sWearing 🇬🇧🇺🇦

If you really want change, go out and vote for it tomorrow.

Moria, as Tolkien wrote it, would have collapsed within a year. The Misty Mountains were granite. Carve a 54-meter-tall room in granite and the ceiling cracks within months. Stress concentrates at corners, fractures propagate, the roof comes down. Subway tunnels are 6 meters tall for a reason. Quarries go open-pit because covered chambers fail. Salt is the only common rock that breaks this rule. Slanic Prahova's Unirea mine sits 208 meters underground. Fourteen trapezoidal chambers, each 54 meters tall, 32 meters wide at the floor, narrowing to 10 meters at the ceiling. Walls slope at 60 degrees. 2.9 million cubic meters removed. No interior columns. The reason is that salt creeps. Under pressure it flows like a glacier on geological time while staying strong enough to support its own weight. Fractures heal as the salt slowly migrates back into the gap. The 60-degree sloped walls are doing structural work. Load arches through the surrounding rock and the chambers stay open for centuries. This is why every vast underground hall you have ever seen in real life is a salt mine. Wieliczka in Poland. Khewra in Pakistan. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve sits in salt caverns along the Gulf Coast because salt stays airtight and watertight at industrial scale. The dwarves mined mithril out of granite. The geology says they would have spent more effort propping up ceilings than extracting metal. Tolkien's instinct was right when he gave them endless pillars. Moria, drawn carefully, would have looked like a salt mine.

Depleted U.S. precision munition stockpiles—and the 4–5 years required to replenish them—could coincide with a period of relatively peak Russian military power vis-à-vis NATO under a scenario in which a tenuous 2027 ceasefire in Ukraine frees Russian forces to reconstitute and redeploy. This window would also overlap with the conclusion of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2030), focused on advancing PLA joint operations, while the U.S. Navy and Air Force may be contending with significant readiness challenges stemming from the Iran war.