There’s a rich ethical literature on assisted suicide and palliative care that points out that the lines between the two become increasingly blurred as you reach end of life, and I suspect Stock has not done any of the reading at all.
Beckerman also seems to spend time on X complaining that his “friends & family” call him “the villain, the racist, the xenophobe, the Islamophobe,” so, yeah, not beating the allegations there.
They straight-up admitted the plan was to usher in a “moderate” government by blowing up all the first and second-tier leaders but leaving the larger military bureaucracy largely intact. Brilliant strategy, can’t imagine why it didn’t work out.
If you don’t have the ships for the mission, you don’t have to figure out how to do the mission!
Two LCS hulls have countermine packages.
The USS Santa Barbara is with the 5th Fleet in Bahrain, and the Canberra seems to be off the coast of India. There are four Avenger MCMs for minesweeping, but they’re all 7th Fleet; the four 5th Fleet MCMs were decommissioned in, uh, September 2025. Oops.
The cover to the 1970s art book / photo documentary WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP
“Tell me again about the bucolic rural life of the ordinary American. TELL ME HOW BUCOLIC IT WAS, DAMNIT.”
Unrelatedly, USN, how’s that SWO retention problem working out? Surely no negative effects from hollowing out the division officers and department heads?
“A third of Republicans think the moon landing was faked” tells a profound story about where we are right now and how, and it is a story the Manhattan Institute would desperately not like to tell.
This was a poll designed to make the GOP look as good as possible, and the GOP simply refused to play ball with “not sounding absolutely batshit racist and crazy.”
A Dallas mosque announced plans for a turnkey subdivision that was going to be built around a number of Islamic cultural and educational centers; Paxton jumped in to make an issue he could run on in the Senate race, MAGA amplified it to help him, and now it’s all Islamophobia all the time down here.
Even that’s not right! There have been sixteen refineries built in the US in the last five decades!
They’ve got some guys with some (not oil majors-large, but decent-ish) midstream and refining experience, but spinning up a new refinery is a heavy financial and engineering lift. Also, this wouldn’t be the first oil refinery in five decades, it would be the largest in five decades — big difference!
There is a dynamic where naval forces plus a large number of tankers could “force” the strait open via large scale convoys and sheer number of tanker hulls and mass of tonnage, but that’s not a casualty-free strategy by any means at all.
Mines were only 5-10% of the total attack vectors during the Tanker War, but no one was trying to fully close Hormuz; the two sides were trying to bottle up ports and target limited shipping. Focusing on the strait and all traffic would make transit exponentially more dangerous than in the ‘80s.
Wow, “48 Laws” stans are on an unbroken, what, three decade run of unparalleled ignorance coupled with the unearned confidence of someone who read a book once.
Yeah, it also comes from England’s (reasonable) naval obsession (wooden walls and whatnot) and the fact that a large portion of naval activity in the 18th century was protecting trade routes from pirates, privateers, and hostile navies. The fiscal implications date back to Elizabeth.
Damn near every monarchic crisis in English history has, somewhere in it, Parliament refusing to pass a bill of supply for one conflict or another.
Yeah, if someone doesn’t distinguish between the 2% of farmers who control 50% of US cropland and, say, someone growing vegetables on 100 acres or less, then I don’t think their policies are going to be particularly helpful.
We need to resurrect the “Corn is not a food. Corn is a platform” thread from The Old Place. Iowa and Minnesota corn country is a giant vertically-integrated biologics factory floor; for god’s sake, every billboard around there is either for gene-tweaked seeds or data analytics systems!
I’d call this the canary in the coal mine, but the canary’s dead and the miners are insisting it’s merely sleeping.
Anyone who mistakes Cormac McCarthy’s prose for a badly-tuned Markov chain needs to produce epistemic proof they are not in fact a p-zombie.
I can tell you from experience that there is a strong institutional bias against communicating systemic risk, because it forces clients into big protective moves, and the fear of being the firm that “predicted seven of the last three recessions” is strong.
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Iran-GCC states escalation, specifically. I’d be very surprised if we didn’t get more and more damaging asymmetric attacks on US targets within and outside the Middle East, but Iran wants to manage compellance escalation with the Gulf states carefully to avoid bringing them into the war directly.
You’ve got multiple Central Markets in Dallas proper, though, so that still counts.
He’s going to send Marco off to manage the cleaning staff at the Trump Copacabana Havana.
I do not think this professor of politics at the Catholic University of America actually understands what Burke meant by “appetites.”
We’re at the “Gorilla Channel, except it’s actually real” part of our decline and fall narrative.
It’s coordination game: Iran needs to credibly keep the strait closed but also wants to minimize escalation. If a few tankers “defect” and sail past, it stays beneath Iran’s threshold. If all tankers sail through, Iran will attack to restore credibility. The question is where that tipping point is.
Notably missing from that list: everything nuclear-related.
