From 2018 to the present
“The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
— Winston Churchill
Sometimes it pays to go back and read things I’ve written before. It sheds new light.
In my post Things Are Not as They Appear, I traced the long arc of de-dollarization—from China’s 2018 petroyuan to the quiet strategic moves that followed. One passage in particular stands out to me now:
“In August, the BRICS met in South Africa. Participants discussed how to make BRICS local currencies easier to use in commerce and finance with each other—in other words, how to de-dollarize. New members (Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE) created checkmate by cornering all the major ‘choke points’ for energy/trade passage, to begin on January 1, 2024. With Egypt’s membership came the Suez Canal. With Iran’s membership came the Straits of Hormuz.”
What felt like a quiet strategic shift then has only become more significant since.
Things are not as they appear
I was looking into media psychology when my research led me to James F. Tracy, an ex-tenured Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University. He was fired in 2016 after accusing the government of hiring crisis actors for an incident that he didn’t think was real. It was before half the world got
“Outstanding, sophisticated, and mesmerizing…a spiritual intrigue similar to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.” —ForeWord Reviews