Drawing upon biblical texts, Second Temple sources, and modern scholarship, students will examine the structure of the biblical cosmos, divinely-ordered time, celestial governance, prophecy, and the relationship between heaven and earth.

The course assumes no prior knowledge and is intended as the recommended entry point into the Metaphysical History curriculum.

Course Structure

12 Reading Notes

12 Lectures

Guided Discussion

Weekly Schedule

Week 1

Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics

Identifying the personal lens the student brings to reality and to the Bible

Week 2

The Modern Worldview

Analysing the Enlightenment critiques of medieval cosmology that led to the modern secular worldview

Week 3

Medieval Cosmology

The influence of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic cosmology on the development of the medieval worldview during Late Antiquity

Week 4

The Late Antique Cosmological Transition

The transition from the classical to the early medieval cosmological worldview during the Late Antique Period

Week 5

Prehistoric Cosmology

The earliest evidence of the significance of cosmology at Tas Tepeler and other megalithic sites

Week 6

The Ancient Cosmos

The ancient Near Eastern and Mesopotamian cosmic mountain worldview

Week 7

Hebrew Cosmological Subversion

Appropriation and subversion of the mythology and cosmology of surrounding cultures within Second Temple Period writings

Week 8

The Bible: Creation and the Cosmic Mountain

The matrix of sacred cosmic order in the Second Temple Period worldview

Week 9

The Bible: Chaos and the Flood

The rebellion of the Watchers and the symbolism of the Flood as restoration of order

Week 10

The Bible: Divinely Ordered Time

The ontological unity of time, cosmos, and number in the Second Temple Period Jewish worldview

Week 11

The Bible: Essenian Cosmology

The development of the Essenes and their worldview as revealed in the Dead Sea Scrolls

Week 12

The Bible: The Cosmology of the New Testament

The continuity in cosmic symbolism between the Old and New Testaments

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this course, students should be able to:

• Explain the historical development of the modern worldview and distinguish it from ancient and medieval understandings of reality.

• Describe the principal features of the Second Temple Period worldview and the cosmological assumptions that shaped the biblical writers.

• Interpret major biblical themes, including creation, chaos, ordered time, and divine rule, within their original cosmological context.

• Evaluate the relationship between biblical cosmology and the cosmological traditions of neighbouring cultures, including points of continuity, appropriation, and subversion.

• Read biblical texts with greater awareness of the worldview, symbolic structures, and intellectual assumptions that informed their composition and interpretation.

Recommended Texts

See: Student Orientation → Recommended Texts and Resources

Commencing Study

Students should begin with:

Reading Note: Week 1

Lecture: Week 1

The courses offered here examine the historical, cosmological, and theological assumptions that shaped the development of the Old and New Testaments during the Second Temple Period.

Instruction is delivered through reading notes, recorded lectures, guided discussion, and recommended texts.

Students may proceed through the curriculum at their own pace.

Purpose

The Bible was written within a particular understanding of reality.

Its authors assumed a cosmology, a view of history, a conception of ordered time, and an understanding of divine rule that differ markedly from those of modern readers.

The purpose of this programme is to examine those assumptions directly through the study of primary sources and contemporary scholarship.

Commencing Study

Students beginning for the first time should proceed to:

Readings → IBC: Introduction to Biblical Cosmology

and then complete the assigned reading notes and lectures in sequence.

Current Areas of Study

• Biblical Cosmology

• Second Temple Judaism

• The Dead Sea Scrolls

• Divinely-Ordered Time and Prophecy

• Ancient Near Eastern Backgrounds

No prior theological training is required. Only a willingness to engage seriously with the evidence and follow the argument wherever it leads.

Metaphysical History delivers instruction through a combination of reading notes, recorded lectures, and guided discussion.

Students may proceed through the curriculum at their own pace.

Course Structure

Each course is divided into weekly units of study.

A typical unit consists of:

• One reading note

• One lecture

• One discussion prompt

The reading note introduces the topic, key concepts, primary sources, and recommended scholarship.

The lecture develops the material in greater depth and provides additional analysis and commentary.

Discussion prompts provide an opportunity for reflection, debate, and further investigation.

Recommended Sequence

Students are encouraged to complete each unit in the following order:

1. Read the assigned Reading Note.

2. Watch the corresponding Lecture.

3. Review any recommended readings.

4. Participate in discussion where appropriate.

5. Proceed to the next unit.

While discussion is encouraged, it is not required for successful completion of a course.

Reading Notes

Reading Notes serve as the foundation of each unit.

They provide historical context, identify important themes, introduce primary sources, and direct students toward significant scholarship.

Students should complete the Reading Note before viewing the lecture whenever possible.

Lectures

Lectures expand upon the material presented in the Reading Notes.

They are designed to provide a structured treatment of the topic and may include additional examples, historical context, and source analysis.

Lectures are organised by course code and week number.

Discussion

Discussion takes place through the publication chat and comment system for the time being.

Questions, observations, and disagreements are welcome provided they remain relevant to the subject under discussion.

Workload

The programme is designed for independent study.

Students should expect to devote approximately one to three hours to each unit depending upon reading speed, prior knowledge, and level of engagement with the recommended sources.

Completion

There are no examinations, assignments, grades, or certificates.

The purpose of the programme is the disciplined study of the sources and ideas under consideration.

Students may complete courses at whatever pace is appropriate to their circumstances.

The list will be expanded as additional courses are added to the curriculum.

Core Texts

Michael Heiser

The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible

A highly accessible introduction to the divine council, spiritual beings, and the supernatural worldview that underlies the biblical text.

Margaret Barker

Temple Theology: An Introduction

An overview of Barker's influential reconstruction of First Temple traditions and their enduring significance for Judaism and early Christianity.

Biblical Cosmology

Crispin Fletcher-Louis

Jesus Monotheism (Volume 1) Christological Origins: The Emerging Consensus and Beyond

A major scholarly study demonstrating that the earliest Christian belief in Jesus' divinity emerged from existing Second Temple Jewish temple traditions rather than from later Greek or pagan influences.

Andrei Orlov

Dark Mirrors

An exploration of priestly, angelic, and visionary traditions in Second Temple Judaism, with particular attention to Enochic and Adamic figures.

Second Temple Judaism

John J. Collins

Beyond the Qumran Community: The Sectarian Movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls

A detailed examination of the origins, beliefs, and historical development of the sectarian movement responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Loren T. Stuckenbruck

The Myth of Rebellious Angels

A comprehensive study of the Watchers tradition and its central role in shaping Second Temple Jewish understandings of evil, judgment, and cosmic rebellion.

Brian Godawa

The Spiritual World of Ancient Israel and Greece

An accessible treatment of a variety of topics relevant to the Second Temple worldview and the cultural influences upon it.

Dead Sea Scrolls

Peter Flint & James C. VanderKam

The Dead Sea Scrolls After Fifty Years (Volumes I & II)

A substantial scholarly collection surveying the history, contents, interpretation, and significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

James C. VanderKam

The Dead Sea Scrolls Today

The standard introductory guide to the discovery, contents, and historical importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

John J. Collins

Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls

An analysis of the apocalyptic worldview of the Qumran community and its expectations concerning history, judgment, and the end of the age.

Ancient Near Eastern Backgrounds

Mary R. Bachvarova

From Hittite to Homer: The Anatolian Background of the Ancient Greek Epic

A groundbreaking study tracing the influence of Anatolian and Near Eastern literary traditions upon the development of early Greek epic.

Doug Van Dorn

Giants: Sons of the gods

An accessible introduction to the Genesis 6 rebellion, tracing the traditions of the Watchers, the Nephilim, and the giant clans through the literature of Second Temple Judaism.

Essenian Judaism

Simon J. Joseph

Jesus, the Essenes, and Christian Origins: New Light on Ancient Texts and Communities

A fresh reassessment of the relationship between the Essenes, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the origins of the Jesus movement.

Lester L. Grabbe

An Introduction to Second Temple Judaism: History and Religion of the Jews in the Time of Nehemiah, the Maccabees, Hillel, and Jesus

A reliable survey of the history, institutions, beliefs, and diversity of Judaism during the Second Temple period.

John J. Collins

The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature

The standard introduction to Jewish apocalyptic thought, literature, symbolism, and its influence on early Christianity.

Christian Origins

James H. Charlesworth

Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls

A collection of essays exploring the historical and theological relationship between Jesus, early Christianity, and the world reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

John J. Collins & Craig A. Evans

Christian Beginnings and the Dead Sea Scrolls

An examination of how the Dead Sea Scrolls illuminate the beliefs, practices, and intellectual environment of the earliest Christians.

John Bergsma

Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Revealing the Jewish Roots of Christianity

An accessible study connecting key themes in the Dead Sea Scrolls to the beliefs, practices, and theological foundations of early Christianity.

This page is intended as a guide for further study and should not be interpreted as an endorsement of every conclusion reached by the authors listed.

No.

The courses are designed for interested readers, independent scholars, pastors, teachers, and students. No formal background in theology, biblical studies, or history is assumed.

Do I need to complete courses in order?

No.

Students may begin with any course that interests them.

However, newcomers are encouraged to begin with IBC: Introduction to Biblical Cosmology, as it introduces many of the concepts and methods used throughout the curriculum.

How are courses delivered?

Courses are delivered through a combination of Reading Notes, recorded Lectures, and guided Discussion.

Students may complete the material at their own pace.

Are lectures live?

No.

Lectures are pre-recorded and may be viewed at any time.

Is participation in discussion required?

No.

Discussion is provided as an opportunity for further reflection, clarification, and debate, but participation is entirely optional.

How much time should I expect to spend on a course?

This will vary according to the student and the subject matter.

As a general guide, students should expect to spend between one and three hours per unit, including reading, lectures, and optional discussion.

Are there assignments or examinations?

No.

Metaphysical History is intended as a programme of independent study. There are no examinations, essays, grades, certificates, or formal assessments.

Will I receive a certificate upon completion?

No.

The purpose of the programme is the disciplined study of the subject matter rather than formal accreditation.

What texts are required?

No text is required for purchase. Recommended texts are listed in the Student Orientation section of the site as well as within the Reading Notes and Lectures.

All required reading will be included within the weekly Reading Notes.

What is the difference between Reading Notes and Lectures?

Reading Notes introduce the topic, key concepts, sources, and scholarship.

Lectures develop the material in greater depth through explanation, analysis, and commentary.

Students are encouraged to complete the Reading Note before viewing the corresponding Lecture.

Can I study at my own pace?

Yes.

All material remains available within the archive, allowing students to proceed according to their own schedule.

How do I access subscriber-only material?

There is no subscriber-only material on Metaphysical History. All study materials are open to anyone free of charge. Donations via the subscription option on Substack are, however, appreciated.

Can I suggest future topics or courses?

Yes.

Suggestions may be made through discussion threads, comments, or publication chat.

While not every suggestion can be accommodated, student feedback is welcomed and considered when planning future courses.

Who teaches the courses?

Courses are prepared and presented by David Hilton, PhD.

Further information may be found in the Student Orientation section.

How do I begin?

Students new to the programme should begin by visiting the Curriculum section and selecting a course of study.

For most students, the recommended starting point is:

IBC: Introduction to Biblical Cosmology

He holds a PhD in Education and is the author of The Great Year of Man: Celestial Order in Biblical Cosmology.

