Wednesday, March 11, 2026
Iran attacks vessels in the Persian Gulf but ships its own oil to China, threatens to mine the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. littoral combat ships prove inadequate as replacements for legacy minesweepers decommissioned last year
... The UKMTO said it had received 17 reports of incidents affecting vessels operating in and around the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz and Gulf of Oman between Feb. 28, when the war began, and March 11. These include 13 attack reports and four reports of suspicious activity. ...
Iran sends millions of oil barrels to China through Strait of Hormuz even as war chokes the waterway
... Iran has sent at least 11.7 million barrels of crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz since the war began on Feb. 28, all of which were headed to China, Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers, told CNBC on Tuesday.
The firm monitors vessel movements with satellite imagery, allowing it to capture vessels that would otherwise go undetected if their tracking systems are switched off. Many vessels have “gone dark” after Tehran threatened to attack any vessel attempting to pass through the waterway. ...
Over the years, China has built up large crude stockpiles, accumulating an estimated 1.2 billion barrels of inventory as of January, which could fulfill demand for 3 to 4 months, according to Atlantic Council. ...
U.S. forces sink 16 Iranian minelayers as reports say Tehran is mining the Strait of Hormuz
... A CNN report Tuesday said that Iran had started laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, albeit not extensively. Sources that CNN spoke to said only a “few dozen” had been laid in recent days.
The report also said that Iran still retains more than 80% of its small boats and minelayers, and could feasibly lay hundreds of mines in the waterway.
Located between Oman and Iran, the strait saw roughly 13 million barrels of crude per day passing through it in 2025, representing about 31% of all seaborne crude flows, according to energy consulting firm Kpler. ...
CBS News, which reported that Iran “may be getting ready” to deploy naval mines, said the country was using smaller crafts that can carry two to three mines each to lay them in the strait. While Iran’s mine stock isn’t publicly known, estimates over the years have ranged from roughly 2,000 to 6,000 naval mines, the report said. ...
... the U.S. had decommissioned four Avenger-class minesweepers that were stationed in Bahrain in late 2025.
The replacement vessels for the Avenger-class, the Independence-class littoral combat ships, have “struggled to meet the requirements of operational mine countermeasures missions,” according to global naval publication Naval News.
Tuesday, March 10, 2026
Monday, March 9, 2026
The panic-mongers on X are out in full force this morning saying Trump must do something about oil this week, all ignoring that Trump said on day one the Iran operation would take four to five weeks
It's been one week.
Oil is currently trading at $93, falling from above $115. NASDAQ is in the green.
Sunday, March 8, 2026
The Chicoms have been the primary source for Iran's sodium perchlorate for twenty years, without which its ballistic missile program would not exist
Iran ships most of its oil to China, and China sends back the ingredients for weapons of mass destruction.
Laden Iranian ships depart Chinese port tied to key military chemicals (March 7, 2026)
... “China could have held these vessels at port, imposed an administrative delay, invented a customs hold — any number of bureaucratic tools, but didn’t,” said Isaac Kardon, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to The Post. “That’s a deliberate policy choice made during an active war in which Beijing publicly calls for restraint.”
Although IRISL operates as a large commercial carrier, Kardon said the circumstances of these shipments strongly suggest the cargo is sodium perchlorate. “Given the track record, the most parsimonious explanation is that they’re loading the same commodity they’ve been shuttling for the past year-plus,” he said. ...
The U.S. and Israel strikes have hammered Iran’s missile storage bunkers and underground depots. “Tehran’s need for propellant precursors just went from urgent to existential,” Kardon told The Post.
Western intelligence says Iran is rearming despite UN sanctions, with China’s help (October 31, 2025)
... European intelligence sources say several shipments of sodium perchlorate, the main precursor in the production of the solid propellant that powers Iran’s mid-range conventional missiles, have arrived from China to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas since the so-called “snapback” mechanism was triggered at the end of September.
Those sources say the shipments, which began arriving on September 29, contain 2,000 tons of sodium perchlorate bought by Iran from Chinese suppliers in the wake of its 12-day conflict with Israel in June. The purchases are believed to be part of a determined effort to rebuild the Islamic Republic’s depleted missile stocks. Several of the cargo ships and Chinese entities involved are under sanctions from the United States. ...
The critics ignore that Kristi Noem's DHS ad campaign was all Trump's idea and that she was saying so already in February 2025
... Self-dealing played a direct role in Noem’s defenestration.
The department approved a $220 million contract — funneled in part through firms run by Noem and Lewandowski allies — for an ad campaign encouraging illegal immigrants to go home.
