In 2000, Saddam Hussein did something very few people paid attention to.

He announced Iraq would start selling oil in euros, not U.S. dollars.

Three years later, the United States invaded Iraq.

No weapons of mass destruction were ever found.

But something else happened quietly.

Iraqi oil went right back to being priced in dollars.

Most people call that a coincidence.

I call it a lesson.

In 2009, Muammar Gaddafi proposed something even more dangerous.

A gold-backed African currency — the gold dinar.

It would have allowed African nations to buy oil without using dollars.

In 2011, NATO intervened in Libya for “humanitarian reasons.”

Gaddafi was killed.

The gold dinar disappeared.

Libyan oil? Back to dollars.

Another coincidence.

I’m noticing a pattern.

Go back further.

In 1971, President Nixon took the U.S. dollar off the gold standard.

The dollar was no longer backed by gold — only a promise.

By all historical logic, the dollar should have collapsed.

It didn’t.

Why?

Because three years later, Henry Kissinger cut a deal with Saudi Arabia.

The deal was simple:

Sell oil only in U.S. dollars, and the U.S. military will protect the regime.

From that moment on, every country on earth needed dollars to buy energy.

That wasn’t free-market economics.

That was force-backed monetary policy.

Or, more honestly, a protection racket.

And it works — as long as the military can enforce it.

Watch what happens when countries challenge it.

Russia demands rubles for natural gas?

Sanctions. Escalation.

Syria discusses pipelines priced outside the dollar system?

Civil war intensifies. Pipeline never happens.

Iran tries to sell oil outside the dollar?

Decades of sanctions.

I’m not saying these are good governments or bad governments.

I’m saying watch what happens when anyone threatens the petrodollar system.

Once you see it, the pattern isn’t subtle.

SWIFT is not a neutral payment system.

It’s a weapon.

Get cut off from SWIFT, and you’re locked out of global trade.

Russia.

Iran.

Cuba.

Venezuela.

Different politics. Same outcome.

They don’t teach this in school because it’s uncomfortable.

We don’t send 18-year-olds to die for “freedom.”

We send them to protect reserve currency status.

Currency funds the military.

The military protects the currency.

That’s how empires work.

Britain learned this the hard way.

The British pound was the world’s reserve currency for nearly 200 years.

After World War II, Britain lost reserve status.

Within two decades, the British Empire collapsed.

Same cycle.

Dutch guilder.

British pound.

Now the U.S. dollar.

Ray Dalio has been warning about this for years.

Late-stage empire looks like this:

• Military overextension

• Rising debt

• Currency weakening

• Rivals building alternatives

China’s Belt and Road isn’t charity.

It’s about creating debt relationships denominated in yuan.

BRICS aren’t talking about alternatives because they’re friends.

They’re building an exit ramp from dollar dependence.

When the dollar loses reserve status — not if, when — the ability to print money without consequences disappears.

- Then the military contracts.

- Then the empire ends.

- You can call this cynical.

I call it financial history.

Every war in my lifetime had a currency angle — if you knew where to look.

“Freedom and democracy” is the marketing.

The actual policy documents talk about

“maintaining dollar liquidity in global energy markets.”

I’m not anti-military.

I’m anti-bullshit.

If we’re sending people to fight…

We should at least be honest about why.

Our 8 foot diameter cedar hot tubs are always a fun build. 1000 gallons of fun for you and plenty of friends.

Right time right place

not everything needs to be a nostr app, but if i can make this work, why not?

for my next vibe coded nostr app idea i want to make a photo and video display app for my grandmother's funeral wake tomorrow. can this be done on nostr in a private manner? if not, i won't do it and will go the traditional route.

i want all family members to upload photos and videos to my blossom server and then at any given time, the application will play a slideshow of photos and videos that exist / have been uploaded from any user if a logged in users clicks play. i guess then we could have logged in users comment / react to photos and videos.

users won't have have nostr keys and will need profiles generated for each uploader.

i guess in theory i could have the events published to a brand new relay that only allows authenticated users to read from it? it could be part of the app package.

maybe i could give family members a password to login to rossfamilyphotowebsite.com. once authenticated with the password, any pubkey generated would then be whitelisted via blossom and the relay for read and write access.

the authenticated or whitelisted pubkeys, how to get them? they could be written to a local database, but how to get them from that database into an auth file that strfry can read? if im doing auth for reading from the relay, i guess i could also do this with the blossom server too. same question. how to get them from the db to blossom

a hack would be to run a db export every time new keys are written to the auth table via a db trigger. im sure a better real dev way exists here, but this is my hacky sysadmin brain working.

hmm. would all of this work then? if you don't auth with a whitelisted key you can't read the event or the uploaded images/videos.

but the final remaining question, can you re-broadcast without authenticating? that's what im not sure about and need answered from experts. maybe ill DM dad and ask him.

i guess that wouldn't matter if you can't download the image? the events would just be a link to a blossom file that non-family members can read. who cares if you can't performat a GET on it without authenticated?

thoughts? :)

Remember - every lie they tell, every betrayal of trust they commit, every rug they pull... brings us closer to the separation of money and state.

The fiat system cannot withstand individuals wielding this much power and creating this much chaos.

Thankfully, we have Bitcoin.

CO2 is a life molecule, so why reduce that?

I can just imagine 4 multisig physical key's inserted into tumblers all turning at the same time to access the wallet... Hahaha That would be sweet. This could be a tradition when paying out dividends at the end of the season.