Flashback Friday | #414: The Red Sea Shooting Gallery

It's all about the macro productions. That's right, Fridays here on Macro Aggressions taking you back to February 20th, 2024, the Red Sea Shooting Gallery. If you want to turn some of your soon-to-be-worthless fiat currency into actual money, check out my friend Tony Arteburn with WiseWolf Gold and Silver. Set up a monthly buy with a Wolfpack subscription as low as $50 or roll over your IRA and 401K into physical precious metals. You can even use your Bitcoin to make purchases. Go to macroaggressions.gold promo code macro for free silver. Now please enjoy the show. What does the goddamn line say Tony? Please do not use gendered language. Then why? I'll be arrested! Put in airport jail! Well you're going to commit sideways, man. It's a big club and you ain't in it. How dare you? Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States! I'm Chris Hansen, the day by the NPC. Jack Mary is Tech Theratrix. I am Spartacus. I'm Jacks and Sacramento Key Hymn. Stephen Seagal. Sex Offender Guy. I'm Keith Morris. This is Moomile Gutapi. I'm Rick James, bitch. It's sorting through the lies. The hijacker's passport was found blocks from the World Trade Center crash site if you can believe that. It's not tracked 2.3 trillion dollars in transactions. And uncovering the century's long plan for world domination. What about Cuba? Having some food? Let's talk about Chinese food. Have you ever been in a Turkish prison? Ah, well, for a decent! Swangles in the world, I mean. I have sent six of my Libyan Missus to blow up the serious hardware department. I think it would be more fun than jumping off a cliff to German vice-sex groups. Oh, you English are so superior, aren't you? Thank you, Comrade. And now, macro aggressions. That's what I was called. With your host, buddy, I don't know who you are, but you're about to get chlamydia. Charlie Robinson. Hey, Whitey, where's your hat? You wouldn't drop the blame on Charlie and say it's all Charlie's fault. He was a retard. I get some goddamn diuretic. Welcome to Macro Aggressions. I'm your host, Charlie Robinson. If you're watching us on Rockfinna Rumble or listening wherever podcasters serve thanks, a million we appreciated. Hey, if you like the show and you think we've done a good job, certainly would appreciate a five star rating and maybe write a little something. If you want to connect with me, the website, macroaggressions.io, it's brand new. You can find out everything about the show, about the books and whatever else is going on over there. Big thank you to the sponsors. They make the show happen. We have a sponsors page over at the website as well if you're interested in getting more information about all these companies. The links are in the show notes. There's links on the website, whatever, but EMP Shield is a great resource for you. You can go to EMPShield.com and find out what they're building over there. They're building something that's many times more efficient than a single-use military design EMP protector. It can handle 40 EMP strikes. It'll work against lightning. It'll work against solar flares, things like that. You can fit it on your house, on your car, boat, RV, generators. If you've got them, you can get bundle packages, which brings the dollar per unit price down a little bit. So check it out. Do this. Go to EMPShield.com. Read about it. If you find something you like, the discount code is macro. That'll save you some money. You want to install it? You can install it yourself. There's installation videos there, or you can just hire an electrician to come out there and, I don't know, be proactive as opposed to reactive. It's kind of the theme of this show. And also, big thank you to the team at Chemical Free Body. Talk about being proactive. You want to be proactive with your health. You don't want to sit around and wait and be reactive. That's what the pharmaceutical industry is all about, about being reactive. I'm screwed up, so therefore, what can I take? No, don't get your body screwed up in the first place. Take care of it. You've got to do this. Nobody's coming to save you. I'm sorry. That's the downside of this, is that you're going to have to do it yourself. But if you're fine with that, if you're somebody that is a little bit more on the proactive side, you want it to be within your control. And your health totally is. Go to ChemicalFreeBody.com, read up on what they're doing. See if you connect with their philosophy on this, because I certainly do. I've been incorporating their products into my life for the last four years, and I feel really great about it. I'm proud to represent the company. I know Tim, he does a great job with making sure that his products are without chemicals, even down to the t-shirts that he sells. I mean, it's a lifestyle for Tim for sure. And if you're interested in finding out more about it, ChemicalFreeBody.com is the place to go and the discount code is macro. And you can also check out Tim's podcast as well. If you want information about getting yourself healthy, he's a great guy. He's a great guy for it. He's been on this show more than anybody, too, because I think it's important that we get honest about our health. And, you know, because life is long. If you feel shitty, life is long, long, long. So you want to feel there's nothing more important than taking care of your health. So ChemicalFreeBody.com, promo code macro. Well, I'll tell you, when we did the show that was looking forward into 2024, not a prediction show or anything like that, but just sort of like reading the tea leaves, where are we? Where are we headed? One of the things I said was that there are some terms that you're going to have to get used to in 2024 because they're going to be everywhere. Terms like the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Oman, Red Sea. You know, you're like, I don't really know where Yemen is. Well, you're going to. You need to. And I'll say that about this episode. If you're driving around or you're at the gym or you're pulling weeds in your garden or whatever you're doing, don't worry about it. But if you're sitting in front of a computer or if you listen to this at a time when, you know, when you are in a place where you can pull up a map of what the Middle East looks like, you might want to do that. Just so that you have it as a handy reference guide, there's going to be geography on this test. I'm sorry. There just is. But, but, and again, I don't expect Americans, which is according to listen notes, 70% of my audience is American. So I don't expect Americans to, to, to know the geography of the Middle East inside now. And it's okay. You know, you probably don't spend too much time there. I know I don't. But, but if you've got a map or if you understand what this area looks like, we're going to talk about it in detail because there's several different places in which things can kick off. And they're already starting to happen when you see Yemen firing missiles at cargo ships and things like that. Oil tankers. You need to know sort of where this is on a map and really take, take three minutes to do it. Just pull it up just so you can take a look and maybe you want to search like Saudi Arabia, Gulf of Aden, Red Sea, something like that. And pull up a map so that you can see what we're working with. I'll do my best to paint a picture of this. But estimates are that over $200 billion in goods have already been diverted away from the most important canal in the world. And that is the Suez Canal in Egypt. Okay. You know, Panama Canal in Panama is extremely important as well. It's not a contest. