Myles Standish’s Ghost

This is wild: Citrini sent a dude with $15,000 cash, recording sunglasses, and a pack of Cuban cigars to the Strait of Hormuz. What he found flips everything Wall Street thinks about the strait on its head. Every hedge fund, every macro desk, every retired general on CNBC is watching the same AIS shipping data to price Hormuz risk. The analyst signed a pledge at an Omani checkpoint promising not to gather information, then smuggled in a gimbal, a microphone kit, and a 150x zoom Leica camera past the border officer who inspected his bag. What he discovered on the ground: the AIS data everyone is trading on is missing roughly half of what's actually transiting the strait on any given day. Ships are going dark, spoofing destinations, broadcasting "CHINESE CREW OWNER" through transponder fields to avoid getting hit. Iran's ghost fleet is running 29+ laden tankers inside the Gulf with transponders off, moving an estimated $3B in crude to Malaysia since the war started. The entire market is pricing a "closed" strait off satellite imagery and transponder data that has a 50% blind spot. Every oil model, every supply forecast, every macro call built on AIS throughput numbers is working from a dataset that systematically overstates the disruption. When the signals deliberately go dark, the people staring at dashboards are the last to know what's happening. Citrini figured that out by putting a guy on a speedboat 18 miles from the Iranian coast while Shahed drones flew overhead. The gap between "what AIS says" and "what's actually transiting" is the most mispriced variable in energy right now.

Europe's disease is not a disease of America. It is a disease of World War 2. In 1946, after we rescued them from themselves and each other, Europeans crawled out of the rubble they had made of their continent, looked around at their mess, wept for a bit, and then formed the wrong conclusions. They decided that ethnic nations are bad. That patriotism is bad. That supporting your tribe, in preference to random strangers, is bad. They decided that these things had led to the horrors of global war and genocide in Europe itself, and so all vestiges of loyalty to one's own people must be stamped out. Nations were, forever afterward, to be post-ethnic, post-cultural legal and economic units filled with... well, anyone, really. A bunch of people who didn't, in fact shouldn't, share values, goals, morals, customs, or even a common language. Nations were to be mere fiefs, their boundaries determined by which set of political elites controlled them. America, having not been smashed to rubble in WW2, did not share this view. We saw WW2 as an expensive adventure in bailing out Europe, which we spent our treasure and our blood on (including my own grandfather's life, and his chance to ever see his grandson) precisely because we shared cultural and ethical values with the people we were rescuing. But they hate us for it. They see our patriotism as fascism precisely because they see all patriotism as fascism. Psychologists have long understood that humans respond to favors with gratitude only up until those favors become so great that they have no hope of repaying them. At that point, their gratitude turns to resentment. How dare we believe we did them a favor? How dare I believe that my father gave up his father so Europe could be safe, peaceful, and free? Don't we know that, because ${ELABORATE MENTAL GYMNASTICS}, we didn't do them any favors by fighting that war? Don't we know that, because ${ANY PATRIOTISM = HITLER}, our love of our country and favoring of its interests makes us fascist and problematic? Well, no. I don't know that. I don't think any European nation is our ally any more. Certainly, we have shared interests, but how much does that really matter, when they refuse to act in those shared interests, because they have come to believe that acting in your people's interest is bad? They hate us too much to work with us. They resent every ounce of the burden which they are asked to share. Our support has made Europe into a pack of idle welfare recipients, complete with sense of entitlement and self-destructive behavior. But if we didn't defend them... who would? Their native populations have been purged of all patriotism, and who would blame them if they didn't fight for ruling elites that hate them? Their imported third-world barbarians won't fight for them. The very idea is laughable. What's left? And what will make them wake up and think about these questions? Perhaps they need to dig themselves out of the rubble of another war.

I've done business all over the world. As an American, the most frustrating thing for me to deal with has been passive-aggressive cultures where what is said and what is actually done is a mismatch. Maybe there are sophisticated cultural cues I'm missing, but I find the practice of saying what you think someone wants to hear when you have no intent of actually doing that thing to be terribly dishonest. And I think that is what confuses so many non-Americans about Donald Trump. Donald Trump unambiguously and loudly tells you what he is thinking, forcefully tells you what he is about to do, then he does it. This is an alien and indecipherable method of communication in much of the world, but it is quintessentially American. As is Donald Trump.

Even/Especially men already established inside the system. You are a THREAT to them unless you have socially approved collateral (wife & kids) to take care of. The only exceptions are tech, where being gay is a membership card, and the military.

It's hard out there

🚨“WE GOT HIM! My fellow Americans, over the past several hours, the United States Military pulled off one of the most daring Search and Rescue Operations in U.S. History, for one of our incredible Crew Office Members, who also happens to be a highly respected Colonel, and who I am thrilled to let you know is SAFE and SOUND!” - President Donald J. Trump 🇺🇸

there is a lot of talk about wasps here on the everything app if you dont fall into one of these categories then youre out of your depth