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John Ʌ Konrad V Profile picture
John Ʌ Konrad V
CEO @gCaptain, ship captain, author of Fire On The Horizon, and cofounder @UnofficialNet - K5HIP
Daniel O'Donnell Profile picture Roger Boaden 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧🇪🇺 #IAmEuropean Profile picture Karen Salitis 💙🌊🗽🇺🇲🇺🇦 Profile picture IVAN ROSARIO MD Profile picture Hakan Profile picture 5 added to My Authors
Dec 7, 2022 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
#USCG investigators find that the pilot of the Ever Forward was distracted while talking on his cell phone and the ship's captain left the bridge to eat dinner when the massive ship ran aground on the Chesapeake Bay in April. The investigation reveals the pilot was relying solely on his Portable Pilot Unit - a portable GPS mapping solution pilots carry - to navigate & made multiple phone calls & texts before grounding.
Dec 7, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
#China's exports and imports contracted in November as the #COVID19 outbreak disrupted production and weakened demand at home. The value of exports fell to a low of $296 billion, the lowest since April when the lockdown of Shanghai closed factories. 🧵 The decline in imports also widened to 10.6%, leaving a narrower trade surplus of $69.8 billion last month.
Nov 19, 2022 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
This is a solid article by @MEaglen but I do have 2 things to add.

Capacity = Speed
Capacity = reduced carbon footprint

This is the lesson @Maersk learned with slow steaming. Let me explain 🧵 About 15 years ago a containership capable of carrying 6,000 containers was considered large but then in 2011 @Maersk built the Triple-E class ships capable of loading 18,000 containers.
Nov 17, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
“You are a cargo ship captain, not a warship guy so why is @gCaptain focusing so much on the US Navy lately?” 👈 a frequent comment I get lately.

My answer: /1 Because my job is to get ahead of emerging trends in shipping and nothing is more concerning to global peace and prosperity than the US Department of Defense’s myopic focus on Army and Air Force spending as America pulls out of unstable regions.
Oct 28, 2022 • 22 tweets • 8 min read
What’s missing here is the absolute hell the small handful of journalists and bloggers who covered the top photo got for “war mongering” when we covered it. Nobody got arrested, but friends got fired from major publications and most of us got yelled at by Admirals and diplomats🧵 There was real anger at high levels of government, and the military was trying to build stronger ties with China at the time.

when I talked about this at business conferences, I had CEOs literally laugh, and how absurd they thought our warnings were.
Jul 19, 2022 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Paging Captain Obvious

Seriously “Capt Obvious” has always been a joke but today it needs to be made a real position inside the cabinet.

Someone needs to hold each cabinet official accountable to the most basic, most obvious logic. I say give @cdrsalamander that fourth stripe and ship him off kicking and screaming to the White House.

He probably won’t take the position but we are past the point of asking for volunteers.
Jul 18, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
A senior navy officer replied to my unofficial request that US Merchant Mariners working with the fleet receive a formal expression of appreciation from @SECNAV. He said "Ok, what do you want? Uniforms, medals, parades?" Here's my response: 🧵 I don’t want anything. ZERO.
Jul 13, 2022 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
It should be needless to say that, as a US Merchant Marine blue-water Captain I have serious reservations with this article on many levels. I can’t tweet about them all but here are specific counterpoints. 🧵 “In fact, the United States has steadfastly refused to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty” This is fully inaccurate. The United States is unique in that the US Senate ratifies treaties and the Senate is broken, especially when it comes to foreign affairs.
Jul 11, 2022 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
The money printer is to backstop commercial mistakes and allow financial evolution via ooda looping the construction-destruction cycle.

Repeat after me the @federalreserve is a bailout mechanism. Full stop.

This is what happens when you turn the printer on to fuel production: Few understand the true meaning of the US Fed. Even those who have figured out the true nature of the Fed, people like GE Griffin, misunderstand why it was created as a bailout mechanism.

