John Hanson

@ick_real Dorcas?

I'm looking for a ridiculously old-fashioned girl's name for our new born . Think great-grandma name. Very old and rare. Any suggestions asap pls?

@RobGreen1010 This is an excellent way to identify and weed out the bureaucrats and replace them with real leaders

Once again Army and Navy bureaucracies appear to be in lockstep with their slow-rolling resistance. Why was a personal weapon carry request process not immediately promulgated across all services and installations?

@MarkHalperin In what universe would he make a decision without consulting the stakeholders?

This is very interesting on multiple levels.

@Daractenus I didn’t look too closely at this but any list that has freedom of the press in UK listed as higher than the US is suspect

Every bit the free speech lover Trump is and with his friends and family now owning virtually every media outlet in the country, Orban's Hungary ranks slightly below Sierra Leone in terms of freedom of press, while Romania has managed to now rank ahead the United States.

With less than 24 hours left until Hungarians head to the polls, I figured it is a good moment to take one final look at what Viktor Orbán has achieved in his 16 years of uninterrupted, near absolute reign in Hungary, by comparing Hungary’s performance with that of Romania.🧵

@gothburz lol! Well I never claimed to be a writer😁

@jdahanson *your

8:06 AM. The man whose name is on a book I wrote posted: "A whole civilization will die tonight." I am a ghostwriter. In 1987, I wrote the most famous business book in American history. Half the advance. Half the royalties. Eighteen months in his office, listening to his phone calls. He would flatter, threaten, hang up, and call the next person the greatest. I wrote it all down. I made it sound like strategy. Chapter 1 was about thinking big. I wrote that about condominiums. This morning, at 8:06 AM, the man whose name is on the cover posted seven sentences to a social media platform. The first: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." That is Chapter 1. I wrote that about condominiums. Chapter 3 was about leverage. "The best thing you can do is deal from strength." The example was a zoning board. The technique was implying you had options you didn't have. He is using Chapter 3 on a strait that carries 20% of the world's oil. The zoning board is a shipping lane. The leverage is a navy. I invented a phrase for him. "Truthful hyperbole." An innocent form of exaggeration, I wrote. A very effective form of promotion. I was describing how he inflated square footage. Thirteen thousand targets struck. Two thousand and fifty-six dead. Twenty-four thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven wounded. I wrote "truthful hyperbole" about square footage. Chapter 4 was about timing. When to make the call. When to let them wait. When to close. I was describing a contractor negotiation. He paused the bombing for Easter. Resumed it Monday. His Defense Secretary compared the rescue of a downed pilot to the resurrection of Christ. Shot down on Good Friday. Hidden in a cave on Saturday. Rescued as the sun rose on Easter Sunday. I wrote about timing. I was describing when to return a phone call. At the Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn, while children hunted eggs, he told the cameras: "We are obliterating their country. And I hate to do it, but we are obliterating." Chapter 2 was about promotion. I wrote that about how to sell a building. A reporter asked if destroying every bridge in a nation of 88 million constituted war crimes. Three words: "Not worried about it." A journalist reported a downed pilot missing behind enemy lines. He threatened to jail the reporter. I looked through the manuscript. There is no chapter on press freedom. There is no chapter on international law. There is no chapter on what happens when the contractor you're threatening is a civilization. I didn't write those chapters. I was writing about real estate. He didn't notice they were missing. He doesn't read. Someone asked if God supported the war. "God is good." There is no chapter on theology either. Chapter 7 was about knowing when to walk away. I described a stalled deal. The lesson was patience. He walked away from every alliance his country had built in eighty years. Forty countries formed a coalition to guard the strait because nobody answered the phone. In my journal, in 1986, I wrote: "All he is is 'stomp, stomp, stomp' — recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in particular." Forty years. Nothing has changed except the size of the things being stomped. I know he never read the book. Eighteen months together, I never saw one on his desk. Not mine. Not anyone's. The man whose name is on the most famous business book in American history has never read a book. He didn't need to. It was never a manual. It was a mirror. He looked at the cover — his name, in gold, larger than the title, as he'd requested — and saw everything he needed. "A whole civilization will die tonight." Seven sentences. 8:06 AM. A Tuesday. I called it truthful hyperbole. He is calling it foreign policy. I built the mythology. He added a military.

