Caption: Watching the world go past in the summer rain. Some might say that you should have the good sense to either not stand in the rain or bring an umbrella. If you’re waiting for a lady (left), maybe the display of toxic masculinity will pay off. When you’re getting ready for that big evening – don’t forget to musk up.
Clutching Pearls
The mainstream media is frantic over the Iran deal. I don’t have the official agreement, but as I will remind VM readers, the Ayatollah is dead (long live the new one or whatever), the Iranian nuclear scientists are dead, the Iranian Navy was destroyed, much of the Iranian military stockpiles were destroyed as were major bases, and Israel has seriously degraded proxies in Gaza and Lebanon. The goal of the war was to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, and that appears to have been successful (too). The IRGC’s leadership ranks were thinned. While regime change would have been nice, the people don’t seem to want it (enough), so they can keep their new ayatollah and new leadership.
The Chinese air defense junk that Iran bought turned out not to be state-of-the-art (Venezuela learned that too). They had their pants pulled down around their ankles.
I was approached by a friend who asked why we didn’t kill them all (all 90 million people in Iran). You mean, nuke them (until they glow and use their asses for runway lights)? Slaughter 90 million people because we can? “Uh, well, those rag heads need to die.”
The threat to humanity was their nuclear weapons, and you think that the USA should become “death, the destroyer of worlds”??
Will Iran keep its word? I have no idea. I will tell you as a matter of historical precedent that Saddam Hussein destroyed his weapons of mass destruction and then the US invaded – and found that he kept his word. We killed him anyway, along with a lot of people on the pretext of removing the weapons he didn’t have, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?
I suggest that we trust President Trump and see how things play out.
Bullet Points:
** Do snipers need to learn to swim? Should they be drown-proofed? Ryan delves.
** Magnatars – never discussed on Star Trek.
** The pair of Antifa operatives who pulled off the Reflecting Pool Algae attack have admitted that their operation was funded by the local chapter for the purpose of embarrassing President Trump. The D.C. Chapter of Antifa has financial and leadership ties to Barack Obama. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced that she will offer them a deal to testify against Obama and other high-level operatives in the city. “It’s worth releasing the minnows to catch the big fish.”
** Do men in drag dancing in front of the White House appeal to you more than a cage match?
** UAE’s Bin Sulayem said he expected Fujairah, the east coast emirate that lies outside the Strait of Hormuz, to grow rapidly in the coming years, echoing the UAE trade minister’s comments to Bloomberg that the UAE was now looking to cut its dependency on the strait entirely. Cause and effect.
** The most difficult prison to escape is the comfort that made you weak. Every man who falls to weakness once called it rest.
** Are you an organ donor?
** What was life like for Beans’ ancestors? Have you ever considered that it might not have been all dungeons and dragons?
** At the White Wolf Mine, we have automatic gate openers. (right)
** A liberal rants against Musk. What do their problems have to do with his ability to earn money?
** Shocking facts about D-Day that you may never have considered (The Bee).
** Trade between Oman and the UAE jumped 13% to nearly $3.8 billion in the first quarter, as Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz pushed commerce away from blocked sea lanes and onto land routes through the sultanate. With its ports and borders sitting outside the strait, Oman has been one of the few economies in the region to benefit from the war: Trade with Saudi Arabia nearly tripled to a record $830 million in March, and customs declarations on Dubai’s “green corridor” with Oman climbed to nearly 100,000 in April. How much of that traffic survives once Hormuz reopens remains to be seen, but Oman is developing its infrastructure for the long-term. Construction began last year on a $2.5 billion project to build a rail line to the UAE, and a $1 billion economic zone is being created on the Saudi border.
The Price of Texas Tea
In the USA, in the early 2000s, there was real concern that domestic natural gas production was peaking. Prices were rising, and LNG import terminals were being proposed because the assumption was that the U.S. would need more foreign supply. Then, almost suddenly, the shale boom took off in Texas, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Louisiana. Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing unlocked reserves that had long been known but were considered uneconomic. Production climbed sharply. Prices fell. The United States shifted from relying on imports to becoming one of the world’s largest natural gas producers and exporters. Those same subsurface techniques helped unlock new oil reserves, driving record domestic production.
Typical well-level breakeven prices for fracked oil in the U.S. range from $30 to $70 per barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude. However, accounting for full-cycle corporate costs and investor returns, the broader industry average sits around $66 to $70 per barrel. The exact price point where fracking becomes profitable fluctuates based on several factors:
Location & Geology: Premium, low-cost “Tier 1” acreage in the Permian Basin (Texas/New Mexico) can turn a profit at $30 to $50 per barrel. Secondary or older basins often require $70-$90+ per barrel.
