The Trump administration has been saying for a while that as many as nine million barrels of oil a day are traversing the Strait of Hormuz. That claim has been “fact checked” and derided by just about everyone. …
Only–oops–it turns out that President Trump and Secretary Wright, one of his cabinet’s most impressive members, were right all along, as Kpler now confirms:
“An average of 8.6 million barrels of oil a day have been flowing through the Strait of Hormuz — more than previously reported, maritime analyst firm Kpler confirmed in a new update that matches estimates from the Trump administration.
***
“Kpler and other trackers had initially put the number closer to 5 million, but new data includes “dark transits,” where ships turn off their transponders and secret ship-to-ship transfers, which the group wasn’t previously tracking.
“The nature of the transits left Kpler and other analysts to report only a handful of crossings every day, figures that were picked up by media outlets and used to point out the discrepancy between what was being reported and what the Trump administration was claiming.
“The White House has long-maintained that the data firms were missing a chunk of the exports due to the dark transits, with Kpler now confirming the fact as the dark ships start reappearing and painting a clearer picture of the oil flow.”
I seem to recall a considerable amount of discussion on this blog in the past about this topic.
They celebrated the killing of Charlie Kirk. They made a hero out of Luigi Mangione. They were completely okay with the murder of a young couple who happened to be Jewish. And now some are celebrating the murder of a young mother who happened to have been a bank executive at Bank of America.
University of Pennsylvania grad Erin Piacenti, 32, of Chester, NJ, posted a touching photo only four days before her murder of herself smiling broadly while holding her infant and standing with her husband — and wrote how happy she was, the New York Times reported.
Piacenti, also a Fordham Law School graduate who ended up working for Bank of America, said in the post that she was grateful for getting five months off to care for her new daughter, according to the outlet. …
The banking exec was knifed to death by mentally disturbed mom of three Pamela Cisneros, 49, during a random attack Monday afternoon in the heart of Manhattan’s theater district. Cisneros also stabbed and wounded another passerby before cops shot her dead.
The perp had a known history of mental illness, so this case is also still another example of a failure of that system. The police tried to tase Cisneros, but the taser had no effect on her.
The NY Post has written many articles about this horrific incident, including this editorial:
The Times Square stabbing maniac should not have been walking free: Court records and social-media posts sounded blaring alarms that she needed help . . . but progressives fight tooth and nail against involuntary commitment, no matter how many innocents like Erin Piacenti die.
It’s bad enough that obviously homicidal people such as Cisneros are walking the streets. It’s horrific that anyone on the far left celebrates such killings based on the race and jobs of the victims. But this has been going on for quite some time. It’s the same impulse that led to the killing fields of Cambodia, which class enemies (including people who merely wore eyeglasses) were slaughtered:
Once the Khmer Rouge took power, they instituted a radical reorganization of Cambodian society. This meant the forced removal of city dwellers into the countryside, where they would be forced to work as farmers, digging canals and tending to crops. Gross mismanagement of the country’s economy led to shortages of food and medicine, and untold numbers of people succumbed to disease and starvation. Families were also split up. The Khmer Rouge created labor brigades, assigning groups depending on age and gender. This policy resulted in hundreds of thousands of Cambodians starving to death.
… Because the Khmer Rouge placed a heavy emphasis on the rural peasant population, anyone considered an intellectual was targeted for special treatment. This meant teachers, lawyers, doctors, and clergy were the targets of the regime. Even people wearing glasses were the target of Pol Pot’s reign of terror.
This is also an impulse I recall from the terrorism in the US during the late 1960s and early 1970s. I very much doubt that our present-day young people of the leftist variety know much if anything of this history except perhaps to applaud it. And I also doubt that the Cambodian killing fields or the earlier war of the Soviets against the kulaks are widely taught in many of our US colleges, except perhaps to be excused and/or justified.
Most garden-variety Democrats probably aren’t applauding killings such as that of Piacenti or championing Luigi Mangione, but there’s a not-insignificant group of leftists who are. Plus, it is the case that a great many of those garden-variety Democrats routinely call for the murder of President Trump. There is a bloodthirstiness there that is chilling.
The analogy isn’t perfect. But I think it’s a good one:
Vance’s strength is his wit, intellect, and gift for political framing. He’s a verbal sharpshooter who decimated Tim Walz in their vice-presidential debate, and Jewish Republicans surely applauded his withering takedown of El-Sayed. …
Vance came across as reasonable, sincere, fair-minded, and respectful. He acknowledged Israel’s importance to American foreign policy, praised it as an ally, and connected the rise of antisemitism to unchecked Third World immigration — traditionally, one of the GOP’s most unifying issues.