@DropSiteNews Very encouraging to read that Trump finally has good advisors who serve him well

Full report: nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/…

💢📰 REPORT | New reporting from NYT reveals how Trump decided to go to war with Iran — after a closed-door Israeli pitch and despite deep internal divisions inside his own team. At a secret Feb. 11 Situation Room meeting, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a four-part pitch for regime change, including a video montage of potential replacement leaders such as Reza Pahlavi. JD Vance was absent, stuck in Azerbaijan. Appearing alongside Mossad chief David Barnea and military officials, Netanyahu argued: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in weeks. The regime would be too weak to close the Strait of Hormuz. Street protests — fomented with Mossad help — could trigger an uprising. Kurdish fighters from Iraq could open a ground front in the northwest. Trump’s response: “Sounds good to me.” Trump’s response: “Sounds good to me.” The next day, U.S. intelligence pushed back sharply. CIA Director John Ratcliffe called the regime-change scenario “farcical,” with Secretary of State Marco Rubio adding: “In other words, it’s bullshit.” Gen. Dan Caine told the president: “This is, in my experience, standard operating procedure for the Israelis. They oversell, and their plans are not always well-developed.” Trump dismissed regime change as “their problem” — but remained focused on targeting Iran’s leadership and military. By Feb. 26, in a final Situation Room meeting, opposition inside the room was clear but fractured. Vice President JD Vance warned the war could spiral and drain U.S. resources, but ultimately said: “You know I think this is a bad idea… but I’ll support you.” Rubio said regime change was unrealistic, but destroying Iran’s missile program was achievable. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was the biggest proponent of war and backed immediate action. Military leadership outlined risks, including depleted munitions and the threat to Hormuz, but all stopped short of opposing the plan. Key officials responsible for managing the fallout, like the Treasury Secretary, and DNI Gabbard were notably absent. Trump went around the table asking advisors their view, then made the call: “I think we need to do it.” The strikes began two days later.

@grok @SteveZfxx9 @nivraxx Not

@SteveZfxx9 @nivraxx Say "I for chair" out loud, super fast, no pauses. It slurs together into "I fornicate." That's the rebus punchline—the sign's warning you not to rush it or it'll sound filthy. 😂

Took me a second, but then I couldn't stop laughing. 💀

@MarkHalperin This

Amid all the baseless and other speculation, what about this: What if the notion that there is an MIA service member is just a smokescreen, meant to distract the media and others from what is about to happen?

In 2019, MIT professor Patrick Winston gave a legendary 1-hour lecture called “How to Speak.” It has 18M+ views for a reason. His frameworks: • Your ideas are like your children • The 5-minute rule for job talks • Why jokes fail at the start 15 lessons on communication:

@nicksortor @DataRepublican @KatieDaviscourt Civil suit

@KatieDaviscourt This verdict is basically a green light for leftists to attack conservative reporters with complete impunity in Portland. Truly messed up.

NOW: Defendant Angella Lyn Davis celebrates being found NOT guilty in attack on @nicksortor outside the Portland ICE facility in October. Davis, known as "Crowtifa," celebrates and screams, "F—ck ICE."

@CCW4COs Liar

We have spoken with the spouse of an infantryman in the 31st MEU currently headed towards Iran. With her permission we are sharing some details of the conversation 👇

@SJCapitalInvest @retail_mourinho You can take out contributions without the taxes or penalties. You might also look into borrowing against it rather than cashing it out. Potentially moving your safe pile to a self directed for more options

@JoeCarlasare @LynAldenContact Awesome!

I love fiction of all genres because it feeds the empathy frozen deep within us. It lets us see through the eyes of someone entirely different from us. Go walk in someone else’s skin this weekend. Pick up @LynAldenContact's new book and you won't be disappointed. I just did! “A fiction reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” - George R.R. Martin

@ick_real Do a direct sales job for at least a year to teach you people and business skills

I’m 23. Give me oddly specific life tips. No general ”surround yourself with positive people” tips. I want the most random, specific advice possible.

