iang

Helium is the only element that escapes Earth’s atmosphere permanently. Once released, it rises through the troposphere, passes the stratosphere, and leaves the planet. It cannot be manufactured. It cannot be synthesised at industrial scale. It accumulates over billions of years in the same geological reservoirs as natural gas. And one third of the world’s supply just went offline because Iran hit the facility that extracts it. Qatar produced roughly 63 million cubic metres of helium in 2025, accounting for 30 to 36 percent of global supply from a total of approximately 190 million cubic metres. QatarEnergy’s three large helium purification plants at Ras Laffan form the world’s biggest helium production base. When LNG production stopped after Iranian drone strikes on March 2 and the subsequent missile damage on March 19, helium extraction stopped automatically because helium is recovered during natural gas liquefaction. You cannot produce helium without producing LNG. The byproduct dies with the primary product. Spot helium prices have roughly doubled since the crisis began. Industry consultants warn that prolonged disruption could push contract prices toward $2,000 per thousand cubic feet. A major industrial gas supplier has already begun assessing customers a helium surcharge. Phil Kornbluth, the most cited helium market consultant, stated the assessment directly: the world cannot compensate for the loss of a third of its helium supply. South Korea imports 64.7 percent of its helium from Qatar. SK Hynix and Samsung operate high-volume fabs producing the DRAM and high-bandwidth memory that power every AI accelerator, every data centre GPU, and every cloud computing cluster on Earth. Helium cools silicon wafers during fabrication. It serves as a carrier gas in deposition and etching tools. It enables leak detection in vacuum systems. Modern extreme ultraviolet lithography requires helium-cooled environments for precise temperature control. Without helium, the fabrication process degrades or stops. SK Hynix and Samsung hold two to three months of helium inventory. Two to three months is not a buffer. It is a countdown. If Ras Laffan remains offline beyond that window, South Korean memory production faces rationing. TSMC in Taiwan is somewhat more diversified but still uses Qatar-linked supply chains. The entire AI hardware supply chain, from HBM3E memory stacks to advanced logic chips, sits inside helium-dependent ecosystems. Beyond semiconductors, helium cools the superconducting magnets in more than 14,000 MRI machines operating worldwide. It pressurises rocket fuel tanks and purges propulsion systems in aerospace. CERN’s Large Hadron Collider depends on helium cryogenic systems. There is no substitute for helium in any of these applications at industrial scale. The United States and Qatar together account for more than 70 percent of global production. The US federal helium reserve and private suppliers offer partial relief, but global prices and spot availability are still governed by Qatar’s market share. Japan’s Iwatani has drawn on US reserves. Canada and the Rockies are seeing renewed investor interest. None of this replaces 63 million cubic metres in weeks. The war hit uranium first. Then oil. Then nitrogen. Then water. Then plastic. Then medicine. Then sulfur. Now helium. Eight layers. Each one deeper. Each one closer to the infrastructure that sustains modern civilisation. The chip that processes your data, the magnet that scans your body, and the rocket that launches your satellite all depend on an atom that leaves the planet when you lose it. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

In 1895, a French social psychologist named Gustave Le Bon published a book so dangerous that it became the private playbook of dictators for the next century. Hitler quoted it. Mussolini kept it by his bedside. Edward Bernays used it to build modern propaganda. The book's name? "The Crowd." Its core claim: The moment people form a group, they become stupid. Not slightly dumber. Fundamentally, structurally incapable of rational thought. And the tactics he described for controlling them still work on you right now. 🧵 (thread)

The CIA doesn't want you to find this GitHub repo 👀 It's called Shadowbroker and it aggregates every open-source military signal on Earth into one dashboard. → US Navy carrier strike groups tracked live → Spy satellites color-coded by mission type → GPS jamming zones with

I talked to two Israeli sources on why Iranian launches continue to increase, despite US-Israeli claims that they have destroyed almost all of the launchers. Here is what they said: 1) The 90–95% drop in volume claimed by CENTCOM earlier in the month was probably a temporary lull as Iran repositioned its remaining launchers into hardened sites. Independent satellite analysis suggests that a significant portion of the "80% destruction" claimed by the IDF actually hit high-fidelity decoys. 2) Despite fewer launchers, the lethality per strike has increased. Iran's shift to cluster warheads has allowed a single missile to impact multiple locations simultaneously, compensating for the lower volume of launches 3) Iran has successfully set up mobile, underground units able to fire at steady rates. Iran used that quiet period to move their remaining ~100-120 heavy launchers into "Super-Hardened" facilities 4) Iran is utilizing its Zolfaqar and Dezful road-mobile launchers. These units move from hardened tunnels to pre-surveyed launch spots, fire, and return underground in under 10 minutes, often before coalition drones can re-task for a strike. 5) Because these launching units are decentralized, it is very hard for US and Israeli intelligence to get info on them. Israel and the United States do not have an answer to this problem. That is why they are trying escalation on energy sources instead. But that is backfiring.

