Fred Standefer

[Charlie Bilello @charliebilello]

S&P 500 earnings are now expected to increase by 25% this year. We've never seen earnings growth this high outside of post-recessionary rebounds. An unprecedented boom fueled by massive EPS gains in big tech.

Video: https://t.co/HdoFAnN6sC

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

BREAKING: Dozens of Christians were massacred in Ethiopia over the course of the last week by Islamists.

Tens of thousands of Christians have been slaughtered by Islamists across Africa, and the world doesn’t seem to care.

[Jim Bianco @biancoresearch]

The reposted chart shows the results of China's admission to the WTO in 2001.

This chart shows the consequences of it (see the 2019 book "Death of Despair and the Future of Capitalism" by Anne Case and Angus Deaton)

[Beef Support | BeefMaps.com @BeefMaps]

King Ranch sits on 825,000 acres — larger than Rhode Island.

They'll tell you it's a ranch. A family story. Cattle, horses, cowboys, legacy.

But look closer.

Artesian wells drilled 500 ft into the earth. Tick eradication campaigns measured in decades. 650 oil wells pumping money back up from beneath the grass.

It's not a ranch.

It's a machine — and the brand outlived every man who built it.

What you're looking at is a blueprint for how private power actually works.

[Muskonomy @muskonomy]

NEWS: SpaceX's IPO is about to turn a 27-year-old ship engineer into an overnight millionaire.

Maryellyn Musselman, 27, spent two years working on a SpaceX recovery boat off the Florida coast, the Wall Street Journal reports.

SpaceX gave her stock as part of her pay. In her industry, that almost never happens. She also used 10% of every paycheck to buy more.

She won't say how much it is worth today. Her plan is simple: use the money to start her own repair business in Chesapeake, Virginia.

She bought a little every payday and held on. Thousands of SpaceX workers did the same. The stock starts trading June 12.

"Mariners are not usually stock owners in their companies, they're not always under benefits."

Thousands of stories like hers cash in on June 12.

[Sarah Adams @sarahadams]

The Most Important Emergency Kit Isn't in Your Closet

Every year, people spend hundreds of dollars on generators, emergency food, flashlights, and survival gear. But when communities are forced to evacuate, one of the biggest problems isn't food or water.

It's paperwork.

Insurance information.
Birth certificates.
Passports.
Medical records.
Contact lists.
Property documents.
Prescription information.
Pet records.

Having gone through a fire in my own home, one key lesson stands out: document everything. Take photos and videos of your valuables before you ever need them. If you're filing an insurance claim after a disaster, that documentation can make a tremendous difference.

Now, ask yourself a simple question:

If your home became inaccessible for the next 30 days due to a fire, could you prove who you are, access your finances, secure a temporary rental, and file an insurance claim?

One simple thing I do is keep scanned copies of my important documents on an old iPad that stays in my go bag with my emergency cash. It's not fancy. It's not expensive. But if I have to leave in a hurry, I know I still have access to the information I need.

Most preparedness isn't about having the perfect gear.
It's about having simple systems that work when life gets chaotic.

Most people spend years building a life and never spend 30 minutes organizing the documents needed to stay resilient during a crisis.

Preparedness is not about surviving the disaster.

It's about recovering from it.

[Bull Theory @BullTheoryio]

BREAKING: The Japanese Yen just hit 160 against the dollar again, the same level Japan spent $73 billion trying to defend earlier this year.

It did not work and The yen is back at 160.

A weak yen is a direct inflation crisis for Japan. The country imports nearly all of its energy. At $93 oil, every further drop in the yen makes that import bill more expensive.

The BOJ meets June 15-16 and is expected to hike rates from 0.75% to 1.0%. A rate hike in Japan matters far beyond Japan. The entire world has been borrowing cheaply in yen for years to fund investments in US stocks, crypto, and AI. When Japanese rates rise, that trade unwinds. Investors sell their positions and convert back to yen.