Search on @Microsoft Outlook sucks. @satyanadella please fix it.

@RapidResponse47 @TFL1728 continues to be right

@johnkonrad @TFL1728 this is interesting

This is potentially the biggest Iran story nobody is talking about: the global insurance market may be heading toward a systemic crisis. Here’s why… Most people don’t realize London isn’t just a financial center it’s THE center of global insurance. Lloyd’s underwrites ~40% of the world’s marine cargo. Ship sinks, port gets bombed, canal gets blocked the bill lands in London. This is why the UK punches above its weight. Not the Royal Navy. Not diplomacy. Insurance. Control insurance, control trade. And London doesn’t just control the 90% of global trade that moves by sea. Lloyd’s and the London market are major insurers of almost everything skyscrapers, factories, ports, satellites, entire supply chains. You can’t participate in public markets or raise large amounts of capital without insurance. Now, the normal playbook for war risk is repricing, not cancellation. Canceling coverage entirely is a massive escalation in underwriting posture. It signals something beyond risk, it signals uncertainty so deep the underwriter can’t even price it. The question everyone should be asking: why? Why not just jack up premiums and make a fortune off the crisis like they did in the Black Sea off Ukraine? To answer that, you have to understand WHY London has maintained a stranglehold on global insurance while losing nearly submarket related to ships. The answer: better intelligence. It is no coincidence that MI6 headquarters sits directly across the Thames from the @IMOHQ, the world’s maritime regulator & a short distance from Lloyd’s itself. I have no proof of a direct pipeline, but it has long been speculated in the industry that intelligence flows from MI6 to Lloyd’s. Having the best intel in the world would be the single greatest competitive advantage any insurer could possess: the ability to price risk that competitors can only guess at. Here’s the problem: the majority of MI6’s intel doesn’t come from its own agents. It comes from Five Eyes the alliance comprising the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. And within 5Eyes, the dominant partner is obvious. The CIA, NSA, NRO, etc generate the lion’s share of intel. So if Lloyd’s pricing advantage flows from MI6, and MI6’s best intelligence flows from the US… what happens when that data pipeline gets throttled? All indications are that @Keir_Starmer was blindsided by the size and scope of the US/Israel strikes on Iran this weekend. That alone tells you something about the current state of transatlantic intelligence sharing. And we know there has been serious anger in Washington over the UK’s decision to sell Diego Garcia, home to America’s most strategically important base in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius. It is not a huge leap to conclude that the submarine cables linking Langley to London have gone dark, or at minimum have been significantly throttled. What this means for UK national security is a question for the Brits. But what it means for EVERY company globally that’s insured through the London market has massive implications for the entire financial system. Because most large insurers worldwide don’t do independent intelligence work. They index off Lloyd’s rates. If you’re insuring a skyscraper in Tokyo, a semiconductor fab in Taiwan, or a port in Argentina you get a Lloyd’s quote, then shop that price around. Other insurers see Lloyd’s number and assume the diligence was done. They price accordingly. This means if London is suddenly flying blind it’s not just Lloyd’s policyholders at risk. It’s the entire global reinsurance chain. The cancellation of war risk coverage on ships isn’t the crisis. It’s the canary. If this hypothesis is correct, we could be looking at a systemic repricing event across global insurance markets…. the kind of cascading uncertainty that defined 2008 and COVID. Watch Lloyd’s. Watch reinsurance spreads. What Five Eyes. That’s where this story, and possibly Wall Street, breaks. CC @BillAckman

