Read it.

A modern aircraft carrier can shrug off layers of aerial threats and still remain exposed to one of naval warfare’s oldest killing mechanisms. That mismatch matters because the danger does not come from dramatic new physics. It comes from the stubborn effectiveness of underwater blast effects, the limits of sonar in cluttered seas, and the growing appeal of low-cost undersea weapons that can force far more expensive ships to operate differently. For a carrier strike group built around radar, escorts, and long-range air defense, the hardest problem may still arrive from below the waterline.

The torpedo’s lethality is rooted in how it attacks a ship’s structure rather than its armor. A heavyweight torpedo detonating under the keel creates a gas bubble that rapidly expands and collapses, lifting the hull and then dropping it with violent force. That shock can break the keel, the load-bearing spine of the ship. The concept is old, but the threat is not obsolete. Modern torpedoes combine acoustic homing, wake tracking, and in some cases wire guidance, allowing them to keep updating their run after launch. Wake-homing in particular is uncomfortable for defenders because a ship’s wake is difficult to disguise, especially for a very large vessel moving at speed.

The carrier’s own design compounds the problem. As one U.S. Naval Institute analysis argued, ships without sonar, such as aircraft carriers, face a punishing reaction-time problem even before maneuver limits are considered. Carriers rely heavily on escorts, helicopters, patrol aircraft, and wider anti-submarine networks for warning and protection. That layered approach remains formidable in open water, but it is less comfortable in littoral zones where background noise, bottom reflections, traffic density, and shallow depth all degrade acoustic performance. In exactly the waters where carriers may be asked to influence access and sea control, torpedo detection can become more ambiguous and engagement windows much shorter.

The New Neo.

Today Trump announced a moratorium on attacking Iran’s energy infrastructure while talks he described as “very good” are supposedly going on. Meanwhile, the Iranian leaders – although “leaders” is a fungible thing in Iran these days – say he’s full of it and that no such talks are occurring, much less “very good” ones.

So, what’s going on? If you expect a definitive answer here, you’re surely not going to get one. But I don’t think you’re going to get one anywhere right now. We’re all speculating, and I think that’s the point.

We do know that Trump likes to keep people guessing as he bobs and weaves and wheels and deals. We know he said what he needs from Iran is unconditional surrender. But we don’t know exactly what that means in a case where we don’t know who’s in charge or if any one person (or even small group of people) is in charge. We don’t even know if he really is negotiating, or with whom such talks might be, or exactly for what. Nor do we know, if the subject is indeed for unconditional surrender, if such talks are with someone or some group with the will to actually surrender or the ability to do so even if the will is there.

Clear as mud. And I believe that is Trump’s intent.

Indeed it is.

The Telegraph (UK).

Research by The Telegraph and Public First has identified six distinct, new social groupings that reflect the reality of today’s Britain.

Read it.

For many years the political left has dismissed all discussion about links between third world populations and low intelligence as “racism” and “xenophobia”. The well documented fact that low IQ populations are more inclined towards lack of impulse control and a higher crime rate does not matter to progressives. They assert that such claims are based on “rigged” and “biased” data.

For example, the data on Somalia’s low median IQ (which is 67 and far below the western average of 100) is often criticized as “incomplete” because the data is usually taken from refugees and migrants leaving the country rather than a population sample from within the country. However, populations in neighboring countries like Djibouti or Ethiopia have nearly identical test results.

It is simply a fact that IQ is largely genetic (around 80% of testing outcome). The rest is a matter of varied experiences and environment. This does not mean that a “disadvantaged” childhood results in a lower IQ score. In fact, high IQ individuals often come from significant struggles and studies on top “high achievers” show that around 75% of them come from difficult backgrounds including extreme poverty.

A game anyone can play.

The Crust
The Clerisy
The Comfortable
The Constructive
The Contemptible

I’m sure you can do the sorting.

Watch it.

Just in case you were wondering.

