Mark Hollifield

[Chris Rawley @NavalDrones]

TAMU Galveston's new National Maritime Security Vessel TS Lone Star State on sea trials. @DOTMARAD has done well overseeing this program. Standardization of state merchant marine training vessels makes a lot of sense.

It would be even better if the US Navy procured a dozen or so for its own use as auxiliaries - new tenders, hospital ships, and command ships.

Gig 'em Ags!

Photos courtesy of @TOTEServices

[Ray Powell @GordianKnotRay]

My response to 🇨🇳@Chinaembmanila's rebuttal of 🇵🇭@jaytaryela's recent post:

-----

You call the 2016 arbitral award “illegal, null and void” and accuse the #Philippines of bad faith for invoking it. You rest that accusation on the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the #SouthChinaSea and on the principle that agreements must be kept.

Fine. Let’s take that argument at face value.

The DOC commits its signatories to resolve disputes peacefully, respect freedom of navigation, and exercise self-restraint in activities that would “complicate or escalate” tensions. #China signed those commitments too, so let’s measure its actions against its own signed agreement.

📍 China dredged and filled thousands of acres of coral reef to build artificial islands in the Spratlys, converting pristine reefs into military outposts with runways, harbors, sensors and missile systems.

📍 China seized control of Scarborough Shoal in 2012 and has increasingly blocked Filipino fishermen’s access, devastating the livelihoods of communities up and down the Zambales coastline.

📍 China’s coast guard and maritime militia have repeatedly blocked, rammed, water-cannoned and swarmed smaller Philippine vessels to forcibly assert its absurdly vast maritime claims based on unilaterally declared “historic rights.”

Let's recall that on August 11th of last year, China turned a peaceful Philippine patrol into a deadly high-speed intercept in which a 7,500-ton PLA Navy destroyer bore down on a 350-ton Philippine Coast Guard vessel before colliding with a China Coast Guard ship involved in the same pursuit. This happened while China was enforcing an undeclared (but very real) 30-nautical-mile exclusion zone around the Scarborough Shoal--one which clearly violates the freedom of navigation China promised to respect under the DOC.

That is certainly not the peaceful self-restraint China signed up to.

📍 It is aggression masked as law enforcement--until the mask drops and the guided-missile destroyer shows the world its true, violent face.

📍 It is gaslighting--invoking an agreement as a weapon against a smaller neighbor while blatantly ignoring your own obligations under the very same agreement.

📍 It is highly escalatory and precisely the kind of collision risk the 2016 tribunal correctly found unlawful.

Now you urge the Philippines to abandon the award and “return to bilateral dialogue.” But why on earth would any rational party do that? If China routinely abrogates the pledges it made to all of ASEAN under the DOC, why should the Philippines now trust it alone, one-on-one, bound by no rule Beijing is willing to accept above its own coercive will backed by violence?

[Mark Hollifield @4915Mark]

@PhilosophyOfPhy Entropy is the conservation of mass, energy and space time all together. Aka Dark Energy.

[Eric Schwalm @Schwalm5132]

Surveys and letters to the right groups are worth doing, but they can easily disappear into a black hole.

The real impact comes from getting the word out. The designers already showed they don’t care when they created this abomination.

Stopping this memorial in its current form is too important to rely on forms and emails that may never be read.

I laid out the full case here.

Share it if you agree this needs to be stopped.

@CynicalPublius
@derrickvanorden
@maphumanintent
@SecWar

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

@mercoglianos @MSCSealift 😪

[Adastrasicitur @adastrasicitur]

New Suncell innovations from Brilliant Light Power:
https://t.co/W0m3trZYUD

[Sensurround @ShamashAran]

I still loved America when Joe Biden was president.

I disagreed strongly with him. I opposed almost all of his policies. I thought most of the things his administration did were damaging to the country.
But here's the thing: I never stopped loving America.

You see, America is bigger than her government.

America is not Joe Biden.
America is not Donald Trump.
America is not Congress.
America is not the bureaucracy.

Governments come and go. Administrations rise and fall. Politicians make mistakes, abuse power, pass bad laws, and sometimes do genuinely terrible things.

But America is bigger than any of that.

It’s the culture, the people, the communities, the traditions, the freedoms, the churches, the charities, the families, the businesses, the neighbors who help each other when disaster strikes. It’s the idea that free people can govern themselves and build something better. (And disagree while trying)

A president can damage the government.
A Congress can damage institutions.
Neither Biden nor Trump can destroy the spirit of America unless we decide to surrender it ourselves.

If your love of your country depends entirely on who occupies the White House, then what you love isn’t really your country. It’s a political administration.

I loved America under Biden. I love America under Trump.

I’ll still love America long after both of them are gone.

[NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman @NASAAdmin]

Happy Flag Day, America 🇺🇸

From sea to shining sea, to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, the great journey continues…

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

.@BernieSanders , it is a time to celebrate. @elonmusk has created enormous value for society by building @SpaceX, driving down the cost of rocket launches and creating a global satellite communication network that has brought high speed, low-cost internet and communication access to hundreds of millions and eventually billions of people along with critical advantages for our military and our nation’s defense.

SpaceX and its technologies will cause an acceleration in the growth of wages and wealth creation globally, including in some of the poorest communities in the U.S. and around the world.

Access to low-cost, high speed communications everywhere will allow children around the world to be educated, families to build businesses, and life-saving medical knowledge and care to be available everywhere.

SpaceX will materially bring down the cost of compute, advancing AI and humanity.

