerbated by the war in the Gulf. It’s making a desperate attempt to revive its economy through military keynesianism, by converting its failing auto plants into factories producing Leopard tanks, even though these are now largely obsolete death traps in the era of drone warfare. This last ditch attempt to prop up GDP artificially is not going to work. Continuing a war in order to justify a military production line is a terrible waste in every possible way.

There is growing discontent among the various European populations about the failing economy, the increasing hardships due to neverending austerity measures, the bailouts of the already wealthy from their bad bets, the constant donations of money and gear to the corrupt Ukranian state, the humiliations imposed by compliance with extortionate American demands, the threats around conscription, the death of freedom of expression, the war on farming, and the flood of mostly culturally incompatible immigrants, who are mostly young men of military age. This discontent is destroying trust at a rapid pace. This is going to accelerate the rise of nationalism, and remind the various European identities why they’ve been at war on and off for a thousand years.

The prospects for Europe are unfortunately bleak. Unrepayable debt, housing bubbles, an expanding gap between have and have nots, a long war, and increasing authoritarianism are bad enough, but these will now be aggravated by a major energy shock followed by the collapse of supply chains and then famine, as fertiliser supplies have been heavily impacted by the war. Farmers who’ve been targeted by regulatory harassment for years, on the spurious grounds of a non-existent climate emergency, are now facing skyhigh prices for both fuel and fertiliser, and later there may be none of either available at any price. The planting window is already being missed in many places, while in others planting is happening, but with insufficient fertiliser for a normal yield, and fuel may not be available come harvest time. All of this is leading to the break up of the EU, as the trust horizon collapses, with the prospect of the region becoming balkanised and ending up like a giant Yugoslavia. The era of outsized European influence on the world is coming to an end as power shifts inexorably eastwards. Geopolitics is dynamic, and nothing lasts forever. A century of humiliation begins.

Chris is looking at the US here, but the US is in one of the better positions. In many other places, the crisis will hit harder and faster. It’s instructive to look at how this will play out in the US context, given how the regime is promising to be the world’s gas station, and geology dictates that this cannot possibly work. All recent non-OPEC oil production growth has come from shale plays, but shale plays deplete quickly and typically have high costs in both money and energy investment terms, so they have a low energy returned over energy invested ratio (EROEI) in comparison with conventional oil and gas.

The US fancies itself an energy super-power, but it’s not. It’s a net importer of hydrocarbons – exporting short chain hydrocarbons from fracking while importing the longchain ones required for the production of diesel, kerosene and bunker fuel. Those long chain hydrocarbons are exactly the ones everyone else wants to import, so the US can do nothing to help even itself in this regard. At the moment it’s exporting from its own strategic reserves, which obviously cannot continue past a certain point, and that point is rapidly approaching. It can continue to export short chain hydrocarbons, but will be competing with everyone else for the rest.

The rig count for shale plays has been falling, and rig count is a leading indicator of production. The only shale oil play that had been growing in the US since 2019 was the Permian Basin, but now that too has topped out and gone into decline. This means the US will be sharing in the calamity that its war is causing for everyone else.

Chris points out that by June operational stress level will have been reached in the US, and by September the operational floor will have been reached, meaning refining will grind to a halt.

As for the rest of the world, the last ships carrying oil from the Gulf arrived at their destinations by April 20th. Now the world is burning inventories, if they have inventories to burn. If Hormuz opened tomorrow, the fuel crisis will still kill millions of people, both directly and indrectly through the effect on other supply chains. A global depression worse than the 1930s is already inevitable, and the longer this goes on, the worse the impact will be, but it will not be evenly distributed.

The impact on the food supply is going to be horrific in many places due to the catastrophic lack of fertiliser. Intensive farming has depleted the soil of many micronutrients, making food significantly less nutritious than it used to be. It has also depleted the macronutrients that artificial fertilisers replace. Approximately half the population of the world exists because the Haber-Bosch process allowed humanity to remove the fixed nitrogen bottleneck and produce vastly greater yields under the Green Revolution. The fertiliser is made from natural gas, and LNG exports are well down due to the closure of Hormuz. Fertiliser exports themselves are down by about a quarter. With less fertiliser, or no fertiliser, yields will fall substantially, if farmers can afford to plant at all with much higher input costs. They would also need to be sure to be able to harvest what they can plant, but with fuel prices being so uncertain, they may choose not to plant at all. The Green Revolution seems likely to be reversed over the next few years, with catastrophic results for the global population.