Helps explain why Britain is such a shit-hole, and why my great-grandfather was willing to spend a couple of months seasick.

I got yer affordable housing, right here….

The Washington Poop, Paper of Record of the Deep State.

President Donald Trump on Friday evening said the United States was considering “winding down” its military efforts in Iran even as thousands of Marines sailed toward the region, leaving unclear whether the White House planned to walk away or escalate its three-week-old war.

Trump’s announcement on social media that he may step back from the war in Iran sought to escalate pressure on allies to assume a greater role in securing the region’s oil shipments — an increasingly urgent concern as energy prices spike. Trump has complained in increasingly bitter terms that U.S. allies are dragging their feet about joining a fight that he launched without consulting them.

“The Hormuz Strait will have to be guarded and policed, as necessary, by other Nations who use it — The United States does not!” he wrote Friday on Truth Social, adding that he would be open to helping other countries “in their Hormuz efforts.”

The Straight of Hormuz is a European problem and an Arab problem. It’s not an American problem, especially with Trump as President unlocking oil exploration and exploitation offshore of California, in the Gulf, on the Alaskan North Slope, and in the many oil shale resources within America itself.

Read it.

Artificial intelligence has become the latest excuse for reviving one of the oldest bad ideas in economic policy: a universal basic income. Recent pieces in Newsweek, the LSE Business Review, and Fortune have all helped push the idea that AI may soon wipe out so many jobs that Washington will need to send everyone a check.

And vote for the Democrats upon whom those checks depend. They don’t tell you that part.

That makes for a catchy headline. It also makes for terrible economics.

The right question is not whether AI will disrupt work. Of course it will. The right question is this: after more than 100 local guaranteed-income experiments, what have we actually learned?

The answer is much less flattering to UBI than its promoters would like.

Read it.

There is something unique about the color purple: Our brain makes it up. So you might just call purple a pigment of our imagination.

Yuk yuk yuk….

It’s also a fascinating example of how the brain creates something beautiful when faced with a systems error.

To understand where purple comes from, we need to know how our eyes and brain work together to perceive color. And that all begins with light.

Read it.

tl;dr:

1. Defer US taxes by reinvesting your taxable income into the economy as business expenses, depreciating assets, etc.
2. For your leveraged investments, pay yourself in refinanced cash when your investments appreciate and/or credit rates drop.

Think of the Tax Code a evolution in action.

Read it.

No matter where you look, a bell curve is close by.

Place a measuring cup in your backyard every time it rains and note the height of the water when it stops: Your data will conform to a bell curve. Record 100 people’s guesses at the number of jelly beans in a jar, and they’ll follow a bell curve. Measure enough women’s heights, men’s weights, SAT scores, marathon times — you’ll always get the same smooth, rounded hump that tapers at the edges.

Why does the bell curve pop up in so many datasets?

Read it.

There are over a hundred million online shops. That number is not a typo. Between Shopify stores, WooCommerce sites, regional marketplaces, and every DTC brand that set up a storefront in the last decade, the supply side of e-commerce is enormous.

And yet, when you want to buy something, you go to Amazon. Or Google. Maybe you open three tabs, compare prices, squint at shipping policies, and give up. The experience of actually exploring what is out there is terrible.

This always struck me as strange. The internet was supposed to make everything accessible. Instead it made everything available but almost nothing discoverable.

Newsweek, a Voice of the Crust.

Contrary to what you might have seen in the Narrative Media.

ScienceAlert.

A seismic shift in the selection pressures acting on humans may have brought us to a major turning point in our evolutionary journey.

According to multiple teams of scientists, human culture – technology, medicine, and our remarkable collaborative problem-solving skills – may now be shaping human evolution more than environmental pressures and the limitations of our bodies.

This is because the solutions we invent to make our lives easier, from central heating to contact lenses, can solve biological challenges far faster than evolution can, reducing the pressure for genetic adaptation.

