Daniel Walker, MBA

Here you go.

Iraq has been hit very hard by the closure of the strait, as unlike Saudi Arabia or the UAE it lacks alternative routes apart from the Kurdish pipeline through Turkey. Iran has considerable interest in Iraq via its militia allies; it likely doesn't want the country collapsing. But this may not mean exports at full volume. And it offers a new source of leverage over Baghdad, and any Western company looking to do business in Iraq.

Crimson Dynasty 6️⃣💍 #RollTide | #AlabamaAdaptedAthletics

“China’s muted response to the war in Iran is a deliberate effort to manage systemic risk, preserve the external conditions necessary for trade and capital flow, and safeguard the foundations of China’s long-term ascent,” writes @ZongyuanZoeLiu. foreignaffairs.com/china/what-ira…

The Artemis II crew began their day prepping for their flyby. Tasks include a manual piloting demo with Victor Glover, reviewing lunar science targets, and collecting bio-samples. The Orion spacecraft remains on track for its flight around the Moon! go.nasa.gov/4mdWpgr

Will water be decisive in the Gulf war? The arid Arab countries of the Gulf increasingly rely on desalination, which provides 90% or more of the drinking-water supply for Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, and almost as much for Oman. For Saudi Arabia it is 70%, and roughly 40% in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). More in today's Chartbook Top Links:

Some people likely imagine that Artemis II will be firing its rockets to perform its “loop” around the back of the Moon. But in fact, it won’t. Orion is essentially coasting. Typically, we imagine that in order to change the course of a spacecraft, the spacecraft itself needs to do something - fire engines, apply thrust, actively steer. But here, it doesn’t. As Orion passes behind the Moon, its path is naturally curved by the Moon’s gravity, redirecting it back toward Earth on what’s called a free-return trajectory. No burn to make the turn. No propulsion guiding the arc. Just gravity. Even more interesting, the trajectory was so precise that planned correction burns weren’t needed. So much for “lost the technology” 😁 And that leads to an unavoidable conclusion: Without gravity, this maneuver is impossible. The spacecraft wouldn’t loop the Moon. It wouldn’t turn at all. It would continue in a straight line into deep space, never to return. Gravity is one of the most important forces in the universe - it governs everything from everyday motion here on Earth to the paths of spacecraft and the structure of galaxies. And here, calculations first worked out decades ago once again bring our travelers safely and efficiently back home.

Tom Nichols is right that someone needs to say this plainly. Pete Hegseth isn't reforming the Pentagon. He's at open war with the professional officer corps... and losing badly at the part that requires actual competence while winning the part that just requires audacity. He's called out "fat generals and admirals" at Quantico. He's purged senior officers. He renamed the whole department the War Department. He has a "Deus Vult" tattoo - the Crusades battle cry - on his arm while presiding over an active shooting war in Iran. And during an Iran war press briefing he told Americans to take a knee and pray to Jesus for U.S. forces. Days later he read a sermon from the Pentagon podium praying that "wicked souls" be delivered to eternal damnation. He just restructured the Chaplain Corps so chaplains no longer display rank... they display their religious affiliation instead. Matthew 6:5 is worth reading here. "When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others." The Pentagon podium is Pete Hegseth's street corner. The uniform is the costume. The war is the backdrop.

The First Quasar Ever Discovered Is Still Revealing Cosmic Secrets After 60 YearsLocated 2.5 billion light-years away in the constellation Virgo, 3C 273 blazed into history in 1963 as the very first quasar ever identified. Despite its immense distance, it remains one of the brightest radio sources in the entire sky — a distant cosmic lighthouse powered by a supermassive black hole devouring matter at ferocious rates.Since 2009, the MAGIC telescopes perched high on the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in the Canary Islands have been patiently watching 3C 273 in the extreme realm of very-high-energy gamma rays. In 2024, after 15 years of continuous monitoring, scientists released a stunning light curve that uncovered something remarkable: a clear, repeating flicker every 120 days.This rhythmic pattern is no accident. It is the orbital period of a blazing hot spot racing around the quasar’s accretion disk, whipping around the central supermassive black hole at breakneck speeds.By applying Kepler’s laws to this cosmic dance, astronomers precisely measured the black hole’s mass: a colossal 300 million times that of our Sun.But the gamma-ray observations reveal even more. The flickering emission region is astonishingly compact — just a few light-days across — and lies roughly 100 times the radius of the black hole’s event horizon. In this dangerous inner zone, gravity is still intensely strong, whipping particles to the highest energies observed in the universe.More than six decades after its discovery, 3C 273 — the original quasar — continues to surprise us. With 15 years of gamma-ray data, it is showing us, in real time, the final, violent dance of matter as it spirals inward for its ultimate plunge into the hungry maw of a supermassive black hole.

