Nina Rosella Strange

🇮🇱🇺🇸🇮🇷 Netanyahu: "The ceasefire with Iran could end quickly." Coming from the guy who's not meant to be part of it

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the SAFER Banking Act has not been refiled. Articles from last week claiming it was reintroduced with 14 bipartisan sponsors are unfortunately fake.

A historic mission, returned HOME. 🇺🇸🇺🇸

My sources tell me: RFK Jr.'s team at HHS has been removed/sidelined by White House. HHS is now run by Big Pharma lobbyists. And now: RFK Jr. suddenly has time to "launch a podcast" with all his free time. It's all over for MAHA.

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🇺🇸🇮🇷 THE DOOMSDAY SCENARIO DIDN’T DISAPPEAR, IT’S JUST WAITING AT HORMUZ. Everyone is acting weirdly relieved. Oil hasn't exploded to $150 a barrel, the global economy has not fallen straight into recession, therefore, apparently, crisis over. That is the kind of logic people use right before the second disaster. Because the doomsday scenario was never just “oil spikes, everyone panics, fade to black.” It was always more slippery than that. Less Hollywood fireball, more slow-motion strangulation. And right now, the ingredients are still sitting on the counter: a ceasefire that has already failed the basic test of being a ceasefire, a shipping artery that is not functioning normally, insurers and shipowners making it up as they go along, and world leaders trying to sell a pause as though it were peace. The market, in other words, is being asked to clap because the building is not yet fully on fire. For the global economy to relax, the Strait of Hormuz has to be open in more than the theoretical sense. Not “technically some vessels may pass.” Not “perhaps under a murky toll arrangement nobody understands.” Open means predictable, lawful, insurable, routine. Open means the world’s energy system is not being run like a hostage negotiation, and that's not where we are. What we have instead is the economic equivalent of someone saying, “Good news, the heart is still beating,” while conveniently skipping over the fact that several major arteries are now subject to extortion, improvisation, and regional brinkmanship. If the normal flow through Hormuz is disrupted for long enough, this does not remain a trader’s problem, it becomes everyone’s problem. First fuel, then freight, then airfares, then fertilizer, then food. Central banks get dragged back into inflation-fighting mode just when they were hoping to inch toward relief. What looked like a contained Middle East crisis starts turning up in grocery bills, debt costs, farm decisions, and public rage. That's how doomsday arrives in the real world. And yet the political class keeps trying to sell this as manageable. Trump, in particular, looks like a man who wants credit for stepping back from the abyss while still threatening to revisit it later, which is a bit like congratulating yourself for not driving off a cliff after already putting two wheels over the edge. His problem now is that the politics are turning sour. The public has a funny habit of losing interest in grand strategy the moment it takes a big bite out of their wallets. That matters because the bluff is getting harder to sustain. Meanwhile, the Gulf states are discovering, in real time, the downside of building prosperity atop a chokepoint that can be weaponized. Even if the shooting slows, they do not get to unsee what just happened. Their vulnerability has been exposed, their assumptions about protection have been badly shaken, and their long-term response is almost guaranteed: more arms, more infrastructure, more bypass routes. But those fixes take years, and the danger is now. Pipelines aren't built by wishful thinking, and even where alternatives exist, they are costlier, slower, and often pointed in the wrong direction for the trade patterns that actually matter. And then there is the idea that because oil has not yet hit the absolute nightmare number, the nightmare has somehow been defeated. The more plausible disaster is a dragged-out one: partial disruption, higher energy costs, shaken investment, strategic uncertainty, rising insurance premiums, more expensive transport, more pressure on indebted governments, and a long tail of inflation that central banks can't easily contain.

Both the White House and the DOJ tell me they're working on this but have offered no timeline. A DOJ spokesperson said this morning the department "is working to implement the President’s executive order on rescheduling, and that work will continue."

Who is holding up President Trump's order to reschedule marijuana?