Dana El-Kurd

They're on this road that they're on.

Yeah, so things continue to go badly for kind of everyone involved in this war, except, I guess, the Israelis, who are... They seem to be happy.

Yeah, they seem to be having a great time doing another ethnic cleansing.

But another group of people who've been doing extremely badly as a result of this and has gotten almost no coverage in the American press to the extent that, like, I found out about... I mean, like, I always started hearing about the stuff from just, like,

by friends who are Indian, which is that things are very, very bad right now in East and Southeast Asia and just Southeast Asia in general.

Multiple countries, including Thailand, for example, have either sent part or all of their government employees home and told them to just work from home because they can't afford to keep their offices open because cooling the offices is too expensive.

There's a sort of rolling crisis across the entire Pacific Rim area because all of these countries are unbelievably reliant on oil, natural gas.

This is also down to stuff like cooking oil, too, which they also have not been able to get.

And so, you know, you can look at Sri Lanka, where there are these just enormous fuel queues because the Sri Lankan governments, they're four years out from the last time that they weren't able to input oil.

That one was a sort of currency crisis before.

balance of payments issue they were having but the moment there was there was a problem with the oil supply the government started doing rationing so now you have these massive lines for people trying to get gasoline that's i think one of the worst ones in terms of just pure inability to get gasoline so this is a problem across the region uh the bbc also said i'm just gonna read this quote from the bbc that they quote declared wednesdays a public holiday

So, yeah, they're just adding another day to the weekend because they can't have businesses open because businesses can't afford to like heat or cool themselves.

They literally can't afford to keep the economy running.

And variations of this are playing out all across South Asia.

There's been a massive closure of industries in India, a whole bunch of restaurants.

I think the estimates were about one fifth of restaurants are just gone because they can't get cooking oil.

And you have the situations where like anything that requires like cooking oil, even other things that are open, like can't be used.

Gujarat, the Indian state of Gujarat has a very large ceramic industry and it's gone.

It's been gone for like a month.

80% of it is shut down.