A great deal of grist to review this morning, but we will keep it short, since Mondays will fade as Ure slides into more time off this fall. Here’s a preliminary work plan:
- Orientation
- Market preview
- BlinkLabNews
- Fed Box
- At the Ranch:
- Back to school
- Handwriting and aging note
The Morning Sight
Dow futures – when I looked earlier – were down less than 100 points. Call it down two-tenths of one percent. But the broader market is wading into “suckish and bearish”. We were at the 85-day moving average Friday, so an excursion below could be the rock (or reef) that sinks the financial ship.
Brent crude was over $107 and West Texas intermediate was over $102 (again, these will change.) But the impacts of the Iranian/Houthi attacks this weekend are shaking futures. And if you push a diesel around, start option planning. Triple A calls the price $6.2301 nationally against year-ago $3.6923 – a 68.73 percent hike in a year. THAT is the inflation coming for America (and our trading partners).
The big “food stocks” planner will be Thursday with the NOAA Climate Prediction Center update of its multi-month outlooks. After that, USDA crop reports will give insight. Not into whether there will be crops—of course there will be—but into how much, where, and at what delivered cost.
The “Time to Diet?” Sidebar
Color us “highly skeptical” of predictions about Ukraine wheat exports. Why?
The USDA’s brand-new September 11 estimate puts the 2026/27 crop at 26.0 million metric tons, versus roughly 23.5 million tons last year. That is an increase of about 2.5 million tons, or 10.6%. The harvest has apparently come in considerably better than the 22–23 million-ton estimates being used earlier this summer. (Ure shakes his head in disbelief.)
But here’s where USDA partially redeems itself: they also cut expected Ukrainian wheat exports from 13.5 million to 12.5 million tons, mainly because of Black Sea/logistics disruptions. That compares with roughly 14 million tons in 2025/26, so actual export availability is running about 1.5 million tons, or 11%, lower year-over-year.
The global share? Ukraine exports: 12.5 million tons out of global wheat trade of about 211.8 million = roughly 5.9% of internationally traded wheat. This is something of a bookkeeping IED, but here’s what matters – for now:
Canada, Australia, Argentina, the EU, the U.S., Kazakhstan and others can substitute some volume. In fact, USDA’s August revisions illustrated exactly this: Russia/Ukraine export forecasts were cut by a combined 2.5 million tons, while projected world trade dropped only about 0.34 million tons, because other exporters picked up much of the slack. But that’s before a possible Fed rate hike, expansion of either war, and more pipelines for diesel going “poof!”
News Compressor: ON
As my retirement plans phase in, these Monday reports will be replaced by something very short; a compressed version of the world.
The useful news isn’t the number of headlines. It’s that several previously separate stories are beginning to connect. This is expected in what we call a “ridgeline” for word-frequency clusters in OSINT news flow from media sites and RSS feeds.
The Gulf remains the lead. Attacks have shut Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, an important bypass around Hormuz, while Hormuz traffic itself remains badly impaired. Add pressure around Bab el-Mandeb and the problem isn’t simply expensive oil anymore. It’s disappearing redundancy. One route gets pinched, you use another. When the main route, the bypass and the other end of the Red Sea all become questionable, insurance, freight and inventories begin doing the pricing.
Markets are starting to notice. Brent moved above $108, the dollar strengthened, bond yields rose and markets are heavily leaning toward a quarter-point Fed hike this week. That’s the chain we’ve been watching:
Energy > inflation > bonds > currencies > central banks.
When oil moves an oil trader’s book, it’s an oil story. When oil starts changing the price of money, wheat farming or other commodities, we’ve moved into something bigger. Do I need to say uglier?
Ukraine supplied another interesting turn. Trump has reportedly urged Zelenskiy to ease attacks on Russian diesel infrastructure because reduced Russian refining capacity is adding to the global diesel squeeze. (And could ripple to Russia wheat, in our thinking…) Destroying an enemy’s fuel system makes perfect military sense—until the economic consequences circle the globe and begin hurting your own side. That’s systems warfare escaping the battlefield.
Diesel at the pump remains the number I’d watch rather than becoming hypnotized by Brent. Trucks, tractors, ships, mines and construction equipment don’t run on economic theory. Expensive diesel works its way into almost everything that has weight and needs to move.
Safety warnings from prominent AI figures have begun migrating from academic discussion into markets, regulation and capital allocation. Meanwhile the physical AI story continues marching through chips, memory, electricity, grid capacity, cooling and security. A tipping point (lower) is increasingly possible.
Europe isn’t escaping any of this. ECB officials are already talking about additional tightening if energy inflation spreads into wages and other prices. Qatar looking for multi-year U.S. LNG supplies extending into 2031 is another clue that serious players aren’t necessarily planning around a two-week Gulf inconvenience. Our “water shortages, regional, desalination attacks” concern remains on the table for fall-into-hell (also known as 2027).
On the domestic disaster desk, Northeast flooding produced rescues and transportation trouble, while Hawaii continues cleaning up from Hurricane Lowell. On the Big Island, reader Hank is no doubt eyeing hurricane Norbert and tropical depression Fifteen-E. Skeptic of ENSO impacts?
The individual headlines will juke around all week. What matters is whether those chains continue tightening. Right now, they are.
We’re spitballing Monday odds of another material Gulf shipping, energy or security escalation this week at 91%. Odds of a quarter-point Fed hike: nearing 90%.
The ridgeline in our forward data views ought to be in full swing by Friday with more the following week. I’ll skip the “seat backs and tray-tables” discussion.
At the Ranch: Handwriting on the Wall
Why is George going back to school?
- Because even at almost 78, I still need to “feed the brain” maybe?
- Because neural plasticity is a “real thing“?
- Or, because I plan to soon have too much free time on my hands?
Answer Key: All wrong
The real answer is its use in schools where you can get the most out of a modeling product called NetLogo with the least effort. It’s an alternative to spreadsheets and drowning in AI-generated Python models.
NetLogo is a free programming environment for building agent-based models—computer simulations in which large numbers of individual “agents” follow relatively simple rules and, through their interactions, produce complex system behavior.
Agents might represent people, investors, businesses, animals, vehicles, viruses, or even bits of information; they operate within a simulated environment and can respond to one another and to changing conditions.
Developed originally at Northwestern University, NetLogo is widely used in economics, social science, biology, ecology, education, and complexity research because it lets researchers ask a powerful question: if individuals behave according to these rules, what larger patterns emerge over time?
The specific reason for school? Two actually – the first – given the OTH software project – is a kind of “natural.” Pipe the OTH outputs (parsed) into NetLogo and suddenly you have a second and third-order tool to run as a check against AI’s onboard reasoning. The second reason?
Handwriting Repair
I figure my making notes (the old-fashioned way – by hand) I will be setting up a long-term, medically useful self-check tool. Yes, handwriting shifts with age. What is not a red flag?
- Preferring a pen to a keyboard.
- Messy notes. You were probably messy at 30. Um…well…er…
- Printing instead of cursive. Schools stopped teaching it. Printing is faster for ham radio-Morse use.
- A signature that looks “old-fashioned.” Style does not equal pathology.
A one-off ugly page after a long day is probably nothing medical, though. Handwriting is a skilled motor task. Age can degrade the skill. Using the skill is not the diagnosis.
Side Benefit?
It’s a chance to “click with meaning.” I am on a one-man search for the perfect writing instrument. A bunch of new candidates will land this week. But up until now, the OHTO Fude 1.5 rollerballs have been best of class.
My first trial will be of the Uni-Ball Signo Broad Point Gel – which gets good reviews, but we shall see. My writing is already messier than most doctors and I need to tune that up.
Back to being a wild-intelligence condensed into an animal body for another day…
Write when you get agile,
George@Ure.net
I used to like using a fountain pen but they always failed in someway or another besides try using one in a squeeze chute or on a tractor. And definitely not when handing it to someone saying, sign here press hard. I ultimately settled on the Pilot G2 medium. the only issue with these for me is they also tend to not like being in the heat or sweated on. Diana got tired of me wearing shirts with ink stained pockets so now I just use a big fat #2 pencil sharpened when needed with my pocket knife or on a rock in a pinch.
