From Pandemic to Geopolitical Panic – Leadership Magazine Column

Martin Armstrong, founder of Armstrong Economics, has over several decades been running an AI market monitoring system, called SOCRATES, that has proven itself, time and time again, in making eerily accurate predictions about market, economic, and political dynamics within specific countries, and at a global level. 

In 2021, the system predicted that the world is set to enter a phase of ‘panic politics’ in 2022. Lo and behold, the year is not even properly three months old, and planetary geopolitics is clearly exhibiting symptoms of profound panic attacks being ‘had’ across several polities (accompanied by loud bangs and the sound track of war drums rolling into town)! 

I – The Russia-Ukraine/NATO war

The year 2022 has clearly come bearing dangerous geopolitical fruits. In the past month the world witnessed the Russian Federation taking significant kinetic military action against the Ukraine. While some might think the war started on 24 February 2022, this war has been raging for eight years already. 

From the 2014 change of government in Ukraine, when the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk refused to cooperate with a government in Kiev that had, among other things, banned the use of the Russian language. This is like banning the use of isiZulu in Kwazulu-Natal province, South Africa. 

While there will be much side-taking and name-calling regarding this conflict, the geopolitical and global economic fall-out of this escalation into a full inter-state conflict in Europe, will be far reaching. The oil price has spiked through the roof, stock markets reacted as if the missiles and projectiles exchanged by belligerent forces in Ukraine had struck at them. 

In the United States, the worst inflation in decades is running rampant due to modern monetary theory in the Federal Reserve that has been engaging in quantitative easing (QE/money printing) to the tune of $120 billion per month since 2020. 

In this year total US debt rose above $30 trillion. Of course, the QE intervention intends to prop up ailing economies. However, all the money printing has now unleashed a freakish inflation monster that is gobbling the value of the US dollar. 

Russia and Ukraine are not only strategically significant for NATO, and Europe, but they are significant producers of agricultural commodities such as wheat, and corn. In a previous column Blindspot noted the UN FAO warning about spiking global food prices, and incoming scarcity. Add a major global military confrontation into the pre-existing toxic mix of economic destruction left in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and one ends up with conditions conducive to panic politics to take root, live long, and prosper. 

Russia and China, with partners across Eurasia (in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation which now also includes the Islamic Republic of Iran) is increasingly a strategic bloc opposed to western- and NATO-ist expansionism. This dynamic has been given significant impetus following the rather disastrous NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

II – The UAE under attack from Yemen, and Iraq 

Frigmentation (a toxic mix of friction and fragmentation) is having a whale of a time in the Middle East, especially if one zooms in on the multi-dimensional regional proxy war situation erupting around Yemen. In this case we zoom in on the UAE that has been on the receiving end of drone attacks, launched by Shia militias, from Iraqi territory. 

Blindspot has covered the war in Yemen, as well as increasing instability in the broad region brought about by proxy war activities. Now, it is clear that Shia-aligned militias have joined the fray to fight the UAE. Aljazeera reported on attacks launched from Iraq, on the UAE. 

This follows several reports from past months indicating how Houthi (Shia) forces from Yemen have also been striking at the UAE using, for example, drones. This points to a definite intensification of what has long ceased to be a geographically confined site of proxy conflict, it is now spilling over more borders, and taking on an increasingly ominous dimension with US, and Iranian naval assets increasingly active in the region to bolster Saudi, and UAE defences. More significantly, non-state actors such as Shia militias in Yemen and Iraq have now proven their capability to also develop and deploy drones. 

III – Body bombs Away! Taliban stands up a Suicide Brigade 

Talk about panic cycles in politics. Being a commentary platform with a multiplicity of spare parts,  Blindspot #026 zoomed in on one story. It is because the subject under consideration, or rather, the act under investigation, being Suicide Bombing, also tends to leave very many unidentifiable spare parts in its wake. Blindspot admits that it is indeed a rather hugely disruptive subject. 

