The Blackout Shade

@infraa_ Market's closed!! War on!!! Peace deal on Sunday night

Looks like the MOU is off to a great start

@KyleAnzalone_ @LibertarianInst His whole premise is a lie. It is not an international waterway

Rubio Says Iran Will Not Be Allowed to Charge Fees in the Strait of Hormuz @LibertarianInst Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Strait of Hormuz must be treated as an international waterway, and Iran is not allowed to charge ships tolls or fees. “It’s an international waterway. No country is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway. That’s existing international law,” Rubio said Tuesday. The status of the Strait of Hormuz has become a major issue in negotiations to end the war. Prior to the US and Israeli attack on Iran in February, the Strait was treated as an international waterway. However, in response to the war, Tehran seized control of the Strait. Iranian officials have argued that because the Strait is less than 24 miles wide, it is within the territorial waters of Iran and Oman. Tehran says it plans to change ship maintenance and environmental fees to transit the waterway. President Donald Trump has threatened to attack Oman if it goes along with Iran’s plan for the Strait. Rubio, who is also serving as Trump’s National Security Adviser, said that the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon is a separate issue from the Iran war. “That process is separate. It’s separate because Lebanon is a sovereign country. It has a government, and when it comes to Lebanon and what’s happening inside of Lebanon, we’re going to negotiate and deal directly with the Lebanese government,” he said. Rubio continued, “There’s an Iranian issue with regards to Lebanon, and that is their support and sponsorship of Hezbollah. And so that factor will be discussed as part of our conversations with the Iranians.” Tehran says any deal to end the war must include a full end to the Israeli war against Lebanon.

@DeItaone He's as dumb as every other person in this administration. The SOH is NOT an international waterway.

RUBIO: NO COUNTRY IS ALLOWED TO CHARGE TOLLS OR FEES ON AN INTERNATIONAL WATERWAY, THAT'S EXISTING INTERNATIONAL LAW

Working at 2:45am on a federal holiday....

Cushing is on track to reach tank bottom by the end of June if EIA confirms the -1.5 million bbl draw.

With Tulsi Gabbard's new revelations about US bio labs in many countries around the world including Ukraine, it's fascinating recall the bizarre series of events that gave rise to this controversy in the first place: In May of 2022, some of us began asking whether the US had bio labs in Ukraine, what they were for, and why the US had them there. For asking those questions, we were instantly branded as "pro-Russian conspiracy theorists" in official Ukrainian intel reports, on our Wikipedia pages, by countless media outlets, etc. This was and remains one of the most bizarre episodes I've ever seen. Before May 2022, when we asked those questions, barely anyone had ever thought about let alone asked about "bio weapons in Ukraine"! I certainly hadn't. Like most people, I had never mentioned a word about it because it had never occurred to me we had them there. But then, Marco Rubio summoned Victoria Nuland to the Senate and asked her in a televised hearing under oath about these "rumors," clearly expecting her to immediately debunk them as obvious Kremlin lies and to proclaim the US had no such bio labs in Ukraine. Instead, Nuland did the opposite! She *confirmed* key aspects of these "rumors," and she explicitly warned that the US has several "bio research labs" in Ukraine that are so dangerous that they must not be allowed to fall into Russia's hands. When some of us heard Nuland's rather shocking admission -- the first-ever disclosure about these labs -- we of course asked: wait! what? Why does the US have bio labs in Ukraine, and what are the US and Ukraine doing in those labs that make them (in Nuland's eyes) so dangerous?? (Note: nobody ever suggested that the presence of these bio labs in Ukraine justified the Russian invasion; we just wanted answers about these US bio labs that Nuland had casually divulged). We never got real answers. We got smear campaigns. To this day, our names are formally attached to claims that we spread "conspiracy theories" for asking about these labs even though it was Victoria Nuland herself who was the one who accidentally revealed them for the first time in a Senate hearing in response to a shocked Marco Rubio. They then quickly tried shutting down any questioning by pretending that Nuland never said this, and it was just a bunch of paid Kremlin mouthpieces who were spreading lies. You see the same tactics now being against Tulsi for releasing this new intelligence report. Watch the Nuland testimony in question:

This was the 39th time since March 23 that @POTUS announced a peace deal with Iran had been reached or was imminent. And the 39th time Iran refuted Trump's claims as false within hours. Don't believe me? The data are below. No deal has been reached. Iran made than clear. Again.

@Osint613 How is this possible? I was told that the US has control of the Strait.