The ad starred — who else? — Kristi Noem, on horseback and in chaps.
The implicit message was that if illegal immigrants didn’t leave on their own, she’d immediately form a posse and run them over the border.
It was a production worthy of a spaghetti Western, or — more to the point, given her political ambitions — a commercial for a 2028 presidential campaign.
Noem couldn’t defend the sketchy spending decisions, or the blatantly self-glorifying ad, or much of anything else in the brutal back-to-back House and Senate hearings that precipitated her doom.
She’d already been taken down a notch after the Minneapolis ICE operation went sideways. ...
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| https://www.c-span.org/clip/public-affairs-event/user-clip-dhs-secretary-kristi-noem-describes-ad-campaign/5195580 |
U.S. Federal Debt continues to be a very popular investment with foreigners who owned $9.2484 trillion of it at the end of 3Q2025
As of early 2026, the average interest rate paid on all outstanding U.S. federal debt is about 3.35%.
This rate represents a significant increase from the roughly 1.5%
average seen in early 2022.
The chart was updated on Mar 4, 2026.
The $9.248 trillion owned by foreigners in 3Q2025 was about 24.5% of the total public debt outstanding at the time.
The latest data available from the U.S. Department of the Treasury indicates that in Dec 2025 foreigners owned $9.2709 trillion.
In the desert, on a horse with no name
Iranian projectiles continue to strike Gulf countries; Tehran says new leader appointed
... Iranian media said a new leader has been appointed, replacing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the opening salvos of the war. ...
Iran’s Mehr news agency quoted Ayatollah Seyyed Ahmad Alam al-Huda as saying Sunday elections have been held to replace Khamenei and that a new leader has been appointed. It did not give a name. “All the rumors and news that tried to pretend that the Assembly of Experts has not yet made a decision are pure lies,” al-Huda was quoted as saying. Iranian state media reported on Saturday that two influential Iranian clerics have called for the swift selection of a new supreme leader. ...
The Israel Defense Forces said Sunday it would “pursue every successor and every person who seeks to appoint a successor.” ...
Saturday, March 7, 2026
If Daniel McCarthy were a conservative who understood history and human nature, he wouldn't issue embarrassing pronunciamentos like these
Win or lose, Donald Trump has begun the last war the United States is ever likely to fight in the Middle East. ...
That's what we thought in 1991 about the victorious George H. W. Bush. And then somehow we lost our minds and elected blow-job Bill with his Sunday-go-to-meeting Bible under his arm, big enough to choke a mule.
The state of mind – and the state of the world – that made possible the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, has passed, never to return. ...
There wasn't a single state of mind from 1991 to 2003.
We didn't choose 9/11. It chose us and changed our minds. And the lunatics in Tehran are crazier and far more dangerous than Osama ever was.
Hell, we didn't even choose the Gulf War. Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and set it on fire as it withdrew in January 1991.
We didn't choose this Iran War, either. Iran chose it for us when its proxies invaded our ally Israel in October 2023.
The state of mind and the state of the world . . . hasn't changed at all, except that Trump's a little slow on the uptake.
The passions that involve us in foreign conflicts in the future will be those of a younger cohort. ...
Yes, it isn't just about a state of mind, is it? Things happen which we can't control. You can't predict "no more wars" anywhere, even though you can pretend for a long time, for example from the summer of 1939 to late 1941, and then something forces your hand.
... if the Iran war goes badly – as badly as the Iraq War did for Bush – Trump’s new style of interventionism will be repudiated by voters as thoroughly as Trump’s own election repudiated the neoconservatives.
Bush 41 was popular because he won the Gulf War and suddenly wasn't because of the economy. And Bush 43 was re-elected convincingly in 2004, hello. If America didn't support his Iraq War, it had a funny way of showing it. There is no comparison with Trump.
Trump's economy already sucks and unsurprisingly right out of the box polling indicates Americans are against his attack on Iran. We're blowing up $1 billion a day over there and can't afford a lousy hamburger at home. We don't have to wait for Iran to go badly for the voters to repudiate Trump.
The only thing Dan is probably right about is this, unfortunately:
. . . what comes next will be an even more radical phase in domestic politics. ...
Here.
Friday, March 6, 2026
Trump makes America 1969 again
February 2026 might as well be July 1969, when the percentage of Americans working hit 59% for the first time.
America does not even come close to working up to its potential.
