Mark Stephens

This guy knows about asymmetric warfare and survival

Morgan Stanley just published this chart about massive disruptions in industries across the board.

Happy Spring Equinox Eve 🇮🇪 Tomorrow Morning, March 20th, and for the following few days, the rising sun will shine through the entrance of Grianan Of Aileach in Donegal, literally cutting the monument in half. A Spectacle Of Celestial Worship 🗿

Don’t say anything. Just retweet.

Senegal doesn’t plan on returning the trophy.😂😂

The Rock Choir performing "Dreams" by The Cranberries, at the Giant's Causeway, in Northern Ireland.

Hitting F-35 during a combat mission over Iran is going to change many things for this stealth aircraft. IRST lock gave heat detection range of F-35. It showed at which speed & altitudes, the stealth coatings failed against infrared sensors. F-35's infrared fingerprint is a priceless record for Iran now. This would be transferred to friendly countries. It will help in developing sensors to identify & target it. After 19th March 2026, the pilots of F-35 will fly defensively. This will degrade their effectiveness. They are no more invisible.

🚨 The Jerusalem Post confirms: an American F-35 has been hit for the first time in history. Iran’s air defenses — which Trump said today were completely destroyed — just hit America’s most advanced stealth fighter. The F-35 costs $80 million per aircraft. It has never been hit in combat in its entire operational history. Until today. Trump said the defenses are destroyed. An F-35 got hit. Joe Kent confirmed there was no nuclear program worth stopping. Hegseth told his son they died to stop a nuclear Iran that didn’t exist. 14 Americans dead. $21 billion spent. Zero allied warships. Pearl Harbor invoked to Japan. And Iran just hit the plane we said they couldn’t touch. Never stop connecting the dots.

Russian lawyer Remeslo has been committed to a psychiatric hospital after verbally attacking Putin. At least, that's what Z-blogger Alexander Kartavakh claims: Remeslo is allegedly currently in St. Petersburg's Skvortsov-Stepanov Psychiatric Hospital No. 3. Attempts by the "Khodorkovsky Live" correspondent to contact him via all the messaging apps Remeslo uses, including WhatsApp, where he responded yesterday, were unsuccessful. He hasn't updated his Telegram channel since last night. Russia is a dirty, stinking dictatorship.

Diplomacy at its absolute finest.

“One cannot assess in terms of cash or exports and imports an imponderable thing like the turn of a lane or an inn or a church tower or a familiar skyline.” Sir John Betjeman

Evelyn Waugh chatting with Elizabeth Jane Howard about being old [he was 60 at the time].

Senegal’s president casually updates his social profile pictures to include the AFCON trophy behind him. How do you say “come and get it if you can” in Wolof?

Got the wife evacuated, so have time to drink a tea and think about the Strait of Hormuz. I've sailed through the it a few times years ago and done antipiracy operations in the Strait of Malacca. Maps can be deceiving. The best way to think about the Strait of Hormuz is a four lane highway, with two lanes per direction for the largest ships like crude carriers, cargo vessels, and warships in the center of the channel where it is deepest and free of obstacles. Then on the outside of those lanes, you have medium sized ships, going Jebel Ali to other regional ports like Sohar, since a lot of international cargo goes direct to Jebel Ali then is cross loaded across the region. On the outside of those lanes, along both coasts, are dhow fishing boats and all manner of local, smaller craft. Maritime trade crisscrossing this region goes back hundreds of years. The Portugese wrote how disappointing it was to find a tight network of trade already established in the region when they arrived in the 15th century. It is hard to describe how crowded these waters are. You sometimes wonder if you could walk to Iran across the decks of ships and not get your feet wet. The amount of traffic makes distinguishing between normal traffic and a threat incredibly difficult. Is that dhow fishing, transiting between coasts, laying mines, gathering intelligence, or a tender for surface drones? Hard to discern while sailing ducks in a row escorting a lumbering tanker or cargo ship. Operation Prosperity Guardian in the Red Sea proved to be a Houthi victory when a land power with no navy to speak of fought the most powerful navy on earth to an agreement. The Hormuz problem is harder now the Iranians have proved they have the will to fight, no matter how much pain is leveled at them from afar. The shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz go around the Musandam penninsula. This turn exposes ships to 270 degree of fire control in layered systems from Qeshm, the surrounding high ground, to further inland, with surface drones now added to the mix. Iran doesn't need to mine the entire strait. Iran just needs to turn that main shipping lanes around Musandam into a kill box and divert approved ships past Qeshm, out of the main shipping lanes like a watery weigh station. It has started doing this. The U.S. has created a hard problem for itself. NATO understandably wants nothing to do with this. If the most powerful navy in the world can't solve this, what difference does European navies make. With the watery weigh station past Qeshm, Iran isn't closing the strait to global commerce. It is simply doing what the U.S. does with the dollar, exerting power over the chokepoint it controls. Understandably the U.S. doesn't like this, so why can't the U.S. just send warships to escort ships through? Well, when you escort a ship through a strait, you tend to stay ducks in a row. So if warships are sent to escort tankers, they are now just another target in the strait. Even if the warships could maneuver through local traffic to screen ships, lets go back to the 270 degree turn around the penninsula. The warships would be receiving layered waves of fire likely worse than they faced off with in the Red Sea against the Houthis from essentially three directions while having the longer route to run to protect the tankers around the peninsula. As the Hormuz Crisis drags on, anything less than breaking Iran's control of the strait will be seen as a loss for the U.S., much like the Battle of the Red Sea was against the Houthis.