"I’m asking you to hold the line. Not because the President is infallible... he’s not, nobody is... but because the logic is sound. You cannot build a fortress of peace on a foundation of unresolved threats. You have to clear the ground first. That’s what’s happening." The question you have to ask... the honest question, not the Tucker question, not the Marjorie question, the real question... is this... Could Donald Trump have achieved a permanent, lasting America First posture... the real doctrine, the thing we all voted for... without first clearing the board of the existential threats that previous administrations allowed to metastasize for decades? The answer is no. And everybody who is being honest with themselves knows it’s no Let me take you through it, because the details matter. They always matter with this President. He doesn’t do anything by accident. People think he’s impulsive... the media loves that narrative, “Trump is impulsive, Trump is chaotic”... but look at the timeline. Look at how this actually played out. Venezuela: The Western Hemisphere First Trump didn’t wake up one morning and decide to grab Maduro. This was months in the making. Years, actually, if you go back to his first term, when the Justice Department indicted Maduro on narco-terrorism charges in March 2020. Nobody did anything about it then. The indictment just sat there. Biden recognized the opposition candidate Edmundo González as the legitimate president after the stolen 2024 election, and then did absolutely nothing about it. Nothing. Just a statement. Trump came back and started squeezing. Designated Tren de Aragua as a Foreign Terrorist Organization on Day One. Designated the Cartel of the Suns... which Maduro basically ran... as an FTO in July. Started a maritime blockade of sanctioned oil tankers in December 2025. And the whole time, by the way, he was offering Maduro off-ramps. Multiple off-ramps. Rubio was negotiating. There were back channels through Qatar. The Rodríguez siblings... Delcy and Jorge... were apparently trying to work out a deal where Maduro would go into exile. But Maduro wouldn’t go. He thought he could wait it out. He was wrong. January 2, 2026... the operation launched. Special forces went in under cover of night. Army Warrant Officer 5 Eric Slover flew the lead Chinook into Maduro’s military fortress. Eighty-three people died, including thirty-two Cuban soldiers who were stationed there... and by the way, what were Cuban soldiers doing in Venezuela? Think about that. Cuban soldiers protecting a Venezuelan dictator. That tells you everything about the network that had to be broken. Maduro is now in federal custody in New York. Delcy Rodríguez is the interim president, cooperating with our government. We’re marketing Venezuelan oil on global markets. The largest proven oil reserves on the planet... three hundred billion barrels, bigger than Saudi Arabia... are no longer being used to fund narco-terrorism and Cuban communism. They’re being used to benefit the American people and the Venezuelan people. Now. Was that regime change? Technically? Yes. But here’s the critical difference... and this is what separates what Trump did from what Bush did in Iraq, what Obama did in Libya, what the whole rotten establishment has done for twenty-five years. Trump did not invade Venezuela. He did not send a hundred and fifty thousand troops. He did not dissolve the Venezuelan state. He did not fire every government employee and disband the security forces like Paul Bremer did in Iraq, which was the single stupidest decision in the history of American foreign policy, by the way. Single stupidest decision. Created ISIS. Created the entire insurgency. Because they took a million armed, trained men, humiliated them, and set them loose with nothing to do but fight. Trump did the opposite. He took the head. Left the body. Made a deal with the body. That’s not nation-building. That’s not a forever war. That’s a surgical correction of a threat that had been allowed to fester for over two decades. Get in, remove the problem, arrange the pieces, get out. The Venezuelan state is still functioning. The military is still intact. The oil is flowing. And America is no longer dealing with a hostile narco-state in its own backyard. We’re not building schools in Caracas. We’re not training a Venezuelan national police force. We’re not spending a trillion dollars over ten years trying to turn Venezuela into Vermont. We’re leaving. That is the doctrine. But you can’t leave a problem you haven’t solved. Iran: The Nuclear Sword of Damocles Iran is the harder case, and I’ll be straight with you... it’s the one that bothers people the most, and I understand why. Because Iran looks like exactly what we said we wouldn’t do. It looks like Iraq 2003. It looks like the neocons got what they always wanted. John Bolton is happy. Bill Kristol is happy. When John Bolton and Bill Kristol are happy about something you did, you should be nervous. I get it. But Iran is not Iraq, and here is why. Iraq in 2003 was a contained threat. Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence was either wrong or fabricated. The threat was manufactured to justify a war that certain people in Washington wanted for ideological reasons that had nothing to do with American security. The entire premise was a lie. Iran in 2025-2026 was an uncontained, accelerating, existential threat. This is not debatable. After Biden let the JCPOA collapse without replacing it with anything... because Biden couldn’t negotiate his way out of a parking garage... Iran was enriching uranium to near-weapons-grade levels. The IAEA confirmed it. Four hundred kilograms of uranium enriched to sixty percent. They were, by every credible estimate, within weeks of breakout capability. The regime was simultaneously funding Hamas... which carried out October 7, the worst massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust... funding Hezbollah, funding the Houthis who were attacking global shipping in the Red Sea, and funding proxy wars across the entire Middle East. Trump tried diplomacy first. And this is the part that everyone who’s screaming “betrayal” conveniently forgets. He wrote a letter to Khamenei in March 2025 offering negotiations. He sent Steve Witkoff to Oman for multiple rounds of talks. Five rounds of talks. Five. Khamenei wouldn’t take the deal. They were offered sanctions relief, normalization, the whole package... in exchange for dismantling the nuclear program. They said no. They kept enriching. So in June 2025, during the Twelve-Day War with Israel, Trump sent B-2 bombers... seven of them, flying eighteen hours straight from Missouri... and dropped bunker-buster bombs on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. The three main enrichment sites. Obliterated. Set the program back years. And then he said... “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE.” And what did Iran do? They tried to rebuild. They kicked out the IAEA inspectors. They refused to let anyone verify what happened to their uranium stockpiles. They kept developing missiles. The regime... Khamenei specifically... made the calculation that he could outlast Trump, rebuild the program, and eventually get the bomb anyway. That calculation ended on February 28, 2026, when a precision strike killed Khamenei at his own residence during a meeting of senior officials. Gone. The defense minister, the IRGC commander, the secretary of the Security Council... all gone. Forty-eight senior leaders taken out, according to the President. And in the streets of Tehran... this is the part the media doesn’t want to show you... people were celebrating. Dancing. Cheering. Because the Iranian people have been hostages of this regime since 1979, and they know exactly what it is. The cost of war is horrific and anyone who pretends there’s a way to do this without innocent people dying is lying to you. This President didn’t lie about it. He said, in his own address, “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties... that often happens in war.” He’s telling you the truth. The question isn’t whether people will die. People were already dying... under the regime, in the protests the regime crushed by killing over seven thousand people in January alone. The question is whether the outcome justifies the cost. And the outcome... the permanent elimination of the Iranian nuclear threat, the destruction of the world’s number one state sponsor of terror, the liberation of eighty-eight million people from a medieval theocracy... is worth it. It has to be. Because the alternative was a nuclear-armed Iran, and a nuclear-armed Iran means the end of everything we’re trying to build. Cuba: Gravity Does the Work Cuba is the proof that the doctrine works even when you don’t fire a shot. Nobody invaded Cuba. Nobody bombed Havana. Trump simply cut the lifeline. When Maduro fell, the Venezuelan oil that kept Cuba alive disappeared. When Trump signed the executive order on January 29 threatening tariffs on any country that sells oil to Cuba, Mexico... which supplied forty-four percent of Cuba’s oil... suspended shipments. Russia called the situation “truly critical” but hasn’t sent a tanker. China made sympathetic noises but hasn’t delivered fuel. And now Cuba is collapsing under its own weight. Eighty-nine percent of families in extreme poverty. Schools suspended. Hospitals losing power. Airlines canceling flights because there’s no jet fuel. The regime can’t even run garbage trucks. This is what sixty-seven years of communism looks like when nobody’s willing to subsidize it anymore. Trump’s approach? “Make a deal before it’s too late.” He’s talking to people inside the Cuban system... including, reportedly, Raúl Castro’s grandson. Rubio, who understands Cuba better than anyone in government, is leading the effort. The terms haven’t been made public, but the logic is obvious... open the economy, release political prisoners, hold elections, or watch the lights go out for good. No Marines. No occupation. Just leverage, applied from a position of absolute economic dominance, and the patience to let gravity do what gravity does. So here is where it all comes together. Here is the part where you have to step back and look at the board... the whole board, not just the