The day after, June 16-17, Kevin Warsh chairs his very first Fed meeting. He is inheriting 3.8% inflation, $93 oil, and a jobs market running twice as hot as expected.

Markets are now fully pricing in a rate hike by year end. If both the BOJ and Fed signal tightening in the same week, the liquidity that has been holding this market up faces its most serious test of 2026.

[Handre @Handre]

Marx lived his entire adult life as a dependent. The capitalist system funded his "research" through Engels, whose family wealth came from textile factories. The irony cuts deep: capitalism's profits subsidized its most famous critic.

Marx never held a real job. Never met payroll. Never risked capital or faced bankruptcy. He spent decades theorizing about labor value while avoiding actual labor. His insights into production came from library books, not factory floors.

The parasitic intellectual tradition he spawned continues today. Academic Marxists collect taxpayer-funded salaries while denouncing the market system that creates the wealth they consume.

It's time to get rid of these people.

[Jack Prandelli @jackprandelli]

Deepwater Drilling Is Engineering Under Pressure. 🌊🛢️

A semi-submersible rig is built for deep and ultra-deepwater drilling.

Everything has a job:

🔹 Ballast tanks control stability
🔹 Submerged pontoons reduce wave motion
🔹 Dynamic positioning keeps the rig on target
🔹 Marine risers connect the rig to the seabed
🔹 The BOP stack protects against blowouts
🔹 The drill string reaches the reservoir below

This is not just a floating platform.

It is a full offshore factory operating above the seabed, holding position in harsh seas, and drilling through thousands of meters of rock.

Offshore oil is not simple extraction.

It is precision engineering at extreme depth.

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, and others continue to support Democratic senatorial candidate Graham Platner, despite comments he made that offended feminist Democrats and an accusation of violence by a former girlfriend. “Look, he has apologized for that,” said Warren, referring to Platner’s comments on social media in 2013.

In response to a Reddit post titled “shorts that prevent you from being raped,” Platner had written, “how about people just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f----ed up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to?”

At the same time, all four Senators refused to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court after a woman alleged that he had tried to sexually assault her while they were in high school. Warren opposed the nomination, citing “credible allegations” of sexual assault. “I listened to Dr. Ford, and I listened to Judge Kavanaugh,” said Sanders. “I believe Dr. Ford.” Said Schumer, “For too long, when women have made serious allegations of abuse, they have been ignored. That cannot happen in this case.” And yet that’s precisely what Schumer has done in the case of Platner.

Some may object that the charge against Kavanaugh was more serious, but it was no more credible than the ones against Platner. An ex-girlfriend, Lindsey Fifield, said Platner “regularly grabbed her by the shoulders,” reported the New York Times, “sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car. During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was ‘calm.’”

Fitfield’s accusation is difficult, if not impossible, to prove, and the same can be said of Ford’s. None of the individuals whom Ford said were at the party, including her lifelong friends, corroborated her account, and one told the Senate she had no memory of it. And a different man told Senate investigators that he was the man who assaulted Ford, not Kavanaugh.

Moreover, there is evidence of Platner misrepresenting the truth. For example, he denied he had a serious relationship with his accuser, but the Times’ reporters said they saw a text he sent her in 2016, which read, “Lyndsey, I love you in a way I can’t even describe. “You are literally everything to me.”

Platner denied knowing that a tattoo on his chest was the symbol of a Nazi death squad, but last August, “months before Mr. Platner acknowledged the tattoo himself,” noted the Times, “Ms. Fifield told friends that her ex-boyfriend-turned-Senate candidate ‘has a Nazi tattoo on his chest.’ ‘It’s a Totenkopf,’ she told them on Aug. 20, according to a screenshot she shared with The Times. ‘An actual one.’”

And Platner said he was treated in 2016 for PTSD, one of whose symptoms is uncontrolled anger and “hyperarousal and reactivity,” which is the feeling of being constantly on the lookout for danger. Platner’s campaign team did not deny Fitfield’s accusation that he fantasized about someone breaking into his home so he could rape them. “Asked about those remarks, a Platner campaign official did not dispute them,” noted the Times.

