Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Conditions in the Strait of Hormuz are coming unstuck in ways that advance American interests, although the situation remains stalemated.

CNN reported late last week that “Iran is losing much of its control over the critical waterway” as the U.S. Navy quietly but effectively transits oil-laden tankers out of the strait under Iranian noses. In concert with the oil and petroleum products escaping the region via overland pipelines, Donald Trump’s energy secretary indicated that energy exports from the region are now approaching pre-war levels.

CNN couldn’t independently verify the administration’s figures. Nor could the Wall Street Journal. But to a certain extent, that is to be expected from a covert operation like the one the U.S. is engaged in. “Many ships are crossing the strait at night with their transponders off, making them hard to track by radio signal or satellite imagery,” the Journal reported Monday. The report’s headline warns that industry trackers “can’t find” the exports the White House touts, but the body of the article notes that some of those trackers’ estimates about what could be coming online run “closer to the administration’s numbers,” albeit only recently.

Even if it only backed into the policy of economic strangulation that it’s applying to the Islamic Republic, the Trump administration is finally seeing it produce some positive results. Naturally, then, it’s incumbent on the president to surrender to the Iranians while he still can. At least, that’s the argument Rosemary Kelanic brought to the pages of the New York Times.

Kelanic, the director of Defense Priorities’ Middle East program and a contributor to the Quincy Institute’s “Responsible Statecraft” blog, contends at the outset of her Monday op-ed that “defeat” is now America’s “least bad option.” The U.S. has little choice but to quit the field, allowing Iran to control and toll an international waterway. But it’s not clear why America must give up now.

As Kelanic admits, the war has shown that, even if the U.S. “cannot completely open” the strait, Iran “cannot completely close” it either. Why should they be bequeathed an unprecedented level of sovereignty over an international maritime chokepoint that they could not capture on their own? Kelanic doesn’t say. She does, however, dwell on America’s challenges.

The geography of the strait ensures that it is “impossible to decisively defeat” Iranian harassment initiatives. Modern technology, like cheap missiles and drones, creates “endemic risk of crossing Hormuz that even a negotiated deal with Tehran would not eliminate.” That sounds like a rationale for abandoning the negotiations that will, by Kelanic’s own admission, fail to produce a durable (much less desirable) outcome.

Indeed, the author doesn’t even attempt to strike a more-in-sorrow tone when arguing for America’s capitulation. The United States is struggling with an irreparable shortage of munitions, she suggests. And even if America’s ordnance stocks were brimming, its people have no stomach for a long-duration mission to “sneak oil through Hormuz.” In fact, the voting public may even resent the political class’s resistance to an Iranian tolling regime that extracts funds primarily from foreign pockets. After all, “those countries could pay their own way.”

The U.S., Kelanic adds, has little slack in its economy — quite unlike the less “oil-intensive” economies of China and Russia. That’s a kick that Kelanic has been on for some time. And she has a point when it comes to China, albeit one that was overstated at the outset of Operation Epic Fury; China’s energy position today is sustained by its consumption restrictions, its oil reserves, and its “shift toward coal.” By contrast, the argument that Russia can easily absorb a fuel shock is betrayed by the evidence of your own eyes.

At no point does Kelanic acknowledge the buffers in the American economy. The “shale revolution,” the Journal’s Greg Ip observed, “has turned the U.S. into a net exporter of petroleum and major exporter of liquefied natural gas.” That might account for some of “the recent resilience of world oil markets,” which Kelanic admits “surprised many.”onditions in the Strait of Hormuz are coming unstuck in ways that advance American interests, although the situation remains stalemated.

CNN reported late last week that “Iran is losing much of its control over the critical waterway” as the U.S. Navy quietly but effectively transits oil-laden tankers out of the strait under Iranian noses. In concert with the oil and petroleum products escaping the region via overland pipelines, Donald Trump’s energy secretary indicated that energy exports from the region are now approaching pre-war levels.

CNN couldn’t independently verify the administration’s figures. Nor could the Wall Street Journal. But to a certain extent, that is to be expected from a covert operation like the one the U.S. is engaged in. “Many ships are crossing the strait at night with their transponders off, making them hard to track by radio signal or satellite imagery,” the Journal reported Monday. The report’s headline warns that industry trackers “can’t find” the exports the White House touts, but the body of the article notes that some of those trackers’ estimates about what could be coming online run “closer to the administration’s numbers,” albeit only recently.

