Tab Clearing...

• Some Substackers are big mad about the automated AI flag.


• A student wrote a piece for his California high school newspaper looking into local connections in the Epstein Files. Some people got big mad.


• I will henceforth be referring to CVS as "shampoo jail". I hope it makes them big mad.

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Tab Clearing...

• The state of the air war over Ukraine, four years on...


• The Rise of American Bushido


• Meta, belatedly and ineffectively, gets worried about creepers using its pervert glasses.

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Houthis in the News Again

The Houthi announcement that they'd blockade Saudi tankers from transiting the Bab-el-Mandab has sent oil prices back toward the $100/barrel mark again.

Earlier this week, the Iran-aligned Houthis announced they had expanded their campaign against maritime traffic by targeting Saudi oil shipments through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the key chokepoint on the Red Sea, through which Saudi Arabia has re-directed most of its crude oil shipments to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

China-bound tankers appear to move through Bab el-Mandeb, but some others, including Denmark-flagged products tanker Torm Innovation, have made U-turns in the Red Sea and are now heading north toward the Suez Canal.

Despite the Houthi blockade, “two China-crewed, China-bound tankers loaded at Yanbu and cleared Bab al-Mandeb apparently untouched,” maritime intelligence firm Windward said on Thursday.

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You probably weren't doomering hard enough...

Latest forecasts don't envision petroleum traffic to return to anything like normal through all of 2027.

Tab Clearing...

• "Quick! Announce talks are re-starting before the markets open this morning!"


• Ghost Bikes


• Do the Euros have the stomach for a fight?

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Tab Clearing...

• Bot farms that create fake social media virality will hawk your product or service.


• The Baltic nations, facing the greatest threat from Russia and unable to count on the USA's promises anymore, are leading NATO in the rearmament race.


• Priorité à Droite (priority to the right) in France.

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Tab Clearing...

• Russian frigate sent to watch over "shadow fleet" tankers moving through the English Channel is now itself low on fuel and drifting.


• Russia, feeling the stress of Ukrainian counterattacks, believed to be preparing "provocation" in Baltic nations or Poland to test NATO resolve.


• New Jersey residents have to keep cool road sign greased up to prevent theft.

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Tab Clearing...

• The goons who keep an eye on the crews of the "shadow fleet" tankers that are the Russian economy's increasingly tenuous financial lifeline.


• The paid influencers who hype Polymarket to the rubes.


• Pokémon Go location data sold for use in training military drones. No wonder people are starting to hate everything about Big Tech.

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Everything from beer cans to party balloons...

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, to say nothing of damage to some of the world's largest smelters, has aluminum prices skyrocketing.

Aluminium prices are at a four-year high, up more than 25% this year, as war in the Middle East and a blocked Strait of Hormuz choke off nearly a quarter of the world’s seaborne metal supply.

Not just aluminum, though. The global helium supply has been kneecapped as well, which will impact everything from microchip manufacturing to MRIs.

The war has also upended markets for products extracted from natural gas. Among the most critical is helium, an odorless element produced as a byproduct of natural gas extraction. Before the war, Qatar supplied roughly one-third of the world’s helium.

Chip manufacturers use it to cool machines that etch circuits onto silicon wafers. Pharmaceutical companies rely on it for quality checks of their products. In magnetic resonance imaging machines, helium cools superconducting magnets.

I've already had a couple people tell me that even though prices on everything from portable electronics to memory cards for cameras is up, if I have any I need to buy, I shouldn't be waiting for Christmas because it's going to be a year minimum once the shooting stops for things to even start getting back to normal.

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Tab Clearing...

• NATO Catching Strays: Russian drone misses Ukraine, hits apartment building in Romania, injuring two.


• Zuckermuskian Solipsism


• Rebuilding US precision weapon stockpiles to pre-Iran levels will be a multi-year project.

Tab Clearing...

• Plop, plop, fizz, fizz...


• The sheer dystopian-ness of the "AI girlfriend"


• Any time you find a crowbar wedged into a societal fault line in a Western democracy, it's a safe bet that the person leaning on the other end is standing in Russia.

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That's just straight up trolling the guy.

Speaking just ahead of Trump, Xi noted the global attention on the meeting, and said a major question for the two countries was whether they could avoid the “Thucydides Trap,” according to an official English translation of his remarks broadcast by CCTV.

Trump was probably rolling his eyes and thinking "Only dummies stick their fingers in those little tubes in the first place."

(In case you, like the president, haven't read Allison: Link. Personally, I think the premise of the book is overly simplistic, but I'm just some rando on the interwebs.) 

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Tab Clearing...

• Norwegian F-35s tracking Russian Tu-95 Bears along NATO's northern flank.


