Meanwhile, there are about 100 towns named Troy in America, and the Christian American heartland had no problem loving Rome and Athens and hating slavery at the same time.
Monday, August 3, 2026
Sunday, August 2, 2026
Suez Canal Transits 2Q2026 vs. 2Q2023 are still down almost 48% for vessels and 60% for tonnage because of the Houthi threat in the Red Sea
2Q2026
Number of vessels 3580 (down 47.8%)
Net Ton 163,899,000 (down 59.7%)
Number of Tankers 1526 (down 31.7%)
Net Ton 77,558,000 (down 27.9%)
Tankers per day 16.8
2Q2023
Number of vessels 6856
Net Ton 407,119,000
Number of Tankers 2235
Net Ton 107,592,000
Tankers per day 24.6
Middle East tanker transits July 26-August 1, 2026: Strait of Hormuz 2.0/day, Bab-el-Mandeb Strait 10.7/day
SoH normal 2022: 70.0/day
BAM normal 2022: 30.0/day
Saturday, August 1, 2026
Do Michigan auto workers know that the UAW, which has endorsed Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, also endorsed anti-auto Democratic Socialist Claire Valdez in NY-7?
How the UAW abandoned auto-workers to back radicals
... The UAW is no longer all about building cars. The union, desperate to build its shrinking ranks, has been adding members in all kinds of professions and trades, including signing up some 100,000 people who work in higher education. That group, which includes post-doctoral researchers and adjunct faculty members, now constitutes more than 25 percent of UAW membership, according to the Detroit Press, and has led, not surprisingly, to a significantly more progressive and activist union profile.
This is why the union’s 2022 changes to its election process, intended to “give a greater voice to rank-and-file members,” has instead empowered an ever-more radical constituency of university teaching assistants. UAW’s resulting leftward lurch made headlines recently in New York’s Democratic primary contests, where democratic socialist Claire Valdez won her race to represent New York’s District 7 in Congress. Valdez had previously worked at Columbia University as a program assistant in the visual arts department, where she joined the UAW. The union boasted, “UAW Region 9A mobilized thousands of members across NY-07 to help deliver a victory for New York’s working class.”
Here is what we know about Valdez: she went to the exclusive School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where tuition runs about $60,000 per year. Also, she hates cars. Her campaign embraced the normal lefty litany: abolishing ICE, Medicare for all, universal rent control and so forth. But one distinctive item was her promise to “fight to redirect federal dollars toward public transportation, walking, and biking” and “reverse the proliferation of surface highways.”
Do UAW workers on Detroit’s assembly lines know that their union’s favored candidate hates automobiles and wants to shut down federal highway spending? Is that in their best interests? ...
Naples, Italy quake is the largest in 40 years
... The quake – which had a depth of 3km and was felt across Naples and the island of Ischia, and as far away as the Sorrento peninsula – was part of an ongoing seismic swarm, Italy’s national institute of geophysics and volcanology said.
... The heaviest damage was reported in Pozzuoli, near the epicentre of the quake, where a building partially collapsed and large chunks of rubble crushed parked cars but caused no injuries. ...
More.
Friday, July 31, 2026
They did this late on a Friday afternoon on purpose because no one is paying attention
Pirro moves to drop Reflecting Pool vandalism case, says damage caused by ‘flawed installation’
U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro on Friday moved to dismiss an indictment charging U.S. Olympic canoeist David Hearn with vandalizing the Reflecting Pool of the Lincoln Memorial, writing in a court filing that damage to the pool’s sealant was the result of a “flawed installation.” ...
The guy with whom Democrats in Maine replaced ex-Nazi Graham Platner, Troy Jackson, isn't objectionable because he's an ex-Republican?
They have hollers in Maine, but they don't call them that.
They could have just gone with the runner-up Mills, but that would have been too woodsy for Maine I guess.
I mean, isn't Maine famous for ranked choice voting and all that?
Thursday, July 30, 2026
Middle East tanker traffic July 23-29, 2026: Strait of Hormuz 1.3 per day, Bab-el-Mandeb Strait 10.7 per day
I find the Traffic Trends claim in JMIC Update 078 for BAM REALLY difficult to believe.
Combined cargo and tankers in the tables averages 35 per day on July 28 and July 29 compared with baseline 60.
Baseline tankers alone would be 30 per day, instead they're showing 13 per day average for the two days, 10.7 per day over the seven days.
The claim is that vessels are running dark.
But the Saudis are loading NOTHING at Ras Tanura in the Persian Gulf, where there is also oil in the water in satellite photography, and the Houthis droned Saudi oil infrastructure to Yanbu in the Red Sea on Monday.
Meanwhile somebody droned two gas vessels at the Egyptian port of Damietta on The Med on Wednesday, clearly meant to signal that the Suez option's days may be numbered.
The oil business is a confidence game, and the authorities have a vested interest in maintaining it to prevent public panic.
Gasoline is now $4.49/gallon where I live.
2Q2026 Real GDP, first estimate, came in at a measly 1.5% today
The last time a quarterly real gdp figure came in close to 10%, outside the grotesquely distorted pandemic hysteria, was in 2Q1983 at 9.4%.
It's been all down hill since then.
Our T.S. Eliot Hollow Man Economy continues to die, not with a bang but a whimper.
The compound annual growth rates show this:
2Q1947-2Q1984: 3.64%
2Q1984-2Q2017: 2.67%
2Q2017-2Q2026: 2.46%.
The era inaugurated by Trump underperforms the era inaugurated by Reagan by 7.9%, which in its turn underperformed the post-war era by 26.6%.
The Trump era underperforms the post-war by 32.4%.
They have no idea how to make America great again.
They are fools, fops, idiots, and sots, stuffed with chaff, straw, and feathers.
Core pce inflation in 1H2026 was 3.23% year over year and headed The Wong Wei
The green line represents Fed Chair Alan Greenspan's 1987-2006 average at 2.46%.
The current rate is elevated 31% above the Greenspan average.
Core pce inflation has been above 2.46% yoy since March 2021, sixty-two consecutive months.
We are not led by serious people.
Wednesday, July 29, 2026
Just shut up about Mitch McConnell already
Democrat Senator Diane Feinstein of California was missing in action in the hospital for three months in early 2023.
When she came back to the Senate in May in a wheelchair she acted like she'd never been gone and had been working and voting, but Democrats let the old demented broad keep voting anyway.
She passed away in office in September of that year.
Just in time for wildfire season, husband and wife team at Purdue University cook up wacky theory of instant dinosaur extinction from trapped asteroid blast heat
We are given to believe that there was an intense heat release which killed off most of the big animals globally, but that it lasted just hours, and then nuclear winter followed immediately in the days and weeks to follow to finish off the rest of the planet from cold and starvation.
Unfortunately for the theory temperature at the time of the extinction is unremarkable.
Meanwhile our betters want us to think that Odysseus felt g u i l t y and thought his age was d o o m e d.
None of this is proper summer entertainment, dammit.
Tuesday, July 28, 2026
OF COURSE The Grauniad is DELIGHTED with a reinvention of the Odyssey which turns it into an epic ordeal of anguish and postwar disillusion
... arriving back to their prewar state emotionally or spiritually . . . may never happen at all ...
Just like England. Vote Labour.
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