Summary of Articles

Since people rarely read the whole article anymore, we've decided to take a gathering of headlines and see if you can piece together a larger story behind them. Let's consider it a game of sorts.

Right, so where to start ?

Well the recent news about the hijacked bitumen tanker off the coast of the UAE causes some concern. The identity of the hijackers is presently unknown but the UK, USA and Israel are all pointing fingers at Iran. Iran however strongly denies involvement in the attack.

The ship has now been released, after the nine armed men that had come aboard decided to leave the vessel before reaching a supposed destination of Iran.

The curious point here is that several other vessels "lost control" (meaning they didn't have power to their controls and couldn't steer) in the same region made this author suspect that there was some form of intelligent electronic hacking going on, but perhaps that's just the occupational hazard of working in Cyber Security. In total there are said to have been SIX vessels that had lost control, all at the same time, all in the same region. Fishy... or perhaps, Oily?

Coincidentally, all-new Oil fields were discovered near the end of 2019 . If the hijacking had anything to do with oil (Iran was also accused of attacking an Oil Tanker with a drone in the last week of July) then it could easily further drive up oil prices in the world market, which means yet more increases to your fuel costs in the long run. Especially if Iran has decided it no longer needs to use the strait to supply European clients, but redoubles it's efforts to supply others such as China, Japan and India. A power play of significant portions.

Power is of course a fundamental factor in stable governing. From the abstract meaning of power in authority and the complicity it inspires in followers, to the more traditional meaning of energy as source of fuel or release of potential, it is always something that society requires at various levels. As each strata of society congeals into the living organism of a nation, what may seem like a minor inconvenience to one sector, may be far more serious to the whole.

For example, if tractors used to bring in a harvest can't obtain the fuel they require, then this could easily have a significant domino effect on food levels. Similarly, if farms aren't able to hire workers they need due to lack of both skilled and unskilled workers as a knock-on effect of Covid restrictions (in this case in Australia) then here again, they could compound seen as a perfect storm of disasters. In this article, millions of dollars could be lost from the harvest due to these circumstances.