Home Blog Page 24

Trump Blows Up Boat, Calls Explosion Evidence and Verdict

Nash Grayson
-
0
Trump Blows Up Boat, Calls Explosion Evidence and Verdict

WASHINGTON, DC — President Trump on Tuesday defended the U.S. military’s strike on a Venezuelan vessel in the southern Caribbean by noting that the eleven men aboard were unquestionably drug traffickers, a determination he said had been reached by blowing them up.

The administration has produced no manifest, no intercepted communications, and no surviving suspects, but officials maintain the case is open and shut, mostly because there is no longer a case or, technically, a boat.

“We had high-confidence intelligence,” Trump told reporters on the South Lawn, gesturing at a grainy infrared clip of a speedboat becoming a fireball. “Look at the video. Does that look like an innocent boat to you? Innocent boats don’t explode like that.”

Pressed on whether the vessel had been boarded, searched, or even visually confirmed to contain narcotics before being struck by what defense officials described as “a precision munition and also a second precision munition just to be sure,” a senior administration official explained that traditional interdictions are “slow, expensive, and frequently end with a trial,” three problems the new policy elegantly solves at once.

The Pentagon released a fact sheet identifying the men aboard as members of Tren de Aragua, a designation arrived at through what one official described as “vibes and the general direction the boat was pointed.” The fact sheet was two sentences long. The second sentence was a disclaimer that the first sentence could not be independently verified.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the strike “a clear message to the Maduro regime” and “a model for future engagements,” before clarifying that the eleven dead men were not necessarily affiliated with the Maduro regime but were, at minimum, on a boat, which under the new framework is sufficient.

Legal scholars noted that summary execution by Hellfire missile of unidentified civilians in international waters traditionally requires a declaration of war, a finding of imminent threat, or at least a courtroom, but Trump dismissed those concerns as “the kind of paperwork the cartels love.” He added that anyone uncomfortable with the strike was welcome to ride the next boat and see how it goes.

The Venezuelan government condemned the attack and demanded an investigation, a request the White House said it would take seriously the moment Venezuela produced a boat for the U.S. to also blow up, in the spirit of fairness.

Asked Wednesday morning whether the standard of evidence might be tightened going forward, the President said he saw no reason to fix something that had so thoroughly worked. “They were guilty,” he said. “Trust me. I’ve seen the wreckage.”

Israel Bombs the Hamas Officials It Was Negotiating With, Calls Talks Productive

Nash Grayson
-
0
Israel Bombs the Hamas Officials It Was Negotiating With, Calls Talks Productive

DOHA, QATAR — In what regional analysts are describing as the most aggressive counteroffer in the history of multilateral diplomacy, Israeli warplanes on Tuesday struck a residential compound in the Qatari capital where Hamas’s political leadership had been gathered to review the latest U.S.-brokered ceasefire proposal, eliminating, among other things, the people the proposal was being delivered to.

Officials in Jerusalem confirmed the strike was both unprecedented and, in the prime minister’s view, long overdue, given that the targets had been living openly at an address well known to every intelligence service on earth, including the one that arranged for them to live there.

“This is what a serious negotiating posture looks like,” said Itamar Ben-Roth, a senior fellow at the Levant Security Forum, a think tank whose entire funding was disclosed in a footnote nobody read. “You don’t get a Nobel by sending a fruit basket. Sometimes you get one by sending an F-35 to the room where the other delegation is sitting.”

The Qatari government, which has spent the better part of two decades hosting Hamas’s political bureau at the explicit and repeated request of the United States so that there would be someone to call when somebody needed to be called, expressed what its foreign ministry described as “a level of surprise normally reserved for being shot by your own attorney.”

Pressed for comment at a Tuesday briefing, a senior White House official said the United States had been notified of the strike with what she characterized as “sufficient lead time to update our talking points,” and clarified that while Washington did not authorize the operation, it also did not specifically un-authorize it, and at some point grown countries have to make their own decisions.

The official added that the strike would not derail ceasefire negotiations, which she said remained “on track,” pending identification of any surviving Hamas officials who could be reached at a forwarding address.

Doha, which serves as the forward operating base for Al Udeid Air Base, U.S. Central Command’s largest installation in the region, was reportedly assured by State Department officials as recently as last week that its status as a major non-NATO ally and indispensable American partner remained “basically pretty solid,” provided no one looked at it too directly.