RT @L0laL33tz: Oh look. The Intelligence Community says one of the primary threats to US national security is....... Banks. Who would have…

🇺🇸The United States Intelligence Community has released its annual threat assessment, and it barely mentions cryptocurrencies. While it notes that the DPRK continues to leverage cryptocurrency thefts to finance its operations, the intelligence community rather assesses that

In 2019 we removed machine-id from @DevuanOrg and we will remove age verification now. "AgelessLinux" is based on Debian, a foundation made to spy on users in a way or another, because it tracks machine-id. linux.slashdot.org/story/19/11/30…

@LackJavalette I'm saying (unhosted) wallets will be banned.

@iang_fc Ian, are you saying BSV is / will be worthless?

So, people who follow the blockchain space and actually understand it know that this has been building up for a while. The goal of the regulators is to ban what they call* "Unhosted Wallets." And they've been building towards this moment for many years. It is coordinated, agreed, there is consensus. It is the next step. It's not @bankofengland we're hearing from here - it's the entire regulatory club. And regulators will succeed. The people in blockchain will bemoan mathematics and thought control and freedom of speech, no matter, they will totally look 180 degrees away from the steamroller coming for them. Meanwhile the regulators will roll on and rule that "Unhosted Wallets" are not allowed. The *outcome* of this is a bifurcation. Crypto will fork. It will bifurcate into inside and outside. Then both will fail. Inside will fail bc it's not crypto, it's some digital token shared by a dozen or more companies and that will eventually be broken. Outside will be small, and will be hunted and eventually exterminated like the pest that it is. Regulators are OK if all crypto - inside and outside - dies. Users are not, but they aren't being consulted and they don't understand. In short, crypto was a fun experiment of the 2010s, but by the end of the 2020s, it will die. Unless some users understand and mount a serious rebellion, but I don't hold out much hope for that. * "Unhosted Wallets" is a made up term and is not correct nor indicative. There are only wallets and accounts. Users have wallets if they have keys locally. Wallets are things that have keys. Clients of exchanges have accounts, they don't have wallets. "Unhosted Wallets" is just another typical misunderstanding, but no matter, it will never bear explaining, so whatever.

@shadowsofvenice @relbus22 @EvanWritesOnX Yes, the history was written to whitewash alllied actions.

@iang_fc @relbus22 @EvanWritesOnX Winnie was a very bad man or there would have been no need of old Montgomery. I am very sorry I couldn't help myself. I just cannot stand the way he is lionized when he was a real villain. He forced the blitz on London.