Famine has frequently been used in history as a control strategy (eg the Irish potato famine or the Ukrainian Holodmor), and it is about to be used again on a much larger scale. This time there is no encouragement to plant victory gardens as in WW2, and no information about the need to prepare or increase resilience. Private credit is being allowed to buy up precious farmland, while farmers are losing farms to foreclosure, and ever more regulatory barriers to growing one’s own food are being implemented. The stated goal is demand destruction, which is a euphemism for deliberately starving people. The real goal is to create total dependency on government so people can be forced to comply with the whims of billionaires. In other words, this is being allowed to happen in order to first control and then reduce the population, because the elites consider many to be useless eaters. Only the productive are of use. Resilience should therefore be on everyone’s minds, and resistance to the pervasive propaganda must increase dramatically in order to wake people up.

In a financial crisis, it’s never different this time, but this is not primarily a financial crisis. One is inevitable, since our current system has reached the end of a debt cycle, making a reset guaranteed. However, the other aspects of the polycrisis are going to obscure this, as food and fuel will be what’s on people’s minds. If a financial reset appears to help with these problems, it may even be welcomed, although it would be the entry portal to the digital gulag that our elites have been constructing through companies such as Palantir. From their point of view, people need to be forced into a system they would never choose if they understood the implications. The global elites are pushing this in order to seize central control of all resources prior to the contraction beginning in earnest. They intend to control the distribution, favouring themselves of course, and protect themselves from retribution for the profiligacy that created the casino capitalism which has handsomely rewarded them at the expense of everyone else.

Matthis Desmet is an expert of the psychology of mass formation, where sections of societies, or whole societies, collectively take leave of their senses for a period of time, typically driving highly damaging beliefs and consequent actions, sometimes culminating in truly tragic circumstances. His work is highly recommended, especially his book ‘The Psychology of Totalitarianism’.

A mass formation is prone to occur when society has experienced a long period of increasing atomisation, a loss of a sense of meaning in life, and the consequent development of free-floating anxiety and anger. Desmet argues that thse circumstances have developed over time since the Enlightenment, when it began to be assumed that humans were primarily rational instead of emotional beings, and could be expected to make rational decisions. Humans are not rational beings, so central governance came rely on emotional manipulation rather than rational argument, hence the development of ever more sophisticated propaganda. A propagandised population loses connection with the truth, as those who see through the propaganda and say so are increasingly excluded or punished for ‘heresy’ by the masses. This is very much a set up for mass formation.

As societies have increased in scale and complexity, so has the scale of potential mass formations. Now they have the potential to consume whole nations, or even groups of nations, and to co-opt the machinery of government to increase the reach of the movement and its control over dissent. Such a situation can be exploited in order to force through changes that could never be achieved otherwise, allowing greater consolidation of power. The Hegelian dialectic is problem, reaction, solution, or ‘never waste a good crisis’. In other words a threat, either natural or manufactured, manifests, and fear of the threat is deliberately amplified before one or more ‘solutions’ are presented. The previously free-floating anxiety now has a focus, and that focus can be extremely intense. The focus on the proposed solutions is typically even more so, and because the connection is emotional rather than rational, it makes no difference if the proposed solutions actually make sense. Performing them, even if obviously harmful, becomes a form of ritual, demonstrating adherence to the collective. Education and intellect are no protection against this kind of propagandisation. In fact schooling appears to lead to a greater likelihood of acceptance, since it’s a form of indoctrination, training people to think similarly.

Those who believe the fear narrative then feel connected in a collective fight against the threat, although they’re connected to the idea of threat, not to each other as individuals. Nevertheless, they feel less lonely than before, so their sense of meaning increases and holds the collective together. The devotion to the collective can be intense enough that people become radically intolerant of those who disagree, either as to the extent of the threat of the effectiveness of the proposed solutions. If the mass formation proceedes to its logical conclusion, dissenters may be physically attacked or eliminated.