Hamas, in a statement released through a spokesman who was not in the building at the time and would like that fact emphasized, condemned the strike as a violation of “every norm of diplomacy, hospitality, and the basic understanding that you do not murder a guy holding your draft document,” and indicated the group would be reconsidering its participation in talks pending a roll call.

Netanyahu, addressing the nation Tuesday evening, called the operation “a message,” which observers noted was technically accurate, given that the Hamas delegation had in fact been in the middle of receiving one.

At press time, Qatari officials were still attempting to determine whether the United States considers a country it asked to host a problem, and then bombed for hosting that problem, to be an ally, an adversary, or, as one senior diplomat put it, “whatever the word is for the guy holding the coats.”

Cleo’s Kindergarten Got New Vinyl Tuesday and Smells Like a Pool Toy Aisle

Brooke Ellery
-
0
Cleo’s Kindergarten Got New Vinyl Tuesday and Smells Like a Pool Toy Aisle

Cleo came off the bus Tuesday with a small pink forehead crease and her hair smelled, top to bottom, like a brand-new beach ball still in the mesh netting.

I asked her if she had a good first week and she told me Mrs. Pridgen’s room “smells funny but in a fun way,” which is exactly what a five-year-old says about a 600-square-foot urethane adhesive curing under fluorescent lights. The district laid down something called EverShine ProGuard Luxury Plank in the entire kindergarten wing over Labor Day weekend and apparently nobody opened a single window between Saturday and the bus drop on Tuesday morning. Three days. Sealed. Kindergarteners.

I posted in Crunchy Carolina Mamas at 4:47 p.m. and by dinner I had forty-one replies. A woman in Hendersonville said her son’s whole Montessori “got the plank” in 2022 and the four-year-olds were drawing rainbows with extra suns for a month. Someone shared a screenshot from a Telegram group called “Off-Gassing in the Off-Hours” that listed seventeen VOCs in a single pallet of the stuff, including one I cannot pronounce that is also in the foam they put inside dollar-store yoga mats. I am not making that up. The yoga mat people and the kindergarten people are buying from the same drum.

My sister-in-law Jordan, who runs the front desk at Dr. Pemberton’s pediatric office and has been there nine years so she’s basically a nurse, said they’ve already had three kids in this week with what she called “first-week-of-school cough” and what I am calling “the room is curing on top of them.” She said the official line is allergies. The pollen count Tuesday was 14. Fourteen. My driveway has more pollen than that on a calm day in February.

So Wednesday morning I drove up to Beaverdam Elementary with a thermos of cold-brew dandelion and a polite face. The hallway hit me before I got to the office. It was the exact smell of the inflatable aisle at a Big Lots in July, plus a base note of new car. Mrs. Pridgen had one window cracked maybe an inch and a single oscillating fan from her own house pointed at the reading rug. She is a saint. She is also breathing it for six hours a day and her voice was already going.

Principal Halverson met me in the front office and told me the adhesive is “school-grade,” which is a phrase that means absolutely nothing and which I have now heard four times this calendar year. School-grade hot dogs. School-grade hand sanitizer. School-grade glue down. He said the manufacturer’s data sheet says the room is safe to occupy after 24 hours. The data sheet, Halverson, was written by the people selling the plank. I asked if he’d sleep in there and he laughed in a way that was not a yes.

Here is what I am doing. Cleo now has a small organic cotton bandana in her backpack that I dampen each morning with lavender hydrosol from Asheville Botanicals and a pinch of pink salt, which is technically a mineral so it doesn’t count as an additive. She has been instructed, very gently, to hold it to her nose during carpet time. She has a little tin of activated charcoal lozenges from the co-op in case she gets a headache, and Garrett has agreed to crack the kitchen window every afternoon when she gets home so the plank smell on her clothes can move through the house instead of settling into the curtains.

I emailed the PTA Wednesday night with a link to a perfectly reasonable Wirecutter piece about VOC monitors and a polite request that we postpone any further “facilities refresh” until the wing has aired out for, at minimum, a school year. Tracy Dempsey replied at 11 p.m. to let me know the PTA already voted, by a show of hands at the August meeting I missed because Wyatt had a flag football scrimmage, to do the gym floor next. Over fall break. Sealed. Five days.

