"The rise of the sub-national power: Why mayors and regional bosses will rule the world"

A bloke named Lennon noted there were 4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. And that was in 1967.

Nobody wants to fix the potholes. We've looked at this topic a few times.

From Brussels Signal, May 21:

It is not an accident that the man most likely to replace Keir Starmer as British Prime Minister is Andy Burnham, the directly elected Mayor of Greater Manchester. Such is his myth and reputation, built on a perceived decade-long record of delivering some improvements in local government and public services, that he is now known, at least in Labour circles, as the “King of the North”. We live in an age when, more than ever, the political classes are discredited by their broken promises and the increasing prevalence of parliamentarians with no real-life work experience beyond politics itself. So, leaders who have demonstrated they can do something – anything – in practice, even at the head of some kind of a sub-national authority, tend to have an advantage with voters exasperated by the run-of-the-mill politicians who believe in nothing and can only offer more empty words and slogans.

Boris Johnson followed a similar path: His tenure as Mayor of London (2008–2016) strengthened his national name recognition and gave him a power base that ultimately propelled him to Downing Street. But none of this is new, of course. Jacques Chirac used 18 years as Mayor of Paris (1977-1995) as a springboard to the French presidency. José María Aznar was provincial president before becoming Spanish Prime Minister. Germany has a strong tradition of state (Lander) premiers or big-city mayors – from Adenauer and Brandt to Kohl and Scholz – moving to the Chancellery. At the other end of Europe, Romania’s last three presidents were previously mayors; and the runner-up in Poland’s presidential election last year was the mayor of Warsaw. Even Vladimir Putin’s early power base was rooted in St Petersburg networks, where he served as deputy mayor.

The path from local government – or, for wider applicability, “sub-national” power – to the very top of a country’s political system is, therefore, well trodden. But we tend to discount the extent to which it is turning into the main route to supreme power, or the ways in which it is competing with national power to begin with. The fact is that in the 21st century the lower levels of government are growing in influence, legitimacy and resources while central administrations are increasingly failing.

This is one of the most important structural tensions that modern states – irrespective of their outlook on the democratic-authoritarian spectrum – must resolve soon. It is also one that receives comparatively little attention, as such. Certain types of pundits may obsess over supranational projects and schemes – such as the EU’s ever-closer union or ideas like CANZUK – hoping to bring whole states into new consortia, on the assumption that great “blocs” are required in order to compete effectively in a world dominated by the US and China.

But the real – and perhaps more desirable – shift in political power is heading in the opposite direction: Downwards from state-level authority to sub-national leaders in charge of provincial governments or great municipalities. The dream of re-creating imperial-sized entities may continue on paper, but the harsher reality is that larger polities, today, only compound the problems of managing complex modern systems at vast scale. National-level dysfunction is spreading, and across this landscape of growing failure and frustration some of the only good news in terms of governance and things like public service performance comes from sub-national authorities....

....MUCH MORE

Also at Brussels Signal: 

Bataclan terrorist already granted penitentiary leave in Belgium 

EU’s Spring 2026 Economic Forecast sees growth down, inflation up 

We are not as sanguine as the writer regarding the trend of expanding mayoral power. 

Previously:

October 2021 -  Global Warming: London's Mayor "to call for cities like London to have greater powers and funding"

....In the introduction to October 14's BlackRock's Larry Fink: "Rich Countries Must Bear the Cost if We Can Ever Hope to Achieve a Net-Zero World":

Having studied the science, economics, politics, finance, psychology, law, messaging, regulation, sociology, and policy prescriptions of global warming since 1992 the overriding lesson learned is:
It's always about the money.

If you take away nothing else from this little blog, take that.

And save yourself an eighth-of-a-million pages of reading.

I obviously wasn't thinking large enough.

It's also about power.

And although the two are to a large extent fungible (see the next post for an example) money and power are separate and distinct manifestations of the reality of human existence.

And earlier looks at various aspects of mayoral might and moolah:

Trends to Watch: "Can mayors actually rule the world?"

In low-key but very persistent ways technocrats* have been aiming at this target for years and now it seems to be gathering some momentum. Here's a good introduction by Harvard's Diane Davis.

"Mayoral Powers in the Age of New Localism"

One of the problems with politics is that the people attracted to power are exactly the ones who should not be allowed anywhere near it.
Go figure.

We've been watching the mission-creep trend in municipal governance for a while now, trying to get in front of it—"Il faut bien que je les suive, puisque je suis leur chef"*—to make a bucko or two but, to date, have only come up with the tautology that these people would rather jet off to Buenos Aires during the Northern Hemisphere winter for the Global Parliament of Mayors** than stay home and fix potholes.
It was ever thus, or at least has been since 1967 when John Lennon noted "4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire"

*Ledru-Rollin, 1848—schoolboy French translation: "I must follow them for I am their leader."
**This year the get-together was actually held in Stavanger in late September. Nice 'hood, nice time of year.

"Cities Are Rising in Influence and Power on the Global Stage"

A subject near and dear to our jaded hearts.
It's the manifestation of the age-old thirst for power, to make the world as you want it, and an acknowledgement that fixing potholes is boring.

A Warning On Mayors Ruling The World From A Surprising Source

There is a determined push to decrease the importance of nation-states while elevating the worldwide political power of municipalities and their mayors, a trend I had assumed CityLab backed come hell-or-high-water.
Maybe not.
The writer of this piece, Amy Liu, hangs her hat at Brookings....

"Gadabout Urbanist Richard Florida Has a New Book... 

"It advises cities on what to do about problems that result from advice he gave them in his previous books..."

 "Why nation-states are good"

Yesterday two Alphavilleins, Izabella Kaminska on Twitter and Kadhim Shubber in the Further Reading post highlighted this Dani Rodrik essay at Aeon.

We've been kicking around ideas on how to profit from a devolution of power from larger entities (nation-states) to smaller (city-states) should said devolution occur. So, stealing a way of thinking from Eisenhower, in another context, obvs.:

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower 

Our most recent piece on what may or may not be a phenomena was last month's "Return of the City-State, Or: The End of the Nation State May Be Upon Us" which also linked to Aeon.

I'm not sure where Kadhim comes down on the structure-of-power thing but I suspect Izabella might not be aghast at a return to prominence of the Baltic City-States although probably not the Hanseatic League... 

And many more, you know the drill.

U.S. "Treasury Plans to Seize Iranian Assets to Pay Gulf Allies for War Damage"

From House of Saud, June 7:

Bessent directs Treasury to redirect frozen Iranian assets to Gulf allies as war compensation, eliminating the $24B Tehran demanded as its peace precondition. 

WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent directed his department on June 6, 2026, to use “all available authorities” to redirect frozen Iranian assets toward Gulf allies as compensation for war damage sustained since Iran’s first strikes on February 28 — a move that converts the $24 billion Tehran demanded as its precondition for peace into the fund Washington intends to use for paying the repair bills of the states Iran attacked. The directive, disclosed by a source familiar with Bessent’s thinking and reported simultaneously by Reuters, CBS News, and Arab News, arrived one day after Mohsen Rezaei, military adviser to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, told CNN that the frozen assets were non-negotiable and that without their release “the negotiations are at a deadlock.” 

The timing is not incidental. Iran filed its Oman counteroffer on June 6 — three days earlier than the expected June 9 deadline — demanding that Washington release frozen assets before Tehran removes mines from the Strait of Hormuz or restores passage to commercial shipping. Bessent’s directive does not merely reject that sequencing; it eliminates the asset pool Iran was negotiating over, redirecting the same funds to the parties Iran damaged. The result is a collision between two governments claiming the same $24 billion for opposite purposes, with neither possessing the legal machinery to force the other’s compliance. 

What Treasury Said — and What It Left Open....

....MUCH MORE 

"NEOM issues temporary work stoppage on The Line until at least 2030"

They should make the stoppage permanent, the whole city-in-a-straight-line idea seemed a bit goofy.

From The Architect's Newspaper, June 2/3:

Work on The Line in Saudi Arabia has been put on pause until at least 2030, per reporting in Semafor. Construction will also temporarily stop on Trojena, a mountain resort city.

NEOM, the company chaired by Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman backing the construction project, will shift its efforts to Oxagon, a port city south of The Line on the Red Sea, according to sources close to the plan. 

The pivot is a directive of the new NEOM CEO Aiman al-Mudaifer. Reports indicated that physical infrastructure that’s been already laid could be repurposed for data center usage.

The reinvestment strategy may be connected to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz because Oxagon is expected to play an essential role in seeding new trade routes. NEOM has pledged $3 billion to Oxagon. A construction timeline for the city’s completion hasn’t been announced....

....MUCH MORE 

"Lindt says weight-loss drugs users are eating more chocolate, not less"

From Reuters, March 10:

Chocolate sales are rising ​faster among U.S. users of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs than in ‌the rest of the population, Swiss chocolatier Lindt & Spruengli said on Tuesday, citing data that defied forecasts the drugs would reduce confectionery demand.

The company said an internal study, ​based on February data from market researcher Circana, found 15% of ​U.S. households use GLP-1s, representing 17.5% of chocolate sales.

 

GLP-1s include ⁠weight-loss drugs such as Novo Nordisk's Ozempic and Eli Lilly's 

Mounjaro.

 

Consumers cutting ​back on high-calorie intake categories, such as pasta, pizza and potato chips, ​are still looking for some kind of indulgence, chief executive Adalbert Lechner told a news conference on Tuesday.

 

"They are upgrading to premium products. Less is more – small rewards with moment of bliss rather ​than mindless munching," said Lechner.

 

Lindt, which makes chocolate Easter bunnies, said U.S. sales of ​premium chocolate increased among GLP-1 users by nearly 17% in 2025, compared to a ‌6.5% ⁠rise among non-GLP-1 users....

....MORE 

 

And at Bakery and Snacks, March 16:

Ozempic’s chocolate contradiction: Indulgence isn’t disappearing, it’s trading up
As appetite-suppressing drugs take hold, the real shift in snacking may not be how much people eat but how deliberately they choose to indulge

There's opportunity in here, somewhere. 

In the meantime, living La Vida Cocoa! 

Possibly also of interest:

Only The Dead Have Seen The End Of Candyflation 

Living La Vida Cocoa: Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway and the Chocolate Wars (BRK.A; BRK.B; CBY; KFT; HSY)  

"Feynman solved ‘restaurant dilemma’ 50 years ago — now a study confirms his mathematics"

From the journal Nature, June 1:

An experiment with 2,520 participants backs Richard Feynman’s answer to every diner’s dilemma: do I want to try something new?  

In a scene that could have easily featured in an episode of the US television sitcom The Big Bang Theory, the late US physicist Richard Feynman once turned a visit to a Thai restaurant he often dined at into a mathematical riddle: how adventurous should we be in trying new dishes? Feynman promptly solved this on a sheet of paper.

Now, behavioural scientists have revisited Feynman’s solution — some of which had been obscured by his inscrutable handwriting — and found that his was indeed the optimal strategy.

Feynman’s dilemma is one that will be familiar to any restaurant-goer. Do we keep ordering the best dish we’ve had so far, or do we explore the menu in the hope of finding something better? A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 1 June probes this question, and includes experimental findings that participants adopt meal-choosing strategies that closely approximate Feynman’s mathematical solution¹.

Behavioural scientist Shoham Choshen-Hillel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem says that the authors wrote a “super creative article”. “The restaurant example stands in for decisions in many settings,” she adds. Real-life examples include choosing a home to buy, deciding whom to partner up with and selecting a parking spot.

Are you ready to order?

The story begins with a regular visit by Feynman, a Nobel prizewinning physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and his friend Ralph Leighton, to a Thai restaurant in nearby Glendale in the late 1970s. (Leighton helped Feynman to write his popular 1985 memoir Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and was the son of the late physicist Robert Leighton, the co-author of the influential 1964 The Feynman Lectures on Physics, together with Feynman and Matthew Sands.) Leighton wondered whether he should order ginger chicken — his favourite dish — or explore the rest of the menu. Feynman began scribbling and promptly claimed he had found a mathematical solution: in his simplified model of the situation, he calculated a threshold — a number of visits beyond which Leighton’s rational decision would be to always settle on his favourite dish

What Feynman had done was turn the restaurant dilemma into a question in decision theory — a field at the intersection of economics and psychology that analyses strategies in one-person games. In particular, it was an original contribution to a larger family of problems in decision theory called stopping problems. These include real-life problems in which someone has to decide whether the possibility they have in front of them is good enough, or whether to keep searching....

....MUCH MORE 

Also at Nature:

Revisiting Feynman on physical law  

In retrospect: The Feynman Lectures on Physics 

And at Climateer Investing, the outro from "COLD CASE — Who smeared Richard Feynman? [FBI FILES]": 

....And later Feynman hangin' at Esalen, Big Sur, CA:

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas -- which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked -- or very little of it did.

But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO's, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.

Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how MUCH there was.

