🇮🇷🚫🚢 My analysis of the Strait of Hormuz over the last 24 hours.

If the tankers use the Iran route, they are dominantly Iran-related. If the tankers use the Oman route, they are not, and never sanctioned.

I have heard from ship owners that most tankers cannot use the Iran route because the EU has not lifted sanctions on IRGC. Using the Iran route would risk sanctions, making the Oman route the only viable option.

With more conflict going on between IRGC and the US, the visible AIS data on Oman's tanker route is going to go dark again, which means Iran will have to keep escalating in order to completely halt flows.

For the US, the fact that the Oman route might be blocked presents it with a big ultimatum: either the US escalates or gives IRGC control of the Strait of Hormuz. Logic says there's no way that would happen, so escalation will continue.

Given that Trump has made it obvious that he does not want to escalate, I fear that the IRGC would just keep escalating until ...

📝 🎥 🎬 What is notable about Citizen Vigilante is that it drags the vigilante genre kicking and screaming from the 1970s to the 2020s. | Millennial Woes

The average liberal instinctively bristles at the tropes of classical vigilante cinema - “soft judges”, “nanny state”, “timid policing”, “moral decline”, “criminal parasites living off hard-working decent ordinary people” - but they long ago came to accept the genre as a necessary sop to right-wing idiots. I think the attitude was: “Let them have their trashy bread and circuses, if it keeps them docile while we remake their world around them.” After all, the tropes referred to realities that were incidental, not fundamental.

But today there are new realities, which today’s liberal cannot stand to see acknowledged because this strikes at the core of his worldview. These realities are fundamental, not incidental.

The first reality is that diversity has, far from improving White societies, degraded them in ...

📵 🇺🇸 👤 US to implement Digital ID if "KIDS Act" passes in the House today

Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications. While supporters continue to claim this bill protects minors online, its requirements come at the expense of privacy, free expression, and the ability of people of all ages to use the internet without revealing sensitive data.

Supporters of KOSA have said the bill doesn’t require age verification. And technically, the KOSA section of the bill does say that KOSA shouldn’t be read to require age verification.

Throughout the KOSA section of the legislation, special protections, controls, messaging settings, and parental tools are required whenever a website or app “knows or should have known” a user is a child (defined in the bill as anyone under 13) or a teen (defined as ...