Category: Observation O’ The Day

EPIC FURY: Trump’s Play to Starve the Dragon?

Bloomberg reported Thursday that Beijing “told the country’s top oil refiners to suspend exports of diesel and gasoline” as Operation Epic Fury continues disrupting oil shipments out of the Persian Gulf. “China’s curbs just six days into a war reflect a scramble across Asia to prioritize domestic needs as the crisis in the Middle East deepens.”

China imports “about 11 million barrels of crude per day,” my Townhall colleague Walter Curt added on X this morning, “with roughly 40-45% of that flowing through the Strait of Hormuz.”

And yes, while China is a net importer of oil and natural gas — and yugely so — the Communist nation exports refined products including gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and marine bunker fuel, largely to Southeast Asian, South Pacific, and African nations.

But not as of today.

“Officials from the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s top economic planner,” Bloomberg [paywalled link] continued, “called for a temporary suspension of refined product shipments that would begin immediately.”

It isn’t just China, either, according to the same report: “With virtually no oil or fuel making its way out of the Persian Gulf since US and Israeli attacks began at the weekend, refiners from Japan to Indonesia and India have begun cutting back run rates and suspending exports.”

I had a brief item about this earlier today on Instapundit, but the news kept nagging at me because it’s worth a deeper look — and, as it turns out, the petroleum exports angle might be the least interesting part.

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I can’t help but notice the Minneapolis riots against ICE only started kicking up once Nick Shirley exposed the Democrat daycare scams. It’s almost as if the Democrats were caught red handed and now they’re trying to distract everyone with violence and chaos.
The bureaucratic equivalent of resisting arrest.
– Rogan O’Handley

SightBringer

When global maritime flows evacuate without formal blockade, it confirms operators now price in kinetic action as near-term probable.
This is where capital, cargo, and risk converge to front-run escalation. It is not theory. It is energy in motion.

Five core implications lock:

1. Imminent precision strike window is real
No one abandons Hormuz lightly. This is the world’s most sensitive oil chokepoint. For this many ships to reposition confirms intelligence loops are flashing red. Strategic planners are now assuming the next 48–72 hours are live.

2. Insurance and compliance engines have flipped
Behind the scenes, maritime insurers, underwriters, and compliance desks are triggering “elevated threat protocols.” That only happens when confirmed threat matrices pass the tripwire. This is sovereign-level coordination, not Twitter drama.

3. Liquidity evaporation effect begins now
This freezes energy flow reflexivity. As risk heightens and flows thin, oil spikes, safe havens pump, leverage unwinds, and Bitcoin rises as censorship-exempt capital refuge. The entire global system starts rerouting around the Iranian footprint.

4. This is not a one-off evacuation
This matches the embassy exits, the regime capital flight, the BTC bid, the media dissonance, the STRATCOM drills, and the political chaos signals. Every layer of the system is now behaving as if a sovereign collision is no longer avoidable.

5. The West just blinked and moved out of the way
This withdrawal creates a vacuum. No Western commercial presence. No diplomatic bodies. No major press corps embedded. That means one thing: space has been cleared for direct, asymmetric, or proxy strike action without global human shield friction.

This is the last step before something burns. The ships leaving are physical confirmation that the global nervous system has already made its move. Everyone close to the blast radius has already fled.

That is never random.

Devon Eriksen

A vast number of humans, probably a majority, aren’t people.

They are large language models.

I’m not saying this as a generality, as a clever or funny way of saying, “they are stupid”.
No. I mean something very concrete and specific, and there are a lot of people who appear very intelligent, maybe even win awards for writing good poetry or something, who are nevertheless not people, not fully sapient, just a large language model walking around in a human body.

First, you have to understand what a large language model is.
It’s a computer (organic or inorganic), which has been trained on a data set consisting solely of language (written or spoken), and rewarded for producing language that sounds like the data set, and is relevant to a prompt.

That’s all there is in there. This is why ChatGPT and Grok lie to you constantly.
It’s not because they are somehow just indifferent to the truth — they actually do not understand the concept of “truth” at all.

For something to be a “lie”, or an “inaccuracy”, there has to be a mismatch between the meaning of words, and the state of reality.
And there’s the critical difference. You see, in order to identify a mismatch between the state of reality, and the meaning of a sentence, you have to have a model of reality.

Not just one model, of language.

This is why Grok and ChatGPT hallucinate and tell you lies. Because, for them, everything is language, and there is no reality.

So when I say someone is a large language model, I do not mean he is “stupid”. He might be very facile at processing language. He might, in fact, be eloquent enough to give great speeches, get elected president, win the Nobel Peace Prize, and so on.
What I mean is that humans who are large language models do not have a robust world-object model to counterweight their language model. They are able to manipulate symbols, sometimes adroitly, but they are on far shakier ground when trying imagine the objects those symbols represent.

Which brings us to this woman.

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BUY THIS BOOK! READ THIS BOOK!!
TELL YOUR PASTOR TO READ THIS BOOK!!
IF YOU HAVE CHILDREN IN SCHOOL- and you have not yet gotten them out of that indoctrination center and started homeschooling them – TELL YOUR PRINCIPAL, SUPERINTENDENT AND SCHOOL BOARD TO READ THIS BOOK!!

First 30 Seconds: The Active Shooter Problem

America has been failing for over 40 years at understanding, planning for, and responding to Active Shooter attacks. So, we continue to see attacks end in high victim-counts. America fails because we:
– do not base plans on TIME & MATH
– like plans that are easy to type, easy to drill, and do not “trigger” anyone
– recommend and adopt “best practices” that are not best
– adopt plans that work flawlessly every day there is no attack, but fail during attacks
– desperately want a non-violent solution to an extremely violent problem
– allow emotions and political agendas to distract us

The author served as an active-duty US Army officer for over 20 years. Throughout this career, planning to give and receive deadly violence was a common, required task. Ten days after his Army retirement, he began teaching public high school, where violence was never allowed, discussed, or planned for. He was STUNNED when school leaders told him the school’s planned response during an Active Shooter attack was to gather in groups and wait to see if the killer or cops got to you first.
This experience started his study of the Active Shooter problem. This book is about what he found.

Read Ed’s no-nonsense, blunt analysis of the Active Shooter problem. Using TIME & MATH analysis, he clearly shows the ONLY response that has a high expectation of minimizing victims in future attacks.
This is UNLIKE any discussion of the Active Shooter problem you have heard from any source. It disproves MANY long-held myths and assumptions, including that we should rely on RUN HIDE FIGHT, Lockdown Drills, and 911 response. It is a wake-up call for America, the “leaders” of our schools, churches, and businesses, and our elected officials.
America has failed at this for 40+ years. It’s time to end the failure.

“Ed Monk is today’s leading expert on thwarting mass murderers. His recommended strategy is by far the most effective, as proven in cases where the defenders did what Monk suggested.” — Massad Ayoob

 

Rusty Shackleford

I’m going to put it bluntly.

They thought they wanted this. They thought they could keep pushing and they would break us. They thought they had the upper hand.

They pushed too far and they have taken us to the point of no return.

Now, they are realizing they didn’t want this. They are realizing we wont be broken. They are realizing they don’t have the upper hand.

The ball has been returned to our court, and we’re better at the game than they are. The game that they wrote the rules for.

So good luck ever getting the ball back again.

We’re done playing fair.

Welcome to the new version of the game.

Our game.