For years, Democrats have accused their political opponents, particularly Donald Trump, of being Nazis, rapists, or soft on Nazis and violence against women. And yet here Democrats are supporting a person facing credible accusations of being sympathetic to Nazism, and accusations of violence that are no less credible than the ones Sanders, Warren, Schumer, and others made against Kavanaugh.

While one interpretation of the remarks and positions taken by Sanders, Warren, and Schumer toward Platner is that they are hypocrites putting ends-justify-the-means politics before principles.

At the same time, the difference in reactions to Franken and Platner shows that accusations of sexual harassment have less salience today than in 2017. Back then, Senate Democrats did not defend Democratic Senator Al Franken after he was accused of sexual harassment, even though some progressives later said the evidence for it was weak, as they have done with Platner.

Meanwhile, the accusations against Platner do not appear to have changed the minds of many Democrats on social media nor among many voters in Maine. And even a Republican strategist told Jesse Watters on Friday that the allegations were unlikely to change the minds of many swing voters. What changed?

https://t.co/HASbNRHIRG

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[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

In supporting Graham Platner, Democrats have abandoned #MeToo's "believe women" slogan. They should now take responsibility for the damage #MeToo caused, including false accusations, the demonization of male sexuality, and the crippling anxiety behind Gen Z's romantic recession.

[Rep Ken deGraaf, CO HD-22 @COrepKdeGraaf]

The turf war makes sense when you consider the plundering of taxpayers is a multi-billion dollar industry in Colorado alone.

[TheNewPhysics @CharlesMullins2]

🚨 SCIENTISTS JUST DEVELOPED A SOLAR DESALINATION SYSTEM THAT PRODUCES FRESH WATER WITHOUT CHEMICALS OR BRINE WASTE.

Researchers at the University of Rochester have created laser-etched solar panels that turn seawater into drinking water using only sunlight with no chemical additives and no toxic brine discharge.

The panels are treated with femtosecond lasers to become super light-absorbing and superwicking. Seawater spreads into an ultra-thin layer, evaporates rapidly under sunlight, and the leftover salts are pushed to passive regions via the “coffee ring effect,” keeping the active area clean and functional.

Why this matters:
• Conventional desalination produces massive amounts of harmful brine and requires heavy chemical treatment
• This new approach leaves behind solid salt instead of liquid waste
• It was successfully tested on real seawater from the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans
• The same system can potentially extract valuable minerals like lithium from the collected salts

The deeper implication:

Desalination has always faced a brutal trade-off: clean water at the cost of environmental damage and high energy use. This research points toward a future where solar-powered systems could produce fresh water while actually recovering critical resources instead of creating pollution.

It’s still early-stage, but the combination of low energy use, no brine, and mineral recovery makes this one of the more promising sustainable desalination concepts in development.

Would you rather see massive traditional desalination plants… or distributed solar systems that turn seawater into both water and critical minerals?

Follow for more frontier clean tech and materials science that could reshape how we solve resource challenges.

[EndGame Macro @onechancefreedm]

The Diesel Cushion Is Getting Thin

Distillate fuel includes diesel and heating oil. Diesel powers trucks, rail, farm equipment, construction machinery, freight networks, buses, and a large part of the supply chain. So when distillate inventories fall near levels last seen in 2003, the message is simple. The system has less margin for error.

Crude oil gets the headlines. Gasoline gets the politics. Diesel is where the real economy feels the pain.

The Problem Is The Lack Of Cushion

Low inventories do not automatically mean an immediate crisis. Weekly data can bounce around. Refineries can increase runs. Demand can soften. Emergency stockpiles can temporarily blunt the shock.

But the bigger picture is harder to dismiss. Distillate inventories are sitting near the bottom of a 20 plus year range at the same time supply risk is rising, geopolitical risk is elevated, and the economy is already dealing with high rates, weak consumers, and fragile freight demand.