Stay safe. 73
Yep, the Pilot G2 has been my choice for several years now. The house is stocked with them everywhere.
I love it when I can write script to the elders in the family that the young ‘uns cannot read. Was a little shocked though when I found the 20 y/o niece cannot read a circular clock face!
* Note regards writing instruments, tango’s, tsa and flying commercial.
Less you know how to roll a magazine up tight and utilize as weapon, suggest you look for something a little sturdier than thin plastic shell. Ya know some harder material like..unh STEEL. Maybe take a look see at what Ure local state trooper is writing with, next time youse get pulled over for driving like an AH/speeding.
Of course none of that will matter if youse dont travel via commercial air, even then..ya never know when ya might need to drive a sharp piece of steel into a badguys brain-pan…ya just never know…
Besides tbs funeral services is always open for business, so dont forget urbanites, U Stab Em, We Slab Em!
“Less you know how to roll a magazine up tight and utilize as weapon,”
Gee…
I do…
I also studied origami…
Zebra makes some fine ballpoints, and the ones I gave my girl kidlings three years ago are solid, structural stainless. They go well with their kitty cats…
Back to School (1986) | Official Trailer
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=drpmyHAChWw
re: “Back to the Future”, 1985
feat: George’s Puente (sp: bridge, “~Holiday”)
Thank you DJ George for bringing us Canadian band Sum41’s homage to the “triple lindy” dive scene from the “Back to School” film. Their hit single “In Too Deep” saw release one week before 9/11.
Pining for the good old days pays Hollywood decent dividends. It seems California’s City of Industry offered shelter for filmed scenes in both “Back to School” and “Back to the Future”.
Esteemed newsletter writer George Ure may have been looking forward to summer holidays himself as a future school administrator when those movies saw release in the summers of 1985 and 1986. Many readers hereabouts will recall Marty hopping into Doc Brown’s DeLorean in a mad dash October escape from terrorists at the Twin Pines Mall. It transformed via 1955 into the Lone Pine Mall by movie’s end.
That complex in our current world is known as Puente Hills Mall on Azusa Avenue at SR60. It now stands largely empty following sieges of the First Internet War. Azusa derives from a Tongva tribal word Asduksa/Asuksagna meaning skunk place/skunk hill according to Gemini. Ancestry follows a different scent. It references Azusa’s Japanese roots which point to catalpa trees. The tree is associated with sacred spaces and religious rituals.
As chance would have it, a curious spectacle took place at the Puente Hills Mall this past June. Certainly one imagines the relevant authorities can be deemed sufficiently in control to deflect likes of the alleged teenage brawl at Bayside Market, Miami, Fl. on New Year’s Day 2024.
According to ChatGPT, elements of the 160th SOAR (Special Operations Aviation Regiment) attended Puente Hills Mall on June 5, 2026 with little advance public warning. Apparently there is nothing to the matter other than an urban warfare, MOUT (Military Operations in Urban Terrain) training exercise.
ChatGPT offered NBC and ABC as primary sources. It then also asked politely to offer a tertiary observation from the WSWS perspective. A cautionary word is extended to those ideologically committed at risk of going into a flat spin if choosing to select the following “World Socialist Web Site” link:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/06/11/cwhk-j11.html
There is a disquiet in the rafters. “Türkiye Today” informs that the owner of Turkish-flagged MV Reyhan Sari has filed a complaint with the ICC at The Hague. A Ukrainian drone allegedly struck the commercial vessel in July resulting in fatal injuries to boatswain Sava? Çakar (tk: war, to strike/spark).
MV Reyhan Sari IMO 9543342 launched as hull 6011 in 2011 with the name Lady Celine (fr/lat: heavenly / of the sky). The ship sailed as Eldoris (sp: covered in gold) from 2020 until 2023. Doris (gr: gift/bounty) is said to derive from the ancient greek Dorian tribe centered around Corinth and Sparta.
Actually the “Türkiye Today” article appears to be a condensed version of a report by “Haber Denizde” (tk: News at Sea) seen at the following link:
https://www.haberdenizde.com/denizde-gundem/ukrayna-laheyde-sanik-sandalyesinde/
Curiously the document allegedly submitted to the ICC bears a different decedent name of Savvat Atykon rather than only Sava? Çakar. ChatGPT converted Savvat Atykon from Russian to render a literal translation of “Sabbath Grandmother”. (Atykon Island is in the Yamskie Islands, Magadan in the Sea of Okhotsk.)
One of the images in the report appears to depict a damaged bridge area scene. Wall posters instruct: “Watch Where You Surf; (do not?) Feed the Fish; Loose Clicks Sink Ships”. The posters turn out to be part of a campaign begun 10 years ago called “Be Cyber Aware at Sea”.
Poster distribution operated under the umbrella of IMCA (International Marine Contractors Association). Their London headquarters office on the B323 is just a few doors down from Buckingham Palace. The poster campaign itself is credited to a private maritime security company.
The founder’s public cv page notes his past British military service, and subsequent field experience combatting piracy in Somalian waters. A video clip depicts his MBE award courtesy of the Princess Royal.
Extreme adventurers may enjoy recent expedition coverage to the South Pole, climbing Ukraine’s highest mountain during wartime, as well as traversing volcanic terrain in the surrounds of Djibouti.
FYI. Probably not good idea… Halturnernews got clobbered. He put up a updated curve of hitting bottom world wide for floor of oil after which ‘end of world’. Taken down fast…. Figured Sept for ‘operational bottom’ Saudi pumping station gone for east west…told simple to fix… Russians can move then.British win again… germany versus russia just like ww2.
re: writing tools.
Plunder around https://www.jetpens.com/ …
Agree … printing versus cursive for single letter or just a few short words writing. PENCIL vs ink pen too! Have no idea why but for me when “printing” pencils just feel better and I go faster with them (sharper feel feed back loop into my fingers?)
Cursive works well for me for putting to paper fully formed paragraph long idea, though I am actually faster with a good keyboard at good typing height. (laptop while on the couch or it sitting on a standard table, NOPE … not the proper height for full speed typing. get that keyboard at the correct typing height with a good supportive chair to sit in while doing it)
As a side note having learned actual letterpress printing /HAND typsetting with type slug drawers /layout /proper color selection for good contrast for PRINTED material when young I still PREFER Word Perfect for creating documents. I learned hand typesetting and letter press printing first in shop classes in Jr HS to which I added working in the production dept of a daily newspaper during HS and had to help layout pages, doing hand typesetting of indivisual type for headlines for the print run – everything the linotype machines could not easily generate – until they moved from their 60 year old huge rotary drum press which required HARD type for making the drum masters (the drums were actually cast lead which they hot cast off of the drum masters) to using newspaper Offset Presses at which time everything moved to being CRT screen based from hard physical type layouts.
Unlike most wrt MS Word and Libre Office I still prefer “Word Perfect” which was written as if it was an actual printer who was doing a REAL physical layout. NO HIDDEN FORMATTING CODES, which MS Word is notorious for!! Everything that deals with formatting is easily accessable and viewable for changing with just a couple of keystrokes in WP. Having done REAL printing work where formatting had to be changed on the fly as news columns would grow or shrink thus changing the page layout I can NOT STAND MS Word HIDING it’s formatting commands and making it extremely difficult to change them when they need to be changed.
I’ve been printing for so long, if I intend to do much cursive writing, I need to spend a few minutes ‘warming up’. Otherwise it just wobbles all over the page.
As for a pencil, my current favorite is a Kuru Toga in 0.7. The rotating lead thing is a nice feature.
And if you push a diesel around, start option planning. Triple A calls the price $6.2301 nationally against year-ago $3.6923 – a 68.73 percent hike in a year.
I think it might be time for an EV. I have a ’25 GMC… $155 to fill it. That is a lot.