Ava DuVernay spent 14 years as a film publicist before she ever directed. She opened her own PR firm, The DuVernay Agency, in 1999. She worked on the marketing for over 100 film and TV projects before ever picking up a camera professionally. First narrative feature at 38. I Will Follow (2010). $50K budget. Self-financed. She won the Best Director prize at Sundance. That film led to Selma.

Millions turned out for the third “No Kings” protest held last weekend. Demonstrators at thousands of events rallied against the war in Iran, immigration enforcement and what they see as overreach by the Trump administration. For her series, America at a Crossroads, @JudyWoodruff went to the protest in Minnesota to explore how it fits into the nation's long history.

I had other things I wanted to do today but someone had to do it: A paragraph-by-paragraph takedown of why basically everything in this op-ed is wrong. Kind of shocking how bad it is (starting with using "messy" to refer to hundreds of thousands of deaths)

Courtesy of @OccupyDemocrats BREAKING: UGH! NPR discovers that the Trump administration hung over a THOUSAND Navy sailors and their families out to dry after evacuating them from Trump’s illegal war and giving them NOTHING when they got back! NPR reports that over 1,500 sailors, their families, and pets have been evacuated from Bahrain after the Trump administration launched a war against Iran without doing the slightest bit of preparation for any possible consequences, like missiles being fired at US bases. "They had to leave in a hurry, many taking only a backpack with clothes. "They literally told them, 'Get what you can get in the backpack. You've got to go,'" said Derrick Johnson, commander of American Legion Post 327 in Norfolk, VA. “They came with no uniforms, nothing. The three we met first, they came with the clothes on their back, what they could fit in that backpack." Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration made no preparations for their arrival, either, forcing the local community to hold donation drives for basic necessities like hygiene products. "The base was asking for donations of toiletries and different things for the sailors coming back, because they were coming back with nothing.” The Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society has handed out $1 million to roughly 2,000 sailors and their families since the evacuations began, said the group's chief operations officer Dawn Cutler, a retired rear admiral. "I saw one gal — she had a 2-week-old and a 2-year-old and a dog in a crate and a suitcase. So she was just at the moment, you know, looking to get out of danger, get to someplace safe. And now we're at the point where families are back and they're starting to ask the question: 'Well, what's next? Will we go back?'" said chief operations officer Dawn Cutler of the NMCRS. NPR reports that “the money [raised] is mainly to pay for essentials and to provide bridge loans so families can pay basic living expenses while they wait for the government to reimburse them, which can take months.” That’s the Trump administration in a nutshell. Put Americans in danger for no reason, upend their entire lives because they didn’t bother doing any preparations, and then do absolutely nothing for them when they get back. THEY. DON’T. CARE. ABOUT. OUR. TROOPS.

Annual appreciation post for Chi Chi Rodriguez and his caddie at Augusta National. 😎

With the 76ers loss, the Hawks' magic number to finish in the top 6 is 2. Any combination of two wins or two Philly losses means they escape the Play-In for the first time since 2021.

Space objects such as meteoroids and asteroids move across the solar system and can collide with both Earth and the Moon. However, the Moon shows far more visible impact marks on its surface. One main reason is that Earth has a thick atmosphere that protects the planet. When many meteoroids enter Earth’s atmosphere, they burn up due to friction before they can reach the ground. This process creates the bright streaks of light we call shooting stars. The Moon, however, has almost no atmosphere, so incoming space rocks are not slowed down or burned up. They travel directly to the lunar surface and strike it at very high speed. Each collision creates an impact crater, throwing dust and rocks outward from the impact point. Over billions of years, thousands of these impacts have covered the Moon with craters. Unlike Earth, the Moon also has no wind, water, or weather to erase these craters, so they remain visible for millions or even billions of years. This is why the Moon looks heavily cratered when we observe it from Earth through telescopes.