That is the danger. When inventories are high, the system can absorb disruptions. When inventories are this low, every refinery outage, shipping issue, weather event, export pull, or geopolitical escalation matters more.

There is less fat in the system.

Historical Precedent

This kind of setup has shown up before. Tight distillate markets appeared during the early 2000s commodity cycle, again heading into the 2008 energy squeeze, and again in 2022 when diesel stress fed directly into freight, food, industrial production, and logistics costs.

The pattern is usually the same. Energy prices rise first. Margins get squeezed second. Consumers absorb it for a while. Then demand destruction arrives later.

That is why energy shocks are so dangerous. They do not only hit the gas pump. They move through the cost structure of the entire economy.

What To Watch Next

The key signals are not just crude oil prices. The more important tells are diesel cracks, refinery utilization, distillate inventories, freight volumes, product supplied, export demand, and strategic reserve drawdowns.

If inventories fail to rebuild before winter, the risk shifts from simple price volatility to something more structural. Higher diesel costs feed into trucking, farming, shipping, construction, and heating. That keeps inflation sticky even as the consumer weakens.

That is the stagflationary problem in one chart.

My Take

This chart is showing a real economy pressure point. Low distillate inventories mean the economy has less protection against an energy shock. Maybe demand destruction caps crude for a while. Maybe emergency releases buy time. But if the buffer keeps shrinking, the next phase is higher logistics costs, tighter margins, weaker consumers, and more pressure on the sectors that depend on physical movement.

Energy shocks do not just raise prices. They eventually break demand.

[Kevin Dahlstrom @Camp4]

🚀 The only career advice you need:

The actor Glen Powell auditioned to play Rooster in Top Gun: Maverick.

When the role was given to Miles Teller, Powell was devastated. He was offered a smaller role, but declined.

Tom Cruise summoned Powell to his house and asked him:

“What kind of career do you want?”

Powell responded:

“I want to be like you—an iconic movie star. You always choose great roles.”

Cruise shook his head.

“You’re wrong. I choose great movies, then I make the role great.”

Powell got the message. He accepted the role of Hangman—and nailed it.

Now Powell says:

“It changed the trajectory of my career.”

When young people ask me for career advice, I tell them something similar:

🚀 Attach yourself to a rocketship.

Join companies that are growing quickly. Work with people who are going places. Be part of something great.

Play your role—no matter how minor—exceptionally well.

The rest will take care of itself.

P.S. I don't write engagement bait, so I need your help to spread the word. If you enjoyed this post, would you like, comment, and repost?

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

Multiculturalism means embracing every other culture over the West’s.

Under the guise of “inclusion,” it acts as a Trojan horse that delivers the total erasure of Western culture in practice.

Every person and organization promoting it is an enemy of the West.

[@Chicago1Ray 🇺🇸 @Chicago1Ray]

Good morning X

Our Country is under invasion.. I'm calling on @SecMullinDHS to stop issuing visas entirely

🚨(7M) visas issued... up to (90%) of them were fraudulent... could they be voting in our elections/collecting Govt aid

This is unsustainable

[Robby Starbuck @robbystarbuck]

Spencer Pratt is likely going to be overtaken by far left Nithya Raman today. This graph shows the count on Election Day through last night.

Nithya did this by suddenly winning 1st in every new ballot drop.

North Korean "elections" have more self respect. Even they’d find it absurd for 3rd to suddenly jump to 1st place in every ballot drop DAYS after an election. It’s just ludicrous.

[C3 @C_3C_3]

Evidence that if you remove violent criminals from society the innocent won’t be murdered.

It’s really simple.

For some reason the Left will not do it…

[Judicial Watch ⚖️ @JudicialWatch]

David Morens used a private email account to hide COVID-related records from the public, Congress, and FOIA requests. The indictment specifically cites a Judicial Watch FOIA request that was criminally obstructed! @TomFitton