Your Shopping Bag Runs Through Hormuz - by Larry C Johnson

 

Every morning the cable networks put up the price of Brent and a graphic of a tanker, and every evening the experts reassure us that the oil is still flowing, more or less. Crude is the scoreboard everyone watches. It is also the wrong scoreboard.

Iran has hit roughly fifty ships in and around the Strait of Hormuz since September 1, most of them tankers. Against a world fleet of more than 8,000 tankers, that is a rounding error. Washington’s reassurance machine will tell you exactly that. What it won’t tell you is that a good share of what moves through the strait isn’t crude at all. It’s the stuff the modern economy is actually made of: the feedstocks for plastics, the methanol for chemicals, the urea and ammonia for fertilizer. And those markets are far less forgiving than oil.

If you want to know what Iran’s tanker campaign really costs, stop looking at the gas pump. Look in your kitchen.

What actually comes out of the Gulf

Start with plastic. The Middle East is the world’s largest exporter of polyethylene, the most widely used plastic on the planet. In 2025 the region shipped 18.7 million tons out of global exports of 43.8 million tons, more than 40 percent of the world total. According to ICIS, about 84 percent of the region’s polyethylene capacity depends on the Strait of Hormuz to reach the sea. Polypropylene and ethylene glycol, the raw material for polyester and PET bottles, follow the same route.

Then the feedstocks. Before the war, nearly 1.2 million barrels a day of naphtha moved through Hormuz, meeting 60 to 70 percent of Asia’s import needs, according to S&P Global. Asia’s steam crackers turn that naphtha into ethylene and propylene, the building blocks of nearly every plastic you own. The Gulf also supplies most of the propane and butane that feed Asia’s other plastics plants.

Then the chemicals. The Middle East exported more than 17 million tons of methanol in 2025. Iran alone shipped well over 9 million tons, and roughly 70 percent of China’s methanol imports came from the region. And fertilizer: by CRU’s count, nearly a third of global urea exports, 44 percent of sulfur exports and almost a fifth of ammonia exports pass through or originate west of the strait.

That’s the cargo Iran is shooting at. Not just oil, but the raw material for packaging, textiles, car parts, medical supplies and the fertilizer that grows the world’s food.....

https://larrycjohnson.substack.com/p/your-shopping-bag-runs-through-hormuz?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1225061&post_id=224852610&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=y7h5a&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email 

The math Washington skipped

The planners who started this war modeled oil. They had the SPR, the escort plan and the pipeline workarounds. What they apparently didn’t model was that the Persian Gulf is also one of the world’s great chemical plants, and that its output has no pipeline, no reserve and no Navy escort sized to protect a fleet of small, uninsurable ships.

Iran figured that out. Its tanker campaign doesn’t have to win at sea. It only has to keep the strait dangerous enough, long enough, for the world to run short of the things that are made from what passes through it. Each strike resets the insurance clock and keeps the small ships away for another month.

So the next time someone in Washington tells you the oil is still flowing, ask them about the naphtha, the methanol and the polyethylene. Then go look at the price of a pack of diapers. That’s where this war is being lost.

The 2026 Covid-19 “Vaccine”. The “Dangerous” XFG Variant of SARS CoV-2

 

1. Introduction

There is ample evidence that the initial 2020-21 Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA “Vaccine” launched in mid-December 2020 had triggered an upper trend in mortality and morbidity. It’s a crime against humanity.

What I want to underscore is the (worldwide) loss of life of children, adolescents and adults from different walks of live resulting from the Covid mRNA vaccine.

It’s the value of human life surrounding each individual case. It’s the grief and sorrow which we all share as human beings.

These individual cases: babies, children, mothers and fathers.

I have a background in mathematical statistics focussing on excess mortality, on trends in Covid vaccine related mortality and morbidity.

What is significant are the individual cases, rather than an abstract data base. What is ocurring are millions of individual cases Worldwide in more than 190 countries.

Yes, It’s a killer vaccine. That message should be loud and clear.

All over the world: children and adolescents are dying. The population of planet earth is more than 8 billion people.

Crimes against humanity, crimes against our children. It’s criminality beyond description.

In January 2022, two years following the roll out of Pfizer’s mRNA “vaccine” in mid-December 2020, a mass funeral protest was held for children who died after receiving the vaccine in Geneva, Switzerland (January 29, 2022)......

https://michelchossudovsky.substack.com/p/2026-covid-19-vaccine-dangerous-xfg-variant-sars-cov-2?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1910355&post_id=218527924&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=y7h5a&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email 

The Feminized Workplace - by Vox Day - Sigma Game

 https://sigmagame.substack.com/p/the-feminized-workplace?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2265630&post_id=224900518&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=y7h5a&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email 

Now, the modern, feminized Western man’s normal reaction is to look at the situation, shake his head, and lament that nothing works anymore. Which, of course, is true, but hardly a solution.