At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky slope below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.

One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beatiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude woman?"

I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, "I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?"

"Sure", she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby.

I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it", he says. "I feel a kind of dent -- is that the pituitary?"

I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!"

They looked at me, horrified -- I had blown my cover -- and said, "It's reflexology!"

I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.....

That, of course is the introduction to Feynman's famous 1974 CalTech commencment speech, "Cargo Cult Science"
More here.

And dozens and dozens more 

"Eisenhower Takes Responsibility for the Failure of the D-Day Landings"

A repost from the 70th anniversary of the invasion. A companion piece to our earlier D-Day "First Wave at Omaha Beach"
(originally "A companion piece to our earlier 'D-Day: A Little Boat that Made the Difference"')

On June 5, 1944 the weather in the English Channel was so nasty it risked the entire invasion of Normandy.
The meteorologists told Eisenhower there would be a small window of calmer seas the next day.
Eisenhower polled his junior generals and made the decision to invade.

He also wrote a short speech:

 'Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.'

Here's the original in the U.S. National Archives.

Ike later attributed the mis-dating to nerves.
You see don't folks taking responsibility so much anymore.

See also:
Churchill Announces the D-Day Landings to the House of Commons

Apparently The Blockade On Iranian Oil Is Driving Some Folks A Bit Nuts

I was trying to remember the term for besieging the besiegers, armed only with the thought fragment that the Romans had done it in Gaul* when these two guys showed up.

Mohsen Rezaei, military advisor to Mojtaba Khamenei: If the naval blockade continues for a period beyond a certain time frame, then we will be the ones who will attack. pic.twitter.com/LUUMFqaKHr

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) May 29, 2026

IRGC Commander-in-Chief Ahmad Vahidi: "We will break the blockade through negotiations. If not, through direct action." pic.twitter.com/WFfgdwhcCx

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) May 29, 2026

*It was Julius Caesar defending against same at the Siege of Alesia. The term is military investment and the tactic that Caesar used was to apply both contravallation against the town and circumvallation when the Gallic relief forces attempted to lay siege to his army.

Basically: If you are going to blockade Hormuz then we'll set up a siege line outside of your siege.

Thanks to The Archaeologist for scratching that itch:

Roman Siege of Alesia: Caesar’s Double Line of Fortifications
May 19, 2026
1. The Engineering of Circumvallation and Contravallation

The construction of a double ring of fortifications was a masterclass in ancient military logistics and defensive architecture.... 

And to History Collection for the visual:

 

"Knives Out for Morris Katz" (Mamdani AND Platner)

New York Magazine's Intelligencer, June 4:

Over the weekend, Democrats around the country were in a panic. Graham Platner, their presumptive nominee for a Maine Senate seat that is the linchpin of the party’s fragile hopes for taking the majority, was revealed to have sexted with multiple women after he married his wife, Amy Gertner. (This was prior to latest round of anxiety around Platner’s candidacy, induced by a Thursday New York Times story reporting on his “unsettling” behavior with several women he dated.) In addition, the Bangor Daily News reported that Morris Katz, a top campaign adviser, was said to have “threatened” the former Platner staffer who revealed the existence of the incriminating sexts, injecting the appearance of campaign bullying into a metastasizing scandal.

In the hothouse world of New York City Democratic political consultants, which Katz came out of, the reaction was mixed: There was fear, of course, about dreams of a Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate slipping away but also something that, if not quite glee, has a suitable German equivalent. “Schadenfreude,” said one local operative describing the mood in her group chats. “Everyone is delighting in this and is guns blazing for Morris Katz.”

Katz is a 27-year-old wunderkind of Democratic politics, a college dropout who did the scut work of campaigns before finding fame as one of the strategists behind Zohran Mamdani’s unexpected rise to the top of the 2025 New York City mayoral field. Profiles in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and this magazine followed, and Katz became a regular on the liberal-chat circuit: Pod Save America, Hacks on Tap, “The Political Scene” by The New Yorker, and David Axelrod’s speaker series at the University of Chicago.

He’s approaching the rarefied world of political consultants who become nearly as well known in their field as the politicians they help elect. Think Axelrod, for one, but also Karl Rove or James Carville. In the world of operatives, it’s a perilous place to be, and those who achieve such recognition tend to move away from politics and into punditry (as Axelrod, Rove, and Carville all did).

“Once you become famous in America, the only way you can earn a living is by being famous,” said Carville, who after helping elect Bill Clinton in 1992 and starring in a documentary about that campaign spent the rest of his career on paid speeches and working overseas. “You can’t work races. You become so much the story that wherever you go people follow you as much as the candidate.”

“I am sure all of the other Democratic campaign consultants in New York are absolutely salivating at this,” said Mike Murphy, a top aide to both John McCain and Mitt Romney and a regular on the Sunday talk-show circuit. “You do a campaign in New York, which is the absolute nerve center of Democratic politics, and it works out, anything you do after is going to get a ton of attention and you get too much credit for what you do right and too much blame for what goes wrong.”

Had some other Platner aide reached out to Genevieve McDonald, the former Platner staffer, and demanded she retract the leaked texts to journalists at The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, it would not have been as big a story. But because it was Katz, the story was picked up by the New York Post and other conservative outlets looking for ways to dent Mamdani and the socialist-aligned political movement that is behind him.

“The knives are out for him,” said another Democratic strategist, who, like many in New York politics, considers Katz a friend. “He went from being a nobody to being a rock star in a couple of months, and he’s 27 years old. There are going to be mistakes, and this is a big one. It’s a dumpster fire.”....

....MUCH MORE 

Normandy: The Only Woman To Land on D-Day

A repost from 2019.

We met Martha Gelhorn in May 25 2019's "The story of Ernest Hemingway’s $187,000 magazine expenses claim" where she appeared as Hemingway's third wife.
And a professionally superior journalist.
In fact, she was one of the best war correspondents of the last century, telling stories of conflicts for readers of Collier's from  Spain, London, Finland, and China.

In addition to being the only woman to land in Normandy on D-Day she was the first reporter to land, period. 

Here's Amusing Planet:

On the eve of the Normandy landings in June 1944, there were over a thousand war correspondents all over Europe reporting back to the millions of British and Americans back home. A handful of these journalists and photographers were also women. Unfortunately, the government had prohibited women from going to the front lines, so while these women correspondents could cover stories from the war zone, they could not go in with the troops.
Understandably, many female war correspondents were not happy with the ban.

“It is necessary that I report on this war," wrote Martha Ellis Gellhorn in an angry letter to military authorities. “I do not feel there is any need to beg as a favour for the right to serve as the eyes for millions of people in America who are desperately in need of seeing, but cannot see for themselves.”