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It has begun. Indian oil tanker was finally allowed to cross after it paid in Chinese Yuen 😂😂😂

Interesting. Standing up to Trump - despite the opprobrium of much of our media as keen to commit to war in Iran as they were to Iraq disastrously 20 years ago - paying electoral dividends. The public remembers even if the press does not.

This guy took G.I. Joe to the next level.

Right now, in barns and equipment sheds across the American Midwest, farmers are making the most consequential decision of this war. Not generals. Not senators. Farmers. At $683 per ton urea, corn economics have collapsed. Nitrogen is the single largest input cost for corn production. At pre-war prices a farmer could justify 180 pounds per acre and expect a margin. At $683 the math breaks. Soybeans fix their own nitrogen from the atmosphere through root bacteria. They do not need the molecule trapped behind the Strait of Hormuz. The seed decision is being made this week across roughly 90 million acres of American cropland. Once the planter rolls into the field, the choice is irreversible. Corn seed in the ground stays corn. Soy seed stays soy. The acreage allocation locks in. USDA Prospective Plantings reports March 31. That report will tell the world how American agriculture responded to the Hormuz blockade. But the decisions it captures are being made now, in conversations between farmers and agronomists and seed dealers who are looking at nitrogen prices and making the rational economic choice: plant the crop that does not need the input you cannot afford. Every acre that shifts from corn to soybeans tightens the corn balance sheet for the rest of the year. Corn feeds livestock. Corn feeds ethanol. The Renewable Fuel Standard mandates 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol annually, consuming roughly 43 percent of the US corn crop regardless of price. That demand is inelastic. If acres shift and production falls while the mandate holds, corn prices spike. Feed costs spike. The protein cascade reverses. The US cattle herd sits at 86.2 million head, a 75-year low. Poultry and pork margins that were benefiting from cheap feed compress when corn crosses $5 per bushel. This is how a naval blockade 7,000 miles from Iowa reaches the American grocery shelf. Not through oil. Not through shipping. Through nitrogen. The farmer cannot afford the molecule. The molecule cannot transit the strait. The farmer plants soy instead. The corn supply tightens. The ethanol mandate consumes its fixed share. The remaining corn reprices. The feed reprices. The meat reprices. The grocery bill reprices. The decision is not political. It is arithmetic performed on a kitchen table by a person who needs to plant in three weeks and cannot wait for a ceasefire, an escort convoy, or an insurance normalisation that the Red Sea precedent says takes years. The deepest penetrator in the American arsenal cannot reach a sealed Iranian doctrinal packet. But the fertiliser price it failed to resolve is reaching every planting decision on 90 million acres of the most productive farmland on Earth. The war’s most irreversible consequence is not happening in a bunker. It is happening in a barn. And by the time USDA publishes the data on March 31, the seeds will already be in the ground. Full analysis in the link. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

The illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is continuing. The map below is the latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine – 17 March 2026. #StandWithUkraine