NavyMatters.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is a reserve inventory of crude oil intended for use in the event of war or extreme emergencies. Oil is stored in 62 salt caverns at four sites along the Gulf of Mexico and holds a total of 714 million barrels of crude oil. In the event of war, the reserve could be used not only for direct military oil needs but also to supply defense industries. To give an idea of the practical impact of the SPR, as of Jan 2022, the SPR represented around 1450 days of total U.S. petroleum net imports at the usage rates at that time.

As an emergency supply, the importance of maintaining the supply at full capacity is self-evident. Unfortunately, President Biden drew down the storage levels for political gain in violation of the intent of the reserve.

As they do.

Babylon Bee.

Sounds about right to me.

Read it.

The Trump administration is weaponizing the Democrat playbook against the Wokerati.

Read it.

On Tuesday, the Morning Midas—a roll-on/roll-off (RoRo) vehicle carrier—was abandoned by its crew in the central Pacific Ocean following an onboard fire, according to a Bloomberg report.

The vessel was transporting approximately 3,000 vehicles, including an estimated 800 electric vehicles (EVs). The fire’s origin has not been confirmed, though lithium-ion battery ignition remains a possible cause given the cargo profile and previous mid-sea incidents involving EVs (see here & here).

Morning Midas had departed China in late May with a scheduled port call in Mexico, according to Bloomberg data.

Babylon Bee.

Sounda fair.

Daily Record (UK).

A horrifying incident on the Byford Dolphin oil rig on November 5 1983 resulted in the instant death of five workers, with a sixth narrowly escaping but left with life-altering injuries. The crew were carrying out routine maintenance work at the time, according to a YouTube video that has now garnered over 5 million views.

The video explains how the men met their tragic end while working on the oil rig situated in the North Sea near Norway after an abrupt pressure change wreaked havoc on their bodies. Roy Lucas, 38, Edwin Coward, 36, Truls Hellevik, 34 and Bjorn Giaever, 29, William Crammond, 33, and Martin Saunders, 30 were all on duty on the rig at the time of the catastrophe.

You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred.

Daily Record (UK).

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

I guess they’re just white supremacists who want to destroy the planet.

Read it.

The new US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has challenged France to match its advocacy for a Palestinian state by creating a new one on French soil. He suggested that France “carve off a piece of the Côte d’Azur,” also known as the French Riviera, for the establishment of such a state. This proposal has prompted an angry response from Paris.

How very Trumpian.

Read it.

Russia is using a new Chinese laser system to shoot down Ukrainian drones, according to pro-Russian Telegram channels. The system seen in a video posted to Telegram on Thursday appears to be at least extremely similar to a system Beijing has apparently already provided to Iran, which you can read more about here.

The video, posted on the Military Information Telegram channel, opens with scenes of troops inside a vehicle, flicking switches and looking at heavily pixelated screens. The next scene shows the system rising out of the vehicle and then being rotated by a soldier in the vehicle using a joystick. It then cuts to small fiery holes being burned into a metal plate. A subsequent view shows the plate with four holes burned through it, apparently created by the laser.

ZMan:

After recording the show and thinking about things while editing it, I think we might be about to see the end of the Trump presidency. I cannot get over the scene of Senator Poofberry and Senator Stolen Valor declaring that they are now running Ukraine policy – while in Kiev. So far, not a word from anyone in the Trump administration about it. That means they are either too stupid to see what is happening or they can do nothing about it.

The only positive spin is that they know Graham is lying and does not have the votes to get the bill through the Senate or they know the House will ignore it. That is not much of a positive. Foreign Policy is the domain of the executive and the only way a president can conduct foreign policy is if the rest of the world thinks he is in charge of foreign policy. Otherwise, he is nothing more than a grocery clerk running errands for whoever is calling the shots.

If Trump cannot get this under control in the next couple of weeks, his party will abandon him. It is not as if the Cuck Party was enthusiastic for him. They have fallen in line thus far mostly because he has had oligarch support for his domestic agenda. If Lindsey Graham is able to put a saddle on Trump and ride him around like a pony on foreign policy issues, then everyone is going to wonder if they are backing the right horse, to mix metaphors.

Read it.

U.S. tariff revenues reached an all-time high in May as President Donald Trump’s trade policies started to fill government coffers.

According to the May 28 Daily Treasury Statement, revenues from “customs and certain excise taxes” climbed to a record high of $23.28 billion this month, up from $17.431 billion in April.

May was the first full month that Trump’s levies took effect. Most of the tax collections occurred on May 22, exceeding $16 billion.