His courses seek to reconstruct the worldview of the biblical writers through the study of primary sources, historical context, and contemporary scholarship.

Amid the darkness, in the despair of too much knowing and the realisation that no one was coming to save us until Jesus comes back, the memes helped to make it more bearable. Laughing into the Abyss as we got banned on yet another social media account.

Memes have done more than essays or long-form videos or stirring orations to change the culture. Seeing Rose, for example, exposed as the true villain of the Titanic: sleeping around on her devoted suitor; letting the guy she shagged die of hyperthermia when she could have helped him up our of the water; hiding a priceless jewel after she was rescued; then throwing said priceless jewel into the sea for reasons instead of passing it down to her grandkids.

She and Jenny from Forrest Gump are the true movie villains, and millions of people have come to understand that through shoddy images and text chucked together on Paint.

The further you go down the rabbit hole, of course, the more you learn about who probably had the Titanic sunk and why. There are memes for that, too.

I’ve been thinking about the Titanic quite a bit recently, because I think it’s a perfect illustration for where industrial modernity is at right now. Israel’s attack on Iran on February 28 was the iceberg moment. We’re still above the water, but it’s just a matter of time.

By ‘industrial modernity’, I mean the ultra-connected material economy that sits invisibly underneath the financial casino that normies think of as ‘the economy’, if they think of it at all.

The material economy, as people around the world are about to be harshly reminded, is the real economy. The debt-based financial system built upon it is just fakery that generates claims upon the material economy via debt. Number go up is only meaningful to people because they assess it against what material resources that number could be used to claim. When Boomers became paper gazillionaires from land price inflation, they felt rich. The number they saw on realestate dot com showed them how many more new cruises and convertibles they could then potentially consume with it.

By attacking Iran and guaranteeing that Middle Eastern oil production, processing, and distribution is offline for the foreseeable future, the Zionists have ensured that the world will soon begin to run out of the diesel, bunker fuel, industrial lubricants, chemical fertilisers, and innumerable derivative products that our way of life depends upon.

We’re talking plastics; food packaging; water pipes (PVC); electrical wire insulation; tyres; synthetic clothing (polyester); foam mattresses; furniture cushions; detergents; shampoo; toothpaste; pharmaceuticals; paints; adhesives; fertilisers; pesticides; electronic device casings; medical plastics (IV bags, syringes); synthetic rubber seals and gaskets; industrial lubricants. For starters.

It’s impossible to overstate the extent to which the material economy that we rely upon for our financial economy to appear buoyant in turn relies upon the magical rock juice that God, hilariously, decided to put under the Muslims.

The Israeli attack was launched on February 28. We’re now at the start of June. The Australian government has managed, via chicanery and the release of strategic reserves around the world, to postpone the day of reckoning. But that day is coming.

There will be no lifeboats for us. The luxury cruise liner of easy consumerism is going down to the bottom of the ocean, never to sail again. That era is over. Permanently.

Nowhere in the world can provide oil of the type and ease of extraction that the Persian Gulf can, and there is no way oil tankers get marine insurance affordably in the future to sail there. Globalism is dead. Consumerism is dead. The world is about to begin a slow process of changing back to what it was before the combustion engine and the modern petrochemical industry made us believe that history had ended.

Unlike the guests on the Titanic, the normies have no idea what is about to become apparent. It won’t be immediate mass starvation, at least not in countries like Australia. But it will be rough. We saw how normies freaked out when they couldn’t get their Sorbent back in 2020. When diesel begins to be rationed, the cargo ships stop arriving, and the crop shortages lead to epic food inflation next year, they’re going to lose their minds. Who will they turn on? Time will tell. The elites no doubt have a cover story scheme ready to roll out so the masses don’t think too hard about why Australia was in such a vulnerable position in the first place.

The normies are still sitting at the bar, enjoying the music, thinking about dinner. Let them. The Titanic is famous because, sinking on the eve of World War I, it is an emblem of an elegant, aristocratic, European way of life that never came back fully again after 1918. Our way of life today has no elegance to it, no innate superiority or refinement. It is degraded and degrading. But it is comfortable, and that is likely what people will miss about it once it’s gone.

The elites who have created this calamitous situation have known for a long time that it was inevitable. They will have their boltholes, their haciendas, and their private retreats. They will have their lifeboats.

I don’t envy them. They will not survive long term once all of humanity is set free from the debt system that enslaves and corrupts us. They probably think AI and robots will save them. They won’t.

I can’t wait for the future. Let the decadent edifice of this rotten system sink into the icy waters. The world we are entering will be harsh and cruel and cold, but it will be ours.

It will not be theirs.

My apologies for my inconsistent posting recently, dear reader. The truth is that I have spent the last three years working on a project that only now is coming to fruition. I’ve been researching and writing a book on Biblical cosmology that is now published on Amazon (here if you’re in Australia and here if you’re in North America).

I’ve been writing commentary now for 10 years and the reality is I’m not very good at it. It requires a skillset that I do not fully possess. My training and experience are in education, and given that the cabal that certainly don’t rule Western countries has made it impossible for me to work in my profession ever again, I’ve come to accept that the only viable future for me professionally is as an independent lecturer.

I’m a teacher, not a ‘content creator’, and certainly not a journalist. In the coming months, I will be launching an online course that will be free to Substack subscribers. The course is called Introduction to Biblical Cosmology, and in it I will be teaching about the cosmological worldview within which the Bible was written and read during the time of the early church.

If you’re wanting to learn how to read the Bible the way it was written, keep an eye out. This will be my last ‘blog’ post. In the future I’ll use this site to post material to support my teaching videos. I might even figure out how to get a Substack podcast going.

I wish to thank all of you who have taken the time to read my articles and send donations over the last ten years. It’s sure been a trip.

David.

It’s quite surreal, really. After the plandemic, the lockdowns, the toilet-paper psyop, and all the associated social engineering, normies still behave as though nothing ever happens.

Trump is just about to start blockading the oil that we were relying on from the Middle East tonight, and the normies are just watching Netflix. How did we become a nation so blase, so cut off from material reality?

This simulacrum of a society that we inhabit began to be constructed in the aftermath of World War II. A social control system was implemented in the Allied nations and then expanded globally in which reality came to be mediated by an elite who saw their orchestrated social engineering as necessary to preserve social order and prevent the horrors of the 30s and 40s from ever happening again.

This Pax Americana was built on three pillars. Firstly, a system of debt-based currency creation that disconnected every level of society from the restraints of physical reality. Social welfare could expand infinitely, parasitic elites could feast infinitely, immigration could pump the house bubble infinitely, and it didn’t matter because there was always new debt enough to pay back the old.

The second pillar was the saturation news and entertainment that has kept us all occupied constantly. Our mental categories have not been our own for a very long time. We’ve been soaking in mind slop for decades.

The third pillar of Boomertopia has been what made it all possible: cheap hydrocarbons. As the normies are going to find out in the coming months, everything we use in the modern world derives somehow from oil.

All three of these pillars are being detonated by the Zionist war against everyone that Israel doesn’t like right now.

We all felt the unreality of it as time went on. The 90s in particular were full of expressions of it: Fight Club, The Matrix, The Truman Show. Each expressed that daily life lacked substance and that life itself lacked meaning, even as we had it materially better than any humans had ever dreamed possible.

Remember how good it was? It was so good.

As long as the shops were full and credit was available, we didn’t think too much about the utter purposelessness and existential ennui of it all. Well, most of us, anyway.

The strong gods of identity, honour, heroism, and nobility had been banished in favour of a simulacrum of reality based upon universalism, materialism, relativism, and the drive-thru.

All three pillars of Boomertopia are being demolished as you read this. The financial system is on the brink. It’s just a matter of moments before a sovereign government declares insolvency or a big bank starts a chain reaction globally. It will all be blamed on Trump, of course, or the Iranians. But it was inevitable.

The authority with which centrally-controlled news and entertainment could manipulate our perception is also slipping away. PM Albanese has been whining recently that people shouldn’t get their views from their phones but instead from the TV, like the Boomers do.

No thanks.

And of course, there’s the oil. That most magical rock juice that is about to remind us how fragile and fleeting our hopes and dreams are.

I don’t know if the people conducting this controlled demolition of the world system have a plan for a new system to replace it. Are we going to experience devastating loss and privation, then be offered the solution of a Palantir-controlled neofeudal dystopia as the remedy? Will we be absorbed by a Han Empire 2.0 and just have to pay tribute to the Jade Comrade in Beijing to be left alone? Or is the world just burning without any plan at all?

Either way, the men without chests running Australia will not have our collective interests at heart. They’ll blame us, filthy plebs, for driving too much or stockpiling or not following the rules.

The puppets in Australia's elite lack the imagination, the fortitude, and the intellectual heft to understand that the end of history has ended. The period during which they could pretend to lead and we would pretend to follow and nothing would go wrong is over. We’re about to become a real country again. That means decisions are about to have consequences again.

Reality is back, and she's bringing with her all the horsemen of the apocalypse.

America is reneging on the postwar settlement under which the US Navy would regulate the seas and the world would become a single debt-based economic system based on the US dollar. Trump is pulling back to Fortress America, and he’s not worried about whether a country like Australia has something as trivial as oil.

As he rageposted on Truth Social recently, we should just go and get our own oil. It’s every nation for itself again now, like it has been throughout most of history.

The local elites in countries like Australia, however, will not be able to adjust to this new reality quickly. It will take time, and probably a crushing military defeat by China and a coalition of our regional neighbours, before we become a serious country again.

Boomertopia is a dying facade. Unfortunately, however, Australia’s ruling caste of apparatchiks are going to try and maintain the illusion as long as they can, and punish anyone who adjusts to the new reality.

And normies still think this is about petrol prices.

At the dinner afterwards, one of the blokes I was chatting to asked me point-blank: “What’s with all you Christians supporting Israel?”

Good question, mate. Good question.

Normies are beginning to ask the question that political elites, church networks, and media institutions have treated as a thoughtcrime for decades. Why are so many Christians willing to risk economic chaos, regional war, and perhaps something even worse for the sake of Israel? Why does every act of Israeli aggression in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, or against Iran arrive wrapped in a moral halo, as though ordinary prudence and ordinary judgment no longer apply?

The answer is not only strategic, though strategy matters. It is not only financial, though money and lobbying matter. The deeper answer is spiritual.

If you want to understand why so many Christians are prepared to blow the world up for Israel, you have to understand Zionism as more than a political programme. You have to understand it as a theology of history.

At the level of present events, Israeli aggression across the Middle East is not simply a series of disconnected military actions carried out under the neutral banner of security. It is increasingly animated by an expansionist ideology that regards land, power, and historical destiny as belonging together. This is why the rhetoric surrounding Israel so often exceeds the language of ordinary statecraft.

A normal state speaks of deterrence, borders, and interests. Zionism, especially in its stronger forms, speaks of inheritance, return, promise, and redemption. What is at stake is not merely the survival of a nation among nations, but the conviction that this particular nation possesses a sacred historical claim which ordinary moral constraints are not permitted to obstruct.

To understand that conviction, we need to distinguish between secular Zionism and religious Zionism. They are not identical, and the former has increasingly yielded to the latter.

The early Zionist movement emerged in nineteenth-century Europe under the pressure of the failure of assimilation. In that context, figures like Theodor Herzl presented Zionism primarily as a political solution to the Jewish question. It was a nationalist project, modern in form and European in method, which sought to make the Jewish people into a normal political nation with territory, sovereignty, and military force. Its grammar was secular, even when it borrowed symbols from Scripture.

