So when does $150–$180 actually hit? Based on current inventory draw rates: Now → May: Market still pricing hope. $95–$110. Late May → June: Asian refiners outside Japan & China run dry. They pay any price for barrels. $130–$150. July: US inventories approach operational minimum. Government intervention likely. $150–$180. Aug → Sep: If Hormuz stays shut — we enter the $180–$224 zone. But by then, governments act first. The critical window: June–July 2026. That’s when inventory depletion meets zero alternatives.

NEW: In just 48 hours, 75 fire hydrants in Detroit have been destroyed after thieves started stealing the metal nozzles and stems. Local officials are now needing to tell scrapyards not to accept the stolen fire hydrant parts, which are worth about $600 each. "One hydrant here or there is manageable, but the problem is whoever's doing this is doing multiple hydrants in a row," said Executive Fire Commissioner Chuck Simms. "So when DFD shows up, they're not going to have a hydrant within 600 or 900 feet, which put people's lives at risk." Officials are asking the community to help find the suspects.

The church is the new Israel. Paul explicitly calls the church the “Israel of God” in Galatians 6:16: "And as many as walk according to this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God.” Some argue that Paul distinguishes two groups in this verse. For example, a Christian Zionist paraphrases the verse this way: "For all [Gentiles] who walk by this rule [the new creation], peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God [Jews who walk by the new creation].” But this is simply an impossible reading of the text. For one thing, the entire letter of Galatians argues that Jew and Gentile believers are one in Christ. There is no way Paul would suddenly break them apart into two groups at the very end of the letter. Paul summarizes the theological argument of the letter in Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” There is one Israel of God – and it includes both Jews and Gentiles who are untied to Jesus by faith/baptism. So what is Galatians 6:16 saying? Galatians 6:16 is a fitting conclusion to the letter: just as Paul began the letter with the threat of a curse, a malediction, so he ends the letter with a promise of blessing, a benediction. But since Paul does not know if the Galatians will heed the warnings in this letter, he has to formulate his blessing in conditional terms: “as many as walk according to this rule” will be the recipients of peace and mercy. Further, it is likely that in 6:16 Paul is echoing a familiar Jewish blessing, “The Blessing of Peace” from Shemoneh Esreh, used in ancient Jewish synagogues, but now repurposed by the Apostle for the use in the church: “Bestow peace, happiness, blessing, grace, and loving-kindness, and mercy upon us and upon all Israel, your people.” In this benediction, the “us” is not a group distinct from “all Israel,” but a subset of “all Israel.” The “us” is the locally gathered people; “all Israel” is the entire covenant community. So it is here. We can paraphrase Paul’s benediction this way: “And as many as walk according to this rule that circumcision and uncircumcision do not count for anything in the new creation, may peace and mercy be upon them in your community, and upon the whole Israel of God of which you are all a part.” 1/4

I just returned from a lovely coffee with an older saint, and it reminded me how crucial these things are to the life of the church. Pastoral home visits and coffee with parishioners should be a thing...a consistent thing, no matter how large your congregation is. I have come to see this more clearly the longer I serve. There is something about stepping into a home, sitting at a table, or sharing a simple cup of coffee that cannot be replaced by emails, texts, or even Sunday conversations. You begin to see people as they really are, not just as they appear in the pew. You hear the tone of their lives. You notice the small things. You sense the burdens that never quite make it into formal speech. I have found that when I neglect this, even unintentionally, my ministry begins to feel thinner. My preaching can drift toward generalities. Faces blur into a crowd. But when I am in the homes of the saints, when I sit across from them and listen, something changes. I carry their stories with me into the pulpit. I pray more particularly. I speak with a greater sense of who is actually before me. It grounds everything. In a larger congregation, I understand the temptation to rely on structure and efficiency. There are always more people, more needs, more moving parts. But I do not believe the answer is to become distant. It simply means we must be more intentional. It may require planning, sharing the load with other elders, or setting aside regular time for these visits, but it should not disappear. If anything, the larger the church, the more deliberate we must be about remaining present. These moments also remind me that the Church is not just what happens on Sunday. When I enter a home, pray with a family, or laugh over coffee, I am reminded that the life of the Church stretches into the ordinary spaces of the week. It is there, in those unspectacular moments, that much of the real shepherding happens. And candidly, I need it as much as they do. It keeps me from becoming a voice rather than a shepherd. It reminds me why I do what I do. It ties my heart to the people God has given me to serve. A church can grow in size, but it should never outgrow this kind of care.