Shortly after his April 2 “Liberation Day” announcement, the administration imposed 10 percent tariffs on nearly every country in the world.

Fiscal year-to-date—the federal government’s fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30—tariff revenues total $93.85 billion.

Rasmussen Reports.

Voters are overwhelmingly concerned about Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and a majority would support an American military strike to end the threat.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 77% of Likely U.S. Voters are concerned that Iran may be developing a nuclear weapon, including 44% who are Very Concerned. Only 18% are not concerned. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

While negotiating with Iran over the issue, President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to unleash airstrikes targeting Iran’s nuclear program if a deal isn’t reached Fifty-seven percent (57%) of voters would support military action by the United States to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program, including 28% who would Strongly Support it. Thirty percent (30%) would oppose a U.S. strike against Iran, including 17% who Strongly Oppose such military action. Thirteen percent (13%) are not sure.

Read it.

In the immediate sense, the schools being defunded are in trouble financially, even Harvard. Half of Harvard’s research budget comes from the federal government. Even if it wins in litigation, the instability could cause researchers to go elsewhere. And maybe they should.

If I were an enterprising president of a mid-tier state school, I’d be doing my best to convince the administration that my institution is free from antisemitism, open to bringing more intellectual diversity to campus, and will wisely use the money.

The bigger problem for higher education is existential. For a long, long time Americans gave support to elite educational institutions, billions of taxpayer dollars, based on the idea that they were of invaluable contribution to the country. But do we need more over-credentialed people in this country who passed through the DEI crucible, or do we need more welders and shipbuilders?

Read it.

Americans are taught in school that the Smoot-Hawley tariff legislation of 1930 greatly exacerbated the Great Depression and sent the world spinning off into a decade of debt deflation and economic contraction.

This seems to make sense until we remember that the history of the United States over the past century was written largely by progressives. In fact, the Great Depression began in 1920 with a decade of falling prices for farm products, a deflationary wave that eventually engulfed the real estate sector and the entire US economy.

What is missed by many discussions of Smoot-Hawley during and after that period, is the fact that the economic collapse of the 1930s was already a given with or without the new tariff law. The impetus behind the political decision to raise tariffs was a misguided reaction to the collapse of agricultural prices, but the force behind this deflationary wave was primarily “positive” factors such as new technology and innovation. The deflation that began after WWI decimated farm communities and eventually led to the collapse of real estate prices, particularly Florida real estate.

ZMan counts up the points.

The first four months of the Trump restoration have exceeded everyone’s expectations for no other reason than it has shifted the conversation. The bad guys are still battling everything in the courts and Congress, but unlike the first time, Trump seems to have a plan, and he has been aggressive in executing it. As a result, he has been setting the agenda rather than the bad guys. The one place where he is failing is with Ukraine, where it looks like he has painted himself into a corner.

When Trump came to power, the choices with regards to Ukraine were to either abandon the whole thing and get blamed for tanks in Kiev or continue the Biden policy and get blamed for tanks in Kiev. To his credit he tried to shake things up by talking directly to the Russians and bypassing the snakes in the foreign policy community while doing it, in an effort to reset the board. Clearly, the snakes and the bad guys did not see that coming, so they were unprepared for it.

The problem is that the facts on the ground have not changed, so there is no deal Trump can make with the Russians to end the war. Zelensky will never do any peace deal as that means the end of him. The nationalists in Ukraine will never accept a deal, which is why Zelensky cannot do a deal. The Europeans seem convinced that peace in Ukraine means the withdraw of America from Europe, so they are fighting like hell to keep the war going, even as it harms their positions.

Why, yes, I do have a cold. Why do you ask?

Read it.

These folks’ logical flaw is to assume that the biological processes in your body are just as predictable and controllable as transistors on a microchip. What they don’t understand, or choose to ignore, is that the human organism is far too complex and unpredictable for that level of control.

Power Line.

“Los Angeles ranks No. 1 in move-outs for second year, PODS data shows,” reports KTLA-5 on the continuing exodus from the Golden State. The station adds,

The report, analyzing customer move data from January 2024 through March 2025, found that California, with seven cities, including Los Angeles, San Diego, and the San Francisco Bay Area, ranked among the top 20 areas with the highest number of move-outs.

The latest PODS study, released last week, shows that nine of the top ten destinations are in the Southeast (North Carolina west to Texas) plus Boise, Idaho (#7, up from #11 last year).

As KTLA noted, Los Angeles repeated as the #1 departure city. Nine of the top ten losing cities are located in blue states, with the lone exception being Miami, Florida.

ZMan watches the turns.