But secular Zionism always lived on borrowed capital. It drew emotional and historical power from biblical memory while often detaching that memory from the theological framework that had once governed it. It wanted the language of Jerusalem, exile, and return, yet it translated those realities into the categories of modern nationalism. That tension could not hold indefinitely.

Over time, the older secular model has lost ground to a more explicitly religious one. In Israel itself, the rightward shift has been unmistakable. Biblical promise is no longer treated merely as a civilisational ornament. It is treated as a political warrant. Land is not only strategic. It is sacred. Settlement is a redemptive act; therefore, atrocity is not merely incidental. It is necessary.

This matters because once political claims are made religious claims, compromise begins to look like betrayal. A border dispute can be negotiated. A divine inheritance cannot. That is why right-wing religious Zionism has become such a powerful force not only in Israel, but also among the American political right. Organisations like AIPAC extend this Jewish expansionism into the heart of the American political establishment, particularly on the Republican right.

That is where Christian Zionism enters the picture. The extraordinary power of Zionism in American politics depends upon millions of Christians who have been taught to regard the modern state of Israel as the centre of God’s purposes in history. For these believers, Israel is not simply another state to be judged, criticised, or restrained like any other. It is a prophetic sign. It is the clock by which the end times are measured. It is the stage on which sacred history is expected to reach its conclusion. Once that imagination has taken hold, ordinary political reasoning becomes impossible. War begins to look providential. Escalation begins to look necessary. Catastrophe itself can be interpreted as fulfilment.

The principal theological engine behind this is Dispensationalism. This is a theory of the Biblical end times that gained traction in the 1800s and took over Protestant Christianity in the 1900s. God is said to have one plan for the Church and another for ethnic Israel, with the promises to Abraham remaining nationally and territorially operative in a distinct sense for the Jewish people.

When Israel was established via the Balfour Declaration and the postwar order in 1948, Dispensationalism became the default end-times view for Protestants. From the evangelical or Baptist churchgoer today, criticism of Jesus will be met with a gracious smile. Criticism of Israel will get you burned at the stake.

Trust me, I’ve got the scars.

Religious Zionism is built upon a monumental amount of rabbinic kvetching about the loss of the land. That stream of thought draws upon the Maccabean revolt against the Greeks and the brief period of independence before Roman subjugation ended Jewish self-rule. Europeans are usually referred to by the rabbis as Amalek or Rome. Both are detestable to the religious Zionist, although they are careful not to make that too apparent to us. For now.

The destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, foretold by Jesus and carried out by the Romans, was a devastating blow to Jewish self-image. The final nail in that coffin was in the 130s when the Romans finally genocided the Jews left in Palestine.

John the Baptist and Jesus referred to the Pharisees as serpents and hypocrites, and what we would call ancient Zionism was at the heart of that critique. It was the driving force behind movements like the Zealots and many revolts against Rome. What became rabbinic Judaism saw the land as belonging to the Jews because of their innate ethnic identity. It prevented many of the Jewish people in ancient times from accepting Christ when He came.

This Satanic deception was at the heart of the Jewish rejection of Jesus. When Jesus told them His Kingdom is not of this world, most fell away. When He repeated it in the Temple in his final days, it was enough to make them choose the political terrorist Barabbas and scream, “Crucify Him… His blood be upon us and upon our descendants!”1

Indeed.

That Jewish racial entitlement to the land and belief in innate superiority has never dimmed. It manifests in different religious and ideological ways, but it is at the heart of what it means to be Jewish. Pointing it out gets us into trouble, and I’m not interested in promoting hatred or retribution. But it’s true.

For Christians to go along with Zionism is irreconcilable to our faith. Christian theology is incompatible with Zionism. The New Testament does not permit the old covenantal categories to remain ultimate after Christ. John the Baptist strikes at the root of genealogical presumption when he warns his hearers not to say that Abraham is their father, because God can raise up children to Abraham from stones2.

Jesus carries the same judgment forward. He does not deny Israel’s history. He fulfils it. He is the true centre of God’s purposes, the one in whom Temple, kingdom, and covenant reach their appointed meaning. The kingdom of God is not arriving through ethnonational restoration or territorial maximalism, but through the Messiah who gathers the people of God into himself.

Paul then states the matter with unmistakable clarity. The Seed of Abraham is Christ. That is his argument in Galatians 3:16, and from it the rest follows. If Christ is the Seed, then those who belong to Christ are Abraham’s offspring and heirs according to promise, whether Jew or Gentile. The chosen people of God are not defined by bloodline and land, but by repentance, faith, and union with the Messiah. This is not a marginal apostolic aside. It is the heart of Christianity.

That is why Christian Zionism is not simply a political error. It is a theological inversion. It asks Christians to centre what the New Testament has revealed as peripheral, and to apostatise what the apostles have fulfilled in Christ.

Israel was never a land in the ultimate sense. The land mattered, but it pointed beyond itself. Israel is a people, and that people is gathered in Christ.

That is not ‘replacement theology’. It’s the Bible.

When you’re learning how to write an opinion piece, the usual formula is you start with a news hook, show how it’s relevant to the reader and then link it back to what you really want to talk about.

You’ll see this formula in op-eds all the time. It’s why mainstream news articles, which have become op-eds anyway now, are all the same these days. They pick out a headline designed to trigger an emotional response in the NPC leftist brain, and then they write the same tedious drivel about minority rights, the environment or evil white people they always do. Rinse, repeat.

There’s no need for me to use a news hook for a piece today on World War III. Anyone paying attention knows it’s coming in some form or another. We’re looking at war with Russia in Europe, war with Iran in the Middle East and, eventually, war with China and North Korea in the Asia-Pacific.

Alongside that, the way the oligarchy who control America are treating Donald Trump is making it likely the USA will have a civil war similar to the one between Julius Caesar and the Roman Senate in the 40s BC.

It’s the Fourth Turning in your social media feed. The end times in every Telegram refresh. And we get to see it. What a time to be alive.

I disavow that it is the oligarchy opposing Trump that is leading America into civil war 2.0. The way the Trump administration used ICE to provoke the left, then has done very little to actually deport non-Americans, makes it pretty clear that Trump is playing a divisive role rather than a constructive one.

Subscribe now

It’s easy to get fear fatigue. The normies I know seem to be aware that things are about to fall apart, but rather than analysing the situation and making prudent preparations they’re hiding in a mental bunker and relying upon normalcy bias to convince themselves our near future will be OK.

It will not be OK. Our world is about to get tipped on its head in a way we’ve never experienced in the West. Ever.

So, let’s wargame the way our deep-state oppressors do. Let’s think this out and see what’s likely ahead for us here in Australia and across the West this coming decade.

We can see who the combatants will be in World War III. RINO House Speaker Mike Johnson has just called Russia, China and Iran a new ‘axis of evil’. There’s another assumption I’m going to make that may well bother some people, too.

It’s clearer than ever now that the Eurasian powers are coordinating. Of course, they’ll be rivals again in the future, but for the moment, the common goal of driving the American imperium out of Eurasia is making them comrades.

I think this time America loses. When we consider the factors that made the Allied nations prevail in World Wars I & II - financial superiority, industrial strength, and an overwhelming coalition of forces - then it is clear that the West cannot win this time.

The ‘developed’ Western world is mired in debt and unpayable welfare state obligations. The globalist elite has given Asia our industrial strength, and we will not have a peer ally to gang up with to win this war. The winning hand, this time, is held by the other side.

Barring America pulling out miracles weapons they got from demonic UFO tech at Roswell, we’re going to be 1940s Japan and Germany in the 2030s.

So, let’s see what that might look like.

The recent destruction of American bases and infrastructure in the Middle East as well as the timidity of the US carriers has borne this out. No UFO tech reveal yet, either. Yet.

Mass Islamic terrorism

We’ve already seen in a Sydney church what events in the Middle East are leading to. Whatever your position on the Palestinians, it doesn’t matter. There are a billion Muslims around the world seeing little kids with their limbs blown off on their phones 24/7. That’s creating a consciousness and a hatred that will erupt once the war between Israel and everyone else around them goes live.

You will not want to be living near one of the many Islamic enclaves established in Western cities thanks to open borders policies since the 1970s when that occurs. The security apparatus of the state will be completely overwhelmed. We will be on our own until local private militias can form among non-Islamic communities, such as what we see in South Africa or South America.

Once this kicks off, we can expect Big Sister to resort to lockdowns, curfews, and expanded digital surveillance ‘for our own safety’—almost like a plan.

It’ll be Biblical. Second horseman of the Apocalypse Biblical. Stay safe.

The destruction of Israel

This one is going to bother Christians influenced by dispensational theology, but it’s the most probable event in the Middle East war. Regardless of what your reading of Scripture (and the influence of preachers in turn influenced by the Zionist-funded Scofield Study Bible) has led you to believe, there’s very little chance that Israel can survive another conflict with its neighbours. This becomes even more true once the relative weakness of the American empire is taken into consideration.

Iran’s proxies have already demonstrated they can hobble civilian shipping. The most recent skirmishes between Iran and Israel, too, are demonstrating that the drone and the missile, in sufficient numbers, will always get through. Add in hypersonic missiles, and the US Navy becomes unable to project force outside the Western Hemisphere with any degree of confidence. The carriers will be kept out of range and out of the fight unless the US deep state wants one or two to go down as a Pearl Harbour-style mobilisation tool.

Even then, Israel is glass early on in the fighting. What the Zionist plan for that is, who knows? Religious visions have a way of bringing down destruction on the heads of those who rely on them for victory. Do not tempt the Lord your God.

Not being Jewish, it doesn’t really bother me whether Israel exists or not. What it will lead to, however, is a crisis of faith among Protestant Christians who drank the dispensationalist Kool-Aid. As a Christian, this is of interest to me as it could have a significant impact on the church. It may either lead to a collapse in Christianity in the West or an expansion as the association between Zionism and right-wing politics in the West dissipates. Time will tell.

The way that Netanyahu has been so openly able to force Trump into triggering the war has changed my view here. The average Western normie now sees that Zionism is behind that war. That includes both Jewish and Christian Zionism. Both will get blamed once people lose everything. Severe persecution against the Protestant churches might be a result.

Zionism will be the new Nazism after America loses this war.

Starvation and privation during wartime

This one is hard for us to imagine. Australia is a super-abundant nation, especially considering our relatively small population for our resource base. How could we experience starvation?

If our grid goes down and the products we rely on for manufacturing are suddenly unavailable, that’s how. The deep state has been seeding grid collapse in the public imagination with Netflix shows such as Leaving the World Behind and the BBC’s Cobra. Is this just a fear tactic? Or is it predictive programming to ready the population?

It’s been a long time since Australians were encouraged to grow Victory Gardens. The rationing this time would probably be sold to the public by blaming greedy panic shoppers and hoarders. Was the Great Toilet Paper Emergency of 2020 a trial run to make the public not lose faith in the elites, but rather blame preppers when the Chinese close off fuel and other imports?

No, that sounds like a conspiracy theory, you cooker.

Although the shortages are coming, the trigger I was wrong about. We took oil and shipping for granted. The Chinese won’t even have to destroy the grid to put us under siege. Stopping diesel will do the trick.

