Chris

[David Frum @davidfrum]

Another way to think about Trump announcement today: If he increased US diesel imports from Canada by 4%, he would gain as much fuel as from this Russia deal. But the Canadians are global super-villains, so who wants to buy from them when you could enrich Putin instead?

[Tom Newton Dunn @tnewtondunn]

In other words: Donald Trump is going to try to win back US votes with cheaper gas prices before the midterm elections by enriching Putin’s war machine, so he can keep killing 1000s of Ukrainians. Dire.

[Tom Newton Dunn @tnewtondunn]

On the day two men are arrested under the National Security Act for breaking into RAF Molesworth...

Why aren't British ministers talking about Leipzig, and what we'd do? In Berlin they are, along with most other European governments
https://t.co/1tM9YiyJx7

[Esfandyar Batmanghelidj @yarbatman]

Someone sent me this analysis and asked me what I think…

Yes, there is more oil flowing through the strait—with the exception of Iranian oil. But people misunderstand the issue of control of the Strait of Hormuz and overstate its importance in the positioning of Iran, the Gulf, and the U.S. as the war drags on. Specifically, this analysis on oil export volumes and its impact on negotiation positions overlooks two more important factors.

First, Iran may not be able to disrupt energy flows as effectively as in the early stage of the war, but it retains undiminished capabilities to destroy stocks, by which I mean the underlying production infrastructure, whether upstream or downstream.

Second, the assessment fails to consider that Iran can still choose to escalate by hitting these production targets if it determines that Trump isn’t feeling enough pain to take the diplomatic off-ramps being put in front of him. Importantly, we know what happens when Iran is exporting no oil and there is no realistic pathway for diplomacy—we saw it in the Abqaiq and Khurrais attacks on Aramco facilities in 2019.

So while the risk premium around oil flows may seem tolerable for Trump, the threats to energy production infrastructure the Gulf remain significant, which is exactly why regional countries are still trying to mediate a return to a durable ceasefire and diplomatic agreement. Trump too, is erratic, and could give cause to Iran to escalate in this way through his own fixation on “winning” the war. Markets are able to price this, especially not when traders are so fixated on short-term price action.

In this respect, the strait isn’t really Iran’s principle source of leverage. It never was! The attacks on U.S. bases and Gulf cities and infrastructure were far more consequential, but these dimensions of the conflict were downplayed because of what it would mean to acknowledge that Iran has such dangerous capabilities that the U.S. was unable to mitigate or degrade during the entirety of the fighting.

Sure, the U.S. navy can escort vessels (at great cost) and keep oil flowing. But the more fundamental issue of the failure of U.S. security guarantees over the entirety of the Gulf remains unresolved, and this is what provides Iran leverage in the negotiations.

Iran did not wage a scorched earth campaign—but it may yet do so if the current situation persists for too long. That is what everyone who actually follows this region and its dynamics is worried about.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

I’ve been warning about the spike in diesel prices, followed by shortages of supply, for several weeks now. Especially if Trump goes along with an export ban. A third of the diesel we import is from America, which is the world’s biggest diesel exporter (1.5m b/d). There are no alternative sources of supply. A US export ban would throw us into recession by Christmas. The economy, from farm machinery to road haulage, is powered by diesel.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

This just in. Forget everything else. Catastrophe looms.
BREAKING: Trump administration prepares 90-day total diesel export ban, with Trump inclined to announce it by the end of the week, per Politico.

[Thomas van Linge @ThomasVLinge]

Tusk warns of Russian strikes on Ukraine’s allies, Lithuania is preparing evacuation plans in case of the worst and now a meeting with Macron terrifies even the most radical of French opposition.

More than ever it seems our European interbellum has come to an end.

[Martin Shaw @martinshawx]

In 1940, the Nazis had probably not even killed 3 per cent of Polish Jews. But they had destroyed their communities, herded them into ghettos, and were starving and brutalising them. This was already genocide, and would have been so whether or not they went on to exterminate them. Educate yourself—the Final Solution is not the standard of genocide. And it is shameful to glibly use it to excuse the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, which has shown broadly similar policies of ghettoisation and starvation to those that Nazis carried out in the early stages of their genocide.

[Ben Kentish @BenKentish]

A current Labour peer taking a senior job at Palantir at the very moment the government is under pressure to scale back Palantir’s involvement in the British state and increase AI regulation. Such blatant vested interests need to be removed from our Parliament. If people want to go and make loads of money lobbying for big US AI companies fine - but they should hand back their peerage rather than being allowed to vote on legislation affecting those same companies. It reeks.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

You can say what you want about Iran but they're definitely pretty unique in their communication: never seen a country threaten another with a math equation before 😅

For those who didn't get it: there is a famous monetary policy formula used by the Fed called the "Taylor rule" that says a central bank's policy rate (i) should equal the neutral real rate (r*) plus target inflation (π*), plus 1.5 times the inflation gap and 0.5 times the output gap (the "i = r* + π* + 1.5(π−π*) + 0.5(y−y*)" part of Ghalibaf's formula).

Ghalibaf adds α(SOH−SOH*) and β(BEM−BEM*): SOH referring to the Strait Of Hormuz and BEM to Bab El-Mandeb. Both have positive coefficient, meaning the more those chokepoints are choked, the higher the rate the Fed would have to set to fight the resulting inflation.

In a nutshell this is Ghalibaf trolling the Fed, telling them that Iran is - in a very real way - setting American monetary policy.

