Three major oil arteries are now being choked at once. He reports Hormuz closed (20 million barrels a day of crude and products before the war), tankers driven off the Bab el-Mandeb (about 4.5 million barrels a day, roughly 70 vessels a day before the Houthi attacks on two Saudi tankers), and Caspian Pipeline Consortium loadings near Novorossiysk halted after Ukrainian attacks on tankers — more than 1 million barrels a day, about 80% of Kazakhstan's oil.
One global market means each disruption tightens every other. He argues India, Europe and Asia will all bid for the same Atlantic Basin barrels, while ships rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope lose 30 to 40 days, burn more fuel, remove tanker capacity and triple delivery cost. He cites an estimate that Persian Gulf, Red Sea and Black Sea instability threatens a quarter of world supply.
The shock absorbers are already spent. He puts the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve at 310 million barrels, the lowest since 1983, with US and European refiners at their limits, Russian diesel exports gone and refining margins at $70 a barrel or more. He lays out the sequence he expects: tanker rates, then insurance, physical premiums, margins, wholesale fuel, and finally pump and grocery prices — with margins and wholesale already moving.
Iran wins by making the war too costly, not by fighting. In his reading, fear does the work: a missile costing a few thousand dollars threatens a tanker carrying $100 million of oil, so owners, crews and insurers enforce the blockade for Iran. He counts eight successful tanker attacks in the Iran conflict in two days, plus roughly 40 Ukrainian strikes on tankers in Russia over the past week.
Losing Fujairah would leave Gulf oil no way around Hormuz. The UAE's pipeline to Fujairah carries a couple of million barrels a day from Abu Dhabi to the Gulf of Oman, within range of Iranian missiles and drones; he calls its loss "checkmate" because supply would then be rationed by price. He says markets complacently expect diplomacy and reserves to cover it, and with US exports back at pre-war levels, he expects more tankers coming for remaining US barrels.
Both Middle East chokepoints are now effectively shut. He reports that, as of July 22, a second Saudi tanker was struck in the Red Sea. He reads that as effectively closing the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, with the Strait of Hormuz already closed, and calls it the nightmare scenario.
Russia's Novorossiysk closure doubles the oil off the market. He reports that Russia closed Novorossiysk, its largest export facility, which ships over 2 million barrels a day. He says this leaves twice as much oil off the market as during the worst part of the war a couple of months earlier. He expects Trump to ask Zelenskyy to "lay off a little bit."
He warns that even brief persistence of this outage turns severe. If the outage is sustained, he expects it to be "really bad." He says he cannot give a timeline but that it is "not that long," and that even a couple of weeks would be very damaging.
Mr. GlobalThe Worst Case Scenario With The Iran War Just Happened
The Houthis have now shown they can close Bab el-Mandeb by force. A fully laden Saudi VLCC, too deep for the Suez Canal unless roughly half unloaded, U-turned north, then turned back toward the strait and was struck and set burning in the Red Sea well short of it. He says the strait had been shut without a shot until now; oil jumped over $1 on the report.
The strike pulls Saudi Arabia, and its refineries, into the war. He assumes Saudi Arabia will respond, which he expects to move its roughly 3.5 million barrels a day of refining capacity up Iran's and the Houthis' target list, with 5 million barrels a day already lost elsewhere. If Saudi infrastructure were hit the way Russia's has been, he says "the sky's the limit" on oil and gas prices.
The US and France each arm Ukraine for different self-interests. The US wants Ukraine producing its own Patriot missiles so American stockpiles are freed up for defending against Iranian drone and missile attacks in the Middle East.
France's real motive, he says, is protecting African interests from Russia. He cites France losing military influence in seven West African countries to Russia's expansion into nine, with Russia now holding about 43 African defense contracts; France is also giving Ukraine about 16 Rafale jets by 2028.
He reads a planned US munitions surge as a more aggressive posture. The US reportedly aims to raise Tomahawk production from about 90 to 1,000 a year and Patriot interceptors from 600 to 2,000, which he says leaves China's allies Iran and Russia both "toothless."