Martha Ellis Gellhorn was an American war correspondent for the Collier’s magazine. Some of you may know her as the third wife of Ernest Hemingway, but her accomplishments as a journalist far outshine her brief marriage to the novelist.

Gellhorn began her career as a journalist during the Great Depression, working as a Field Investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) created by Franklin D. Roosevelt to report on the impact of the Depression on the country. Later, she travelled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War in 1937. During this period she met Ernest Hemingway, who was also in Spain as a correspondent. They married in 1940, she becoming Hemingway’s third wife, and Hemingway becoming Gellhorn’s second husband.

Gellhorn and Hemingway’s marriage was troubled from the start. Hemingway refused to let go off his second wife even when both of them were seeing each other, and Gellhorn’s long absences during her reporting assignments irritated Hemingway. When D-Day approached, their marriage was already dead in the water. To get even with Gellhorn, Hemingway got himself accredited as the correspondent for Colliers, the magazine Gellhorn worked for, blocking any chance Gellhorn might have of getting to the front lines.

But Martha Gellhorn was not ready to bow out....

...MUCH MORE

re: Hemingway's expenses claim, we intro'd with "Journalism, especially at the top of the heap, used to be very profitable."

Six Years Ago: The Moment Millions Of People Lost Their Faith In Science

It's hard to top this story for raw credibility destruction. 

Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests.

"White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19," they wrote.https://t.co/EewPNgDSu3

— NPR (@NPR) June 2, 2020

D-Day: "First Wave at Omaha Beach"

We usually mark D-Day with the story of the little boats that carried the troops but in 2020 decided to post this piece. 

Original post:
I have debated posting this article but finally decided to link.
The first consideration is: this is a ghastly story.
Beyond the high-flying rhetoric of politicians and commentators is the fact that people were killed and maimed in nasty, brutal, horrific ways.

Secondly, the author, S.L.A. Marshall, although an official U.S. Army combat historian who eventually retired as a brigadier general has, since his death, been found to be something of a stolen valor exaggerator and a sometimes methodological fabulist.

Still, the fact this piece was published in a major magazine just sixteen years after the events recounted is remarkable in and of itself.

From The Atlantic, November 1960 Issue:
S. L. A. Marshall

An account of the “epic human tragedy” that unfolded when Allied troops landed on the shores of Normandy on D-Day 

Unlike what happens to other great battles, the passing of the years and the retelling of the story have softened the horror of Omaha Beach on D Day.

This fluke of history is doubly ironic since no other decisive battle has ever been so thoroughly reported for the official record. While the troops were still fighting in Normandy, what had happened to each unit in the landing had become known through the eyewitness testimony of all survivors. It was this research by the field historians which first determined where each company had hit the beach and by what route it had moved inland. Owing to the fact that every unit save one had been mislanded, it took this work to show the troops where they had fought.

How they fought and what they suffered were also determined in detail during the field research. As published today, the map data showing where the troops came ashore check exactly with the work done in the field; but the accompanying narrative describing their ordeal is a sanitized version of the original field notes.

This happened because the Army historians who wrote the first official book about Omaha Beach, basing it on the field notes, did a calculated job of sifting and weighting the material. So saying does not imply that their judgment was wrong. Normandy was an American victory; it was their duty to trace the twists and turns of fortune by which success was won. But to follow that rule slights the story of Omaha as an epic human tragedy which in the early hours bordered on total disaster. On this two-division front landing, only six rifle companies were relatively effective as units. They did better than others mainly because they had the luck to touch down on a less deadly section of the beach.

Three times that number were shattered or foundered before they could start to fight. Several contributed not a man or bullet to the battle for the high ground. But their ordeal has gone unmarked because its detail was largely ignored by history in the first place. The worst-fated companies were overlooked, the more wretched personal experiences were toned down, and disproportionate attention was paid to the little element of courageous success in a situation which was largely characterized by tragic failure.

The official accounts which came later took their cue from this secondary source instead of searching the original documents. Even such an otherwise splendid and popular book on the great adventure as Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day misses the essence of the Omaha story.

In everything that has been written about Omaha until now, there is less blood and iron than in the original field notes covering any battalion landing in the first wave. Doubt it? Then let's follow along with Able and Baker companies, 116th Infantry, 29th Division. Their story is lifted from my fading Normandy notebook, which covers the landing of every Omaha company.

---

Able Company riding the tide in seven Higgins boats is still five thousand yards from the beach when first taken under artillery fire. The shells fall short. At one thousand yards, Boat No. 5 is hit dead on and foundered. Six men drown before help arrives. Second Lieutenant Edward Gearing and twenty others paddle around until picked up by naval craft, thereby missing the fight at the shore line. It's their lucky day. The other six boats ride unscathed to within one hundred yards of the shore, where a shell into Boat No. 3 kills two men. Another dozen drown, taking to the water as the boat sinks. That leaves five boats.

Lieutenant Edward Tidrick in Boat No. 2 cries out: "My God, we're coming in at the right spot, but look at it! No shingle, no wall, no shell holes, no cover. Nothing!"

His men are at the sides of the boat, straining for a view of the target. They stare but say nothing. At exactly 6:36 A.M. ramps are dropped along the boat line and the men jump off in water anywhere from waist deep to higher than a man's head. This is the signal awaited by the Germans atop the bluff. Already pounded by mortars, the floundering line is instantly swept by crossing machine-gun fires from both ends of the beach.

Able Company has planned to wade ashore in three files from each boat, center file going first, then flank files peeling off to right and left. The first men out try to do it but are ripped apart before they can make five yards. Even the lightly wounded die by drowning, doomed by the waterlogging of their overloaded packs. From Boat No. 1, all hands jump off in water over their heads. Most of them are carried down. Ten or so survivors get around the boat and clutch at its sides in an attempt to stay afloat. The same thing happens to the section in Boat No. 4. Half of its people are lost to the fire or tide before anyone gets ashore. All order has vanished from Able Company before it has fired a shot.

Already the sea runs red. Even among some of the lightly wounded who jumped into shallow water the hits prove fatal. Knocked down by a bullet in the arm or weakened by fear and shock, they are unable to rise again and are drowned by the onrushing tide. Other wounded men drag themselves ashore and, on finding the sands, lie quiet from total exhaustion, only to be overtaken and killed by the water. A few move safely through the bullet swarm to the beach, then find that they cannot hold there. They return to the water to use it for body cover. Faces turned upward, so that their nostrils are out of water, they creep toward the land at the same rate as the tide. That is how most of the survivors make it. The less rugged or less clever seek the cover of enemy obstacles moored along the upper half of the beach and are knocked off by machine-gun fire.

