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A wicked ruler is as dangerous to the poor as a roaring lion or an attacking bear. A ruler with no understanding will oppress his people, but one who hates corruption will have a long life.

May I offer a different perspective on the whole transatlantic family feud brewing over NATO. Europeans are furious at what they call American unilateralism and "wars of choice," while Americans are done subsidizing allies who won't lift a finger when Washington actually needs them. Given all the sentimentality and historical baggage, there’s been a lot of bad blood and high grade insults thrown both ways. A lot of pride here is at stake. But given that I am not American or European, what I can provide is an Asian perspective. The whole thing looks very different as there are no blood ties or cultural nostalgia to pull me either way. Because of distance, the default Asian lens on America has always been colder, clearer, and far more pragmatic than the European one. Asians have never lived under the illusion that their relationship to the US is one based on shared values. If they ever did, the illusion was shattered during the Cold War. Instead, Asian nations saw the relationship to America as a cold, interest-driven bargain in a dangerous neighborhood full of communists, insurgents, and bigger powers. Fast forward to today, and this lesson still holds. Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore and Indonesia all partner with America because their interests (not values) align - especially when it comes to countering China. These nations have reasons to be alarmed about Beijing's ambitions in the South China Sea, around Taiwan, and across the Indo-Pacific. They don't need lectures about democracy or liberal international order to see the value in US forward presence, intelligence sharing, tech transfers, and security guarantees. It's a straight-up transactional deal: the US keeps the sea lanes open and the PLA at bay. Meanwhile, Asian nations host your bases, buy your weapons, and join your alliances (Quad, AUKUS, etc.). When interests diverge, they adjust pragmatically, without the drama and meltdown. Probably not many in the West know this, but one of the forces that shaped this attitude was the US pullout of Vietnam and the rest of America’s Cold War shenanigans. Lee Kuan Yew was one of America’s loudest cheerleaders in Southeast Asia. In 1967 he flew to Washington, testified to Congress, and begged Lyndon Johnson (and later Nixon) not to cut and run in Vietnam. He warned that a hasty US exit would trigger the dominoes - Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and then pressure on the rest of Southeast Asia. Singapore became a logistical hub, providing a haven for US troops on R&R, oil refineries supplying the American war machine, and Lockheed servicing aircraft. At one point, US military-related spending made up 15% of Singapore’s entire GDP. Singapore didn’t support the war because it loved American democracy but because it kept the communists tied up and bought Southeast Asia time to build up its own economy and military. Then came the pullout - the Paris Accords in 1973 and then Saigon falls in 1975. Despite all the lobbying, despite the blood and resources America had spent, domestic politics in the US (the anti-war movement, Congress, Vietnam syndrome etc.) ended it. LKY watched in disbelief as the superpower that had promised to hold the line simply walked away. The lesson was that American commitments are real only as long as they serve American interests and American voters don’t get tired. It’s a brutal one to internalize. LKY was disappointed and noted American “unreliability” but Singapore didn’t collapse into panic or anti-Americanism. They just recalibrated and kept pursuing pragmatism by building its own deterrent, diversifying partners, and later offered the US naval logistics access (Sembawang port) when the Philippines kicked them out of Subic Bay in the early 1990s. Malaysia drew the same conclusion. The Tunku was pro-Western and anti-communist early on, but Malaysia never joined SEATO and pushed ZOPFAN (Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality) instead. When the British announced their East-of-Suez withdrawal in 1968 and Nixon’s Doctrine (1969) told Asians “you defend yourselves first, we’ll just help,” Kuala Lumpur accelerated its neutralist tilt. The message was clear - don’t count on Washington to bleed indefinitely for distant allies. South Korea is similarly pragmatic but it operates under far higher stakes due to baggage from the Korean War and the ongoing North Korean threat. American intervention literally saved the South from conquest, resulting in a bond that is forged in blood. While South Korea had to learn the same lessons - that the American umbrella isn’t permanent, sharing a border with a nuclear-armed adversary forces tighter coupling with Washington. The reverberations of Nixon’s 1973 opening to Beijing cannot be understated. It shocked the entire region that America, the great anti-communist crusader, suddenly would cozy up to Mao to counter the Soviets. If Washington could flip on core principles when interests demanded it, why should smaller states pretend the relationship was about anything deeper? The core Asian critique of the European approach to dealing with America is that it is entirely bound up in moral values and civilizational kinship. This means that every disagreement feels like a betrayal and breeds resentment on both sides. Because Europe is so hyped up on abstract values, it makes NATO feel like a sacred club that America is disrespecting. Asia's interest-based lens sees alliances as tools - useful until they're not. Maybe Europe thinks the Asian approach is cynical but the irony is that this is actually what keeps Indo-Pacific partners far more reliable counterweights to China than many NATO members ever were against Russia.

Why do people whose groups say death to America want to live in America?

@hypergraphing @GBNT1952 History of the reports are here I believe iaea.org/newscenter/foc…

@hypergraphing @GBNT1952 I was reading in the UN report how Iran was holding much more enriched uranium than was allowed and had way more centrifuges than they should have for civilian purposes.

So, Iran was absolutely close to having a nuke (as it has been confirmed they had large amounts of 60% enriched uranium) and they had secret ICBM capabilities that could allow them to reach out to London or Paris… why hasn’t the EU and UK publicly thanked us for saving them once again?

@Infrarot_Medien Did people think they were a bunch of goat herders?

Die Iraner hauen einen LEGO-Propaganda Film nach dem anderen raus. Hier einer der neusten. Da werden jetzt viele überrascht sein, dass auch der Iran KI-Experten hat. Man beachte auch die Begleitmusik, bei der auf Farsi gerappt wird. Da werden jetzt viele überrascht sein, dass es im Iran auch solches gibt.

