Les Wes

I'm going to keep posting this Alstair Begg clip "The Man on the Middle Cross" (less than four minutes in length) every Holy Week, because its message is true in 2026, it will be true in 2036 and it will be true in 3036. "If i take my eyes off the cross, I can then give only lip service to its efficacy while at the same time living as if my salvation depends upon me. And as soon as you go there it will lead you either to abject despair or a horrible kind of arrogance. And it is only the cross of Christ that deals both with the dreadful depths of despair and the pretentious arrogance of the pride of man that says you know, I can figure this out."

3 weeks ago I argued the US goal in Iran is to seize the global oil spigot. Venezuela in January -> Iran in February. Neutralize every supply channel outside the dollar system within 90 days. Achieve a compliant successor government and complete energy dominance. The oil thesis was the obvious layer. However, when you zoom out & view the last four years as a single sequence rather than isolated geopolitical events, the architecture of the grander US plan becomes visible. 1st was Europe, which laid the groundwork. The Ukraine conflict provided the justification for sanctions that collapsed Russian pipeline gas from 150 billion cubic meters to 40. Then Nordstream was destroyed, which rewired the entire European energy system permanently. The US went from supplying 28% of Europe's LNG in 2021 to 58% by 2025, exporting a record 111 million MTs, the 1st country in history to break 100 MT. Europe was transformed from a customer with options into a captive market now purchasing its survival in USD. 2nd was Syria. The fall of Assad severed the critical node connecting China's Belt & Road Initiative to the Mediterranean. The trilateral railway linking Iran, Iraq & Syria, designed to bypass Western maritime chokepoints, was completely destroyed. This isolated Iran geographically & cleared the path for what came next. 3rd was Venezuela. In January the US effectively took control of the world's largest heavy crude reserves. The US Gulf Coast has the most advanced refining complex on earth, specifically built for heavy sour crude. Phillips 66, Valero & the rest are now positioned to process hundreds of thousands of barrels of Venezuelan crude daily. The US captured a massive strategic reserve & solidified its position as the dominant exporter of refined petroleum products, an industry worth $110 billion in 2025 alone. Venezuela & Iran were the two major oil supply channels that existed outside the dollar system. Both produce heavy crude sold primarily to China & evaded US financial supervision. Both now being neutralized within 90 days, which leads us to.. 4th is Iran & the Middle East energy shock. Israel struck Iran's South Pars gas field, the world's largest natural gas reservoir. Iran retaliated against Qatar's Ras Laffan, the single largest LNG facility on earth, responsible for a fifth of global supply. QatarEnergy's own assessment is that 17% of export capacity is gone and recovery will take up to 5 years. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. European gas prices spiked 70%. Asian spot prices doubled. The only remaining scaled supplier? The United States. If Iran falls & a successor government is installed that the US controls or influences (the Delcy model described weeks ago) then roughly 40 to 45 million barrels per day of global production out of 103 million is effectively under US control. OPEC becomes irrelevant because the US coalition is now the marginal producer. Now add the gas dimension & it goes beyond oil. This war is solidifying the petrodollar system as it evolves into a hybrid petro/LNG-dollar. The old system was built on Saudi crude priced in USD. The new system is built on American crude plus American gas from the Gulf Coast, with no alternative supplier of comparable scale. The dependency is deeper because LNG infrastructure requires long term contracts & regasification terminals that lock buyers into supply relationships for decades. Europe & the Pacific allies (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc.) cannot pivot away as there is nowhere left to pivot to. They're now locked into the US energy system. The market confirms this. DXY went from 96 to 101. Gold down ~20% from its January all time high. Bitcoin down 20% on the year. Brent above $100. European & Asian institutions are liquidating precious metals and crypto to buy dollars because they need dollars to buy the only remaining scaled energy supply. The world is selling its gold to buy American energy in American currency. The dollar is now being weaponized through energy dependency. The structural repricing is happening regardless of how the conflict resolves. But the US grand strategy goes deeper.. Artificial intelligence is a physical industry. It runs on power and chips. Data centers require massive uninterrupted baseload electricity, primarily provided by natural gas. Semiconductor fabrication requires helium & rare earths. By choking the Strait of Hormuz & crippling Middle Eastern LNG & helium production, the US is systematically degrading China's ability to power its data centers & fabricate semiconductors at scale. The US is energy self sufficient, especially with newly captured Venezuelan reserves & expanding Gulf Coast capacity running on domestic gas. On the other hand, China is import dependent & every joule it imports effectively now transits chokepoints the US Navy controls.. Iran was the Belt & Road's overland energy bypass, the corridor that allowed China to mitigate the Malacca Trap. With Iran neutralized that corridor is severed. China faces a world where its compute infrastructure competes for scraps on a depleted global LNG market, while American data centers run at full capacity on domestic energy. Russia is next in the sequence. A post-war Iran reopening under US influence competes directly with Russia for the same refineries in China & India at lower cost. Iran's production costs are lower. Russia loses its last structural advantage in heavy crude & its economic lifeline. Additionally, under the Iran war cover, Ukraine has been opportunistically destroying Russian energy infrastructure & all signs point towards Russia being at the end of the line. The message from Washington becomes very simple: we dismantled two regimes in three months, your economy is about to get crushed, sign the Ukraine deal. Then Trump sits down with Xi holding every card. Complete energy dominance. The hybrid petro/LNG-dollar fortified, Iran cleared, Russia cornered, & China facing the Malacca Trap fully closed with no remaining energy bypass. Israel & the GCC are absorbing the kinetic cost of a conflict whose primary beneficiary, counter to the mainstream narrative, is actually America (First). Qatar offline for 5 years reprices the entire global gas market in favor of US exporters for the remainder of the decade. The Gulf states face years of rebuilding. Europe faces its 2nd energy crisis in four years. Sure, the average American might face temporary moderate inflation & higher gas prices. But if you are the architect of the US empire & you view the rise of China & Chinese ASI as an existential winner takes all scenario, the collateral damage is acceptable cost. Whoever controls the energy corridors controls the monetary system. Whoever controls the monetary system & the energy supply simultaneously controls the compute infrastructure that determines which civilization builds ASI first. The US is seizing all 3.

