If you have not yet read Part 1: Making The World A More Dangerous Place available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

Look, we’ve given these warnings before and unless you happen to live in one of the unfortunate countries that is being bombed or overtly or covertly supplied with the weapons of war by the west, they seem to not have amounted to much.

Such is the nature of reading tea leaves.  Instead of thinking of them as binary outcomes – things that either happened or didn’t happen – think of them as ‘probability fields.’  Like the chance of rolling a three with a 6-sided die vs. the chance of rolling a three with a 20-sided die.  The ‘probability field’ of the 6-sided die is a lot higher.

The probabilities and forces that push us closer to and further from war are ever changing and highly complex.  They shift with events and decisions, most of which we are unaware of because they are either not reported on or reported with heavy distortion of the truth.

So reading the tea leaves is the best we can do.

Our advice for any war breaking out anywhere in the Middle East, or especially between Russia (or China) and the West would be to have all of your preparations done a year before that moment.

Anything that disrupts global maritime trade, even for a very short while will rock the financial systems of the world.  Anything that calls into question the desire or ability of a country to repay its foreign debts (and wars are great excuses to stiff your creditors if they happen to be attacking you) will rock the financial world.

Heck, anything that…