Operational Stages: Drilling a brand-new well requires immense capital. Conversely, once an existing well is fracked, “lifting costs” (keeping the well pumping) can be profitable even if WTI dips into the $30-$40 range.
Natural Gas vs. Oil: Many fracked wells produce both. For “dry gas” wells (primarily in regions like the Marcellus Shale), breakeven costs typically sit between $2.75 and $3.50 per MMBtu (or Mcf), while returns spike if “wet gas” yields valuable natural gas liquids (NGLs)
In its June Oil Market Report released Wednesday, the IEA said global oil demand is now expected to decline by 1.1 million barrels per day (mb/d) in 2026, a steep downgrade of 700,000 barrels per day from last month’s forecast. The agency cited soaring fuel prices and disruptions to refined product availability as key drivers behind the decline.
How The Ages End
There is a version of the Viking story that almost every culture has agreed to tell. The longships arrive. The warriors pour onto the beach. Nobody stops them. It is a useful myth. It is also incomplete. The part that gets left out is what happened when they lost.
In the popular imagination, a Viking warrior either wins or dies in some blaze that earns him a place in the old songs. The reality was considerably less poetic. Defeat in battle meant capture, and capture meant one of several outcomes: ransom if you were valuable enough, slavery if you were not, or a slow walk home with nothing to show for the crossing except the men you had buried along the way.
The Norse legal and social order was built around honor, and honor was inseparable from martial success. A warrior who returned empty-handed did not simply feel bad about it. He came back to a community that measured status in livestock, land, silver, and reputation, and he had none of the first three to distribute and had damaged the fourth. The consequences were real and structural, not merely emotional.
Slavery ran in both directions. The Norse raided for thralls across Britain, Ireland, and the Frankish coast for generations. But Norse warriors captured in failed raids were themselves enslaved by the populations they had intended to plunder. The Irish annals record Norse captives put to work on monastic estates. English chroniclers describe defeated raiders sold south. The social catastrophe of enslavement was not abstract to a culture that practiced it so fluently.
Mutilation was another instrument. Enemies who wanted to humiliate a captured warrior rather than profit from his labor had older options. A man returned to his home fjord without a sword hand, or with his face marked, sent a message that traveled faster than any ship. Loss of honor was perhaps the deepest wound of all, because it was the one that compounded. A jarl who had recruited men for a raid, promised them silver and glory, and returned with neither had broken an implicit contract. Men stopped following him. His household contracted. The social machinery that produced Norse military power, the ability of a leader to assemble and provision a fighting force, depended entirely on a track record that a single catastrophic failure could undo.
All of which brings us to September 25, 1066.
Stamford Bridge, in Yorkshire, is not a dramatic landscape. A river, a bridge, flat ground on either side. Nothing about the place suggests that anything much should happen there.
Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, had arrived in England with what the sources describe as a fleet of around 300 ships. He was, by any measure, the preeminent military figure of the Norse world at that moment. He had served in the Byzantine Varangian Guard. He had campaigned across the Mediterranean and into the Middle East. He had spent decades as a mercenary, an exile, a pretender, and finally a king. He had fought in more places than most men of his era had heard of.
He had also already won once on this campaign. At Fulford Gate, five days earlier, his forces had broken an English army. England north of the Humber was effectively his. When Harold Godwinson’s English army arrived at Stamford Bridge, the Norse forces were not expecting a fight. By most accounts, a substantial portion of Harald Hardrada’s men had left their armor back with the ships, a few miles away at Riccall. It was a warm September day. They were in the comfortable aftermath of a victory.
The English had marched roughly 185 miles from London in four days.
The battle that followed was not close. Hardrada was killed, reportedly by an arrow to the throat. His co-commander, Tostig Godwinson, the English king’s own brother and a traitor to the invasion, was also killed. The Norse army, caught without its full equipment and surprised by the speed of the English approach, was broken. Of the fleet that had sailed into the Humber with somewhere between 9,000 and 15,000 men, depending on which source you credit, so few survived that the return voyage to Norway required only 24 ships. The rest of the fleet sat empty at Riccall.