Delegitimisation of our current socio-political order

This is what Big Sister fears most, yet it is guaranteed when we lose this war. We will experience ‘regime change’. Our elites will be replaced, and either we will have foreign elites imposed upon us or else members of the upstart counter-elites will be given positions should they accept the new world order.

If it’s the second, I say ‘Nihao!’ to our bright new future.

Our children and grandchildren will be taught that the hegemonic regimes of the Western powers were fascist, imperialist and expansionist. Given that they’re already taught that great-grandpa was a racist coloniser, this won’t be too much of a change.

The peoples of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are ready to accept such a narrative too, given that those mass mental templates are already in place thanks to postcolonial and communist ideologies. They are part of the worldview taught in their schools.

They’ll just have lost millions of their young people, too. They’ll want revenge.

This will likely go along with feelings of disgust toward Christianity. Christian Zionism will be blamed for its role in starting the war, and as the Islamic world unifies and flexes its strength perhaps under neo-Ottoman leadership and neo-communist Chinese and Russians take primacy on the world stage, Biblical Christianity will come to be widely persecuted.

Many intellectuals and public figures espoused fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. By the 1950s, the only fascists left were feds and informants. This is what happens when you lose a war. You take the fall.

There will likely be a rising antipathy toward those who call themselves Jews today, too. This happened in Germany after World War I. Not having a homeland will make this a highly uncomfortable situation for diaspora Jews. The Jewish ascendancy we’ve seen since the 1940s will be over.

Essentially, whatever beliefs and groups led us into the war will be hated afterward, once we lose.

I think the revolt against liberal democracy will get going after the peak in the war. We’re on the cusp of a global sovereign debt default crisis on top of the war, shortages, and destruction of critical infrastructure. No one’s going to be a democratic socialist once the welfare payments stop, and imperial liberalism will be discredited once it is defeated by the Eurasian autarkies. Globalism will be a distant memory, comrades. Good riddance.

Occupation and fragmentation after the war

America, at least, and maybe Australia, too, can expect to be broken up and fragmented after we lose the war. This occurred to Germany, of course, and to the Koreans when neither side could win the 1950s civil war. Depending on which Asian nations side with China, we can expect parcels of the country to be under foreign control for either a short time or indefinitely. If we’ve been taken out via an EMP attack, this may be done under the guise of a ‘humanitarian response’.

It’s worth noting the devastating psychological impact this can have. Many German men still sit down to pee and the Japanese are famous for looking at softcore anime porn while being unable to leave their bedroom.

Both nations experienced terrible suffering during and after the war, but no one cared because they were the bad guys. That collective trauma has never been able to heal. Should we experience similar, and we will once we’re losing the war, it would alter the Australian psyche permanently.

The locus of world power will shift forever during this war. The Chinese will be the main beneficiaries, as they are sitting back and building up during the early stages of the fighting. This tactic enabled the Americans to emerge supreme in 1945. Smart dumplings.

We see the rising madness in our nation and are disgusted by it. Most people stay quiet due to fear of losing their job, reputation or social standing. The hard times that are coming will purge such duplicity from our society. Bullshit is not tolerated among the rubble. Those hard times will again produce stronger, and hopefully more honest men.

Who unfortunately might sit down to pee.

This I’m not so sure about anymore. Would China be bothered to occupy the place? Then they’d have to take responsibility for it. Maybe they’ll just declare terra nullius and send ‘settlers’. Which is what’s happening already, anyway.

Before it became digits on screens and abstractions in central bank language, it was a claim on something tangible. In the ancient world, money was not first imagined as a free-floating symbol. It referred back to things that could actually sustain life and production such as grain, silver, copper, or livestock. In Mesopotamia, systems of account were tied to measurable stores of value, and across the Bronze Age world, metal objects circulated because value had to remain anchored to something real. A token only mattered if it could still command substance.

That is the first thing modern people forget. Money is not wealth. It is a socially recognised claim on wealth, and it only works for as long as people believe the claim can eventually be honoured. Strip that away and the whole thing becomes theatre.

As Eurasian civilisations expanded, metals became the preferred backstop because they solved the problem better than almost anything else. Grain rots. Cattle die. Land cannot travel. But gold and silver can be stored, weighed, divided, transported, and recognised across frontiers. More importantly, they impose a discipline on rulers and merchants alike. A king can stamp his image onto a coin, but he cannot decree the underlying metal into existence. Material reality still governs the system.

That gave the old world a monetary continuity that outlived dynasties and empires. States rose and fell, borders moved, regimes changed, but the underlying logic of exchange remained coherent because it rested on something outside political wishfulness. Gold and silver were not perfect foundations, but they were foundations.

When Europe expanded across the globe, it did not invent a new monetary order. It exported the Eurasian one.

The conquest of the Americas was not just territorial plunder. It was a vast enlargement of the world’s metallic monetary base. Silver from Potosí and gold from across the New World poured into European systems and then into Asia, binding distant economies into a single expanding order organised around precious metals. Europe did not simply seize land and labour. It imposed valuation. Indigenous systems of exchange and obligation were subordinated to a monetary logic that understood metal as the universal denominator of worth.

By the nineteenth century, that process had matured into a world economy running on gold and silver standards. Paper money existed, but paper was not the foundation. It was the claim. Its credibility depended on convertibility into specie. Exchange rates between major currencies were relatively stable because they all referred back to fixed quantities of metal. Trade could widen because trust had a common substrate.

But there was always a limit hidden inside this arrangement. Gold and silver can stabilise a civilisation. They cannot easily accelerate one.

As economies became larger, denser, and more industrial, the stock of precious metal available to support them became increasingly inadequate. The modern world required more than coins and bullion. It required a far larger architecture of claims on future production, future trade, and future growth. Money had to become less like stored substance and more like a system of layered promises.

This is where modern banking and finance become central. Banks discovered that they did not need to hold enough metal to redeem every depositor simultaneously, because under normal conditions not everyone asks for redemption at once. That gap between actual reserves and circulating claims became the operating space of modern debt-based money creation. Credit could now expand beyond the physical stock of gold and silver.

Once that door opened, the modern world rushed through it. Stock exchanges allowed ownership in future enterprise to be bought and sold. Futures contracts allowed prices to be fixed for goods not yet delivered. Credit networks linked producers, merchants, insurers, investors, and states into increasingly dense structures of interdependence. Economic life ceased to be a simple exchange of existing goods and became instead a system built on anticipated production.

This is what made modernity possible. It is also what made modernity unstable.

Because once a civilisation begins living on claims about the future, it becomes capable of enormous expansion and enormous fragility at the same time. Credit allows a society to build ahead of itself. It also means that when confidence breaks, the whole system can suddenly discover that it has been leaning on expectations rather than reserves.

That is why financial history looks the way it does. Tulip Mania is remembered as a joke about flowers, but the mechanism underneath it was deadly serious. The Australian banking collapses of the 1890s followed the same deeper pattern. So did repeated financial crises across South America. Debt and speculation allowed these systems to stretch beyond their foundations. Collapse came when reality called those claims back in.

That tension between symbolic expansion and material constraint never went away. It simply moved upward into larger systems with larger consequences.

After the Second World War, it was folded into the American order.

Bretton Woods was not merely a tidy monetary agreement between technocrats. It was part of the machinery of Pax Americana. The United States emerged from the war with overwhelming industrial power, huge gold reserves, command of the sea lanes, and the capacity to organise the postwar world around itself. Under Bretton Woods, major currencies were tied to the US dollar, and the dollar itself was tied to gold.

That arrangement preserved the old monetary truth that money required a material anchor while making the United States the gatekeeper of that anchor. Gold remained the final foundation, but the dollar became the instrument through which the world accessed it. And because the arrangement sat inside a much larger system of American power, it worked. The US Navy secured trade routes. American industry supplied a rebuilding world. American institutions provided liquidity and credit. The postwar order was not simply ideological. It was logistical, military, and monetary all at once.

But the contradiction at its core was obvious. The world needed more and more dollars in order to function, because trade was expanding, production was expanding, and the American imperium itself was expanding. Yet every dollar remained, in theory, a claim on a finite quantity of gold.

That could never hold forever.

By the 1960s, the pressure was becoming intolerable. The United States was financing the Vietnam War while also carrying the costs of empire and domestic expansion. Dollars flooded outward into the world economy. Foreign governments accumulated them in vast quantities and began to understand what was happening. There were now far more claims in circulation than could plausibly be redeemed.

This is why 1971 matters.

When Nixon closed the gold window, he did not just tweak a monetary arrangement. He ended the final formal link between the reserve currency and the metallic discipline that had underwritten serious money for centuries. The dollar ceased to be a claim on gold. It became a fiat instrument resting on American power.

But a reserve currency cannot remain dominant purely because a government says so. It still needs a foundation. It still needs a reason for the rest of the world to keep demanding it. Once gold was gone, something else had to replace it.

That something was oil.

This was the real significance of the post-1971 order. Gold had anchored the old dollar. Petroleum would anchor the new one. Under Henry Kissinger, Washington moved quickly to stabilise the broken system by binding the dollar to the one commodity every industrial economy could not do without. Through agreements with the major oil-producing states of the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, oil would be priced and sold in US dollars. That meant any country needing energy would need dollars first. Since industrial civilisation runs on energy, demand for the dollar would now be sustained not by convertibility into gold, but by the necessity of purchasing oil.

This was not some incidental diplomatic convenience. It was a structural replacement.

Gold was the ideal monetary anchor for a mercantile world. Oil was the ideal monetary anchor for an industrial one. Gold stores value. Oil moves civilisation.

Oil powers ships, trucks, aircraft, mechanised agriculture, petrochemicals, plastics, mining, construction, and the transport systems that hold modern economies together. It is not just another commodity. It is the concentrated energy source that made twentieth-century civilisation possible. By tying the dollar to oil, the Americans effectively replaced one material foundation with another.

But this new foundation came with a new danger.

Gold can sit inert in vaults for centuries. Oil has to move. It has to be extracted, refined, shipped, insured, defended, and delivered through chokepoints and corridors that are vulnerable to sabotage, war, state collapse, and imperial rivalry. In other words, the post-1971 monetary system did not transcend material reality. It attached itself to a far more volatile part of it.

That is why the Gulf mattered so much. The Gulf monarchies were not merely lucky desert kingdoms sitting atop useful resources. They became custodians of the commodity that now underwrote the monetary order of the industrial world. This gave them extraordinary leverage, and they used it. The fuel crises of the 1970s were not just economic disturbances. They were demonstrations of where real power in the system had shifted. Western economies convulsed because the hidden energetic basis of the monetary order had suddenly become visible.

And this is the environment in which the Iranian Revolution has to be understood.

Iran in 1979 was not simply a country having an internal political crisis. It was one of the key states inside the strategic architecture of the emerging petrodollar order. Under the Shah, Iran had been deeply integrated into the American system in the Gulf. It was part of the machinery linking energy, security, and monetary dominance.

The revolution shattered that arrangement.

The Islamic Republic that emerged was not just anti-Western in a rhetorical sense. It represented a postcolonial revolt against a regional order that had become inseparable from American power and the monetary system that power upheld. Iran sat on enormous hydrocarbon resources, near one of the most important maritime chokepoints on earth, while refusing full submission to the system that had replaced Bretton Woods.

That made it intolerable.

