David

Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things. Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy.

@jackprandelli Maybe, but the idea behind Trump is probably right. It’s always misdirection and layers of plans with him. Who knows what he cooked up and why.

Trump's number is wrong. The strategy behind it is genius. China doesn't get 90% of its oil from Hormuz. The real number is closer to 50-55%. For reference maybe he was thinking about Iran that's selling 90% of it's oil to China. But here's why the exaggeration doesn't matter. The strategic move is real Think about what Trump is actually doing If China has to guard Hormuz: → Chinese naval assets move to the Middle East → The Taiwan Strait gets less covered → Beijing has to choose between its oil supply and its Taiwan ambitions → China either lets Iran lose a key protector or gets pulled into the conflict It's a forced choice. Guard your oil or guard your future. You can't do both. Trump isn't giving Hormuz to China. He's handing Beijing a problem that drains its military focus, its diplomatic capital and its budget. And the 90% number? Doesn't need to be accurate. It just needs to make China feel responsible. Have a look at my latest article, where i explain the deeper strategy behind all of this🔗 Link 👇 themerchantsnews.substack.com/p/what-is-the-…

@RichardHaass There are always a few layers and misdirection. I bet you anything he had a version announcing a big deal or that be use talks failed.

Totally mystifying why Trump asked for 20 minutes in prime time on the first night of Passover to deliver a nothingburger of a speech that changed not a thing. Makes no sense.

@Eng_china5 Also….supporting ground troops.

BREAKING — Unusual: The Pentagon has doubled its fleet of A‑10 warplanes in the Middle East, a move interpreted as preparation for a possible ground invasion of Iran. These aircraft — known as “tank killers” — are highly effective against armored vehicles, military convoys, and fast‑moving naval craft.

@MOSSADil I thought about this, perhaps those who oppose them will have to encere in human wave attacks. How else?

🎥 WATCH: Tanks in the streets of Tehran. Not to defend against a foreign enemy, but to intimidate unarmed citizens. A regime that turns its military on its own people isn’t governing—it’s clinging to power in fear. This is what desperation looks like. Stay connected, follow @MOSSADil.

@ChrisCillizza So why have it in the first place? With him there is always misdirection or something else in the works….maybe he did the press conference earlier while talks happen and then nothing to announce so he just ranted.

My one BIG takeaway from Trump’s primetime Iran speech

@MOSSADil @geok why are they doing this? Did they give reason?

Israel's Defence Minister Israel Katz says his country will seize control 'of the entire area up to the Litani', in comments that lay bare the scale of Israel's military plans in southern Lebanon. 'In addition, the return south of the Litani [river] of over 600,000 residents of southern Lebanon who evacuated north will be completely prohibited until the safety and security of the residents of the north [of Israel] is ensured,' he added. Katz also said 'all houses in the villages near the border in Lebanon will be demolished, in accordance with the Rafah and Beit Hanoun models in Gaza', referring to two towns razed by Israel. (The National)

BREAKING🚨: This is might be the most important photo of this century taken by @AJamesMcCarthy “We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

@shanaka86 I love your analysis and commentary, but what is the solution? I am seeing solutions offered.