There is a pattern forming that does not fit the conventional framing of American foreign policy failure. The standard reading says the United States is losing credibility because of an unpopular war, an erratic president, and a string of strategic miscalculations. The reading behind the curtain says something far more uncomfortable. The loss of American credibility is not a bug in the system. It is the system working exactly as designed. Joe Kent's resignation letter was not a quiet departure. It was a controlled detonation of the official narrative. He stated that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. He accused high-ranking Israeli officials of running a misinformation campaign that lured the administration into war. He cited Israel's powerful American lobby by name. He invoked his own status as a Gold Star husband who lost his wife in what he called a war manufactured by Israel. And he posted the letter publicly on X for maximum distribution. This is a narrative weapon deployed at a precise moment. Kent's letter accomplishes several things simultaneously. It distances the Trump administration from the war's origins by pinning responsibility on Israel. It validates the global protest movement's central claim that this war serves Israeli, not American, interests. And it provides domestic political cover for the exit that is already being engineered. David Sacks, Trump's AI and crypto czar, delivered the complementary signal. His recommendation was blunt: "declare victory and get out." This is not a dovish outlier in a hawkish administration. This is a man with direct access to the president, speaking on a podcast with millions of listeners, publicly building the case for withdrawal while the bombs are still falling. Now look at NATO. Trump asked the alliance to send ships to help secure the Strait of Hormuz. NATO refused. Trump's response was to publicly muse about leaving the alliance entirely, stating he does not need Congressional approval to do so. He posted on Truth Social that since the US has had military success in Iran, "we no longer need or desire" assistance from NATO, Japan, Australia, or South Korea. You do not announce that you no longer need your allies unless you are preparing to act without them, or preparing to let them go. The conventional reading of all this is chaos. An administration at war with itself, allies refusing to cooperate, public opinion turning hostile, credibility collapsing. But move away from the headlines and a different picture emerges. The FIC benefits enormously from the collapse of the NATO security architecture, because NATO's collapse forces European rearmament. The EU has already increased defense spending 60% since 2020. At The Hague summit, NATO members agreed to spend 3.5% of GDP on core defense by 2035, up from the previous 2% target. The "Re-Arm Europe Plan" is explicitly designed to build autonomous European defense capabilities independent of the United States. This is not a reaction to American weakness. This is the market being created. Every European nation that must now build its own military infrastructure, its own procurement pipelines, its own defense industrial base, represents a new revenue stream for the same transnational defense contractors who currently service the American military. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, BAE Systems, Thales, Rheinmetall. These firms do not care which flag flies over the hardware. They care about volume. A world where 30 European nations each build independent defense capabilities is vastly more profitable than a world where one American military provides a security umbrella and everyone else free-rides. The TPS benefits from the narrative separation of American and Israeli interests because it creates the political conditions for the United States to withdraw from its unconditional security commitment to Israel. That commitment has been, for decades, the single most expensive and diplomatically costly obligation the US maintains. It distorts Middle Eastern policy, constrains energy relationships, and generates anti-American sentiment across the Global South. Joe Kent's resignation letter is not just a protest. It is a proof of concept for a new American political consensus: the war was Israel's idea, America was manipulated into it, and the lesson is that the US should never again allow a foreign government to determine its military commitments. That consensus, if it solidifies, frees the TPS to restructure the Middle East around the GCC without the US-Israel relationship acting as a constraint. Who benefits from Iran gaining global sympathy? The emerging multipolar order benefits. Iran under bombardment is more sympathetic than Iran building nuclear weapons. Protests erupted across Pakistan, India, Indonesia, South Korea, and dozens of American cities. 56% of Americans oppose the war. 76% of Spaniards oppose it. 57% of British respondents oppose it. The only population that overwhelmingly supports it is Israeli. This polling data does not describe a failed war. It describes a successful narrative operation that has repositioned Iran from pariah state to victim of aggression, which is precisely the status Iran needs to enter the post-war order as a legitimate actor with grievances rather than a rogue state with sanctions. If this were genuine policy failure, you would expect the administration to be scrambling to contain the damage, to shore up alliances, to manage the narrative. Instead, every action amplifies the damage. Every statement widens the gap between the US and its allies. Every resignation letter sharpens the blame on Israel. The pattern is not chaos. The pattern is demolition conducted from the inside. The TPS does not need the United States as sole hegemon anymore. A unipolar world with one military guarantor is actually less profitable than a multipolar world where every major bloc must build and maintain its own security infrastructure, its own financial architecture, its own energy supply chains. The American century was useful for establishing the global financial architecture that the TPS operates through. But the architecture is now mature enough to function without a single guarantor. SWIFT has alternatives. The dollar has competitors. Energy markets have multiple clearinghouses. The US military, far from being indispensable, has become an overhead cost that constrains TPS flexibility by tying it to one nation's political dysfunction. What Trump is doing, whether he understands it in these terms or not, is executing the controlled demolition of American hegemonic infrastructure. NATO weakened means European rearmament spending. US-Israel separation means Middle East restructuring without the constraint of unconditional commitments. American unpopularity means the multipolar order gains legitimacy by contrast. Each of these outcomes opens new markets, new dependencies, new extraction architectures for the TPS to service. The Iran war is not making America unpopular by accident. America's unpopularity is the product being manufactured. The US will reach a settlement with Iran, framed domestically as "declaring victory" per the Sacks formulation. The settlement will be positioned as Trump's decision to end a war that Israel started, completing the narrative separation that Kent's resignation letter initiated. NATO will not dissolve formally but will be functionally hollowed as European nations accelerate independent defense procurement, generating significant new revenue for transnational defense firms. The post-war Middle East will be restructured around a GCC-centered order with a degraded Israel and an integrated Iran, both of which serve TPS interests better than the pre-war configuration. American global reputation will not recover because its recovery is not part of the plan.