So Iran was punished. The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s bled it heavily, with Iraq receiving backing from the United States. Sanctions followed. Isolation followed. Decades of economic strangulation followed. Iran was not simply being disciplined for bad behaviour. It was being contained because it occupied a structurally dangerous position inside the energy geography of the American world order.

That reality has not changed. It has only become more dangerous.

And this is why the present moment matters.

When Iran attacks oil infrastructure, shipping routes, and the wider energy architecture of the region, then it is not merely retaliating in the ordinary military sense. It is striking at the actual foundation of the post-1971 system. It is reaching beneath speeches, alliances, and diplomatic noise and touching the load-bearing structure itself.

Because beneath all the abstractions of modern finance, the American monetary order still rests on the same proposition it adopted after Nixon severed the link to gold. The dollar remains central because the industrial world still runs on hydrocarbon energy priced and moved through systems organised under American predominance.

That is the real backstop and Iran is now hitting it with missiles.

This does not mean the system collapses tomorrow. Large systems rarely fail in one dramatic gesture. They weaken through repeated stress. Shipping becomes more expensive. Insurance becomes more expensive. Energy volatility bleeds outward into inflation, capital markets, and political instability. Every disruption can be managed in isolation. But management is not the same as durability. A system that must constantly absorb shocks at its foundation is not stable. It is simply not dead yet.

What matters is that the hidden mechanism is becoming visible again.

For decades, people in the developed world have been encouraged to think of money as something generated by central banks and sustained by confidence alone. But confidence is never the foundation. It is only the surface effect of deeper material realities. Under every serious monetary order lies a substrate that cannot be negotiated with.

For centuries, that substrate was precious metal.

After 1971, it became concentrated energy.

And that means the ghosts of the 70s are not historical curiosities. They are still alive inside the system because the problem was never solved. Gold was removed, but the need for a foundation remained. Oil took its place. Now that foundation is under attack.

Trump is being haunted by the same reality that earlier generations of American strategists wrestled with. They created the illusion of stability we’ve taken for granted ever since.

Unfortunately, reality is not Trump’s strong suit. His inability to deal with it will haunt Americans for a very long time to come.

Given that he’d already set up a ‘task force’ committee, this was the only card he had left to play. He fearlessly declared that the government will change export-finance laws so that oil importers can get subsidies from the taxpayer to delay the inevitable moment of reckoning from Iran’s strategy of squeezing America’s vassals by the cajones via oil.

Not only was it brave. It was also stunning.

The phrase “Potemkin village” comes from the old Russian story that Prince Potemkin built fake villages to impress Catherine the Great as she travelled through newly conquered territory. Whether the original story is fully true is almost beside the point. It survived because it names something real. A Potemkin village is a facade. A front. Something built to look solid from a distance while hiding how little is really there underneath. Which is why the image fits Russian political culture so well, all the way through to the Soviet world of propaganda, parades, heroic posters and films like Battleship Potemkin. The point was not just power. The point was to make power look convincing when reality fell short.

A country the size of Australia should not be scrambling for an extra few weeks of diesel.

Australia is not Singapore. It is not Malta. It is not some cramped little import-dependent city-state with no room, no resources and no strategic depth. It is a continent. It is rich in energy, rich in raw materials, and built around vast internal distances that only function because liquid fuel makes those distances traversible.

And yet, not long ago, Anthony Albanese was effectively forced to ease diesel quality rules because the country needed a little more breathing room.

That should have been treated as a national embarrassment. Instead, it was treated as heroic government by the establishment media.

That is the part worth noticing. Not just the diesel issue itself, but the way it was absorbed into the normal rhythm of Australian politics, as though this is simply what leadership looks like now. A policy setting quietly creates fragility. The fragility starts becoming inconvenient. The government adjusts the setting slightly. The media reports this as calm crisis management. As Churchillian. Then the news cycle moves on.

But if you stop and look at it properly, it tells you something important.

Diesel is not some obscure technical issue. It is not one more line item in a policy briefing folder. It is what moves the country. It runs the trucks. It runs the farms. It runs the machinery that sits behind the machinery. In a place like Australia, diesel is not optional. It is one of the things that turns geography from a liability into the basis of our way of life.

Which is why this sort of thing matters.

If a country like Australia is suddenly discovering that fuel policy has consequences, then the problem is not really fuel policy. The problem is that the people running the country no longer seem to think in material terms. They think in administrative, moral, media, and symbolic terms. But not in the older, harder language of industrial reality.

That is the thing modern politicians seem least able to understand. A civilisation does not continue because it has the correct values statement. It continues because the physical systems underneath it continue to work. Our civilisation continues in its current form because fuel and spare parts arrive, freight moves, food can still be produced, transported, and sold, and distance can still be overcome at scale.

Australia, more than most countries, depends on that.

We are not a compact little European state with rail lines, density and inherited redundancy built into the landscape. We are a very large place held together by movement. Remove enough movement, or make it sufficiently unreliable, and what begins to break down is not just commerce but societal coherence.

That is why the whole diesel episode was so revealing. It showed, very briefly, that the people in charge do not really govern the Australia that exists. They govern a kind of administrative fiction layered over the top of it. An Australia of targets, frameworks, optics and announcements. An Australia where reality is something to be narrated, not secured.

That works for a while. It’s worked for them for quite a long time, given that we have spent the last few decades moving through a historical period of relative stability and American imperial economic expansion after the crisis of World War II and the detente of the Cold War. As American power stretched across the globe and the American imperial ideology is based on (a predatory and usurious form of) free trade, the political class in Australia became less and less leaders and more and more administrators. Everything was optics, my fellow working Australian battler.

Albanese’s fuel announcements this week were less the actions of a serious state than the improvisations of a political class that still thinks governance means explaining away consequences after they arrive. That is the pathology of modern Australian leadership. These people were not formed by scarcity, risk or hard constraint. They were formed by faction rooms, media cycles and the sort of undergraduate debating society culture that mistakes verbal fluency for competence. So when reality finally intrudes in the form of diesel, reserves, shipping and strategic vulnerability, they do what they have always done. Reframe, reassure, and hope nobody notices that the adults never really turned up.

That, in the end, is what a Potemkin politician really is. Not simply a liar, and not even simply a coward, though there is usually enough of both. A Potemkin politician is something more specific. He is a man produced by a fake world and perfectly adapted to surviving inside it. He knows how to look official, how to sound measured, how to gesture toward responsibility while standing in front of hollowed-out systems he neither built nor understands. He is not there to preserve the underlying reality. He is there to maintain confidence in the facade for as long as possible.

And Australia is now full of them.

We are ruled over by people whose entire formation took place in an era where almost nothing truly hard was allowed to touch them. No real scarcity. No real strategic terror. No genuine confrontation with the fact that civilisations are made of physical things that can fail. They have lived inside a padded historical chamber where every problem could be turned into a media event, a values statement, a task force, a subsidy, a slogan, or a ministerial reshuffle. That is why they still behave like undergraduate debating club apparatchiks even while sitting at the controls of a vulnerable industrial society. They think words are steering mechanisms. They think optics are ballast. They think reality can be indefinitely managed by tone.

But reality is not interested in tone.

It does not care how compassionate, progressive, moderate, inclusive or technically compliant a government sounds while it quietly weakens the foundations beneath the country. It does not care how many committees are formed or how many media hits are done or how many little rhetorical sandbags are piled around the latest failure.

If the diesel does not arrive, the diesel does not arrive. If the reserves are thin, the reserves are thin. If a nation has spent decades hollowing out its own resilience while pretending this was moral advancement, then eventually the bill arrives and there is nobody left to hide behind except the same thin, theatrical men who created the problem.

That is the real danger now. Not just Albanese, not just Labor, not just one fuel scare, one shipping disruption, or one panicked week in the market. The deeper problem is that Australia is entering a harder world with a ruling class trained entirely for a softer one. A world of constraints, shocks, shortages, pressure points and consequences is beginning to return, and we are being led into it by people whose highest skill is still explaining why none of this is really their fault.

Potemkin politicians can survive almost anything except the moment the facade stops being load-bearing. They can survive scandal, mockery, bad polling and televised embarrassment because all of that still belongs to the same artificial world that produced them.

But they cannot survive a system that begins to fail in ways that cannot be narrated away. Because at that point the question is no longer what they say, but what still works. And that is where the illusion collapses. Not all at once, not dramatically, but in small, accumulating failures that reveal, piece by piece, that the people in charge were never really in charge at all.

It was January 24, 2020. I remember the date because it’s the date of our first ever date. She’s adamant our first date was January 23, but she’s wrong. I’m right.

I showed her the videos on Twitter of people falling over in the street in China and the bodies being incinerated, which were circulating just as Wuhan went into a ‘lockdown’ due to a mystery new illness.

Alert but not alarmed, we got online to buy face masks and PPE, only to find out that there were already none easily available in Australia. Chinese had bought it all up and sent it back home before the gweilo realised what was happening.

That’s when the urgency kicked in and we realised we were dealing with something that was going to become significant. I’d had preps on and off for ten years prior, but it was then that I started taking prepping seriously and I haven’t stopped since.

Let’s just say we’re good for tp for a while.

As it turned out, COVAIDS was just a weird engineered mutant flu that got itself mysteriously cancelled out by the Omicron variant. It was all a scam. People lost jobs, though. Lost social connections. The young have never fully recovered their oomph, I think. It’s cast a pall on societies and individuals ever since.

And all that time, throughout late January and February 2020, the politicians appropriated the response and told the public there was nothing to worry about. It was a protracted masterclass in mass gaslighting. Instead of providing as much clear and accurate information to the public as possible and letting people manage their own responses, the political elite appropriated all messaging and management to themselves and then manipulated, deceived, divided, bullied, and terrified the population, rather than substantively addressing the problem.

They pretended to do border closures after they’d let the planes keep coming from China. Then they called anyone who said to close the border a racist. Then they closed the borders, and called anyone who wanted to go visit their dying nanna in Tassie a cooker conspiracy theorist threat to public safety.

Australia has intelligence agencies. They’re not smart people, but they get a lot of funding. There is no way they didn’t know about COVAIDS in the second half of 2019. They probably know who created and released it. For all we know, the Five Eyes created the entire thing.

Yet they pretended it was nothing, then they pretended to be investigating, then they pretended to be not alarmed while they launched economic warfare on the population, then they pretended that anyone who didn’t enforce mass terrorism and get an experimental mystery needle was literally Osama bin Laden.

And they’re doing exactly the same thing now, however, this time it’s about a real threat. Alarmism aside, Australia without diesel, fertilisers, and unleaded is not the Australia we know anymore. It’s somewhere between Afghanistan and Argentina, and fast.

Add in the likely opportunistic attack by China and the very likely use of nuclear weapons as Israel comes under existential threat, and it’s about to get real spicy.

If we know that, they know that. If we’re prepping, they’re prepped.

The same playbook is being rolled out in Australia that was used in 2020. While Asian nations are making radical preparations to protect their domestic populations, the Australian government is jawboning and gaslighting to bide the time. They want the crisis to engulf the population so they can pretend to rescue us and tighten the leash.

It’s classic narcissistic behaviour because we’re ruled by narcissistic sociopaths.

It’s difficult to get a clear picture, but from what I can tell, we hit the wall in Australia about April 10-15. If you have a different timeline or a different viewpoint, let me know in the comments. I don’t want to mislead anyone. Yet that’s the baseline scenario our household is planning for.