I love this school. I love Mrs. Pridgen. I love that Cleo wants to read every sign in the carpool line out loud. I just don’t love that we keep deciding the cleanup of children’s rooms is a chemistry problem we are willing to solve at full strength on a long weekend, and I will be opening every window I am legally allowed to touch on the morning of October 13th.

Jets Fan Resumes 14-Step Pregame Ritual That Has Never, Statistically, Helped

Tara Sparks
-
0
Jets Fan Resumes 14-Step Pregame Ritual That Has Never, Statistically, Helped

PARSIPPANY, NJ — At 9:47 a.m. Sunday, exactly 13 minutes before the New York Jets’ season opener, 47-year-old Mark Devlin began rotating his recliner four degrees clockwise — Step One of a 14-step pregame ritual that has, across 11 NFL seasons, produced a combined record of 47-129.

The ritual, which Devlin refers to internally as ‘The Sequence’ and to his wife as ‘shut up I’m doing the thing,’ includes putting his Brett Favre jersey on inside-out, eating exactly six baby carrots, texting his brother the word ‘ascend,’ and refusing to make eye contact with the family dog until after the coin toss.

‘He thinks the dog is a bad omen because we got her in 2020, which was the Adam Gase year,’ said Lisa Devlin, who has been quietly documenting the ritual since 2014 in a spiral notebook her husband does not know about. ‘The carrots have to be from a bag opened that morning. Last September I tried to use leftover carrots and he made me drive to ShopRite at 9:12.’

According to Devlin, the ritual was developed organically after the Jets’ 2014 home opener, in which he happened to be wearing complimentary socks from a Marriott in Hartford. The team won. He has worn Marriott socks for every home opener since. The Jets are 2-9 in those games.

Step 11, sources confirm, requires Devlin to recite the entire 1998 Jets starting lineup from memory while holding a TV remote ‘like a microphone, but not in a way that’s weird.’ Step 12 involves opening and closing the refrigerator three times. Step 13 is ‘a thing he does with his hands that he won’t let anyone film.’ Step 14 is kickoff.

Dr. Henrik Vance, a behavioral psychologist at the Atlantic Heartland Project who studies what he calls ‘magical sports thinking,’ noted that fan rituals tend to expand and never contract. ‘A fan adds a step every time the team wins. They never remove a step when the team loses. Over a decade, you end up with a grown man who, before each game, is essentially performing a small one-act play in his living room for an audience of zero, plus a confused goldendoodle.’

Devlin remains undeterred. The Jets went 5-12 last season, a year in which he added Step 9 (humming the first eight bars of ‘Eye of the Tiger’ while opening the carrot bag) midway through October. He attributes the team’s 2-3 finish over the final five games to the addition, and not, as his brother-in-law has suggested, to garbage-time stat padding against backups.

‘You can’t argue with results,’ Devlin said, in reference to a 17-year run with no playoff wins.

As of press time, Devlin had already begun drafting modifications for Week 2, including a 15th step involving a specific kitchen chair he is no longer allowed to sit in for non-football reasons, and was telling his 9-year-old nephew Caleb that this — this — is the year.

Hedge Fund’s Shutdown Model Is Just Polymarket on a 49-Inch Monitor

Cody Thompson
-
0
Hedge Fund’s Shutdown Model Is Just Polymarket on a 49-Inch Monitor

GREENWICH, CT — The proprietary government-shutdown probability model at Crestmoor Brook Capital, marketed to limited partners as “real-time D.C. risk telemetry,” was revealed Thursday to be a Polymarket browser tab open on a 49-inch curved monitor next to a half-eaten Sweetgreen Harvest Bowl with the goat cheese picked out.

The model, billed at 75 basis points and described in the August LP letter as “multi-source Bayesian with proprietary D.C. overlay,” is reportedly refreshed by a second-year associate named Brendan who hits F5 every eleven minutes between fantasy draft DMs and a running argument about whether to keep Saquon.

“We blend prediction-market data with on-the-ground sourcing,” said Patrick Vinh, head of macro at Crestmoor, gesturing toward the monitor, where the market “Government Shutdown by Oct 1?” sat at 64¢ bid. The on-the-ground sourcing was later identified as a group text with three former Hill staffers, two of whom now work in cannabis PR and one of whom answered with a thumbs-up emoji at 2:14 p.m.