“Human evolution seems to be changing gears,” said cultural evolution researcher Tim Waring of the University of Maine, who co-authored a study on the subject published in September 2025.

“When we learn useful skills, institutions, or technologies from each other, we are inheriting adaptive cultural practices. On reviewing the evidence, we find that culture solves problems much more rapidly than genetic evolution. This suggests our species is in the middle of a great evolutionary transition.”

Unmentioned in the article is the fact that our stupid people are outbreeding our intelligent people. Advanced technology and cultural softheartedness interferes with natural selection weeding out the unfit and the inferior.

Read it.

The Strait of Hormuz is twenty-one miles wide. Two shipping channels, each two miles across, separated by a two-mile buffer. There is no alternative. Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline to Yanbu and the UAE’s pipeline to Fujairah can handle maybe five million barrels combined. The math doesn’t work. The bottleneck is not political. It is geological and hydrographic.

Every TV analyst in America is talking about minesweepers and carrier strike groups. They are asking the wrong questions. The binding constraint on Hormuz was never a minefield or insurance. It is the US Navy’s willingness and ability to reopen it.

Every talking point suggests the White House and Navy are working hard to reopen the strait but progress is slow. A new posts on Truth Social suggests we may have to considet a new hypothesis.

“I wonder what would happen if we “finished off” what’s left of the Iranian Terror State, and let the Countries that use it, we don’t, be responsible for the so called Strait?” wrote President Trump in a psot this morning. “That would get some of our non-responsive “Allies” in gear, and fast!!!”

Read it.

Familiar to anyone who pays attention to vintage aesthetics, I’m embarrassed to say it’s taken me 40 years to learn the name of the beloved typographic symbol that been guiding the way for centuries. Alas, that beloved inked symbol in the shape of a pointing hand (often used to draw attention to a section of text) is known as the manicule. Elegant name, n’est ce pas. Once you know the name, this little hand that has survived the march of time can take you down the rabbit hole from the age of quills to the era of cursors. So let’s follow the hand…

Read it.

Geothermal power stations are mature technology with proven performance, reliable operation and ideal for baseload generation. The units are synchronous, so they support the grid. The production from them is considered by most to be renewable. They do not use fossil fuels to provide the heat. It is not “carbon free”, but no generation truly is. It has a relatively small footprint, environment harm is low, and it can coexist with farming or industrial development. Most developments have a cheaper energy cost than onshore wind, using published accounts for analysis. For countries or areas where the resource is there, geothermal generation is very viable.

Read it.

Working in the field of genetics is a bizarre experience. No one seems to be interested in the most interesting applications of their research.

We’ve spent the better part of the last two decades unravelling exactly how the human genome works and which specific letter changes in our DNA affect things like diabetes risk or college graduation rates. Our knowledge has advanced to the point where, if we had a safe and reliable means of modifying genes in embryos, we could literally create superbabies. Children that would live multiple decades longer than their non-engineered peers, have the raw intellectual horsepower to do Nobel prize worthy scientific research, and very rarely suffer from depression or other mental health disorders.

The scientific establishment, however, seems to not have gotten the memo. If you suggest we engineer the genes of future generations to make their lives better, they will often make some frightened noises, mention “ethical issues” without ever clarifying what they mean, or abruptly change the subject. It’s as if humanity invented electricity and decided the only interesting thing to do with it was make washing machines.

I didn’t understand just how dysfunctional things were until I attended a conference on polygenic embryo screening in late 2023. I remember sitting through three days of talks at a hotel in Boston, watching prominent tenured professors in the field of genetics take turns misrepresenting their own data and denouncing attempts to make children healthier through genetic screening. It is difficult to convey the actual level of insanity if you haven’t seen it yourself.

As a direct consequence, there is low-hanging fruit absolutely everywhere. You can literally do novel groundbreaking research on germline engineering as an internet weirdo with an obsession and sufficient time on your hands. The scientific establishment is too busy with their washing machines to think about light bulbs or computers.