Best of all, he did it without pandering.
But on the other hand, Vance failed to separate himself from Tucker Carlson, whom many Jewish Republicans feel is just as much of a dangerous antisemite as El-Sayed. The event’s emcee, ex-Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), gave him a golden opportunity to denounce Carlson’s rhetoric.
Vance declined, opting to pivot to Nick Fuentes and Joe Rogan …
By failing to cleanly separate himself from Hasan Piker, El-Sayed has shot himself in the foot. He’s now dogged by Piker everywhere he goes — and every time Piker says something offensive, El-Sayed is back on his heels. …
But what’s true about Piker is also true about Carlson: He monetizes outrage and controversy to stay in the headlines, too. That’s his business model as well.
Which means, JD Vance and Abdul El-Sayed share the same political vulnerability.
It’s puzzling why Vance refuses to bandage his wound. It wouldn’t take much. Just two or three sentences.
All he’d have to say is that Carlson has changed — and as a Christian, Vance prays for Carlson’s redemption — but OF COURSE he vehemently disagrees with Carlson about Trump being the antichrist, a slave, and/or Israel “destroying” the United States.
Carlson isn’t some quiet personal friend of Vance’s, he’s a major figure who is (or used to be) on the right, and he is a disgusting blood-libeling Jew-hater who is vocal about it nearly on a daily basis. Vance’s refusal to even criticize him in that regard is very telling, in my opinion.
Vance sometimes utters words that indicate he’s an Israel-supporter, but he has also said many things having nothing to do with Tucker Carlson that show a compromised support of Israel which is sometimes more like the position of a politician on the left than one on the right. I’ve written about it before; please see this from about a month and a half ago. In that post, I quote Lee Smith, who had written:
During his grievance-fueled performance on Rogan’s podcast, Vance lashed out once again at the Jews, alleging, among other things, that there’s an Israeli-funded plot to undermine his negotiations with Iran; some Israelis want war indefinitely for the sake of endless war; and the U.S. government has probably destroyed evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad operative. …
Now that the Iran deal that Vance favored has blown up and he’s taking heat for it, he’s showing that no one puts baby in a corner. So, he resurrects Epsteingate, predictably inspiring the dumbest people in America, and around the world, to flood social media with details from an information operation targeting Trump.
I also think Vance has shown some naivete about Iran.
I am assuming that Vance’s motive for all of this is to not alienate the Tucker wing of the GOP. That’s the kindest interpretation.
My ex-husband was doing better, but now there’s a new problem and it presents several dilemmas and decisions to be made. So I’m going over to the hospital now, and probably won’t be posting until tonight.
Prayers would be good. He’s not at death’s door, but he might need to have another surgery very soon and is not in any shape to have it because of the pneumonia that has been improving but is certainly still present.
UPDATE 9/2 at 1:30 PM: Nothing new to report so far today. The idea is to try to hold off on the surgery and get him stabilized first, which could take a while.
According to whistleblower Daniel Wiesenfeld, a former Brooklyn prosecutor who works in the Investor Protection Bureau, James produced her chosen defendant and ordered her staff to find a crime, any crime.
Wiesenfeld sent an email to call on fellow lawyers not to assist James further in weaponizing her office. He recounted his own experience as a prosecutor in her office and how Bureau Chief Shamiso Maswoswe allegedly directed him to target “Trump himself, Truth Social, Hewlett Packard (DOJ approved merger) . . . without having a credible reason for targeting the organizations and individuals.”
He added that “If you believe Trump is using the [Department of Justice] attorneys to prosecute his enemies and further his political interests, you should find it equally troubling that Tish [James] is doing exactly the same thing.”
In his blistering email, Wiesenfeld reminded his colleagues that they have other things to do than hunt down James’ enemies. While she wastes “significant public taxpayer dollars to target convenient public enemies,” Wiesenfeld reminded them that there is “rampant nonprofit homeless shelter fraud and antisemitic crimes in and around synagogues.”
Instead, James concentrated on an absurd civil case against Trump where the “victims” made money, lost nothing, and wanted more business from the Trump corporation.
We’ve known this for a long long time. The basic idea is not new and in fact, James campaigned on it. She had identified the criminal and all she had to do was find the crime. The one she and her underlings found was absurd, underscoring how difficult it was to come up with a crime for which to prosecute Trump. They had to essentially make one up.
