James

Here’s Mayor Pete announcing the Biden administration’s decision to fight the Jet Blue and Spirit merger so they could protect consumers and ensure low fares. Now the airline doesn’t exist and passengers are stranded across the country.

Ryan Holiday's Response to Ivanka Trump

The motto of the US Merchant Marine is Acta Non Verba. Actions Not Words. We run the largest moving structures on Earth. Big, dirty ships that move oil, machinery, and coal. Biden personally pushed through the first female service academy cadets. Did he put them at the Naval Academy, West Point, or USAFA? No. He put them at the US Merchant Marine Academy. Are you surprised we were the first industry shut down? Are you surprised Trump has appointed hundreds of people from every service into his administration, but has only been able to place one US Merchant Mariner? It is so bad they will not let us run our own academies. The head of my alma mater? A Navy Admiral. The Trump appointed head of the US Merchant Marine Academy? A Captain from the most feminized service: USCG. Are you surprised I got approved for a security clearance on a project critical to shipbuilding and logistics, and everyone has been cleared except the Merchant Mariner? I have been waiting months. SHIPBUILDING IS IMPOSSIBLE UNDER GYNOFASCISM They will do anything to block anyone who says Acta Non Verba from a position of power. Tens of thousands of decisions go into building a ship. You CAN NOT build one if you hold a meeting for every single one. The last two CEOs of our nation’s largest shipbuilder are women. The last one was a US Merchant Mariner. Are you really surprised it has taken 17 years to build our newest carrier. SEVENTEEN. NAVSEA, the Navy’s shipbuilding and repair arm, employs 83,000 people. Grok estimates 25% are women. That is twenty thousand women. And nobody at NAVSEA actually builds ships. That work is done by shipyard workers. NAVSEA holds countless meetings and processes piles of paperwork. Those meetings produced over 16,000 change orders on the USS Ford. The examples are endless. We are in the age of drone warfare. What drone has the Navy bought the most of? SailDrone. Literally the slowest drones possible. Why? Because that company grew out of marine biology, a field dominated by women. They generated thousands of meetings, reports, and studies before they ever tried to sell to the Navy. Overseas it is worse. The UN head of all things maritime refuses to speak on stage or attend any event unless a woman is given the mic. This post is not about women. My wife is a Merchant Mariner. I have championed women’s rights aboard ships for decades. We absolutely 💯 benefit from women in the planning stage. They 💯 have improved safety at sea. Women are awesome. The problem is not women. The problem is that the men who call time on a meeting are blocked from making the call. The problem is the men who walk out holding thousands of pages of reports are not allowed to shut down the conversation and get to work. My fellow US Merchant Mariners have not been blocked from appointments and leadership jobs because we are men. We have been blocked because we are “rude,” “crass,” and we get our hands “dirty.” We are blocked because we are Acta Non Verba. We are sidelined because we get ship done. The problem is not that women are now leaders in the workplace. The problem is that the men who stand up and say ENOUGH TALK, NOW IS TIME TO BUILD are absolutely 💯 excluded. My entire service was flushed from the swamp and stripped of our dignity, authority, autonomy, and benefits because the swamp hates strong men who live Acta Non Verba. And it is not just us. They do not hate Trump because he is “a fascist,” “a sexist,” or “a racist.” They hate him because he shuts people down and pushes projects to completion. They hate him because he is a New York City construction manager. Fine. Hate him all you want. But if you want ships built in this nation, you need Acta Non Verba. We have a Maritime EO, Maritime Action Plan, OMB shipbuilding budget, SHIPS Act studies, risk guidance, policies, plans, and procedures to build ships What we do not have is an Acta Non Verba leader. 1/2

Zero. That's how many major gasoline refineries America has built in the last 50 years. And it's why you just paid $4.23 at the pump. The last big one came online in 1976. Year before Star Wars premiered. Jimmy Carter wasn't even president yet. Since then: nothing. Population went from 218M to 340M. Vehicles on the road went from 144M to 290M. Refineries went the other way. From 254 in 1982 to 131 today. This year alone, two California refineries come offline. Phillips 66 idled its 139,000 bpd Los Angeles facility in October. Valero is shutting down its 145,000 bpd Benicia refinery this month. 17% of California's total refining capacity, gone in 6 months. Look at where US oil production actually sits. 13M barrels per day last year, more than Saudi Arabia and more than Russia. Crude is everywhere. What's missing is the thing that turns it into the green nozzle in this photo. That thing has been shrinking for 40 years. A new refinery got announced in Brownsville, Texas this March. Groundbreaking is Q2 2026. Refineries of that scale need 4-6 years to commission. First gallon ships in 2030 at the earliest. You cannot order capacity that takes a decade to build and expect it to show up at the pump next quarter. $4.23 is the floor of a structural problem the country has been deferring for half a century.