JUST IN: Ten heavy bombs hit the IRGC Aerospace Forces headquarters in western Tehran overnight. The facility was a command node for ballistic missile coordination and drone operations, buried beneath reinforced concrete in a city of nine million people. Secondary explosions confirmed penetration. Fires burned for hours. Iranian state media acknowledged the strike and claimed “no strategic impact,” which is what you say when the strategic impact is too large to admit on television. Within 48 hours of the strike, Iranian missile and drone launches against Israel fell to their lowest level since the war began on February 28. The correlation is not coincidental. The command architecture that selects targets, assigns launch sequences, and coordinates saturation barrages was physically degraded by GPS-guided munitions dropped from aircraft that took off from English countryside and Indian Ocean coral. The IRGC Aerospace Forces headquarters was the brain. The brain was hit. The body slowed. This is the pattern across the entire campaign. Over 200 strikes in 48 hours. B-52s from Fairford delivering JDAMs on bunkers in Isfahan and Tehran. A-10s from Lakenheath suppressing IRGC boats in the Strait. Cruise missiles from Diego Garcia reaching targets beyond surviving air defences. Interception rates above 90 percent. The barrages fewer and less coordinated than at any point since the first week. By every military metric, the war is being won. And the crisis is getting worse. The bombs cannot open the Strait of Hormuz. They cannot restart a helium plant that takes three to five years to repair. They cannot put fertiliser on Indian fields before the planting window closes. They cannot stop the 200 cryogenic containers from losing pressure on a thermodynamic schedule that ignores successful sorties. They cannot make 20,000 stranded seafarers less thirsty or convince the IRGC to dismantle a toll system that generates revenue with every $2 million yuan payment. The strikes solved the military problem. The molecular problem is untouched. This is the paradox at the centre of Operation Epic Fury. The better the bombing works, the less urgent the deal appears, and the longer the molecular crisis deepens unchecked. Every successful strike on a command node makes the next Pentagon briefing sound more optimistic. Every reduction in Iranian launches makes the April 6 deadline feel less like a cliff and more like a formality. And every day the war continues because the air campaign appears to be winning, the helium boils off, the urea does not ship, the rice does not grow, and the 3,000 vessels sit in water that nobody can insure at a price that makes commerce viable. The war is being won in the air. The crisis is being lost on the water and inside 200 pressurised containers drifting in the Gulf. Both clocks are running. One measured in sorties, the other in molecules. The sortie clock says America is ahead. The molecule clock says nobody is. And the molecule clock does not reset. Ten bombs hit a command node in Tehran. Attacks on Israel dropped to their lowest level. The air campaign is a masterpiece of precision. And the strait is still closed, the helium is still boiling, the rice is still waiting, and the deal is still unsigned. The bombs have a five-metre accuracy. The crisis has a five-year repair timeline. Precision does not solve duration. And duration is winning. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

@dirtman Seriously!

Love seeing the timeline come together for some of the coolest shit ever

@forallcurious What? Seriously?

🚨: Japan plans to build a solar ring around the Moon that will provide energy to Earth forever.

@mdubowitz @SecRubio Indeed he does. Thanks

Young DC interns: watch @SecRubio closely. He explains difficult issues with remarkable clarity and brevity. Communicate like that and you’ll go far.

@esaagar The problem is Iran is not a rational country for the most part and has not acted rationally for quite some time. The Trump administration recognizes this and are not prepared to do what is necessary to win. They thought they would fall after bombing and it didn’t happen.

The main reason I am skeptical the unilateral TACO can hold is precisely because the strategic logic for the GCC countries now is to go all in: They see a muscular Iranian controlled Strait as existential This further aligns Gulf and Israeli interests to escalate the war

@balajis @esaagar But won’t this in Bolden Iran? Won’t this make them more arrogant and aggressive as they pursue whatever post conflict policy they pursue? Their whole ideology is based on surviving this and driving people out and ultimately winning, which will now be confirmed if they stop.

Counterargument: the Gulf states can’t do anything on their own in military terms against Iran, so they won’t. They are much more likely to join a multinational diplomatic coalition and just negotiate a settlement with Iran. For Hormuz, at even $1 per barrel, it’s far cheaper than the billions per day in infrastructure that’s being vaporized by this war. Not to mention the prospect of real food shortages.

@wethefifth Interesting - to hear him talk, in not sure what a democrat is. I wonder if either party can regain a plot when the framework upon which plots originate is undermined.

Rahm Emanuel on how and why the Democrats have "lost the plot." Our members-only episode with Rahm Emanuel is available now on Substack.

@earthcurated Awesome! This is incredible! Godspeed good luck and all that.

🚀 BREAKING: The Artemis II crew has suited up and is heading to the rocket! Everything is still GO for tonight’s historic launch to the Moon. 🌕 Let’s go!!! 🇺🇸🔥

@r0ck3t23 This is not bad. It’s too bad that Donald Trump is so controversial and creates so much disdain from the opposition. I worry that because he is who he is they will reverse his efforts even when they are good.

