Showing posts with label Straits of Hormuz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Straits of Hormuz. Show all posts

Thursday, May 7, 2026

King Donald's War, Part 5. Quagmire. The $25,000,000,000 and thirteen American lives later, "So we (but not Donald) were in Vietnam for 18 years. Iraq, many, many years....I've been doing this for...six weeks" Edition.

 

King Donny before he was a national embarrassment, and just working on being a family one.

April 30, 2026

Secretary of Defense Hegseth testified the war had cost the US $25B so far.

We clearly have absolutely no idea how to get out of it or win it.

May 1, 2026

Iran responded to King Donny's threats to ramp up the war on Iran, now in a ceasefire, with threats of their own.

They seemed rather unimpressed by Donny.

Donny's administration says it doesn't have to comply with the sixty day provision of the War Powers Act due to the ceasefire.

May 3, 2026

Iran sent the US a fourteen point peace plan.  

May 4, 2026

The U.S. rejected Iranian peace proposals and is now going to escort ships through the Straits of Hormoz.  Iran threatened to strike the ships and has already claimed to have hit a U.S. Navy craft with missiles, which the U.S. denies.

cont:

Iran attacked ships in the straits today with small surface vehicles and it resumed drone strikes on the UAE.

May 6, 2026

Yesterday was Taco Tuesday, and so we have this headline from the Tribune.


Well of course we do.  Trump's an ignorant man with extremely limited world experience with a cabinet of sycophants.  This was a war run by ignoramuses.


Trump paused his latest version of the illegal war with his escort program in the Straits of Hormuz.  We have no way out of the war that anyone in D.C. grasps.

The US has clearly and absolutely lost this war, not succeeding in a single one of its objectives.  At this point, absent ground operations, this is humiliating US defeat, worse than the loss in Vietnam.

May 7, 2026

Taco's flip on the most recent operation is because Saudi Arabia denied the US use of its airspace.

It seems to be the case that Taco didn't inform the kingdom of the operation before coming up with it.

Last edition:

King Donald's War, Part 5. After 13/15 U.S. deaths, Hundreds of Iranian deaths, $50B spent fighting it, and a massive increase in the price of oil, King Donny surrenders to the Iranians. The "If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied" edition.

Tuesday, April 28, 2026

King Donald's War, Part 5. After 13/15 U.S. deaths, Hundreds of Iranian deaths, $50B spent fighting it, and a massive increase in the price of oil, King Donny surrenders to the Iranians. The "If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied" edition.

April 8,2026

What MAGA wizard King Donny said at the start of the war:



What the befuddled demented agreed to as an a starting point now:


The MAGA's I know and read about are already bragging this up as another example of Trump brilliance.  This demonstrates how completely brainwashed MAGA really is.  There is a Trump Derangement Syndrome alright.  It's what allows people who voted for no more overseas wars, lower prices, a return to (Calvinist) Christianity, and a deep belief in a conspiracy to keep the Epstein files hidden vote for a man who has now waged two wars, surrendered to a Muslim theocracy, caused higher prices, while hiding the Epstein files and living a life contrary to the Gospels to be worshipped no matter what he does.

We lost this war, completely.  We not only lost it for us, we lost it for Israel too.  Israel, which duped Donny into the war, deserved it.  The American people did not.

Thirteen American servicemen died for nothing whatsoever, other than an attempt at the greater glory of Trump.  Their lives were wasted. Their deaths didn't serve the nation, but one man.  Six were Army National Guardsmen.  Six were members of the USAF.

No Trumps or Musks, or the children of the rich, died.  If you visited Epstein Island, your family wasn't fighting.

And by the way, the oligarchs grew richer during the war, due to timely made trades and a rise in the price of oil, which made regular Americans poorer.

Trump once claimed that veterans were suckers.  The veterans of this war are.  But more than that, those who voted for Trump were proven to be.  There was no excuse to support him in the last election and there's no excuse not to remove him now.  

Before the war Iran was a theocracy.  It still is.

Before the war the Iranian people wanted freedom. They still do, and still lack it.

Before the war Iran could launch missiles and drones at their enemies. They still can.

Before the war Iran had 1000 pounds of uranium.  It still does.

Before the war the Strait of Hormuz was open.  Now Iran gets to charge a toll for its passage.

During the war Iran shipped more oil at a higher price than it did before the war.