What a true son of the Patriarchy does is play by the new women’s rules that have been established.

For more than three-and-a-half years, Chowdhury juggled multiple jobs across the civil service – as many as five at a time. He was employed by the Departments for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), Health, Business and Trade, the Food Standards Agency, as well as the Home Office.

At one point he was contracted to work 183 hours a week, the equivalent of more than 26 hours a day, seven days a week. This fraud was astonishingly lucrative: at his most dishonest, he was drawing salaries amounting to almost £350,000.

So while it’s true that the women’s workplace is a dramatic morass of avoidance, unaccountability, and a complete lack of accomplishment, that doesn’t mean that real go-getters can’t find real opportunities there. If you’re a man in a feminized workplace that operates according to women’s rules, you can’t help but succeed once you stop playing the wrong game. You simply have to accept that the objective isn’t to do anything, it is to make your coworkers feel good.

It’s that simple. Just do that and failure isn’t even possible!

In any event, we obviously have our answer to Martin van Creveld’s long unanswered question concerning his observation that the more women who work in a field, the less social status it has.

House Prices To Fall 30% - John Rubino's Substack

 The following chart explains today’s “frozen” housing market.

It also guarantees that at least one of three things will happen to restore balance in the sector.

• Mortgage interest rates fall to 3%

• Household incomes rise by 40%

• Home prices fall by 30%

Let’s consider each scenario:....

https://rubino.substack.com/p/house-prices-to-fall-30?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1166121&post_id=224187439&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=y7h5a&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email 

...

30% Lower Home Prices

Now for a feasible number. A 30% drop would bring home prices more or less into line with the incomes required to buy them.

And there’s historical precedent for this kind of decline: During the previous decade’s housing bust, the Case-Shiller home price index fell by 27%.

But as with everything else in this inflationary decade, home prices are now at levels that make a 30% cut hard to imagine. On a $500,000 house (typical in today’s middle-class neighborhoods), 30% equals $150,000 off the asking price, something for which today’s sellers are not prepared.

Getting from here to there will feel like a crisis. But it might happen surprisingly fast. Consider Bitcoin this year and NVIDIA this month:....

The Forgotten Causes of Alzheimer’s and the Cures They’ve Buried

 

After decades and billions spent chasing amyloid, a new body of evidence is revealing the real causes of dementia and decades of forgotten research for healing cognitive decline is being rediscovered.

Story at a Glance:

•Alzheimer’s disease is commonly thought to result from abnormal plaque buildup in the brain that gradually destroys brain tissue. As a result, almost all Alzheimer’s research has been directed toward eliminating amyloid, even after the basis for much of this work was shown to stem from fraudulent research.

•As such, despite decades of research and billions of dollars spent, this model has completely failed to produce useful results. The costly “groundbreaking” Alzheimer’s drugs only slightly slow dementia progression—at the expense of causing brain bleeding and swelling in over a quarter of those treated. In April 2026, the most rigorous independent review of these drugs to date concluded they make no meaningful difference to patients.

•In contrast, numerous affordable treatments have been developed for Alzheimer’s disease that target the root causes of the disorder, producing significant benefits at a fraction of the cost and without any toxicity.

•One neurologist, for example, proposed that amyloid serves a protective function in the brain and treats Alzheimer’s by identifying the underlying process causing dementia (which can often be diagnosed through symptoms). Remarkably, despite the method being proven in clinical research (and now a randomized controlled trial), awareness of it or the fact there are completely different types of “Alzheimer’s disease” which require different treatments remains almost nonexistent.

•Likewise, a strong case can be made that impaired cerebral circulation, along with impaired venous and lymphatic drainage, plays a pivotal role in Alzheimer’s disease.

•A large body of forgotten research (much of it from Russia) shows that blood cells clumping together (“blood sludging”) obstructs the brain’s smallest vessels and can precede the brain changes seen in Alzheimer’s—a process Chinese medicine has long recognized as “blood stasis.”

