Colpetty

Trump on Iran: They gave us a present today. And it was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money and I'm not going to tell you what that present is but it was a very significant prize. It said to me that we are dealing with the right people.

BREAKING: Volkswagen is in talks with Israel’s Iron Dome maker over a deal that would switch production at one of their factories from cars to missile defense, per FT. The German government is actively supporting the proposal.

Everyone is covering the force majeure. Everyone is covering the 13 million tonnes. Everyone is covering the gas prices and the geopolitics and the five-year timeline. My good friend Veron Wickramasinghe just asked the question nobody else is asking: how do you rebuild when the machines that make the molecules take three to four years to manufacture, ship through a closed strait, and commission in a war zone? Read what he found. Every LNG train at Ras Laffan requires high-purity nitrogen from Air Separation Units: cryogenic plants cooling air to minus 190 degrees to distil it into component gases. Pearl GTL needs 30,000 tonnes per day of pure oxygen from eight Linde-built ASUs. Each cold box: 470 tonnes, 60 metres tall. Lead time from contract to commissioning: three to four years. If destroyed, replacement arrives no earlier than 2029. But here is the choke point that Veron identified that nobody else has. The heart of every cryogenic ASU is a brazed aluminium plate-fin heat exchanger called a BAHX. These exchangers operate with temperature differentials of one to two Kelvin and require precision brazing in vacuum furnaces. Only five companies on Earth are qualified to manufacture them. Five. For every cryogenic heat exchanger in every air separation unit, every LNG train, every industrial gas facility, and every hydrogen plant on the planet. Fives Cryo in France. Kobelco in Japan. Linde in Germany. Sumitomo in Japan. Chart Industries in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Current lead times: 12 to 18 months or more. And their order books are already full. Veron was honest about what is confirmed and what is not. QatarEnergy CEO al-Kaabi confirmed LNG Trains 4 and 6 are damaged: 12.8 Mtpa offline, 3 to 5 year repairs, $20 billion annual revenue loss, force majeure up to 5 years. Shell confirmed Pearl GTL Unit 2 needs roughly one year of repair. What has NOT been confirmed is whether the ASUs themselves were destroyed. Shell’s one-year timeline is inconsistent with total ASU loss, which would require four to five years. Veron flagged this honestly and gave you the analysis both ways. And then he showed you the cascade nobody else sees. Qatar produces one-third of the world’s helium from the same facility. Helium is irreplaceable in semiconductor fabrication: cooling wafers, purging chambers, detecting leaks. Samsung and SK Hynix import 64.7 percent of their helium from Qatar. Spot prices have doubled. Liquid helium vaporises within 35 to 48 days. Fourteen percent of capacity is permanently damaged. The LNG trains, the ASUs, and the helium plants all sit on the same rock, fed by the same gas field, accessed through the same strait. One set of missile strikes on March 18 to 19 took out 17 percent of global LNG, threatened one-third of global helium, and exposed a supply chain that runs through five workshops in Germany, France, Japan, Italy, and Wisconsin with three-year lead times and full order books. This is what Veron understood that the headline analysts missed: the recovery is not constrained by money or political will. It is constrained by vacuum furnaces, aluminium metallurgy, and the physics of brazing at tolerances measured in single-digit Kelvin. You cannot accelerate physics. You cannot surge-produce a 470-tonne cold box. You cannot commission cryogenic equipment in a war zone. Five companies. Five workshops. Three-year lead times. Full order books. A closed strait. An active war. That is not a recovery timeline. That is a sentence. Read Veron’s full analysis. It is the most important thing written about this war that does not involve a missile.

Jim Hacker: Humphrey, I'm told there's a situation at Diego Garcia. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Only geographically, Prime Minister. Jim Hacker: Geographically? Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes. It's still in the Indian Ocean. Jim Hacker: Humphrey, Iran fired missiles at it! Sir Humphrey Appleby: Towards it, Prime Minister. Jim Hacker: Towards it? Sir Humphrey Appleby: One missile ceased to function and the other was intercepted. So the island remains entirely where it was. Jim Hacker: I'm not worried about the island moving! I mean the implications. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Ah. Strategically speaking, the implications are extremely stable. Jim Hacker: Stable?! Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes. Since nothing actually hit us, we can express grave concern without the administrative complications of retaliation. Jim Hacker: But the base is on British territory! Sir Humphrey Appleby: Indeed, Prime Minister. Which means we are in the enviable position of being attacked in principle while remaining uninvolved in practice. Bernard Woolley: It's what the Foreign Office calls a very tidy situation, Prime Minister. Jim Hacker: Tidy? Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes. Untidy situations are the ones where the missiles land.

My neighbor just had a baby, but it was born without ears. My son and I went to visit, and I warned him not to say anything about the ears or he’d get in trouble. My son looked into the crib and said, “What a beautiful baby, lovely hands, feet, and skin. How’s its eyesight?” The mother replied that the baby’s vision was perfect. My son said, “Good, because it would be in trouble if it needed glasses!”

Here's to all u beautiful people who have been down since Vaas. Thank u 💚🦂

US boars are contaminated because of rodenticides — and they turned blue. Hunters in Northern California were stunned when they dressed out wild pigs and found glowing neon-blue fat—an unmistakable sign of poisoning by a common rodenticide. The pigs, taken in Monterey County, had eaten bait containing diphacinone, an anticoagulant rodent killer that manufacturers dye bright blue for easy identification. Although diphacinone is considered less persistent than newer “super-toxic” rodenticides, it still accumulates in fat and remains lethal to anything that eats the poisoned animal. While the meat itself looks normal, the vivid blue lard has raised immediate food-safety alarms: contaminated pigs are unsafe for human or pet consumption, yet the discoloration is only visible after the animal is field-dressed. Wildlife officials say the incident exposes a much larger problem. Mountain lions, bobcats, foxes, coyotes, eagles, and even endangered northern spotted owls have all died after feeding on rodents killed by the same class of poisons. In response, California has sharply restricted many anticoagulant rodenticides and is pushing integrated pest management—using snap traps, owl boxes, habitat modification, and non-toxic repellents instead of broadcast poison. Authorities are now asking hunters and hikers to immediately report any unusually colored fat or organs in wildlife. The glowing blue pigs are a vivid, visible reminder that chemicals spread far beyond their intended target and can silently move up the food chain.

These breads aren't from Mordor