The story is quite straight forward. Reports surfaced in recent times that the Taliban government in Afghanistan announced plans to stand up a Suicide Brigade. Of course, this brigade will be deployed for operations of a very special kind. A veritable one-way operational street awaits these sacrificial soldierly lambs. And no, at the end of their days, they are most definitely not silent. 

Blindspot asks: Is it bravery, is it brutality, or is it just one more odd manifestation of the morbid fascination humans have with the invention of ever more gruesome ways of whacking each other? 

In a way this is not news, but it also is. Only the Japanese had formally employed pilots committed to making uni-directional missions ending in the soldier and its plane framing themselves as one big, and dangerous, integrated flying bomb. Returning to base, and motto’s such as, ‘leave no-one behind,’ has no meaning for the suicide soldier. 

Now the Taliban, in the thick of the turbulent twenties of the twenty-first century, is not grasping for AI big-tech dancing robotic dogs to protect the poppy harvest. No, they are going as low-tech organic as possible, by turning bodies into bombs. 

Not only is this not news, but, it is also clearly not new because suicide bombing as technique in unconventional warfare has been with humans since the late 19th century. 

Since then, and much like tools developed by military-industrial complexes with the aim of whacking humans in ever more efficient ways, the method of suicide bombing has remained relatively stable, at least in terms of delivery system. 

Unlike military-industrial complex weapons and unmanned weapons systems, the suicide bomber’s most trustworthy, and sought after sacrificial vehicle is the organic human body. The latter is, of course, especially the case when the suicide bomber’s convictions are shaped by religious and other off-worldly, post-life, aims and promises of paradise following on maiming and utterly destroying those that believe anything the suicide bomber does not. 

The types of explosives, nuts and bolts additives, methods of detonation, blast impact and radius and such have of course changed much since the late 1900s. But, the fundamental underlying delivery system remains a bi-pedal ideologically charged human hell-bent (or for Islamists, of course – ‘Heaven bent’) on deploying the body as bomb and last final personal stand against enemy, infidel, and anyone classified as ulterior ‘other’ by the ideological operating system driving the human body setting out on its first, and last mission: BANG! 

One thing is for sure, being that the human species’ technological, scientific, socio-cultural, and most certainly political evolution over the centuries has not only been influenced by, but probably led by the above, being, the quest for zero defect in discovering ever more gruesomely efficient tools and techniques, by way of which to whack other humans. 

IV – Bill Gates at Munich Security Conference – Omnicron better than vaccines to ensure immunity! 

During February the annual Munich Security Conference took place. At this event Bill Gates spoke about Covid-19, and vaccines, making quite an interesting comment. But, firstly, let us be reminded that as some commentators have been commentating: the worst thing about locking everything down for “Fifteen days to flatten the curve,” is the first two years thereof! 

Nevertheless, then there came the epic inner-biological system and chemical company space-race to produce vaccines at breakneck speed. Mr reboot-Windows-Error&EverydayUpdate Gates was of course one of the main global cheerleaders of the importance, safety and efficacy of the MRNA-tech vaccines. And, of course, the need to get a needle into every arm on the planet, not once, but serially and on an ongoing basis, like Windows Updates uploaded into an arm close to you. 

Well, surprise surprise, at the recently concluded Munich Security Conference Mr Update Gates said clearly that the Omnicron, and other variants, have become ‘better vaccines’ than the pharmaceutical company bio-tech versions. See Blindspot #28 for a video clip of the statement he makes. 

Clearly natural immunity follows from exposure to the Omnicron, and other variants. He also specifically refers to the African continent where the mix of vaccination, and natural immunity – stemming from previous infection and recovery, is already doing the job of providing natural immunity. If it is the case that Mr Reboot Gates gave a nod to low-tech, old school organic natural immunity, very many are going to use those words to attack the needle-mandate carrying political heads populating governments around the world.