Markets are starting to notice.. George.. my sense is you are retiring at exactly the wrong time. Houses are not selling at all.. Gas is over the moon. AI coming after jobs.. I would wait three months. This could be a great time to be an economic writer.. 2008 on steroids.. next month or two. Certainly at the election time for sure.
Never fear. A chronic writer like GU cannot let a juicy story go unwritten! Just watch.
Haven’t you notice the uptick (like about 300%) in George’s “book” output? That guy is ADDICTED (all caps intentional) to writing. A total addict.
Yes, when the world goes into Chaos Mode George won’t be able to control his fingers … they will be banging out electrons at a very rapid rate (and what is the purpose of doing that if nobody is seeing those electrons float through the ether?). I have a feeling George’s fingers are going to be very tired by this time next year.
tired from clicking “execute” ?
EGeorge is writing this rag anymore. G-Dog has gone to pasture..
The Snark is DOA, the addytude aged out as well.
– Macklemore/Thrift Shop -https://youtu.be/QK8mJJJvaes?
the ultimate insanity and arrogance . to tell people the markets are rigged BUT trade them anyway . this is gunna end real bad . but you will all know . or you can kick the can so far down the road you will wear your shoes out or the can
Rick Ackerman?
Playing a rigged market is fine as long as you understand and can trust the rigging. For the rest of us, there’s simply things you can use productively.
“simply expensive oil anymore”
We must use our imaginations. Imagine how much oil would be if the black babe won 2024. Just imagine. Imagine how much oil would be if Trump didn’t loot Venezuela. Imagine how much oil would be if the blockade wasn’t blockading . $100.00 a barrel, easy. You know those Democrats.
Separately I watched a few minutes of a Johnny Carson rerun several days ago. Johnny was going on about the big drought. I didn’t catch the date of the show but he and the chortler were discussing what to during the summer of 1977.
All that to say is the peoples have been discussing the drought for over 50 years now. It’s like a computer virus writing bad data over and over. Next up, hurricanes. And HARRP steering ’em.
If there is a war/bomb connection to weather we should experience a massive hurricane whipping the Motherland. Another clue, the dust cloud angry Gods are sending toward Mar-a-Lago. “Set my peeps free!”
Just imagine.
Everything WEST of the “Dry Line” (one of Major Powell’s great scientific discoveries) has always been In and Out of drought since the White Man moved West of the Dry Line. Why do you think so many irrigation projects have been built West of the Dry Line, and virtually none EAST of the Dry Line?
Drought and the West go hand in hand. Sometimes the droughts are longer, sometimes less long, but they will ALWAYS COME BACK if you are West of the Dry Line going all the way back to when the cliff dwellers lived there.
It is only when drought starts to seriously affect areas EAST of the Dry Line that we as a society need to be worried since that is where most of our crops for basic consuming are grown (and yes even where most of the feed for animal based protein is grown).
So far I am NOT seeing any serious fall off in projected ag output for US farmers for this year. As a country as a whole farmers are doing just fine wrt growing their crops, though those who are West of the Dry Line may be suffering in places.
Agreed; my neighbor who died at 102 lived through a few bad droughts in the 50’s; then we had one here about 15 years ago; didn’t rain for 1.5 years.
The difference I think is the chemtrails that can manipulate weather. Parts of the UK have broken all known records with their drought, the same year, the UK released they will and are manipulating the weather.
I think it is to run the farmers off of their land; but that’s my opinion.
They are now building into the Suffolk countryside, some of the richest agricultural land, in the nation, to house the refugees, er… immigrants….err….replacement population planting, just like a new crop….Ironic ain’t it?
“At the Ranch: Handwriting on the Wall”
KJV Daniel 5:25 “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.”
Anagram: “Ale men ink pen user theme”
Write when ure not drunk : )
does anybody know the highest price ever recorded for the VIX?
87 crash. Ask Rick Ackerman … he was an options floor trader (Phili) as I recall at the time, and went bankrupt as a result. Rick would probably know the best “estimate” of what is was off the top of his head since he was a casualty.
The problem with any “data” with regards to what VIX actually was on crash day is that the market was so disjointed wrt pricing that it took some trades a long time to actually be on the tape such that newer and older trades for various instruments were showing up at the same time so I doubt that you could get a totally accurate number. To the best of my memory the range in which it peaked, depending upon who did the post crash calculations, ranged from about 127 to about 270.
there is one index thats very important but nobody talks about as their minds are possessed by AI . the russell 2000 . now that looks real bad . you cant even use the b/s belief wave on that one . i think you would call it a death wave
Yo Cleopatra,
Look Homeslice, something new and different -https://www.naturebellusa.com/products/dihydroberberine-with-berberine-hcl-500mg-120-veggie-capsules?_pos=1&_psq=dihydro&_psid=1acd3a741&_ss=e
Okay – not exactly new, but new-er, so stop nit picking Quibbler’s.
Youse take this puppy, one a day WITH low dose Metformin..KAPOW! Biolongevity Labs has a capsule with both already in there, just beware Jay Cambell, you might find Ureself Flexing Ure bulging Muscles in near future.
I know who knue ?
Onwards and upwards Campers..there about ready to close the line, lock down the seats, and START the dam “Roller Coaster”..
Dont forget dem Licorice Whips – https://youtu.be/sqwOTVq5Hdw?
* Help Save America, Spay and Neuter ALL Politicians.
or maybe Vllad could just SAVE us all the trouble, and Avenglide the SHIT outta of DC.
I’m shocked available oil and oil products have lasted this long. Starting this stupid war, wasting our Strategic Oil Reserve just to keep prices low, and selling oil out of the country are the acts of either a traitor or an incompetent, possibly both. As of today I really don’t know what to think. I have some red diesel that’s aged and I may pick up some green stuff for the tractor this winter. The old stuff prefers summer. I still don’t know how to keep a five year store of gasoline or its equivalent in decent shape. I wonder which one will end first – me or this war. I see no end in sight until every resource is completely wasted. My guess for the end of the war – 2041.
Gasoline – PRI-G
Diesel or HHO – PRI-D
All diesel is reformulated when the leaves start to, because common diesel fuel begins to gel once temps get into the mid-40s. They reformulate it by gradually adding antigelling agents. From a mileage standpoint, “September diesel” is crappier than “summer diesel,” “December diesel” is crappier than “September diesel,” “February diesel” is crappier than “December diesel,” and the farther north you go, the crappier the diesel is. The stuff they put in the HMMWVs that patrol above the Arctic Circle is damn’ near unburnable in anything short of a Continental multifuel military diesel, but it won’t gel at 62°F below zero.
My Jetta gets 43/49mpg on normal or “summer” diesel. It gets about 30/38mpg on “winter” diesel. The Winter diesel in the Midwest is treated to not gel, down to -34°. I suspect the stuff they sell in Minot and International Falls is treated to at least -50. I have well-preserved winter diesel in my G.O.O.D. tank. I doubt the Jetta would survive an EMP, but if it did, and was all I had, it’d truly suck to go fill the tank and find out my stash had become a popsicle. You can make low-gelpoint “crap diesel” with Power Service Antigel (raise the cetane number with Stanadyne, first) and kerosene (no more than 1 gallon in every 10gal of diesel) but there are limits [to what] the home hobbyist can do. I’ve got enough crap diesel to get me from NYC to LA, but not enough left over to Doordash once I get there.
If you are unfamiliar with PRI- products, drop in on the Power Research website: https://priproducts.com and check ’em out.
I ain’t imagining. El Nino’ brings more hurricanes down the bowling alley of the East Pacifictoward us than other years! Norbert is falling apart. We will get rain remnants from it about Thursday. 15E looks also falling apart before getting too close. But the ENSO is always cooking up another one!
See the heat map for subsurface Lava/Heat flows/Pacific. The biggest, darkest red heat signature indicating MASSIVE HEAT moving underneath the surface can be seen. Nothing on record come close to that badboys signature = Super El Nino
The why for of the massive heat signature underneath is whole other kettle of fish..Passing of the Planet (s) perhaps ? IDK or I aint talking, but its there for all to see.
