There was a very interesting article in European Business Magazine last Friday. This extensive quote explains what's been happening:

For over 300 years, Lloyd’s of London has underwritten maritime insurance for the tankers and cargo ships that carry the world’s oil, gas, and goods.

Its dominance over the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow chokepoint through which approximately 30% of the world’s seaborne oil supply passes — represented one of the most quietly powerful financial monopolies in history.

Control the insurance, and you control who can sail. Control who can sail, and you control the flow of energy that powers the global economy.

Then Iran’s attacks on Gulf shipping spiked maritime insurance rates by 400% overnight. Lloyd’s panicked. Coverage was pulled. 

The energy market consequences of the Iran conflict had just produced an entirely unexpected second-order effect — and into the vacuum stepped America.

The 48-Hour Shift

Within 48 hours of Lloyd’s withdrawal, two things happened simultaneously.

The US Navy, operating through US Naval Forces Central Command, expanded its escort operations across the Gulf — effectively offering the physical protection that insurance underwrites.

And American insurers began moving to replace Lloyd’s coverage entirely, stepping into a market that British financial infrastructure had monopolised since the reign of William III.

The Crown’s 300-year chokehold on global energy insurance was severed — not by war, not by sanctions, but by filling a vacuum created by an institution that blinked at the wrong moment.

How fortunate Massachusetts is to have Bill Galvin!

After almost a half-century in politics, the 75-year-old secretary of state would like nothing better than to close his long career as an elected official and enjoy a comfortable and lucrative retirement.

He has already served a record-setting eight consecutive terms in his current position as the Commonwealth’s chief elections officer and record keeper.

Since Galvin’s tenure as secretary of state began in 1995, Beacon Hill has cycled through seven governors, five House speakers, and seven Senate presidents. Galvin has easily dispatched every challenger, cruising to reelection every four years.

After so many decades in public life, Galvin is amply entitled to let someone else take over the responsibilities of secretary of state.

But this selfless warrior, knowing that there is no one else in Massachusetts who can defend the state’s interests properly, refuses to abandon his post.

“To leave a battlefield in the middle of a battle, it’s something I’m not going to do,” Galvin declared last month, announcing his campaign for a ninth term that would keep him in office through 2031.

That battle seems to never end. When he ran for reelection in 2018, Galvin told the Globe’s editorial board that it was probably the last time.

Four years later, he was back on the ballot for another term — but he made it clear that it would be his last hurrah. “I am certainly done here with this job,” he assured my former colleague Scot Lehigh in 2022.

Alas, circumstances are always conspiring to keep him at his post.

Galvin is hardly an exception. Indeed, he’s practically a role model. The inability to relinquish power is among the most reliable constants in American politics.

[TTP:  In an era when the Left has deconstructed so much of education, the Space Age and the Homestead Movement are both burgeoning. Is this paradox – or cause and effect?]

In the fall of 1980, a yellow school bus from Trimble County Middle School rattled down a gravel road somewhere in the sticks of northern Kentucky and let us off at what felt like the edge of the world.

About twenty-five of us–mostly twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, all restless energy and muddy sneakers – piled out into the crisp October air. Our teacher, who knew the Hubbards personally, had promised us something different from the usual field trip. This wasn’t a museum or a factory. This was a living lesson.

We hiked down a steep, leaf-strewn path through the trees, the Ohio River glinting below us through the branches. At the bottom, the trail opened onto a narrow rope bridge swaying gently over a creek. We crossed one by one, gripping the ropes, half-laughing, half-terrified the whole thing would give way.

On the other side stood Harlan and Anna Hubbard’s place: a low, hand-built house high above the riverbank, surrounded by chickens scratching in the dirt, goats wandering freely, and ducks waddling toward us the moment Anna appeared with a bucket of feed.

She let us help scatter the grain, smiling quietly as hands shot out to grab fistfuls. Then we filed inside. The house was small, spare, and impossibly clean – every surface polished or whitewashed, every corner thoughtful. Sunlight poured through the windows and landed on a baby grand piano that dominated the living room like it belonged to a concert hall, not a river shack.

Harlan’s paintings hung on the walls: soft river scenes, barges at dusk, the water and sky bleeding into each other in colors so calm they almost hurt to look at. Across the wide Ohio, on the Indiana shore, the skeletal frame of the unfinished Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant loomed, contrasting with the Hubbard’s off-grid lifestyle.

[TTP:  This article is from Friday, and quite short, but the news is so delightful that it may just make your entire week!  I know it did ours.]

We've seen Israel and the United States take out a lot of Iran's leaders.

The two countries have also been pounding away at their military capacity.

They've decimated their Navy, and they've taken over their skies.

"Never before has a modern, capable military, which Iran used to have, been so quickly destroyed and made combat ineffective," Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared.

So on one level, they've already largely succeeded in taking down the military.

But how do you help the people along in rising up and overthrowing their oppressors?

