BTFD
21.9K posts
@JCBarraza2
“The moral of the story is you get one life. So do it all.” Bobby Axelrod
Senior White House advisers are telling Trump that his new Middle East war with Israel is very popular among Americans generally, even though the vast, vast majority of polling data shows exactly the opposite.
BREAKING: The world thought Hormuz was an oil story. Then it became an LNG story. If the damage assessment holds, it becomes a civilisation-input story that lasts half a decade. There is a difference between a shipping shock and a capacity shock that the market has not yet priced. A shipping shock traps molecules. The oil exists, the gas exists, the tankers are anchored, and when the strait reopens the molecules flow again. A capacity shock destroys molecules. The liquefaction trains that convert gas into LNG are physically damaged. The molecules cannot be produced even if every ship in the world is available to carry them. QatarEnergy’s CEO Saad al-Kaabi told Reuters that damage to Ras Laffan is severe. Repairs to impaired liquefaction capacity could take three to five years. Force majeure was declared on March 4 and has since escalated as the damage assessment worsened through March 18 and 19. Long-term contract buyers including Italy, Belgium, South Korea, and China face multi-year delivery disruptions. Shell declared force majeure on cargoes it resells from QatarEnergy. The market must now confront a possibility it has refused to model: that roughly 17 percent of Qatar’s 77 million tonne per annum capacity is not delayed but structurally impaired. JERA’s CEO stated that the global LNG market does not have the spare capacity to bridge the gap if Hormuz-linked supply is meaningfully lost. That single sentence reprices everything. If the replacement molecules do not exist in sufficient volume, the adjustment mechanism is not alternative supply. It is fuel switching, demand destruction, and rationing by balance-sheet strength. Rich buyers can pay more. Poor buyers cannot. The poor buyers are already breaking. Vietnam’s diesel is up 40 to 59 percent. Australia’s petrol is up 70 cents per litre. Sri Lanka is rationing fuel with QR codes at 15 litres per car per week, a four-day workweek, and Wednesday school closures. India raised LPG prices while importing 85 percent of its crude through a strait that is 90 percent shut. Gulf air cargo collapsed 79 percent. Jet fuel surged 58 percent. IndiGo and Akasa imposed surcharges. Vietnam Airlines warned of shortages from April. Ninety-five countries have reported petrol price increases since February 28. Ras Laffan is not just LNG. It is helium, urea, methanol, polyethylene, and sulfur. The downstream cascade from a multi-year Qatari impairment runs through semiconductor fabrication, pharmaceutical synthesis, phosphate fertiliser production, food packaging, and desalination. The facility that is damaged produces the molecules that four billion people depend on for chips, medicine, fertiliser, plastic, and drinking water. Europe’s post-2022 gas security was built on Qatari LNG replacing Russian pipelines. A structural impairment does not merely make gas expensive. It makes gas unavailable to industry. That is how an LNG shock becomes a deindustrialisation shock. BASF and Yara are already cutting fertiliser output. Russian LNG fills the gap at 18 to 22 percent of European imports. The country Europe sanctioned is the country Europe now depends on because the country Europe trusted was struck in a war Europe refused to join. Anyone arguing this resolves quickly now carries the burden of proof. They must explain where the replacement molecules come from when the world’s largest LNG hub is physically impaired, the strait is commercially closed, and the CEO of Asia’s biggest power buyer says there is no bridge. The market priced a shipping delay. The evidence demands a capacity repricing. The difference between those two words is measured in years, in trillions of dollars, and in whether the lights stay on. Full analysis: open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…
At the rate we are going, Muslims in the Middle East are going to accept Israel sooner than extremists on the political far Left and far Right in the USA will.
Today they're denouncing Joe Kent. Last week, it was Tucker. The week before, it was Candace. Before that, it was MTG. Before that, it was Massie. The Israel-First crowd will have you denouncing your own mother by next week.
@techdevnotes Grok 4.20.1 went live yesterday in a quiet release. Point releases of 4.20 are rolling out every 3 or 4 days, sometimes with big improvements.
Shocking new polling shows British Muslims prefer Iran, China and Russia to the US & Israel. This is alignment with despots, the ayatollahs, enemies of the UK, and the 'axis of resistance' - and it should worry us all. Great work from @rakibehsan see report @Policy_Exchange
NEW: Utah woman who wrote a book about grief after her husband died has been found guilty of murdering him. According to prosecutors, Kouri Richins put 5x the lethal dose of the synthetic opioid into a cocktail that her husband Eric Richins drank. Prosecutors also say Richins said she was $4.5 million in debt and thought that if she killed him, she would inherit his estate worth $4 million. She was also seeing another man. Richins attempted killing her husband on another occasion where she gave him a fentanyl-laced sandwich that made him black out. Before she was arrested in 2023, Richins published the book “Are You with Me?” and promoted it on local TV and radio stations. Prosecutors say this was an attempt to cover up the murder. Richins is scheduled to be sentenced on May 13.