This is the time of year when entertainers, politicians and famous rich people are asked to deliver commencement speeches. Inevitably they deliver tirades against normal people and in favor of the latest trends. This season, the popular chant with this sort is the “rule of law” which is ironic given that the people chanting it spent the last decade obliterating the concept. The question that is rarely asked is why is it that rich people are so eager to support this stuff?

It is not just the ditzy actors who are prone to this. A part of getting rich in America is adopting the politics of the rich, which is hostile to normal things. Rich people, until very recently, were solidly behind open borders. They backed the street violence and chaos of the last decade through donations to the thicket of not-for-profits. The billionaires underwrote the entertainment content that preached the bizarre social theories at the root of their deranged politics.

On the surface, it makes little sense. If you are a rich person, you should not want to undermine order, as it is the rules that make you rich. You got your wealth because of the system, so the system is your friend. Think a little further, however, and you can see why the rich might want to make the rules more opaque. It is a form of pulling up the drawbridge behind them so new schemers cannot get in on the action. They got theirs, so it is time to keep you from getting yours.

Axios, a Voice of the Crust.

Here are five steps Trump’s taking to try to keep Republican control of the House, where the GOP has an eight-seat majority — including vacancies created this year by the deaths of three Democrats.

The Foundry.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship on his first day back in office in January. Since then, 22 states have sued to block it, sparking debates over whether the Constitution grants citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil.

“Many people today take it for granted that the answer is ‘yes’: If you’re born on American soil, you’re an American citizen. Period. End of issue. But is that what the Constitution says?” asked Amy Swearer, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, in a recent Prager University video examining the legal issues behind birthright citizenship.

While the 14th Amendment says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States,” Swearer said that this raises the question, who is born subject to U.S. jurisdiction?

Whatever it means, if they intended to give people born in the U.S. unconditional citizenship, they wouldn’t have included that qualifying clause. So the Woke Narrative is a lie.

Read it.

Germany has deployed a permanent military brigade beyond its borders for the first time since the end of World War II, with troops dispatched to the capital of Lithuania. The event was inaugurated by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said during a military ceremony in Vilnius that “the security of our Baltic allies is also our security.”

The decision is part of a series of actions in recent months by European nations to “bolster defenses” on NATO’s eastern flank amid claims that Russia intends to invade greater Europe if they defeat Ukraine. The “domino theory” remains unfounded and the Kremlin has never threatened to attack any country outside of Ukraine. The move to shift troops to Lithuania places them near the border of Belarus (a Russian ally) and within striking distance of Ukraine or the Russian border.

European governments have been threatening an escalation by eventually moving NATO troops into Ukraine in direct confrontation with Russian forces. Vladimir Putin has previously warned that NATO troops in Ukraine represent a red line which could result in nuclear conflict.

ZMan goes literary.

When you look at lists of the best science fiction movies, what you see is a mix of recency bias and popular nonsense. Star Wars gets placed near the top because the lists are usually targeted to people who consume corporate slop. Back to the Future is another one on these lists that does not qualify as science fiction. It is a comedy where time travel is the MacGuffin. Of course, this raises the question as to what qualifies as science fiction and what makes for good sci-fi.

Science fiction is speculative fiction that relies on science to create scenarios where questions about the human condition are more easily explored. Artificial intelligence, for example, is useful in telling stories about what it means to be human. We instinctively know a computer program is not human, even if it is able to speak with us like a real human being. That gets to the issue of what separates flesh and blood humans from the artificial versions we are creating.

Heinlein said that science fiction takes what we know now, what we thought we knew before now and then speculates about the future based on a solid understanding of how science advances. Asimov famously said that science fiction is about how humans react to changes in science and technology. Together they make for a good definition of science fiction, which is as much about the science as the fiction. In other words, it is not just drama in space or in the future.

Read it.

In 1900, South Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa were patrilocal and patrilineal, but with one fundamental distinction. Endogamy versus exogamy. South Asians married kin, East Asians did not. This cultural difference may have mediated their responses to economic growth, in turn shaping culture.

I suggest that exogamy motivates an outward orientation for marriage, commerce and cooperation. As exogamous societies undergo economic growth and urbanisation, people seize any and all opportunities to develop ties of trust, intimacy and reciprocity.

Read it.

The lecture that launched geopolitics in the Anglosphere was given 120 years ago, on 25 January 1904, to the Royal Geographical Society in London. The speaker, Halford Mackinder (1861–1947), didn’t invent the term, but did more than anyone else to give the idea currency, not least because he was a leading commentator of the world’s most powerful empire and naval power — two elements that featured so heavily in the concept.

