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Louisiana republican primary (sen)
MAGA candidate with a commanding lead in a three way race, incumbent RINO Cassidy last place…
Ipso 14:16
Sometimes I wonder if this was all by design vs reckless over site. Meanwhile all these techs headed to China for what, to share notes on survaloence?
Double the Fun
The Hormuz Letter
@HormuzLetter
NEW: Iran is now ready to fully block the Bab el-Mandeb Strait the moment the war resumes, building on “initial steps” Iran began on April 17 toward blocking the strait, with the goal of triggering “unprecedented energy shortages and soaring prices” to shift the US stance toward Iran, per informed sources in Tehran.
Bab el-Mandeb carries 15+ undersea cables, twice as much as Hormuz, transmitting 90 percent of all Europe-Asia bandwidth. A single dragged anchor damaged 15 cables in the strait in September 2025. Iran would control the digital connection between the world’s two largest economic zones.
The strait is also the southern chokepoint for the Suez corridor, carrying roughly 30 percent of global container traffic between Asia and Europe.
That’s a biggy
Oliver GroĂź
@minenergybiz
Barrick Mining’s MONSTER Fourmile gold discovery in Nevada is now estimated to contain over 15.5 million ounces of gold at a grade of 15+ gpt Au. đź‘€
And is still open in many directions – unreal! 🇺🇸🥇
More on the risk of a global food crisis.
Everyone is focused on oil, but they should be worried about food.
Global oil inventories fell by 250 million barrels in March and April. JPMorgan warned stockpiles in the wealthy world could drop to “operational stress levels” next month and to an “operational floor level” by September. Oil prices are going to go higher because everyone knows the Persian Gulf is the world’s gas station. Most people don’t know it is also the world’s chemistry set.
The same petrochemical plants in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Iran that ship crude oil and liquefied natural gas (“LNG”) also ship out the nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphate inputs that feed roughly half the planet.
The Persian Gulf accounts for at least 20% of global seaborne fertilizer exports. The Middle East supplies 46% of globally traded urea. Iran by itself is the world’s second-largest urea exporter. The Strait of Hormuz handles nearly half of global seaborne sulfur trade. It also carries about one-third of seaborne methanol. These Gulf commodities are the primary engine of global food supply.
Natural gas is processed into ammonia. When combined with CO2, it creates urea, the world’s most widely used nitrogen fertilizer for crop growth. Sulfur (a byproduct of gas and oil refining) is converted into sulfuric acid. This acid is the essential solvent used to dissolve phosphate rock to create phosphate fertilizers. Methanol is primarily a fuel, but it also serves as a critical processing agent and precursor for various specialized agricultural chemicals and formaldehyde-based fertilizer coatings that control nutrient release.
In summary, the Gulf provides both the energy (gas) to create nitrogen and the acid (sulfur) to unlock phosphorus – the two critical fertilizers that feed the entire world.
Shipping intelligence firm Kpler reported that fertilizer loadings in the first month of the war fell to roughly 1.5 million metric tons (“mt”), from about 3.4 million in the same period of 2025. That is a 56% drop in one month, on a product that does not store as well as crude oil and does not have a strategic reserve to draw down.
Sulfuric acid is a critical leverage point for the world’s economy. It is the most widely used industrial chemical. It is the feedstock for phosphate fertilizers. You cannot make DAP or MAP without it. DAP is the most widely used phosphorus fertilizer in the world. MAP, the world’s other main fertilizer, is used in areas where alkaline levels are high.
The real crisis – the food crisis – didn’t really begin until May 1. That’s when China, the world’s largest exporter of sulfuric acid, banned all sulfuric acid exports.
A lot of poor people are about to starve.
India’s exposure, in particular, is terrifying because 80% of India’s ammonia comes through the Persian Gulf. India is 60% dependent on imports for its fertilizer needs overall. And India is gearing up for the kharif planting season – rice, cotton, maize – that begins in June with the monsoon.