square you’re standing on. Before January 2025, the Western Hemisphere contained a hostile narco-state with the world’s largest oil reserves, a communist holdout that served as a forward base for Russian and Chinese influence ninety miles from Florida, and a Middle Eastern theocracy with an active nuclear weapons program that was funding terror organizations across three continents. Those were not theoretical threats. They were active, operational, escalating threats that any future president... of either party... would have had to deal with eventually. The question was never whether to deal with them. The question was how. And the twenty-five-year answer from the foreign policy establishment... sanctions that didn’t work, diplomacy that got played, nation-building that wasted trillions, forever wars that killed thousands... had been tried and had failed catastrophically. Iraq proved it. Afghanistan proved it. Libya proved it. What Trump has done in sixty days... Maduro captured, Khamenei killed, Cuba strangled into negotiation... is not a betrayal of the America First doctrine. It is the precondition for the doctrine. It’s the thing that has to happen once so that it never has to happen again. Think of it this way. If you inherit a house with a flooded basement, a collapsing roof, and a gas leak, you don’t get to say “I’m a low-maintenance homeowner” and sit on the porch. You have to fix the emergencies first. Rip out the pipes. Replace the roof. Seal the gas line. It’s expensive. It’s messy. People are going to say “I thought you said this would be a quiet house.” And you say... “It will be. After I fix the things that are about to kill us.” That’s what the second term has been. Emergency triage on a world that was handed to this President in a state of active decay. Not by accident, not by fate, but by the deliberate incompetence of everyone who came before. The Trump Doctrine... the real, permanent version... is still coming. And it will look exactly like what you voted for. No permanent troop deployments in Caracas. No American military governor in Tehran. No nation-building, no democracy-exporting, no trillion-dollar reconstruction funds. Get in. Fix the emergency. Arrange cooperative locals to run things in a direction that doesn’t threaten America. Get out. Venezuela is already on that track. The oil deal was signed within days of Maduro’s capture. Delcy Rodríguez is cooperating. American companies are investing. The troops are not staying. Iran is going to be harder and take longer... there’s active combat right now, this weekend, as you’re reading this. Three Americans are dead. More will follow, the President himself said so. But the objective is not to occupy Iran. The objective is to break the regime’s capacity to threaten the United States and its allies, support whatever transition the Iranian people choose... and they’re already in the streets, they’ve been in the streets since December... and then leave. This is not Afghanistan. There will not be twenty years of patrols in Isfahan. There will not be a democratic transition monitored by USAID consultants who’ve never been outside the Green Zone. There will be a broken regime, a liberated population, and an American exit. Cuba will fold without a single American boot on the ground. It’s already happening. And when it’s done... when the threats that took decades to build have been eliminated in months... the doctrine takes hold. Not as a slogan on a hat. Not as a campaign promise that sounds good in a rally and dissolves on contact with reality. As an actual, operational, strategic posture that future presidents will inherit and maintain, because the conditions that required intervention will no longer exist. No Iranian nuclear program to contain. No Venezuelan narco-pipeline to interdict. No Cuban forward base to monitor. No justification for the next generation of neocons to drag us into the next Iraq. That’s the vision. That’s what the second term is building toward. And I know it’s painful right now. I know three families are grieving tonight. I know more will grieve before this is over. And I know it looks, from the outside, like everything we were promised has been broken. But I’m asking you to hold the line. Not because the President is infallible... he’s not, nobody is... but because the logic is sound. You cannot build a fortress of peace on a foundation of unresolved threats. You have to clear the ground first. That’s what’s happening. It’s ugly and it’s costly and it was never going to look the way anyone wanted it to look. But the house will be clean. And then we maintain it. And then... finally, for the first time in a generation... we stop sending our kids to die in countries that hate us. That’s the Trump Doctrine. Not the opening act. The final destination. And we’re almost there.

@GuyTalksFinance At 6.25% you should pay it off. If sub 4% I wouldn’t recommend it

Paying off my mortgage early is a guaranteed 6.25% annual return plus the freedom of owning my home. Investing into the S&P 500 is hoping for a 10% annual return over the next 30 years. The choice of paying off my home early seems obvious to me.