Even if it only backed into the policy of economic strangulation that it’s applying to the Islamic Republic, the Trump administration is finally seeing it produce some positive results. Naturally, then, it’s incumbent on the president to surrender to the Iranians while he still can. At least, that’s the argument Rosemary Kelanic brought to the pages of the New York Times.

We can’t let American win in Iran because that might help Trump.

The August 2026 jobs report blew all expectations out of the water.

Economists expected the economy to add only 53,000 jobs.

Well…the report shows the economy added 162,000 jobs:

• Food services and drinking places: +59,000
• Local government education: +42,000
• Manufacturing: +16,000
• Health care: +13,000
• Information: -23,000
• Construction: +22,000

The bad news for me personally: My sector (information) was the only one of those with job losses. AI continues to suck up all the VC funding…

More countries are reconsidering their support agreements with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a senior State Department official confirmed to Just the News.

Following Just the News reporting that the United States’ Agency for International Development’s Inspector General’s office found more than 100 UNRWA employees had participated in the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, Finland’s minister for foreign trade and development announced on Thursday that the country would not extend its support for UNRWA.

Several more countries have since indicated that they are reconsidering their own support for UNRWA as well, a senior State Department official briefed on the USAID IG’s investigation told Just the News.

It’s a bribe and terrorism organization with a debating society attached.

Kimberly Peeler-Allen, a member of ActBlue’s board of directors, invoked her constitutional right against self-incrimination while appearing before the House Administration, Judiciary and Oversight committees, according to sources familiar with her testimony.

ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergalis invoked the Fifth during a closed-door deposition Aug. 20, while CEO Regina Wallace-Jones asserted the same right during congressional questioning in June.

The House Administration Committee began investigating ActBlue in 2023 following concerns that the fundraising platform’s fraud-prevention procedures were inadequate to prevent illegal foreign donations.

German police have opened a terror investigation after two attacks on power stations, and a bombing at a railway station, within 24 hours.

Officials are investigating the possibility that the power plant attacks were carried out by a hostile foreign state, such as Russia, or home-grown Left-wing terrorists.

California has bicoastal company in its efforts to drastically reinterpret a Supreme Court precedent that reinstated a permanent injunction against the Golden State’s so-called gender secrecy policies in public schools, with the majority citing a century of parental rights precedents that it said lower courts were ignoring.

Moms for Liberty is suing a New York City suburb on behalf of unnamed members with children there, seeking to force New Jersey’s Chathams School District to notify and give parents veto power over their children’s “asserted ‘gender transition'” and “social transition-related accommodations,” arguing a trio of related policies violate the Mirabelli precedent.

School Board President Ann Ciccarelli argued at a June 15 public meeting that the high court’s March 2 emergency order was “not binding” on New Jersey public schools, in response to demands from parents to eliminate a policy requiring schools to “accept a student’s asserted gender identity regardless of parent consent or involvement.”

SCOTUS scolded the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Mirabelli for having “brushed aside” its 2025 precedent Mahmoud, which required school districts to notify and get consent from parents before exposing their children to LGBTQ “storybooks,” by wrongly limiting it to curricular decisions.

“The Chathams Board of Education’s open defiance of the Supreme Court’s clear rulings in Mirabelli and Mahmoud is an assault on the constitutional rights of every family in that district,” Moms for Liberty CEO Tina Descovich said.

Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar:

“What they are trying to do is exclude certain portions of voters from actually participating…non-citizens on the voter rolls.”

His state was one of four states reviewed where over 270,000 noncitizens were found on voter rolls.

Yes. Thanks for noticing.

In a Federal Election Commission filing made on Wednesday night, America PAC disclosed $800,475 in total spending in August.

The expenditure data showed that the billionaire’s PAC primarily poured resources into competitive Senate races in Texas, Maine, Ohio, New Hampshire, Michigan and a few other states.

The Texas Senate race between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton received the largest share of spending—around $248,000.

The Maine Senate race, which Democrats view as a key pickup opportunity, received the next largest tranche of spending at around $170,000.

In total, the PAC spent around $712,000 on seven Senate races—around 90% of the total disclosed expenses—and only around $88,000 on a small number of House races.

(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

The US Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon announced on Tuesday that more than 80 percent of the roughly 100 defendants federally charged with trafficking fentanyl in Portland are illegal aliens from Honduras and Mexico. The apprehensions began in 2023 and remain ongoing as federal and local authorities work to rid the sanctuary city of drug-related criminal activity.

As a result of the crackdown on open-air drug markets, authorities have seized more than 100 kilograms of fentanyl, 40 guns, and $1.3 million in proceeds. ‘That is enough fentanyl to kill 50 million people, or Oregon’s population, 11 times,’ the US Attorney’s Office said in a press release.