“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.” ― Soren Kierkegaard

The CIA's venture capital arm funded the technology behind Pokémon Go. That's not conspiracy. It's public record. Niantic's founder John Hanke previously built Keyhole, a 3D satellite imaging tool funded directly by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm. Keyhole was used to support US military operations in Iraq before Google acquired it and turned it into Google Earth. The same founder also led the Google StreetView WiSpy scandal, where Google cars secretly harvested emails, passwords, and browsing data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks across multiple countries. Now look at Niantic's board. Gilman Louie, co-founder of In-Q-Tel, sits on the board of both Niantic and Vantor (the defense contractor Niantic just partnered with). Niantic's CTO co-founded Keyhole with Hanke after spending a decade at E-Systems, a military contractor later acquired by Raytheon. Another co-founder came from DARPA-funded Silicon Graphics, which built 3D graphics for defense systems. This was never a gaming company that pivoted to defense. The defense lineage was there from the beginning. Pokémon Go was the data collection mechanism. 30 billion images. Centimeter-level spatial accuracy. GPS-free navigation for autonomous weapons. Built by a team with direct ties to the CIA, DARPA, and Raytheon. The story isn't that Niantic tricked gamers. It's that the intelligence community found a way to crowdsource a centimeter-accurate map of the physical world by making it fun. Full report from @theragetech

@segmentintender @DNIGabbard The eternal dilemma!

@iang_fc @DNIGabbard Do you think Joe Kent should have resigned, as he will surely be replaced by a sycophant?

@segmentintender @DNIGabbard And be replaced by what? Someone who channels Trump's errors into the IC? Another sycophant on the cabinet, admiring the Emporer's New Clothes? Someone who speaks truth to power will last less than a minute.

@segmentintender @DNIGabbard True. But my understanding is that she is a politician. If the American commentator class wants a powerful point being made, perhaps they should look at the root cause of this fight, not the actors.

@iang_fc @DNIGabbard How will things be different if Tulsi is replaced by "Another sycophant on the cabinet"? If they won't be any different then at least resigning makes a powerful point.

As awareness spreads of EU undermining democracy in Europe, the interesting question is how people respond to knowing their democracy was always for sale. What happens post-democracy?

We know that the IC assess Iran as not a threat. We also know that Trump decided to go to war. Which means Trump ignored IC and went with "Israeli Intel" aka lies. So @DNIGabbard is using coded language to say "IC says was no threat, IC was overridden, POTUS said there is a threat." It's either that, or resign?

This is probably the most important article of the month: an op-ed by Oman's Foreign Minister, who mediated the talks between the U.S. and Iran, in which he writes that the U.S. "has lost control of its foreign policy" to Israel. He repeats that a deal was possible as an outcome of the talks (something confirmed by the UK's National Security Advisor, who also attended: x.com/i/status/20341…) and that the military strike by the U.S. and Israel was "a shock." Interestingly, given he is one of Iran's neighbors and given that Oman has been struck multiple times by Iran since the war began (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran…), he writes that "Iran’s retaliation against what it claims are American targets on the territory of its neighbours was an inevitable result" of the U.S.-Israeli attack. He describes it as "probably the only rational option available to the Iranian leadership." He says the war "endangers" the region's entire "economic model in which global sport, tourism, aviation and technology were to play an important role." He adds that "if this had not been anticipated by the architects of this war, that was surely a grave miscalculation." But, he adds, the "greatest miscalculation" of all for the U.S. "was allowing itself to be drawn into this war in the first place." In his view this was the doing of "Israel’s leadership" who "persuaded America that Iran had been so weakened by sanctions, internal divisions and the American-Israeli bombings of its nuclear sites last June, that an unconditional surrender would swiftly follow the initial assault and the assassination of the supreme leader." Obviously, this proved completely wrong, and the U.S. is now in a quagmire. He says that, given this, "America’s friends have a responsibility to tell the truth," which is that "there are two parties to this war who have nothing to gain from it," namely "Iran and America." He says that all of the U.S. interests in the region (end to nuclear proliferation, secure energy supply chains, investment opportunities) are "best achieved with Iran at peace." As he writes, "this is an uncomfortable truth to tell, because it involves indicating the extent to which America has lost control of its own foreign policy. But it must be told." He then proposes a couple of paths to get back to the negotiating table, although he recognizes how difficult it would be for Iran "to return to dialogue with an administration that twice switched abruptly from talks to bombing and assassination." That's perhaps the most profound damage Trump did during this entire episode: the complete discrediting of diplomacy. If Iran was taught anything, it is: don't negotiate with the U.S., it's a trap that will literally kill you. The great irony of the man who sold himself as a dealmaker is that he taught the world one thing: don't make deals with my country. Link to the article: economist.com/by-invitation/…