Within seven minutes after the ramps drop, Able Company is inert and leaderless. At Boat No. 2, Lieutenant Tidrick takes a bullet through the throat as he jumps from the ramp into the water. He staggers onto the sand and flops down ten feet from Private First Class Leo J. Nash. Nash sees the blood spurting and hears the strangled words gasped by Tidrick: "Advance with the wire cutters!" It's futile; Nash has no cutters. To give the order, Tidrick has raised himself up on his hands and made himself a target for an instant. Nash, burrowing into the sand, sees machine gun bullets rip Tidrick from crown to pelvis. From the cliff above, the German gunners are shooting into the survivors as from a roof top.

Captain Taylor N. Fellers and Lieutenant Benjamin R. Kearfoot never make it. They had loaded with a section of thirty men in Boat No. 6 (Landing Craft, Assault, No. 1015). But exactly what happened to this boat and its human cargo was never to be known. No one saw the craft go down. How each man aboard it met death remains unreported. Half of the drowned bodies were later found along the beach. It is supposed that the others were claimed by the sea.
 

Along the beach, only one Able Company officer still lives—Lieutenant Elijah Nance, who is hit in the heel as he quits the boat and hit in the belly by a second bullet as he makes the sand. By the end of ten minutes, every sergeant is either dead or wounded. To the eyes of such men as Private Howard I. Grosser and Private First Class Gilbert G. Murdock, this clean sweep suggests that the Germans on the high ground have spotted all leaders and concentrated fire their way. Among the men who are still moving in with the tide, rifles, packs, and helmets have already been cast away in the interests of survival.
 

To the right of where Tidrick's boat is drifting with the tide, its coxswain lying dead next to the shell-shattered wheel, the seventh craft, carrying a medical section with one officer and sixteen men, noses toward the beach. The ramp drops. In that instant, two machine guns concentrate their fire on the opening. Not a man is given time to jump. All aboard are cut down where they stand.

By the end of fifteen minutes, Able Company has still not fired a weapon.....

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"The CIA’s insane gold bars scandal"

From the Washington Examiner, May 28:

THE CIA’S INSANE GOLD BARS SCANDAL. Here is the basic story, as alleged in an affidavit filed in federal court: 

In 2009, a man named David Rush, a Navy veteran, took a job at the CIA. As part of the application process, he told the CIA that he had a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Clemson University, when in fact he had never attended or obtained a degree from Clemson University. Rush also told the CIA he had a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, when in fact he had never attended or obtained a degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Rush also told the CIA he had been a Navy test pilot, when in fact he had served in the Navy but was never a pilot of any sort. 

CIA officials apparently never caught any of these falsehoods when they hired Rush. On Nov. 20, 2009, when, as a new employee, he submitted an application to obtain the highest possible security clearance, Top Secret/Secure Compartmented Information, Rush again claimed to have degrees from Clemson and Rensselaer. He received the clearance.

Rush moved up the ranks of the CIA. In 2018, he applied to enter the Senior Executive Service, which would place him at the top level — and among the highest paid — of agency workers. In that application, Rush “stated he was a graduate of the United States Air Force Test Pilot School, and he was the current Director of Test for a 145-person, 18-aircraft joint Army/Navy weapons test organization,” according to the affidavit. The affidavit continued: “In this same application, Rush stated he had an eleven-year tenure as a Thesis/Dissertation advisor at the Air Force Institute of Technology.” None of that was true. Nevertheless, the CIA promoted Rush.

During this time, the affidavit said, Rush also continued to claim leave pay for military service even though he was no longer in the Navy. Government records “indicate that, since being honorably discharged in February 2015, Rush has claimed 744 hours of military leave on his official timesheet, representing approximately $77,000 in compensation,” the affidavit said. That, if known at the CIA, did not stop Rush’s move into the senior executive ranks. 

Then, starting in November 2025, Rush allegedly did something astonishing, more striking than anything he had done before. According to the affidavit, “Rush made several requests to the U.S. Government to obtain a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses.”

And the CIA gave it to him! Officials began handing Rush money and gold. Only later did someone begin to wonder what was going on. The CIA then searched a storage space in Rush’s office but found “only a portion of the currency” that he had been given. Government officials were “unable to locate the gold bars or significant amounts of the foreign currency Rush received pursuant to his requests or to identify the intended use of these funds,” the affidavit said.

At that point, it appears that light bulbs finally started going off at the CIA. Officials there notified the FBI, which on May 18 conducted a search of Rush’s home in Virginia. “During the search, FBI agents seized approximately 303 gold bars, each of which weighs approximately one kilogram,” the affidavit said. “Based on the current price of gold, the estimated value of the gold exceeds $40 million.” Agents also found $2 million in U.S. currency.

Rush is now under arrest. His story raises a number of critical questions. How did the CIA — remember that the middle initial stands for “Intelligence” — allow itself to be defrauded so easily and so often? How did it not discover, just in the routine course of hiring, the nonexistent college degrees, the test-pilot fraud, and the rest of the lies in Rush’s job and security clearance applications?....

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"Meta putting up tents across the US to house AI servers, like ‘a scene out of the movie Mad Max’ — structures take three months to build and use jet engines for power" (META)

Mad King Zuck?

We shall see.

From Tom's Hardware, June 5:

These "makeshift" structures are housing hardware that costs millions of dollars in total. 

Meta has moved from building traditional structures for its data centers to putting up tents across the U.S. and sticking AI servers inside them. Michael Thomas, founder of market intelligence and data center tracking firm Cleanview Energy, said on X that the AI tech firm has already built or is in the process of constructing three data centers that use the strategy. 

One site, located in New Albany, Ohio, already has five buildings that took approximately two to three years to complete. The company then started putting up five tents, with an area of around 125,000 square feet each, in the area. City permits seen by Cleanview Energy say that the construction started in April 2026, while recent satellite images show that the structures have already been completed.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the strategy of pitching tents and filling them with AI servers last year. It seems that he wanted the infrastructure to come online quickly while demand for compute is increasing exponentially. It’s said that Meta is inspired by Elon Musk’s feat with xAI, which built a 100,000-strong AI data center in just 19 days in 2024 — something which usually takes four years, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The technique is apparently quite effective, and it’s now being applied to two other sites, including one in Tennessee....