A secondary monitor displayed C-SPAN on mute, a chyron about appropriations frozen on screen for the better part of an hour. Beside it sat a glass dish of trail mix with all the M&Ms picked out and a stress squeeze-ball shaped like the Federal Reserve building, missing one corner.

LPs receiving the August “D.C. Risk Note” — a four-page PDF watermarked CONFIDENTIAL in 14-point Garamond — were charged a 12 basis-point premium for what the fund’s deck calls its “differentiated political read.” The note’s central thesis, that “shutdown probability is elevated and CR negotiations bear watching,” appears to be reproduced almost verbatim from the fourth paragraph of a Reuters wire published the previous Tuesday.

Asked how the model differs from simply opening Polymarket on a phone, Vinh explained that Crestmoor “contextualizes the data” by applying a 1.4x multiplier during weeks Congress is in recess, a methodology arrived at by a junior analyst over Topo Chicos in late 2022 and never formally revisited.

A pension consultant in Hartford, asked whether his client understood it was paying premium fees for a publicly available betting market accessible from any laptop, paused for several seconds, said “they know it conceptually,” and excused himself to take a call about a different fund doing the same thing with Kalshi.

Crestmoor’s Q3 letter is expected to praise the model’s “robustness through political volatility” regardless of whether the government shuts down, stays open, or briefly does both for forty minutes on a Saturday morning while no one is watching.

Fantasy Commissioner Drops 41-Page Bylaws PDF on League That Hasn’t Read a Group Text Since 2018

Tara Sparks
-
0
Fantasy Commissioner Drops 41-Page Bylaws PDF on League That Hasn’t Read a Group Text Since 2018

COLUMBUS, OH — At 2:47 a.m. Thursday, regional sales manager Brett Hollister attached a 41-page constitutional document to the GroupMe of an 11-team fantasy football league whose members have collectively suggested zero rule changes since the iPhone 6.

The PDF, titled Hollister Memorial Dynasty League: Governance Framework v9.2 (Final)(Final2)(USE THIS ONE), includes a 14-paragraph preamble, a flowchart explaining trade veto philosophy, and an appendix titled “On the Sanctity of the Toilet Bowl.” It was opened by no one.

“Brett does this every Labor Day,” said Kyle Petrocelli, 34, a league member who has not read an email from the commissioner since drafting Le’Veon Bell in the second round of 2018. “Last year it was 36 pages. The year before, 29. He’s just adding stuff. I don’t think anyone’s ever told him we don’t read it. We just say ‘lfg’ in the chat and he takes that as ratification.”

Sources within the document confirm Section 4(b) now allows the commissioner to award a “Spirit of Competition Bonus” of 1.5 points to any team owner who attends his daughter’s recital, and Section 11 establishes a three-person “Constitutional Review Subcommittee” that consists entirely of Brett, Brett’s wife Megan, and a man named Doug who left the league in 2021 and moved to Tampa.

The escalation has not gone unnoticed. According to Maren Doolittle, an organizational behavior consultant at Beacon Strategy, fantasy commissioners constitute one of the last unregulated municipalities in American life. “There is no oversight body,” she said. “A man with mid-tier authority at a logistics company can, in his off-hours, draft binding legislation governing the leisure activities of seven friends from his Sigma Chi pledge class. The Founders did not anticipate this.”

Hollister’s bylaws also include a five-page section on “Punishment Protocols for Last Place,” which this year requires the loser to spend 24 hours at a Buffalo Wild Wings wearing a homemade sash, plus an addendum specifying the sash’s font (Papyrus, bolded) and material (felt, not foam). League member Anthony Ruiz, contacted while picking up his daughter from kindergarten, said he had skimmed only the part about waiver wire priority and assumed the rest was “some kind of legal cover for if Brett wants to keep Saquon for the eighth straight year.”

Brett’s wife Megan, reached at the family kitchen island where the document was reportedly drafted between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. across four separate nights, declined to comment beyond saying, “He printed it. He printed all 41 pages. We have one printer. It took an hour.”

The document concludes with a “Spirit of the League” clause stating that the bylaws may be amended only by a unanimous vote of all active members during the in-person draft, an event Hollister has personally hosted in his finished basement every August since 2013 and which features a charcuterie board he refers to, in writing, as “the Magna Carta plate.”