There's a new report that shows the Iranian people may have figured out a brilliant answer to that question, with the help of Israel.

Anthropic AI, until very recently, occupied a privileged position within the technological architecture of the United States national security apparatus.

The company, founded by former artificial intelligence researchers and lavishly financed by Silicon Valley capital, developed an advanced family of large language models known as Claude.

These systems were designed to ingest vast oceans of data, synthesize intelligence, assist engineers, support cyber operations, and accelerate the decision making processes that increasingly define modern warfare.

Because of these capabilities, Claude became the only frontier artificial intelligence (AI) system authorized for use within certain classified Pentagon environments.

It was used for intelligence analysis, research inside national laboratories, cybersecurity tasks, and complex logistical modeling.

Yet by early March 2026 the very same technology once welcomed into the digital bloodstream of the American military was abruptly expelled.

The Department of War formally designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” ordering contractors and agencies to begin phasing the system out of defense related work.

The reason was neither espionage nor foreign ownership nor a catastrophic data breach. The problem, according to senior Pentagon officials, was ideological contamination embedded within the software itself.

When officials speak of “polluting” the supply chain in this context, they are not referring to environmental damage or corrupted hardware. The word describes something far more insidious. A military supply chain must be doctrinally neutral.

John Solomon is reporting on previously suppressed information indicating that, as early as 2020, we knew the Chinese were trying to interfere in our elections, and that this intelligence was covered up.

The burning question is, of course, why that happened.

Solomon’s report is based on a 7April 2020 National Intelligence Council Assessment. That report reads in part:

“We assess that China and Russia are increasing their ability to analyze and manipulate large quantities of personal information in ways that will allow them to more effectively target and influence, or coerce, individuals and groups in the United States and allied countries. Their cyber espionage efforts have helped them acquire bulk data.”

“Adversaries almost certainly are already applying data-analysis techniques to hone their efforts against US targets.’

“Chinese intelligence officials analyzed multiple US states (redacted) election voter registration data…”

In 2022, the election security nonprofit True the Vote broke the story that a company called Konnech in Michigan was storing data on American election workers on servers in China.

True the Vote leaders Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips were, of course, ridiculed by the so-called mainstream press.

Then …

In all the tens of millions of words that have been written by the mainstream media about the Trump-Russia collusion story, in all the hundreds of names that have appeared within those often-breathless filings, one name almost never appears: Kevin Clinesmith.

No, Clinesmith doesn’t appear in any of the four books — Fear, Rage, Peril, and War — written by the so-called Dean of Investigative Journalism, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward.

Nor does Clinesmith appear in The Divider, the ostensibly serious 725-page book about the entirety of Donald Trump’s first term by former New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker and his wife, New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser.

I have a theory as to why this might be: because the mainstream media can’t account for what Clinesmith did.

Clinesmith, a well-placed Trump-hating FBI lawyer, pleaded guilty in 2020 to having falsified evidence on an application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

What, exactly, did Clinesmith do? He doctored an email saying that Page had been a CIA source to indicate just the opposite — that Page had not been a CIA source.

That warrant was ultimately approved by a FISA court judge, and it allowed the Obama administration to spy not just on Carter Page but on candidate Donald Trump and his entire team during the 2016 campaign.

And its three successive renewals allowed the FBI to continue spying on Trump during his presidency.

So when you ponder the term “abuse of power,” don’t think about Watergate and Richard Nixon. Instead, think about Crossfire Hurricane and Barack Obama.

[TTP:  Parenting the citizens (and politicians) of the future is hard, especially in the Age of the Screen. Here is an excellent essay to assist in navigating this supremely important mission.]

Mary Shelley learned to read by tracing the letters of her mother’s name on a gravestone.

Behind London’s St. Pancras Old Church, the young girl would run her fingers over the markings: “Mary Wollstonecraft,” the writer, philosopher, and women’s suffrage campaigner who died giving birth to her.

Raised by her father William Godwin, Shelley’s childhood was marked by radical ideas at the dinner table, the tensions of a complicated family life, and a taste for the eerie that she harbored from her earliest years.

In 1816, at just eighteen, she accompanied the poet Percy Shelley to a Lake Geneva villa where Lord Byron, the celebrity poet who had just fled England in disgrace, had gathered a small circle of friends.

Volcanic ash from Mount Tambora had blocked out the sun, so they resolved to stay indoors to write ghost stories. Carrying with her a fascination with experiments showing dead creatures twitching in response to electric charge, Mary wondered what it might be like to be switched on rather than born.

Her story, Frankenstein, took this idea to its logical conclusion. If the scientific showmanship of the day could produce a being through technical wizardry, then the fruits of this creation would exist as a child without childhood.

For someone who never met her own mother, a book about life without formation seemed like a fitting project.Frankenstein is often read as a tale of hubris…but it is a story about a man who refuses to become a parent as much as a man who wants to play God.