nsurer in the history of the industry. I just received their laughable estimate for repairs to my home and the contents after the Palisades fire. He says it is charitably one-tenth of the actual cost. And he says that I guess this is who's in charge of the insurance industry should shut it down but he's too busy in Bermuda. Now are other people having the same experience? Goes I bet they are. Can you imagine having insurance, having a fully paid up insurance, and then when you have the disaster they're only willing to give you about 10% of what it would cost to fix your house? His house survived but needs substantial work to make it livable. 10%. So State Farm has some explaining to do. And I feel like somebody in the government needs to drag their asses into a room and say all right, you know, what's going on here? So this is completely unacceptable. So State Farm, you need to fix that. You need to fix that.

I guess Trump had a call with Zelensky yesterday and it was a fantastic conversation. Fantastic. And one of the ideas was that instead of doing a mineral deal, so I guess the US has moved away from we'll take your minerals and as payment to we'll run your nuclear power plants because we have expertise. I don't know how much expertise we have but sounds like a good idea. And I think the idea would be similar to the mineral deal in the sense that it would give the US an important presence in some of the more important assets, nuclear power. So that might be a disincentive for Russia to attack if they knew that America was running the power plants. I don't know if that's enough of a reason for Russia not to attack. I don't know.

Meanwhile the US announced sanctions on Iran. So I always think how many sanctions could there be left? Like do we have infinite sanctions and you could just do more of them all the time? So some of them are about targeting Iran's oil minister and its shadow fleet of tankers. So I guess the shadow fleet would be ships that Iran has control of but they're not branded as Iranian ships so they can sneak by the sanctions. So somehow I guess we can figure out what the shadow fleet is. And I don't know how we're going to stop them unless militarily. But maybe if they're registered to some private company we could sanction that private company. I don't know. But we'll see if that makes any difference.

In other news a federal judge has ruled against the Trump administration dismantling the USAID. And the question is whether Elon Musk in his advisory capacity exceeded his authority. To which I say, was there really some point where Elon Musk was making that kind of decision without checking it with the boss? Couldn't Trump do that if he wanted? Wouldn't Trump be able to cut the budget on USAID? Because if Trump could cut the budget and Musk was talking to him every day about what the big stuff is, he was definitely talking to him about USAID, right? So at what point, if you're in continuous conversation with the boss, can you really say that it wasn't the boss who authorized it? It's not like he had a conversation with Trump and Trump said well whatever you do don't cut USAID and then Elon Musk went and cut it. That didn't happen. No matter what those conversations look like they were clearly on the same side. So I don't know how the courts can stop that. But we'll see. We'll see.

Meanwhile Kash Patel, you've heard this story before, he says he's going to shield his staff at the FBI from any retribution from Trump. So the retribution would be if there were any FBI agents who were involved in any of that lawfare against Trump or any of the dirty tricks against Trump. But I kind of like this. You know I like that Kash Patel is willing to publicly say you know this is a line we're not going to cross. And he's the one who will decide if somebody's done something worthy of firing. So I kind of like a little bit of pushback. A little bit. That makes sense to me. So that would be more, I would put this in the scalpel not the chainsaw category. So if he wants to shield some of them because he thinks they're more valuable than the power of retribution, I'm okay with that.

Well according to Mario Nawfal he's talking about there's a new UK defense intelligence report estimating that Russia has suffered around 900,000 casualties in the Ukraine war so far and up to a quarter million soldiers killed. And that's the highest Russian losses since World War II. But I guess Putin quite cleverly is doing most of his recruiting not from Moscow. So if you lived in the more populated parts of Russia, the more metropolitan areas, you might not be feeling the war because they're not running out of money in Moscow and that's not where most of the recruits are coming from. So they're getting the recruits from minorities and places that are further away. But my question is how do you kill that and wound that many people without eventually everybody in the country saying what did we get out of this? Like what was the point of that? You know what if you were wounded, if you were a Russian citizen and you were wounded in that, what exactly were you fighting for? It's not like Ukraine was going to attack you. So wouldn't you feel like that was sort of your Vietnam? You know there wasn't any strong reason to do it and there certainly wasn't a strong reason to lose a quarter million people. So we'll see. I think maybe Putin has enough control over the media and the country that he can just come up with a frame that can keep him in power. But in the US that'd be a bit of a problem.

All right so what else is going on? So in The Hill, the publication The Hill, there's an opinion piece on Ukraine from Alan Kuperman. Now what makes, David Sachs was pointing this out on X, what makes this unusual is that it starts out with quote, I rarely agree with President Trump. So this is not a Trump supporter but he's going to go on to say that Trump was right about Ukraine. So I want to read just some of the opinion of somebody who apparently is a Democrat who's not batshit crazy who was just saying okay I don't agree with Trump but he did get this spot on.

So here's what he said. And by the way you don't have to agree with this. It's just interesting why his argument is. He said that about Trump that his latest controversial statements about Ukraine are mostly true. They only seem preposterous because Western audiences have been fed a steady diet of disinformation about Ukraine for more than a decade. So he goes on, Alan Kuperman does, he said it was Ukraine's right-wing militants who started the violence in 2014 that provoked Russia's initial invasion of the country's southeast including Crimea.

Now here's where I'm going to say maybe. But it's also possible the Boris Johnson hypothesis that Putin had long signaled he was going to take Ukraine. It's in writing. He didn't say I'll take it militarily in writing but it was well signaled far in advance. And that maybe Putin was using whatever excuse was available as the justification. So I'm not sure I agree with him but he's agreeing with Trump and that's the news.

He says second Zelensky contributed to a wider war by violating peace deals with Russia, the Minsk one and Minsk two, and seeking NATO military aid and membership. Now I do think there was some violating of the agreements but I'd be surprised if there wasn't a little violating in both directions.

And third Joe Biden also contributed crucially to the escalation and perpetuation of the fighting. And he raised Biden raised false hopes that somehow Ukraine could win if you just gave it enough support. And nothing's really changed since then. You know basically the borders have changed about 1% in a few years. And he says even more tragic whatever peace deals emerge after the war will be worse for Ukraine than the Minsk Accords.

Now you could put this in the category of whether or not this interpretation of things is correct. And I do think the Boris Johnson interpretation that Putin was going to do it and he just needed whatever excuse worked and then there were a few excuses that were given him and made it easy. So at least easy to make the decision, not easy to do.

So my earlier point was what do the Democrats have if Trump is right about everything in Ukraine and Biden was really the problem and Biden destroyed Ukraine? It's really going to be tough for another Democrat to say but trust me I'm not going to make that Biden mistake. I know.

Meanwhile over at the University of Glasgow they did a study in Scotland and apparently they found that four out of five men who were in prison in Scotland have a history of head injury. Four out of five. Now do you believe that? Now a lot of people ask but what does the normal male have? It's not unusual for a normal male to have a head injury. Anybody who played a sport, anybody who rode a bicycle, you know head injuries are really common for men, boys especially. So I don't know if that's way out of line or it could be that the same people who would not worry about a crime don't worry about doing something dangerous that could hurt your head. So it could be just that it shows that there's a certain group of people who are not afraid of stuff. Maybe they should be more afraid but aren't. So I'm n