The US didn't just attack Iran. It closed the Strait of Hormuz itself, and nobody's talking about the real reason why. @anasalhajji, one of the most respected energy analysts in the world, just published an extraordinary breakdown of what's actually happening in the Strait of Hormuz. The short version: Iran didn't close it. Insurance companies did. And the US has every incentive to let it happen. Here's what actually occurred. Emails were sent to oil and LNG tankers claiming to be from the IRGC, saying the strait was closed. No official Iranian statement backed this. Nobody knows who actually sent the emails. But within hours, European insurance companies canceled policies or jacked premiums so high that tanker operators couldn't move. Cargo ships and container vessels passed through fine. Nothing happened to them. Only oil and LNG tankers were affected. Why? Notably, the administration has not criticized the insurance companies or pushed back on rising oil prices, a departure from its usual stance of vocally opposing anything that raises energy costs for American consumers. Meanwhile, Venezuelan oil was pre-positioned in US ports before the crisis began, specifically to replace Iraqi crude that would be cut off by a Hormuz closure. That doesn't happen by accident. The 2025 National Security Strategy document lays out the framework: US dominance runs through AI, and AI runs through cheap, abundant energy. The strategy is to make energy cheap domestically and expensive for competitors. To do that, you need control of global chokepoints: Panama Canal, the Red Sea, Greenland's Arctic passage, and now Hormuz. The Hormuz disruption accomplishes several goals at once. It forces Asian companies to abandon long-term LNG contracts with Qatar and the UAE in favor of American suppliers. It cripples competitor access to fertilizer exports (33% of global supply transits Hormuz). It drives chip manufacturers to reshore to the US. And Trump's offer to provide Navy escorts and US-backed insurance for tankers gives America indirect control over the strait indefinitely. The biggest beneficiaries of a closed Hormuz are the US and Russia. The biggest losers are Europe, Asia, and the Gulf states themselves. Iran is the excuse. Energy dominance is the goal.

So, as expected, the European Commission has finally activated the Digital Services Act’s (DSA) “rapid response system” in the context of the upcoming Hungarian elections, which gives EU-funded “fact-checkers” and “NGOs” a veto over online speech in Hungary. This is a serious escalation in the EU’s interference in the Hungarian elections. The official explanation is that this is needed to combat “Russian interference”. But as I noted in a recent article for @compactmag, no evidence whatsoever has been produced to support this claim. The narrative almost exclusively relies on an “investigation” by journalists at the Warsaw-based nonprofit VSquare, which claims that Putin has instructed a group of political strategists and Russian military intelligence to interfere in the parliamentary elections in Hungary in April in order to ensure that Orbán wins. And what is the evidentiary basis for this extraordinary claim? It boils down to this (literally): “Multiple European national security sources have told me.” In other words, no evidence whatsoever is provided. We are simply asked to trust the “investigative journalists” in question. One might be inclined to extend that trust if the outlet in question were genuinely independent. Regrettably, it is not. A glance at VSquare’s donor list reveals it to be less an independent journalistic outfit than a textbook example of artificial civil society, funded by entities like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), USAID, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and various EU-funded consortia. In other words, VSquare is part and parcel of the “color revolution” infrastructure that, for decades, has sought to bring Central and Eastern Europe in line with the agenda of Brussels and Washington. It’s clear what is happening: they’re applying the Russiagate script that was previously used to subvert the elections in Romania just over a year ago. The aim is twofold. Ideally, tilt the elections in favour of the pro-EU, pro-war opposition candidate Péter Magyar by using the DSA to influence the pre-election online narrative. It’s well-known that the the EU’s “rapid response system” enables approved third parties — the aforementioned EU-funded “fact-checkers” and “NGOs” — to submit priority content moderation requests that disproportionately affect “populist” or EU/NATO-critical actors. If this doesn’t work — and it’s unlikely to work in the Hungarian context — then the allegations of Russian interference serve the purpose of laying the groundwork to delegitimise the result if Orbán wins, by seeding seeding a story of “stolen” or “unfair” elections. This is incredibly dangerous, and is yet another confirmation that the very institutions invoking the threat of foreign interference to justify their intervention are themselves the most consequential foreign actors in Hungary’s election. Read the full article here: compactmag.com/article/russia…

They are about to shove extraordinary ASIO powers bill through the Senate - arrest without warrant etc. @ReubensteinM reports #auspol michaelwest.com.au/civil-libertie…