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe in terms of like dollars of goods shipped, maybe there's more going through the Panama Canal. I'm not sure. But the Suez Canal is deeply important for a variety of reasons, not just the geography, which makes it crucial, but also because of the relationship and location to the oil producing countries that need this waterway in order to reach the Mediterranean and then out into Europe. And wherever. And frankly, even if they're not going up the Red Sea through the Suez and into the Mediterranean, maybe they're coming down from the Mediterranean through the Red Sea. It doesn't matter. This is a choke point. And it's a place that we here in the United States don't think about too much unless it's a situation like this where we're starting to see conflict down there. And most people don't understand sort of why it is imperative. But we're going to get into it. We're going to talk about what has become a shooting gallery, you know, in this area and why this area is important. Part of it is just dumb luck, just geographical dumb luck. There are areas in which the sea, the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf itself start to get narrow in parts, not by not because of man made issues or anything like that. Just topography, geography, whatever. It just is a little bit narrow in certain areas. And where it is narrow, that makes it a logical choke point. That makes it a place where you don't have to control all of the Red Sea. You just have to control the narrow parts of the Red Sea, right? So it's not even so much geopolitics as it is just logic and strategy and dumb luck. So if you're a country that borders the Red Sea, like Egypt and Sudan and Saudi Arabia and Yemen and Eritrea and Djibouti, then you have been, this has been a crucial part of your existence forever. The Red Sea is majorly important, not just for oil, just for everything. So it's not like it's new. It's not like we just invented it. It's been there for a while. There's been problems there for a long, long time. I mean, this isn't like some new occurrence. It's just that now, because of the situation in Israel, as a way to fight back on behalf of the Palestinians in Gaza that are being overrun, they're align their brother in brothers, I don't know, religious brothers, political brothers in Yemen have decided that what they're going to do is they're going to do their part to disrupt anybody that's trying to bring supplies into Israel and therefore bringing supplies into what they perceive to be their enemy. So if you're a ship that is going through the Gulf of Aden and into the Red Sea, you've got to pass by Yemen. You don't have a choice. You can hug Djibouti and Eritrea on that western coast to the extent that you can. But there is a region right at the beginning, the southernmost part of the Red Sea that we're going to get into that is extremely narrow. And when you go through there, you're just a gigantic target. You better hope that you don't have enemies on the shorelines, because if you do, you've got nowhere to go. And that's kind of the situation that we're in right now. So let's start with, we'll do a little, this is going to be like sort of a geography class, you know, and, but I like geography. I always have, and I've come from a family that I'm a traveling family, you know, we've been in all kinds of places. My mom was a one of those legendary Pan Am flight attendants in the 60s on the international leg. So she's been like every week, like, Hey, have you ever been to Beirut? She's like, I've been to Beirut 200 times. You're like, Damn, you know, like, you know, so like, we come from a family, my dad was a pilot, we come from a family that likes to get out and see things. And I, and I've been to Egypt and it's, you want to talk about a humbling place, man, you got there to the pyramids. Sphinx is a little less impressive than you might think it is, but the pyramids more than make up for it. And I don't know how it works now, but at the time when I was there in 1989, you could go in the pyramids. Like I've been in the chambers and everything in the narrow, very steep ladders that they've put in there and gone up. I mean, it's a, it's a really important place. It's an important place geographically. It's important now because we have, we place a lot of emphasis on it because of the oil in that region, not so much Egypt, but, but in that area. And, and, and it's been, you know, as they call the birthplace of civilization in that region. So it's very important. It's got a long history and it's, and we should probably pay attention to it because it's now going to become part of our problem. And that's, that's, that's the thing is that I'm not just picking some random place and say, well, it's like, let's talk about this waterway that nobody cares about. No, this is important because it's only going to get worse. I don't see this getting better. Well, I wish I don't see it. There's too many, there's too many people at play. There's too many agendas. Somebody gets an itchy trigger finger and it's on. So let's start with this. Let's talk a little bit about the Suez Canal. No, Suez Canal is at the, if you look at the Mediterranean Sea, like the southeast part of it. There's a little canal that goes from the Mediterranean. It splits this region of Egypt, Sinai Peninsula on the east side and Egypt proper on kind of the west side. And it's a narrow band. It's 120 miles long. It connects these in the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea connects them. 20,600 ships per year pass through that. That works out to about 60 a day. Okay. So you've got, you know, it's busy. It opened in 1869. It was widened in 2016. So it's now a little bit more up to date in terms of