The names of the thirteen known men and women who gave their lives, not for their country but for Donald Trump, are:

CWO Robert Marzan
SFC Nicole Amor
SFC Noah Tietjens
Sgt Declan Coady
Maj. Jeffrey O'Brien
Cpt. Cody Khork
Sgt. Benjamin Pennington
Maj. John "Alex" Klinner
Cpt. Ariana Savino
TSgt. Ashley Pruitt
Cpt. Seth Koval
Ct. Curtis Angst
TSgt. Tyler Simmons

Only some of the names of the 170 some Iranian girls the U.S. killed during the war are known.  Those names, including a few of the names of their teachers, are:

1. Hana Dehqani, eight years old

2. Fatemeh Salari, 34 years old

3. Reza Habashian, seven years old

4. Arya Bahadori, nine years old

5. Ali Asghar Zaeri, eight years old

6. Zahra Bahrami, seven years old 

7. Ahmad Soltani, eight years old

8. Hamed Par-ashegh-nezhad, seven years old

9. Fatemeh Yazdan-panah, young girl, age unknown

10. Mahdis Nazari, seven years old

11. Athena Chamani-nezhad, six years old

12. Amirghasem Zaeri, seven years old

13. Fatemeh Dorazehi, 10 years old

14. Arad Ahmadizadeh, eight years old 

15. Saman Karimzadeh, seven years old

16. Fatemeh Shahdadi, age unknown

17. Nadia Shahmiri, nine years old

18. Parham Ranjbari, nine years old

19. Mahmoud Gholamyani, 35 years old

20. Fatemeh Rahdar, 10 years old 

21. Amir-Hassan Rasouli, eight years old

22. Zahra Behrouzi, eight years old

23. Mohammadhatam Raisi, 10 years old

24. Asna Raisi, 12 years old 

25. Benyamin Jangjou, eight years old

26. Mohammad-Sadra Zarei, eight years old 

27. Maryam Pazark, 10 years old

28. Liana Mohammadi, seven years old

29. Mandana Salari, 29 years old

30. Sara Shayesteh, five years old

31. Zoha Pasand, eight years old

32. Esra Zakeri, nine years old

33. Salma Zakeri, six years old

34. Fatemeh Taherifard, 29 years old

35. Zahra Ansari, seven years old

36. Fatemeh Fadavi, 10 years old 

37. Mahna Zarei, two months old

38. Athareh Zarei, 10 years old

39. Alireza Zarei, nine years old

40. Mohammadreza Shahsavari, eight years old

41. Samira Basarde, 38 years old

42. Ehsan Saleminia, six years old

43. Fatemeh Zahra Karimi, seven years old

44. Zeynab Bahrami, 10 years old

45. Mohammad Shah-dousti, eight years old

46. Reza Barani, seven years old

47. Athena Ahmadzadeh, 10 years old

48. Khadijeh Darvishi, nine years old

49. Roqayyeh Karimi, 42 years old

50. Reza Ranjbar, six years old 

51. Marzieh Bashiri-far, 38 years old

52. Mohammad-Mehdi Chegini, 10 years old

53. Mohammadian Bahrami, 17 years old

54. Ali-Akbar Karyani Pak, eight years old

55. Hananeh Mehdikhah, seven years old

56. Fereshteh Sangarzadeh, 44 years old 

57. Mohammad-Ali Karyani Pak, seven years old

58. Parsa Mokhtari-nasab, 12 years old

59. Arina Arab-Kish, eight years old

60. Makan Nasiri, 12 years old

61. Esra Farahi-Zadeh, young girl, age unknown

About half of the American lives were due to a mid air accident, but they're just as dead as they would be had they died fighting.  All of the Iranian lives lost that are listed are due to a targeting accident.

What the death toll for anybody in Lebanon, which opened up as a theatre of war while this was going on, we don't probably really know.

May the perpetual light shine upon them.

If any question why we died, 
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

None of these people had a choice in the offering of their lives for Trump's desperate attempt to have a legacy.  American voters do have a choice on allowing him to continue to kill in an attempt to gain one, however.  They'll have that choice in November, and through their members of Congress, they have a sort of choice now.  The second it becomes clear to Republican members of Congress that their phony jobs are in danger by supporting a madman, they'll suddenly have never supported him. 


April 9, 2026

Nothing is going through the Straits of Hormuz yet. . . a sign that shippers doubt the ceasefire will hold.

And it hasn't in Lebanon, where Israel continues to conduct operations arguing, logically enough, that it doesn't apply there anyway.

