🚢 🌍 🏴☠️ Why Attack Shipping: a thread
🔶️ The Houthi strategy looks primitive to most with the random attacks on ships sounding desperate and quite elemental in a world of AI and space exploration. But the game theory behind it is superb.
🔶️ Introducing shipping:
Shipping is an old world industry, global in nature, but greatly affecting everyone and every local economy differently. It operates in vast open oceans with minimal policing or regulation for centuries, and it works extremely well to support our everyday lifestyles. But in the last few years disruptions due to various factors have brought shipping to the forefront. Why suddenly shipping matters?
🔶️ Although there are so many different types of ships in a global commercial fleet of 80,000+ vessels, picking what matters is essential: for the western world one does not really care much about dry bulk (iron ore/coal cargoes are mainly China focused meaning a disruption does not really affect the US/EU regions); you don’t really even care about tankers (freight costs is like 4% of oil price so to inflict real pain it becomes very difficult from a shipping cost perspective plus China has become the dominant importer in that market as well); but … you do care about containers. This is what hurts the most the average western consumer and for a good reason: containers transport most of the goods we use in our daily lives and we know and understand the price of. It relates to what is called the delivered price of a good. Push up the delivered price and suddenly you have inflation
🔶️ So, if you want to hurt the western world, you need to focus on what the Central Banks are trying so hard to contain: inflation. If supply chains get disrupted again, and that can really happen, it will matter greatly. And it will matter for what REALLY matters: all upcoming elections in the US/EU in 2024. Disruption is a game of chaos in a supply chain that strives for extreme optimization and JIT inventory management. And it does not take much to do so. But anything similar was an unimaginable scenario when inflation was not a risk for decades until Covid. But now it is. And a rebel group in southwest Yemen can affect the election outcome in a lot of “First World” countries this year. Remember the butterfly effect?
🔶️ Bulk commodities (oil, coal, iron ore, etc) can adjust to disruption as they are mostly fungible: local prices adjust a bit but would not affect the bigger picture much( take a look at NSea and SAm crude spreads this week and how rapidly they adjusted to the situation). Finished goods however are not, cause they are manufactured East and consumed West. Disrupt the East-West corridor for finished goods and you have leverage because prices will react positively and there is no adjustment path anywhere else.
🔶️ Expect this playbook to become part of the global geopolitical chess game for years to come. Straits, canals and waterways are going to play a much bigger role than even before in a world where inflicting economic pain in the Western world without real conflict is becoming much more difficult than ever before. Technology allows anyone to obtain RT information on vessel position, ownership and cargo details which makes it an easy game for bad actors with minimal resources. We are all about to become much better in oceanography and geography for the years to come…
📎 Breakwave
The U.S. Army 4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne) often nicknamed the "Ghosts in the Machine" released their newest recruitment video on November 19, 2025. hell this one slaps still no lujan no join. 😒
Somali dance at the Timberwolves vs the Celtics game yesterday in Minnesota https://x.com/westtoeastt/status/1995140208589967665/video/1
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16,499 people died by euthanasia in Canada in 2024, accounting for 5.1% of all deaths in the country.
According to the latest report on “medical assistance in dying” (MAiD) from Health Canada released at the end of last month, there was a 6.9% increase in state-assisted deaths in Canada in 2024.
In 2024, although assisted suicide is permitted, in which the person who wishes to end their own life self-administers the lethal substance, there was not a single case of assisted suicide. Instead, every single person who died under Canada’s MAiD programme died by euthanasia. In 2023, there were fewer than five instances of assisted suicide.
There have been a total of 76,475 instances of euthanasia and assisted suicide since they were made legal in Canada in 2016.
Posters have appeared on the New York subway offering would-be parents the opportunity to "genetically optimise" their future baby.
By signing up to their $8,999 service, Nucleus Genomics will profile the full DNA sequence of up to 20 embryos for couples undergoing IVF.
The New York start-up's slick app then allows would-be parents to review their brood for known disease genes, conditions like autism and ADHD, as well as traits like eye colour, height, and intelligence.
Peter Thiel, who shares similar views to Musk on the topic, supported the start-up through his Founders Fund. – Article
OpenAI's Sam Altman has also invested in gene-editing startup, Preventive, to eliminate gene-hereditary diseases from babies.
The first successful IVF (test tube baby) occurred in 1978. The place, perhaps appropriately, considering English author Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, was England.
The irreversible transformations to the human genome will make the 4IR a pandora’s box.
👀 – ...
AI influencers are now boasting personalities, backstories and even making ill-advised decisions
Aitana Lopez is an AI influencer who makes as much as $11,000 per month.
She’s part of a new breed of digitally created avatars winning the battle for the public’s attention, joined by the likes of chart topping “singers” Solomon Ray and Breaking Rust and “blonde bombshell” Mia Zelu, who stole the show at the Wimbledon tennis tournament — even though she wasn’t physically there.
Aitana has made promo videos for Amazon, while huge global brands such as Calvin Klein, Prada, Samsung and YouTube have all used AI influencers.
AI generated Christian recording artist Solomon Ray topped the Billboard gospel charts with his song “Find Your Rest.” He’s cleverly billed as a “Mississippi-made soul singer,” and has over 500,000 monthly listeners on Spotify.
One of the most followed AI influencers, Lil Miquela, caused serious backlash when she posted about being diagnosed ...