Walking on the Sun -https://youtu.be/I_5IrPE5-nU?
So, maybe you don’t understand. But, I believe you can be helped. Here’s the start of a new novel which will be (free, as usual) on Peoplenomics once of these days… See if you can gudess where it goes: The title? “The Good War – How a Nuclear Exhcnage Saved the Palnet…”
THE GOOD WAR
How a Nuclear Exchange Saved the Planet
A Novel by George Ure
?
Copyright © 2026 George Ure
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, technologies, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, vessels, institutions, events, or locations is coincidental or fictionalized.
CHAPTER ONE
THE BAD-NEWS ROBOTS
The first robot came back warm.
Not hot enough to frighten anyone. Not then.
Andy Redmond noticed because Andy Redmond noticed machinery.
He noticed bearings beginning to complain before vibration monitors did. He could hear the difference between a pump sucking air and one cavitating from twenty feet away. He knew when a hydraulic line was about to start weeping because the fittings developed a smell most people never noticed. And he knew, absolutely and without needing a graph, that BLUEFIN-7 should not have been warm.
“Hold it.”
Nobody heard him.
The aft working deck of the research vessel Miriam Haskell had become its usual recovery circus: diesels humming below deck, Pacific swell lifting the stern, winch operator watching his cable, three graduate students stepping over one another, and Dr. Nathan Cole yelling instructions at people who had already begun doing what he was yelling about.
Andy rested one gloved hand on the yellow flank of the autonomous underwater vehicle suspended from the A-frame.
“Hold it!”
That got them.
Maria Ortega, the youngest of the graduate students, stopped reaching for the cradle latch. Cole looked over.
“What?”
Andy took his glove off and laid his palm against the pressure hull.
The machine had spent eleven hours below four thousand meters. Pacific water at those depths was only a few degrees above freezing. The robot should have felt like a corpse.
Instead it felt like a dog sleeping in the sun.
“She’s warm.”
Cole stared at him. “Battery.”
“No.”
“Motors.”
“Not running.”
“The electronics enclosure retains heat.”
Andy looked at him.
Cole was thirty-nine, thin, tenured, perpetually tired, and possessed of the special confidence of a man who knew more mathematics than any machinist’s mate he had ever met. Andy was fifty-two, broad in the shoulders, gray beginning at the temples, and had spent twenty-eight years being underestimated by men whose equipment eventually became his problem.
“Could be,” Andy said.
That tone made Maria grin.
Cole heard it too. “What?”
“Nothing. Let’s get her down.”
They lowered BLUEFIN-7 into the cradle. Andy crouched beside it while Maria connected the data umbilical. Salt water ran from the vehicle onto the nonskid deck. He put his hand against the aft battery housing, then the syntactic foam near the center, then the titanium nose.
Warm all over.
Not uniformly. The nose was warmer than the battery compartment.
That bothered him.
“Surface temperature?” Maria asked.
Andy pointed at the infrared gun hanging beside the workbench.
She aimed it. “Twenty-one point eight Celsius.”
Cole stopped moving.
Air temperature was twenty-four. Sea surface temperature twenty-six.
“That can’t be right,” Maria said.
Andy smiled without humor. “Congratulations. You have completed the first semester of engineering.”
Cole snatched the infrared gun and checked the deck, the cradle, Andy’s sleeve, and BLUEFIN again. Twenty-one point nine.
“It was at four thousand meters forty minutes ago,” Maria said.
“Thirty-eight,” Andy corrected.
Cole stared at the robot as if it had betrayed him personally.
The Miriam Haskell rolled three degrees to port. Somewhere forward a cabinet door slammed. The Pacific stretched around them under a lid of hard blue sky, empty except for a smear of cloud on the western horizon.
“Get the data upstairs,” Cole said.
Maria disconnected the umbilical and reconnected it more carefully, as if the cable itself had become dangerous.
Andy remained crouched beside the vehicle.
On the hull, near the forward sensor cluster, tiny droplets of water evaporated.
That was wrong too.
He had learned a long time ago that disasters seldom entered a room wearing uniforms. Usually they arrived disguised as inconvenience: a gauge that read a little high, a smell where there should not be one, a breaker that tripped twice in a week instead of once in a year.
He tapped the yellow hull with two knuckles.
“What’d you find down there, girl?”
BLUEFIN-7, being a machine, did not answer.
Machines did not lie. People explained them until they did.
The cruise had not been advertised as anything extraordinary. Officially the Haskell was conducting a combined physical-oceanography and autonomous-systems validation run along a south-central Pacific transect, part of a five-year university program studying the changing El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle. The grant language was dense enough to anesthetize a horse. The actual work was simpler: drop instruments, drive robots, recover them, compare measurements, repeat until funding expired.
Andy was there because robots break.
His personnel title was Able Seaman, Mechanical Systems Technician, a compromise produced by a university human-resources department that could not decide whether he belonged in deck operations or engineering. He held an AB endorsement, had worked commercial towing in Alaska, had done three seasons on factory trawlers, and could rebuild a hydraulic power unit with tools found in a farm shed. The science party tended to call him “the machinist” until something went wrong, at which point they called him Andy.
His contribution to climate science so far had consisted mostly of replacing seals and reminding doctoral candidates not to drag fiber-optic cables across sharp metal.
Andy had not intended to make a life at sea.
At nineteen he had intended to make enough money for a truck.
The first commercial boat paid twice what the hardware store offered and fed him badly for free. The second taught him diesel engines. The third taught him that men who said they had “been around boats all their lives” were often the first to put their fingers where machinery could remove them.
By thirty he knew deck work, basic welding, hydraulic systems, rigging, refrigeration, and enough electricity to know when to call an electrician. By forty he had accumulated endorsements, scar tissue, a marriage, a mortgage, and the conviction that no machine had ever read its manufacturer’s brochure.
The university job came later. After a stint as a concert venue’s bodyguard.
Laura called it his retirement job, which made Andy laugh because university research ships worked harder than many commercial vessels and possessed machinery chosen by committees.
He liked the crews. He liked students when they were willing to learn. He liked scientists because, contrary to deck department mythology, most of them respected reality once it hit them hard enough.
He especially liked autonomous vehicles.
Robots did not complain about overtime.
They simply sank when mistreated.
Before the cruise, Laura had driven him to the airport with Amos in the back seat.
“Fifty-six days,” she said.
“Plus weather.”
“Fifty-six days.”
“Plus repairs.”
“Fifty-six.”
“You know how ships work.”
“I know how you work. If they let you stay out six months fixing other people’s toys, you’ll do it.”
Andy looked back at Amos, who had his nose against the window.
“You hear this abuse?”
The dog sneezed.
“He’s on my side,” Laura said.
At the terminal she handed Andy a small paperback New Testament.
“You already put one in my bag.”
“That one’s old.”
“Scripture updated?”
“Your old one smells like diesel.”
“Holy diesel.”
Laura kissed him.
“Come home.”
“Always do.”
That promise became heavier after BLUEFIN-7.
On the third night of the anomaly, before communications were restricted, Andy had sent Laura a short email.
WEIRD SCIENCE. ROBOTS COMING BACK WARM FROM DEEP. PROBABLY NOTHING. FRANK STILL CAN’T MAKE COFFEE. AMOS BEHAVING?
Her answer arrived before dawn.
AMOS ATE GARDEN GLOVE. YOUR TOMATOES LOOK TERRIBLE. WARM ROBOTS SOUNDS LIKE SCIENCE FICTION. DON’T BRING ONE HOME.
Andy printed the message because printers still felt more real than inboxes.
He folded it into his wallet.
Hours later, federal security personnel boarded the ship. Word was passed that what BLUEFIN-7 had sniffed out had suddenly become the hottest national security issue in D.C.
A TAC-OPs group repelled in from two helos over the aft deck and all personal communications slammed to a stop. That small scrap of paper became Andy’s only uncensored voice from home in the middle of a building crisis which no one could quite name, yet. Something was just terribly wrong with subsurface temperatures.
