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🔺”In case of the slightest attack on the electricity infrastructure of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the entire region will go dark,” Iran’s IRGC-affiliated Mehr news writes. It shared the following graphic. 💢Here’s the list it shared: Saudi Arabia ➤ The Village (near Al-Khobar): gas power plant (4,000+ MW) ➤ Ras Tanura (Sharqiya Province): major oil and gas facility / power infrastructure United Arab Emirates ➤ Barakah (Al Dhafra, Abu Dhabi): nuclear power plant (~5,600 MW) ➤ Jebel Ali (South Dubai): gas power and desalination complex (multi-GW capacity) ➤ Mohammed bin Rashid Solar Park (Dubai): large-scale solar power project Qatar ➤ Ras Laffan (north Qatar): gas power plant (one of the largest in Qatar) ➤ Umm Al Houl (south of Doha): gas power + desalination plant (multi-GW capacity) Kuwait ➤ Al-Zour South: oil and gas power plant ➤ Al-Zour North: combined-cycle power plant (multi-GW capacity) ➤ Shaqaya Energy Park (west Kuwait): solar and wind renewable energy complex

Europe spent years debating whether the energy transition was affordable. Spain quietly answered the question: gas now sets its electricity price in only 7% of hours (in Italy is 90%). Strategic autonomy must be built in advance, in wind farms, solar parks, and grid investment, or it isn’t built at all. The countries still exposed to fossil fuel price shocks didn’t lack the warnings. They lacked the will.

I can't believe the flood of silly analyses on X about this virtual "Narva People's Republic." If this trend continues, journalists / commentators will effectively orchestrate the secession themselves, annex Narva to Russia, and subsequently ponder how to reverse it. The fairy tale about separatism in Narva and all sorts of "people's republics" in the Baltic states is just a way to get attention/clicks. Virtual "people's republics" online have been popping up since the start of the previous decade. They've already targeted Latvia, Estonia, and there was even a "Vilnius People's Republic" run in Polish. Did any of them come true? NO! The vast majority of these "people's republic" news stories are written by journalists who don't know the local context of Russian-speaking communities in Latvia or Estonia. Okay, but what about these internet separatists this time? Since this "scandal" blew up, the "people's republic"'s online reach has grown from a few dozen subscribers to 500. I'll bet most of the followers who joined last week are people interested in the group for professional reasons. Today's Postimees edition published an investigation into the online phenomenon of the "Narva People's Republic," which suggests there are only two active supporters of separatism in Estonia :) The journalists joined the inner circle of internet separatists. As it turned out, in that circle besides the channel owner, there were just two others: a port worker from Sillamäe and one potential "fighter" from Tallinn. The Sillamäe port worker was the Postimees journalists, and the "fighter" from Tallinn, according to the authors, is probably a journalist from a competing paper or a KaPo officer. Unfortunately, these sensational stories harm Estonia's image.

Der Krieg in Iran macht absolut Sinn, wenn man Trumps Ziele so versteht: 1. Westen dazu zwingen, wieder uneingeschränkt russisches Öl und Gas zu kaufen. 2. Weitere Flüchtlingskrise in Europa auslösen, die MAGA-freundliche Parteien stärken. 3. Regime Change in Europa.

