☕️ LOVELORN FROGMEN ☙ Tuesday, April 28, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Your roundup includes: why Iran is filling its bathtubs with crude; how Trump just fired the 25-member committee that gatekeeps nearly all American science spending; and Ohio’s bipartisan plan to legally adopt a magical bipedal frog. Defying all expert predictions, the President’s Iran War plan appears to be working, and the Second Great Depression has not landed. Plus, yesterday’s breaking war news exposed most of last week’s trad-media war reporting as outright lies. The Wall Street Journal reported, “Iran Is Flooded With So Much Unsold Oil That It’s Stashing It in Derelict Tanks.” The sub-headline added, “Tehran is trying to buy time as the war turns into a race to see whether its oil fields or global consumers can take more pain.” They’re playing chicken. BUCK-BUCK-BACAAAW! You might think that having too much oil is one of those good problems that no one sympathizes with, like having so much bitcoin the taxes are eating me alive, or the quarterback who complains to the nerds in the IT class that he can’t decide which cheerleader to take to prom. But it turns out that, under certain rare and exotic circumstances, having too much oil is more like having too many black mambas slither out of your Manhattan apartment toilet. Whoever is in charge right now in Iran —probably some anonymous, morally flexible, Arabian business gentlemen who are totally off the grid and who enjoy multiple Swiss bank accounts and a private army— finds themselves tightly pickled in one of those rare and exotic “black mamba” situations. Iran is burning up its own oil in desperation. 🚀 Why? For one reason and two reasons. The one reason is President Trump. More broadly, the two reasons are, first, Iran is running out of places to stash the pumped oil, but it cannot stop pumping. Second, President Trump’s Uno-reverse-card blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has stuffed a cork in Iran’s lower drainage aperture and it can’t ship the oil anywhere else. It’s that simple. It gets worse. You see, Iran pumps a lot of oil. A lot. It has to, to meet expenses. Supersized private armies and secret nuclear programs are among the most costly of the modern world’s luxuries. And recently, due to various ‘sanctions’ that the ‘International Community’ strongly worded and then promptly forgot to enforce, Iran has been pumping it out of the ground at record rates. They’ve been pumping it, and pumping it, and pumping it. (Note to self: That would make a good refrain for a pop rock song, Pump It Good!) At this point, you, being a logical person, are probably wondering: Well, why can’t they just switch off the pumps for a while? This is because you, like me, do not understand how an aging Middle Eastern oil well works. An oil well is not like a garden hose. If you turn off a garden hose, the water stops, and the only negative consequence is that your azaleas die, which they were going to do anyway because you bought them at a home improvement store where they were primarily watered with leftover Diet Mountain Dew. But if you turn off an Iranian oil well, the entire apparatus seizes up. The subterranean pressure collapses, the machinery breaks down, and the well can never be restarted. (Note to self: Wait! “Subterranean Pressure” would be an even better song name. Someone call Spotify.) Hence, they cannot stop pumping. The oil must flow. It is like that hilarious scene in I Love Lucy where the chocolates keep coming down the conveyor belt, except instead of chocolates, it is millions of barrels of highly combustible unrefined crude, and instead of Lucy and Ethel, it is a group of panicked clerics frantically searching around for empty containers. They are filling up derelict oil tankers. They are filling up spare barrels. They are probably filling up Tupperware containers, empty swimming pools, and those little plastic cups you get at the dentist. Any day now, the Supreme Leader is going to wake up, go to the kitchen to get some milk for his Cap’n Crunch, and find that his refrigerator is completely full of light sweet crude. It is the geopolitical equivalent of a defective soft-serve ice cream machine you ordered from Temu that won’t stop dispensing vanilla. You start out holding a cone, then you grab a bowl, then a bucket, and eventually you are just standing there in your pajamas, screaming at your spouse to bring the kiddie pool into the kitchen. This awkward conundrum is Iran’s own fault. After President Trump asked Iran to give up its enriched uranium, Iran said, “No, we need it for personal purposes,” yelled something incoherent about Great Satans, and told the Orange Man to stuff it. They deployed six motorboats with black-masked men holding machine guns to shut down the Strait. Trump shrugged and said, “no, you’re not shutting down the Strait. I am.” Iran’s mullahs had forgotten one very important fact— they need the Strait, too, to get rid of all the pumping oil. But Trump played his Uno reverse card and the clock started ticking on Iran’s ability to find spare gas cans and pickle barrels to hold the black stuff. Iran reached for the cork; Trump used it on them. And thus began one of the most mendacious media campaigns in history. Iran can be forgiven for lying; it’s in a war. War involves propaganda. But the media isn’t supposed to report our enemies’ propaganda as straight news. 🚀 While President Trump and CENTCOM were calling the US blockade a “tremendous success,” corporate media sneered until its reporters’ faces required extra Botox, and reported official Iranian State announcements as news facts. For example, consider this Financial Times headline from just three days ago: “At least 34 tankers with links to Iran have passed through the US blockade to exit the Gulf,” the Times gushed, whereas “US forces have so far detained one container ship in the Gulf of Oman and boarded a sanctioned tanker in the Indo-Pacific.” In other words: Trump’s blockade is a joke. But one week ago, before the FT article, the trade press was reporting the opposite. From Kpler (a commodities industry financial rag), dated April 23rd: So, if the Financial Times’s story was true, it seems super weird that the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Iran is running out of pots and pans to hold its “black gold.” According to the Journal, Iran is down to maybe days before things start getting really slippery. Sad! The WSJ’s “race” is a game of chicken. Iran, which cannot win on the battlefield, is trying to win a political pressure war, to force Trump to unblockade its oil so that futures prices fall. Meanwhile, Trump is waiting for the Iranian oil fields to collapse. So far, Iran —erroneously believing Democrats’ TACO nonsense— has bet that Trump wouldn’t actually let the oil fields collapse, because then its global output will begin being permanently reduced. JPMorgan estimated Iran is already down roughly 750,000 barrels per day from pre‑war levels, even before full shut‑ins, and that a prolonged shut‑in cycle could lock in a permanent loss of several hundred thousand barrels per day relative to pre‑war capacity. In other words, Iran is betting that the President will back down and chicken out, well before its oil fields begin imploding, since, as time marches on, the damage will permanently reduce its ability to contribute to global oil supplies. That increasingly seems like a bad bet. Trump is showing no sign of relenting. Think about what this reveals about the bigger plan. The structure of Trump’s blockade strikes the heart of the one thing — the aging oil fields— that really supports Iran’s nuclear ambitions, its gigantic private army, and its terror proxy budgets. By driving export flows down roughly 70% and pushing Iran’s mature reservoirs toward forced shut‑ins, Trump’s policy is not just squeezing this year’s cash flow; it’s sailing straight toward permanently shrinking the entire resource base that funds Iran’s private armies and secretive underground programs. If th…