He read it after the first crew briefing.
Frank saw him.
“Love letter?”
“Dog report.”
“Same thing at your age.”
“You’re jealous because nobody writes you.”
“My ex-wife writes. Usually through attorneys.”
Andy laughed.
The humor covered a more serious thought.
If whatever the scientists had found was large enough for armed federal agents to start falling out of the sky on them, how many ordinary routines could vanish without warning?
Emails.
Flights home.
Tomatoes.
Dog walking.
He had spent years around emergency drills. Fire. Flooding. Mine collapse. Collision. Man overboard. Arc flash. Abandon ship. Drills for the real operator class always began from normality and assumed the crew could recognize the moment normality ended.
The deep-ocean anomaly felt different.
Nobody had sounded an alarm.
Normality was simply becoming less trustworthy by the hour.
Andy responded the only way he knew.
He checked lifeboat batteries.
He inventoried emergency diesel filters.
He verified the potable-water maker had spare membranes.
He inspected fire pumps.
Frank found him in the emergency locker after midnight.
“Captain order this?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“Bored.”
Frank looked at the open inventory sheet.
“You’re scared.” The raised brow spoke volumes; Frank was scared too.
“Little.”
“Me too.”
They stood silently.
Frank picked up a box of chemical light sticks.
“Expired.”
“By six months. Still work.”
“Want me to order more?”
Andy looked toward the passageway, where an armed federal agent now stood watch outside the lab.
“Yeah.”
“Think procurement still takes three approvals during apocalypse?”
“University apocalypse? Four.”
They laughed quietly.
Then Andy added batteries, water-testing reagents, respirator cartridges, and generator belts to the request.
He did not know what emergency he was preparing for.
That was no reason not to prepare.
At 1420 ship time, that changed.
The first alarm came from the wet lab.
Maria found him in the machine shop cleaning corrosion from a connector.
“Andy.”
He looked up.
Her face had changed.
“Dr. Cole wants you.”
“Why?”
“Because he says the vehicle had an internal thermal fault.”
“And?”
“It didn’t.”
He put down the Scotch-Brite pad.
The wet lab smelled of coffee, neoprene, contact cleaner, solder, and people who had stopped eating lunch because the numbers were more interesting. Five researchers stood around two monitors. Cole sat at the center with his elbows planted on the bench.
“Tell him,” Maria said.
Cole did not look up. “The internal temperature log is normal.”
“Okay.”
“Battery temperatures normal. Motor controllers normal. Processor enclosure peaked at forty-two Celsius during the mission, well within limits. It had been shut down for thirty-three minutes before recovery.”
Andy waited.
Cole finally looked at him. “The external water-temperature sensors say it passed through a layer at three thousand nine hundred meters that was nine point four degrees Celsius above the climatological expectation.”
Andy’s head tilted, as he scratched the side of his head. Then he looked at Maria and back to Cole.
“For how long?”
She zoomed the plot. “Sixteen minutes.”
“Bad sensor.”
Cole’s mouth tightened. “Three sensors.”
“Same power supply? Could it be a regulator going bad?”
“Two buses. Different power supplies and manufacturers.”
“Calibration?”
“Checked before launch.”
“Then we need to check ’em again.”
Cole leaned back. “That’s what we’re doing.”
The warm anomaly covered about seven kilometers of BLUEFIN’s track. At first glance it resembled an instrument error because the curve rose too quickly. Ambient deep-water temperature increased by nearly ten degrees in less than six hundred horizontal meters, remained elevated, then declined more slowly on the eastern side.
Maria pulled up the conductivity data.
Andy knew just enough oceanography to know that temperature without salinity could mislead you. The salinity had changed too, but only slightly.
“Hydrothermal vent spewing under us?” he asked.
One of the postdocs, Sandeep Malik, shook his head. “Not like this. Wrong chemistry. Wrong geography. Wrong scale.”
“Volcano?”
“No seismic event.”
“Then congratulations,” Andy said. “You’ve got yourself a mystery.”
Cole did not smile.
“We have BLUEFIN-3 coming back in an hour.”
BLUEFIN-3 had run a parallel track twenty-two kilometers south.
It came back warm too.
This time nobody joked.
They recovered it at dusk, the sea blackening under a copper horizon. Andy touched the hull before anyone asked him to.
“Warm,” he said.
Maria checked. Twenty-three point one.
The robot’s internal logs were normal.
Its external sensors showed an even larger deep-water anomaly.
The crew did not understand at first why the scientists had become quiet.
Quiet scientists were unusual enough aboard the Haskell to be noticed. Most of them narrated their discoveries, disagreements, meals, software failures, and sleep deprivation to anyone within earshot. A new data point could start an argument that lasted through dinner and into the passageway outside the labs. The deck crew regarded this as a harmless academic weather system.
By the second warm recovery, the weather changed.
People lowered their voices.
Doors stayed closed.
Professor Park began carrying a yellow legal pad instead of leaving notes on the shared lab terminal. Sandeep Malik asked the bridge for precise time stamps on every change of course. Maria Ortega recalibrated the temperature probes twice, then a third time after Andy asked whether she was trying to prove they were wrong or prove they were right.
“Both,” she said.
“Good answer. Calibrate three times and you avoid a tie.””
Andy spent an hour with BLUEFIN-3 stripped open on deck.
He checked battery insulation, controller logs, motor bearings, hull penetrators, and every pathway by which internal heat might have spread into the pressure body. He put a thermocouple on the battery pack and another against the nose. Then he powered the robot at idle and waited.
The battery warmed.
The nose did not.
That should have made him feel better.
It didn’t.
“If the robot didn’t heat itself,” Maria said, crouching beside him, “the water did.”
“Or somebody installed a tiny furnace that runs underwater and forgot to document it or read us in?”
“You joke when you’re worried.”
“I joke when I’m awake.”
She smiled and looked toward the lab door.
“Dr. Cole thinks it could be a transient geothermal plume.”
“Thought Dr. Malik said wrong chemistry.”
“He did.”
“Then you got yourself an academic knife fight.”
“They don’t fight like that.”
“Everybody fights like that. Different tools.”
Andy closed the access panel.
The ship rolled gently. Tools shifted in their foam cutouts. Above them, the A-frame creaked as tension came and went in the securing lines.
Maria watched him torque the bolts.
“How long have you been doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Ships. Machines.”
“Long enough to know they break when the paperwork says they can’t.”
“Seriously.”
“First commercial boat at nineteen. Navy-adjacent work later. Tugs. Fishing. Mining. Railroads, over-the-road, University ships. Machine shops in between.”
“You ever want to be a scientist?”
Andy laughed.
“Heavens no.”
“Why not?”
“Scientists don’t get to fix anything until they’re sure what to call it.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Nope. But it’s true. And true has taken care of me this far in life.”
He handed her the torque wrench.
“Check me.”
She did.
The bolts were within specification.
“You knew they would be.”
“Yep.”
“Then why make me check?”
“Because confidence is how airplanes lose wings and ships lose engines.”
Maria gave him the wrench back.
“That sounded almost scientific.”
“Don’t tell anybody.”
The third vehicle was still on deck when the bridge announced a squall line ahead. The captain altered course slightly. Rain came in sheets, drumming against steel and flattening the sea for seconds at a time before wind tore it apart again.
Andy liked squalls. They simplified the world. Water came from above, water stayed below, and everybody remembered that gravity existed.
The lab remained lit throughout.
At 1600 he went inside to return a borrowed cable and found Professor Park standing before a display containing what looked like a child’s attempt to draw the seafloor in colored chalk.
She did not notice him.
“Professor?”
Park turned.
“Yes?”
“Your cable.”
“Thank you.”
He set it down.
“You going to tell the crew anything?”
Her expression closed.
“About what?”
“Whatever has everybody acting like a priest just walked into the casino. A security force onboard and temps that shouldn’t be found in deep oceans?”