FROM DEI OFFICERS, TO USA OFFICERS What a great clip. Trump is at his absolute best when overriding Democrat governance. He’s just genetically optimized to cut through blue bureaucracy. Did it for years as a New York real estate developer. In this scene he’s doing what every CEO has done but no president in decades has: going directly to understand what’s failing, talking to everyone first hand, and not taking no for an answer. And often the answer is so simple! “Allow people to clean up their own homes” is at the level of “put water on the plants instead of Gatorade.” Blues created such an Idiocracy that extremely obvious moves like this nevertheless unlock billions in value. How to do this systematically, though? On a one-off basis, Trump could maybe unblock blue state bureaucracy with targeted executive orders from above. But personnel is policy — so what you really want is to just de facto fire everyone like Bass. After all, many of these mayors are actually ceremonial because city managers run the cities. So as a thought experiment, imagine the US had a vertically integrated org chart, with all mayors reporting to their governors reporting directly to the president. Then Trump could just fire Bass on the spot and hand over command to one of his many new competent lieutenants. In practice, he might not legally be able to fire these people, but he could effectively strip them of authority. Think about what happened during Hurricane Katrina, when GWB handed over control of New Orleans to Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré. With appropriate legal authority, Honoré just started barking orders and cleaning up the mess local blue government had made. You could systematize that. Maybe as DOGE shuts down the useless parts of the federal bureaucracy, it boots up a series of “embeds” that sit in every blue mayor and governor’s office, with full information rights on everything. Kind of like a DEI officer — except they’d be a USA officer! While DEI officers ensured compliance with blue values, a USA officer would ensure compliance with the people’s values. That is, they’d make sure each local action by a blue elected is compliant with the President’s guidance for the whole country. And if the mayor or governor did something different — if they delayed permits, or released criminals, or distributed syringes, or funded homeless encampments — the USA officer could just report up to DC to rain down an executive order on the next Bass’ head. That’s how you scale this scene to every blue city in America.

Donald Trump told the story of how he decided on the war, which was that stock prices were so high he could afford to attack Iran. To get advice on the decision he asked Susie Wiles. Now you know why they had no clue the Strait of Hormuz would shut down. Try to read it. “We're doing great. I went to Susie my beautiful Susie Wiles. There's nobody like Susie. I went to Susie. Right? And everybody's with her and she's a great woman really she's a great woman. But I went to Susie. I always go to Susie. I said Susie do you mind if I take a little excursion here? Do you mind if I you know we're hitting all these records, right? Most more people are working in the United States today than ever before as I can name this I don't want to bore you Because this is all about Ireland but you're a big part of it because you're a big part of this country but I said do you mind if I take a little excursion my chief of staff because I want to do this. I have Marco here. We have a lot of our great people JD is here. They're all here and I say let's let's do this. We're gonna do it right should have been done by many presidents should have been done Long before 47 years. It's 40 years of living in terror You know, they're they're called the bully of the Middle East But they're really the bully of the world because he used oil to bribe right? He used oil to bribe and to you know gain power. I don't know what they gained. What are they gained? What the hell? How are they doing? Not so good. They're all gone now. Every one of them. They're all gone. We don't even know who to our biggest problem. We don't know who to deal with over here. I can call the speaker of the house He's so powerful. I can call him. I can make a deal maybe I can even call your Democrat counterpart this guy. I said to Kelly. What do you think of your counterpart? He said he's a great guy. This is Republican Democrat. I never thought I was gonna hear that about you. Let me shake your hand. When Kelly when Kelly tells me that I said that's the way it used to be You know, that's the way it not so long ago and maybe someday that's the way it'll be again. It's really great. But I said you mind of I take a little excursion Because we have to do something and it'll be a short term excursion? But we have all these great things going and we had to say you know, we could have. What could have gone up up? It was only going in one direction. But I think now it's gonna go much higher than it would have gone had we not taken this little journey. And so I appreciate all of the people that have worked with us I was not an easy decision to make we have a country that was hotter than any country anywhere in the world and Doing great in every way and I say oh, we have to put out this this cancer. It's a cancer We had to take that operation and we did and it was very successful and continues frankly as somebody said very they could leave today. And it would take ten years to rebuild the damage has been done. But I think we have to make it a little bit more permanent because no other president has to go through this and we shouldn't have any other President having to go through this kind of a thing and If they didn't want to do it if for some reason they didn't want to do it. Would have the same problem. We don't ever want to have that problem again Not with lunatics. We can't have lunatics controlling nuclear weaponry. So I just want to thank everybody.”

An Iranian-backed militia successfully used a (likely fiber optic) FPV drone to carry out a reconnaissance mission through the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad yesterday. Seen here, the drone flies unchallenged through the embassy complex for nearly two minutes.