capacity. You know, obviously, if it was just what you got in 1869, we would be in big trouble. But it's been adjusted over the years and widened really recently within the last decade. So, and it's very important. Clearly, you get a lot of traffic that goes through there and oil in particular. A lot of it flows through this region. So as you go down, let's say you're in the Mediterranean, you find where the Suez Canal is in Egypt. You're pretty close to Israel right there. Israel is kind of like due east and you're kind of like southeast here in Egypt. And you go to reverse down this Red Sea as you're going down the Red Sea on the western side, you have Egypt. And as you get further down, you have Sudan and then you have a small little country called Eritrea. And on your eastern side, almost the entire way down the Red Sea, you've got Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is gigantic, right? And it's like a large, very large peninsula that dips down. And the Red Sea runs alongside it. And so you've got like proper Africa on one side and you've got kind of like the Middle East on the other. So as you make your way down the Red Sea south, you get to a part when you reach almost the very, very end of the Red Sea, it narrows to a place that's almost like a choke point. And it is only 14 miles wide in this area, which is extremely narrow. You can see the other side sort of thing, you know, to put this in, I don't know, how would I compare it? Yeah, I mean, if you've ever been in Hawaii, if you've ever been in Maui, and you look across and you see like Lanai and Molokai in those places, those islands are about seven miles away. So you're talking about something that's about twice as wide as that, not wide at all. And this is an area called Babel El-Mandeb. And it's, and once you get into this area, this real narrow region in the Red Sea, as you're going south down the Red Sea, and you're about to pop off into the Gulf of Aden, this narrow area, Babel El-Mandeb, is basically just the choke point between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. You've got 9% of all of the oil that travels by boat goes through this region. 9%. We can round up and say 10% if it makes it easier. This works out to about three and a half million barrels a day. Go through there. It's a lot. If you did something and messed up 10% of the World Sea traveling oil, you would be creating a catastrophe. We need every barrel that we've got. And this is where ships are getting attacked now because as you come down through Babel El-Mandeb, you no longer have Saudi Arabia on your eastern side. You now have Yemen. Saudi Arabia is almost like a big square peninsula that comes down at the very bottom of it. One half of it is Yemen and the other half of it is Oman. Saudi Arabia, as it goes down, its southern most flank never hits water. It becomes Yemen and then Yemen hits water. Where Yemen and Oman hit the water, that is called the Gulf of Aden and also the Gulf of Oman. Just south of Saudi Arabia. The Red Sea runs through. Once you get through this narrow part, you would probably have protection if that narrow part had Saudi Arabia on one side. Saudi Arabia wouldn't be launching missiles, but it doesn't. If you had Yemen higher, up more northern, the waterway would be too wide for Yemen to do all that much. But because it narrows down into just a 14 mile across channel and because Yemen is on one side and Eritrea is on the other side, two countries that are pretty easy to, you know, I mean, they do what they want to do, essentially. So that region is where a lot of these ships are getting hit. They don't have anywhere to go. They can't. So you either avoid this area or you take your chances. And this has been, you know, this is an easy region to shut down. So as it stands right now, what we've been experiencing are missile attacks coming from Yemen that are targeting ships, ships that they have deemed to be worthy of targeting, meaning you're either flying an Israeli flag, you're flying an American flag, or you're flying a different flag, but you're taking supplies to Israel or from Israel. If you're doing any of those things, you're going to you run the risk of getting attacked. If you're a Chinese vessel, if you're a Saudi Arabian vessel, which is interesting because Saudi Arabia and Yemen have been fighting for the last several years. In fact, it's been really brutal. But Yemen and Saudi Arabia have come to an agreement where they are no longer going to be fighting each other. And so when Saudi ships traverse this part of the Red Sea, and by the way, it's not, they don't have to, they have access on their Eastern flank, which into the Persian Gulf, and they can go all the way around this if they want. But what they've found is that Saudi Arabian vessels, they're not being hit. You know, they've got the ghetto pass. They can get through. Nobody's shooting at them. So that's something to consider. And so as you come down the through the Mediterranean, down the Suez Canal into the Red Sea, down further south through Babel El-Mandeb, you make it through this 14 miles of narrow passageway with an enemy on one side. You then wind up dead ending into a region called the Gulf of Aden. And once you're in the Gulf of Aden, it's wider. Of course, now it starts instead of going north and south, it starts to kind of just go towards the east a little bit. You kind of have to hang a turn and head towards the east. Now on the Africa side of things, you've got Somalia, Somalia on one side, which ain't great because it's been kind of lawless. And you've got Djibouti in there, which is a very small country. America likes it because just geographically, it's a good place. And you in this region is called the Horn of Africa. And so in this Gulf of Aden, this is one of the places where I said, like, get ready for it. You might not know where it is on the map. You're going to. You're going to need to. So the Gulf of Aden, and I said the Gulf of Oman, this is all just a big area of water that is south of Saudi Arabia, that peninsula. And it's a very important waterway. First of all, it's sort of like the connection between Africa and the Middle East. And that's very important. We've got a lot of oil producing nations in the area. Of course, that's very important. So as you start to head a little bit more towards the east in the Gulf of Aden, because it's the only direction you can go. If you go west, you run right into Africa. But as you as you traverse the east, you come to that that coastline of Yemen and Oman at that southern tip, where Saudi Arabia kind of dead ends into Yemen and Oman. And then Yemen and Oman touch the water in the Gulf of Aden. If you just keep