So in about two weeks, the S is going to hit the F. Big time. Not just fuel shortages. Everything shortages. The normies will panic last instead of first, like they always do, then the elites will use the chaos and the pain to push through social engineering plans they’ve had for a long time. Friends of mine think they’ll do lockdowns. I’m not so sure. Why lock us down when we’re stuck and starving? They might be right, though. We’ll see.

As soon as Trump attacked Iran for the Zionists, Anthony Albanese should have called a press conference and laid out to the nation what was coming. We could have requisitioned supplies, made the transition to domestic self-sufficiency, and prepared the population mentally. Shops would have been stripped, but that’s going to happen anyway.

We could have begun to organise community seed banks. A national system of Uber-style community ridesharing to encourage EV owners to get ready to help out neighbours while being incentivised through appropriate remuneration. A national mobilisation effort that was bottom-up and community-based, that would have brought the nation together beforehand, rather than a strategy that seeks to tear it apart afterwards.

Instead we’re going to have divide-and-control strategies that seek to demonise anyone who got ready beforehand or who isn’t going along with the agenda.

It’s all so diabolically evil. The deep state and their puppet masters would have perfect information about this crisis. They’d know what Trump and Iran are going to do. They’d have mapped out the probabilities. Instead of using that insider information to best prepare the nation collectively, they’re feigning calm to ensure the tsunami engulfs us when it arrives.

They must think it’s so funny. Iranian content creators are calling the Western elite the ‘Epstein class’. It’s very clever propaganda. The released emails show a network of people defined by their nihilism, debauchery, arrogance, and delusion. These are the people who are about to use World War III to commandeer our lives.

There’s a certain type of person who confuses cleverness with dishonesty. They think they’re smarter than everyone else because they routinely deceive. These people have unfortunately risen to the top.

Even more unfortunately for us, the only thing they’re good at is lying.

Just in time for TACO Tuesday, Trump chickened out. The Iranians have power, for now, and the greatest war crime of the 21st century hasn’t been carried out.

The greatest war crime of the 21st century remains Gaza. For now.

Once Trump does destroy Iran’s power grid, and I expect that he will given that this is what America always does before launching an invasion, then he will create the greatest humanitarian disaster since World War II and send a tsunami of Islamic refugees into Europe.

This has been the pattern every time America has attacked Middle Eastern countries since 9/11. Americans bleed, Muslims emigrate, Europe gets rapefugees, and Israel expands its sphere of influence.

Every single time.

Right when the dramatic 48-hour period that had the world on edge was up, Trump posted this.

Whoever this ‘country of Iran’ is, the leaders of the Iranian government and the IRGC have no idea what Trump is talking about. Given that Trump and Netanyahu have murdered just about every guy who could have negotiated a ceasefire, including the parents, wife and children of the new ayatollah, it’s highly unlikely Trump is talking to anyone.

Five days after the second message just happens to be Saturday, when the markets have closed. As he’s done many times before, Trump is clearly hoping to time whatever hairbrained, foolish, delusional, mad thing he’s going to do against Iran to be absorbed as news before markets open the following week, thus keeping oil low and the DOW up.

If he can’t pull it off, there will surely be some insiders around the Trump family who will make squillions off the event via insider trading anyway.

It’s the TRUMP coin rugpull all over again, but with more death and destruction.

When dealing with a grandiose pathological liar like Trump, it’s vital to never listen to what they say. That’s the siren song to distract you. Instead, watch what they do. Then you’ll see what they’re really up to.

As of writing, US forces are being moved toward the Middle East. Not a massive number at this stage, but enough to indicate that boots are about to hit the ground in Persia.

The clearest tell is the movement of command elements linked to the 82nd Airborne. You do not reposition airborne command structures into a theatre because negotiations are progressing. You do it because the system is being arranged for options that may soon need to be exercised at speed. War rarely begins with a formal announcement. It begins with logistics, staging, escorts, command integration and the quiet preparation of force.

This is the lesson of the magisterial World War I history, the Guns of August: once mobilisation begins, wars are hard to stop. And Trump is mobilising.

There are enough movements into West Asia to suggest that Washington is preparing for more than a symbolic strike package. The likely focus is not Tehran in the abstract, but the narrow band of strategic infrastructure that actually matters to the world economy, namely oil and gas facilities, maritime chokepoints and above all the Strait of Hormuz. That is where the pressure point is. If the Strait is no longer secure, then the fantasy of a stable, functioning global economy begins to fracture very quickly.

That is also why the most likely scenario is not some grand invasion of Iran in the Iraq sense, but a narrower operation that still carries enormous risk. Special forces, marine or amphibious elements, and seizure or destruction missions around energy and shipping infrastructure are far more plausible. Washington will tell itself this can be contained. It always does. But once American troops are on the ground, even in limited numbers, the logic of escalation takes over. Iran is not some shattered post-state waiting to be disciplined. It is a large, armed, coherent regional power that has spent decades preparing for this exact confrontation.

And that raises the darker possibility. If American troops are hit hard in the opening phase, that will not necessarily be treated in Washington as a warning to pull back. It may instead be treated as the emotional pretext for a much larger war. That has happened before. A failed limited mission can become the thing that transforms a reckless operation into a national crusade. Mission creep is not an accident in American war-making. It is often the mechanism through which political hesitation is converted into total commitment.

The problem for the United States is that once it goes down that road, it enters the old imperial trap. It cannot leave without humiliation, but it cannot stay without bleeding itself dry. A prolonged war with Iran would not restore American authority in West Asia. It would expose how thin that authority has become. And once that weakness is visible, other powers will begin testing it elsewhere. China will watch. Russia will watch. North Korea will watch. The rest of the world will begin adjusting to the fact that American power still has destructive capacity, but less and less ability to impose durable order.

That has obvious implications for Israel as well. A wider war may buy time tactically, but strategically it risks placing Israel in a much more dangerous position. If the region enters a prolonged phase of open combustion while American power is overextended and politically brittle, then Israel is no longer sitting beneath an unquestioned imperial shield. It is sitting inside a regional furnace.

And back in the United States, the domestic consequences would begin arriving very quickly. Not all at once, and not necessarily in dramatic form, but in the familiar pattern of imperial overstretch. Shortages, energy shocks, inflation, emergency language, heightened surveillance, pressure for sacrifice and the gradual normalisation of a war footing in a society that has neither the discipline nor the cohesion to absorb it cleanly.

That is why even the smaller signals matter. The recent expansion of military eligibility in the US up to the age of 42 with drug convictions not a barrier any longer does not prove a draft is imminent. But it does suggest a system trying to widen the manpower pool at exactly the moment strategic risk is rising. That is not proof of what comes next. It is simply one more indication that the state is beginning to prepare for a larger burden than the public is aware is coming.

So stop listening to Trump and start watching the machinery.

He is lying for time.

He is lying to keep markets calm.

He is lying to keep the public passive while the physical architecture of war is moved into place.

And if this does become what it increasingly looks like it may become, then people should not be preparing for a dramatic television event. They should be preparing for a slow deterioration in the conditions that underpin ordinary life. Shortages, price shocks, possible conscription pressure, travel disruption, civil unrest, and the gradual collapse of the assumption that the Western world is stable, rich and insulated from history.

That assumption was always more fragile than it looked.

And just like the price of oil, lying can only keep it under control for so long before reality catches up.

South Pars was hit. That matters because it is not just another energy asset, but the largest gas field in the world and a load-bearing part of regional and global supply. Iran’s response followed the same logic. Ras Laffan in Qatar, one of the central nodes of global LNG export, was struck hard enough to remove a significant portion of capacity. Around it, the pattern has filled in quickly. Tankers are getting harassed or redirected. Insurance markets are tightening. The Strait of Hormuz is no longer a neutral conduit but a variable one.

None of this is accidental. The infrastructure is not collateral damage. It is the target.

What these events make visible is something that is otherwise easy to miss when systems are working as they should. Modern societies do not rest on stockpiles so much as on movement. Energy moves. Goods move. Data moves. Capital moves. People move (unfortunately). The appearance of stability arises because these movements are sufficiently continuous to feel like a given. When they begin to stutter, even slightly, the underlying structure starts to show.

Industrialisation did more than increase output. It reorganised life around throughput. Energy-dense fuels allowed production to scale, but that scale required coordination across distance. Globalisation extended that coordination outward, so that inputs, components, and finished goods are now routinely separated by oceans. Centralisation then narrowed the number of places where key processes occur. Fewer refineries were doing more work. Fewer ports were handling more volume. Fewer facilities were producing what entire regions depend on.

And all of it was made possible by the global policeman role of the US Navy.

That combination works exceptionally well under stable conditions. It is fast, efficient, and in normal times surprisingly resilient to small, local disruptions. But it has a particular weakness that becomes obvious once pressure is applied across more than one part of the system at the same time. It does not have much slack.

I can remember my grandparents talking about how their parents had a goat, chooks, and a veggie garden in the backyard. My grandparents had decorative plants. My parents had a pool. At our place, we’re back to chooks and a permaculture garden.

The point is, earlier societies lived much closer to their points of production. They were exposed to scarcity in ways modern populations would find intolerable, but their systems were also less tightly bound together. A failed harvest was devastating, but it did not usually propagate through an entire civilisation at speed. Famines were localised. Disruption travelled slowly and usually petered out, unless it was a global catastrophe event.

Modern systems do not behave that way. They are integrated by design. Fuel underwrites transport. Transport underwrites food distribution. Electricity underwrites water, communications, refrigeration, and payments. Data systems coordinate all of it. When one layer is strained, others begin to tighten. When several are strained together, the system does not absorb the shock so much as transmit it.

This is what “critical infrastructure” really means in practice. Not just important assets, but the narrow set of systems through which everything else has to pass: energy fields and refineries; LNG terminals; major ports and shipping lanes; substations, fibre networks, data centres; and financial clearing systems. They are efficient precisely because they are concentrated. That concentration is also what makes them difficult to replace and slow to repair.

Once you see the system in those terms, the recent pattern of attacks no longer seems baffling or bizarre. War is no longer only, or even primarily, about seizing territory. It is about interfering with function. You do not need to occupy a country to make it hard to live in. You need to make its systems unreliable to apply pressure to the elite you are trying to destroy.

The United States spent the better part of the past two decades demonstrating this in various forms. Sanctions that reach into the plumbing of global finance. Targeting of energy infrastructure. Cyber operations against industrial systems. Control of shipping and insurance regimes. The lesson, whether intended or not, was clear. Modern power can be exercised by shaping the flows a society depends on.

Others have absorbed that lesson. They do not need to reproduce it perfectly or in coordination for it to have an effect. Pressure on shipping routes, energy production, key industrial nodes, and the digital systems that coordinate them can accumulate even when applied from different directions. The system does not care whether the strain is centrally planned. It only registers that it is there.

What follows is not an immediate collapse in the cinematic sense. Systems tend to degrade before they fail. Deliveries arrive late, then irregularly. Prices move first, then availability. Workarounds are found, but they are less efficient and put pressure elsewhere. Firms begin to prioritise, households begin to adjust, and governments begin to reassure. The system continues to function, but with increasing friction, and with a growing difficulty in predicting how it will behave from one week to the next.

There is also a tendency among political and managerial classes to misread this phase. A system that is still functioning is taken as evidence of resilience. But systems designed for efficiency under stable conditions often have very little margin once those conditions change. Redundancy was removed because it appeared uneconomic. Now that US hegemony is waning, it is showing that inefficiency was resilience.

