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testerone wrote: Mon Mar 16, 2026 5:43 pm Do you really think President PigMan gives a flying fuck about the environment?

It's not a motivator in what passes for thinking. Rather the bull in the china shop will only stop when he has no choice or sees something even worse to seize upon like say nuking the entire region. The more damage he inflicts to the world economy the more damage he does to what is left of the US economy. When the mountain comes crashing down on his head he will grab a golden parachute and fuck off to wherever pedos go to after they outstayed their welcome while the public bares the brunt.

Can't make this shit up...

An Iranian-backed militia just flew a first-person-view drone over the US Embassy in Baghdad for nearly two minutes. Low altitude. Unchallenged. The footage shows buildings, vehicles, the American flag. Geolocated to inside the Green Zone. Released publicly as a trophy.

The drone was not intercepted because there was nothing left to intercept it with. A kamikaze strike days earlier destroyed the Saab Giraffe-1X radar on the embassy roof, the sensor that feeds targeting data to the C-RAM defense system. With the radar blind, the FPV drone flew freely. Analysts report the drone used fiber-optic guidance, a tethered data link that renders conventional radio-frequency jamming useless.

One of the most heavily fortified American diplomatic compound on Earth was surveilled by a device that costs less than a used laptop.

This is the cost asymmetry that is quietly determining the outcome of the Hormuz crisis.

The United States has spent trillions building the most advanced military in human history. Iran-backed proxies are defeating specific nodes of that military with systems built from commercial components for hundreds of dollars per unit. A C-RAM fires 4,500 rounds per minute of 20mm tungsten. Each burst costs thousands of dollars. The drone it is trying to hit cost a fraction of that. When the radar feeding the C-RAM is itself destroyed by another cheap drone, the entire defensive architecture collapses and the next reconnaissance flight is free.

This is the 153rd attack on US targets in Iraq since October 2023. The pattern is not random. It is systematic. Each probe identifies a vulnerability. Each vulnerability is exploited in the next wave. The Giraffe-1X was the eyes. The eyes are gone. The next target is whatever the militia chooses.

And every dollar, every asset, every hour of command attention spent defending Baghdad is a dollar, an asset, and an hour not spent assembling the Hormuz escort convoy that is the only pathway to restarting global fertiliser flows.

This is why the blockade persists despite the most successful air campaign since 2003. The US won the war it prepared for. Iran is winning the war it designed: a distributed, low-cost siege across multiple fronts that stretches American resources thinner with each $500 drone while the $20 billion DFC reinsurance facility sits unused, the Navy remains weeks from escort readiness, and the planting calendar burns down.

The strait is mined. The airspace is closed. The embassy radar is destroyed. The coalition allies have declined. And the molecules that feed half the planet remain trapped behind all of it.

Iran does not need to match American technology. It needs to exhaust American bandwidth. A fiber-optic drone over Baghdad. A mine in Hormuz. A suicide skiff disguised as a fishing boat. Each one costs almost nothing. Each one forces a response that costs millions. Each response is a resource that does not escort a fertiliser vessel through the strait.

The war that matters is not the one on the screen. It is the one in the accounting.

On March 12, India formally asked China for emergency urea to keep its fertilizer plants running.

On March 16, China halted NPK fertilizer blend exports and extended its phosphate suspension through August.

Read that sequence again. The world’s most populous nation asked the world’s largest fertilizer producer for help. The response was a lockdown.

This is the second trap.

The first trap is Hormuz. One-third of global seaborne fertilizer trade physically blocked. Transit collapsed 97 percent. Gulf urea, ammonia, and sulfur stranded behind mines, drones, and an insurance market that has fractured beyond repair.

The second trap is China. Beijing looked at the Hormuz crisis, calculated that Gulf sulfur (over half of China’s imports) would not arrive, and made the rational decision to protect 1.4 billion of its own people first. Strategic sulfur reserves activated. Commercial nitrogen and phosphate stocks released early. NPK blends locked down for export. Phosphate banned through August. The 725 million tonne grain target in the 15th Five-Year Plan does not bend for India’s Kharif season.

Nobody should be surprised. This is exactly what China did in 2022 when the Ukraine shock hit. It is what China will always do. And it is what every government with the capacity to hoard will do when the molecules run short. The crisis does not produce global solidarity. It produces national triage. And in national triage, the countries with domestic production and strategic reserves survive. The countries that depend on imports from those countries do not.

India has 17.7 million tonnes of fertilizer stockpiled, up 36.5 percent year-over-year. That is a buffer, not a solution. Plants are running at 60 percent capacity. The subsidy bill has been revised to 1.86 lakh crore rupees, over 40 percent of the entire subsidy budget, with urea sold at 242 rupees per bag against international prices many times higher. If Skymet’s 60% probability of below-normal monsoon materializes during Kharif, India faces a food production challenge of a severity not seen since the crisis that prompted the Green Revolution.

Bangladesh has shut 4 to 5 of six urea factories. Boro rice season is underway with no domestic nitrogen. Pakistan’s debt service consumes 81 percent of tax revenue. Egypt feeds 69 million on bread subsidies at prices it never budgeted while owing $28 billion in external debt. Southeast Asia faces granular urea above $700 per tonne. Sri Lanka, the country that already proved what happens when fertilizer vanishes, faces 15 to 30 percent yield risk from the same import dependence that collapsed its rice output 40% in 2021.

Now map the sulfur cascade that almost nobody is tracking.

Roughly half of global seaborne sulfur trade is Gulf-sourced. Sulfuric acid is the chemical required to convert raw phosphate rock into plant-available fertilizer. Without Gulf sulfur, phosphate processing breaks globally. Morocco’s OCP, the world’s largest phosphate exporter, imports roughly 3.7 million tonnes of Gulf sulfur annually. China imports over 4 million tonnes. The sulfur shortage does not just constrain nitrogen supply. It simultaneously fractures the phosphate chain, creating the first simultaneous disruption of all three primary crop nutrients since the Haber-Bosch process was industrialized.

Two forces are now converging on the global food system from opposite directions. Iran blocks the molecules physically. China blocks them administratively. Neither is acting irrationally. Both are executing national survival logic. And the countries caught between them, the ones with no domestic production, no strategic reserves, and no fiscal capacity to compete on the spot market, absorb the full force of both.

318 mn people were at crisis-level hunger before either trap snapped shut.

The math does not require malice to produce catastrophe. It only requires geography, chemistry, and a planting calendar that waits for nobody.

open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

House Speaker Mike Johnson rebukes Joe Kent after his resignation over the Iran war, saying the former NCTC chief was not privy to key intelligence briefings.

“I'm on the Gang of Eight. I got all the briefings. We all understood there was clearly an imminent threat that Iran was very close to the enrichment of nuclear capability and they were building missiles at a pace that no one in the region could keep up with. The Commander-in-Chief and his administration had a very difficult decision to make. I don't know where Joe Kent is getting his information, but he wasn't in those briefings, clearly, because the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and everyone, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Caine, they had exquisite intelligence that we understood that this was a serious moment for us. Had the President waited, I am personally convinced that we would have mass casualties of Americans, servicemembers and others, and our installations would have been dramatically damaged.”

Basic stuff, but none of it is done.

And this is why, fish rots from the head.