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"The Burden of Discernment" (science, communication, AI, plus bonus Robet Maxwell)

From Palladium Magazine, May 23: 

In 1633, the year after Galileo Galilei published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, a book that made a comparative argument strongly favoring heliocentrism, his work was banned by the Roman Catholic Church, and he was sentenced to lifelong house arrest. On October 31, 1992, after a 13-year investigation into the condemnation of the Italian astronomer, Pope John Paul II officially closed the inquiry and formally acknowledged the Church’s error in the affair. The Supreme Pontiff also stated that science and the Christian faith are not in opposition, and that contemporary culture requires constant effort to synthesize knowledge: “a true culture cannot be conceived of without humanism and wisdom.”

As artificial intelligence reshapes our relationship with knowledge, this synthesis is perhaps more relevant than ever. It is also more nuanced than what is highlighted about the case in popular tellings of the history of science. It then isn’t a coincidence that Galileo’s case is also invoked to bolster rejected or inadequate claims—a logical fallacy called the “Galileo gambit” that conflates scientific criticism with undue persecution, and one that has seen use by alternative medicine enthusiasts, vaccine and climate-change skeptics, conspiracy theorists, and pseudoscience proponents. It isn’t only good ideas that attract passionate advocates.

Whether as individual thinkers or as a civilization, we cannot simply drop the burden of discernment, the often difficult task of distinguishing sound scientific challenges from pseudoscience, and ultimately of distinguishing what is correct from what is not. The case reveals a fundamental tension in how society handles challenges to consensus that remains today: while scientists face legitimate concerns about their ideas being stifled or dismissed prematurely, this same concern is exploited to shield poorly evidenced claims from appropriate scrutiny.  

However, scientists and researchers who take on entrenched views in academia and in the public eye today face daunting moral and professional challenges. These challenges are more subtle than papal decrees or house arrests, but academic gatekeeping, algorithmic visibility controls, funding pressures, and a strained, long-overextended peer-review system can have a similar detrimental effect.

This problem of institutional discernment has perhaps been the fundamental problem of knowledge and humanity’s relationship with it all along. Can science do better, or are we bound to continue seeing the same problems in new technologically and socially updated guises? 

The Institutions of Knowledge 
Institutions dedicated to accumulating and sharing knowledge evolve in lockstep with technological progress, with each major technological advancement reshaping our information preservation methods and how we synthesize knowledge into understanding. Pre-literate societies relied on oral traditions with structured memorization and performance to transmit knowledge across generations. The advent of writing led to libraries, transforming knowledge from ephemeral recitation into collectible, searchable, and cumulative works. Later, medieval monastic libraries played an important role in preserving valuable texts through societal collapse, while the emergence of universities in the 11th and 12th centuries helped institutionalize structured debate and formal teaching.

The printing press enabled widespread distribution outside of localized institutions, giving rise to the Republic of Letters—an international network of intellectuals such as the botanist and physician Carl Linnaeus, who developed and popularized a system for classifying life or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of the most influential mathematicians who ever lived, and the author of over 15,000 letters to hundreds of scholars. In the Enlightenment era, knowledge became a recognized commodity, with rising specialization prompting the creation of scientific disciplines and laboratories. In contrast to prior bodies geared toward archiving and deliberation, laboratories rigorously expanded insights in focused areas, fueling the momentum of modern scientific progress. 

With the advent of laboratories, the need to share and discuss discoveries became paramount. The emergence of scholarly publishers who recorded and distributed research and experimental outcomes, enabled the scientific community to scrutinize, debate, and build upon the existing knowledge base. This tradition began with the early printed journals, such as Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society dating back to the 17th century. While printed journals set the groundwork for the distribution of findings and sharing of ideas, contemporary digital scholarly publishing platforms have greatly expanded the volume and accessibility of published work.

The digitalization of knowledge brought its own challenges with scientists and researchers facing an overwhelming amount of data and published material. NASA’s EOSDIS program is estimated to archive over 500 petabytes of data by 2030, while CERN has already reached a one-exabyte milestone as of 2025. At the same time, arXiv recorded a steady year-over-year increase of paper submissions since August 1991, rising a thousandfold over 35 years. There are signs our ability to integrate and make sense of this digital deluge is lagging behind. Yet for the vast increase of the papers submitted, each paper is becoming less disruptive, and less likely to “break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions.”

Artificial Intelligence technology which excels at distilling large bodies of text and structured data, is in a timely alignment with the need for a transformation in science, promising both the potential to accelerate the expansion of academic publishing and the problems that come with it even as it holds vast potential to help humanity advance science. For now, we are yet to see its real impact on science and knowledge as a whole. 

Each subsequent technological breakthrough has necessitated novel frameworks to synthesize knowledge. All relied on human judgment in some form or another. Oral traditions required the judgment of elders to decide which stories mattered; libraries required scholars to determine which texts to preserve and copy, and laboratories required peers to judge which findings held. These transformations can be seen as differing approaches for how to structure distributing the burden of discernment.

The Volume of Papers Has Overwhelmed Academic Journals
Despite a narrow audience, academic publishing is one of the highest-margin businesses today, with profit margins as high as 40% mirroring tech giants like Google and Microsoft. For many years, this field primarily functioned as a service to the academic community and was managed by scientific societies relying on handouts to cover printing costs rather than large conglomerates. The transformation occurred in the post-World War II era, when in 1951, Robert Maxwell, the enigmatic Czechoslovak-born British entrepreneur and father of the infamous socialite and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, took over a small scientific publisher that became Pergamon Press....

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If interested in a bit of a divertissement see 2021's "The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell"  

Or back on topic:

AI is like the printing press, to a point. Instead of making information cheap and easily 

available, it makes intelligence cheap and easily available. That is, it not only serves users 

information, but it can find it for them, analyze it for them, and help them convert it into 

understanding. If we could transform society by spreading information, then we ought to 

be able to transform it more dramatically by spreading intelligence. 

—https://freesystems.substack.com/p/building-political-superintelligence 

About Free Systems:

FREE SYSTEMS is a research lab and newsletter dedicated to one question: how do we preserve human liberty in an algorithmic world?

I’m Andy Hall, a political economist at Stanford GSB and the Hoover Institution. I’ve become convinced that AI is going to massively change the world, requiring new research to understand how we maintain freedom and liberty in this new era—-and that we can use AI itself to completely transform how we do that research.

So I started this Substack, built a radical AI-centered lab at Stanford, and hired a team of researchers all across the world, from Rwanda and Singapore to Japan and the UK, and of course the US, who help me manage AI agents, build new governance prototypes, and rapidly release research....

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Meanwhile, at DARPA....