Illegal alien drug cartels + Woke Portland allowing open drug use = Americans dead.

What a tremendous scheme here from the Democrats.

They’re just selling the dope that Americans won’t…

After cattle country stresses over President Donald Trump’s plan to flood the market with cheaper foreign ground-beef trimmings, the 47th president posted that four giant processors have made life “miserable” for American ranchers and that he is authorizing farmers to process their own food if desired or necessary.

“Trump wants to remove some of the red tape and costs associated with setting up USDA inspected facilities for small producers or areas of the country that don’t have USDA processors to be able to sell their protein to consumers in a legal way,” grazier Derek Lange told Just The News last week.

“Consumers want to buy beef from ranchers and be a part of their story.”

Jeanine John Taele, 38, had more than 200 pages of writings that included schedules for the first lady and members of the president’s USSS detail, The Associated Press reported, citing information revealed during a Los Angeles County court hearing Wednesday.

The New York Post reported that prosecutors said Taele had seven notebooks containing 208 pages of drawings and sketches of Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles in Rancho Palos Verdes, lists of USSS schedules, details about individual security personnel and copies of Melania Trump’s schedule.

Yet somehow Teale has been declared mentally unfit to stand trial…

A routine arrest in North Austin developed into a much broader investigation after police said they discovered a large collection of mail, payment cards, checks and postal keys believed to have been stolen, according to Yahoo.

Austin police arrested 42-year-old Elizabeth Rozo on Aug. 25 after officers tracked her to an apartment complex near Tech Ridge Boulevard. Authorities were looking for Rozo because she was wanted on a warrant stemming from a credit or bank card abuse investigation.

Officers with the department’s North Metro Tactical Unit reportedly watched Rozo leave the apartment complex and enter a vehicle. They followed her before initiating a traffic stop.

The investigation expanded significantly when officers searched the vehicle. Police said they recovered roughly 400 bank cards believed to have been stolen, along with nearly 300 gift cards. Investigators suspect at least some of the gift cards had been purchased using compromised bank cards.

Officers also discovered two counterfeit Arrow Keys, a type of master key associated with U.S. Postal Service mail equipment. Such keys can potentially be used to open certain shared mailboxes and other postal receptacles, making them particularly valuable to people seeking access to mail belonging to multiple households.

Evidence from the vehicle led investigators to secure a warrant for Rozo’s apartment. The second search produced considerably more material, according to police.

By the time officers finished searching the vehicle and residence, authorities said they had collected thousands of pieces of suspected stolen mail and hundreds of checks. They also recovered about two dozen identification documents that police believe were either stolen or fraudulently produced.

Investigators reported finding 17 stolen postal keys in addition to the two counterfeit keys discovered during the investigation. Authorities have not publicly explained how the postal keys were allegedly obtained or identified how many mailboxes could have been accessed with them. Police also have not announced an estimate of how many people may ultimately be connected to the recovered mail and financial documents.

A former Houston police officer pleaded guilty to abusing his authority as law enforcement in his falsification of information used to obtain a search warrant that resulted in a no-knock raid and two murders for which the officer is already serving time.

Gerald M. Goines pleaded guilty to making false claims, including that a resident had sold illicit drugs to a confidential informant and that additional other customers had bought drugs from the resident in prior weeks, in an affidavit that was necessary to obtain a search warrant — known as a “color of law” violation.

Goines was a senior narcotics officer with the Houston Police Department (HPD).

The no-knock warrant was executed in January 2019 and became known as the Harding Street Raid when officers shot and killed a couple in their home. The raid added fuel to the fire in regards to particular scrutiny of HPD, with activists and some Houston City Council members calling for the department to be defunded or similarly financially impacted. This occurred amid anti-police protests that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.

Due to his role in leading the raid, Goines was charged with the murders of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, who were shot and killed alongside their dog during the drug bust. He was indicted in 2019 on two counts of murder and found guilty at trial, and is currently serving a 60-year prison sentence as a result.

Goines did not fire the fatal shots. The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the summer of 2026 that the officer who did so, Felipe Gallegos, was protected from a civil rights lawsuit under qualified immunity after he was previously indicted for Tuttle’s killing, a charge that was ultimately dismissed due to alleged prosecutorial misconduct.

(Previously.)

Two middle schools in Austin Independent School District (ISD) received their fifth failing A–F accountability rating from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) last week.