As director of the London School of Economics, Mackinder was a well-connected academic who was also active in politics. He had joined the Conservatives in 1903, having been one of their allied Liberal Unionists. After two unsuccessful attempts to enter Parliament in 1900 and 1909, he was to serve as MP for Glasgow Camlachie from 1910 until 1922.

During Britain’s intervention in the Russian Civil War, he was High Commissioner to (anti-Bolshevik) South Russia in 1919–20. Subsequently, he was chairman of the Imperial Shipping Committee from 1920 to 1945 and chairman of the Imperial Economic Committee between 1925 and 1931.

The contemporary influence of Mackinder’s views is a matter for discussion. Yet the nature of the British state, which then lacked administrative and intellectual institutions for imperial planning and defence, increased the possibilities for ideas from external thinkers to make an impact. The gap was filled by circles of intellectual opinion sustained through meetings in London, including in clubland. Mackinder’s metropolitan milieu was therefore very much an active part of the debate about the power Britain should rightly wield and the anxiety about its ability to do so in a changing world.

“Pay attention to me or I’ll hurt myself!’
“Go ahead, knock yourself out – so to speak.”

The New Neo.

The definition of being a Jew is complicated somewhat by the fact that different strains of Judaism believe that being ethnically Jewish – or part of the Jewish people – is inherited in different ways. The more Orthodox believe that Jewishness involves having a Jewish mother and even if the father is not Jewish the offspring are Jewish (part of the Jewish people) as long as the mother is Jewish. Reform Jews believe Jewishness is passed through either parent.

The legal system of Israel reflects some of this, but Jews outside of Israel aren’t bound by it in any way unless they happen to agree with it anyway. All Jewish denominations around the world reject Messianic Judaism as a form of Judaism in the religious sense. However, Messianic Jews can become Israelis under the right of return – but only if they qualify in terms of ancestry.

Read it.

An estimated 6.2% of U.S. adults and 5.8% of U.S. children – more than 20 million people – have food allergies (Ng and Boersma, 2023; Zablotsky, Black, and Akinbami, 2023). For consumers with food allergies, labels indicating the presence of an allergen in a product can reduce information asymmetry and enhance the safety of purchasing decisions (Simons, et. al, 2005). For producers, however, ensuring that food products with and without major allergens are kept separated in production and distribution can be a significant challenge. The costs associated with mislabeling and cross-contamination, driven by costs of recalls and related civil litigation, can be large (Gupta et al., 2017). Indeed, the current most common reason for recalls of food products in the United States is the incorrect labeling of allergens (Gendel and Zhu, 2013).

For the last two decades, U.S. statutes have required that the presence of any of the “big eight” major allergens – milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, wheat, peanuts, and soybeans – be clearly labeled on the packaging of food products. Recently, new statutes required the inclusion of a ninth major allergen, sesame, first at a state level (2019) and later at the federal level (passed in 2021 and enacted in 2023).

Strikingly, media reports indicated that some food manufacturers began adding sesame to products that previously did not contain the ingredient following the implementation of the new allergen labeling requirements (Aleccia, 2022; Chatman, 2023; Hughes, et al., 2023). Statements from U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials also noted the prevalence of such unexpected responses by producers (Califf, 2023). To our knowledge, however, there has not yet been any systematic examination of food manufacturers’ responses to the regulatory change. To address this gap, we use ingredient label data to evaluate the timing and frequency of firm responses, thus illuminating some of the unintended consequences of the change in allergen labeling requirements for sesame.

The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

Well, it seems to be all of the Wokerati, Grievance Studies majors, and ‘funding’ leeches that are moving.

Actually, looking at the effects ‘academics’ have had in the last fifty years, that’s a feature, not a bug.

UPDATE College English majors can’t read  But they can deconstruct! And they can interrogate! And they can even hear the dog-whistles!

Read it.

A couple attempting to make friends with wild grizzly bears were viciously mauled to death after making a fatal mistake.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Women who would rather encounter a bear than a man in the woods: Take note.

Evidently the oft-heard advice “I don’t need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you” isn’t as useful as supposed.

Props to the girlfriend, though, for going after the bear with a frying pan. (I’d have just said, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes” and departed the scene. But that’s me.)

Read it.

Alberta is set to hold a referendum asking voters if they wish to secede from Canada, with some residents even supporting the idea of becoming America’s 51st state.

Alberta, known as “Canada’s Texas” for its oil-rich economy and conservative-leaning politics, has long felt used by the rest of the country, which gobbles up its wealth in the form of taxes but provides little in return.