Request for information (RFI). 

Via SAM.gov:

Realistic Mass Casualty Medical Simulation Capabilities RFI  

Original Published Date: May 15, 2026 01:37 pm EDT
Original Response Date: May 31, 2026 04:00 pm EDT

Description

The Biological Technologies Office (BTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) seeks input from industry, government support organizations, military training organizations, and civilian emergency preparedness entities regarding capabilities to plan, resource, execute, and assess high-fidelity, large-scale mass casualty (MASCAL) medical simulation events. This Request for Information (RFI) is a preliminary step to assess current capabilities to conduct realistic MASCAL simulations involving greater than 50, 100, or 200 simulated patients within a single event lasting less than 72 hours.

This RFI is solely for information gathering and planning purposes. It does not constitute a solicitation for proposals, abstracts, or quotations nor indicate an intent to fund those who respond.... 

Respondents are requested to submit a maximum 3-page (including graphics) white paper detailing their organization's experience and overall approach to creating high-fidelity MASCAL medical simulations that incorporate moulage, live actors, physiology-enabled medical manikins, and the ability for caregivers to perform life-saving interventions (LSIs) using realistic Class VIII (medical materiel) consumables. Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), or Mixed Reality (MR) solutions are also in scope. Responses should demonstrate expertise in this domain, not in unrelated fields (e.g., tabletop exercises or low-fidelity classroom training). Please structure your response to address the following sections...

 ....MUCH MORE (download)

Let's hope the timing on this RFI, and whatever follows it, is a bit looser than the October 2019 Event 201 pandemic exercise:

https://www.weforum.org/press/2019/10/live-simulation-exercise-to-prepare-public-and-private-leaders-for-pandemic-response/ 

Here's Johns Hopkins University's description of the scenario:

The Event 201 scenario

Event 201 simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms.... 

"...Efforts to explain what makes nations wealthy and what makes empires decline."

From The Dublin Review of Books, May 29, Issue 161, Summer 2026:

Messy versus Tidy
The shadow of Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith hangs over two contemporary efforts to explain what makes nations wealthy and what makes empires decline.

Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, by Luke Kemp Viking, 592 pp, £25, ISBN: ‎978-0241741238

Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages, by Johan Norberg Atlantic Books, 512 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-1838957315

The year 1776, whose quarter-millennium we mark this year, was a good vintage for documents that would last. Almost four months before the publication on July 4th of The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America (sic), the publishers William Strahan and Thomas Cadell in the Strand published, on March 9th, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. A few weeks before that (sources disagree about the exact date), the same publishers launched the first volume of a projected six-volume work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. It’s surprising that subsequent historiography has drawn few explicit comparisons between the second and third of these documents, almost as if the chronological coincidence were an embarrassment for serious scholars, like a form of astrology. The disciplinary separation between history and political economy is doubtless part of the story. One of the rare books to treat both works together, Harold James’s The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (Princeton) is by a scholar unusually at home in both traditions.

Smith and Gibbon certainly knew each other, at least through correspondence. In a letter dated November 26th, 1777, Gibbon writes to Smith: ‘Among the strange reports that are every day circulated in this wide town, I heard one today so very extraordinary that I know not how to give credit to it. I was informed that a place of commissioner of the customs in Scotland had been given to a philosopher who for his own glory and for the benefit of mankind had enlightened the world by the most profound and systematic treatise on the great objects of trade and revenue which had ever been published in any age or in any country. But as I was told at the same time that this philosopher was my particular friend, I found myself very forcibly inclined to believe what I most sincerely wished and desired.’

Gibbon probably knew Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. It’s hard to read Smith’s ironic account in 1759 of the social function of religion (‘That the terrors of religion should thus enforce the natural sense of duty, was of too much importance to the happiness of mankind, for nature to leave it dependent upon the slowness and uncertainty of philosophical researches’) without wondering whether it influenced what may be Gibbon’s most famous sentence: ‘The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.’ Smith had begun writing The Wealth of Nations in 1764 in my home city of Toulouse. This was just a year after Voltaire (whose interest in universal history was certainly an influence on Gibbon) had published his Treatise on Toleration in response to the terrible miscarriage of justice in that city in the Calas affair. It makes sense to think of these two writers as exercised by a common set of preoccupations, even if neither framed them in the same terms.

Smith’s ostensible subject is what makes nations wealthy, while Gibbon’s is what makes empires decay. But each of them is fascinated by the mirror image of their focal question. For Gibbon, what made the Roman empire decay was not a single cause but an accumulation of political, fiscal and religious trends, themselves the fruit of prosperity, that together undermined both civic virtue (especially through luxury consumption) and institutional capacity. For Smith the qualities that made nations wealthy were precisely the qualities that could be blocked by the short-sightedness of opportunistic political leaders. These included not just environmental and technological qualities – the division of labour, mechanisation, the absence of constraints on trade. He also believed in the importance and fragility of civic virtue (trustworthiness, prudence, a sense of justice), albeit in a more sober and less martial version than Gibbon’s, and as a supporting condition rather than a central motor of historical change....

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"One of Wall Street's Most Bullish Market Strategists Sees a 3-Phased Market Coming That Includes a Correction or Bear Market"

Mr. Lee is only the second analyst we've seen mention lock-up periods. In the case of SpaceX the current shareholders will have to sell stock just to get the free-float high enough to meet S&P's criteria for inclusion into the 500 sometime next year.

Additionally Lee's crossing the valley of the shadow of death to the broad sunlit uplands (boy, there's a pair of mixed allusions/metaphors) is interesting for its eventual bullishness.

From The Motley Fool, June 5:

Tom Lee of Fundstrat is undeniably one of Wall Street's most bullish market strategists.

In fact, it's unusual for Lee not to be bullish. To his credit, Lee has nailed most of his bull market calls over the past several years. Interestingly, however, Lee recently appeared on CNBC to discuss what he called an upcoming three-phased market. Lee expects a bumpy ride in the near term, including a correction or bear market that could begin shortly. Let's take a look.

The market is about to run into a host of challenges 
At recent prices, the benchmark S&P 500 (^GSPC 1.53%) index has risen nearly 11% this year. That's impressive, considering all the challenges it's had to overcome, including doubts about artificial intelligence (AI) at the beginning of the year and then the Iran war, which has led to higher oil and gas prices that are likely contributing to elevated inflation.

However, Lee said the market has been bolstered by incredibly strong first-quarter earnings. According to Lee, most market forecasters had penciled in $70 of collective earnings per share (EPS) for the S&P 500. First-quarter EPS actually came in at about $80, a big beat on expectations for what had already been expected to be a strong quarter of growth.