going east, it passed Yemen, you'll eventually wind up into Oman. And as soon as you come around that corner at the end of the peninsula, you're in the Gulf of Oman. And then you wind up in a region that is called the Strait of Hormuz. And the Strait of Hormuz is extremely important as well. It's just as important as the Red Sea and also has that geographical quirk where there is a very narrow passageway that just happens to be in the Strait of Hormuz in an area that puts it, puts friendlies on one side, which would be Oman, a UAE, the United Arab Emirates group there, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, the like, and also Saudi Arabia. So you've got them on one side. And then you know who you have on the other side? You have Iran. Okay. So you, so again, you, if you want to deal with oil on the water, you got to get it out of these tight spots. You got to get it down the Red Sea and through a 14 mile wide area called Baba El-Manda. And if you want to take it the other way out of the other side of Saudi Arabia, on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia, through the Persian Gulf and south, which is a logical place to do it, you then have to go through the Strait of Hormuz and you've got Iran on the other side watching. Okay. And if Iran wants to throw a monkey wrench in this entire thing, they shut down the Strait of Hormuz and they can do it because it's only 21 miles to 52 miles wide. Okay. A little bit bigger than the 14 miles on the other side, but 21 miles in nautical terms, you know, is nothing. It's a narrow passageway. It's certainly small enough that you could lay mines all over the place. You could put subs out there, which I'm sure there are, and you could shut that place down. If you wanted it shut down, you could shut it down. You could make anybody going through there have to pay a huge price. So I know it's kind of like a, I know this is a bit of a geography class, but it kind of has to be in a sense that once you take a look at this and you kind of understand the topography of it, it starts to make a lot of sense. You go, oh, no wonder they're so concerned about supply chains in the Middle East on the water. No wonder. It's not like you can just bring it out. You can take this stuff out of like 18 different ports. You still have to navigate these straits that are very small and you've got enemies on one side of the strait in both. You've got Yemen on one side in the Baba El-Mandeb and you've got Iran on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz. Okay, so if you're America or you're Britain or you're Israel, these are not your friends. Israel's been trying to fight Iran forever. So you have to be very careful about this. Now the Strait of Hormuz is 104 miles long. So, you know, Suez Canal is 120 miles long. And that's roughly the same thing. But here's the difference. Whereas the Red Sea has just about 10% of all oil. We've decided to round up about 10% of all oil going through there. When it comes to the Strait of Hormuz, you get 20% of the world's oil goes through there. So it's twice as important. And we're not even talking about liquefied natural gas, which in this case, a third of it goes through there. So now you've got a serious problem. You think you've got problems with Yemen firing missiles and shutting down the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. If you want to kick this thing off even further, the minute Iran decides to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, there goes 20% of the oil. On the other side, there goes 10% of the oil. So that's 30%. There goes a third of the world's natural gas. You're going to have massive, massive problems with this. And not for nothing, but even in the Gulf of Aden, when you consider yourself to have maybe the good guys on the other shoreline, meaning not Yemen, on the other side of Yemen, one of the places right across Yemen is Somalia. And I would like to remind you that Somalia is on Wesley Clark's list of seven countries in five years, just so you know. So we would most definitely like to take control of that. All right, enough of the geography for a little bit. Let's talk about... Well, let me do this. Just mentioned really quick here. When we talk about the supply chain issues that are going on in this region, I've mentioned oil quite a bit because it's at the top of the list, but it's not limited to that. So industries and corporations that are impacted by the supply chain with regard to oil, since we'll start there, Shell, BP, Valero Energy, Qatar Energy, and Edison have all diverted from that region. They've all decided that it's just too dangerous in the Red Sea, near Yemen. We're not going by there. So we're already starting to see that. In the automobile industry, we have Volvo, Tesla, Suzuki, Michelin, and Chinese car manufacturer, Geely, have all diverted away from the Red Sea. So again, this adds timing to the shipping because it's now got to go around the southern part of Africa or elsewhere. It adds price to it. It takes... It adds traffic. It screws things up. Okay. Logistics companies FedEx and DHL have decided they're no longer interested in trying to take the chances through there. And frankly, they may not have a choice. They may not be able to get insurance for it. And then retail companies such as Target, these are companies that have had their supply chain impacted already and have had to find ways around it. We're talking about Target, Ikea, Adidas, Tractor Supply, Primark, Danone, William Sonoma, Stainsbury, Electrolux, Levi's, Logitech, Marks and Spencer, PEPCO, and Primark. This is all according to Al Jazeera who have reported on this. So it's not limited to oil, but of course, oil is a huge factor in it. Let's move on to Yemen, if we can, and talk a little bit about this because Yemen's a mess. They had a coup in 1962 that was organized by Lacerkell by their UK branch, guy named Neil McClain. So the West has had their fingers in Yemen for a long time because of the geography of it. I mean, it really kind of boils down to that. And if you don't have oil or you don't have a strategic port or something like that, then America will usually leave you alone. They might starve you to death, but usually they don't really mess with you too much. But Yemen has this sort of geography that makes them a prime candidate to throw a monkey wrench in a lot of things going on in this area. And you will hear when talking about Yemen, you will hear them talk about the Houthis, right? And they're almost contractually required to say Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. Those are the four words you'll hear. Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. Yes, Iran backs them. It doesn't mean they do exactly what Iran says. Iran backs a lot of people. The US backs a lot of people too. It doesn't mean that they do exactly what the US says. So yes, the Houthis are backed by Iran. And yes, they take funding from them, among others, and they take weapons from them, among others. And they are ideologically aligned, for the most part, but not on everything. So they don't want to work with the US, Saudi Arabia, or Israel. They just don't want to work with them. But they've been fighting Israel or Saudi Arabia for a while now. And you find these missiles that have gone off inside some part of Yemen. And they put the camera on them and the missiles on the side of them. The parts that are still intact, it's all written in English. You're like, oh, it's from Raytheon or Lockheed Martin or whatever. So we're in it. It's like a proxy American war, of course. We're the worst. We're in it. But in and you will know this because, like I said, the 1962 coup that happened as recently as 2017, the president of Yemen was assassinated, I'm sure. I'm sure the CIA had nothing to do with that at all, wink, wink. Also, in 2017, Yemen had the worst outbreak of cholera in the world, with a million cases of cholera in just one year. That's what happens when the Saudis start bombing Yemen's water infrastructure, causing the cholera epidemic. And not accidentally either. Water treatment facilities, water facilities. You know, they starved a bunch of them out too. They starved, I think, millions of people to death. There are currently, God damn, man, there are currently 19 million people in Yemen that are hungry, which is 60% of the population. 60% of the population are hungry and starving to death. And they know who did it. They know who's involved in that. Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States. So when these ships go through, they're not just doing it for fun. They're not just taking shots at them for fun. They're taking shots at them to get revenge for what the West has done to their people. 4.5 million people in Yemen have been displaced just since 2015. 17.8 million people in the country of Yemen lack safe drinking water. 22 million people in Yemen are without healthcare. It's one of the poorest countries in the world now because of this. It's one of the hungriest countries in the world. So when they fight, they are fighting for more than just high fives. And, you know, they are avenging the mass genocide that was committed against their people by the West. So when Israel clutches their pearls or America gets up on its podium and starts talking about how we're going to bring law and order back to this region, you guys go fuck yourselves. You're the reason why this is happening. If it wasn't for Saudi Arabia and Israel and the United States doing what they're doing here, Yemen wouldn't be firing missiles at you. I mean, what you've done to the Palestinians is the justification for this, but it's only one of them. It's only the latest justification for this. They have plenty of reasons to launch missiles and destroy this area. I mean, I can't even blame them. They are part of the Arab League, which includes Palestine, but not Israel. That's a key component here. So currently, an arms embargo is being enforced by the United Nations Security Council against Yemen while Saudi Arabia creates a famine there. So again, the United Nations, uniting nations into a one world government started by David Rockefeller, who's also deeply involved in depopulation. Do you think the United Nations gives a flying fuck if Yemen can defend itself? Absolutely not. They would prefer all of those people were dead. Houthis have attacked cargo ships tied to Israel, but they have an agreement currently not to attack Saudi Arabia. I find that to be very interesting. I think that the relationship between the Saudis and the Americans is on life support. I think that if George H.W. Bush were alive today and not in hell where he belongs, he would be turning over in his crypt right now. If he saw what the Biden administration and the Obama administration has done to the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia, they've destroyed it. I have no love for the Saudis or the American Empire. I don't care. But George H.W. Bush would never allow this to happen. Just so you know, I mean, there would be airplanes blowing up with critical people of his regime inside them. We just know that. Here's the motto from the Houthis. God is great. Death to America. Death to Israel. A curse upon the Jews. Victory to Islam. I mean, it doesn't look great on a Hallmark card, but it does, you know, I get it. I mean, listen, if I were there, I'd feel the same way. Hell, I'm not there and I feel the same way. America's doing this. Israel's doing this. Yes, we know who's doing it. They know who's doing it. You know how they know who's doing it. You know why they know? Because they are watching their family members starve to death. And they know who's responsible for that. It's not confusing to them. They're very clear on who it is. It's us in the West. It's the Westerners and their partners in Israel. And speaking of that, BDS, Boycott, Divestment and Sanction, plus Israeli ships targeting is working. There has been a 90% decline in activity in the Israeli port city of El Yat in the Gulf of Aqaba. Again, this is a geography. There's a very obscure port in Israel and there's a very tiny channel of water called the Gulf of Aqaba. And 2.6 million tons of cargo goes through this place annually. And you can only reach it through the Red Sea and it is basically cut off. There's nothing going on there. Since the situation started in Gaza, that place is just, the Yemenis just turned it off. They just said, nope, we're not letting anybody get through. It's not even geographically close to Yemen either. It's just that they said, anybody going to that port is Israeli in nature. It's an Israeli port. You're going there to get something or you're going there to drop it off. Either way, you're not going there anymore. 