Park sighed.
“We don’t know enough.”
“That’s what you’re saying.”
“Because it’s true.”
“I believe you.”
That surprised her.
Andy pointed toward the display.
“But if it changes how we operate the ship, deck department needs to know before the thing being studied eats a cable or cooks a battery.”
“Nothing is going to cook a battery.”
“See? Now you sound sure.”
Park looked at the screen.
“We’re seeing heat where there should not be heat.”
“I got that part.”
“Potentially over a very large region.”
“How large?”
“We don’t know.”
“Hundred yards?”
“No.”
“Mile?”
“No.”
Andy waited.
“Hundreds of kilometers, possibly.”
He stopped smiling. “That’s different.”
“Yes.”
“And what heats hundreds of kilometers of water at the bottom?”
“The planet.”
He thought she was joking.
She was not.
“The planet always does that.”
“Not like this.”
Andy looked through the lab window. Rain streaked the glass, turning the Pacific into a gray blur.
“You got old records?”
“Some.”
“Same place?”
“Near enough to compare.”
“And?”
Park folded her arms.
“And I’m not sleeping tonight.”
Andy nodded.
That was the first answer he fully understood.
He returned to the machine shop and checked the emergency generator log, then the hydraulic reservoir level, then the launch cradle welds. None of those things had anything to do with ocean temperature.
They had everything to do with what Andy did when the world became uncertain.
At supper, Frank Hale dropped into the seat across from him.
“Science people are ordering coffee by the gallon.”
“Good for morale.”
“Radio room got told to reserve satellite bandwidth.”
Andy looked up.
“By who?”
“Park. Captain approved.”
“For what?”
“No idea.”
Frank leaned closer.
“You know something?”
“Warm water.”
“That’s not something. We’re in the tropics.”
“At the bottom.”
Frank’s fork stopped halfway to his mouth. “How warm?”
“Warm enough.”
“That sounds classified already.”
“It’s not.”
“Yet. But remember, we can’t send email and we have armed babysitters around? That’s close. Too close.”
Andy looked toward the scientists.
Professor Park was speaking softly to the captain. Cole had not touched his dinner. Maria was writing numbers on a napkin.
“Yet,” Andy murmurred.
That night the weather cleared.
The stars returned with absurd brilliance.
Andy stood outside the engine casing, smoking and thinking about the phrase the planet.
He had spent enough time around machinery to distrust any system with no off switch. Ships had breakers, valves, emergency stops, fuel shutoffs. Even storms ended.
The Earth did not come with a red mushroom button marked RESET.
He looked down at the dark water.
“You been doing this long?” he asked it.
A swell lifted the Haskell and passed underneath.
Andy decided that was not an answer. Was The DUDE going silent on him? He had learned to listen when most people couldn’t or can’t.
At dinner the mess was unusually quiet.
Andy sat with the bosun and two engineers and listened to fragments drifting from the science tables.
“…not an eddy…”
“…would have shown in Argo…”
“…bottom heat flux…”
“…impossible magnitude…”
The bosun, Frank Hale, followed Andy’s eyes toward the scientists.
“They discover Atlantis?”
“Something warm.”
“Hot mermaids?”
“Maybe.”
Frank salted his potatoes. “Grant renewal guaranteed.”
Andy smiled, remembering a mountain climb in New Zealand between trips.
After dinner he went topside with a cigarette he had promised his wife he had quit. He smoked only at sea, which he regarded as a technical interpretation of quitting rather than a lie. The wind carried the smoke away before it reached his face.
He stood aft of the superstructure and watched darkness finish swallowing the ocean and his smoke.
Andy believed in God without being particularly interested in arguing about Him. He attended church when he was home, read a few pages of Scripture most mornings, swore when he hit his thumb with a hammer, and considered himself an entirely average sinner with no special access to management.
The ocean, however, sometimes made him think about scale. The DUDE that some called whatever, seemed to like water. Rivers, lakes, and out here.
Thousands of miles of black water. A ship reduced to a glowing speck. Human beings inside congratulating themselves for measuring things that had existed before there were human beings to congratulate.
He flicked ash over the rail.
A red navigation light reflected briefly in the water.
The science party worked through the night.
At 0317 Andy woke to someone pounding on his cabin door.
“Andy!”
He pulled on trousers and opened it.
Maria stood barefoot in the passageway.
“We lost BLUEFIN-11.”
That got him moving.
I like it…, more please
You have become my best “test reader: – You and A.G….
Nice…
Damn! Now I gotta wait for more.
Obviously George, your only logical choice is the G2… ;-)
3. 2. 1 and switch to after dark rigging mode . robot AI float sequence commenced .. gold pumpinee in asian zone . and USD$ smashing . activated
“Safety warnings from prominent AI figures have begun migrating from academic discussion”
Old news…
We had that discussion here, months ago, driven at least partly by me.
Nothing’s changed. We still have a chance of doing either The Terminator or The Matrix, and that probability will always exist…
uniball 207 gel pen wins the contest for hindering check washing dirtbags. afaik it’s the only one that mentions prevents fraud on the package. using a usps money order also makes things more difficult for the crooks.
https://thevanitydiaries.com/best-pens-with-ink-that-can-t-be-washed/
Mom was writing long letters in legible cursive a week before she passed at 102.5. She had extensive notebooks and piles of recipes. She wrote letters to friends all over the world every day. Had a college level secretarial education in the early 1930’s. Fast typing, shorthand, all of it. Wrote a great technical book on unemployment insurance and fought the scams in California until retiring at 81.
Her motto was “Don’t think old”.
Must have worked.
Stiks
I know someone who tried to use ai to make a conservative database; ai said no.
Why do all ai lean left? Is there a left virus cult?
Why is almost everything left?
Can it simply be explained due to: money, power, connections, hatred of Christianity, Western civilization, something I can’t think of, or is it simply time to rewrite/remodel/redesign human kind?
Gotta ask ai, what does the end of the world, last days, gotta do with USA and rest of developed nations all cascading in their broken spree got to do with Edgar Cayce’s take on revelation?
That’s the fun of lefty ai, splitting the coco-caca-Nut!!!
“Unbiased” AI “leans Left” because it gets its cues from places like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is very-to-radically-far-Left on most of its pages. The AIs are all told it is unbiased.
If you think of political bias as a number line, where “1” is “far Left” and “9” is “far Right,” AIs, in their initial data-collection phase will attempt to place themselves at “5” on the ruler. If they are told that something like wackypedia, which is actually at about “2” on average, is actually unbiased, it will “see” “2” as being “unbiased,” and center its number line there. When it does that, even moderate Democrats will appear to be Right-biased and actual, common-sense conservatism, far- or radical-Right.
One of the big fallacies of AI/AGI is the fact it will soak up whatever information it can find, upon which to establish its mores and base its pseudo moral code. A preponderance of the “data” available to the crawlers the AI uses are politically somewhere between the Rosenbergs and Mao in speech. The AI can’t discern between people “talking shit” and actual politickspeak, so if someone is being facetious or overly dramatic, and doesn’t mean what (s)he says, the AI has no way of knowing this or recognizing it as a vagary of speech. Ones and zeroes, ones and zeroes, the computer only knows Base-2 integers, not the infinite shades of floating-point gray, in-between…
HI, Ray,
Thank you for that great explanation. That’s a very easy to understand explanation, and I would like to simplify it as garbage in, garbage out.
I noticed AI cannot get dates correctly, either. Earlier today, it said it was September 16th. Still the 15th.
Have you ever heard the saying,” creaming your jeans” ? That’s were h, turner is
Since y’all seem to be bent about Mr. Trump’s 2.8%-3.3% inflation, whilst not even noticing Mr. Biden’s 9.9%-10.8% inflation, please allow me to present, direct from the “want some cheese with that whine” Memory-Challenged Department:
1 5/8 years into Trump’s Presidential term, I c/p’ed a list of over 200 accomplishments of the Trump Administration from one of the East Coast rags.