🇺🇸🇮🇷 The Trump Timeline: 🔸️Jan 18: “Iranian patriots, help is coming. We are moving in.” 🔸️Feb 28: “We are launching the decisive operation. It will be very fast.” 🔸️Mar 2: “We will win easily.” 🔸️Mar 3: “We have won the war.” 🔸️Mar 7: “We defeated Iran.” 🔸️Mar 9: “Strike Iran. The war is almost over—clean and decisive.” 🔸️Mar 12: “We have won, but not completely yet.” 🔸️Mar 13: “We won the war again.” 🔸️Mar 14: “We need help to open the strait.” 🔸️Mar 15: “If you don’t help, I will remember it.” 🔸️Mar 16: “We actually don’t need help—I was testing loyalty. If NATO doesn’t help, consequences will follow." 🔸️Mar 17: “We don’t need NATO help and don’t want it. No Congress approval needed to exit NATO.” 🔸️Mar 18: “Allies must cooperate to open the Strait of Hormuz.” 🔸️Mar 19: “US allies must step up and help open the strait.” 🔸️Mar 20: “NATO is cowardly. We may phase this out.” 🔸️Mar 21: “We don’t use the strait. Others need it, not us.” 🔸️Mar 22: “Final warning. Iran has 48 hours. Iran is finished.” 🔸️Mar 23: “One more week, then we bomb power plants.” 🔸️Mar 24: “The war is nearing its end.” 🔸️Mar 25: “We are negotiating with Iran.” 🔸️Mar 26: “Iran is begging for peace. They gave us a gift. We delay strikes on power plants.” 🔸️Mar 27: “I and the Ayatollah will jointly manage the Strait of Hormuz.” 🔸️Mar 28: “Regime change has occurred in Iran.” 🔸️Mar 29: “Negotiations with Iran are going extremely well.” 🔸️Mar 30: “We are prepared to destroy Iran’s oil and energy infrastructure and occupy Kharg Island.” 🔸️Mar 31: “We are ready to end the war without opening the strait.” 🔸️Apr 1: “War ends in 3 days. We will bomb them for 2–3 weeks back into the Stone Age.” 🔸️Apr 2: “We destroyed three major bridges. Why haven’t they called us yet?”

MG Green personally approved this study to better understand the implications of U.S. Army Chaplains’ understanding of legally and morally legitimate drone strikes for operations abroad. Well done, sir. cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Jane Goodall had no college degree and no science background. She was a secretary. A scientist hired her to study wild chimps specifically because she knew nothing about science, and she ended up proving that the one thing we thought made us different from animals was wrong. Louis Leakey was studying human origins in Kenya and needed somebody to go live near wild chimpanzees in Tanzania and just watch them for months. He picked Goodall because he figured a trained scientist would show up with a head full of textbook ideas about how animals are supposed to behave. Goodall had none of that. She’d just observe what was actually happening. She showed up at Gombe in July 1960 with a notebook, binoculars, and her mom (local officials wouldn’t let her go into the jungle alone). For four straight months, every chimp she approached bolted, and her funding only covered six. Then she spotted a chimp she’d named David Greybeard. Naming them was considered completely unscientific, and her future professors at Cambridge would lose it over this, but she did it anyway. David poked a grass stalk into a termite mound, pulled it out covered in termites, and ate them right off the stalk. He was using a tool to get food. Then she watched him strip leaves off a twig to make it work better, turning a found object into a custom tool. Scientists had one rule for what made humans different: only we make tools. When she sent the news back to Leakey, he wrote: “Now we must redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human.” Cambridge let her get a PhD without ever finishing a bachelor’s degree. Only the eighth person in the school’s history to pull that off. She discovered chimps eat meat (everyone assumed they were vegetarian), form alliances, and grieve when their family members die. A chimp named Flint stopped eating after his mother Flo died in 1972. Three weeks later, he was dead too. Between 1974 and 1978, a group of chimps she’d been watching for years split in two. The bigger group hunted down and killed every male from the smaller group, one by one, over four years. Ambushes on chimps caught alone. Goodall said she’d lie awake at night with the images stuck in her head. She’d always believed chimps were “rather nicer” than us. That belief didn’t survive. She got the Presidential Medal of Freedom in January 2025. Nine months later she died in her sleep at 91, on a speaking tour in California, still giving talks 300 days a year.

Phang: I think they do have buyer’s remorse. I think they understand that they gave him such wide berth that he has now said, “Thank you for the inch—I’m going to take 100 miles.” And now they’re trying to reel him back in, as we’ve seen through a series of decisions that have come out of SCOTUS. But they haven’t done us any favors.