Saudi Arabia struck the Houthis, Iran's last functioning proxy, in Sana'a. Hezbollah has been defanged by Israel and Hamas claims to have stepped down, leaving the Houthis as Iran's only proxy capable of offering meaningful support if Israel enters the war directly.
He corrects himself: Israel hasn't actually been attacked by Iran. Unlike Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain, Israel has been spared, which he speculates may trace to Israel's roughly 80-ton bomb dropped on Lebanon two weeks earlier — a fraction of Hiroshima's yield but still, in his view, a likely deterrent.
He predicts Oman may eventually abandon neutrality for the US. Iran has struck US naval-support facilities in Oman despite Oman's professed preference for diplomacy, which he thinks could eventually push Muscat toward open cooperation with Washington.
Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, which just rattled U.S. markets, was built by a founder America trained. Zhilin Yang earned a PhD at Carnegie Mellon and researched at Google Brain and Meta AI before choosing to build his company in Beijing rather than accept recruitment from firms like Apple.
The U.S. talent pipeline has visibly reversed since Yang finished his PhD in 2019. International students once made up about 40% of U.S. STEM doctoral candidates, with roughly 90% of Chinese nationals earning STEM PhDs from 2000-2015 staying in the country; new student visas fell 35.6% between summer 2024 and summer 2025.
A DHS rule taking effect September 2026 shifts the burden onto foreign students. It ends the "duration of status" framework in place since 1978, replacing it with a fixed expiration date after which unlawful presence accrues automatically with no hearing — making an already-shrinking pipeline less attractive to the next Zhilin Yang.
FIFA's solidarity payment system gives European youth clubs a property right in the players they develop. Under rules covering development from age 12 onward, 5% of every international transfer fee flows back to every club that trained the player, automated since 2022 through a Paris clearinghouse — no lawsuits or lobbying required.
America is one of the only major football economies that refuses to connect to that system. U.S. Soccer told European buyers no "solidarity money" needed to be set aside, so a youth club like Seattle's Crossfire Premier, which developed DeAndre Yedlin, filed a valid FIFA claim on his transfer and was denied.
Because U.S. youth clubs can't earn from a player's future transfer, they earn from enrollment instead. Parents become the customer rather than the kid being the asset, pushing clubs toward retention products like trophies and showcase tournaments; elite pathways can run $8,000-$20,000 a year, and about 70% of players quit by age 14.
Germany and Belgium proved the system is fixable. After humiliating losses around 2000, both countries mandated development-first youth academies indifferent to early winning, producing the generations (Özil, Kroos, Hazard, De Bruyne) that later won or dominated major tournaments — while U.S. Soccer's declared "neutrality" since a deadlocked 2015 meeting functions as a veto on reform.
A "second wave" of the war has begun, he says. It was triggered by a US strike on a bridge Russia and China had reportedly been using to move goods to and from Iran, both of which had warned the US against re-engaging; oil rose only 5–7%, which he attributes to the world being desensitized and prepared this time.
Iran's strike capacity has fallen to about 8% of February's level. He estimates this is likely from destroyed munitions, and invokes the 2002 Millennium Challenge war game — where cheap speedboat-launched rockets sank a simulated US fleet — as a reminder that a low-tech asymmetric threat, not conventional firepower, is what closed the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran has struck four countries but avoided the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Iran hit Israel, Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan but has held off the two Gulf states that already retaliated once; he also flags that Israel — with Hezbollah already hobbled and thus no two-front risk — has still not launched its own attacks, calling the delay "interesting."
Battery-metal prices spike whenever war breaks out, he observes. He points to a lithium price surge when the Russia-Ukraine war began in 2022, and a further jump in 2026 when the US-Iran war added to prices for nickel, cobalt, lithium and graphite that were already climbing.
He explains why graphite's hexagonal carbon structure works as a battery anode. Its shape lets lithium ions insert and later exit reversibly between layers of graphite sheets, which is what makes lithium-ion batteries rechargeable; the cathode is typically a lithium compound paired with cobalt, manganese or nickel.
The electrolyte conducts lithium ions but not electrons, he notes. That distinction — ionic but not electrical conductivity — is what forces electrons to travel through the external circuit that powers a device.