April 13, 2026

Well negotiations are going badly so now King Donny is threatening to blockade Iranian ports.

The world's worst dealmaker screws up the Iran negotiations

Forget the "Art of the Deal” myth.

April 17, 2026

There apparently is an agreement for a ceasefire in Lebanon.

April 18, 2026

A suspicious package caused a lockdown on parts of F. E. Warren yesterday.

Related?  I don't know, but then, I don't know.

The Straits of Hormoz were announced open yesterday, and then Iran announced that they are under strict Iranian control today.

April 20, 2026

The United States announced a second round of talks in Pakistan and even discussed the delegation, with Trump claiming the parties were close to a deal.

Iran said nope, it wasn't going to any talks.

April 21, 2026

Some reporters are indicating that the US and Iran were close to a deal to end the war and that it was blown up by Trump's tweeting.

April 22, 2026

Trump was going to rain down destruction if things weren't moving yesterday, yadda yadda, yadda. . .


On other matters related to Mad King Donald's War, there are persistent rumors that recently he asked for the nuclear codes and was denied them by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Did that happen?  We just don't know.  If it did, we are way past the point where the 25th Amendment needs to be invoked.  But again, we don't know.

April 23, 2026

More head's rolling in the DoD:

It's well known that Hegseth has the Secretary of the Army in his sights but hasn't been able to pull that off yet.

Interesting . . . 

In other news, Iran is reporting that its Revolutionary Guards seized to vessels. Granted, that's not the Iranian Navy, but it does show that Iranian forces are more resilient than the US claims.

April 24, 2026

Trump's war on the global food supply

Just the latest moral and logistical atrocity.

April 25, 2026

Talks that were supposed to start today, aren't.

April 26, 2026

News has leaked that an Iranian Air Force F5 hit a US base in Kuwait awhile back.

The F5 was a great airplane.  They haven't been made since 1987 but they're in the class of weapons, like the A10, that just keeps on keeping on.

The interesting thing here is that we've supposedly completely destroyed the Iranian Air Force and Navy, and yet the Iranians are still capable of flying (they were pretty limited in this before the war) and putting small boats in the sea.  In order to really defeat Iran, we would have to be troops on the ground, and the Iranians will fight.

April 27, 2026

Guests and panelist on This Week made it clear that the momentum with the war is now with Iran and that if proceed on the current path, Iran will come out of the war stronger than they went in it.  

April 28, 2026

It's hardly been noticed, in part because of the attack at the Correspondence Dinner, but the US is on the verge of basically formally surrendering to Iran and leaving Iran a more powerful nation than it was when the war started.

Trump Blinked

This will close out this edition.  The man who is attributed with the Art of the Deal, which of course was ghostwritten, is being shown the Art of the Squeal by a nation that's not impressed with him, and which is run by people vastly more intelligent than he is.  He's going to surrender.  He won't call it that, but that's what he's about to do.

And with the surrender imminent, we'll go on to a new edition of this thread. 

Last edition:

King Donald's War, Part 4. The Raving Madman threatens to resort to mass war crimes.

Wednesday, December 31, 1969

Wars and Rumors of War, 2026. Part 5. Trump's forever war. King Donald's War, Part 1.

 


You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.

Matthew, Chapter 24.

We shall not enter into any of the abstruse definitions of War used by publicists. We shall keep to the element of the thing itself, to a duel. War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale. If we would conceive as a unit the countless number of duels which make up a War, we shall do so best by supposing to ourselves two wrestlers. Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: each endeavours to throw his adversary, and thus render him incapable of further resistance.

Carl von Clausewitz

The irony is that Trump could make a plausible case that this war is allowable under the Authorization to Use Military Force George W. Bush received in 2001. But symbolically that would mean Trump is continuing Bush’s “forever war.”

Regardless, Republicans aren’t just under a legal clock to get this thing over with, but a political one, too. Polling shows Americans, including many Republicans, have no thirst for a long conflict, which makes sense given that they were not asked to prepare for this war. Hence, the insistence that this war will be short and tidy.

The problem is that Iran knows this. That’s why they don’t have to win, they just have to ride out the bombings until the public or Trump loses patience with this very real war.

Jonah Goldberg, Republicans aren’t willing to call war in Iran what it is.

But they were very strongly involved and all of the people that died through the roadside bombs died and are right now walking around with no legs, no arms. A face that’s been so badly damaged.

Donald Trump, alleged commander in chief.