The covid era was a prime example of this process in action. The threat was manufactured, the fear pumped up, and a compliance test was initated. The ‘solutions’ were lockdowns, mask mandates, arbitrary social distancing, mass testing with an inappropriate method, forced closure of small businesses, restrictions on gatherings and travel, inappropriate medical treatments, restriction of effective treatments, and mandatory vaccination. The public failed the compliance test, going along with most of these, even though many measures were non-sensical and counter-productive. Governments, the media, and the public all became radically intolerant of opposition. Highly coercive methods were used to force compliance, and increasing threats against dissidents were made. Eventually the mania broke, as the disease was revealed to be much less severe than had been thought, and the ‘solutions’ both far less effective than promised and very damaging.

The focus of mass formation then switched almost seamlessly to the war in Ukraine and the demonisation of Russia, and later to the demonisation of Iran, because the conditions for mass formation had not changed. Anyone expressing an actual fact-based understanding of the situation in either Ukraine, Iran, or Israel, is demonised within their own society. Putin and the Iranian leadership must be considered to be monsters, while Israel is supposed to be above all criticism no matter how barbaric its behaviour. None of this makes sense to anyone paying attention to the facts on the ground, but mass formations are not about making sense. They’re about emotional committment to a narrative, and facts be damned.

Each situation is being hyped for maximum impact, with amplified threats being used to force through an enormous wealth transfer from the poor to the already rich. Covid was an excuse for massive money printing, and war is an even bigger one. This is driving up the cost of living, while also about to crash supply of many essential goods, including the critical energy supply, without which economic activity is not possible.

In a mass formation, typically some 30% of the population has completely swallowed the narrative and is imper pvious to evidence. Another 60% or so may go along to get along, valuing the sense of belonging that confers over the desired to question a flawed narrative. Belonging is, after all, a survival strategy, while truth-seeking, critical thinking, and counter-narrative speech are not. The remaining people recognise the irrational nature of the narrative, and the proposed solutions, and begin to dissent, accepting the social exclusion and punishments that go with rebellion. While these people typically cannot convince others outright, their skepticism can disrupt the hypnosis sufficiently to prevent the mass formation from going to its logical conclusion, which would be extreme violence against the dissenters. Eventually the hypnosis breaks if its own accord, but terrible things may have been done in the meantime.

Trust determines effective organisational scale. The trust horizon expanded thoughout the decades of globalisation, hence the huge increase in scale and complexity. Now the process has gone into reverse as economic contraction drive the collapse of trust. The large scale that led to such all-encompassing mass formations will be much less effective as it loses political legitimacy and attempts to substitute surveillance and control. This may work for a time, as totalitarian systems have before, but is doomed to fail in the end, as all attempts at extreme centralisation do.

Ultimately, trust can be rebuilt, but at a smaller organisational scale more typical of the past, as the surplus energy that drove complex globalisation and a just in time network of supply chains will no longer be available. Unfortunately the human toll of this cycle of boom and bust will be immense, even under conditions of early failure of the control grid out elites are trying to implement under cover of crisis. When rebuilding, humanity is more likely to operate at human scale, which is the best antidote to the kind of all-consuming mass formations that cause the worst harm. It will be extremely important to rediscover respect for the sincerity, and respect for truth, that allows for personal trust to develop. A necessary precondition for this is free speech, which is currently being widely suppressed. Our complex predicament as we hit non-negotiable limits to growth requires honest dialogue and debate, a willingness to listen, and a move away from pervasive and divisive tribalism.

Nima Alkhorshid is an excellent interviewer with his own show – Dialogue Works – which is a highly recommended channel on geopolitics. Here he’s being interviewed by Lt Colonel Daniel Davis. Nima is Iranian by birth, but has worked for a long time as a professor of engineering in Brazil. He was recently back in Iran, over the time of the recent riots, and so is able to give first hand acocunts of events there in the run up to the war. He’s able to present the reality of Iran, which is in sharp contrast to the propaganda found in the mainstream media, and even more in contrast to the delusional utterances of Donald Trump.

