$WHACKD

So I was looking into the supply chain disruptions that were caused by COVID to try to figure out if any of them would impact any of my investments in the stock market.

But what I was finding out wasn’t making any sense.

There are a lot of disruptions that are happening which cannot possibly be blamed on COVID.

I was mostly looking into lumber, metals and minerals. But I was also looking into other building materials.

This is where it gets really strange. Production hasn’t actually slowed down at all for a lot of the materials I was looking at. In fact, production actually increased due to the demand caused by home renovations etc during COVID.

It looks like a lot of companies are having no problems whatsoever with production at least not since the first wave after they figured out how to stagger their employees and adapt to the evolving COVID situation.

If production hasn’t slowed down then why are the supply chains still breaking down?

I’m not talking about localized supply chain disruptions from goods not making it across a country. I’m looking at supply chain disruptions caused by issues with international shipping only because I wanted to make sure the companies I’m invested in won’t have problems with their operations as they can easily arrange for their own pickup from a port and are more than adequately funded to do so.

I’m going to mostly look at container ships here. In particular the ones that ship goods internationally.

This is where I ran into the problems.

It doesn’t actually look like the container ships have slowed down at all during the pandemic.

Everything I could find was showing less ship traffic at first for the regular routes.

But then I found out that some of the ships aren’t just hanging out at the ports. They aren’t at the ports at all. They aren’t being stored anywhere. They’re just “missing”.

I tried looking at container ship traffic maps online and there were quite a few less container ships travelling than usual for certain periods over the last year or so.

But I think they are still travelling but going dark (turning off their tracking).

The reason I suspect that is simply due to the count of ships at any given port.

But there are some ports where I could track how many container ships got to the port. And it was consistently more than the amount that was actually anchored.

But it gets even more weird. I ended up looking at photos of the ports on social media (checking the dates the pictures were posted). And the count of ships anchored didn't match what should have been there based on the maps.

So after checking ship traffic to any given port and counting how many ships should be there as the maps never showed the ships leaving I realized there is a discrepancy.

Where are all the missing ships? They clearly left the ports and went somewhere else but their new routes aren’t being displayed.

The biggest reported container ship disruptions were in China. Supposedly the ports were almost completely shut down due to COVID.

But I found some other strange things. I found that after some ships were loaded with the regular materials they were then unloaded and the materials were being stored in warehouses and the organic material was being dumped. This could be due to trying to minimize the issue of goods going bad. But why unload building materials which don’t have a shelf life?

And it looks like there is a huge headache with missing Chinese ships.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/24/business/china-shipping-data-mic-intl-hnk/index.html

Just like I suspected as per the above article there is a 90% decrease in Chinese vessels sending signals.

And there are also reports of Russian cargo ships going dark.

So we have missing Chinese ships and missing Russian ships. China is Russia's primary trading partner when it comes to imports and exports.

https://www.voanews.com/a/russian-cargo-ships-spotted-going-dark-to-evade-sanctions-/6505792.html - article on Russian ships going dark as well.

I was also interested to learn that quite a few countries have developed weapons specifically designed to be launched from container ships.

https://www.navyrecognition.com/index.php/naval-news/naval-news-archive/2019/april/6971-china-is-building-long-range-cruise-missiles-launched-from-ship-containers.html

Then there is also a container ship that had a “fire” off the coast of Vancouver Island. A fire that somehow resulted in over 100 containers “falling overboard”.

The ship is called the Zim Kingston and you can easily find that in google images.

It doesn’t look like the ship caught fire. It looks like it fucking exploded. You don't have 109 containers go overboard from a fire they would just melt or stay in place.

https://www.observerbd.com/news.php?id=336932

And for some reason the authorities can’t actually get a list of what was actually in any of the containers.

And then we have this here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNDhIGR-83w

There was a massive explosion at a port in Beirut from a container that supposedly had "fireworks" stored next to "ammonium nitrate".

But if you watch the video you can clearly see that there are shots coming from the containers and then there is a massive explosion which is clearly a bomb going off and it is clearly beyond something that ammonium nitrate would cause. It is the kind of explosion that can only come from an explosive compound inside a "shell" of some kind where that sort of pressure can build up during the detonation.

The container was clearly full of munitions!

Edit: https://graphics.reuters.com/LEBANON-SECURITY/BLAST/yzdpxnmqbpx/

“Experts estimate the massive warehouse explosion that sent a devastating blast wave across Beirut could be one of the strongest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded.”

Edit: “Experts have estimated the size of the blast as being the equivalent of 200 to 300 tons of high explosives” -This clearly contradicts the fertilizer explanation as this makes the explosion bigger than the largest non-nuclear military device.

Other news articles mentioned that the above explosion was linked to a Russian container ship.

This type of smuggling has happened before during what I will now refer to as the last cold war. In 1962 the Russians smuggled mid range nuclear weapons into Cuba using commercial shipping vessels.

Edit: I wasn't done writing the post yet and accidentally posted it already. However I still haven't gotten into the part of the theory about countries scrambling to change who they rely on for which goods and services. Basically that can simply be tracked by checking how much traffic is going back and forth between different countries and quite a few other countries having container ships "going dark" now while sending fewer ships along the usual routes.