Unless otherwise noted, every item in this updated thread is on Mad King Donny's war on Iran.  Or not a war if you ask Sycophant Mike Johnson, Toady of the House.

March 12, 2026

New Hampshire National Guard’s 157th Air Refueling Wing in connection with the war with Iran.

Up to 17 ships have been hit by the Iranians in the Gulf of Hormuz.

Iran hit refinery targets in Oman.

The first week of Trump's war cost the $11.3 B.

$11.3B and they can still hit ships.

The US is releasing 172M bbls of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Oil opened today at $90.75.

And, not only is the war nowhere near ending, Iran is dictating terms to the United States and Israel, those being acknowledging Iran's "legitimate rights" are acknowledged, compensation for damages and strong international guarantees to prevent future attacks.

Iran would not have made those if it was anywhere near "surrendering" in any form.  Indeed, the last item strongly suggests that they've coordinated with China and Russia who would probably back that demand.  If the US accepts any variant of this, we're surrendering, but given that the war is a unilateral action by demented Donald Trump, and that the GOP will start panicking soon about this still going on in November, of which there's an excellent chance it will be, and prices are going to skyrocket enormously, and that his mind wonders, there's a pretty good chance he'll do it and declare victory, which nobody except the most deluded MAGA will believe.

This has gotten next to no press and right now, the concept of the U.S. surrendering to Iran seems absurd, but Donald Trump surrendered to the Taliban in the Afghan War and is simply not a very intelligent man.  As casualties mount and inflation ramps up, he'll look like a failure, which of course, he largely is.  Because of that, he'll grow anxious.  I don't put it past him at all to agree to some version of this, if not this.

Cont:  

Iran's Supreme Leader issued a statement vowing to avenge those killed in the first strikes and to keep hitting other states.

So, the war isn't over.  It's not close to over, and we have no idea how to win it.

March 13, 2026

Two acts of terrorism occurred yesterday.

A major Jewish synagogue was attacked by a U.S. citizen of Lebanese origin whose brother was killed last week in an Israeli raid there.

Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a former Virginia Army National Guardsman attacked a ROTC class at Old Dominion. He joined ISIL after his discharge from the Guard and had been previously convicted of plotting a terrorist attack.  The class instructor was killed before the ROTC cadets killed Jolloh.

These attacks are fairly clearly "lone wolf" type attacks, not sleeper cell attacks.  The probable result will be howling complaints by MAGA that every Muslim in the US needs to be deported.

I will note that the Muslim population in the country is really winning the stupid prize for playing the stupid game. They rallied to some degree to Trump as they were upset about Biden's support of Israel.  Well, now Gaza, which was the source of all of that, has been utterly flattened, Israel is waging war in Lebanon, and the US is in Iran.  This is one of those items like Wyoming conservatives and their support of the "health care" amendment to the Wyoming Constitution wondering if maybe they have the blood of aborted fetuses on their hands (they do). Muslims who supported Trump are partiallyr responsible for this.

Trump threatened the Iranian leadership yesterday, calling them in "deranged scumbags". That's real adult.

A KC135 went down over Iraq, killing the crew of four.

Figures in the administration are quietly backing away from claiming the war will result in regime change.  If it doesn't, it will have achieved utterly nothing, but then, we don't really know what the war is supposed to be about in the first place.

March 14, 2026

Is JD Vance Rooting for the Iran War to Fail?

Whatever Vance is or is not rooting for, the price of oil, now at $97/bbl, is definitely going to go up as the US hit a major Iranian petroleum loading facility yesterday, a purely economic target.  Going after Iranian petroleum infrastructure means the price rise will last for years, to at least some extent.

Indeed, riffing off of this, the satirical "The Onion" has Trump getting the Greenpeace award for making oil too expensive to use.  There's some truth to that.  Electric vehicles are starting to look pretty good as the world's petroleum supply gets systematically destroyed.

Indeed, somewhat related to that, we have this:

Although President Trump said seizing tankers would be a financial boon, the cost of maintaining just one aging ship has already reached $47 million.

We not only aren't making money from seizing tankers, we're spending far more on them than the contents of the oil they contained.

This really should have been obvious, but it does not appear that there's anyone in the administration who understands the petroleum industry whatsoever.  

Indeed, frankly, while Trump may be a businessman, the administration is amazingly dim on economics itself.  This probably shouldn't be a surprise as Trump is merely a real estate developer operating on inherited wealth.  M'eh.  

