NO. NEXT QUESTION? Is Israel Dragging the U.S. Into Another Regime Change War?
Archive for 2025
June 18, 2025
WINNING:
Trump Overnight Presidential Job Approval – is in.
Single overnight approval for last night: 55.96%
He remains unchanged today in the 5-day rolling average pic.twitter.com/VT30gYY394
— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) June 18, 2025
A MACH 2.5 SHOTGUN: F-15E Armed With Drone Killing Laser-Guided Rockets Appears In Middle East. “We now have a picture showing a U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle down-range in the Middle East with an air-to-air loadout that includes six seven-shot 70mm rocket pods, as well as four AIM-9X and four AIM-120 missiles. This comes a week after TWZ was the first to report on testing of the laser-guided 70mm Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II (APKWS II) rockets as a new armament option for the F-15E. As we noted at that time, the exact loadout we’re now seeing on a deployed Strike Eagle turns the jet into a counter-drone and cruise missile ‘weapons truck’ with a whopping 50 engagement opportunities, not counting the internal gun.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dems’ Fave Argument for Illegals Just Took a Kick to the Groin. “The notion that illegal immigrants became a significant part of the labor pool in the United States because Americans just decided to stop working is absurd. American workers were replaced with cheaper options, plain and simple. Employers got addicted to their off-the-books, substandard pay laborers. It never had anything to with concern for illegal immigrants or the lack of available American workers.”
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Truth wins as ‘citizen journalists’ rise — and legacy media fades.
THE HORROR OF CLIMATE CHANGE:
Excessive heat and humidity surge, also known by its street name “summer” https://t.co/jD0A4Aprj5
— The Dank Knight 🦇 (@capeandcowell) June 17, 2025
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China conducts pad abort test for crew spacecraft, advancing moon landing plans. “Footage of the test shows the escape system rapidly boosting the spacecraft away from the ground. Around 20 seconds later, the vehicle reached a predetermined altitude. The return capsule separated from the escape tower and its parachutes deployed successfully.”
WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Joy Behar Forgets Arnold Schwarzenegger Is an Immigrant and Asks About ICE Raids—His Answer Is Epic.
HAHA Arnold Schwarzenegger STUNS The View after he refuses to participate in their delusion regarding illegal aliens who commit crimes in our country 🇺🇸
— Meitai jean (@MeitaiJean) June 17, 2025
I’D LIKE TO SEE THE IRS MAKE UNRECOUPED BOOK ADVANCES FOR GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS EXPENSIVE.
The favorite method of funding corruption in Washington is book deals. https://t.co/U20GrJgjog
— Robert Barnes (@barnes_law) June 17, 2025
Perhaps a rule that they can’t be deducted as losses, but must be treated as gifts.
J. POD IS FEISTY:
What's "unacceptable" about Ben wanting Omar to get the hell out, @oliverdarcy ? She's traitorous anti-Semitic scum. Somalia's too good for her. Tehran would be the right place for her. It's a pity she was ever allowed in the US. Oh, is that "unacceptable"? Too fucking bad. pic.twitter.com/pmdWmZsx5y
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) June 18, 2025
What I love is all the people responding, calling him “Zionist swine.” No doubt working from a bot farm in Karachi.
THE PRESS’S CHIEF ROLE IS TO COVER FOR, AND SHILL FOR, DEMOCRATS:
This should have been a bigger story but because Menendez is a Dem it got dutifully buried. The Senate Foreign Relations Chair taking bribes for foreign counties is kind of a big, treasonous deal. Convenient all the other Dems on that committee can feign ignorance. See no evil… https://t.co/rGHhAHZsMH
— Daniel Turner (@DanielTurnerPTF) June 17, 2025
WE HAVE ZOROASTRIAN FRIENDS HERE WHO ARE REFUGEES FROM IRAN. I WONDER IF THEY’LL GO BACK?
The fastest growing religions in Iran are Zoroastrianism and Christianity.
Islam is rapidly declining, with mosques shutting down weekly and lack of observance even during islamic holidays.
Ironically, the islamic republic destroyed the religion of islam in Iran. pic.twitter.com/lRHRFCnIIz
— 𝗡𝗶𝗼𝗵 𝗕𝗲𝗿𝗴 ♛ ✡︎ (@NiohBerg) June 17, 2025
Someone asked her why she hates Muslims and she said it had something to do with the way they raped her sister, cut her breasts off, and then hanged her.
OUT ON A LIMB: The case for cars.
I once had an idea to host a conference where the speakers and the attendees had all recently retired. The idea was that, freed from the obligation to repeat the usual approved platitudes, you could learn what experts really thought when they were free to speak their minds, rather than reciting a Davos-style litany of received opinion. (My cunning idea was not to pay the speakers, but to hold the event on a cruise ship, which are like catnip for the over-sixties.)
