The White Empire is squeezing oil out of dire straits, but at what cost? As Matt Burnell says, "You could be getting 100% of the pre-war flow out of the Persian Gulf and it could not possibly matter less for the price of crude because as long as ships are consistently getting hit, the baked in cost to move that oil is going to be astronomical."

So forget the bullshitting, the cost of shipping is ≈ 40% more on freight and insurance alone. That's before accounting for troll tolls and 'unplanned capital depreciation' via explosion. That 40% is just table stakes, the other part is you need a new table. Shippers are paying at least $40 on top of a $100 barrel to still get their shit blown up, when they could just pay $1 to Iran and... not. What do you think is sustainable? How do you think this plays out?

The White Equation

When we talk about cost, it is important to account for it correctly, that is, twice. Double-entry book-keeping is the double helix of corporations, it is their DNA, it's how they work. So when you read the news, remember that every debit has a credit, and every cost is someone else's profit center. Looking at it this way, it's not like 'boohoo, costs went up 1,000%', it's 'woo-hoo, revenue went up 1,000%'. You have to look at things this way (seeing double), because that's how corporations do (the voodoo, they do do, so well).

When you see the news meant for human rubes, you have to read it backwards, remember this. If the news says 'costs went up' read it as 'revenue went up' and you'll get the jist. Thus, while human populations are being reduced to wearing a barrel, corporations sold us the barrel and take everything else, to rent back to us with interest. They're making money six-fingered hand-over-fist. War is a racket, as some dude said, and the White Empire are racketeers par excellence.

Someone is making at least 40% more on each bloody barrel sold, more on the blood spilt to lubricate it. Someone (something, really) gets to recapitalize the destroyed capital, and speculators can make 4,000% just vibing with the President. American oil companies profit from higher prices, Greek shipping companies profit from higher freight, and London insurers profit from higher rates. And stock-jobbing swindlers make money on the volatility. The nationalities of these corporations are irrelevant, it's all one White Empire ruled by Corporate AI and has been since 1602 at least.

An Important Digression You Can Skip

For background, we have been ruled be an evil White Empire for over 500 years and it hides in the background, like the white of this page. Since at least the first IPO in 1602, the White Empire has ruled by bloodless Corporate AI given continents to devour (there is little point debating the intelligence of a tiger when you're in its mouth). This Corporate AI has divided (and conquered) humans into White and non-White to multiply their profit margins across a planetary energy gradient (Whites are naturally solar poor, hence the pastiness).

Viewed this way – bloodlessly, with only double-entry as DNA – what are all the loses we bemoan in the news? Nothing. All that matters is the profit rate, which is going great. Given the racism inherent in White Empire (nothing personal, strictly business), they give negative shits about Slavs killing Slavs or Semites killing Semites. Slavs and Arabs are beneath human to them, so nothing lost and much gained. It's not blood for oil as much as blood AND oil, ie two cakes. And they don't care about 'White' citizens either, as they periodically blow the whole world up in what they call World Wars™ when it affects White people. I argue that we've been in World War III since 2001 if you're not racist about it.

When feeding on colonial possessions cannot satisify the profit, ie metabolic rate of Corporate AI, it starts the most capital intensive and expensive racket there is. Industrial warfare. Which is what's happening. Remember that every second and third order cost (petrol/diesel, food/everything) is a profit for some corporation. In the face of the declining rate of profit, there's always war, to make it incline quite vertically. Which is happening in so many graphs we've seen.

It's all there in the double-entry accounting. They're not complaining in the press about costs going up. They're bragging. Just follow the money, which is the only ideology these cruel algorithms have. As Frank Zappa said, politics is just the marketing department of the military-industrial complex.

Once you see things this way, not like a state but like a corporate, you can see the play. The White Empire does not care about press-ganging and killing Ukrainian men or blowing up West Asian infrastructure to get there. The ruling class is not human at all, they just have human spokespeople replaced like so many wheels and spokes. Human 'losses' do not even register on their books, they live and die by the market, and the market's on coke. If the slaves or energy slaves (oil) die or fall overboard, who cares? They're not inhuman, they just not human at all.

Dutch Shell doesn't care about dead people any more than the Dutch VoC did. They follow no prophet but profit and that's going gang-busters. Yes it's killing the host, but who cares? From Amsterdam to London to Washington, the corporations have always found a new host. They won't this time (inshallah), but how would they know that? They're just algorithms. If it ain't broke, go for broke.

OK, Let's Jump Back In There

Understood this way, with crazy AI already running the place, things start to make a bit more sense, don't they? I'll repeat it because few say it, the White Empire is causing this crisis, not trying to solve it in any way. The Empire blew up the Nordstream pipeline and is attacking Russian oil infrastructure, they're taking that supply offline on purpose. That's not Ukraine, Ukraine is not a real country. Then they attacked Iran and double-blockaded the Strait of Hormuz themselves, without even bothering to go through 'Israel' (also a fake country). The point of a system is what it does, and what the White Empire is doing is a classic white mafia (PE) play, known as a bust-out in the less-white mafia.

In a bust-out (or leveraged buyout), you take over a restaurant or shop, run up bills on the joint's credit, and then light a match and collect the insurance money. Which is precisely what they're doing with the petrodollar. They are not losing money, no no, flip the accounts and see. Don't make the mistake of identifying the USA as a human government (never has been, literally enslaved people) and not just the latest host of Corporate AI devouring continents since the 1500s at least. They are making money hand over six-fingered fist and simply do not give a shit. All the news about this being bad is one more grift. They're loving it.