GeoHussarAlexander the Great Solving The Gordian Knot # #History #alexanderthegreat #gordian #mythology
The Gordian Knot may be entirely mythical, with no archaeological evidence. Its origin story traces to Phrygia, a kingdom that emerged around 1200 BC in Anatolia after the Bronze Age collapse, where an oracle prophesied that whoever arrived by oxcart would become king.
Gordias's son Midas — the golden-touch Midas — tied the original knot. A subsequent prophecy held that whoever untied it would rule all of Asia, and for roughly a millennium, kings and thinkers reportedly failed to do so.
In 333 BC, Alexander cut the knot instead of untying it. The speaker frames this as a characteristically brash solution from a young conqueror eager to outdo his more cautious father, Philip of Macedon.
He expects Putin to fall soon as Ukraine pushes Russia out. The piece opens on the report that Ukrainian drones hit 35 Russian ships in the Sea of Azov over 4 days, meeting nothing that stopped them. He calls Putin the biggest dictator of his generation and says he will celebrate the day it happens.
He blames Russia's failure on corruption, and draws a domestic parallel. His reading is that a powerful nation run by a strongman cannot beat a much smaller opponent because corruption wasted its resources, which he calls "eerily familiar." He adds that Putin's fall will be a horrible day for MAGA, which he says loves him.
He describes childhood abuse — burned, beaten, threatened — for being white. He says that had he stayed in that town without traveling, he believes he might have grown up racist himself.
Traveling from age 18 showed him the reverse dynamic elsewhere. He saw Black, Hispanic and other non-white people treated as lesser in other places, a contrast he says is what first made him understand the concept of white privilege — including moments like police singling him out as the "safe" person to address at a mixed-race gathering.
He argues prejudice is universal, exploited by elites to divide people. His conclusion — presented as his own opinion, not reported fact — is that recognizing shared humanity across race and religion is what would let ordinary people build a "powerful force" against that manipulation.
GeoHussarGrowing up in adversity is rough, but it does have its merits: part 1 #adversity
He says he was harassed, robbed, or attacked almost daily from age 9 to 18. Growing up as a white kid in a mostly Black and Hispanic neighborhood, he describes burn marks from matches and being beaten and threatened, despite trying to signal sympathy and citing his own immigrant family (father arrived in 1960, mother's family around 1905-1906) as having no tie to slavery or oppression.
A growth spurt around age 14-15 shifted him from fear to anger, he says. Reaching 6'3" and 200 lb, he stopped being scared and became confrontational, developing what he calls a charge against anyone displaying "thuggish," aggressive mannerisms regardless of race.
He rejects the concept of "white privilege" as applied to his own upbringing. He says he would have refused to write about it for college essays given his experience of abuse, and credits later travel and curiosity, rather than his hometown environment, with keeping him from becoming racist.
Britain's dominance rested on a credit machine, not just its Navy. The Bank of England shifted government borrowing from expensive goldsmith loans (up to 30% interest) to long-term bonds backed by parliamentary taxation, letting Britain finance wars against France for over a century even as its debt hit roughly 180% of GDP after Waterloo.
What mattered was credibility, not the debt level itself. France, despite being larger and richer than Britain, lost their long rivalry partly because its monarchy defaulted repeatedly and borrowed expensively; financing the American Revolution helped trigger the fiscal collapse that fed the French Revolution.
Alexander Hamilton copied the British model directly for the new United States. He assumed the states' war debts to bind wealthy bondholders to the federal government's success, then chartered a national bank in 1791 whose stock could be bought largely with U.S. war debt, turning the country's most despised paper into its most valuable asset.
The bet worked almost immediately. Bonds went from trading around 70 cents to par within seven months, and America went from a defaulting confederation of states to an investment-grade country in three years — evidence the author uses to argue that today's debt-ceiling fights and reserve-currency risk threaten the same credibility mechanism underpinning American power.
The Theodosian Walls withstood over 20 sieges across roughly 800 years. He describes the fortifications — walls at least 12 meters high and 4.5 meters thick, with hundreds of towers and wide moats — as considered the world's most impregnable defense until they finally fell in 1453.
