“I had the titular role in Out of Africa.” – Upright Citizens Brigade
Will that work? I have my droughts.
World economic systems are straining due to the current IAI (Israel, America, Iran) war. One of the lessons learned from previous economic crises is that issues show up at the weak points first. Back during the Arab Spring in 2011, people in the Arab world were revolting.
I mean rebelling.
One big driver was the inflation that had hit the area. What caused the inflation?
Well, money printing in the United States due to the 2008 Great Recession had finally spread internationally to the Middle East. Certainly, the Middle East is already as stable as a methed-up stripper ex-girlfriend whose rent-check just bounced, so adding vodka to the mix didn’t help.
Countries burned.
They overthrew their governments, and when they didn’t like the new ones, went and got the old ones back. This was caused at least in part because the Arabs were hungry and food was too damn expensive. Can’t farm the desert, so might as well blow the place up.
Which they did.
Once again, the Middle East is center of worldwide economic stress and it’s moving quickly across the world.
Bigfoot is confused with sasquatch, yeti never complains.
In Australia, they’re running out of something they call petrol. If only they knew about gasoline!
In India, they’re running out of fertilizer so it will be difficult to line the streets with poo.
In Taiwan, soon enough they’ll be running low on helium, which is a byproduct of natural gas processing.
Helium?
Yeah, they need lots of helium to make computer chips so that you can make Internet cat pictures that are photorealistic plus I think they huff it a lot which is why they can’t pronounce “R”. Regardless, here’s an A.I. cat for you:
But one place that will certainly be having difficulty is Africa. Africa is the basketcase of the world.
Why? For starters, Africa imports 85% of its food.
85%.
85%.
Why? Farming is apparently too hard, and whenever they have a few white people farming and feeding Africa, black people decide they’ll take the magic farm and get rich. Except they don’t. Lush, productive farms fall into disrepair, but, hey, the Africans who looted the place ate for a day.
Not only that, their governments are also basketcases. In almost every country, the government requires copious amounts of foreign aid to get anything done. I’d make more fun of them, but then I think about our budget deficit and go, “Oh, yeah, at least in America we know some payday lenders.”
So, since they have to bring in food and can’t care for themselves in any way at all, at least they’re doing the responsible thing by keeping their wombs from being clown cars and not having hundreds of millions of children that they have no way to feed, right?
No. They’re turning their wombs into clown cars and having hundreds of millions of children that they have no way to feed.
And, of course, they’ll blame us. In this case, they might be right. We’ve taken a group of civilizations whose only actual contributions to the world are raw materials and AIDS and given them medicine and food. Since the entire continent has been in super-fertile rabbit mode since forever (r/K biology –link below), what did they do with effectively unlimited food and a drastically reduced child mortality?
r/K Selection Theory, or Why Thanksgiving is Tense* (for some people)
Breed.
They’ve gone from a reasonable 10% of the population of the world when I was a kid to more than double that today, as the world population has doubled. They double-doubled. And they were starving and dying when I was a kid.
Regardless, it’s like someone turned on the “African-making machine” and left it on overnight. For decades. And, their population is projected to be some silly number like 40% of the world’s population by 2100.
(as-found)
But that will never happen. Why? Because a big crisis, like the one we’ll be seeing soon due to the IAI war, will simply remove the excess wealth that sends medicine and food down to Africa. We all know what happens next: the senseless deaths, the violence, the revolutions, the cannibalism.
Oh, wait, that’s Africa when things are going well. Things will soon enough get much darker on the Dark Continent as the wealth spigot dries up. I can’t imagine that Europe will continue to absorb them there, either, but then again I never thought the West would be committing collective cultural suicide like it is today.
Sadly, not AI or a horror movie. (as-found)
The IAI war isn’t some far-off desert dust-up that only affects oil futures and late-night cable news. It’s a live-action stress test on every fragile supply chain we’ve built since the last big reset. Oil tankers with $100,000,000 cargos reroute around the Red Sea like it’s a game of dodgeball with $3,000 drones. Grain ships that used to feed half the planet now sit idle or pay pirate insurance that would make your mortgage look cheap.
Fertilizer plants in Europe and Asia that run on Middle Eastern natural gas?
Yeah, those are suddenly “strategic assets” instead of just boring factories. The ripple hits the weak points first, just like it always does. Australia’s petrol shortages aren’t because they suddenly forgot how to drill and can’t figure out how to spell “gasoline” it’s because the tankers that used to show up like clockwork are now playing naval chicken in the Strait of Hormuz.
India’s fertilizer crunch? More natural gas.
And Taiwan’s helium? That’s not some niche nerd problem. Helium keeps the fabs running so your phone can update and your cat video can render in 8K. No helium, no chips.
No chips, no economy that looks even vaguely modern.
It’s all connected, and the connections are fraying faster than a cheap suit at my uncle’s funeral. Africa just happens to be the thinnest thread on the whole sweater. They don’t grow enough food to feed themselves on a good day. They don’t manufacture much beyond raw materials that richer countries turn into actual products. Their governments run on foreign aid the way a junkie runs on his next fix.
And while the rest of the world was busy printing money and inventing new genders, Africa was busy doing what r-selected populations do best when you hand them calories and medicine: exploding in numbers.
The math is brutal and it doesn’t care about feelings. When the aid stops, when the container ships prioritize Europe and Asia over charity runs to the Sahel, when the NGOs pack up because the insurance premiums are higher than their budgets, the party ends. Not with a polite “thank you for the fish,” but with the kind of scenes that make Arab Spring look like a polite disagreement at a PTA meeting.
Who has two thumbs and a poor grasp of visual humor? This guy. (as-found)
We helped create the conditions. Not out of malice, but out of the same soft-hearted, soft-headed Western instinct that says “we have extra, so let’s share.”
We shared vaccines.
We shared grain.
All this while infant mortality plummeted and fertility stayed at levels that would make a rabbit blush.
The result?
The bill is coming due, and the IAI war is just the guy in the suit who shows up to repossess the furniture. Europe already has its hands full with the last wave. America is staring at its own debt mountain and wondering why the grocery bill looks like a car payment. Australia and India and Taiwan are discovering that “just-in-time” supply chains work great until the “just-in-time” part becomes “just-in-case the war lasts another six months.”
The weak points crack.
Then the stronger ones start groaning.
Then the whole system starts looking for someone to blame.
The Dark Continent is about to get darker. Revolutions, famines, the whole greatest-hits album of human misery played on repeat.
(as-found)
And the rest of the world? We’ll be too busy trying to keep our own lights on to send another aid convoy. And I worry the most about rebellion here. Especially among the cows.
I can’t abide a mootiny.