Meanwhile, 4,000 SpaceX employees yesterday became millionaires, including hourly wage employees who you claim you are trying to help.

The Elon Musks of the world drive growth, global GDP, and provide access to goods and services at lower cost that would otherwise not exist.

Elon’s nominal trillionaire status is due to his ownership of SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, the Boring Company and his other initiatives that have brought new technologies that improve our everyday lives.

Elon is not sitting on a trillion dollar pile of cash, jewelry and gold. He is using his controlling stakes in his companies to advance mankind. Elon’s companies don’t pay dividends. They reinvest all of their capital to accelerate innovation and value creation.

Elon is working 24/7 for all of us. He deserves respect and appreciation, not smears.

Bernie, your socialism would never allow a SpaceX to be built. Socialism has only proven to impoverish mankind and lead to death and destruction.

We need to create the conditions for more SpaceXs to be built, not attack the great entrepreneurs who are helping to advance our country.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson @neiltyson]

June 14, 2026

[cdrsalamander @cdrsalamander]

The American Taliban.

[Robert P. George @McCormickProf]

Court-packing by either party would unleash a dynamic that would destroy the independence of the judiciary. Its advocacy by a politician should be treated by sane and reasonable people of both major parties as disqualifying that person for office. It is worse than a crank idea.

[USMaritimeAction @USAMaritimeX]

The U.S. Navy has been ordering T-AOs for tanker capacity. Meanwhile Congress/MARAD setup the Tanker Security Program (TSP) in 2021 to add 10 commercial tankers for national security. The problem is 3 of the TSP tankers were built in 🇨🇳. The rest were built in 🇰🇷.

How about we build any new U.S. Flag tankers here in America?

https://t.co/Fk6tfWoXao

[Mark Hollifield @4915Mark]

@Chinaembmanila Liars.

[Ray Powell @GordianKnotRay]

SURPRISE: 🇨🇳@Chinaembmanila is calling its new platform at #ScarboroughShoal a "scientific expedition" & accusing the 🇵🇭#Philippines of "stirring up trouble" for bringing it up.

Wait ... let me show you my "shocked" face: 😲

Scarborough sits about 125 nm from Luzon, roughly 4 times closer to the Philippines than to #China. It's inside the Philippine exclusive economic zone, where Filipino fishermen worked its waters for generations until China seized the shoal in 2012 & began restricting access.

But now the embassy reminds us again about China's "indisputable" & "inherent" right to whatever it claims. Golly, where have we heard that before? 🙄

(Bizarrely, Beijing also describes this as a "dispute" that should be resolved diplomatically--one of those two lines of argument is doing an awful lot of work.) 🤔

Over the past two years, Beijing has doubled its coast guard & militia presence at the shoal, and it now enforces an undeclared & illegal 30 nm exclusion zone that violates UNCLOS' freedom-of-navigation clauses (and thus the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the #SouthChinaSea, which Beijing signed) & keeps Philippine vessels out.

Most marine scientists don’t arrive with a large paramilitary cordon and a stack of talking points.

If this is an environmental survey, at least we can understand why it's necessary. The damage done by over a decade of destructive PRC giant clam harvesting at Scarborough is depressingly well documented -- except by Beijing, which publishes glossy tributes to its environmental stewardship while denying access to anyone who might want to check its work.

🔥 What we have here is a classic case of gray-zone gaslighting: seize your neighbor’s fishing ground, blockade it -- oh, and while you're at it cause a high‑speed collision between two of your own ships while chasing a much smaller Philippine patrol boat operating in waters it used to sail freely -- and then scold your neighbor for being "provocative" when it has the temerity to point out what you’ve done.

We all know this isn’t really about science. Sorry, but China has, by its actions, forfeited the benefit of the doubt.

It's about expansionism. Full stop. 🛑

Wrapping a maritime occupation in the language of "science" and "conservation" doesn’t make it any less of an occupation.

It does make for cute AI-generated social media rebuttals to @jaytaryela. So well done on that.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

No one on this planet is doing more than Elon Musk to end poverty.

That’s the thing about capitalism: it makes EVERYBODY wealthier.

Also, these idiots do not understand that Elon is a trillionaire on paper only, the SEC prohibits him from selling his shares willy-nilly, and if he could legally have liquidity on those shares, the share price and the company itself would collapse literally within minutes.

Why are Marxists so stupid?

[Carolina Hurricanes @Canes]

IN BUSSI WE TRUSSI

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

I find it hard to understand why people who point out divisiveness that is already there, are considered more trouble than the people who created divisiveness in the first place

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

https://t.co/NYh0E6vFv4

[BRP Sierra Madre @BRPSierraMadre]

🚨CHINA’S NEW MOVE IN THE WEST PHILIPPINES SEA IS RAISING ALARMS | The presence of Chinese nationals on a floating platform inside Bajo de Masinloc, coupled with the coordinated deployment of PLA Navy warships, China Coast Guard vessels, maritime militia units, and rotary-wing aviation assets, reflects a calculated campaign to entrench China’s influence and establish a persistent footprint within Philippine waters.

These actions are indicative of an ongoing gray-zone operation aimed at transforming temporary presence into perceived control, undermining Philippine sovereignty while advancing China’s strategic objective of consolidating dominance in the West Philippine Sea.

📢 The World is Watching. Share and Expose the deception. Defend the truth.

#BRPSierraMadre #WestPhilippineSea #ScarboroughShoal #BajoDeMasinloc #DefendTheTruth #KnowTheFacts #RulesBasedOrder #ProtectWhatIsOurs #MaritimeRights #FactsOverPropaganda