90% closed. This is, it was the fuck aroundest of times. It was the find outest of times. What do you want? I mean, you should know that this is going to happen. Deutsche Bank warns clients about global supply chain crisis in the Red Sea. Love it. When Deutsche Bank is concerned about something other than their own balance sheet, you should really be worried because Deutsche Bank should rightly be out of business. They're so poorly mismanaged and they have arsonists working for them. They're burning their own buildings to the ground, essentially, not actual arsonists, but financial arsonists. And they're waving their hands going, stay away from the Red Sea. It's really fucked up. When the most decrepit zombie bank in the world is telling you to be careful of the Red Sea, maybe listen to them. Baltic Dry Index, that's where you go if you want to get shipping rates for around the world. You check the Baltic Dry Index and it'll show that war risk insurance premiums are spiking. So you can get insurance, but you have to buy what's known as a war risk insurance policy instead. It's not like I insured this boat against running the ground, getting hit by a rogue wave, Exxon Valdez situation, Captain's Drunk, whatever. You can insure against a lot of things. But if you have an active war going on in the region, you have to get war insurance from companies like Allianz and places like that. Those very hard to find insurance policies. And what the Baltic Dry Index is saying is that, yeah, the shipping rates are up, but the rates are up in particular because insurance in that area is up. And shipping companies are just flat out avoiding the area. So as it stands right now, they have other options. There's other places they can go and they're exploring that as you would expect. Hundreds of oil tankers have already diverted, which is obviously messing with the supply chain, but currently there's a place to divert to. The problem becomes when they cut off both choke points, when they get Boba Elmandev and they get the straight up four moves at the same time. And now you've got 30% of the crude that's not going through and a third of the LNG not going through. You've got massive problems. You have something that impacts oil prices, which impacts transportation, manufacturing, global just energy, heating your house, fueling your car, all those things. And then the multiplier effects of all of those industries that then are impacted because of it. Shipping food costs the food because now you have to ship it and now the food, the gas is more expensive for the truck. So all you have to do is impact oil and you can screw everything up. If you impact enough oil, then you'll set off a think of, you know, the guys that spend a year setting up all those elaborate dominoes in cool patterns and they hit one and then they all sort of simultaneously start to go down. Well, think of it like that. You hit oil, a third of the oil in the world, all of a sudden the price of oil just explodes through the roof. That triggers derivative contracts to hit and that causes banks to have to pay on derivative bets or lose or, you know, and it starts a cascading effect where now you start to mess with options, derivatives, which are bets on bets. And by some accounts, there are two quadrillion dollars of derivatives sitting out there on these banks balance sheets. So you have the possibility of taking down the entire banking system, not by blowing up the bank for international settlements. God willing, just kidding. Oh, really, all you have to do is shut down these two areas, a 14 mile stretch and a 21 mile stretch on either sides of Saudi Arabia. And next thing you know, you've ended the banking system. You think you're just impacting you think you're going to get revenge against the West for what they've done in Gaza. You wind up taking the entire oil, gas and banking system down. I mean, this is this could happen. This this isn't like 90 things need to happen in order for this one thing to happen. Not like four things need to happen. They decide they coordinate. They decide we're shutting down oil. We're going to mine the shit out of these regions. Good luck. First, one of those ships that blows up there. Nobody's coming through. Send a couple of subs in there. Start taking shots in American ships. Start taking shots at Exxon ships that are going. I mean, all of a sudden oil stops flowing. All of a sudden it goes from $100 a barrel to $300 a barrel. I mean, this could happen. I'm not trying to, you know, I'm not trying to say it's going to happen. But it's not as disconnected from reality as I would like to think. And of course, you know, now we've got the USS Gravely, a Navy destroyer out there that had a Houthi missile come within a mile of it, which is pretty close in terms of like launching missiles at boat sort of things, you know, it's not a direct hit, but I don't know, man. I get Vietnam vibes when I start hearing about missiles getting launched at ships. And what are we going to do? Double check their work, make sure they're not lying to us. I, how would we know? Another USS Maddox incident? I mean, it's possible. Let's talk about the Bricks for a second here. Because I think I see their strategy. Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, those are the five major players that started the Bricks Coalition. They just made a move to add seven more. They agreed to add seven more. One of those seven was Argentina. Once Malay became president, he then reneged and pulled them out. So now they're down to adding six. So it was five. Now it's going to be 11. But if you take a look at what they're doing, at what they've got, and the countries that they're going after, they're being pretty strategic here. So they just added Egypt. It's one of the new members to the Bricks conglomerate. So now they control the Suez Canal. They just added Iran to the Bricks. So now they control the Strait of Hormuz. They just added Saudi Arabia to the group. So now they control the Red Sea in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. They added UAE. So now they grabbed the Gulf of Arabia. They added Ethiopia. So they control the Gulf of Aden. All of those waterways that I just talked about, the Bricks countries are doing deals with them. America is about to find themselves completely shut out of that region geographically. That's what the Bricks expansion is about. It's about two things. It's about securing energy, which by all accounts they're doing. They just got Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates. And it's about controlling travel and trade through the maritime regions. They got the Suez Canal. They got the Strait of Hormuz. They got the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Gulf of Arabia. They locked it all down. One shot. Frankly, Argentina can go fuck themselves. They're unnecessary here. They were the most expendable of the seven. So now they control the ports. Now they control the waterways. They're expanding, as we know, the Belt and Road Initiative. This is part of it. Part of the Belt and Road Initiative, there's a port in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. That's part of their BRI push. And this is a way to introduce Saudi Arabia to China, to tie them even closer together. Remember, China is the sea in Bricks. And now Saudi Arabia is