Best Of

Morning all

Plenty of people getting a bit over-excited on a Monday morning and let's hope there are enough trousers for all the braces being thrown around.

West Texas Intermediate remains below $100 while Brent is $113 per barrel. Not quite sure why the disparityin prices is so great.

I presume our old friend uncertainty is doing the rounds and everyone is agitated about what Trump might or might not do and how the Iranians might or might not respond.

I see one or two are "hoping" 10year gilts will do for Starmer what they did for Truss - I suspect not given the very different circumstances.

On topic, I don't get the antipathy to Rayner any more than I get the antipathy to Starmer. There seems a visceral disappointment she hadn't built a billion houses before she was forced out of office but, and here I think the maxim isn't wholly appropriate, Rome wasn't built in a day and the Conservatives had 14 years of leading the Government to build all these houses and change the planning system etc, etc.

I'm also not sure what she did was anywhere near a hanging offence given what others have got away with in recent times. Nonetheless, she will serve her penance in the wilderness and return as so many have before her.

Jeremy Corbyn and friends’ trip to Cuba is going about as well as expected.

They’re staying in the only hotel in Havana that appears to have power, as even hospitals have run out of fuel for their generators, then there’s what can only be described as a poverty safari, the Western communists going around in tour buses looking at the local poors as if they were animals in a safari park.

https://x.com/samanthataghoy/status/2035887568294686816
https://nypost.com/2026/03/22/world-news/champagne-socialists-in-cuba-stage-concert-stay-in-5-star-hotel-as-country-plunges-into-nationwide-blackout/

Yes, we should really be concentrating on the rsoles that have cut off fuel causing patients on ventilators to die bacause of powercuts.
Bound to be woke Dems at the bottom of it.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak

“Can the Strait of Hormuz be opened? You need to deploy two American divisions there and prepare to stay for months. That’s how the start of the war in Vietnam looked, the start of the war in Iraq, and the same in Afghanistan.

It succeeds at first. By the way, all wars, including this new chapter of ours, one must know: an initiated war starts with a brilliant achievement and impressive damage.

Then comes the stage of treading water, which I believe we have entered.

And if you don't know how to get out of it and cut it short in time, it ends in negotiations under conditions inferior to what existed before it all started, or in defeat.

And America hasn't won a single war. It won almost every battle, but it hasn't won a single war in the last 60 years.

All of this needs to be considered, and I very much hope I am wrong.”
https://x.com/Osint613/status/2035993996095258682

America won the war in Iraq.

It cost a lot of blood and treasure, and is not as great as one would hope, but Saddam is gone, Iraq is a far better and less threatening place today than it was under Saddam.

One can debate whether that victory was worth it, but it was won.

..it ends in negotiations under conditions inferior to what existed before it all started, or in defeat...

This is Adam Mockler explaining to a MAGA panel how NATO actually works.

The woman is furious. America is fighting in the Strait of Hormuz and the allies won’t show up. “What’s the point of an alliance if they won’t help us?” she asks.

Mockler explains, with the patience of a man teaching long division to a golden retriever, that NATO is a defensive alliance. Article 5 is not a blank check. It does not activate because one member decided, unilaterally, to go to war in someone else’s waterway. Europe does not scramble its navies because Washington picked a fight and then expected company.

The face she makes says everything.
This is the real cost of ideological illiteracy in a nuclear-armed democracy. When the people advising power have never bothered to understand how the world is actually assembled, every institution becomes a betrayal. Every ally becomes a coward. Every rule becomes an obstacle.

They spent years calling Europe freeloaders. Then started a war. Then got angry that the freeloaders wouldn’t come. The confusion is genuine. That’s the part that should keep you up at night.
https://x.com/Microinteracti1/status/2035999238258131086

Am stealing that.

The OG quote - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmHl7hKlVj4

One of Trump’s many problems is that he mentally exists in the late 20th century, when the USA was hegemonic and militarily peerless - able to crush enemies at will

Now it is economically rivalled and industrially outranked by China. It is also heavily indebted. And militarily the balance has shifted in favour of smaller cheaper drones. So it is harder to impose overwhelming power even on inferior, poorer rivals

Which means he may lash out in frustration as this drags on, unexpectedly

They still are peerless in many ways, no other country could project 5% of the firepower into the Gulf that the US has in the last four weeks.

There is something else going on with the Hormuz other than the drone threat, but I don't know what it is. The Iraqis, with technical and doctrinal support from the French, struggled to sink tankers with fucking Excocets during the 'Tanker War' of the mid 80s. The USN could and would secure the strait if ordered to, but they have not been ordered to. Maybe Trump is very reluctant to take any significant amount of casualties or lose a ship.

It's also a matter of changed attitudes.

Back in the 80s, the insurers priced in a few holes from anti ship missiles. Tankers are very hard to sink, as you say.

Used to work, long ago, with a tanker captain who ran down an Iranian speedboat that was threatening his ship - put the helm over and slapped them with the side. Quarter million tons at 15 knots...

The thing is, these days, the insurers are a bit more sensitive to the optics of dead sailors and pollution. The last is a big one. So they withdraw coverage at the drop of a hat.

The rust-bucket-manned-by-exependable-african lot would go through tomorrow. Just insure their ship for 110% of the value they claim (always bullshit) and indemnify against pollution risk.

Paris has elected a new socialist Mayor, Emmanuel Gregoire, joining London and New York city again electing a left wing Mayor

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crk14m7mjddo

The Guardian is spinning this result as bad for the right. Getting 42% in Paris isn't a bad result for them at all.

There are some interesting election results and polls coming out of the EU

eg in Spain the political gender gap is now enormous. For young Spanish men the far right Vox are the most popular party. By a distance. Yet young Spanish women support the centre left PSOE

https://x.com/richardhanania/status/2035758062011834445?s=46

Good morning, everyone.

Mr. Leon, are we not seeing similar things elsewhere in democracies?

We are

But this is a quite recent evolution in Spain - it is now following France and Germany

My flint agent told me the other day that her two sons - 15 and 18 - are very very right wing. As in - they think Reform are pathetic centrists. Nor do tbey try to hide their sentiments

They are both privately educated and grew up in impeccably liberal Notting Hill

Its not unknown for rich posh boys to be right wing.

It’s quite new for them to be openly fash-adjacent, and not scared of admitting it

Er, what about posh boy Farage in the seventies, apparently openly racist and fashy according to DC contemporaries?

A fair point

And yet I still find it surprising that young posh London lads are openly pro-remigration, for example. It just feels counter intuitive, one always expects the young to be left (as indeed most are in the UK, still - the Greens are I believe the favoured party of 18-24s)

If you are a rich posh London lad in your twenties who wants a real shift to the right and to shock one's leftie and liberal contemporaries mostly voting Green or reluctantly still Labour who does one say you back Farage or Kemi? No contest, even your Mum and Dad in Kensington are still voting for Kemi's Tories and your leftie friends see her as an also ran now anyway, it is Nige they hate

Living in that world (my daughters when to private school - partially) the politics of the young is left wing. Uniform support for the Greens. My youngest is unusual, in that she actually discusses and considers policies - most just take the Green=Nice line - and disagrees on some policies. This is considered a bit radical.

The boys are generally similar, though the schools worry about a minority who fall down the manosphere garbage chute - they are actively fighting this. Much as in the (literally) next door state schools.

The pro-immigration thing is de-rigour - you'd be ostracised by your peer group instantly for being even vaguely anti. Though you hear some mutterings connecting the lack of jobs to "why do we need more immigrants?". But we are long way fro the dam bursting on that one.