Read it.

I would like to propose that we all agree that American military leadership is not stupid, and that Israeli military leadership is also not stupid. We should all agree they would not undertake any mission without a plan. This should not be a difficult debate. The military does not undertake the mission of going to lunch without 3 contingency plans.

The military leadership knew better than anyone that history is without an example of a regime being brought down solely by air power. They duly informed political leadership of this historical fact, and political leadership instructed them to do the best they could.

Will they succeed? Too soon to say. It is not too soon to say, however, that political opponents sound like morons when they accuse the military of not having “a plan”. They sound like defeatists in proclaiming failure because total regime collapse has not happened in 3 days, 10 days, or 18 days.

Iran is a country twice the size of Texas with 90 million educated, smart people, who have financed a state-of-the-art oppressive regime with billions of dollars from oil sales. Only a cockeyed optimist (such as myself) could believe regime change could ever be achieved. Only a disingenuous idiot would insist that final judgement on the project should be proclaimed after two weeks.

One rule of warfare is keep your plans secret. That also means never tell your plans to the Armchair Generals in Congress.

And never—no, NEVER—tell your plan to a Democrat.

Read it.

Throughout the First World, and, particularly in the US, there is an increasing consciousness that fiat currency, far from being the solution to economic problems, is, in fact, a cause of them.

There are even those who, over the years, have predicted that the continued massive creation of fiat dollars may well lead to price controls, destruction of savings, looting, riots and, possibly, even revolution. A decade ago, such predictions were regarded by most as nonsense. Today, all of these eventualities seem more likely, although there still remains a strong contingent (possibly even a majority) who believe that, “It can’t happen here.”

What is ‘money’? Money is two things:

1. A store of value. When people produce more than they need, or more than they can trade for something they need, they put the extra aside for a rainy day. If I grow more tomatoes than I can eat, or that I can trade to my neighbors for potatoes or strawberries, then I can ‘can’ them (put them up in mason jars) so they will keep longer and be available should I want to eat them or trade them in the future.
2. A medium of exchange. If I have ‘canned’ tomatoes that will keep for a while, then later on I can trade them to my neighbors for stuff that they have and for which they are willing to accept ‘canned’ tomatoes in exchange. My neighbor might hate tomatoes but know people who don’t and might take them in trade, so the ‘canned tomatoes standard’ is an effective currency.

Everything proceeds from those two facts. Of course, tomatoes have intrinsic value—I can eat them, and people that I trade them to can eat them—unlike a paper dollar. BUT I can’t eat gold or silver, either; popular mythology aside, neither gold nor silver has any use value (unless you are an artist). Just like a paper dollar, gold or silver are ‘valuable’ because a lot of people will accept them in trade for stuff that is actually useful.

When I was a young man living in New York City in the early 1970s, I usually carried a pocket full of ‘New York money’: subway tokens. Such tokens cost 25 cents and were good for a subway ride. Almost everybody in New York rode the subway every day, so almost everybody in New York would accept a subway token place of a quarter. By itself, a subway token was useless—a pretty piece of metal. But it would get you a subway ride anywhere in the city, and so it had a kind of use value.

The problem with ‘fiat currency’ is that producing it is always cheap and easy; it’s basically just an IOU.  The problem comes when the government wants to trade them for actual goods and services, in effect trading what is effectively nothing for what is actually something. This works because the government has guns and if you won’t ‘trade’ your goods and services for government paper, they will just take them anyway and leave you with the paper.

Read it.

Previously slated to be decommissioned in May and already past its “final cruise” last December, the carrier will be kept in service until at least March 2027. Breaking Defense first reported on the carrier’s service extension.

The new timeline for the Nimitz matches up with schedule delays in the delivery of the Ford-class USS John F. Kennedy, the Navy’s newest carrier. That ship has experienced delays in coming online, but is scheduled to enter service in March 2027.