NOW: New escalation Fars reports Iranian forces blocked a tanker from entering the Strait of Hormuz, claiming the vessel attempted to transit without prior coordination.

I didn’t realize we are now at the “making shit up” phase of the analysis. JPM’s EM team seems to be in the game of making shit up. Good job. “200% of pre-conflict levels” are the dumbest words ever written by a human being so far in this conflict. insights.windward.ai

“I worked at Pfizer for 17 years. We didn’t discover drugs - we discovered markets. If a drug cured asthma in 3 days, we’d kill it. Chronic disease is where the money is. Cures are bad for business.” — Peter Rost, former Pfizer executive That’s the business model. Not healing people … keeping them customers for life.

@financialjuice Is anyone stupid enough to believe this?

Trump tells Fox News: spoke directly with Iranian officials

"Sometimes the biggest stories are hiding in the open." -Seymour Hersh Take for example the chart below: Why would the US ever export oil for USDs that the US can simply print for anything they want? 🤔

The key question here: Is the US government TAKING a stake, or BUYING a stake Also important: is the equity going to have voting rights? This "socialism" is becoming firmly bipartisan, as I've been predicting for 2yrs now

@thevivafrei Dissent is the most American thing there is. The people who wrote the anthem were literally booing the government of their day.

Booing during the other team’s National Anthem is disgusting. Booing during your own National Anthem is traitorous. Enjoy Mamdani and government-run grocery stores, New York.

Oil experts warn that price manipulation has led to a rapid draw down in oil inventories, with many countries potentially giving false reports on inventory levels to reduce panic. In the coming weeks, people will be increasingly seeing two rarely used phrases in stories covering our dwindling worldwide oil inventories: "operational minimum" and "tank bottoms." Operational stress will become apparent in the second to third week of June. $cvx $xom $oxy oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-…

59 years ago today, Israel attacked the USS Liberty in international waters. 34 crew members were killed and 174 were wounded by the IDF. Today, I spoke on the House floor to honor the fallen and to recognize the survivors who were present in the gallery.

@ErikSTownsend Trump is going to sign the deal Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. And he has never lied about something like this before

Only 5 mins into the session, but so far I'm underwhelmed by the action on crude. Yes, we got a ~$3 gap-up open, but so far no substantial upside follow-through after that, and just barely matching Thursday's daily high. The news had deteriorated considerably since Thursday. And still nowhere close to Wednesday's daily high, which is still almost $4 above the market now. Is the Hormuz situation better or worse than it was at 3pm on Wednesday? Market is saying better (so far). I disagree.

I agree with your thesis about Anthropic and OpenAI, they will die off just like Global Crossing and Sun did back when the dot-com bubble popped. However your statement that "AI is freakishly expensive" isn't going to hold up for much longer. Smaller models that aren't as expensive are getting better and better all the time. The costs of running Claude and ChatGPT are freakishly expensive, so the smaller, cheaper models will take over as they keep getting better.

Once the bubble pops, Anthropic and OpenAI will become the Coinbase and Block of the AI world. Mundane companies that ship narrative wrappers on mundane bytes. That the bubble will pop isn’t some apocalyptic doomsday prophecy. It’s not that complicated: AI is freakishly expensive to serve. If the returns on the other end are not justified, the bubble pops. And thus begins the decades long buildout to actually economically justifiable AI. It’s amusing how resistant reality is to our fictions and fantasies. In the peak of the crypto bubble we thought reality was going to be transformed into financial liberty and democratization for all, and network states and decentralized reserve currencies. Coinbase stood to be a multi-trillion dollar company and is now just a mundane tech startup. Today we spin similar narratives about the intellectual upheaval of AI, about the new democratization of intelligence and how everything will soon begin to orbit this new technology. At the end, Anthropic and OpenAI will be mundane IT providers with an insanely grim research outlook to make AI economically sensible and useful, no different from Google’s position in trying to make quantum commercially viable. Reality is, fortunately, pretty hardened against our delusions.

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began. The not-war began because Iran had uranium that was totally, completely, beautifully obliterated, so they can’t build the nuclear bomb they weren’t building, which is why the United States had to start the not-war it definitely didn’t start. Now the United States, which has nuclear weapons, is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for countries with nuclear weapons to allow other countries to have. If the United States saw the United States doing what the United States does in other countries, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

"Anarchy is not about chaos, it's about order through voluntary association." @michaelmalice