None of Trumps economic plans are working out.  We're losing jobs, businesses are not moving to the US like he claims, and we're about to get hit by inflation in a ramped up fashion.  Folks who bizarrely feel that Trump is some sort of super genius should read this:

Those folks should read this:

I Was Born Wealthy, And Know Rich People Don’t Work Harder Than You I never saw exceptional “hard work” or “intelligence” among the members of the class I was born into.

The gravity of the current situation can hardly be overemphasized.  Trump doesn't know what he's doing.  As far as anyone can tell, this war was launched as he thought it would be easy.  It's not turning out to be at all.  There's no plan on how to end the war and we don't really have solid war aims.  Pete Hegseth and his company have a radical Calvinist view of what they'd like to do with US power.  Marco Rubio is probably chomping at the bits, in his too big shoes, hoping to invade Cuba.  We're nowhere near the end of any of this, including what will be endless price rises to fuel a war most Americans did not want and do not want now.

Cont:

As if any more evidence was needed that Trump had utterly no idea whatsoever about what he was doing, we have this:


Last week Trump rudely dismissed a vague suggestion from the UK that it might send ships to the region as we didn't need the help of Allies when we'd already won the war.

Today, Trump is begging for the help of allies.

March 14, 2026, cont.

Edgar Paxon's depiction of the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  More thought appears to have gone into the deployment of the 7th Cavalry in this July 1876 event than went into "what if the Iranian regime doesn't collapse when we attack" this month.

An editorial note.

When we started tracking Wars and Rumors of War as a series, the United States was not in a full blown war.  Indeed, back in 2020, when the series started, the U.S. wasn't really in any major conflicts at all.  That first entry is here:

Wars and Rumors of Wars


The first mention of the U.S. in the context of a war in that thread was in an entry on a prospective war with China over Taiwan, something that remains very much a possibility.

Now, the U.S. was to some degree at war, but in a minor way. We still had troops in Afghanistan although Trump had sealed the fate of that war by surrendering to the Taliban.  And a U.S. military mission remained in Iraq and Syria, as they still do.  Still, these missions did not meet the definition of war by any reasonable standard. The tread didn't really anticipate tracking anything major, let alone a major war involving the United States.

That first changed with Putin's invasion of Ukraine, bringing about the Russo Ukrainian War.  That ongoing conflict remains a very serious one, one which a serious President would be aiding Ukraine to help bring about a Ukrainian victory.  

We don't have a serious President.

We have King Donald, an octogenarian with dementia who admires Putin.

And now we have our own major war.

Given that, the time has come to sperate out the two big wars, Czar Vlad's war on Ukraine, and King Donald's war on Iran, into separate training threads.  We should have done that when we started this entry, rather than try a Part 5 to the Wars and Rumors of War series for 2026.  However.  Every single entry here is on Kind Donald's War, so we'll run with this and make it a joint entry until something on the world stage gives us an entry for Part 6 that doesn't involve Iran, or Ukraine.  The Russo Ukrainian War will also have a separate thread.

This also gives me a little more room to freely comment on both ongoing wars.  I'll just note now that King Donald's War will stand as a monument to hubris for the ages.  No plan to win it, not plan to get out, the Iranians were supposed to just quit.

Incredible.

Czar Vlad's war has a different set of lessons, one being that the Russian Army has always sucked.  The Japanese defeated it in the Russo Japanese War, the Germans in World War One and darned near in World War Two.  They never got over their own propaganda about winning the Second World War are now bogged down, and losing.

To paraphrase an older judge I heard the other day, well, if things look bad, at least we have a front row seat to the Apocalypse after all these years. 

cont:

The U.S. has instructed Americans to leave Iraq after a second attack on the embassy there.

The Administration seems to have been caught flat footed all the way around.  It didn't warn anyone, and it didn't bother to get the support of the American people.  It seems to have thought things would be over by now.

Domestically, it seems pretty clear J. D. Vance let it leak that he wasn't in favor of the war.  As the Heather Cox Richardson item below notes, this administrations leaks pretty severely anyway.  But this is pretty remarkable.

There's a fair amount of "this wasn't my idea" going on right now, and no wonder.  A week into the war, there's no end in sight and, frankly, Iranian predications of oil hitting $200/bbl don't seem that far fetched.  Terrorism is ramping up.  Things aren't looking good.

March 16, 2026

King Donny was in fit mode over the weekend, threatening NATO if they don't help with the Straits of Hormuz and begging China for help.