One of the speakers would have been David Metz, the author of Travel Fast or Smart? A Manifesto for an Intelligent Transport Policy, a fabulous polemic written after the author had left his job as chief scientist at the Department for Transport.
The book is a revelation. What becomes clear is that, in policy circles, it is now impossible to express any opinion which is pro-car or in favor of roadbuilding. The only approved vision of the future involves extracting people from their cars and cramming them into some form of mass transit. This is obvious nonsense. While trains and buses are fine for very specific journeys, for the overwhelming number of journeys we make day to day, the car is either irreplaceable, or else supreme. If it’s raining, if you have luggage, if you have children, if you want to transport anything heavier than a suitcase, if you want to travel at an unusual time or anywhere remotely rural, the car or van wins hands down. And I write this as someone who really likes trains.
New roads might be better than rail in countless ways. For one thing, you can build houses alongside them. Indeed, when you take land value into account, the case for road-building becomes stronger still. High-speed rail mostly connects places where land is already expensive with other places where land is also expensive. It is centripetal, funneling people into areas which are already comparatively rich. Roads, by contrast, are centrifugal – they disperse people and their money, adding value to land that was cheap beforehand. If you can capture the increased value of newly accessible land (for instance by selling planning permission) it becomes possible for government to build roads for free while reducing the housing shortage.
So why the desire named streetcar? (To coin a phrase.) That’s an easy one, Jeff Jacoby tweets:
Oh, that's easy. Trains are controlled by the government. They routinely lose money. They're unionized. They go only where & when bureaucrats decide they should go. Passenger preference counts for squat. Satisfaction is never guaranteed.
For progressives, what's not to love? https://t.co/HR78obp4cH
— Jeff Jacoby (@Jeff_Jacoby) June 18, 2025
LIMITED TIME DEAL: BLACK+DECKER Smart Portable Air Conditioner. #CommissionEarned
HMM: If Iran’s Oil Is Cut Off, China Will Pay the Price.
Iran exports around 1.7 million barrels of crude a day, less than 2% of global demand. The U.S. reimposed sanctions on Tehran’s oil exports in late 2018, a few months after President Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal during his first term.
Most countries won’t touch Iran’s sanctioned crude, so Tehran is forced to sell at a discount and find covert ways to get it onto the market. It uses a “dark fleet” of tankers that sail with their transponders turned off to ship cargoes of oil.
More than 90% of Iran’s oil exports now go to China, according to commodities data company Kpler. Most of it is bought by small Chinese “teapot” refineries clustered in the Shandong region that operate independently from state-owned oil companies. They switched to illicit Iranian oil en masse in 2022 to protect their margins.
The discount on Iran’s oil compared with a similar grade of nonsanctioned crude such as Oman Export Blend is currently around $2 a barrel, according to Tom Reed, vice president of China crude at commodity data provider Argus Media. The gap has narrowed recently because of worries that conflict with Israel and stricter enforcement of U.S. sanctions could disrupt Iranian supply. The discount has been wider in the past, averaging $11 in 2023 and $4 in 2024.
With few alternative buyers for Iranian oil, Chinese refineries have leverage. Last year, an official from Iran’s Chamber of Commerce characterized the trading relationship as “a colonial trap.” As the sanctioned oil is paid for in renminbi rather than in dollars, Iran has few choices about where to spend its crude earnings except on Chinese goods, reinforcing its dependency on one country.
Tiny Israel might just knock the I right out of CRINK.
THE E.V. BUBBLE CONTINUES TO DEFLATE: EV Takeup Is Fading Faster in Europe Than U.S., Survey Shows.
“EXPERTS:”
Still waiting for the economic “devastation” to hit Argentina https://t.co/zsYEXUCqUP pic.twitter.com/9Cu6VQwZLx
— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) June 17, 2025
HARDLY AN OSCAR-WORTHY PERFORMANCE: Alex Padilla Cries As He Continues His Fake Victim Performance on the Senate Floor.
IT IS NOW ACCEPTED THAT A RISE IN CANCERS CORRELATES WITH THE BOOSTER SHOTS: Another spike in the vaccine coffin?
EXACTLY:
Good grief. And they told us over and over again with a straight face that the Justice Department was not weaponized.
— Rhetoric Facer 🇺🇸 (@John_Monahan) June 17, 2025
REGIME JOB SECURITY AIN’T WHAT IT ONCE WAS: Israel Just Took Out Iran’s New Military Chief—After Only Four Days on the Job.