That number is worth sitting with. An armada that had carried thousands of men needed fewer than two dozen ships to carry the survivors home. The men who made that crossing came home to communities that had sent fathers and brothers and sons on what was supposed to be a conquest. They came home to an accounting. Where is the silver? Where are the men? Where is the king? The answers were all the same.
Stamford Bridge did not end the Viking Age in a single afternoon. History rarely works that cleanly. The Norse world had been changing for over a century before 1066, pulled toward Christianity, toward settled agriculture, toward the political structures of European kingdoms rather than the fluid violence of raid-and-return.
But the battle serves as a marker for something that was already happening and then accelerated. The calculus of raiding was changing. The coastlines of England and Francia had been hardening for generations, building burhs and fortified positions in direct response to Norse pressure. The populations being raided had learned. The element of surprise, so central to the early raiding model, was harder to sustain against communities that had been defending themselves for 200 years. And the losses were accumulating. Stamford Bridge was, in terms of scale, one of the largest single Norse military disasters of the era. But it was not unique in kind. The defeats were adding up, and each one had the consequences described above: dead men, enslaved men, ruined reputations, broken promises, smaller war bands the next season.
The cultural shift from raiding to settlement was not simply a matter of the Norse deciding to become farmers because farming seemed pleasant. It was, in part, a rational response to a changing military and economic environment. Settlement offered a more reliable return. The great Norse settlements in Normandy, in Dublin, in the Danelaw territories of England, in Iceland, were not failures of Norse ambition. They were adaptations. The men who settled stayed because staying had become a better proposition than the crossing.
Harald Hardrada has a reasonable claim to being the last of a particular kind of figure: the Norse king-adventurer whose entire identity was organized around the old model of personal martial glory and territorial conquest by force. He was extraordinarily good at what he did. He simply ran out of road in a flat field in Yorkshire, on a warm September afternoon, in the same year that William of Normandy would win the battle that actually gets remembered. Three weeks later, Hastings.
But the Viking Age did not end at Hastings. It ended at Stamford Bridge, where the last great Norse invasion force of the medieval period met an English army that had marched for four days without stopping to reach it. A ship that needs to sail home half-empty tells a tale all on its own.
VDH on the Democrat ‘Remake’
“We’re working class just like you.”
Identify the Aircraft
1
2
1 built 72% common parts with its predecessor
3
28 built
4
End
(1) North American RB-45C Tornado.
(2) Convair YB-60.
(3) Boulton-Paul Overstrand.
(4) RAF Brewster Bermuda.
– Kle.
You got them all!
Identify the Aircraft
1 – North American B-45 Tornado
2 – Convair YB-60
3 – Boulton Paul P.75 Overstrand
4 – Brewster SB2A Buccaneer/RAF Brewster Bermuda Mk I – The Brits said it was unsuitable for combat and often used for target towing
Yes the SB2A could tow a target – they found something it could do. Well done.
Identify the Aircraft:
1. North American RB-45C Tornado
2. Convair YB-60
3. Boulton Paul Overstrand
4. Brewster Bermuda aka Buccaneer in US service
Well done.
We knew that Saddam had CW assets in the 1980s and these were classified as WMDs. Indeed, he was very willing to use them on Iranians and Kurds. I heard a rumor in 1991 that the US delayed any possible ground operations for ~30-60 days to allow time for his mustard gas stockpiles to degrade since they were likely not made with the same preservative additives that the west would have used.
Although he had aspirations for nuclear WMD, and had constructed facilities intended to provide those weapons, time and circumstances, including international sanctions, basically shut that down. In the 2003 US led military action, while no nukes were found, there were thousands of remnant CW weapons that were still toxic, but not really usable as they were intended. Some number of our service personnel were still injured by these remnants.
Is the world a better place without Saddam and his spawn? Probably, but it’s not my intent to debate that action. I do feel that trying to build nations in areas of the world that even the population doesn’t think of as a nation seems dubious to me. These are mostly tribal areas where people look to the local warlord for guidance (including religion) and protection. For example, I think even the Mullahs in Tehran want nothing to do with most of Baluchistan, nominally a part of Iran. They leave that to the locals. Here in the west, we have a sense of national identity that has never been present in significant areas of the world, including the ME.
The tribal affiliations that go back many thousands of years, the affiliation to the larger bazaars, Twelvers (Ithna Ashariyya), seveners (7) Ismailis in Central Asia and fivers (5) Zaydis – mosty in Yemen, are all powerful movers. There is also the vast difference between rural Iran/ME Countries and urban centers in terms of opportunity, education and exposure to a larger world. Blend it all together and add the regional influences in Tabriz, Caspian and Baluchistani as you mention and top it off with the Kurds.