John piper attempt to define “SIN” and I’ve never thought of it this way. Watch this and save it.

That’s one way to pay for all those GPUs 😂

Tim Pool is right in his analysis. The officer was NOT in front of her vehicle until AFTER she backed up. The front tires then accelerate while they are pointed towards the agent, and appear to spin out on the ICE. This is all the information the ICE agent had in the moment. Also, there was no reason for her to back up to leave. The road was clear in front of her and the ICE agents were to the left and right of her car. The ICE agent only ended up in front because she backed up. This leads me to believe she wasn’t just trying to leave. Chat - what do you think?

@CrackerBarrel Are you still charging for toothpicks?!?!?

Like any good relationship, sometimes you just need a little tune-up. We’re going back to the things that made us all fall in love in the first place.

@CrackerBarrel Won't be back until you stop charging for toothpicks. Stupidest thing EVER!

You’ve shared your voices in recent weeks not just on our logo, but also on our restaurants. We’re continuing to listen. Today, we’re suspending our remodels. If your restaurant hasn’t been remodeled, you don’t need to worry, it won’t be. With our recent announcement that our “Old Timer” logo will remain, along with our bigger focus in the kitchen and on your plate, we hope that today’s step reinforces that we hear you. Learn more: crackerbarrel.com/allthemore

@CrackerBarrel You still charge for toothpicks! Not coming back until you have a serious management change.

We thank our guests for sharing your voices and love for Cracker Barrel. We said we would listen, and we have. Our new logo is going away and our “Old Timer” will remain. At Cracker Barrel, it’s always been – and always will be – about serving up delicious food, warm welcomes, and the kind of country hospitality that feels like family. As a proud American institution, our 70,000 hardworking employees look forward to welcoming you to our table soon.

@elonmusk @realDonaldTrump In spite of your wealth, being humble enough to admit your mistakes is a great example for your children. Great job dad!

I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far.