Under the Texas Education Code (TEC), “If a campus is considered to have an unacceptable performance rating for five consecutive school years, the commissioner shall order: (1) appointment of a board of managers to govern the school district; or (2) closure of the campus.”

The district originally had three middle schools with four consecutive failing ratings: Burnet, Dobie, and Webb. While Burnet and Webb earned F ratings, Dobie earned a D rating for this year.

According to TEA, a D rating does not break a consecutive failing streak — only an A, B, or C rating will stop the count. A D rating instead pauses the count until there are three D ratings in the chain, at which point the failing streak resumes.

Over the past school year, Austin ISD has made headlines for numerous challenges. In November, the district approved 10 school closures and 24 state-mandated turnaround plans for struggling campuses. After a projected $181 million budget deficit, the district was forced to make $205 million in cuts.

The district also announced the last-minute closure of Paredes Middle School on July 30, shortly before the start of the school year.

Austin ISD applied for Senate Bill 1882 partnerships for Burnet, Dobie, and Webb, which would have allowed the district to partner with an open-enrollment charter school or institutions of higher education approved by the TEA. These partnerships can receive increases in state funding and are exempt from certain accountability measures for two years.

Segura told KXAN News that the accountability pause was “not the driving factor” for the partnership, but rather the resources the partnership made available.

The TEA denied Austin ISD’s request in May, but said that the district could continue the partnerships, just without the state incentives. Austin ISD announced the dissolution of the partnerships for the three middle schools in July.

In an August 13 letter to parents, Austin ISD Superintendent Matias Segura addressed the possible state takeover, saying that “challenges remain.”

One failing grade for a school should be a wakeup call. Two demands heads should roll and get AISD to make whatever changes are necessary to fix the problem. Five is educational malpractice.

Ohio Democratic congressional candidate Brian Poindexter was arrested for allegedly swallowing a rock of crack cocaine at a traffic stop after he was stopped by police and for slapping a man at a baseball game according to police records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Poindexter, a city councilman and former union organizer running against the embattled Republican congressman Max Miller in Ohio’s Seventh Congressional District, has a criminal rap sheet dating back to the late 1990s, the records show.

On Jan. 23, 1998, Poindexter, then 18, was pulled over by police officers at a street corner known for heavy drug activity in Cleveland, according to the police report. Poindexter allegedly pulled out “some small objects from his coat pocket and put them into his mouth” and “began to swallow them.” The officer tried to retrieve the objects from Poindexter’s mouth, and the two men fell to the ground in a scuffle. The officer eventually recovered a “rock of suspected crack cocaine,” according to the records.

Another towering intellectual genius batting for Team Blue. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

The man accused of orchestrating the murder of legendary rapper Tupac Shakur — one of the entertainment industry’s most captivating crimes — was found guilty by a Nevada jury.

Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, learned his fate in a Las Vegas courtroom on Monday after about two weeks of trial, as Shakur’s emotional family members passed tissues around and embraced, the New York Times reported.

The conviction of Davis, a former high-ranking “shot caller” in a Los Angeles chapter of the Crips gang, marked the first person to face justice for Shakur’s murder, which went down on a Las Vegas street on the night of Sept. 7, 1996.

Shakur, a pioneer of the burgeoning rap scene, was driving in a car when another pulled up alongside and blasted him with a hail of bullets. He died days later at 25.

Davis was not accused of shooting the gun which killed Shakur, but prosecutors argued he gave it to the gunman — long presumed to be his nephew Orlando Anderson, who died in a gang shootout two years after the murder — and orchestrated the entire attack.

(Hat tip: Dwight.)

The NBA on Wednesday announced severe punishments for the LA Clippers — including the loss of five future first-round draft picks, a fine of $30 million and a yearlong suspension of owner Steve Ballmer — for violating salary cap circumvention rules in a case involving star Kawhi Leonard.

In a statement, the NBA said a near-yearlong investigation “found a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations by the Clippers organization, a prior offender of the salary cap circumvention rules.”

As a result, the Clippers must forfeit first-round draft picks in 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032 and 2033. In addition to the $30 million fine, Ballmer is suspended from all league and team activities for one year “for knowingly seeking to help Mr. Leonard obtain off-court income opportunities,” among other issues. President of business operations Gillian Zucker is suspended without pay for one year, and president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank is suspended without pay for six months.

(Hat tip: Dwight.)

Golden retriever and deer playfully race each other along the fence..🐕🐾🦌💨😍 pic.twitter.com/mhgVXQXJav

— 𝕐o̴g̴ (@Yoda4ever) September 3, 2026

(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)