Kipling………..fool who tried to hurry the East.
“Now it is not good for the Christian’s health, to hassle the Aryan brown,
.
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down,
.
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased.
.
The message drear, “A fool lies here, who tried to hustle the East.”
Great Quote of the day L.L. My weakness is now addressed. Rest, getting off my feet after 8, is essential. The remaining hrs of the evening can become a mental prison. What brings comfort that edifies?
The Word that refreshes.
💯
Text of the MOU can be found here: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2026/06/17/read-the-14-point-memorandum-of-understanding-between-the-united-states-and-iran/
To me it reads like a 60 day cease fire with a promise to negotiate a full settlement within that time frame. Iran gets $300B, but from gulf states, not from the US. Iran promises not to pursue nukes and the deal hinges in Israel standing down in Lebanon.
I hope it holds up.
Me too, toss a coin.
I am not fond of pressuring Israel on the issue of Hezbollah.
to view the world through my eyes wryly (as opposed to askant):
I was raised early on in the Orthodox Jewish, then teensly in the Conservative Jewish religion, with many forays into the several varieties of Christendom in my teens to early thirties. I’m still a Jew though not one that my Dad would recognize. His dad, my grandfather, OTOH, was born a Lutheran who was baptised as when he married a Catholic who passed away very young; his second wife was from a Hungarian Orthodox Jewish family – and yes! – he told me it was very painful – the healing as well.
Posit:
The sliver of land to the west of Jordan, the south of Lebananon, and to the east of “Palestine” is nation of religious Christians, say Baptists, maybe Latter Day Saints (i.e. not Jews).
I’d like your thoughts.
Please recall: Muslims, per Koran, are required to enslave, kill, or convert any non-Muslim within smelling distance.
Would there be as much anti-Semitism (in the U.S., worldwide?), anti-Zionism (assuming there’s a difference).
Agreed!
**operatives who pulled off the Reflecting Pool Algae attack have admitted that their operation was funded by the local chapter for the purpose of embarrassing President Trump. The D.C. Chapter of Antifa has financial and leadership ties to Barack Obama.**
The Obama coup continues!
Prison…or shot at dawn, whatever works to stop these crazies from continuing their personal anarchy against our Republic and the Administration. (Sorry, giving no quarter for the mentally deranged on society…and their ‘funders’.)
And Obama is a mouthpiece for others. Take away the teleprompter and he’s mute.
In his latest statement he sounds like his ‘community organizer’ activist self…regurgitating old perceived grievances. Total empty suit.
Comfort. My bumper sticker version: Convenience is going to kill us all.
“I suggest that we trust President Trump and see how things play out.”
100%…listened to The Five the last two days, had VP Vance on and he – in his polite but brilliant velvet hammer manner – shredded Tarlov’s false assertions about the $300mil deal part, plus a few others, and Gutfeld spoke his spot-on truth to the ‘deal’ now the details are out. Media is like the little chick in the next with mouth wide open clamoring for the next tidbit…that is dang near always premature and incorrect in order to be ‘the scoop’ winner in an otherwise very weird world that news has become.
I too trust our President 100%, the man knows exactly what he is doing and has the ‘fortitude’ to see it through.
***
Barrel price is now, what, mid-70’s…the sweet spot. Funny how pump prices go up very quickly with increased barrel price but when the reverse happens, and barrel prices drop precipitously, we are told by ‘the experts’ (trotted out right on cue) it’ll take months (as in, just after the mid-terms) for prices to come back down. Nah, nothing to see there by the market manipulators. Everything these talking heads say is a lie.
***
Lefty on Musk: Envy is a powerful thing. Sorry pal, the world owes you nothing, it is your job to make something of yourself…so quit yer whining and get after it, while using your Starlink…created by Musk….maybe that’ll wake up your T-levels and fix ‘Whine #3’. These people…oy vey.
***
Opening Graphic: You can feel the rain…well done.
Quite. Definitely not Winslow.
No flatbed Ford to be seen.
Pump prices (often the subject of regional price-fixing) often have to do with the income associated with the store/market adjacent to the pumps. The mark-up inside can justify a loss leader at the pump. So it’s complicated.
I know, just an observation that the spike is quick while the recovery ‘takes time’.
I heard a guy in the oil business describing price fluctuations.