Constantinople mattered because Western Europe depended on it for Silk Road trade. He argues Venice, Genoa and other Italian city-states grew wealthy and powerful by controlling that trade route, which the Ottoman Empire wanted to choke off.
He frames a Hungarian engineer's defection as the decisive betrayal. Orban offered his advanced cannon design to Byzantine emperor Constantine XI, who couldn't afford it, so he sold the same cannons to the Ottomans' Mehmed, who used them to finally breach the walls.
GeoHussarThe Miraculous element of Carbon #Science #chemistry #carbon #organicchemistry
He argues carbon's structure keeps him from embracing atheism. He states he holds no religious belief himself, and his reasoning centers on carbon's unique suitability for building all organic life — presented explicitly as personal conviction rather than established science.
Carbon's four valence electrons ("tetravalency") let it form complex 3D shapes. He contrasts this with elements like sodium (one valence electron, readily lost) or chlorine and fluorine (seven, aggressively taken), which form ionic bonds that dissolve in water rather than sustaining stable structures.
Four other elements share carbon's tetravalency, but something sets carbon apart. He names tin, lead, silicon and germanium as also tetravalent; the transcript cuts off before he explains the distinction, but he frames carbon as having "something extra" none of the periodic table's 118 elements can match.
The Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship 6-3 in Trump v. Barbara, but the same term narrowed protections for everyone one rung below citizen. Five justices grounded the ruling in the Constitution itself rather than a narrower statutory path Justice Kavanaugh urged, making it resistant to anything short of a constitutional amendment.
Blanche v. Lau flipped the burden of proof for green card holders. Lawful permanent residents returning to the U.S. are now treated as "seeking admission" rather than simply returning, meaning they must prove they should be let in rather than the government proving why they should be kept out — even absent a conviction.
Mullin v. Doe stripped courts of jurisdiction to review the executive's termination of Temporary Protected Status. The ruling let the administration end TPS for roughly 350,000 Haitians and thousands of Syrians with no judicial review of the Secretary of Homeland Security's determinations, regardless of the process behind them.
The author frames the term as a building: citizenship secured at the foundation, but permanent residence made conditional and temporary status made unreviewable above it. With the CBO projecting immigration will drive all U.S. population growth after 2030, the piece argues this repricing of America as a destination carries direct economic costs, not just legal ones.
Ukraine has shifted from defense to setting the war's tempo, he argues, by punching corridors through Russian air defenses to open paths for deeper strikes. He reports over 190 Russian anti-air systems destroyed this year, with strikes reaching near St. Petersburg and into Moscow-area territory rather than staying confined to border regions.
Recent strikes hit high-profile and high-volume targets: a drone attack near St. Petersburg during a World Economic Forum event there, and a reported 1,000-drone raid on the Moscow area with roughly 500 hitting their targets. He frames the WEF-adjacent strike as deliberately exposing Russia's vulnerability to visiting foreign officials.
He argues Russia's oil infrastructure damage is outweighing the effect of the US lifting some sanctions, producing fuel shortages for both civilians and the military despite Russia being the world's number two oil and gas producer. He also argues, as his own position, that sanctions should be increased and enforcement tightened against European rerouting through Russian satellite states.
Trump withheld his signature from a bipartisan housing bill (passed 358-32 in the House, 85-5 in the Senate) over unrelated voter-registration demands. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act restricts institutional investors' single-family home purchases, streamlines environmental reviews, and incentivizes local governments to build, but Trump instead wanted federal voter-fraud legislation, despite data — including from the Heritage Foundation — showing voter fraud is negligible.
The institutional-investor restriction is more symbolic nationally than locally. The ban triggers at 350 homes, and even investors owning 1,000+ homes hold only about 0.34% of national housing stock, though the impact is concentrated in specific metros like Jacksonville, Dallas, and Phoenix where such investors own 20%+ of rentals.
Trump's leverage is illusory: the bill becomes law regardless of his signature. With veto-proof majorities and Congress in session, it takes effect 10 days after presentment; withholding his signature only forfeits credit for an affordability win — the platform he ran on — while handing Democrats the opening to claim it instead.