"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux

I'll have to try that trick the next time I get a speeding ticket.

Unfair, those guys were substantially more capable than he is.

It is, of course, all gender.

We're doing War-as-Gender-Affirming-Care. Some men get hair transplants, some buy a too-expensive car, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth accidentally-on-purpose tank the global economy killing thousands in an idiot war.
bsky.app/profile/prom...

Incredible to watch Hegseth just faceplanting into the Absolute Destruction acceleration of violence with his whole face.

Utterly convinced that you lose wars if you don't war crimes hard enough and entirely unprepared for any other theory of victory or success.

Why Are There No Ships in the Strait of Hormuz | March 5, 2026, Update

Video: youtu.be/lwSLe1qWpSs

I was just about to say, 'but this sure does seem like a job for @mercoglianos.bsky.social '

Unlike the Red Sea crisis, where the solution was 'go around Africa the long way' there is no other route for these ships to take. There is no feasible alternative for a lot of this oil to move - some of it can be piped, but not most.

It's just stuck. Completely stuck.

Again, I am not claiming to be a Shipping Knower - I'm not.

But I can read a map and I can do basic math and if traffic through an artery that moves a quarter of the world's natural gas and oil is down by ~95%, that is going to be a global economic problem pretty quickly.

A marinetraffic map showing ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz 2/27/2026 at 22:00 UTC. There are dozens of large ships moving through the strait.

For comparison, this is what normal pre-war traffic through the strait looked like - this is what they have to restore:

I count at least two-dozen tankers (large red arrows) transiting the strait at any given time.

I'm by no means a pro at using MarineTraffic but having looked it up, green is cargo, red is tanker and the size of the dot or arrow indicates the size of the craft. So the wee little green arrows are small cargo ships.

You want to watch the big red arrows. Which are, you know, not transiting.

So there are a few ships making the Hormuz run, but in tiny numbers and not big ones.

By contrast, you can see the huge cloud of ships waiting outside the strait on either side.

Until there are more ships moving in the strait than sitting outside, the USA/Israel is not winning.

Home by Christmas is what I am hearing.

Yeah, in practice here the measure of operational success is just, "is it safe to navigate the Strait of Hormuz?"

If the answer is 'no,' then you haven't yet achieved the objectives.

The only statistic you need to know about the effectiveness of the air war in WWII was the Luftwaffe had a grand total of 380 operational aircraft on the Eastern and Western front to stop a combined 17,000 Allied and Soviet aircraft supporting Operation Overlord and Operation Bagration

There is something deeply, grimly funny that she wrecked her entire face and still got dropped like a rock like we all knew would happen.

The Kurds live in the wrong part of Iran.

...will they? After you blew up the Council of Experts, blew up the supreme leader and the new supreme leader is his son who is probably pretty upset that you turned his Dad into goo?

So it's either an extremely expensive, costly and risky naval mission or a ground action that is horrifying to contemplate in terms of cost and potential casualties.

Or pray *really* hard that Iran regime-changes itself.

There are no good options. There are non-boots options, but they suck too.

My understanding is that if the Strait is not open in the next few weeks, we're to expect $100-110 oil which would put gas prices well over $4 per gallon.

I struggle to communicate both how intractable that problem is and how deeply forked the GOP prob. is if gas is, like, $4.50 average in the USA.

These guys basically now have to fix the Strait of Hormuz or they might as well toss in the towel and rebrand as the Whig Party.

And no one has the foggiest f***ing clue how to fix the Strait of Hormuz.

I think that reflects some pretty significant movement in politics.

And looking forward, if the war goes pear-shaped, as it seems most likely to do, the downstream catastrophe for the GOP seems obvious and likely to be pretty overwhelming.

Folks will be - legitimately - furious with the Ds that voted no (leadership whipped hard for yes), but I think it is worth looking on the other hand: 98% of House Democrats (and 1% of House Republicans) just voted to try to block the president from waging war on Iran.

Iran! The Great Evil!

I felt I had to be sober for Gladiator II because I was technically working for @beijingpalmer.bsky.social when I saw it, but to be honest I'd probably have been nicer in the review if I'd had wine and cheese.

I saw 3.19 this morning.

Especially since frankly our colleagues positioned to make the largest impact - the ones in the elite institutions which churn out the people who make the decisions on our funding - are often the members of the discipline least exercised about its decline.

As historians and classicists, we are the keepers of living traditions well over 2,000 years old.

We may have wished for the fat years; we have been given the lean years. But it is not for us to surrender these disciplines bequeathed to us by two millennia and change of labor.

We must keep them.

This is brutal and dispiriting but also more of the same as humanities programs close under sustained attack.

Of course I think we need to work harder to bring our field to the public, to build the kind of support which sustains public funding of our fields as research fields.

Gonna be a real surprise to Markwayne Mullinw hen he finds out what Corey Lewandowski actually does for the Secretary as part of his job.

You can only imagine her terror when someone suggests they might treat her like a dog.