Nobody is promising to send ships. Why would they?  The US even asking is proof that this was wasn't thought out.  What China would probably like to see if the US commit to keeping the straits open and tie up the U.S. Navy.

Iran rejected opening up a dialog with the United States and hit an oil target in the UAE.

Iran's Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is reportedly in Russia where he received surgery.

Last edition:

Wars and Rumors of War, 2026. Part 4. Sumer and Elam.

Subsidiarity Economics 2026. The Times more or less locally, Part 2. The "War, what's it good for?" edition.


February 28, 2025

War, huh, yeah

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing, uhh

War, huh, yeah

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing

Edwin Starr.  War, 1970.

Oil is at $67.29.

It'll go up over the next several days with the US and Israel ineffectually rocketing Iran, and Iran ineffectually rocketing the entire Arabian Peninsula in a war that's going to get much, much, worse.

War, what's it good for?  Well it's good for raising the prices of everything, that's for sure.

A local headline:

Company eyes Wyoming for massive crude oil pipeline

Pipelines create a lot of work while they're being built, although usually the pipeliners are from out of state.

March 3, 2026.

Oil is at $76.08.

Wyoming oil is oddly, still under $58.00/bbl.

March 4, 2026


Obviously everything is going great.


March 6, 2026

Brent Crude:  $90/bbl.

March 9, 2026
There is no precedent for this. The sky is the limit.
Neil Atkinson, former head of oil at the International Energy Agency.

Don't worry, the American Supreme Leader has declared that this is a very small price for you schmucks to pay.


I thought we'd already ended the Iranian nuclear threat?

Well, we did, but didn't, the Dear Leader declares.  So enjoy your higher price at the pump and remember, no Trumps will be harmed in the war, so it's all okay. That's the important thing.

Wyoming crude is at $75.00/bbl.

In spite of what his admirers seem to think, everything Trump touches, just turns to shit.

Cont:

Wild market today.  Oil went up to $119/bbl and has since fallen to $90/bbl, as there's indications the administration might do something.  Some financial analysts feel that petroleum may be reaching the "demand destruction" stage. 

Cont:

I've worried, and warned, about this:


As previously noted, I assume Iran has sleeper cells.  It's surprised me that they haven't activated them, but then, once you do, you probably only get to do it once.

Let's hope they aren't activating anything, or better yet, that they don't have any.

March 11, 2026

Headline in the CST:

Trump’s claim of ‘roaring’ US economy not backed by data 

 2026 has kicked off with job losses, rising gasoline prices

Sen. Roger Marshall on high gas prices: "Freedom is not free. Americans are gonna have to make some sacrifices."

Quite a statement in support of a war Americans didn't want launched by an oligarch who doesn't even drive.

Petroleum prices are a price leader, if they go up, given as all goods that are moved in this country are moved via a petroleum fueled thing, the price of everything goes up. So does the price of farming, so  the price of food goes up.

March 13, 2026

Trump Removes Sanctions on Russia to Help Oil Flow Amid Iran Conflict

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said it was “unfortunate” that the move could benefit Russia, but maintained that it was only for the short term.

The Trump administration seems to have no grasp on what it is doing at all.

March 14, 2026

It's not just oil. Here comes Hormuz inflation.

Garden supplies, birthday balloons and semiconductors could get hit by price inflation or shortages.

The gravity of this can't be overemphasized.  Crude oil is up 47%, so far.  Fuel prices are going to go up. The boneheads running the war hit a fuel loading island yesterday.  Fertilizer is going to go up, and food production down.  

It's clear Trump thought this war would be over in a few days, even though we know that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs warned against the war.  This is going to go on for months. Prices will continue to climb.

Trump hasn't really been correct on a single thing he's done in his second term so far.  This is the shit icing on the shit cake.  It's going to be extremely bad.

March 16, 2026

Something that Americans seemingly failed to take note in the Trump economy, which has been backwards looking, is that the rest of the world has been rushing into an electric future.

Contrary to what Donald Trump imagines, China is investing in wind power like crazy and now over 50% of new vehicles sold in China are electric.

The current war will accelerate those efforts everywhere but here, and as a result, we'll get further and further behind the curve.

This is what rule by demented octogenarians and their acolytes produced.

March 17, 2026

Wartime oil spike likely portends more bad than good for oil-rich Wyoming

Last edition:

Subsidiarity Economics 2026. The Times more or less locally, Part 1. The reap what you sow edition.