Author: nick

At the peak of the crisis, oil surged to $110–116/bbl. But it remains volatile at $90–100 after ceasefire pause. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) took an even harder hit. Oil price surged more than 50%, but LNG soared as much as 143% – a 3-year high. In Asia, supply risk is significant because 20% of global oil and major LNG flows via Hormuz to the region. Here’s the difference between the two sources of the shock. LNG is the binding constraint; oil is volatile but more substitutable. By April 12, the region is overshadowed by LNG tightness, shipping frictions, foreign exchange…

After a month of relentless bombing, the US can only confirm that a third of Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles has been destroyed.  Five people familiar with intelligence assessments told Reuters that the US can only confirm with certainty that a third of Iranian missiles have been destroyed. Tehran’s ballistic missiles are the backbone of its defense strategy. Iran has claimed to possess tens of thousands of ballistic missiles produced and stored in elaborate tunnel networks.  The sources added that the US intelligence community believes another third of Iran’s ballistic missiles have been damaged or are inaccessible. Still, Tehran having…

Failure Isn't Necessarily a Symptom of a Learning Disability Source link

Tablet Magazine editor Jacob Siegel joined the “Charlie Kirk Show” to discuss his new book: JACOB SIEGEL: The Information State is a new kind of political regime that rules not through the consent of the governed, the way we expect from a democracy, or through the formal procedures of law and constitutional procedure. Instead, it rules through control of digital code.It moves decision-making power from the recognizable centers we know from the framers’ intentions and the history of America, takes sovereignty and political decision-making power from there, and relocates it into the digital infrastructure.Debanking, mass information operations, mass censorship –…

The U.S. is pitching new rules for stablecoin issuers to treat them like every other financial firm that must maintain armor against illicit uses. What to know: The U.S. Department of the Treasury is about to issue proposed rules that would set standards for stablecoin issuers to battle money laundering and sanctions violations. According to a summary of the proposals first reported by CoinDesk, the Treasury’s FinCEN and OFAC arms will pursue a joint rulemaking that sets out how issuers would have to comply with last year’s GENIUS Act, including setting up controls to prevent illicit transactions and to be…

Why Leftist Economics Can't Work. Mathematically Source link

Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity, by Omri Boehm, New York Review Books, 192 pages, $17.95 “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the Declaration of Independence famously announces: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” “What grounds the truths in the declaration’s legendary second sentence, let alone their self-evidence?” asks Omri Boehm, a philosopher at the New School for Social Research. He sets out to answer that question in Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity, a philosophically dense but intellectually rewarding book.…

North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un attended the tests of new missiles, including an upgraded engine for its intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM). North Korean state media reported on Sunday that Kim oversaw the tests of a new engine for its ICMB that generated significantly more thrust. He said, “The test [is] of great significance in putting the country’s strategic military muscle on the highest level fully conforms with the national strategy and the military demand for modernizing the strategic forces.” Pyongyang claims to have an ICMB capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to the mainland US. Kim views North…

Child care got expensive—more than $13,000 per child, per year. So many people want government to pay for it. My state just agreed. New York will fund free child care. Yay! But wait—what government does isn’t free. Taxpayers pay. And taxpayers pay more because “government rules have unintended consequences,” says Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women’s Forum. Washington, D.C., day care teachers must have a degree in early childhood education. That can take two years and cost $22,000. “Of course you’re going to have to pay a lot more,” says Lukas in my new video, “when you’ve asked people to…

What will the costs of the latest round of illegal, ill-fated U.S. military adventurism in the Middle East amount to? Some of the toll is already clear. Washington has squandered billions of dollars on a reckless war of aggression against Iran. A merciless campaign of aerial bombardment has driven millions from their homes. American and Israeli airstrikes have rained destruction on 10,000 civilian sites and already killed more than 3,000 people in Iran and Lebanon. Among the dead are more than 200 children, many killed in a U.S. strike on a girls’ school, a war crime that evokes the grim precedent of such past American atrocities as the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam or the 1991 Amiriyah…