As of Friday afternoon, the league chat had received 247 new messages, 246 of which were about Justin Jefferson’s hamstring. The 247th was from Brett, asking if anyone had any questions about Article VII.

No one did.

NFL Opening Night Had Eight Sponsors Before the Coin Toss

Duke Holloway
-
0
NFL Opening Night Had Eight Sponsors Before the Coin Toss

I sat down at 7:47 with a beer and a plate of leftover meatloaf, ready to watch the National Football League play a football game, and the first thing that happened was a man in a turtleneck welcomed me to the Caesars Sportsbook Presents Visa Cashback Kickoff Powered by Verizon 5G Pregame, brought to me in part by Crown Royal, Frito-Lay, and the United States Air Force.

I counted eight sponsor reads before the coin toss. Eight. The coin itself was sponsored. The flip was sponsored. The replay of the flip was brought to us by State Farm, which I assume now also insures airborne quarters.

Then they did the ring ceremony. Now look — the Eagles won the Super Bowl, congratulations, get your rings. I’m not against a ring ceremony. My old coach, DiMaggio, used to hand out a single laminated certificate at the diner after a winning season and call it a banquet. We thought it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to us. He once skipped my certificate because I’d missed a block in October and made me wait until November to get it. Built character. Cost the school nothing.

This ring ceremony lasted thirty-eight minutes. I timed it. There was a string quartet. There was a poet — and I want to be very clear with you, I am not making this up — there was a poet who read a piece called “Brotherhood Is a Verb.” The cameras cut to Jason Kelce, who was crying, which is fine, Jason Kelce is allowed to cry, he has earned it, but then the cameras cut to a guy in section 134 who was also crying and I do not know that man and I do not know what he has earned.

Around the second commercial break my buddy Ray Kowalczyk called me. Ray played a year of arena ball in 1989 and brings it up at every wedding. He said, “Duke, are you watching this? They got a sommelier.” I said what. He said, “They cut to a sommelier. In the suite. Pairing wine with the trophy.” I told him I was on the same broadcast and I had not seen a sommelier and he said “You will,” and hung up.

Ray was right. There was a sommelier. His name was Bertrand.

Now, when the football finally started — and this is the part that kills me — the football was good. Genuinely good. It was a real game played by real men at full speed, and for about forty-five seconds at a time, between commercials for sports betting apps and commercials for fantasy apps and commercials for an app that lets you bet on whether the next commercial will be for a sports betting app, you could see the actual sport. Saquon ran somebody over. Jalen Hurts threw a ball that traveled like a missile. A linebacker hit a tight end so hard I felt it in my back teeth. That’s the game. That’s the thing they keep burying under the production.

I was at Murph’s watching the second half because my recliner gave out. Behind me was a kid, maybe twenty-three, who told his date that the Eagles were “a really cool franchise from a brand-equity standpoint.” I turned around. I couldn’t help it. I said, “Son, what does that mean.” He said it meant they had “strong cultural capital.” His date was nodding. I paid my tab.

Here’s the thing nobody at the league office wants to hear: the actual football is enough. It has always been enough. You don’t need a drone show. You don’t need a poet. You don’t need Bertrand. Coach DiMaggio used to walk onto the field with a clipboard and a thermos of coffee and we would have run through a brick wall for him. He once benched a kid for wearing wristbands. He thought wristbands were a sign of vanity. I’m not saying he was right about that. I’m saying he understood that the game was the game.

Ray called me again at 11:30 to tell me the postgame had a chef. I told him I’d seen enough. I went to bed.

Denise is bringing chili over Sunday for the early window. She says the recipe’s from a podcast. I’m choosing not to ask which one.

By 11–3 Vote, Kewaunee Tavern Will Show NFL Opener on the Good TV

Hal Cranston
-
0
By 11–3 Vote, Kewaunee Tavern Will Show NFL Opener on the Good TV

KEWAUNEE, WI — At 8:47 p.m. Wednesday, the regulars at the Anchor Inn held a show of hands and decided, by a margin of 11 to 3, that tonight’s Cowboys–Eagles season opener would be carried on the good television, the one mounted above the Old Style sign that has worked uninterrupted since the bar replaced its picture tube in 2014.