“Up like a rocket, floatingdown like a feather…”
Musk Envy:
they (almost everybody – almost every male, anyhoo) envies his intelligence and his ability to put his intelligence to work for him. Everybody envies his leadership qualities and his ability to get rid of the chaff without a tear.
everybody says (almost every male, anyhoo) “I can do that.” So, go ahead: do it! Nobody’s stopping you!
BTW: personally I think (almost everybody – almost every male, anyhoo) envies Vladimir Vladimirovich (and Donald John) for pretty much the same reasons.
Alpha males project strength and intelligence, and that is intimidating to beta’s…but real woman respond appropriately.
PDJT’s G7 opener, “I’m the boss’, 🤣..as they waited in the greeting line to shake his hand. Then the international conga line photo op had Trump in the middle flanked by the rest. WTP voted for that level of leadership, not the prior weaklings who gave away the store while telling us this is how it’s done. Nope, an international businessman who knows and dealt with these types his entire life is so far out ahead of them…and they know it.
“the Ayatollah is dead (long live the new one or whatever), the Iranian nuclear scientists are dead, the Iranian Navy was destroyed, much of the Iranian military stockpiles were destroyed as were major bases, and Israel has seriously degraded proxies in Gaza and Lebanon.”
might have to quote you, Mr Wolf
Truth, LSP.
That Cunk video, oh, God, it’s almost as bad as Kevin Costner’s “Robin Hood.” Almost. Just… You know… Gahhh…
–
Norman castles were air-tight. Cold, as all that stone takes a metric butt-load of heat to warm up. But clean. Nice. They had toilets and buckets so no pooping nor peeing in the corner. Walls were plastered and painted, colors and murals, happy little scrollwork here and there. It was a working community from top to bottom, from highest to lowest. All run by noblesse-oblige, if run right.
–
But too much of ‘what we know’ from books and movies is based on Victorian-era fantasy and envy and pure bullscattery.
–
There’s more parallels to life on an army post in the American West in the late 1800s. The post commander rules the area, benignly, with those in the army fulfilling all the castle’s positions. And a strong base commander allows civilians to exist safely and towns sprout up around or near the bases and so forth.
–
Expect to see something roughly the same to form in communities on Mars and in space.
I think Mars is somewhat farther down the road than Elon is hoping for – but yes.
As to the slow end to the Viking Era, one has to look no further than what caused the Viking Era to begin with. Climate Change. Yup.
–
Warming temperatures in the late 600s to 900s allowed for more harvestable lands, more animals, more fish, which meant more Scandinavians of all sorts (Danes, Norse, Swedes yada yada) which meant more pressure for more harvestable lands and other food sources which meant that usable land slowly then rapidly ran out of being usably divided. Thus an excess of excess sons needing to go somewhere else to find land and wealth.
–
And around the 1100s the temperatures plateaued. Then started getting cooler. Less food, less usable land, less happy little Scandinavian children to excessive levels, especially since Russia, Normandy and the English Isles pulled so much excess population. Along with Iceland and Greenland. And then the hammer fell in the late 1200s and 1300s, to where Old Man Winter dominated. Hard to be a world expanding empire when you’re freezing your asses off while hunger looms.
–
Yes, a simplification. But weather and temperature changes factor majorly into The Viking Era. Just like weather and temperature changes were behind the fall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages (which weren’t as dark as the Victorians made them out to be) and just about every major change involving migration and invasion. Huns? Weather changes allowed expansion of the Huns’ enemies to the east which displaced the Huns. Mongols? Warming weather causes excess population, can’t go East, so go West, young Chingis.. And over and over and over. Even the conquest of the Americas comes from Europe’s populations increasing in the 1400 to 1500s and then a mini-ice age reducing farming lands, thus reducing food, and an excess population having nowehre to go… in the 1600s. (Which also played into the 30 Years War and the English Civil War and other wars and struggles in the 1600s.)
And all of that climate change was brought about because of lawn mowers, automobiles and backyard BBQs. If only there had been a wealth tax back then to fix the problem. We’re so much more enlightened now.
Just watched Tomorrow War for some cheap decompression entertainment (yeah, made for 12year olds, which I am still from time to time). In that vein, Lefty’s today, if given the opportunity and tech, would go back to the time of the internal combustion engine and firebomb every inventor’s garage and barn shop to stop them from causing globalclimatewhatevertheheck 100 years in the future…thus from their ‘society started when we were born, grievance baloney self-justify saving the future from the sins of WHITE MEN INVENTORS in the past.