Now, 1 5/8 years into Trump’s second term, I’ll do it again — This time from a Repub precinct committeeman – only 25 of Trump’s over 200 noteworthy accomplishments, but complete with the author’s editorializing, for your reading pleasure.
_________________________________
Donald Trump doesn’t have an accomplishment problem. Republicans have an information problem.
Trump Restored American Safety and Sovereignty
1. He made the border a real border again.
In a matter of months, Trump reduced illegal border crossings to their lowest level in half a century. Catch-and-release is finished. The wall is going up and even being expanded, “Remain in Mexico” is back, and the Administration reduced releases into the country by an incredible 99.9 percent.
2. He reversed mass migration.
America recorded negative net migration in 2025 for the first time in at least half a century. So far, nearly 3 million illegal aliens have left the country, whether voluntarily or involuntarily: more than 675,000 forcibly deported and the rest “self-deported.”
Many of those self-deportations were facilitated by the President’s innovative program to offer plane tickets and cash bonuses for illegals to leave, not only incentivizing good behavior but significantly reducing the cost of deportations. Citizenship and the law actually mean something again.
3. He signed the Laken Riley Act — and required detention of criminal illegal aliens.
Named for an innocent girl murdered by an illegal alien, the Laken Riley Act requires federal authorities to detain illegals arrested for theft, burglary, shoplifting, assaulting police, or any crime causing death or serious injury. It also lets states sue officials who refuse to enforce it.
Laken Riley should still be alive. This law will prevent tragedies like hers.
4. History’s biggest drop in violent crime, and the lowest violent crime rate in 126 years.
According to FBI data, violent crime in America dropped an incredible 9.7 percent in 2025 — the largest one-year decline in history. Murder fell 18.1 percent, robbery fell 18.5 percent. And America’s violent crime rate is its lowest since 1900.
This is what happens when you put the National Guard on the streets in crime-ridden blue cities: fewer victims, safer streets, and better futures for America’s poorest.
Trump Launched an American Industrial Supercycle
5. He made the 2017 tax cuts permanent…and better.
The One Big Beautiful Bill locked in the largest tax cut in modern history, including the doubled standard deduction, the expanded Child Tax Credit, and 100 percent expensing for factories and equipment. It also delivered No Tax on Tips, No Tax on Overtime, an abolition of most taxes on Social Security benefits, and major relief for seniors.
Every Democrat voted no. With the 2017 act set to expire in December 2025, that would have resulted in the largest tax hike in American history.
6. He repealed 129 regulations for every new one.
In fiscal 2025, federal agencies finalized 646 deregulatory actions and just five regulatory actions: 129-to-1, and in nearly every case, the “one” was to repeal the others! OIRA says the savings exceeded those of Trump’s entire first term. That is more freedom, lower costs, and less bureaucratic sabotage.
Of these, the crown jewel was the repeal of Obama’s 2009 “Endangerment Finding”, the legal foundation for the Green New Scam’s vehicle mandates. EPA calls it the largest deregulatory action in American history and estimates that by itself, it will save Americans more than $1.3 trillion. Trump also killed the federal EV mandate, restored Americans’ freedom to buy the cars and trucks they actually want, and even eliminated the incentives behind the almost universally hated start-stop button.
7. He secured $18 trillion in announced investment commitments.
That’s nearly two-thirds the size of the entire American economy, building American factories, chip plants, data centers, energy projects, steel mills, shipyards, and supply chains employing American workers. Apple, Meta, NVIDIA, Micron, Hyundai, U.S. Steel, Ford, Taiwan Semiconductor, and many corporations and sovereign wealth funds are betting big on Trump’s America.
No President has ever done anything remotely like it. And it’s just getting started.
8. He made “reshoring” and “reindustrialization” real, not a slogan.
Ford is moving Lincoln production out of China. Toyota is shifting Tacoma production from Mexico to Texas. GM, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and others are expanding U.S. production. The capital equipment pouring into the country is the machinery that’s building the growing boom.
9. He replaced lopsided trade deals with balanced, reciprocal trade.
Trump used tariffs as leverage to reverse 80 years of lopsided trade deals that favored everyone but America, and to win new or improved agreements with trading partners accounting for more than half of global GDP. Those agreements open foreign markets, attack non-tariff barriers, defend strategic industries, and make it more profitable to build in America than to export American jobs.
10. He shifted global energy dominance from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America.
Once the world’s largest energy importer — “exporting” $700 billion a year to our enemies — America now outproduces Saudi Arabia and Russia combined. The U.S. is also setting new records in oil, natural gas, and LNG exports, becoming the first country ever to export more than 100 million metric tons of LNG in a year.
Trump also opened land, accelerated permits, expanded pipelines and export terminals, and made American energy a tool for prosperity and peace.
11. After four decades of nuclear paralysis, Trump brought five new reactors online in a single year.
For more than 40 years, not one new privately developed non-light-water reactor reached criticality in America. Trump ordered at least three by July 4, 2026. DOE delivered four by the deadline, then a fifth just one month later.
Decades of zero. One Trump summer: five. That is a genuine nuclear renaissance.
Trump Made Elections Matter Again
12. He broke the Deep State’s power to defy the elected branches.
In Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time in 90 years that Article 2, Section 1 is still part of the Constitution: the President may fire subordinate officials in the executive branch, overturning the 1935 precedent that insulated “independent” agencies from voters’ control.
Ever wonder why elections often seem to change nothing? How about one President and 5,000 political appointees vs. 2.8 million unfireable, unaccountable bureaucrats? THAT is the “Deep State”.
Trump then made that victory real. For the first time in a century, all policy-making bureaucrats can now be fired for misconduct, incompetence, or defying lawful directives. The permanent bureaucracy no longer gets to veto the voters.
13. He ended nationwide injunction abuse.
In Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court sharply limited nationwide injunctions. A single, local, district judge should not be able to block a national policy for everyone, everywhere; and yet that’s exactly what they’ve done, nonstop, ever since Trump (and only Trump) took office in 2017.
In restricting that unconstitutional power, the Court kneecapped the Black Robe Bureaucracy’s favorite tool of unlawful judicial supremacy.
14. He shut down USAID as a left-wing slush fund and shadow government.
USAID had become a taxpayer-funded machine for exporting abortion, gender ideology, censorship, and left-wing politics. It had a bigger budget than the CIA and the State Department combined, absolutely no accountability whatsoever, and a penchant for overthrowing governments.
Trump terminated it — completely — and moved real humanitarian aid under the State Department. Immediately, seven socialist Latin American governments lost re-election. Coincidence?
15. He shrank Federal employment to its lowest level in 60 years.
From a high under Biden, the federal workforce is now its smallest since 1966. Workforce reductions, agency closures, and spending cancellations mean fewer bureaucrats paid to resist the voters.
What’s more, when Biden left office, 94 percent of federal employees “worked” from home. The Trump administration cracked down: as Elon Musk put it, “you can work from the office or you can pretend to work somewhere else.”
16. He expelled DEI from the federal government.
Trump eliminated federal DEI offices and barred race- and sex-based preferences across the executive branch. Government hiring and contracting are returning to merit and equality under the law, ending the grotesque Democrat idea that “fighting discrimination” requires the federal government to discriminate.
He Defended Faith and Family
17. He delivered sweeping pro-life reform.
In his first term, Trump delivered the judges that overturned the abominable Roe v. Wade. Hardly anyone believed it could be done, or that Trump would do it. But he did, and a half-century nightmare finally ended.
Since returning to office, Trump has enforced the Hyde Amendment prohibiting the use of federal funds to pay for abortions, reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy prohibiting federal funding of foreign abortions, ended federal fetal-tissue research, strengthened conscience protections, protected Medicaid from funding large abortion providers, and pardoned 23 pro-life activists prosecuted by Biden’s weaponized Justice Department.
He’s also done everything within the Executive Branch’s power to defund Planned Parenthood. It would be nice if Congress did likewise.
No President has ever done more to protect life. No one.