(geek note: population estimates get updated at the beginning of each year, which means current percentage calculations and comparisons such as this one will not exactly match previous ones posted here in 2025, 2024, 2023, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera)
How come there are still 5.75 million more foreign born in the United States in Feb 2026 than when Trump was president the first time?
I used peak ! foreign born under Trump I in Mar 2019 just to be fair!
Thursday, March 5, 2026
GOP-controlled US House and Senate both cede war power to the president, shirking their constitutional duty
Republicans claim to be against more wars, but they let them happen anyway.
House rejects war powers resolution to rein in Trump on Iran
... The vote was 212-219, with four Democrats joining Republicans to torpedo the measure and two Republicans joining Democrats in voting for the measure. The Senate shot down a similar measure on Wednesday. ...
War powers vote fails in the Senate, allowing Trump to continue Iran strikes
... The measure, brought by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Rand Paul, R-Ky.,
faced steep odds and was largely symbolic even if it passed — Trump is
almost certain to veto any bill aimed at decreasing his authority to use
the military. The vote was 47-53, under the 50-vote threshold needed to
advance the resolution. ...
Speaking of crazies from Texas, Republican Representative Dan Crenshaw has lost his primary and ain't comin' back
Dan has public opinions about what are the worst features of contemporary Christianity, which I imagine have not endeared him to the anti-woke warriors of recent ascendancy.
Texas Democrat U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico thinks the constitution's main features are bugs and imagines a past which never existed
James also believes in 6 genders and abortion rights for trannies, among other lunatic things.
Kristi Noem fired, replaced by a plumber lol
Trump says he will replace DHS Secretary Kristi Noem with Sen. Markwayne Mullin
Now he's poaching from the thin Republican majority in the U.S. Senate. Brilliant. Just Brilliant.
Jobless claims continue at the four year lows in 2026, at 216k on average in February
Claims have averaged between 216k and 224k on an annual basis starting in 2022.
We haven't had a monthly average number at or above 300k since Jan 2022.
Wednesday, March 4, 2026
Private payrolls in Feb 2026 continue an anemic trend
The additions in the last year average just 26,500 per month.
The U.S. and Israel pulled the Iran war trigger when they did because intelligence revealed the opportunity to decapitate the regime in one fell swoop
Let's hope that this time they are successful in eliminating Iran's nuclear capabilities once and for all.
Last Monday [Feb 23], Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called President Trump
with a stunning tip: Iran's supreme leader and his top advisers were
all set to meet at one location in Tehran on Saturday morning [Feb 28].
They could all be killed in a single devastating airstrike, Netanyahu told Trump and his team, according to three sources briefed on the discussion. ... The Feb. 23 call — held from the White House Situation Room and unreported until now — was a pivotal moment that set the Iran war in motion. ...
On Friday at 3:38 p.m. EST, [Trump] gave the final order. Eleven hours later, bombs fell on Tehran, Khamenei was killed and the war had begun. ...
... According to a Financial Times report, almost all of the Iranian capital’s traffic cameras were secretly tapped. ...
Tuesday, March 3, 2026
Keystone Kash strikes again
... The removals have cost the Justice Department and FBI decades of combined experience in identifying the types of threats that sources say could appear in the wake of Operation Epic Fury. ...
Former Goldman Sachs boss Lloyd Blankfein says he is worried about hidden secret leverage in the nearly $2 trillion shadow banking market after Blue Owl shut a fund and MFS collapsed
... “One has to worry about opaque assets where there’s illiquidity,” he told Bloomberg in a separate interview. “We’re getting close to the end of late stages of cycles on this and we’re due for a kind of a reckoning.” ...
China expected to expand submarine fleet to 80 by 2035, up to half nuclear-powered, from 60 now, more than half of which are diesel-powered
... Brookes cited a Pentagon projection that China’s submarine force will reach 80 vessels by 2035, about half of them nuclear-powered—up from the current estimated fleet of more than 60 subs, most of which are less capable diesel-powered vessels that have a shorter range of movement and must surface more frequently than nuclear-powered ones. This projection has appeared in past Pentagon annual reports on China’s military power. ...
Monday, March 2, 2026
COVID-19 infection peaks in the U.S. overall have been trending steadily less severe since Jan 2024, with the last two only in the high, not the very high, range
The regional data taken individually is more erratic.
Ruh-roh, sign of a top
Since 2020, the number of low- and moderate-income investors has
increased 2.7 times, or 167%, according to new research from the
BlackRock Foundation and Commonwealth.
In that time, factors including increased access to investment
information and additional cash through Covid-19 stimulus packages
helped those individuals to invest. ...
Sunday, March 1, 2026
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