Entropic, Not Anthropic...

Even disregarding the immediate human impact [which we can't and shouldn't] of the current wars being waged in the Middle East by what is becoming an axis of the most hawkish of nations in the West, the US and Israel, we can't avoid the wider geopolitical issue of energy supply and what will become in the coming months and possibly for years hence a major factor in economic decline across the globe, most particularly in the West itself. Waging war in the Middle East has always carried with it the intrinsic threat of systemic economic damage: energy supply lines in the form of crude oil are directly impacted by the geographical vice that the Middle East holds over the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal. Whilst we are still stupidly over-dependent on fossil fuels arriving at our refineries to supply industry and domestic fuel needs, we are beholden to those countries that surround that narrow sea passage trading normally and without duress of conflict. When that narrow line is squeezed, oil prices rise and the concomitant economic effects knock on down to street level, affecting everyone in their wallets.

We're still trying to recover from the effects of the 2008 financial crash and the fallout from the pandemic and all the dubious financial antics that ensued from that catastrophe: now the old men who would be boy soldiers are waging wars that will scupper the few seeds of recovery that we have been trying to nurture for the last twenty years as a result of those events. People deserve and need better than performative chancers and tin-pot regimes: there are too many psychotic and deranged old men in the wilds of politics worldwide. They need a use-by date that should be enforced by statute, not through the barrel of a gun. The time for co-operative legislation is truly upon us: the once revolutionary claims, aims and statutes that held true in the past are now unfit for purpose [cf. the American Constitution: ripe for exploitation in the modern era, never mind our unwritten British Constitution] and a multiple resetting of political and economic thinking is long overdue. If we don't start some serious international debate about how we rein in the idiots pretty soon, they'll have done too much damage for it to be easily repaired. You might say it was ever thus, as my dad was always wont to say, but at least he, like I am, was an eternal optimist when it comes to the human spirit. It's just a pity that so much shit has to happen before people actually sit up and take notice of what is being imposed on them...