•This article will review the common causes of cognitive impairment and dementia (e.g., cells becoming trapped in a shocked state where they no longer function) along with the forgotten treatments for neurodegenerative disorders—some of which, like DMSO, have extensive evidence supporting their use.....

https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-forgotten-causes-of-alzheimers?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=748806&post_id=223062121&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=y7h5a&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email 

Has decoupling worked out for the US?, by Hua Bin - The Unz Review - (An excellent analysis of economic long term planning vs short term profit driven wishful thinking. - CL)

 ....So what happened with decoupling?

There is no policy change in the US or Europe. If anything, both are doubling down on the decoupling rhetoric and actions.

What happened is something more mundane called “market” and “economics”.

China’s supply chain dominance

Dell did set up factories outside China. But it’s only the final assembly.

It remains heavily dependent on China for upstream components and raw materials. Just like most global electronics manufacturers.

China dominates the early and middle stages of the PC supply chain including mechanical parts and casing, specialized tooling and injection-molding, printed circuit boards (PCBs), semiconductors, batteries and power components, and display panels.

Basically, everything that goes into the PC.

In each category, Chinese suppliers control the bulk of global production. For example, China controls roughly 60% global PCB production, over 30% mature chip nodes, nearly 50% PC batteries, and 70% LCD display panels.

A brand like Dell merely assembles the parts and components made by Chinese suppliers that go into the PC and sticks its label on top.

To replace Chinese electronics supply chain, trillions of dollars will be needed in CAPEX and decades of time. As well as hundreds of thousands of skilled engineers and technicians.

I haven’t even touched on the upstream critical minerals for electronics where Chinese dominance is nearly complete.

For example, rare earth elements, gallium, germanium, and battery-grade graphite used in magnets, semiconductors, and thermal paste.

China’s global market share in these inputs is often above 90%.

Furthermore, basic electronic building blocks—such as multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs), resistors, inductors, cables, and USB/power connectors—are overwhelmingly produced or packaged in China.....

https://www.unz.com/bhua/has-decoupling-worked-out-for-the-us/ 

...The dilemma of Western political imperative vs. market reality

Sitting in the center of the US industrial policy and supply chain decoupling from China is an uncomfortable fact – immediate, guaranteed economic damage versus theoretical long-term gains that has not materialized.

The gains are quite likely never to materialize.

• The scale and ecosystem gap is too wide: China’s manufacturing dominance is not about cheap labor—it is about an unmatched concentration of hundreds of thousands of specialized tier-2 and tier-3 suppliers, massive domestic demand, and decades of infrastructure investment.

Neither the US nor fragmented Southeast Asian hubs can replicate that depth of ecosystem within a realistic political or corporate timeframe.

• Subsidy fatigue and political whiplash: rebuilding complex supply chains requires 10 to 20 years of consistent policy and capital.

However, Western policy shifts every two to four years with election cycles. Businesses hesitate to commit irreversible capital to long-term domestic or “friend-shored” factories when tariffs, tax credits, or industrial mandates could be altered or repealed by a future administration.

• Lasting labor and cost realities: Even if factories are built in the West or allied nations, structural bottlenecks remain.

The West faces severe shortages of skilled technicians, tool-and-die makers, and electrical engineers, while emerging hubs like Vietnam and India have much smaller qualified workforces than China while facing rapid wage inflation.

Dell’s shifting final assembly to countries like Vietnam or Mexico gives the “illusion of decoupling”.

The brutal reality is that it just adds a middleman without actually reducing reliance on China.

Because upstream materials, sub-components, and factory machinery still come from China, the US ends up paying higher prices for the exact same underlying dependencies—getting all of the inflationary pain with almost none of the promised security.

I guess this is what people mean when they say, “caught between a rock and a hard place”.

Parliament Seeks to Abolish the English – The Occidental Observer

 England was first unified as a nation in 927 AD by King Æthelstan, and as such, the English people have existed for well over a thousand years. The English are not a modern creation nor are they an administrative classification; they possess not only a long and storied history, but also a deep and undeniable connection to England as their ancestral homeland. What is more, the founding populations that coalesced into the “English” were all of European descent – and as such, they would all be referred to as “White” when looking to assign them a racial designation. Those groups came together, went on to adopt a shared religion, developed a shared language, and gave birth to a distinct and complex culture that was unique to them, while still sharing broader characteristics – including biological traits – with other European ethnic groups of a common racial background.

It is therefore clear: the English are a distinct and individual ethnic group with a common racial, national, cultural, and linguistic background that belongs to a wider racial group of people of European descent, for which the shorthand term is “White.” Consequently, there is no debate: the English are “White.” This is neither exclusionary nor racist; it is merely a statement of fact.......

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2026/11/14/parliament-seeks-to-abolish-the-english/