in that group. So we've now created a new partnership that can be used to kill the dollar and create the Petro Yuan. Look, I'm not cheerleading for the Bricks in this multipolar scenario here. Because there's no good guys in this scenario. It's the Western American Empire and those fuckers. And it's everybody else now. It's starting to click up and grow themselves. Now, I mean, if you fast forward and run this tape, you know, 50 years from now, you may find that this new group of Bricks is worse than the American Empire. I wouldn't be surprised by that at all. I think there's something about when you take over the world, you sort of become awful. Or maybe you have to become awful in order to take over the world. But either way, once you're there, you're usually up to no good. So right now, this is a nice little check on the American Empire's power to see the rise of the Bricks in the Bricks Plus countries. But it's only a check for a while. It could lead to war, of course. That's not good. It's definitely going to slit the throat of the American Empire financially. I mean, it's just a catastrophic failure on their part to not understand this. And look, the BRI, Belton Road Initiative, has a port directly across from Yemen in that Baba El-Mande straight in Djibouti. So the Chinese are already there. And the Chinese don't have a problem with Yemen. And the Yemenis don't have a problem with Chinese. They got no problems. So now China is on one side in Djibouti, on the Africa side. They've got Yemen on the other side threatening to close it down, but they get along with each other. So I'm not going to close it down if you float Chinese ships through there. They're fine with that. And in Djibouti, on this very small, sort of like almost very obscure, but geographically significant country in this Horn of Africa, what you have is the port at Djibouti is being directly fed by a railroad that is originating in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. And it's already built. This railroad is already built. It's functional and it's part of the Belton Road Initiative. So they've already built it in Ethiopia. And so it's going from Ethiopia up kind of like to the northeast a little bit into the port of Djibouti and then from there out to wherever. So this is part of the Belton Road Initiative is that it's one thing to have all these ports everywhere, but you also have to have a rail system inside Africa itself. In order to get if you're extracting all these minerals, you got to get them from the center part, the landlocked area of Africa out to an edge where you can get it to a port. And so they've already been doing this in Ethiopia. They've got this. They've built the railroad. So that goes straight up to Djibouti, which is part of the Belton Road Initiative. So China is in this region in a big way. We're just not talking about it yet, or at least the mainstream media isn't. A little bit south, a little bit south, if you go around that horn down around Somalia and down a little bit south, you wind up in Kenya. And in Nairobi, Kenya, the Belton Road Initiative has a port or lease agreement there as well. There's a port in Sudan. There's a port in the United Arab Emirates. There's a port in Iraq. So they've got the Chinese are building ports everywhere. The US is threatening people with their ships while the Chinese are building ports strategically. And, you know, look, not for nothing, but we've got a currency problem on top of all this. We have a petrodollar arrangement that is coming to a close. We have the BRICS nations getting together and saying, you know, maybe for our inter-country trade, we could have our own currency, a BRICS currency, but instead of backing it fiat, you know, styled by a promise or whatever, we'll back it with gold. And that's what they've been doing. Of course, they took this idea from the ruble, which once America slapped all its sanctions on Russia, Russia decided, well, let's just back our ruble with gold. And we got a bunch of it. We've been buying gold for a while. We who knows how much they have, but, you know, they've got to have a lot. So we've now got instability in the form of a petrodollar, instability in the form of trying to get your oil around these regions. If you're the United States empire or Israel, you know, you've got all this instability with the West. And yet on the other side of things, this BRICS group is building a goldback currency. That's more stable. They have their building ports along the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden and everywhere that where the America is worried about having to fight their way, you know, fight in order to keep the oil flowing. The Chinese are building ports and signing leases in agreement with the countries there. There's no fighting. They're partnering. So you've got stability in the BRICS countries. Surprising as that might sound, but you do. You have more stability. You have a goldback currency. You have ports that are being built. You don't have animosity. Nobody's launching missiles at Chinese ships. But I think this kind of leads us to the conversation that a lot of people are unwilling or unable to have. The elephant in the Middle East and that is that Israel is bad for America's reputation and that and that's saying something. Okay, because America's reputation is really bad. And I would say around the world, Israel's is worse. If you can imagine that the United States is totally captured by Israel. The Iraq anti defamation league, the Lovats, those groups are embedded in American politics. Just watch the performance art. Find me a president that hasn't put his hand on the wall and kissed, you know, and bowed his head with the amicone. You show me one. You show me a president that isn't doing that. And I'll show you a president that isn't captured by Israel. They're all captured. Even your beloved God figure, Donald Trump, maybe even the most captured because he thinks he's not the reputational damage to the United States. I mean, it's a really it's a two way street because I will say this for the people of Israel to the people of Israel. I I'm sorry that you guys are held hostage by your psychotic government. But I know the feeling we're held hostage by our psychotic government too. The American people don't want this. I assume the Israeli people don't want this either. It's not us. I'm not shitting on the people. I mean, I think at this point, we're well versed enough to have the conversation and understand that there's a differentiation between the American Empire government and the shitty things that they do and the general public of America that is not involved. They don't ask our opinion on this. We're mortified