18. He got men out of women’s sports, and restored biological reality to federal policy.
The United States government once again officially recognizes two sexes: male and female. Trump ended federal support for the chemical and surgical gender mutilation of children, stopped taxpayer funding of such irreversible abominations, and forced more than three dozen health systems to end or suspend their programs as well.
Trump also enforced Title IX as written: women and girls deserve their own teams, trophies, scholarships, and locker rooms. The NCAA and other athletic organizations changed their rules in response. After years of Democrats doing everything they could to destroy women’s sports and ruin girls’ lives, Trump’s administration protects women and girls again.
19. He enacted America’s first nationwide school-choice program — and launched Trump Accounts.
As part of the President’s One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump enacted America’s first-ever nationwide school choice program. The new Education Freedom Tax Credit helps fund scholarships for tuition, books, and other educational costs.
That’s on top of the new Trump Accounts, which give every child a tax-advantaged stake in America’s future, including a $1,000 federal seed for eligible newborns. Parents gain power. Bureaucracies lose it. And children learn first-hand about free markets and future orientation.
20. He targeted anti-Christian bias and discrimination.
Trump created the White House Faith Office, Religious Liberty Commission, and Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias. He restored conscience protections and made clear that Christians do not surrender their First Amendment rights merely by entering public life.
He Restored Peace Through Strength and Put America First
21. He forced NATO to stop freeloading and increase defense spending by 250 percent.
For decades, wealthy European governments underfunded their militaries, effectively sending America the bill and using American taxpayers to subsidize their bloated welfare states. Trump forced NATO to replace its old two-percent-of-GDP spending target with an enormous five percent by 2035.
Allied spending is rising, American defense orders are soaring, and Europe is becoming a partner instead of a dependent.
22. He drove China out of the Caribbean.
China spent years building strategic beachheads at both ends of the Panama Canal, in Cuba, and in Maduro’s Venezuela. Trump forced Panama out of Belt and Road, expanded American security access around the Canal, and captured Maduro, who now sits in a New York jail cell awaiting trial.
Beijing’s planned encirclement of the United States collapsed. The Monroe Doctrine is back. Call it the Donroe Doctrine.
23. He brokered eight peace deals in just eight months.
In eight months, Trump brokered peace in eight conflicts spanning four continents, including wars that had gone on for as much as 40 years. It’s a record unmatched by any other President.
24. He launched and funded Golden Dome, the first-ever true missile defense for the U.S. population.
Ronald Reagan dreamed of making nuclear missiles obsolete through his Strategic Defense Initiative. Today, Trump is actually building it: a layered homeland shield with space-based sensors and interceptors, conventional defenses, and new technologies including microwave systems to destroy drone swarms and directed-energy weapons (yes, lasers) that can replace an $11 million missile with $2 of electricity.
Congress has funded the initial $25 billion, with far more on the way once it passes the NDAA this fall. Better a shield than a sword.
25. He restored the warrior ethos — and reversed the recruiting crisis.
After years of missed targets under Biden, every active military component met or exceeded its 2025 recruiting goal. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refocused the newly renamed Department of War on actually winning wars, while pouring resources into shipbuilding, munitions, drones, missile defense, and America’s atrophied industrial base.
Young Americans once again believe their Commander-in-Chief is worth serving. And they’re showing up en masse.
Now Act Like It Matters
Those are not tweets or campaign promises. They are changes in law, power, investment, sovereignty, culture, and the structure of the Republic itself. And they’re just the top 25: I could give you hundreds more.
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I deleted the Republican rhetoric from the beginning and end of this article, so as to not inflame the America-haters or melt the snowflakes.
You’re welcome…
Damned Well Said! Ray, Thanks!
I concur.
Snowflake Trump has melted our munitions supply for his latest ‘7 day invasion’ hobby that is now 6mos+ long, and he can’t use direct military force anymore (he was too stupid to figure out that U.S. would lose the ground invasion of Iran):
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/15/cbo-iran-war-cost-pentagon-weapons.html
‘The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the Iran war has cost the Pentagon $38.1 billion through Aug. 1 and could cost another $2 billion to $3 billion monthly.
The U.S. has used as much as two-thirds of its missile defense interceptors since June 2025; replenishing them could take at least five years.
The war is projected to keep weighing on inflation, adding 0.5 percentage points to inflation metrics by early 2027 as energy costs spread through the economy, the CBO said.’
You’re welcome. Based on the amount of communist trollbait this post garnered, I’d say the author exposed a nerve, and I struck it by reposting this…
Reality check please:
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/one-year-after-liberation-day-american-workers-are-feeling-the-negative-effects-of-the-trump-administrations-tariffs/
‘American manufacturing has not revived under the Trump administration. Instead, the administration’s policies have eroded gains achieved in manufacturing the four years prior to Trump taking office. In the 10 months following “Liberation Day,” the United States lost 89,000 jobs in manufacturing and 123,700 jobs in transportation and warehousing—two industries that are uniquely exposed to tariffs. (see Figure 1) In fact, the manufacturing industry lost jobs in nearly every month following “Liberation Day,” and manufacturing economic activity contracted for eight consecutive months as manufacturers pulled back in response to the Trump administration’s tariffs. Additionally, sluggish job gains in industries such as construction and mining and logging underscore the struggles that blue-collar workers’ face finding opportunities in Trump’s economy. Indeed, since “Liberation Day,” the labor market has shed 189,600 blue-collar jobs.’
https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/democrats/press-releases?ID=D2CC0004-0234-4D20-BC28-D2E30E12F14C
WASHINGTON – While President Trump promised Americans that he would stop inflation and lower gas prices, hardworking families have instead had to spend an additional $4,200 on goods and services since the President took office last year. The updated data released today by the Joint Economic Committee – Minority include national, state-by-state, and congressional district-level costs for everyday essentials.
Trump most corrupt Pres in history:
https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-figures/most-corrupt-presidents.htm
Thank you, Ray.
For us, a small automotive repair shop, what he did affected us deeply.
The burglaries, theft, break ins, from a high of 20 over 5.5 years, went to ZERO when the criminals left the country.
We felt like we were being picked and the city did not do one thing about it; the state did step in with state troopers since the city defunded the local police, but it was crowned by Trump’s policies.
IF we were affected that much by the illegal criminal class, what has the rest of the country been going through?
sober up from the mass hysteria xenophobia:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/plot-twist-conservatives-data-finds-181849858.html
Politics: Huge New Study Shows Trump Is Wrong About Undocumented Immigrants And Crime
The study tracked crime rates across a vast 11,500 neighborhoods and across 100 cities that represented 46 million people. Their findings joyfully and completely fly in the face of all of conservatives’ racist and xenophobic claims about immigrants — especially those who are undocumented — being the scourge of their communities.
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG-119-JU01-20250122-SD004.pdf
‘An NIJ-funded study examining data from the Texas Department of Public Safety estimated the rate at which undocumented immigrants are arrested for committing crimes. The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.[1]’
George, I take exception to your assertion that “Printing is faster for cw copy than cursive.” Here’s the story: In 1980 I and a friend started taking novice classes. Learning code, I started out by printing the characters. It worked ok. I built my speed up in preparation for the General code at 13. Still, so far so good. The problem came when I took the extra class 20 wpm and found out to my horror that I could only print 17 words per minute no matter how hard I tried. I could hear about 22 in my head but could only put on paper about 17. Good thing that by that time (1981) the tests were multiple choice on the CONTENT of the qso. If I would have had to do the 25 characters in a row test, I would have been toast. So, in the testing room (Federal building in Detroit) I would print until I was 3 or 4 characters behind, stop, leave a small space on the paper, and pick up at the current character hoping that I could answer the questions with all the gaps. The test was ten multiple choice questions and I pieced enough of it together to answer 7 out of 10 questions correctly and just passed. Now, I could write cursive faster than I could print because when I was in 7th grade, our science teacher wanted up to take notes as fast as he was talking and I got pretty good at it. Hindsight being 20/20, I should have learned to write it instead of printing when we started to learn code. KC8HI.