• Real time video deepfakes make it easier to scam people live.


• The Russian school training the next generation of hackers, scammers, and influencers, all the better to mess with your mind and shape your opinions.

Pain at the Pump

Gas in Indianapolis went up another forty cents overnight. Statewide average is now $4.80 a gallon for regular, here in Indy it's $4.99 pretty much everywhere. Monday it was $3.99 a gallon, and that was already higher than it’s been in years, and now it’s gone up another 25%, with more increases incoming. Bobbi filled her tank with the required premium earlier in the week and it set her back over eighty bucks.

Bring this up on social media and you'll hear from your friends in London or Oslo how that's cheap compared to what they're used to, but so what?

First, people structure their budgets and lives around the prices and wages where they live, not halfway around the globe. Second, at this rate people are going to add a GoFundMe to fill their tank in addition to the one they already have for hospital bills. (To which your Euro friend replies "Hospital bills?")

Public transit, health insurance, lengthy suburban commutes, student loan payments, et cetera et cetera... It’s why comparing how many drachmas per dram gas costs between countries is kinda pointless.

Tab Clearing...

• High-resolution sonar images of the USS Monitor wreck.


• Russia's hacker unit known as Fancy Bear is behind the hacking of wi-fi routers.


• Panopticon-like surveillance isn't any better just because it's not the government doing it.

WTAF?

I have no idea what's supposed to be going on in this AI slop picture. Is that Jefferey Epstein or Hunter Biden he's laying hands on?

EDITED TO ADD: Ell. Oh. Ell. This post took so much blowback from MAGA stalwarts that it got deleted.

Dire Straits

A large number of internet pundits have abandoned their earlier fields of expertise in virology, epidemiology, and deep sea submersible design, and become experts in global supply chains, seizing on the president's statements that we don't need the Strait of Hormuz opened. (Although he also issued a stern ultimatum that they'd better open it by today, or else!)

While it's possibly true that none of the gasoline in the tanks of my cars originated in the Persian Gulf, that's kinda immaterial, despite what the Very Serious Economy Understanders are telling me.

See, the Gulf States are sitting on a massive natural gas deposit. In order to utilize this gas, they sell some of it, but also put it to other uses.

For example, do you know why Alcoa built their smelting plants near hydroelectric dams? Because the Hall-Héroult process for smelting aluminum takes a tremendous amount of electricity. 

Bahrain and Qatar use natural gas electrical plants to do what Niagara Falls and the TVA did in the US; namely to drive massive aluminum smelters. Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) and Qatalum alone produce a significant percentage of the world's aluminum. Half of all aluminum used in the US is imported, mostly from Canada, but the second and third largest sources are the UAE and Bahrain. Further, since very little alumina and bauxite is actually mined in the Gulf States, most of the ore has to be shipped there in the first place... through the Strait of Hormuz, before the finished aluminum is shipped back out... through the Strait of Hormuz. The war has already seriously dinged aluminum production and shipping.

Another thing that the natural gas in the Gulf States gets used for is the Haber process. Before Fritz Haber figured out a way to produce ammonia by reacting atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen, nations used to go to war for control of islands covered in fossilized seabird crap because it was needed to produce the nitrates necessary for things like gunpowder and fertilizer. You are alive today because of the revolution in farm productivity allowed by ammonium nitrate fertilizers. About a quarter of the nitrates for the fertilizer that the farmers in the US use is produced on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz.

Finally, even if every drop of petroleum that shipped out through the Strait of Hormuz went to China, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, and Thailand, a very large amount of that does not get used to make fuel for Tokyo salarymen's Toyotas and PLA tanks. It gets used to make... plastic. And if you can't touch something plastic made in China/Japan/Korea/et cetera from where you're sitting right now, I'll eat my hat. 

Hell, you're probably sitting on a chair made with petroleum while reading this on a monitor made with petroleum and about to compose an angry email on a keyboard made with petroleum... all of which went through the Strait of Hormuz.

So, yeah, it's kinda important.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot, there's also about a third of the globe's helium supply stuck in there...

 

Tab Clearing...

• Mimetic v. Agentic: The weird new mutation of grind culture.


• Gulf allies frustrated by lack of warning.


• Microsoft files for a patent on an AI agent to play video games for you.

Tab Clearing...

• When you go to war, you need a why.


• Military officials question fortifications at site where U.S. troops were killed in Iranian strike


• The first phone call was 150 years ago. Where did we go wrong?

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War News...

• Norwegian police still searching for suspect in bomb detonation at US embassy in Oslo.


• Synagogue in Belgium bombed, and three in Toronto shot up.


• Iranian missiles attacking Israel increasingly using cluster munitions.

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