The other television, a 32-inch Sanyo above the dart board, will continue to do what it does, which is show a slightly green version of whatever the good television is showing, roughly a quarter second behind.

Owner and bartender Dale Pribyl, who tabulated the vote on a Spangler Brewing pad, said the meeting was unusual only in that there was a meeting. “Normally the good TV is just the good TV,” Pribyl said. “But Lonny brought up the Brewers, and once Lonny brings something up you have to take a vote or he won’t sit down.”

The three dissenting votes belonged to Lonny Vavricek, who wanted the Brewers–Cardinals game on the good TV; Sharon Kveck, who wanted the good TV turned off entirely because her brother-in-law plays in a kickball league that streams on Wednesdays and once she sees a screen she’s obligated to ask; and a man identified only as the guy who comes in for the fish fry and stays.

Pribyl said the Sanyo will carry the Brewers game with the sound off, which is consistent with the Sanyo’s general policy. The Sanyo has not had functional sound since the second Bush administration, a fact most regulars regard as a feature.

Reached at the IGA, Marlene Dax, who has tended bar at the Anchor Inn on alternating Thursdays since her divorce, said the vote was “the most democratic thing that’s happened in this town since they let us redo the swim dock,” and added that anyone showing up tonight in a Cowboys jersey would be served, but slowly.

The Anchor Inn opens at 4. Kickoff is at 7:20. Pribyl said he expects a full house, by which he means thirty-one people, which is the number of stools and chairs the fire marshal will pretend not to count.

The forecast calls for clear skies and a low of 54.

They Ground Up 40,000 Tires Into Wyatt’s New Field and Coach Said Hydrate

Brooke Ellery
-
0
They Ground Up 40,000 Tires Into Wyatt’s New Field and Coach Said Hydrate

I picked Wyatt up from the first day of seventh grade and his cleats were full of little black pellets that smelled like the back of a U-Haul. He shook one out onto the floor mat of my Subaru and Garrett — Garrett — said, “oh that’s just the new turf, don’t worry about it.” Reader, I worried about it.

Asheville Middle spent the entire summer installing what the principal’s email called “a state-of-the-art athletic surface” and what an actual invoice posted to the PTA Facebook page calls 40,000 pounds of “post-consumer recycled crumb rubber infill.” I clicked the supplier’s product page. It is shredded car tires. They took forty thousand pounds of old tires, ran them through what I can only describe as a giant pepper grinder, and spread them across the field where my twelve-year-old is doing up-downs on Thursday.

I posted in Crumb Rubber Mamas (8,400 members, very active, pinned post is a periodic table with the tire-relevant elements circled in pink) and within ninety minutes I had screenshots of a 2019 EPA letter, three separate state attorney general suits, and a PDF from a high school coach in Ohio who keeps a Geiger counter in his truck. One mom in Toledo said her son came home from August conditioning with a pellet stuck behind his eyelid for nine days. Nine. Days.

My sister-in-law Janelle, who works the front desk at a pediatric office and has therefore seen things, says the boys come in after football week with what she calls “tire chin” — a low rash from breathing whatever the rubber breathes out when it hits 140 degrees in the sun. She said in August they go through aloe like it’s a controlled substance and one kid showed up with a pellet melted into his retainer.

I emailed Coach Reddick. His reply, which I am copying word for word so you understand what we are working with here, was: “Mom — kids will be fine. Make sure he hydrates.” Hydrates. With what, Coach. With the water from the fountain that runs the entire length of the field, where 40,000 pounds of zinc-laced tire dust is currently baking under a 92-degree sun and softly aerosolizing into the bleachers?

Garrett asked me, gently, over dinner, if maybe I was “spinning out a little.” This is the same man who last month sealed our back deck with a product so industrial the can has a literal skull on it, then ate a pulled-pork sandwich directly on top of it. I do not need a tutorial on chemical exposure from someone who voluntarily marinates his own lungs every Memorial Day weekend.

So here is what we are doing. Wyatt has a pair of high-cuff merino socks that I have treated with a beeswax barrier I make in a mason jar with one drop of cedar oil. He has a clean cotton undershirt waiting for him in a Pyrex in the back of the car, and he changes in the parking lot behind the cafeteria before he is allowed in the vehicle. The cleats live in a milk crate in the garage. They do not enter my mudroom. They do not enter Marlene’s mudroom. They do not come within forty feet of the twins, who have already had a year.