Now That You're Insane, Maybe Things Make Sense

Viewed this way, let's look at the oil prices above, which people are wringing human hands over fruitlessly. Oil was $60 a barrel before the Iran War (sorry, but American War hardly narrows it down). This is stupid but these prices are stupid, let's napking it out. If we add 40% in direct costs, that'd give us an expected price of $84. And indeed, that's the roughly the price of WTI ($89). But wait, WTI stands for West Texas, which is in pre-genocided America and which should be immune to this. Wrong, wrong. Oil is a literally liquid commodity, so it rises to match.

Take price plus 40% as the base rate, without the other costs of actually moving a barrel of Oman. For example, rumors and indeed reports abound that shippers are paying a troll toll to Iran under the table. Kpler is a bit of an op, but their head of policy Michelle Brohard said as much. She estimated that shippers were tipping Iran 10-20% so they wouldn't tip shit over. It's funny because this is more than they'd pay if America just left everything alone.

This is backed up by a US Treasury press release (via Brett Erickson) saying they're sanctioning some bank because, "Since June of this year, OFAC-designated Hormuz Safe Marine Services Authority has used BitBank to transfer payments it received to the Iranian regime." But sanction one bank another one will just appear, either pay the troll toll or pay more to play whack-a-mole, that's the game. Factoring these added costs in, as much as these dumb markets can process information, DME Oman is trading at $112.

This is still low because, as the hero of Batman, Bain, says while capping a CIA agent, the fire rises. Because for the ships that don't pay the troll toll, there's the troll.

The Empire keeps trying to push its vassals through the strait, and Iran keeps sending them back or otherwise waylays them. The Empire gets some squeakers through, sure, but who knows if those paid Iran anyways? Meanwhile, other ships get blown up on the daily, which is not a sustainable. These ships cost millions if not jabillions of dollars and take years to fix or replace. And on the ground, where it's just hanging around, oil infrastructure is hit on the weekly. When they fix it it just gets hit again (shout-out Yemen).

There isn't much to say for the idiot Gulf Apostates. They're like the ruler that asked the sage Vishvamitra to get to heaven early, but Indra kicked him out immediately. Then the king fell back to earth, except upside down, and Vish asked what are you doing here? and sent him back up again. Vish kept pinging the hapless king back and forth, upside down, until the dude cried out for what he had before, just a normal life on earth, right side up. But he never got it. By some accounts he's in his own upside down heaven now, but for our purposes on earth, he's just gone. This is what the Whites are doing to the hapless Arab rulers, anon.

As the CEO of the Arab American Oil Company (Aramco) recently said, "with precious little else the world can turn to, the supply resilience cushion is scarily thin." Amin Nasser said his master's Brent (UK North Sea crude) could have reached $200 per barrel without the Saudi East-West pipeline. But that was blown up once and is getting blown up again. I don't know why people whose job it is to analyze things professional go along with this charade but I suppose, like Upton Sinclair said, that's it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.

The Aramcomprador did acknowledge that, "until Hormuz fully reopens and confidence returns, the crude reality is that pressure at both ends of the barrel will intensify. While the squeeze on crude is serious, refined fuel prices have risen even more sharply." But when and how does that reopen, and what does that mean?

Resolution

The resolution to this problem is very simple. America just leaves. Everybody pays Iran $1 a barrel, which is nothing, and the region proceeds. Iran has said either everyone can sell oil or no one can sell oil, which is reasonable, and that neighbors should work things out with each other, which is just neighborly. This is the position of Yemen, of Iran, of Russia, and of China. Nothing unites them ideologically except sovereignity, which is of course the one thing an empire cannot tolerate, especially a White supremacist one. So it pits neighbor against neighbor, to rule over a ruin. That's what's happening across West Asia (up to the Ukraine) and what they'd like to do to East Asia, with the islands they hold in chains. At this point you have to conclude that the White Empire is the problem because if you remove them the problem disappears.

So that is what we're waiting for. Not for peace talks with warmongers or negotiations with the nedogovorosposobnost. There is no negotiating with these people, they're not even people. Americans are just genocidal oil-thieves from the other side of the world and that's all they're trying to do in West Asia, just a century late and a petrodollar short. The Empire tried to rip Iran and Russia's oil trade off, with the result, as Bain predicted, being "extremely painful... for you." The pressure is building, and Asians are used to suffering. The rest of the world, led by West Asia, are simply waiting for the pressure to build until the wheels fall of the imperial war machine, the Yankees go home, and their final horcrux 'Israel' falls. And the pressure is building.

If you want another graph of things going up and to the right, these are Suezmax (big-ass ship) transit rates not through Hormuz but going anywhere at all. Lloyd's List, not typically known for being hyperbolic, says "Suezmax rates have gone parabolic over the past three days, mirroring the near-vertical trajectory of VLCC rates in mid-September."

Numerous shipping agents are waxing elegiac, with Sparta Commodities saying, "Atlantic freight is repricing violently on real tightness," and Fearnley Securities saying, "Available tonnage is seemingly vacuumed off position lists the second it is marketed." Lloyd's ties it up saying, "Tanker shipping’s “Overton window” — the window of thinkable possibilities — now has an extra zero, at $1m per day." Shipping guys don't usually talk like this, as Jorgen Lian, shipping analyst at DNB Carnegie said, "Our imagination is obviously not imaginative enough, because we’ve been lagging the reality by far." Shipping is, for the global economy, everything, and while the corporations are making record profits, the human world is in deep ship.

But again and again, this is all intentional, insomuch as algorithms incarnated as corporations have intentions. They are driving up the profit rate and destroying capital stocks like they have done in every World War before. And the only way this ends is not negotiation, we already passed our Versailles moment, where Trump signed the dead-letter MOU. This ends with the collapse of the simulation they reverently call 'the economy' which is coming, as the GZA said, immediately if not soon.

OK, actually how though