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.

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.

Britain is an island.

An island trading power does not get to treat sea power as optional.

It does not get to assume that trade routes, undersea cables, overseas territories, distant bases, and maritime deterrence will somehow take care of themselves.

And it certainly does not get to discover, in the middle of an actual crisis, that it has preserved more brass than ships.

Yet that is where Britannia is today. She no longer rules the waves, not even in junior partnership with the United States. She can barely put to sea.

The Royal Navy’s escort fleet is down to just 13 destroyers and frigates, only a handful of which are actually usable at any given time. Britain began the year with only seven frigates in service, one already in deep maintenance, with only around four effectively available.

For shameful perspective, the last official parliamentary count showed 41 admirals across Navy Command, the Ministry of Defence, other government service, and NATO. The Navy’s headquarters culture is robust, the brass is plentiful, and the fighting fleet is vanishing.

That’s not a statistic. It’s an indictment.

Nor is it merely Britain’s problem.

Britain is not some modest continental state freeriding quietly under somebody else’s umbrella.

It sits astride the North Atlantic approaches.

It anchors the GIUK Gap.

It is a nuclear power, a veto-wielding permanent member of the UN Security Council, and a nation with sovereign territories scattered across the globe.

It is supposed to be, alongside the United States, the premier maritime power in NATO.

Instead, it has spent decades dismantling the material basis of that role while continuing to speak as if the role still existed.

[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.