Good question! The answer is no. I'll explain and try to be brief: There are hundreds of thousands of basijis and IRGC thugs, armed to the teeth and fanatically willing to die. Meanwhile, Iranian citizens are unarmed and traumatised from the last massacre. Unfortunately, while drone strikes on checkpoints have been very welcome and appreciated, it just hasn't been widespread enough. They don't have bases, but instead they operate out of their homes and keep their guns there. They terrorise civilians by shooting into people's windows and randomly killing others. If Iranians were to flood the streets today, they'd be mowed down just like before. Not having weapons or internet access is the main problem here. Iranians can't fight Shia ISIS barehanded. It doesn't help that the regime has imported Iraqi terrorists who are now ALSO roaming the streets. It will also take a significant wave of assassinations of regime suppression figures, judges and commanders. And the assassinations so far, once again while appreciated, aren't enough yet. The next weeks will be very vital to set the stage for a true regime change.

@allroundfields @Erdayastronaut Wakanda

@Erdayastronaut What would be that bright spot in the middle?

This photo of Earth is EXTRA spectacular for a good reason... let me explain. Most images you see of Earth from space are the daylight side of the Earth, and it's obviously very bright (see my last image), this means stars are too dim to be seen with that bright exposure setting (low ISO, high shutter and / or stopped down aperture). BUT this image taken by the Orion crew looks so incredible because you can see the sun is BEHIND the earth, meaning it's night time on the side of the earth facing the crew in this image. So how do you expose a night time earth from space? Same way you do on Earth! A mixture of opening up the aperture (F4 in this case), cranking the ISO (51,200 here), and using a relatively long exposure (1/4 of a second). We can see the settings used by looking at the exif data from the camera. What this means is our camera is also sensitive enough to see stars in the background of Earth, leading to an extraordinary image!!! GREAT WORK!!! These are the kind of images I've been so excited to see!

So the ayatollah is a billionaire too? How come Bernie isn’t all mad about this?

Good morning, world! 🌎 We have spectacular new high-resolution images of our home planet, all of us looking back through the Orion capsule window at our Artemis II astronauts as they continue their journey to the Moon.

@mo_hamz Is it true that the sons of its leaders live in the west and enjoy its luxuries?

These make me smile. Music track is 🔥 btw. #lego #iran

@implausibleblog How does a propel change a regime when they don’t have weapons? A regime that has no problem killing and raping them at will? What’s the answer to that?

President Macron scolds the US and Israel for attacking Iran, "The day you say I don't like your regime, I consider you threatening your neighbour so I will intervene and bomb you, you open a Pandora's box" "Iran is a very bad regime, no discussion about that. I disagree with on a lot of topics" "But I don't agree we will fix the situation just by bombings or military operations" "Look at what happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya - we never delivered. Never" "You have to respect the sovereignty of people, if people want to change a regime, they can do so" "Having an agenda shared by Korea, France, the other Europeans, Canada, Japan, India, Brazil, Australia, you start having a third way" "Those who don't want to be dependent on China, or aligned by definition, on the US"

@ElectionWiz People like her are purposely changing reality right in front of their eyes to make it what they want it to be. Delusional.

DISTURBING: Gavin Newsom’s wife on how she raises her son: “I've given our boys dolls… if I'm reading a book and the protagonist is a male, I just change the 'he' to a 'she.'”

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

@vvliiiv That’s weird, I thought there were no negotiations happening.

عاجل 🚨🚨🚨: عراقجي يقفل الباب نهائياً: "التفاوض مع الأمريكيين انتهى إلى الأبد.. تجربة مريرة وخيانة بعد وعود بعدم الهجوم!" وزير الخارجية الإيراني عباس عراقجي 🇮🇷: لا مجال بعد الآن للحديث مع الأمريكيين، فقد خدعونا بوعود بعدم الهجوم، وحتى بعد إحراز تقدم كبير في المفاوضات، قرروا مهاجمتنا رغم ذلك. التجربة مريرة جداً، والثقة معدومة تماماً. الحرب الإقليمية تُغلق أبواب الدبلوماسية نهائياً!.

@eliasmakos What is pushing NASA to visual excellence? What’s the inventive? It’s not the culture of excellence in the video department. Were they willing to spend a few million dollars to upgrade their systems? I think the launch cost 4.1 billion.

Can someone explain why the Artemis launch video feeds didn’t look as good as this?

@gummibear737 Already there

Serious question: How many things do I need to get right before you start trusting me as a goodfaith source of information and analysis?

@LBGamestips All that education and still “death to America”

WAIT! Iran’s 🇮🇷 ‘MR COME CLOSER’ has Bachelor's degree in mathematics He has Master's degree in mathematics A Doctorate in Western philosophy Hafiz of the Quran He also Speaks four languages: Persian, English, Arabic, and Hebrew Broooo these guys are fucking educated 😳😳😳

It’s a military bridge that people are crying about.

@DrChrisCombs All that time and Outlook is down, can’t check email.

I love this perspective as well Really showcases how we are "catching" the moon with this trajectory

@PrinceEwa5 @sentdefender They are working on it and their buddies in China and Russia have some pointers. I’m sure.

@sentdefender Iran can still hit nearby countries and targets in its region, but it currently cannot reach the United States itself. Building missiles that can go that far would take a lot more time and advanced technology.

U.S. intelligence assesses that Iran still maintains a significant missile launching capability, including roughly half of its cruise and ballistic launchers, as well as thousands of one-way attack drones, despite daily strikes against military targets across Iran for the last five weeks by Israel and the United States, three sources familiar with the assessment told CNN.