The carrier is currently on a deployment that was originally intended to take it to its final home port of Naval Station Norfolk. Last week the ship left its home port of Naval Base Kitsap for a deployment to the U.S. Southern Command area of responsibility. The ship is making its way around South America on its way to Norfolk and will be the one carrier deployed to the command — where several warships are still operating — after the USS Gerald R. Ford left last month.

Daily Record (UK).

I’ll bet she was. I’ll just bet she was.

Think different.

Read it.

The U.S. is examining laser weapon systems as a way to counter Iranian drone attacks and protect U.S. and allied forces in the Middle East, as the conflict places increasing strain on existing missile defenses.

CBS reported that Iranian Shahed drones, which can cost $20,000 each, have been used in attacks across the region.

U.S. and allied forces typically intercept them with missile defense systems that can cost millions of dollars per shot.

The cost imbalance has drawn attention to directed energy weapons, including lasers, that could neutralize drones at far lower cost.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Watch it.

Supposedly every cloud has a silver lining. One might say that the ‘silver lining’ of the Pandemic Panic is that companies woke up to the fact that, with modern technology, they didn’t have to cram all of their employees into a single location. From the beginning of the world down to 2020, the unconscious assumption that everyone in business made was, that efficiency was a Good Thing, that efficiency depended on ease of communications, and that ease of communications required physical proximity. COVID forced people away from each other, and a lot of companies discovered that this assumption no longer held true. As a result, dense urban cores such as those that characterize places like New York and San Francisco lost a lot of their value, and lose more and more of it as dense urban cores turn increasingly socialist in fact if not in name..

Socialism is inherently totalitarian. You can be a socialist in a free country, but you can’t be free in a socialist country, because freedom is based on legally-enforced property rights, and socialism is based on the destruction of any meaningful property rights.

Businesses that had been stuck in progressive hellholes like Seattle discovered that, hey, we don’t need an urban core to have a productive business. So we’re not stuck here subject to socialist leeching; we can decentralize and put our people where it’s best for them personally and for the organization as a business.

“Socialism works … for those who don’t.”

Tatler.

When the Marquess of Bath, Ceawlin Thynn, and his wife Emma Thynn turned to the court this month amid ‘uncertainty’ as to whether their son would be entitled to the family inheritance, the case of peerages and modern pathways to parenthood came under the spotlight once again. The couple’s younger son, Lord Henry Richard Isaac Thynn, now nine, was born via a US surrogate. He is the biological child of the Marquess and Marchioness and has been recognised in law as their legal child following the grant of a parental order in England and Wales. Yet a Bristol hearing revealed questions over whether he currently falls within the class of beneficiaries of historic family trusts.

Of course, with hereditary peers getting the boot from the House of Lords (now an oxymoron), culmination of at least a hundred years of invidious Labour resentment, the question loses much of its relevance.

Read it.

Every crop we consume came from a wild ancestor. Through breeding, people selected for bigger grains, juicier fruit, more branches, or shorter stems – gradually turning wild plants into improved yet recognizable versions of their originals. The rare exception is Brassica oleracea, wild cabbage: the origin of cabbage, bok choy, collard greens, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and much else.

Wild cabbage is unassuming: some untidy leaves and a few thick, coarse stems on the browner side of purple that poke out from the soil. Nothing about it looks appetizing.

Nothing about any of its cultivars looks appetizing, either.

The way we used to be:

Are we better off now than we were then? Well….

I have often described Socialist regimes — Communism, Nazism, Islam — as political religions, but I think we still underestimate the danger of these regimes because they blur the lines that separate religion and state, which are at the foundations of modern civilization.

That separation grew out of the horrors of the Inquisition, the excesses of Torquemada and the persecution of so-called heretics. Islam today does exactly that, and we tolerate it because we are scared of being labelled ‘racist’.