So, what is new about this? The details are being fleshed out via a whistleblower.
Turley points out, correctly I believe, that most on the left still applaud her:
James is unlikely to be deterred by Wiesenfeld’s email. She knows that the far left still prefers performative lawfare to actual enforcement of fraud and other laws. Some voters would willingly watch billions stolen in program fraud in exchange for just one more trophy Trump conviction.
In fairness to James, she has always been open about what she is and what she was offering.
Absolutely.
Not only that, but some of the left are recipients of the largesse of that fraud. So of course they don’t mind – it’s a win/win situation for them.
[NOTE: I recently heard a bunch of very garden-variety non-DSA Democrats talk with relish about wanting to impeach Trump. Again. For what, they didn’t say; it was just assumed this would be a good thing.]
In Germany, there are efforts to ban the AfD (or at least its more extreme elements) as it becomes even more popular with the volk:
With Alternative for Germany (AfD) surging in polls ahead of next month’s regional elections, establishment parties are calling for a ban on the right-wing party. “High-ranking German politicians have advocated for proceedings to ban the most radical regional branches of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party,” German public broadcaster DW News reported Sunday.
For years, the German left has called for a ban on the AfD, but these demands are now reaching a fever pitch as Berlin’s political class dreads a looming right-wing victory.
Over a year ago I wrote this post on efforts to weaken the AfD’s legislative power by denying the party the committee leadership to which it was entitled by its victories in elections. In that post, I quoted the following rationale that’s been given:
The rationale given for this anti-democratic coup is a recent designation of the AfD as a right-wing extremist party. On May 2, 2025, four days before parliamentary power was to change hands, outgoing Interior Minister Nancy Faeser from the Social Democratic Party announced that Germany’s domestic spy agency (the BfV) had slapped that label on the AfD, based on a 1,000-page secret dossier. According to press leaks, the dossier appeared to consist of public statements by AfD leaders, many already chewed over endlessly by the party’s opponents, relating to Germany’s mass migration problem.
AfD representatives have asserted, for example, that Germans have a cultural history tied to their ethnic and national identity; that this history and identity deserve protection; and that unchecked illegal migration threatens national cohesion.
The dossier also contained statements “implying,” as a scandalized Reuters put it, that “immigrants from Muslim countries were more likely to be criminals.” Actually, those AfD statements didn’t “imply” that immigrants from Muslim countries were more likely to be criminals; they asserted that fact outright, because that is what government crime statistics overwhelmingly show.
Germany’s past causes it to be understandably wary of parties that speak of the special German identity and the need to preserve it. But what is the AfD actually advocating? From what I’ve read, it sounds somewhat similar to MAGA regarding immigration – but of course, the favorite tactic of MAGA’s leftist opponents here is to call MAGA “Nazis.”
… that the party’s more radical, ethnically based wing rejects the constitutional principle. In their view, this wing should be subject to legal scrutiny.
They refer to this faction of the AfD as “völkisch” — a German adjective derived from das Volk, meaning “the people.” The völkisch movement was an ethno-nationalist movement and precursor to Nazism. Today, the AfD is often accused of holding völkisch views because its officials repeatedly distinguish between Germans with and without a history of migration.
Banning a very popular opposition party is highly unlikely to cause its members to just quietly take it.
Recently I was thinking about Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and that led me to the following video. A relatively short portion of it discusses the more general topic of utopian literature versus dystopian literature, and the speaker points out that those visions share collectivist characteristics and that therefore utopias and dystopias are two sides of the same coin, and that efforts at creating utopias lead inevitably to dystopic nightmares.
Here’s the excerpt
I once attended a philosophy class of my son’s that consisted of a discussion of Candide’s Dr. Pangloss’ insistence that this is “the best of all possible worlds.” That statement seems absurd on the face of it – how could it be? But by the end of the class it seemed quite plausible that in fact, this is the best of all possible worlds – accent on the word possible.
Here’s a study indicating that Americans are lonely and young Americans are the loneliest of all. It’s from quite a while ago, 2018. But it’s not atypical of the sort of figures such polls often get, and this one has some interesting generational data:
More than half of survey respondents – 54 percent – said they always or sometimes feel that no one knows them well. Fifty-six percent reported they sometimes or always felt like the people around them “are not necessarily with them.” And 2 in 5 felt like “they lack companionship,” that their “relationships aren’t meaningful” and that they “are isolated from others.”