that they're conducting these wars on our behalf talking about spreading democracy and freedom and America stands for all these things like, oh my God, what a lie. And I fully recognize that the same thing is happening to the people of Israel, that there is a huge percentage of them that are like throwing their hands up saying, we don't want this either. These people in our government don't represent us. Benjamin Netanyahu is a terrorist. Okay. Joe Biden is a terrorist. Barack Obama, George W. But these are terrorists. And in the Likud Party of Israel, it was formed by actual terrorists. Menachem Begin was a fucking terrorist who's blowing up hotels. Okay, so we got a lot in common. The United States Empire and the Israeli Empire, whatever you want to call it, both like to take over land and then exterminate the people that are on it. It's a bad look and then tell everybody else how to live. It's just preposterous. But I want to make sure I say that because I want the Israeli people that listen to this show and I know I've got an audience there to understand. We know it's not you. Okay. And we hope that you know it's not us. We're mortified by this. But it is not in America's best interest, as Scott Horton says on Twitter about three times a day. It is not in America's interest to be allies with Israel at all. International Court of Justice, they have no teeth, but they said Israel was guilty of genocide. Not that that means anything. Not that that means anything. To, to, to, to, like in a legal sense, the United Nations will do nothing because everyone is controlled by Israeli blackmail. Long history of doing that. US allows Israel to do whatever they want through the United Nations. Again, a reminder, the United Nations started by David Rokofov. If you think that this is like somehow like the world court where like you're going to get a fair and impart, like stop, don't ever think United Nations Security Council, the United Nations, I mean, they have all these very official sounding names. It's just David Rockefeller. It's just him sitting, you know, he was sitting in his office in New York City saying, how can we take over the world? We're going to get all these international governing bodies and make it look like they're international in scope, but actually we're running them. Thirty Palestinian civilians found wrapped in black plastic after being shot execution style and dumped in a mass grave in Gaza. Israeli soldiers were blamed for not just shooting them, but for torturing them as well. Real fuckers. Congratulations. Defending your right to exist. Go fuck yourselves. Representative from Florida, Brian Mass, who wore his IDF uniform into Congress. I'm pretty sure isn't allowed. Former member of the IDF, dual citizen, dual loyalties, or I should say a single loyalty to Israel, made it very clear on camera. So he's not misquoted here that Palestinian babies were not innocent victims. He said, there's more infrastructure that needs to be destroyed when talking about Gaza. Holy shit. So what are we doing? Here's from a friend of the show, Kyle Anzoloni from the Libertarian Institute and also antiwar.com. He wrote, here's a headline. Israel destroys Belgium aid agency office in Gaza. Why would you do that? Are there terrorists hiding in there? Are they hiding in the basements and tunnels? Is that it? You know, never forget beheaded raped babies, except that the story was bullshit, except that there's zero proof of it, except that they had to walk it back. But never forget it, even though it didn't happen. Interesting though, that Israel, of all of the aid agencies that you could destroy in Gaza, interesting that they destroyed the one that belongs to Belgium. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that Belgium just voted against Israel at the United Nations. Right. I'm sure that's just a humongous coincidence. U.S. strikes Iraq and Syria, 85 targets. 40 more additional strikes. They say they're going after command centers, supply chain, intelligence centers. The United States is being attacked in Syria because it has bases in Syria that it's not supposed to have. So when the United States freaks out and says, they're attacking us in Syria, the question should be, why are you in Syria? I know you're, I know why you're there. You're there stealing the oil. We all know that. But instead of them saying nothing or spinning it differently, it's just interesting that they flip out as if there's just some that the Syrian people are completely unreasonable and have just decided for some reason to attack the poor Americans that are doing nothing, you know, except, you know, except, except occupying their country and putting military bases in their country when they're not supposed to and drilling for oil and stealing the oil. And all that shit. But besides all that, I wonder why the Syrians decided to attack. I mean, what the fuck do you think is going to happen here? U.S. strikes targets inside Iraq. U.S. strikes targets inside of Syria. Let me guess, were they terrorists? Was it al-Qaeda? Was al-Qaeda there? I'm getting very confused now because, you know, for a while, al-Qaeda was the worst thing in the world. You know, and then we started financing them and then they weren't the worst thing. They were al-Qaeda in Iraq or they were, you know, I mean, whatever brand name there, it's very difficult to keep track because it keeps changing. One thing you can tell for sure is that the terrorists that we're told we're fighting against are often financed by us. And in actuality, the real terrorists, the American Empire. This is a really bad idea. Everything about this bothers me, worries me. We're too close to Iran here. You think Iraq was a mess. Iran is three times the size of Iraq. Iran is partnered with Russia and China. Iran is not fucking around. This is a fight you don't want. Or maybe they do. Maybe they do. I mean, somewhere out there, John Bolton is consulting a doctor because his erection has lasted longer than four hours with all this talk of going to war against Iran. I just know it, you know, somewhere that guy loves this. But I don't. I think it's disgusting. I think what America is doing is disgusting. I think what Israel is doing is disgusting. Don't be careful in that red she's red sea shooting gallery, man. You know, these boys are not messing around. And if oil gets cut off, you'll have nobody to blame but the American Empire. Hey, if you liked this episode, you can take the additional step right now of sharing it with your friends and family. Follow me on Twitter at macroaggressions. You can go to the website macroaggressions.io. Thanks, everybody. I'll talk to you again soon. Bye. Thanks for watching.