Religious Socialist entities bypass separation of church and state by pretending to be ‘political’ rather than religious, and thus flying below the constitutional radar.

The French revolutionaries chose the ‘Goddess of Reason’ as their deity. In her name the tumbrels rolled, the guillotines chopped and the ‘Committee for Public Safety’ executed hundreds of thousands, all for their own good. Mass murder comes with the territory.

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There was a time when environmental stewardship meant conservation grounded in gratitude rather than condemnation. It reflected a belief that a prosperous and confident society could protect its natural inheritance without repudiating the very progress that made such protection possible. The American conservation tradition grew from strength, not shame. In recent decades, however, much of what is presented as settled “climate science” has drifted from practical environmental management toward a sweeping moral narrative that indicts industrial civilization itself. The debate is no longer confined to atmospheric chemistry or predictive modeling; it has evolved into a broader philosophical claim that humanity’s advancement is inherently suspect.

Science, properly practiced, is iterative and self-correcting. It advances through questioning, testing, and refinement. Yet public climate discourse increasingly exhibits the traits of ideological orthodoxy. Skepticism about model assumptions or policy prescriptions is often met not with counterargument but with moral denunciation. The language of heresy—“denial,” “anti-science,” “existential threat”—is deployed to narrow the field of acceptable opinion. When a discipline presents itself as beyond debate and frames policy disagreement as ethical failure, it ceases to resemble open inquiry and begins to resemble doctrine. This transformation warrants scrutiny not because environmental concerns are illegitimate, but because intellectual humility is essential to credible science.

The philosophical undercurrent of contemporary climate activism reveals a deeper unease with human progress. At its more radical edges, the movement portrays mankind not primarily as steward but as contaminant. Human industry is described as invasive, consumption as pathological, and growth as inherently destructive. Advocates of “degrowth” openly argue that reduced economic output and lower living standards constitute moral improvement. Discussions about limiting childbirth in the name of reducing carbon footprints have moved from fringe to mainstream academic settings. Such arguments rest upon a pessimistic anthropology that views human flourishing as environmentally incompatible.

The Telegraph (UK).

There’s a strong misconception in Europe that President Donald Trump prefers dictators and authoritarian powers over democratic allies. The fact is that he has just taken out a major Chinese ally (Venezuela), is in the process of taking out another (Iran), and is threatening to take out a third (Cuba).

As we think about the problem set that confronted the United States when he came into office, we see that he inherited a dwindling heavy-industry sector and a rigid US ideology about offering the world free markets, despite extremely unfavourable terms (US tariffs on EU cars were 2 per cent while EU tariffs on US autos were 11 per cent). He also inherited a rising rival in China, which seemed to be eating US manufacturing share every year while gaining dominance in global shipping and energy markets.

But unlike so many previous American presidents, Trump looks at these problems differently. He sees different problems – inherited from his years as a businessman – and he responds differently.

The Register (UK).

Openreach claims its fiber network infrastructure can detect leaks in nearby water supply pipes, which could save millions of liters of the precious fluid… if the water companies can be bothered to fix them.

The infrastructure arm of Britain’s former state-owned telco BT says it has conducted a trial with Affinity Water and the developer of the technology, Lightsonic.

According to Openreach, the pilot demonstrated that its fiber-optic cables can double as sensors to detect and pinpoint any leaks from water pipes in the surrounding subterranean environment.

Check it out.

A reference guide to the world’s most strategic waterways.

Read it.

There is a certain kind of computer review that is really a permission slip. It tells you what you’re allowed to want. It locates you in a taxonomy — student, creative, professional, power user — and assigns you a product. It is helpful. It is responsible. It has very little interest in what you might become.

The MacBook Neo has attracted a lot of these reviews.

The consensus is reasonable: $599, A18 Pro, 8GB RAM, stripped-down I/O. A Chromebook killer, a first laptop, a sensible machine for sensible tasks. “If you are thinking about Xcode or Final Cut, this is not the computer for you.” The people saying this are not wrong. It is also not the point.

Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something. The machine’s limits become a map of the territory. You learn what computing actually costs by paying too much of it on hardware that can barely afford it.

Perplexity Computer for Beginners: Everything You Need to Know

You will own nothing, and you will be happy….l

Perplexity: Everything is Computer, everything is AI, Computer is everything, AI is us (The Register [UK])

Read it.

n adult Fairfax High School student has been charged with nine counts of assault and battery amid accusations that he was groping girls in the halls during school.

7News Reporter Nick Minock was the first to break this story and spoke exclusively with the victims’ parents.

“There’s a group of about 12 individuals that have reported this assault,” one mother told 7News. “It was all perpetrated by a single individual who is a stranger to the girls. He just sneakily walked up behind them and put his hand in between their legs. It was not just a butt smack or a butt grab. It was a groping of a private area. It had been occurring for several months.”

Israel Flores Ortiz is almost 19 years old, and he’s in the 11th grade at Fairfax High School.

Read it.

Someone asked a good question. I’d written a post arguing that what the industry calls “AI agents” are flowcharts with good marketing, and that the mathematics to do better has existed since the 1960s. A commenter on LinkedIn replied: “So why did it stop being widely used?”

It deserved more than a comment-length answer.

The short version is: path dependence, disciplinary silos, and the seductive convenience of not having to specify your objectives. The long version requires a brief tour through the recent history of artificial intelligence, which turns out to be less a story of progress than of fashion.

Read it.

In the rugged interior of Newfoundland, an hour’s drive west from the Canadian Forces Base in Gander, sits a dormant mine with profound implications for the nation’s security and prosperity. Beaver Brook could be the largest North American producer of antimony — a critical mineral threaded through the entire spectrum of modern military hardware, from small arms and artillery shells to advanced missile seekers and night-vision goggles.

But China owns the mine and shut it down in early 2023 — one year before Beijing imposed export controls blocking antimony sales to U.S. military end users, driving prices from about US$5,900 per tonne to more than US$50,000.

Antimony forms in crystalline masses, often clustered in dark silver needles — nature’s own suggestion of the gunmetal world it enters. It was little known before Washington recognized that Beijing had quietly secured a near-monopoly over the world’s critical mineral supply, antimony among them. The metal fires every conventional round, hardens military components, and provides the infrared edge that defines lethality in modern conflict. Armies could not sustain combat for even a single day without it — a reality that has driven urgent U.S. efforts to stockpile it, revive domestic processing, and cut reliance on China and Russia.

I guess the Canadian government is just stupid.

Read it.

Don’t lose your shit over mines in the Strait of Hormuz and the oil price shooting up. Iran has many thousands of mines. But something has to lay them out in the water. Iran has no more naval ships. They have small boats. The US can see everything moving on the surface, or sitting at docks. We are blowing them up methodically. The news outlets who want the US to fail in this operation (because: Trump) want you to think that we had no plan for dealing with this problem. That’s not so.

There are very few mines actually laid so far. Tankers are not going through the Strait of Hormuz because their captains are nervous. Their ships and their cargos are worth millions and the insurance costs millions. So, they’re waiting in place, hanging back. The US still has work to do destroying Iran’s shoreline defenses of missile and drone launch sites. Iran is firing all they’ve got left. Whenever they launch something, we see the geo-location on our satellites and radars. The mobile launchers are a little trickier because, obviously, they shoot and move. But they don’t always move fast enough, and there isn’t an endless supply of them.

The US Navy decommissioned its four Avenger-class minesweeper ships in the Persian Gulf in September, 2025, but replaced them with more agile Littoral Combat Ships (LCSs) capable of countering submarines and clearing mines. Two LCS ships — USS Santa Barbara and USS Canberra — quietly deployed in March 2025.

Don’t hold your breath for the LCS to do anything productive.