Friday Night Links

• Citrini Research sent our incredibly capable field analyst – dubbed Analyst #3 in order to avoid emotional attachment – on assignment to the Strait of Hormuz. Armed with a fluency in four languages including Arabic, a Pelican case full of equipment, a pack of Cuban cigars, $15,000 in cash and a roll of Zyn, #3 set out to fulfill the itinerary we’d planned in our Manhattan offices the week prior. [Citrini Research]
• What he discovered on the ground: the AIS data everyone is trading on is missing roughly half of what's actually transiting the strait on any given day. Ships are going dark, spoofing destinations, broadcasting "CHINESE CREW OWNER" through transponder fields to avoid getting hit. Iran's ghost fleet is running 29+ laden tankers inside the Gulf with transponders off, moving an estimated $3B in crude to Malaysia since the war started. The entire market is pricing a "closed" strait off satellite imagery and transponder data that has a 50% blind spot. Every oil model, every supply forecast, every macro call built on AIS throughput numbers is working from a dataset that systematically overstates the disruption. When the signals deliberately go dark, the people staring at dashboards are the last to know what's happening. Citrini figured that out by putting a guy on a speedboat 18 miles from the Iranian coast while Shahed drones flew overhead. [link]
• Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshipers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved. [G. K. Chesterton] 
• We all know that past a certain age, men just want to sit and read books about history. I remember when my dad went through The Change; I came home from school one day, and instead of being in the driveway shooting baskets and listening to Dire Straits, Dad was inside reading a book about the Korean War the size of a cinder block. At age 45, I’ve now undergone a similar shift: I now seek out information about the Italian invasion of Ethiopia the way 15 year-old me sought out topless photos of Cindy Margolis. [link]
• I am reading over the Trump pardons of well-connected fraudsters and people like that (not January 6 pardons or other political ones) and kind of synthesizing it with my mental image of the people described below, and as a result a sort of red-coded crook-pervert broad-elite is emerging in my mind, an alternate elite to the blue-coded broad-elite of professors and NGOs and whatnot, a more inchoate elite that isn't quite as legible as the blue one in the imagination of the general public but exists alongside it and is as every bit as loathsome, but for different reasons. It's a local gentry elite, the GOP's real base (not the blue-collar types voting Trump, but the "jet ski dealership" or "nursing home operator" McMansion dweller type), and the real reason the party exists. No one can actually name these people as individuals off the tops of their heads, at least not until the Trump pardon comes along. [@wmslamcan]
• Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate. The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions. Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement. [@aakashgupta]
• High-agency people seem to have this weird immunity to embarrassment. Getting rejected? Not embarrassing, that’s just data collection. Looking naive? Not embarrassing, that’s just information asymmetry you’re fixing. Breaking minor social rules? Not embarrassing, most rules are just Schelling points anyway. What would be embarrassing to them is not trying. That’s the thing they can’t live with. [@Kpaxs]
• Keweenaw Land Association, Limited today announced that it has entered into an exploration option, lease, work commitment, and royalty agreement with Pulsar Helium Inc. to evaluate helium resources across a large portion of the Company’s mineral rights portfolio in Upper Michigan. Helium is a critical industrial gas used in healthcare imaging, semiconductor manufacturing, fiber optics, aerospace systems, leak detection, and other advanced technologies. Demand has expanded alongside growth in space technologies and advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Approximately 40% of global helium supply is currently offline from traditional producing regions. This agreement positions Keweenaw and Michigan to help meet domestic demand, by leveraging the scale we have built over the past few years and laying the groundwork for a broader expansion with our partners. Under the agreement, Pulsar will initially receive an exploration option covering approximately 488,000 acres of Keweenaw’s mineral rights. The agreement includes a 36-month staged surrender schedule of acreage, and a minimum exploration expenditure at a level consistent with early-stage district-scale programs allowing Pulsar to evaluate the regional helium system before refining its exploration focus to a core 20,000-acre development leasehold. [Keweenaw Land Association, Ltd.]
• The other thing is that Bernie Sanders, who used to be a prominent critic of open borders, needs to lead his whole flock back to a politically sustainable posture on this. People are going to worry that the next Democratic administration will open up the floodgates to a chaotic flow of new asylum claims. They are going to understand that Democrats don’t like to be mean to sympathetic people, but that realistically the only way to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control is — yes — to frankly and unapologetically turn away people who are in fact not rapists or murderers or terrorists but just basically normal people who simply don’t have permission to move to the United States. This is going to be a tough issue for any Democrat, because the credibility problem after Biden is so severe, and because Democrats (myself included!) are really quite sincere in shying away from cruelty to people who really are just seeking a better life for themselves. But we do have immigration laws and we need to enforce them, and again I think moderating here is consistent with leftists’ core message. [Matt Yglesias]
• Starship will make it possible to use low Earth orbit as a parking lot for a giant space-based arsenal. This would allow the U.S. to pre-position conventional munitions with ablation shields and inertial guidance systems to strike anywhere on Earth within minutes. Putting tens of thousands of small munitions into orbit would become cost effective, by my estimate, at around $100 a kilogram. Munitions could include bunker busters, kinetic weapons, antipersonnel, incendiaries, fuel-air explosives, cluster munitions, and antitank, antiaircraft and antiship capabilities with sophisticated terminal guidance. Starship’s payload capacity promises to be so great that it will enable the deployment of much larger single munitions than today’s biggest airplanes, enabling conventional effects of a greater magnitude against even the most deeply buried targets. New kinds of strikes would become feasible. Imagine a strike package of thousands of 200-pound bombs, each landing precisely, at the same time, on electric grid sites, government buildings, railway crossings, border stations and road intersections—without putting planes or military personnel at risk. This wouldn’t be limited by the number of available missile launchers or by the need for multiple sorties by strike aircraft. Such a system would obviate the need to establish air superiority before bringing in bombers and the need for large numbers of expensive cruise missiles. From an appropriately chosen low Earth orbit, munitions could be deorbited with very little warning. [WSJ]