President Donald Trump’s regular quips of bringing Canada into U.S. statehood, coupled with the election of yet another left-wing prime minister in Mark Carney, has given a boost to a small but motivated group of secessionists in the province.

That would be amusing.

ZMan:

It was reasonable for the crazies to demand that normal people tolerate the guy in the dress. Tolerance has deep roots in Christian ethics to the point where it is a habit of mind for Western people. The crazies could appeal to that deeply held belief in favor of the pervert. When they demanded that the pervert in the dress have easy access to your kids, then things changed. In the fullness of time, it will be the lurch towards the kids that ended the woke terror.

Book recommendation: Not That Kind of Good Guy (John Ringo)

Read it.

This sort of time flip has been described as looking into a mirror and spotting your back instead of your face. It sounds like science fiction, but it has a basis in real physics.

Researchers had predicted for more than 50 years that sudden shifts in a wave’s environment could trigger such reversals.

Time reflections differ from everyday mirror views in one crucial way. Instead of light or sound bouncing back in space, the wave is forced to reverse its flow in time.

That shift causes the frequency of the wave to change, sparking a chain reaction of interesting phenomena in the system.

In normal reflections, you see an immediate image or hear an echo. A time reflection, on the other hand, makes part of the signal run backward.

There is no need for any speculation about time travel, though, since these effects involve a swift flip in the medium’s physical traits.

Read it.

College officials around the country—including those at some of the most selective (and notoriously left-leaning) schools—have admitted a student’s high school grades and often-obscure extracurricular activities aren’t enough for making admissions decisions.

Now, schools that abandoned use of college entrance exams during the COVID-19 pandemic—schools like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and MIT—are reinstating the practice.

Read it.

A modern chess engine can easily outplay even the top ranked chess players of the world. It can be useful for practice and even developing new styles of play, but using one in a chess tournament is considered cheating. Such use is considered cheating for the same reason it’s also considered uninteresting: Humans want to watch human feats. To most people these days, a computer playing chess comes off as an extremely computery activity. Everyone understands that chess is a closed – albeit complex – system. Everyone also realizes that a modern computer can make deeper, faster and better predictions than any human is capable of. It isn’t interesting, impressive or entertaining – at least not the same way a 12 year old human chess prodigy is.

A computer that can detect a certain type of disease is of course more interesting and beneficial than a highly competent chess engine, and is going to be accepted by the vast majority of humanity as something good. It’s not cheating, it’s helping. Yet, it’s not much to hang a bunch of hype on: Like with a chess engine, or halfway decent machine translation, it’s simply a computer finally doing one of the many things we’ve always been told they should be able to. A one trick pony, basically just another piece of medical software, more like Word or Excel than a thinking machine.

Alma T.C. Boykin.  (Whose books I highly recommend.)

So, does a person have to have a word before he can imagine a concept? Or can you understand a concept if your language doesn’t have that word or idea yet? Linguists and historians of language have been arguing over this, and over other questions about how language shapes perception, ever since future Prime Minister William Gladstone write a three-volume analysis about Homer. In a short chapter at the back of the last volume, Gladstone observed that Homer’s descriptions were either about light things, dark things, or red things. Everything else was texture or related it to something (“rosy-fingered dawn”) and so on. Gladstone had some theories about this. He was … ignored, in part because he actually believed that Homer was telling a true story, which everyone knew was silly. Gladstone was right about both things, although not exactly.

It turns out that only comparatively late in the development of languages and vocabulary to people start splitting colors up past dark, light, and blood-colored (red). Next comes yellowy-green, then yellow and green, then blue, and then it gets sort of jumbled. So, does this mean that the human eye develops color vision at different rates in “complex” versus “primitive” societies? Um, well, to make a lot of arguing and anatomy short, no. Colors are need based, to an extent, and only when artificial tints (as in, made by people and put on things like walls, rather than staying on plants and rocks) come into use do larger numbers of color words appear. How the language people finally reached this conclusion is a long and interesting story.

The American Mind.

Attending oral argument last week in the case touching on birthright citizenship pending before the Supreme Court, I observed a combination of confusion, omissions, and outright lies from some of the justices. As the lawyer for one of the amici, I witnessed the Court address the propriety of the nationwide, universal injunctions that have been issued by several district court judges blocking the execution of President Trump’s day-one executive order on birthright citizenship.

Let’s begin with the lies.

Read it.

Only if another country (like, oh, say, China; or its lapdog, North Korea) attacks us with ICBMS.

If nobody attacks us, then it won’t be a ‘battlefield’. Problem solved.

Read it.

Dogs don’t like it when you rub their noses in the poop the put on the carpet.