[The Rest Is Politics @RestIsPolitics]

Rory doesn't hold back on his thoughts about the Reform donation scandal.

[Tucker Carlson @TuckerCarlson]

According to an informed federal official, in the coming months the Trump administration plans to send a total of 40,000 Mark 84 and Blu-117 bombs to the government of Israel. Each bomb weighs 2,000 pounds. This appears to be the largest transfer of conventional explosive ordnance from the United States in modern history.

How big is this shipment? It amounts to 40,000 tons of bombs. For perspective, the largest American air raid of World War Two was the Eighth Air Force’s attack on Berlin in March of 1945. Combined, the 2,023 Allied aircraft involved dropped about 3,000 tons of bombs. That’s 7.5 percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. That same month, March of 1945, the US Army Air Forces began the single most destructive bombing raid in human history, Operation Meetinghouse over Tokyo. More than 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. By the end of that operation, the US had dropped 1,600 tons of bombs. That’s four percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. World War Two ended five months later, when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The shipment Trump is sending to Israel amounts to more than three times the destructive power of that nuclear explosion. There is no precedent for what the Trump administration is doing.

Nor is there a justification. The government of Israel is not fighting World War Two, or even a war. It is engaged in periodic skirmishes with a guerrilla force in Lebanon, and it is working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza. Neither front requires modern 2,000-pound bombs.

An American-made Mark 84 has a destruction radius of half a mile. It releases a thermal wave the temperature of the surface of the sun. Within 100 feet of the explosion, rock melts and human flesh turns to vapor. The bomb collapses apartment buildings and leaves craters thirty-five feet deep. Until the war with Iran, the US military generally avoided using the Mark 84 in urban areas. It kills too many civilians.

For the Netanyahu government, that’s been the upside. In the weeks after October 7, the IDF dropped nearly six hundred 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas in Gaza, including on more than 100 officially designated civilian evacuation zones. The slaughter was so grotesque and embarrassing that for a moment the Biden administration paused a shipment of Mark 84s. Those shipments quickly resumed under Trump. Now they’ve accelerated.

It’s hard to overstate the scale of the crime the Israeli government is committing in Gaza. Over the last three years, more than a quarter-million Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces there. The majority of them have been noncombatants: women, the elderly and tens of thousands of children. Many thousands more remain missing, presumably entombed under the rubble of 200,000 collapsed buildings. So far the Israelis have destroyed 92 percent of all homes in Gaza, and 34 of the 36 hospitals. By comparison, the 1945 Allied bombings of Dresden, now acknowledged as a war crime, destroyed about half of the city’s inhabited buildings.

By any definition, what the Netanyahu government has done in Gaza is genocide. The 40,000 new bombs the Trump administration is sending will be used to do the same in Lebanon, and likely in other countries in the region. If you wanted to extend the Iran war into the indefinite future, this is exactly what you’d do.

So far none of this has received public scrutiny. At some point, inevitably, it will be described in media accounts as an “arms sale.” It is not an arms sale. It is a gift, funded by American taxpayers through the Foreign Military Financing program, an arrangement designed to disguise welfare as capitalism: Congress appropriates money to the executive branch, which transfers the cash to Israel to “buy” American-made weapons, in this case from General Dynamics. Politicians claim this is a win for America. Most voters have no idea they paid for it. The bill in this case is about $3 billion. Add that to the $352 billion the US Treasury has transferred to Israel since 1951.

How did this happen? The request for 40,000 new high-explosive civilian-killing bombs originated at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, which is run by Christian Zionist Ambassador Mike Huckabee and his aide David Milstein, who is the stepson of Fox News host Mark Levin. From there it moved to the State Department, where Marco Rubio enthusiastically approved it.

At this point, only four more people need to sign off before the bombs ship to Israel: Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Congressmen Brian Mast and Gregory Meeks, the top two members of the equivalent House committee. All four are committed neocons. Collectively they’ve taken millions from the Israel lobby. In 2015, Brian Mast traveled to Israel to volunteer for the Israeli military. In 2023, Mast showed up in the House of Representatives wearing an IDF uniform.

It’s hard to imagine any of them hesitating before sending more free bombs to Israel. Only public outrage can stop this.

[🔪 killer buns 🐰 @desigotdone]

Munya’s done it again 🤣

[(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges]

This is what I don't get about people like Matt. He consistently calls for an honest and open debate on immigration and race. Fine. Let's have one. Some of his statements are objectively and clearly racist. So why be a snowflake about it. Just own it.

[(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges]

There hasn't. It won't. The fact these people are willing this shows who the real traitors to Britain and its values are.

[(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges]

Coming to a community near you if Tommy and his friends get their way...

[(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges]

Genuinely don't understand why Reform want their conference's Business Day to be overshadowed by this form of overt racism. If you're a major company contemplating engaging with the party what sort of message does it send.

[Mark Carney @MarkJCarney]

The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big”.

The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.

We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.

Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.

[Fraser Nelson @FraserNelson]

Look, says Chris Philp: 76% of social housing in an immigrant-heavy London neighbourhood is foreign-born!

What he doesn't say: the whole neighbourhood is 78% foreign-born. Private renters: 92%.

Also: 81% of those social tenants already hold UK passports. They are UK citizens.

[Rory Stewart @RoryStewartUK]

Inspiration to plant a great forest in the Green belt around London - air quality, biodiversity, carbon, walking in nature and temperature!