Bangladesh is the next domino. Bangladesh imports roughly 1.7 million tonnes of urea, 700,000 tonnes of TSP, 1.5 million tonnes of DAP, and 1.2 million tonnes of MOP (muriate of potash) a year — and the USDA describes its DAP and MOP markets as “fully” or “mostly” import-dependent. The country’s 170 million people get their rice from this imported fertilizer.A 28% urea price increase in three weeks doesn’t matter much to a Maryland soybean farmer hedging on the Chicago Board Of Trade (“CBOT”) futures exchange. It is a different sentence when 60% of your country’s fertilizer is imported, 80% of your ammonia comes through the Strait of Hormuz, your harvest is single-cycle and rain-fed, and your purchasing power is already gutted. And there’s no diesel, either.
If urea and DAP are not on the docks in Mumbai, Chittagong, and Karachi by mid-June, the yield damage is locked in for this crop year. The famine would hit Southeast Asia by the end of the year.
We already know what will happen because, in April 2021, the Rajapaksa government of Sri Lanka banned chemical fertilizer imports. The government intended to make the country the world’s first 100% organic farming nation. The country went from being a rice exporter to importing 783,420 tonnes of rice at the peak of the crisis at a cost of $292.5 million – its first large-scale rice imports in decades. Sri Lankan rice output has still not returned to its pre-ban peak of 3 million metric tons. The food inflation that followed contributed to the country’s worst economic crisis in over 70 years.
That was one country that went seven months without global fertilizer. It is hard to imagine what will happen to the people of Southeast Asia if the Persian Gulf isn’t completely re-opened in the next month.
Out Damned RINO
Louisiana Fires the First Shot the RINOs of the UniParty Cannot Survive
The polls open in Louisiana this morning on a question that has nothing to do with Louisiana and everything to do with the future of the Republican Party. For the first time in nearly a hundred years, a sitting United States senator may lose a primary to his own base.
The senator is Bill Cassidy. The base is everyone who has watched Republican incumbents legislate like Democrats between elections and then come home wrapped in the flag every six years to ask for another term.
Cassidy is not an aberration. He is the prototype. He is what happens when a senator concludes that the Swamp will protect him from his voters, that party leadership will run interference, and that the conservative grassroots have the political memory of a goldfish. What happens today in Louisiana will tell us whether that calculation still holds, or whether the era of the milquetoast RINO incumbent is finally, mercifully ending.
https://jdrucker.substack.com/p/louisiana-fires-the-first-shot-the
Japan taking in Muslims. Appears to be plenty to go around.
From a friend born in Japan, American citizen. She still has relatives that keep her up to date what’s going on. Even today there is bad feelings going on between Japanese and Chinese. She told me that they are naive in some ways as far as immigration. They think the Muslims coming in are nice. I told her as minorities but as they grow in numbers that may change. The last thing a small Island needs is a group that will expand in numbers on their dime. She did know that they are demanding special food. Also because of lack of space they are cremated and the Muslims don’t cremate the bury. Seems like right there that should be a reason for a no.
They try with the Chinese but get discouraged. One of their rental groups like Air B and B here they would rent to Chinese tourist and they would ransack the rentals, taking rice cookers, bedding, pottery, basically anything not nailed down, even toilet seats. They stopped renting to them.
Ferrett. Final rekoning of healthy food a humane treatment of livestock?
I can agree and disagree. I would not call mass production, GMO and their health risks including allergies, if the body can even recognize or obtain nutrients digesting it or just store it as fat, aluminum resistant by injecting it in the seeds, and antibiotic resistant bacteria, the killing of vital bacteria that breaks down the food in the soil the plants need, scorched earth, increasng poisonous pesticides, decreased biodiversity which could pose risk to crops, as healthy for humans or animal.
It certainly isn’t cheap either and many including children aren’t getting enough of nutrients they need. School lunches in the US are little help, heavy on grain and processed foods like a slice of boxed processed pizza. The cost of groceries used to be affordable and less toxic than today. As these new unhealthy farming apparently cost more. Although organic farmers would argue that.
goldie, perhaps this is the start of the final reckoning.
Because, over the last century, food has become worthless. ‘Improvements’ in so many areas have resulted in cheap, low nutrition foods, dead soil, over-leveraged farmers and consumers addicted to stuff; and cheap food. Food used to be a third of the household budget. Now it’s an eighth, or a tenth. After air and water, which are both free, our fundamental building block is insignificant in our budget, which means that the farmers aren’t getting the necessary price. We need to start valuing our food. Paying what is required for a stable supply of nutritious meals.