amzn.to/3yVA9RF
Jun 9, 2022 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
This article helps to explain why most 🇺🇸 industrial bases like oil refining, shipbuilding, and shipping have been eviscerated by globalist neoliberals like @tomfriedman while other 🇺🇸 industrial processes like domestic 🌾 production still flourish 🧵 americancompass.org/the-commons/sh… “To begin with, if the lead nation casts off old industries, without developing newer, better-paying, more advanced industries, then it will simply be deindustrialized.” But who decides if an industry is “old”?
Jun 8, 2022 • 6 tweets • 10 min read
The BIGGEST global shipping event #Posidonia2022 is on & 3/4 of my feed says ‘everyone’ is here. ‘Everyone’ but @typesfast,DaveClark @alexrkonrad, #1 ship news @MikeSchuler @gCaptain @FreightAlley, #1 podcaster @TheStalwart, #1 TV @TimothyDooner, #1 ship YouTuber @mercoglianos 🤔 The biggest change for shipping is deglobalization, demographics, and geopolitical tensions yet #Posidonia2022 didn’t invite @PeterZeihan to Greece amzn.to/3xy1HeU
Jun 8, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
@SECNAV are you still certain that FedFire doesn’t need any #fireboats? news.usni.org/2022/04/19/stu…
Jun 6, 2022 • 21 tweets • 8 min read
This arrow points to the Singapore the Wall Street of Asia, the entrance to the South China Sea and the most important maritime “choke point” in the word. In black letters is the Chinese Navy’s #PLAN new base. washingtonpost.com/national-secur… A choke point is an area where traffic meets and a numerically inferior defending force can use as a force multiplier to thwart or ambush a much larger opponent or cripple the economy of large regions of the world.
May 12, 2022 • 31 tweets • 16 min read
I am so angry at the US Navy over this and disheartened by Navy Twitter too. THIS PERSON IS IN CHARGE OF NATIONAL SHIPBUILDING. Yet she has zero experience. You all are (rightfully!) upset about the Navy shipbuilding plan but CNO said there is no yard availability to beat China🧵 Repeatedly I've been told that I don't understand how the Navy works, that I'm blaming @USNavyCNO for things out of his control. That he can't order ships into the Black Sea, for example.That request, to protect the cargo ships that will prevent famine, has to come from elsewhere
May 9, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
🤦‍♂️I love you Navy guys but you are exhausting. Nobody cares about ship numbers , minesweeper locations, CENTCOM or any of the details you keep sending me. But they would care if the @eucopresident asks @USNavyCNO for minesweepers and gets this response: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You don’t win the budget battle for new ships by hitting the voting public over the head with operational concerns, statistics, charts like this, and joint operation control. You win it with BIG MEDIA HEADLINES Image
May 4, 2022 • 23 tweets • 7 min read
I take the opposite stance. In a world aligned under the petrodollar rewards went to linear thinkers. Globalization got too big & too simple. To non-linear thinkers the trenches built by mega-corporations look like the Maginot Line, formidable but fairly easy to circumvent 🧵 Armed with huge about of VC cash non-linear thinkers like @elonmusk are collapsing the systems and swimming in the resulting complexities.
May 2, 2022 • 9 tweets • 11 min read
I'm NOT saying you should use the fertilizer shortage as an excuse to claim your own island but... vox.com/2014/7/31/5951… @man_integrated @mercoglianos what shall we name our new island?
Apr 30, 2022 • 25 tweets • 6 min read
Today the conversation in media & on Twitter with regards to Ukraine is having a major positive effect on the DOD which is much needed in the wake of a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the @USNavy has 💯 underestimated the power of that narrative. Here's my 🧵 The USN forgets that the internet is unlike any communication technology that has come before it; they underestimate the power of this technology to scale & control the public conversation. They forget it's the public conversation that drives Congress, which drives budgets,
Apr 28, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Here it is @USNavyCNO Gilday answers the RUST question. 1:02 "It's part of readiness, deterrence, Appearance is important, we got to look sharp. We are the world's premier Navy, we got to look like it." 1/4

"This is part of the real get, a better campaign asking people to self-assess and self-correct. To stand up and take action when they see stuff wrong, and not accept stuff that's broken." 2/4
Apr 26, 2022 • 19 tweets • 6 min read
One of the myths stopping us from investing in US Naval shipbuilding is that shipyards and defense contractors are wringing huge profits from taxpayers. They do charge exorbitant rates but do they make exorbitant profit? Or does DOD bureaucracy eat away their bottom line? 🧵 The above is a chart of S&P 500 (in orange) performance against major naval defense contractors.
Apr 26, 2022 • 24 tweets • 12 min read
The Danube Contains floating mines!?! That's it I'm 💯 fed up with @USNavyCNO & @NATO. Why is @gCaptain providing better reports to shipping than the entire western military-industrial complex? Why is some journalist guy typing in his boxers in Massachusetts (me) & another dude in the middle of a desert @MikeSchuler with a combined total active-duty experience of 1 year, why are we providing critical agricultural supply & humanitarian ships better naval intel than you?