The Sour Crude Problem: Why America’s Refineries Depend on Imports and Why It is Relevant to the Strait of Hormuz

 ....you need to understand why the US is dependent on sour crude oil, which comes out of the Persian Gulf. I will try to make it simple - About 65% of the US refineries are built to handle sour crude while the US oil industry primarily produces sweet crude. We need sour crude to produce diesel and aviation fuel. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz means that the US will not have enough sour crude to sustain current production levels of diesel and aviation fuel. That’s the problem in a nutshell.

https://larrycjohnson.substack.com/p/the-sour-crude-problem-why-americas?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1225061&post_id=206404821&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=y7h5a&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email 

Without Subsidies, AI Is Unaffordable

 Let’s pull all this into an undeniable conclusion: AI is based on massively subsidizing users’ costs.

What’s already abundantly clear but verboten to say as it would pop the bubble of AI valuations and triumphalism is that AI is unaffordable once the direct and indirect subsidies are withdrawn. Nothing that consumes this much electricity and requires such an immense scale of costly processing and memory capacity can be low-cost, never mind free.

The major AI platforms and vendors are subsidizing corporate and individual users in the hopes that they can achieve AI sector dominance –and the pricing power that comes with it–via the network effect, the dominance generated by having the majority of users bound by habit or dependence to your platform or tools.

This battle for network effect dominance is playing out in full view:

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/07/charles-hugh-smith/without-subsidies-ai-is-unaffordable/ 

Germany Bankrupts Itself - Vox Popoli

 https://voxday.net/2026/07/10/germany-bankrupts-itself/ 

The fundamental problem with all the Smart Boy reasoning about things is that they always try to reduce everything to a simple binary with no tangents or consequences. Even now, as services are overextended, housing prices are shooting through the roof, and unemployment is rising, you will hear the government policy-makers mindlessly intoning “we need more immigrants for the labor force”. And less-intellectually challenged ones will try to add a caveat about only “high-skill labor” or some other such nonsense.

But the reality is, has always been, and will always be that a high-skill foreign laborer comes attached with a low-skill wife, several useless children, three criminal cousins and two sets of useless parents. Except when the high-skill foreign laborer is coming from a similarly-advanced and compatible culture, the net impact is usually very negative, as we’re now seeing in Germany, the UK, the United States, and even Japan.

When Korean immigration into Japan continues to be an observable problem 70 years after the fact, there is no chance that the various third-world immigrations into the European world are going to end well for anyone. They never should have been permitted in the first place, and the ultimate responsibility for the inevitable outcome rests with those who permitted and encouraged it.

They Were Never American - Vox Popoli

 https://voxday.net/2026/07/10/they-were-never-american/ 

Most US-based big tech is no more American than Alibaba or Deepseek. Which, of course, is why they’re perfectly happy to disemploy Americans and hire foreign labor, whether it is cheaper or not.

How many times do Paper Americans have to prove they are not Americans before Americans believe them?

Big tech shouldn’t be bailed out or awarded government contracts, it should be nationalized.

Too Crazy for Bluesky - Vox Popoli

 ...Because Mr. White, once deemed one of Salon’s 25 conservatives worth following on Twitter, is, quite literally, mentally ill, he naturally doesn’t see why he shouldn’t be able to advocate murdering a man who opposes the violent invasion of the UK by foreigners. Also, a correction – he wasn’t permanently banned, he was only suspended for four days.....

https://voxday.net/2026/07/09/too-crazy-for-bluesky/ 

.....I wonder if he would apply that logic to other rich people, particularly those who advocate racial genocide in the Middle East?

Regardless, and presumably because Mr. White is mentally ill, he clearly doesn’t understand that he shares what he believes Mr. Musk’s position to be. By his own logic, if there is no way to stop poor, non-white, downtrodden people from invading the UK and victimizing the English people through normal social, economic, political, or legal means, then the only thing that will stop them is the very fate that he is advocating for Mr. Musk.

Of course, Mr. White’s position isn’t the same as Mr. Musk’s position. Mr. Musk wants those poor, non-white, downtrodden people who are invading the UK, and other countries around the world to be repatriated to their home countries, peacefully and legally. And he is warning people, as I have warned people for more than two decades, that every failure to repatriate the immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers will result in large scale violence and war, regardless of whether the country invaded is the UK, Palestine, Germany, Japan, or the United States.......

The Useless College Degree - Vox Popoli

 It used to be that at least the possession of a university degree meant that you weren’t an innumerate, half-illiterate peasant. This is no longer the case.

Gone are the days of university freshmen reading classical philosophers like Plato or contemporary pedagogues like Ta-Nehisi Coates. These days, incoming college students are lucky if they can get through Judy Blume’s “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.”.....

https://voxday.net/2026/07/09/the-useless-college-degree/ 

.....This certainly puts the lie to the concept of Progress, or the idea that we are smarter than our ancestors because Science. But giving pieces of papers to peasants no more makes them educated or intelligent than giving pieces of paper to foreigners modifies their genetics.

Part of the reason for the decline of the Western countries is the mass importation of sub-100 IQs bringing down the average. But a more significant element is the convergence of the schools and universities, neither of which are still capable of performing what used to be their primary functions.

Some College Students Are Testing At The Level Of 10-Year-Olds | ZeroHedge

 https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/some-college-students-are-testing-level-10-year-olds 

Are you smarter than a 4th grader?

Gone are the days of university freshmen reading classical philosophers like Plato or contemporary pedagogues like Ta-Nehisi Coates. These days, incoming college students are lucky if they can get through Judy Blume’s “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.”

According to a new “Survey of Adult Skills” conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development - a forum for 38 high-income, predominantly Western countries - a not insignificant number of adult students enrolled in higher education are now reading and doing math at a level which, in a more functional society, would be alarming for a middle schooler.