I asked the PTA president if we could revisit the surface choice and she told me the bond is locked in for fifteen years. Fifteen years. Wyatt will be twenty-seven. The twins will have been running drills on this field for nearly a decade. By the time anyone replaces it, that infill will have quietly outgassed roughly a full Goodyear’s worth of zinc, lead, and 6PPD into the airways of an entire generation of Asheville kids, and someone in 2040 is going to make a very tasteful four-part podcast about it with acoustic guitar between segments.

I am not telling Wyatt he can’t play. I am telling him to come straight to the car, breathe through his nose on the sideline, drink the lemon water out of the green Yeti and NOT the blue one — the blue one is Garrett’s and it has a bright pink electrolyte powder in it that I am also going to write about — and to trust that his mother is on this. Honestly, that’s all a kid that age needs. A mother on it.

He nodded, said “okay Mom,” and slipped a single rubber pellet into the pocket of his shorts “for later.” I will be retrieving it during the wash cycle, which I am running on cold, separately, with a half-cup of distilled white vinegar and the windows open.

RTX Analyst Pegs Each Venezuelan Speedboat at $2.1M of Hellfire TAM

Cody Thompson
-
0
RTX Analyst Pegs Each Venezuelan Speedboat at $2.1M of Hellfire TAM

ARLINGTON, VA — Equity research desks across the defense sector spent Tuesday morning quietly upgrading RTX Corp. on what one note called a “durable, repeatable boat-engagement cadence” emerging off the Venezuelan coast, with junior associates at three banks independently arriving at a $2.1 million per-vessel revenue assumption before their second cold brew.

The strikes — at least four since Friday, against small fishing-style craft the Pentagon has described as carrying narcotics — were initially modeled as one-time events. By Sunday night, a Goldman associate had reclassified the line item as “recurring,” stapled it to a deck, and emailed it to her MD with the subject line “Caribbean SaaS.”

“We’re seeing a clean handoff from kinetic event to revenue event,” said Devon Marsalis, who covers prime contractors at Beacon Strategy and was eating a chicken-bacon-ranch wrap from the Pentagon City food court while reviewing the morning’s footage. “Each engagement is roughly one Hellfire AGM-114, call it $150,000 unit cost, against a target whose street value the administration is still workshopping. The street value doesn’t matter to the model. What matters is whether the cadence holds.”

Marsalis’s note, distributed to clients at 6:14 a.m., included a sidebar titled “Boats per Quarter: Bull, Base, Bear” and assumed a base case of eleven. The bear case, in which the Maduro government collapses and there are no more boats, was flagged in red as “materially negative for FY26 guide.”

Lockheed Martin opened up 2.7%. Northrop added 1.9%. A junior trader at a long-only fund in midtown spent twenty minutes trying to figure out who actually manufactures the boats before concluding, correctly, that there is no publicly traded pure-play on the long side of the trade.

The Pentagon, for its part, has not commented on the cost-per-engagement ratio, though a defense official reached by phone confirmed that the strikes were “proportionate” and added, unprompted, that the seized cargo had been valued by DEA at figures “definitely higher than the missile.” He declined to share the working file.

At Raytheon’s investor relations desk, an associate who asked not to be named described the morning as “unusually constructive” and said the team had received four inbound calls from buy-side analysts asking whether the company could break out Caribbean-theater munitions as a separate reporting segment. Management has not committed, but a slide in the deck for next month’s analyst day reportedly now includes a small map of the southern Caribbean with three red dots and the phrase “addressable waters.”

One PM at a Greenwich-based hedge fund, reached briefly between calls, said he had pulled up a satellite image of the Gulf of Paria on his middle Bloomberg monitor and was attempting to count visible vessels. He stopped at fourteen. “Fourteen is a number you can build a thesis around,” he said. The Dell behind him made the soft fan-whine of a machine that has been on since February.

By Tuesday’s close, the iShares Aerospace & Defense ETF had set a fresh 52-week high, and Marsalis had updated his model to include a footnote clarifying that the recurring-revenue assumption was “contingent on continued availability of boats.” The footnote was, per firm policy, in eight-point type.

1...232425...52Page 24 of 52