Ansel is right. People with this view don’t truly understand the open source aspect or the proof of work aspect fully. A strong point about Bitcoin is that it literally doesn’t matter who created it. It can be assessed on its own merits since it’s transparent and decentralized.

BREAKING: U.S. reportedly preparing plans for a possible operation in Cuba, awaiting Trump's orders.

This was Churchill’s logic in attacking Gallipoli in WW1 (disaster for UK) & Japan’s logic in bombing Pearl Harbor in WW2 (disaster for Japan)… …but maybe going to war against the nation with the world’s biggest factory base will end differently for us this time? @bscholl

We treated them like barbarians they treated us like worthy enemies. Never underestimate your opponent it is how you will lose every time. Honestly maybe we need this loss to break away from trying to be a empire. We have to go back to what we built.

Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability. The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code. But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along. So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions. TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.

BREAKING: US GDP growth falls from 4.4% to 0.5% in Q4 2025, well below the initially expected 2.8% growth.

🚨BREAKING: The CDC just announced U.S. birth rates hit a NEW RECORD LOW in 2025. Let that sink in: there were MORE babies born in 1966—when our population was 196 million—than in 2025, with 343 million people. This collapse is an existential threat to humanity.

Sal Mercogliano: "1️⃣Iran has ZERO authority to monitor what sails into or out of the Persian Gulf" Iran's "authority" is both geographical and weapons-based. It's a fait accompli, unless the US Navy wants to do something to stop it. That would mean a direct naval confrontation at point-blank land-based anti-ship-missile range. Modern drones, anti-ship missiles and even just the threat of activating sea mines gives those nations along chokepoints "the authority." This is why the US Navy conducted an "emergency sortie" out of the Persian Gulf and beyond the Gulf of Oman. Even 5th Fleet HQ has been abandoned, its support staff evacuated back to Norfolk. The Pax American freedom of navigation that had existed since 1945 is over, at least through chokepoints. Our misbegotten sneak-attack war of choice on Iran has exposed this new reality to the entire world.

Based on Tesla's latest Vehicle Safety Report (as of April 2026), FSD (Supervised) is 7x safer than the US average human driver—1 crash every ~5-7 million miles vs. ~660k for humans, with over 9 billion miles of data. On a 1-10 scale (10 being zero risk, perfect autonomy), I'd rate it an **8.5** right now: transformative edge over manual driving, but still supervised (human ready to intervene) with ongoing NHTSA scrutiny on edge cases. Data keeps improving quarterly.

The missing WSO from the shot-down USAF F-15E is now safe and back in American hands. An officer involved in monitoring the CSAR in southern Iran describing the aviator’s incredible tenacity: “He evaded up a 7k ridge. They’ve been schwackin’ dudes chasing him all day. Was nuts.” #iran #csar

Wheels up all friendlies out. C130 got a wheel stuck in the sand at the FARP and a Delta element had to come in and blow it in place. Whole op sounds dicey as hell but they pulled it off. Goodnight.

“We need a new foreign policy that says we oughta mind our own business, bring our troops home, defend this country, defend our borders.” — @RonPaul in 2007 in the GOP debates Watching this debate is always so bittersweet, but it’s even worse now that the Iran war has started. Listen and remember that the GOP sided with John McCain and Mitt Romney over this guy. “We dug a hole for ourselves, and we dug a hole for our party. We’re losing elections, and we’re going down [in 2008] if we don't change it, and it has all to do with foreign policy, and we have to wake up to this fact.” As predicted, the GOP went on to lose in 2008 while Obama was pretending to be the peace candidate. Obama’s foreign policy record was Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Yemen, Iraq, killing 90% of civilians in drone strikes, etc. We had so many off-ramps. We should’ve listened.

E15 and E10 fuel standards have been waived by @epaleezeldin, providing Americans with relief at the gas pumps and fortifying the national fuel supply.