If the market stays on this trajectory, that's $40 in additional EPS on an annualized basis, which could lift the S&P 500 by 800 to 1,000 points, according to Lee. However, Lee's base case, based on what he and the team at Fundstrat had expected to be a "challenging year," is a three-phased market.

The first phase, currently underway, is largely bullish. With the S&P 500 now slightly above 7,560 (as of June 3), Lee thinks the rally could last a little bit longer, potentially taking the market to around 7,700.

The second phase, which will shortly follow, will be a challenging period for the market.

"Then we are going to digest a lot of things until October," Lee told CNBC. "And that's a new Fed chair; it's the energy shock ... especially shortages of petroleum products and lubricants. ... And the third is the IPOs of SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic that when the unlocks happen, that's a lot of extra supply.

By "unlocks," Lee refers to the expiration of lock-up provisions that allow insiders and employees with company shares to sell those shares in the public market.

"I think that could pressure stocks in a way that feels like a bear market," Lee added.

However, Lee sees this more difficult period settling after the midterm elections, at which point he expects stocks to rally strongly, with 2027 yielding "some of the best we've ever seen in our lifetime."....

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Big Business: "The paper trail linking a US fuel trader to a notorious Mexican cartel"

From Reuters, May 27: 

Mystery customers. Missing permits. Inaccurate customs declarations. Investigations in the U.S. and Mexico. Documents shed light on an alleged fuel smuggling racket.

Ikon Midstream, a Houston-based petroleum trader whose offices were raided last month by U.S. authorities, is under investigation in Mexico in connection with fuel smuggling, according to three Mexican security sources with direct knowledge of the matter and four Mexican government security documents viewed by Reuters.

 

The probe is part of ongoing investigations into maritime shipments of petroleum products that were brought to Mexico from the U.S. and Canada in an alleged scheme to evade a hefty tax due on these imports, the documents and sources said.

 

Ikon Midstream is among the “central pieces” in a suspected scheme linked to one of Mexico’s most powerful crime groups, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), and Mexico’s attorney general’s office has opened an investigation into the company “based on testimonies, documents and surveillance,” according to one of the documents.

 

Mexico’s attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

The Texas trader’s export of diesel aboard the tanker Torm Agnes is being scrutinized for potential cartel links, as is Ikon Midstream’s purported relationship with a suspected CJNG-related trucking company that helped offload the vessel’s cargo in the ports of Ensenada and Guaymas, according to the security sources and the document.

Smuggled fuel and stolen crude oil have become the second-largest source of revenue for Mexico’s cartels behind narcotics, according to the U.S. government.

Two of the documents laid out the operations and players in the alleged racket. Among them, Ikon Midstream was allegedly a supplier of petroleum products that moved through a complex web of importers, transporters, distributors and facilitators in Mexico. The other two documents contained summaries of the probes. The four documents were created in March and April and their authenticity was confirmed by the security sources.

 

Asked to comment about the investigations, Ikon Midstream Executive Director Rhett Kenagy said in a May 12 email to Reuters that there was “not a single shred of documentation to back any of it up” and that the company was “not going to respond to accusations grounded in hearsay.”

 

Homeland Security Investigations, the primary transnational investigative agency within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, executed a criminal search warrant at Ikon Midstream’s Houston offices on April 14, a DHS spokesperson told Reuters in an April 17 statement. “This is related to an ongoing investigation into criminal activity,” the statement said. DHS did not elaborate, and it did not comment on whether it was coordinating with Mexican authorities.

 

 

Excerpt from an April 17, 2026, statement to Reuters from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security 

about a raid made earlier that week by its investigative unit at the Houston offices of Ikon Midstream.

Ikon Midstream has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. In an April 24 statement to Reuters, the fuel trader said it “has never knowingly provided, and does not knowingly provide, material support or resources to CJNG.” Regarding the raid by Homeland Security Investigations, Ikon Midstream said in its statement that “an investigative action by law enforcement is not itself a finding of wrongdoing.” 

 

Mexican authorities have announced the arrests of at least 16 people since September in connection with fuel smuggling. While officials have said they’ve uncovered a “criminal structure” behind the alleged illicit activity, they haven’t publicly named the detainees or said anything about their possible connections to CJNG.

 

In an October report, Reuters chronicled how diesel exported by Ikon Midstream aboard the tanker Torm Agnes made its way into the hands of Intanza, a Mexican company that authorities there suspect is a front for CJNG. Intanza has no listed phone number, website, social media presence or physical location that Reuters could find.

 

That story detailed how Mexican cartels earn billions of dollars annually by smuggling fuel, mainly from the U.S. to Mexico, in what boils down to a massive tax dodge: Diesel, gasoline and naphtha are claimed in trade paperwork to be lubricants to avoid a steep import duty that Mexico charges on these imported fuels. 

 

Smuggled fuel and stolen crude oil have become the second-largest source of revenue for Mexico’s cartels behind narcotics, according to the U.S. government, which has ramped up efforts to crack down on the illicit trade. The Trump administration designated CJNG as a foreign terrorist organization in February 2025. 

 

Import-export paperwork for these transactions is often incomplete or faked by smugglers, who use front companies to facilitate these deals and enlist established oil industry players to help, some actively colluding, others acting unwittingly, trade experts, tax authorities and law enforcement officials told Reuters.

 

Ikon Midstream sued Reuters for defamation on November 14 in a district court in Texas, contending the news agency made “categorically false” statements about its business in the October article. Reuters stands by its reporting and is contesting the suit.

 

Ikon Midstream said it never did business with Intanza. Following publication of Reuters’ October report, Ikon Midstream provided Reuters with internal company documents that showed the Torm Agnes cargo plus three other 2025 shipments of diesel and naphtha aboard the tanker Torm Louise were sold to a Mexican customer named Azteca Cone.

 

Azteca Cone, like Intanza, is part of the same alleged scheme and is likewise under investigation for fuel smuggling and suspected links to CJNG, according to the three Mexican security sources and two of the government security documents.

 

Azteca Cone cuts a mysterious figure in the fuel industry. Just like Intanza, Azteca Cone has no listed phone number, website or physical location that Reuters could find....

....MUCH MORE

Previously:

October 2025 - "How a ‘dark fleet’ of tankers helped a Mexican cartel build a fuel-smuggling empire"
A very deep dive into some very nasty people, from Reuters, October 22...

With this outro: 

For more on just how depraved the CJNG members are see Borderland Beat on blogroll at right or here in a site search.