Persistent Delusion Among the American and NATO Defense Establishment

The Crowdsourcing Of Cutting Waste & Fraud Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times, The Trump administration came into office with a pledge to uproot waste, fraud, and abuse within the government’s system of transfer payments. Leading the charge would be Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). They began their work early on with earnest and passion, starting inauguration evening, with many long days and nights of data crunching and number slinging, under the assumption that auditing government would be similar to auditing a private company. DOGE quickly found...

Russia To Stop Kazakh Oil Flows To Germany Via Druzhba Pipeline After several weeks of the main oil artery into Europe being halted - perhaps as Ukraine awaited the outcome of the Hungary election and the greenlighting of Europe's €90 billion loan to Kiev - Zelenskyy stated the Druzhba oil pipeline will be ready to ship Russian oil again. There is just one problem: Russia said it would halt halt Kazakh crude-oil shipments to Germany through the major Druzhba pipeline next month after reporting "technical issues."  The move would deal a major blow...

China To Import Record Amount Of US Ethane As Iran War Chokes Off Naphtha, LPG Supplies One year ago, in the immediate aftermath of Trump's Liberation Day tariffs, there was a flurry of discussion over who is more reliant on whom: the US on Chinese rare earth materials, or China on US ethane output (see "Chinese Plastics Factories Face Mass Closure As US Ethane Supply Evaporates" and "Who Blinks First? China May Exempt Tariffs On US Ethane & Other Goods"). Following the detente in the US-China trade war, that discussion was...