Trump has repeatedly said that the leadership in Iran is hopelessly divided, with no common position, so he doesn’t know who to talk to. This is patently false. The entire leadership were part of the IRGC as young men, with the current President as a medic (now a cardiologist). They’ve know each other since the Iran-Iraq war, know how to work together, and are completely united in outlook. Trump is trapped. He knows he cannot win the war, as the US is already critically short of tomahawk missiles and air defence interceptors and lacks the surge capacity to replace them. He knows his attempted blockade is an ineffective stunt, since the US has too few ships to establish and maintain it, and tankers hugging the coastline are protected in any case by onshore weaponry. He would like nothing better than to walk away, declare victory, and spin a narrative about it to the country, but this is not going to work and he knows it, so instead he may choose to escalate despite the catastrophy that would lead to. His narcissism simply won’t let him be seen to lose and be humiliated.

At the last negotiation session in Islamabad, Iran sent a team of experts with a peace proposal and full documentary back up. Trump sent two Israel-first representatives with an obvious bias and no relevant background, and the Vice President, who also has no experience at all in international relations or diplomacy. None of them had the authority to make decisions on behalf of the US, so they were constantly calling home for permission. A final call to Netanyahu ended the negotiations with a flat no to any concessions whatsoever, insisting on the hardline Israeli demand for complete capitulation. It’s clear that there was never a serious attempt at negotiation on the American/Israeli side. Israel’s goal is the utter destruction of Iran, and that has not been achieved. In fact it never will be achieved because Iran is effectively a defensive fortress, far better armed and prepared than they were given credit for. It seems very likely that the deep state wants this war to continue, even though Trump himself would much prefer to be able to walk away. He’s already bored, and he knows how much damage this is doing go his already tarnished reputation and political chances. He’s now posting ridiculous AI mock-ups like this:

The deep state position is expressed by people warmongering Senator Lindsay Graham and naval commander Kirk Lippold, who says that Trump has a constitutional responsibility to resume the attack on the grounds of national security. This is ridiculous as Iran had never posed a threat to American national security, or to the security of its neighbours. It does not sponsor terrorism. Virtually all Islamic terrorism is conducted by Sunni groups funded by western intelligence agencies, not by Shia Iran or its allies.

There is no trust between the warring parties because the US position is amateurish and incoherent, and too many times negotiations have been used as cover for a surprise attack. In the meantime, Israel continues to flatten villages in southern Lebanon, which is contrary to the terms of the ceasefire. Knowing that no common position can be found, Iran’s approach is to endure the pain for as long as necessary. All they have to do to win is to survive, while the US and Israel need a spectacular victory which is not possible. Iran’s founding stroy is that of the sacrifice of Imam Hussein and his few followers in defence of their country against a vastly superior force. Sacrifice for the greater good of the country is in their DNA. This is why hundreds of young people gather around pieces if critical infrastructure and don’t run even of being bombed. This is a culture that honours martyrdom above all. It is also a country that is largely self-sufficient in food and other essentials of life. Oil exports constitute only 20% of Iran’s economy, so even a successful blockade would not be the end of the world for them, and they have already built a rail link for oil export to China in any case. Iran prizes its sovereignty highly and will defend it to the death.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been bragging about his programme – Economic Fury – to destroy the Iranian economy through financial leverage. The original non-violent protests in Iran were the result of his attack on the Iranian currency, znd the protests only turned violent when infiltrated by oursiders armed by the US and Israel and told to be as violent and destructive as possible. This was an attempt to generate a revolution against the government, and it failed. Iran is now busy divorcing itself from US-controlled internet services in favour if their own domestic systems. This is critical for digital hygiene, to limit the spread of foreign propaganda. They’re finding new ways to communicate and do business. Price inflstion is currently a problem, but the government is helping people to shoulder the burden. Support for the government is at an all time high, as the various factions have come together.

Iran is now in a very powerful position, controlling the Strait of Hormuz, which lies in the territorial water of itself and Oman, with which it intends to share revenue from the toll system its has established. The Wall Street traders who orginally coined the term TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) to refer to Trump, have now come up with a new one – NACHO (Not A Chance Hormuz Opens). Trump is delusionally posting this:

And the Wall Street guys are posting this in response:

Once the leader of a cult of personality has reached the stage of being widely ridiculed by powerful people, the cult is very close to its end. Trump mental and physical health are clearly failing, and it’s becoming more obvious by the day. Unfortunately he’s likely to bereplaced by the extremely unpopular JD Vance, who is a tool of the technical industrial complex currently trying to impose a digital control grid on the country and beyond, but that will be a fight for another day.