The survey found that the average loneliness score in America is 44, which suggests that “most Americans are considered lonely,” according to the report released Tuesday by the health insurer…
The latest survey also found something surprising about loneliness in the younger generation. “Our survey found that actually the younger generation was lonelier than the older generations,” says Dr. Douglas Nemecek, the chief medical officer for behavioral health at Cigna.
Members of Generation Z, born between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, had an overall loneliness score of 48.3. Millennials, just a little bit older, scored 45.3. By comparison, baby boomers scored 42.4. The Greatest Generation, people ages 72 and above, had a score of 38.6 on the loneliness scale.
I have no idea why anyone would be surprised at the fact that younger people are most lonely and older people least. I would bet that when the “Greatest Generation” members were young, they were even less lonely than they are now, because old age sometimes does lead to increased loneliness (and by the way, people over 72 are not Greatest Generation members for the most part; they are the “Silent Generation” and Boomers. The Greatest Generation is mostly dead, and its very youngest members are 97 at this point.) But as a generation, the Greatest and the Silents tended to have more ties to other people than young people do today.
I think of my parents and their friends. My parents were so old they weren’t even the “Greatest”—according to the chart, the were the “Lost” generation. They grew up in a certain community and lived there all their lives, although my mother briefly moved to New England to be near me in her extreme old age. The community in which they lived was tight – that is, few people moved away and the entire crowd had known each other since at least high school, with just a few newcomers who had entered mostly through marriage.
This community wasn’t just tight and stable, it was also enormous. My parents knew – really, really knew – hundreds of people. My mother spoke on the phone almost daily to ten people or more, and my parents socialized most nights of the week. Some of this socializing wasn’t strictly social, but involved projects and volunteer work and fundraising.
I thought this was normal. Maybe back then, it was. Now, it’s not. I have moved quite a few times, and what’s more many of my friends have moved away, so that now they are spread out (the survivors among them, that is) all over the country. Phone and email and internet can theoretically keep far-flung people in touch, but the reality is that distance and lack of community makes it much easier for friendships to fade. Proximity isn’t everything, but it’s a lot. And few of my friends know each other, so there’s little community there.
One of the things that article I linked to at the beginning of this post fails to mention is that loneliness has two basic dimensions. A person can score high in one but low in another. For example, I would never say my relationships aren’t meaningful or close. They are. Nor would I say that no one understands me, except in the general sense that no one completely understands anybody (including himself or herself).
What I would say, though, and do say, is that I lack acquaintances in the neighborhood, a social mix of casual friends who get together. This is despite a host of efforts I’ve made to join various groups and associations and develop such relationships. And although I have three good friends nearby, they are extraordinarily busy and/or quite ill and I don’t see them as often as I’d like.
So when I took that survey referred to in the study – the UCLA loneliness scale – I came out only “moderately lonely,” and just barely. In other words, apparently I’m actually a bit less lonely than most Americans. I’m almost positive that’s because my answers to all the questions about closeness indicated that I had quite a few people who are close to me, but my answers to the questions about socializing indicated loneliness.
Young people move around a lot move than people used to. They switch jobs more, they divorce more, they marry less and later, they have fewer children. Their entertainment and their affiliative behavior tends to be more solitary; the old Bowling Alone syndrome, which is about lack of community even more than lack of friends.
I have an online community: you. It’s wonderful, but it’s not the same.
“At my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, working closely with Highly Respected Interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and, through a partnership with private business, have secured majority US control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer,” the president wrote.
“This Historic Transaction MORE THAN DOUBLES American Oil Reserves, greatly increases our Oil Supply, and will substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans, long into the future, while helping to continue to set Venezuela on a course toward Tremendous Success and Great Prosperity,” he added.
This was not on my bingo card when I voted for Trump in 2024. But if it’s actually true, it’s quite a development.
From Rubio:
“For the Venezuelan people, this deal will bring nearly $100 billion in private investment, support thousands of high-paying jobs, and drive the reconstruction of Venezuela’s economy,” the secretary of state said.
Win/win? Too good to be true?
I had a college roommate who was an American born in Venezuela, whose father worked in the oil industry there. That’s how I learned, long ago, that the US had been instrumental in developing that country’s oil production, although the Venezuelans always owned the oil fields. You might say it was a mutually beneficial relationship, but Chavez ended it and also instituted other changes that deeply harmed the industry. The blows came from many decisions of Chavez’s; you can find much of the history here.
As for “Highly Respected” Interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, she seems to be willing to deal.