Peter Thiel just compressed forty years of American decline into one sentence. Thiel: “Silicon Valley deals in the world of bits; most of the economy is the world of atoms.” For four decades, the most talented engineers alive funneled into a single corridor. Computers. Software. Mobile. Internet. Not because the physical world ran out of problems. Because solving them became illegal. Thiel: “It was a bad idea to become an aerospace engineer. These were all industries that were sort of in structural decline because they were getting outlawed, they were getting regulated to death.” Nuclear. Chemical. Mechanical. Aerospace. Field after field, regulated into silence before a generation of builders ever arrived. Thiel: “Computer science was the only sort of scientific, technical field that actually had a future in the 1980s.” So the builders went where building was still allowed. The physical world paid in decades. Founders Fund: “We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters.” That is not satire. That is the ledger. Now AI is forcing the reckoning no one scheduled. The intelligence being built inside data centers does not stay inside data centers. It moves into manufacturing. Into energy. Into aerospace. Into every domain that was locked and left to decay. That gap is closing. Faster than most institutions can process. America fills it. Or cedes it.

@shanaka86 I like these posts but you don’t mention or o haven’t read much about the ideology of the Iranians. Your posts seem to indicaste they are rational actors when they are not. They don’t care how many people leave from brain drain or how many die.

BREAKING: In 1622, Shah Abbas I captured the Strait of Hormuz from the Portuguese and made it the economic engine of the Safavid Empire. He ruled from Isfahan. He built the Shah Mosque there, the Naqsh-e Jahan Square, the Ali Qapu palace, the Chehel Sotoun pavilion. Isfahan became, in the words of historians, one of the most beautiful cities ever constructed. Its wealth flowed from one source: control of the strait. Tonight, 404 years later, Isfahan is burning because of the strait. Al Jazeera confirmed overnight US-Israeli strikes hitting the Badr military airbase in Isfahan, producing a column of fire visible across a city of 2.3 million people. Bunker-busters detonated ammunition depots in secondary explosions that turned the night sky orange. This is the fourth wave of strikes on Isfahan since February 28. Previous waves destroyed Il-76 transports, C-130s, Su-22s, S-300 radar systems, and runway infrastructure at the 8th Tactical Airbase. On March 9, strikes damaged Naqsh-e Jahan Square itself, along with the Shah Mosque, Ali Qapu, and Chehel Sotoun. Blue Shield International called it a war crime. The monuments Abbas built with Hormuz revenue are being destroyed in a war triggered by Hormuz closure. The geography has not moved in four centuries. The chokepoint has not moved. The city that profited from controlling the strait is now paying the price of a regime that weaponised it. Shah Abbas understood something that the IRGC also understands: whoever controls Hormuz controls the economic destiny of every nation that depends on what passes through it. In 1622, he used English warships to seize it from the Portuguese and redirected its wealth to build a capital that rivalled Constantinople. In 2026, the IRGC is using the same chokepoint as a toll booth, charging two million dollars per tanker in yuan, while the air defences that protected the city Abbas built are systematically dismantled by the descendants of the same English-speaking naval power that helped him take it. But here is the connection nobody has made. Isfahan is not only the city that Abbas built with Hormuz wealth. It is where Iran’s enriched uranium sits underground. The same city. The same geography. The column of fire tonight is burning above the facility where 1,000 pounds of uranium hexafluoride sits in cylinders that both diplomats and commandos are racing to reach. Every strike that degrades Badr’s air defences makes a future special operations approach to that uranium more feasible. Rubio’s four stated objectives, destroy the air force, navy, factories, and missile launchers, are the precondition for the unstated fifth: extract the uranium. And the precondition converges on Isfahan. Shah Abbas captured Hormuz to fund Isfahan. The IRGC closed Hormuz and brought war to Isfahan. The uranium that could end or extend this war sits beneath the city that was built by the strait that started it. Four centuries of Persian strategic logic, from Safavid empire to Islamic Republic, compressed into one burning city where the chokepoint, the capital, the heritage, and the nuclear material all occupy the same coordinates. The Shah Mosque was designed to last a thousand years. Whether it survives April depends on whether a Pakistani diplomat landing in Beijing this morning can broker a deal faster than the bunker-busters can reach the cylinders beneath the city that Hormuz built. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

@matt_gray_ Thank you!

here's what makes you irreplaceable when AI kills most businesses:

@thinkingwest Have you watched the Power of Myth with Joseph Campbell? In that, he talks about how the largest building tells you about the culture as it passes from one era to another. Problem is that, the cathedral era has passed and these things do not come back around sadly.

The highest point of a city should be its cathedral

100% - it’s not him or anyone or anything by us. We must be the authors of our own defeat.