The question this raises is not simply who can strike harder, but who can continue to function under sustained pressure on their infrastructure. Industrial civilisation has traded a great deal for its speed and scale. It has traded storage for flow, locality for reach, and redundancy for efficiency. Those were rational trades in a world where the underlying conditions were assumed to be stable.

The events of the past fortnight suggest that those conditions can no longer be taken for granted. The infrastructure that made modern life possible is now also the most direct way to disrupt it. That is not a temporary feature of this particular conflict. It is a property of the system itself.

Collapse, when it comes, is unlikely to announce itself with a single decisive break. It will present first as irregularity. Systems that work, but not quite as they did. Gaps where there used to be continuity. A growing sense that the machinery is still running, but no longer under control. And then, at some point that is difficult to time in advance, the transition from strain to failure.

It is the strategy of the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea, and I’m sure they’re all coordinating this, to leverage our fragility against us to maximum devastating effect.

Trump now has a choice. He can either retreat or invade Iran. There are really no other options.

A retreat would signal the end of US hegemony globally. The Eurasian powers seeking to end the Pax Americana would smell blood. There would be regional warfare around Eurasia very quickly, i.e. World War III.

An invasion would be a bloodbath for American troops. Jimmy Carter tried to use Delta Force to rescue the embassy hostages in 1979, and it was a disaster. A larger, overt attack to capture the processing facilities in the Persian Gulf would be a catastrophe. Mission creep would kick in, and even if the soldiers could take the facilities, more troops would have to then go in to capture the entire oil and gas production systems. America would bleed out, the Eurasian powers would pounce on the weakness, and there would be regional warfare everywhere soon after. World War III again.

Trump’s handlers clearly wanted a catastrophic war, likely a nuclear war, and now they’ll get one. As I’ve written before, I believe they are motivated by eschatology.

Trump is doomed if he doesn’t and doomed if he does. And so is our critical infrastructure.

Rows of fruit in perfect colour. Meat sealed in tidy packages. Bread stacked in quiet abundance. Freezers full of meals from cuisines most people would not have recognised two generations ago. Forty thousand products under bright lights, available seven days a week.

It is one of the quiet miracles of modern civilisation.

We rarely think about it anymore.

But the abundance resting on those shelves depends on something most shoppers never see.

Oil.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Modern food is, in a very real sense, rearranged petroleum.

For most of human history, agriculture ran on three energy sources: sunlight, human muscle, and animal muscle.

A farm in medieval Europe was essentially a solar energy system. Crops captured sunlight through photosynthesis. Animals converted those crops into labour. Humans organised the work and hoped the weather cooperated.

Productivity was low. Harvests were uncertain. Entire communities could be pushed into crisis by a single failed season.

Agriculture produced food, but it did so slowly and precariously. Then fossil fuels entered the field.

The first transformation was mechanical. Horses and oxen gave way to tractors. Irrigation pumps driven by diesel replaced the limits of rainfall. Mechanical harvesters replaced large armies of seasonal labour.

The scale of farming expanded dramatically. One farmer who once fed a household could now feed a village. In many modern economies, a single farmer produces enough food to sustain more than a hundred people.

Cheap energy did not simply transform industry. It transformed the farm.

The deeper revolution, however, came from chemistry.

Modern agriculture depends heavily on nitrogen fertiliser produced through the Haber–Bosch process. The chemistry itself pulls nitrogen from the air and converts it into ammonia that crops can absorb. But the process requires enormous energy inputs, and those inputs come overwhelmingly from natural gas.

The result is a quiet but extraordinary fact. A substantial share of the world’s food supply is effectively produced by the natural gas industry.

Estimates vary, but many researchers suggest that roughly half of the global population is fed by crops grown using synthetic fertiliser.

The Green Revolution was not purely agricultural. It was petrochemical.

Modern farming is therefore not simply a biological activity taking place in fields. It is part of a much larger industrial system.

Tractors the size of small houses cultivate land using satellite guidance. Diesel pumps draw water from deep aquifers. Fertiliser factories operate hundreds or thousands of kilometres away from the farms that depend on their output.

A medieval farmer needed a plough and a horse. A modern farmer requires diesel deliveries, replacement parts manufactured in global supply chains, fertiliser plants powered by natural gas, and transport systems capable of moving enormous volumes of crops across continents.

The farm has become an industrial site that happens to grow plants.

And industry runs on energy.

Now widen the lens beyond the farm itself.

Modern food systems assume that distance is cheap.

Beef travels from Brazil to European markets. Soy grown in Argentina feeds livestock in China. Apples harvested in New Zealand appear in northern supermarkets long after local orchards have gone dormant.

In the late nineteenth century, refrigeration changed the meaning of distance in food. Before that, meat was either eaten locally or preserved by being salted, dried, or smoked. Freshness did not travel. The breakthrough came with mechanical refrigeration and the first successful refrigerated shipping lines, which allowed frozen and chilled meat from Australia and New Zealand to reach British markets in usable condition. That was not just a commercial innovation. It was a sanitary one. Cold did what distance and time had always undone: it slowed bacterial growth, stabilised food, and made it possible to handle, store, and transport perishable goods without rapid spoilage. Modern food safety, the expectation that meat can sit in a cabinet for days without becoming dangerous, rests on that cold chain.

But refrigeration is not an independent system. It is an energy system. From the earliest ammonia compressors driven by coal-fired engines to modern refrigerated containers powered by diesel generators and electricity grids, the cold chain has always depended on abundant, continuous energy. Every refrigerated warehouse, every supermarket freezer, every chilled truck is a small, ongoing claim on the same underlying fuel base. Remove that energy, and refrigeration does not degrade gracefully. It stops.

The global food system is not merely agriculture. It is a vast logistical network that spans the planet. Container ships move grain across oceans. Refrigerated trucks distribute food across national highway systems. Fertiliser travels thousands of kilometres before it ever reaches a field. Oil made those distances economically manageable. In effect, cheap energy turned the world into one interconnected farm.

But distance has a way of returning when the cost of energy rises.

Even inside the supermarket itself, the system depends on speed rather than stockpiles. Most stores hold only a few days’ worth of inventory. This is not recklessness. It is the logical outcome of a supply chain optimised for efficiency. Food moves continuously through a chain that rarely stops. It moves from farm to processor, from processor to distributor, and from distributor to supermarket. Efficiency keeps prices low and shelves full. It also removes the buffers that once protected the system from disruption. When the flow slows, the shelves empty quickly.

Efficiency is a remarkable achievement. But it is not the same thing as resilience.

One way to understand the transformation of agriculture is through the language of energy. Traditional farming largely ran on solar income. Industrial farming runs on sunlight organised by fossil fuels. Fertiliser production requires natural gas. Farm machinery consumes diesel. Food processing, refrigeration, packaging, and long-distance transport all draw energy from the same industrial system.

And this is where the present moment stops being abstract. In the past few days, the war in the Middle East has moved beyond threats to actual damage. Iran’s strike on Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex has knocked out roughly 17 per cent of Qatar’s LNG export capacity, with two LNG trains reportedly damaged badly enough to be offline for years. Before that, Israel struck Iran’s South Pars gas field and the Asaluyeh processing hub attached to it. Trump then warned Iran against any repeat strike on Qatar, while reports elsewhere described an explicit threat against the rest of South Pars. This is not diplomatic theatre. It is the targeting of the machinery that keeps global energy moving.

That matters because modern agriculture is downstream from all of it. Natural gas is not just something that heats homes. It is the feedstock for fertiliser. When LNG capacity is destroyed, when gas fields are hit, when shipping risks rise, and cargoes are redirected, fertiliser costs move with them. Oil does the same work elsewhere in the system. It powers farm machinery, road freight, shipping, and cold storage. What begins as a strike on energy infrastructure quickly becomes a rise in the cost of producing food.

You can see it already, in small ways. A few cents more at the bowser. A missing brand on a supermarket shelf. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that looks like a crisis.

That is how these things begin.

But take the worst-case scenario seriously for a moment. Not as a thought experiment, but as a baseline.

Australia sits in an especially brittle position. It exports enormous volumes of LNG, yet the infrastructure to direct it locally quickly does not exist. And LNG is not a substitute for oil.

Petrol stations run dry first. Panic buying will empty the system even before the boats stop arriving.

No fuel, no logistics. No logistics, no supermarkets. It is a brutally simple chain.

The initial shock is psychological as much as physical. Households do not wait for empty shelves. They anticipate them. They buy early, buy more, and strip the system of its buffer. What looked like a supply problem becomes a behaviour problem, which then becomes a real supply problem.

It’s an unstoppable feedback loop once confidence disappears.

After that first shock, the deeper damage begins.

Fertiliser supply tightens hard enough that farmers pull back immediately, not cautiously. Application rates drop across an entire planting cycle. That decision is invisible to most people at the time. Fields still look the same. Tractors still move.

But agriculture runs on delayed consequences. What is not put into the soil now is not harvested later.

At the same time, diesel, if available at all, becomes scarce enough to change behaviour. Marginal land is not planted. Harvesting decisions become selective. Transport begins to falter across a continent where distance is not an inconvenience but a governing reality.

Distance itself becomes an enemy.

Imported food does not provide relief. It simply does not arrive as global supply tightens and other countries begin quietly, then openly, protecting their own populations. Export restrictions appear first as temporary measures, then harden into policy.

Australia is not immune to that logic. It participates in it.

So the system does not collapse in a single dramatic moment. It degrades in layers.

First, the servos become unreliable. Then the shelves become inconsistent. Then the prices become prohibitive.

Abundance does not disappear. It thins. Variety goes first. Then affordability. Then trust. And once trust goes, everything accelerates.

People do not shop for what they need. They shop for what they fear they will not be able to get tomorrow. Businesses hold inventory rather than sell it. Governments intervene with price controls here, export restrictions there, usually just enough to distort signals without restoring stability.

Everyone begins acting as if scarcity is inevitable. That’s how it becomes so, even before the physical logistics make it so.

The modern world did not solve food security. It outsourced it to energy and logistics, then built a culture that forgot the dependency. No supply lines, no abundance.

For a long time, those supply lines were so stable they became invisible. Supermarkets looked like systems of production rather than systems of distribution. It felt as though food simply existed.

But it does not simply exist. It has to be moved.

And if the movement stops, if gas fields burn, if LNG trains go offline, if oil does not come in or go out, then what Australia faces is famine.

Not a theatrical collapse on day one, but a fast-moving unravelling.

Shelves empty, then stay empty. Distribution breaks, then cannot be restored. Production falls, then fails to recover. A country with food somewhere, but not where people are.

Since World War II, politicians have been able to manage crises rhetorically. They rely on spin and process. They will believe that it will work again, just as it always has.

Until it doesn’t.

Petrolmageddon, coming soon to a bowser near you.

Normies don’t really pay close attention to news developments. That’s wise, really. Most of the time, they’re a waste of time.

But sometimes they’re not. And when they’re not, it’s really handy to be the one who panics first.

Along with ballistic missiles hitting Israeli cities, oil tankers getting bombed in the Persian Gulf, missiles raining down on Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Iran getting pummelled, and Middle Eastern oil looking like it’s about to go permanently offline, becoming apocalyptic is not entirely unreasonable.

For Christians, though, ‘apocalypse’ doesn’t just mean the destruction of the world. There’s much more to it.