This makes A LOT of sense. This explains why so many woman get manipulated into being liberals “George Orwell once wrote women are always and inevitably on the side of the state. He wasn't being misogynistic, he was making a psychological observation. In his view, women, particularly in their role as caregivers and moral enforcers, tend to prioritize safety and compassion over risk and freedom, and that instinct, while natural, is easily weaponized by totalitarian systems. When conformity is marketed as compassion, control is rebranded as care, the state taps into the feminine psyche to enforce ideological obedience. Now consider this: men will do almost anything to attract a mate, so when the state captures women through propaganda, redefining tyranny as empathy and compliance as virtue, men follow, especially those who can't compete in the traditional dating market, they feminize themselves and trade strength for submission. This is what evolutionary biologists call the sneaky f - strategy. Low status males mimicking feminine traits or moral positions in hopes of reproductive access. And while all of this unfolds, families disintegrate. Single motherhood, a top predictor of poverty and social dysfunction, becomes the norm. Children from single parent homes are far less likely to climb the economic ladder, and who steps in as provider and protector? Not the father, the state. But here's the kicker, the state is funded disproportionately by men, so rather than supporting the women they married and raised children with directly, men subsidize the state, which in turn provides for women through social programs. Why? Because women have been propagandized to see every relationship as a power dynamic, except one with the state, which is ironically the centralization of raw power. They've been told that to rely on a man is weakness, but to rely on a bureaucracy is empowerment. This is not progress. This is dependency with a new face. And both men and women are suffering. The childless middle aged woman and the incel are two sides of the same broken culture. A woman without her own child often directs her maternal instinct towards abstract causes, infantilizing minorities under the guise of social justice. What we are witnessing from psychologically unwell men and women is Nietzsche's concept of resentiment. Envy dressed up as morality. The strong became evil. The weak became good. Strength became tyranny. We now live in a pathologically soft society that sides even with those who harm it, where punishing crime feels unfair and victimhood is the highest virtue. Nietzsche called them the tarantulas, those who preach justice but act from bitterness. They don't want to uplift the weak, they want to drag down the strong. Orwell saw them too. Most middle aged socialists, while theoretically pining for a classist society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige. These bitter, well educated, and affluent types don't actually care about the downtrodden. They weaponize them. The real target is success, competence, independence, because those qualities expose their own inadequacies. But the answer to pathological femininity isn't pathological masculinity. It's not swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction. The answer is balance. Masculinity and femininity are not enemies. They're symbiotic. We've simply overcorrected. We escaped a world where masculinity once tyrannized femininity only to arrive in a world where femininity is tyrannizing masculinity. We are not oppressed by patriarchy, we are being suffocated by pathological softness, envy, and resentment. And unless we recognize this imbalance, the future will not be free. It will be emotionally manipulated, morally confused, and biologically unsustainable.”

Here's a 16-hour timelapse of an embryo building a central nervous system so 23 years from now it can sell b2b SAAS

Jordan Peterson and Andrew Huberman changed my life. I watched hundreds of their videos over the last few years. Here are the 20 best habits I learned that will change your life:

I give this to all my patients. Feel free to share it.

@CharlieKNews 👍

@MarshaBlackburn You rode Trump’s coattails to re-election, now listen to the people who voted for you and vote for @SenRickScott

@elonmusk Help. Paid for premium servces but can’t access any of the services. Go to Premium support help page, but it will not let me message Premium Support because I’m not a Premium member. I’m at a loss how to fix this.

Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one. Can you believe she wears that outfit!?

American Farmer Spreading Awareness, Read Every Word Of This 👇 “The seed companies are essentially bullying farmers into buying their seeds, which is another reason why your food is becoming so expensive” “Farmers can be and will be sued if they plant their own seeds” “Farmers don't own the rights to the genetics of their own seeds unless they're using heirloom seeds. So in order to have the right to plant these seeds, we have to pay a fee. The seed company can actually come on to your property, check your plants, and if the plant has any trace of their genetics, they sue the farmer. So all that hard work growing the plant, yeah, we don't own it. And the seed companies love to remind us this, by saying, we know you bought our seed last year, so if you don't buy seed again from us, we're gonna be auditing you. So my order of three totes just came in, enough to plant 300 acres of soybeans, and to have the right to plant them cost me over $30,000”

@simonateba @RepMTG Freedom is paid for with blood. Live free or die.

BREAKING - PURE BETRAYAL - SPYING ON AMERICANS WITHOUT WARRANT: @RepMTG EXPLODES, says, “Mike Johnson set up a private classified briefing room and inside members are being told that people are going to die if we don’t pass FISA! Now, some Republicans are saying reauthorizing FISA for 2 years rather than 5 will solve our problems. Stop kicking the can down the road! KILL FISA!!”