The Greek word from which we get ‘apocalypse’ actually means ‘revelation’. Hence, the name of the final book in the Bible. It’s the content of the Book of Revelation, trumpets being blasted, seas turning to blood, Hell being opened, Whores getting burned, that kind of thing, that has given us our meaning of apocalypse.

I have to confess, and it might not surprise you to read this, that I’m kind of looking out for the apocalypse maybe soon, too. But it’s not because of the sudden outbreak of a very dangerous war in the Middle East. That’s secondary. There have always been wars and rumours of wars.

I’ve got other reasons, and given that it’s March 18, 2026 today, I thought I’d go through one of them with you.

Today is New Year’s Day. Or at least it was for the group of people who wrote and stored the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Scholars are pretty confident that they were Essenes, and it’s my view that this group was a community of people on the lookout for the messiah who got absorbed into the Jesus movement and became the foundations of the early church in Palestine.

A scholar who has spent decades investigating how these people understood time is Dr Ken Johnson, and he wrote a book about the Essenian calendar and how it points to the timing of prophetic events.

Ken Johnson’s work is not especially well known, but it is unusually specific. He argues that, unlike the more familiar lunar calendar used in mainstream Judaism to this day, the Essenes appear to have followed a solar calendar structured around fixed cycles. Johnson’s claim is that this calendar preserves a Jubilee framework that is not merely symbolic but chronological.

They are fifty-year cycles of ordered time.

Within that framework, he places what he calls the “final Jubilee” of the last age1 between roughly 26 AD and 76 AD. The dating is not arbitrary. It begins around the start of Christ’s ministry and ends with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 AD, with a few years on either side to complete the cycle.

The claim is not just that important things happened in that period. It is that the period itself was structured to contain them.

All the big events that Daniel and the other Prophets had proclaimed about Israel came to pass within that time window.

If you accept that premise, even tentatively, then the implication is difficult to ignore. Jubilee cycles do not simply stop. They roll forward. And if one such cycle marked the end of an age centred on Israel, then a corresponding cycle could mark the close of a broader age.

Not a local ending this time, because God has not been dealing with humanity through one people during this age. This time, the events foretold in the New Testament’s version of Daniel, Revelation, will affect the entire world.

And today, March 18 2026, is the first day of the final Jubilee year according to the Essenian calendar.

Happy New Year !

You may, however, not be a believer in such Bible nonsense. That’s fine. The cyclical view of time held by ancient people, however, is something that I still believe we can learn from and gain wisdom by.

They understood that time is cyclical in ways that we intuit but can’t explain. Certain pressures recur. Certain alignments return.

We are living through a time that in many ways echoes the 1970s. The Bretton Woods monetary system broke apart, and dollar hegemony was challenged. Oil shocks disrupted industrial economies. Inflation unsettled politics and destabilised governments. Remember the Whitlam Dismissal? The US seemed overextended and on the wane.

The same cluster of pressures is visible again. Energy insecurity. Questions around dollar dominance. Regional conflicts that sit uncomfortably close to critical supply routes. None of these, taken alone, is unprecedented. Together, they begin to form a pattern that is harder to dismiss.

What we are seeing is not simply a crisis. It is the reappearance of a particular kind of moment.

These are the types of insights that are often best captured in literature, and the novel I’ve found myself reflecting on recently is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Heart of Darkness is often read as a critique of colonial brutality, which it is. But structurally, it is about something more precise. It traces the movement from order into ambiguity. The further Marlow travels from the administrative centre, the less coherent the imperial project becomes. By the time he reaches Kurtz, authority has detached from any recognisable moral framework.

The horror is not just what Kurtz does. It is that he has become the chaos he was sent to tame.

Apocalypse Now! lifts that structure almost intact and places it in the context of the Vietnam War. The river journey remains. The gradual breakdown of command remains. Instead of Africa, we see Southeast Asia.

A mission continues because it has begun. Each layer of authority is thinner than the last. By the time Captain Willard reaches Kurtz, the war has ceased to have a clear objective. It persists out of inertia.

With Trump, we are seeing the Heart of Darkness play out in the Middle East. Destruction for the sake of destruction. Out of the imperial project to impose order emerges chaos, horror, and despair. Imperial overreach bringing darkness, atrocity, and ultimately destruction on the empire itself.

The revelation for Marlow and for his film adaptation Captain Willard is that the darkness is not external. It was internal all along.

The revelation of celestial reality at the end of the Bible does bring God’s destruction down on the corrupt world system at the end of this age. It is Yahweh on the storm clouds, bringing divine retribution and the administration of catastrophic judgement.

The Essenes seemed to get it right about the apocalypse of Israel at the end of the last age. The Jews had been warned. They suffered terrible destruction in Jerusalem for what they’d done to the messiah.

We’ve been warned, too. Nothing lasts forever.

The storm is coming.

It is the sort of thing that we wouldn’t have thought of as an event a decade ago. Load the car, fill the tank, drive a few hours down the motorway, spend the day quoting Cobra Kai one-liners, head home again.

But along the way, something unsettling hit me.

This was beginning to feel already like a bit of a luxury thing to do.

The petrol alone made that clear. What once felt like a routine weekend outing now carries the faint sense of indulgence. A long drive for a hobby. A casual trip between cities. The assumption that fuel will always be cheap enough, abundant enough, and available enough to make such things ordinary.

For most of our lives, we have taken that assumption for granted. Petroleum and its derivatives are the blood of modern civilisation. We take it for granted that its circulation will always supply our needs.

But civilisation is held together by logistics that most people never see.

The supermarket shelves appear full as if by magic. Aircraft cross continents overnight. Container ships arrive in Australian ports stacked high with goods from every corner of the planet. Petrol stations glow under bright lights along the motorway, dispensing energy with the casual ease of a vending machine.

Behind that apparent simplicity lies an enormous machinery of pipelines, tankers, refineries, ports, shipping insurance markets, naval patrols, and financial clearing systems.

Modern life rests on that machinery, and the heart of that machinery is being exploded as you read this.

It’s a civilisational heart attack, and we get a front row seat to live through it.

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the narrowest and most important arteries in the global economy. Roughly a fifth of the world’s traded oil passes through that thin stretch of water between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula. Tankers leaving the Persian Gulf must navigate a corridor only a few dozen miles wide before entering the wider Indian Ocean.

It’s the narrowest artery in the most vital area of the global circulatory system. Now Iran is blocking it off.

By attacking the oil infrastructure of the Gulf Cooperation Council states and effectively shutting down traffic through Hormuz, Tehran has not merely launched a regional military operation. It has struck directly at the logistical foundation of the modern economic system.

Oil is often described as fuel for cars. That description is convenient but misleading.

Oil is far more than a transportation fuel. It is the industrial blood of modern civilisation.

Petrochemicals form the basis of plastics, synthetic fibres, pharmaceuticals, bitumen, and countless industrial materials. Aviation depends on refined petroleum products. Global shipping runs on bunker fuel. Fertiliser production relies heavily on hydrocarbons. Manufacturing, construction, and modern agriculture all draw deeply from the same energy well.

The plastic case on your phone. The insulation on electrical wires. The paint on your walls. The foam in your mattress. The polyester in your clothes. The tyres on your car. The paint on your car. The seats in your car. The dashboard in your car. The bitumen under your car.

The syringes in hospitals. The packaging around sterile equipment. The fertilisers that grow modern crops. The pesticides that protect them. The shampoo in your shower. The nylon in sportswear. The resins in wind turbine blades. All of these things begin in petrochemical plants.

We do not merely burn oil. We build our civilisation out of it. Remove oil from the system, and the consequences extend far beyond the price of petrol.

Industrial societies function because they possess vast reservoirs of concentrated energy. Oil provides that energy in a form that is dense, portable, and easily stored. It is the quiet enabler of almost everything that makes modern life possible.

But energy alone is not the whole story.

The global oil market is also the hidden pillar of the international financial system.

Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary order in the early 1970s, the United States has effectively anchored the world economy around the pricing of oil in US dollars. Nations require dollars to purchase energy, and therefore hold dollar reserves. Those reserves flow back into American financial markets, reinforcing the dollar’s position as the central currency of global trade.

Energy and finance thus became intertwined.

Oil stabilised the dollar. The dollar stabilised the trading system.

The result was a monetary architecture that supported the enormous expansion of globalisation over the past half-century. Supply chains stretched across continents. Manufacturing dispersed across oceans. Consumer societies in the West imported goods from everywhere while exporting the currency used to purchase them.

Yet this entire arrangement rests on something older that I wrote about in 2024: control of the sea lanes.

For roughly five hundred years, the global trading system has been underwritten by Western naval power. The Portuguese opened the ocean routes in the fifteenth century. The Dutch and the British turned those routes into commercial highways. In the twentieth century, the United States Navy inherited the task of keeping the oceans open.

Global capitalism was never simply a matter of markets and finance. It was also a matter of security.

Merchants will ship goods across oceans only if they believe those goods will arrive safely. That belief depends on naval patrols, international law, and an intricate web of maritime insurance markets centred historically in London.

Trade, in other words, requires both protection and trust. For centuries, the Western maritime powers provided both.

The Persian Gulf oil trade is one of the most important pieces of that structure. Tankers move through Hormuz under the assumption that the sea lanes will remain open and insurable. Shipping firms calculate risk accordingly. Insurance companies price policies based on the expectation that major naval powers will prevent sustained disruption.

But those assumptions begin to unravel the moment a chokepoint becomes a battlefield.

Insurance premiums spike. Shipping companies hesitate. Naval escorts become necessary. Even if tankers can technically pass through the strait, the cost of doing so may become prohibitive.

The system has a myocardial infarction.

Since World War II at least, the Western world has lived inside the illusion that global integration is permanent. Goods flow effortlessly across oceans. Supply chains stretch thousands of kilometres without serious interruption. Distance itself seems to have been conquered.

Cheap energy and secure sea lanes created that illusion.

Yet history offers a more sobering perspective. Large trade networks have collapsed before. The Bronze Age trading system disintegrated around 1200 BC. The Roman Mediterranean fractured in late antiquity. The Silk Road periodically vanished for centuries when political and military conditions made long-distance commerce too dangerous.

Arrogant neocon think tank intellectuals in America told us we had reached the End of History in the 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union. The ‘mad mullahs’ say otherwise, and are now bringing history back with a Shahed drone bang.

Iran’s attacks on Gulf oil infrastructure and its effective closure of Hormuz represent more than a regional escalation. They mark a signal event in the slow unravelling of the economic order that has shaped the modern world.

The consequences will not appear overnight. Civilisational systems rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment. Instead, they begin to strain. Prices rise. Supply chains falter. Governments scramble to stabilise markets that were once taken for granted.

Gradually, the underlying assumptions of everyday life begin to change.

A long drive to Sydney becomes something you think about before filling the tank.

For the past half century, the industrial world has lived within a system built on cheap energy, secure sea lanes, and a financial architecture tied closely to the global oil trade. That system produced extraordinary prosperity, but it also created an illusion of permanence.

Now the foundations are beginning to crack.

Modern civilisation likes to imagine that its problems are primarily political or technological. Yet the deeper structures of history are often logistical. Empires rise when they master the movement of energy and goods across distance. They falter when those flows become uncertain.

The tankers burning in the Persian Gulf are therefore more than images of regional conflict.

They’re a planetary blood clot blocking the most important coronal artery of our civilisation.