kptow

What if? au/ra u're killing me

[Danny Haiphong @GeopoliticsDH]

Did anyone notice how this didn't happen to Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian?

Israel is the most despised government entity in the world.

[Ryan Rozbiani @RyanRozbiani]

Iran put a picture of Hajj Qasem Soleimani at their delegation's table during Netanyahu's speech at the United Nations

Iran never fails to deliver a message

[X Global @X_Global_tv]

🚨 BREAKING:

In Tokyo, tens of thousands gathered outside parliament, demanding the prime minister's resignation over his support for the U.S. and Israel.

The Japanese people are showing incredible determination.

[1Z ENTERTAINMENT @1zentertainment]

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[🅰pocalypsis 🅰pocalypseos 🇷🇺 🇨🇳 🅉 @apocalypseos]

Jeffrey Sachs: a president stood at the UN and claimed the right to annihilate a civilization. Congress said nothing. That is the constitutional order collapsing in public.

“I shuddered then, and I shudder now that a president of the United States can stand at the podium of the UN General Assembly speaking to world leaders in a language of annihilation of other countries and of sending them to hell. It was ghastly, unprecedented, totally disgusting, disgraceful for the United States. But I would also say a measure of how broken the constitutional order of the United States is.

Trump basically said, like a madman, which I think arguably he is, that he and he alone will decide the survival of Iran. He said that he has a big, big choice to make. Maybe Iran will be a great country. Maybe Iran will be annihilated. Maybe Trump will send it to hell. And not only was the language vulgar in a way that I certainly could never in my lifetime have imagined coming from a president of the United States or anybody standing at the UN podium—because what Trump said was odious and completely in violation of every religious, moral, ethical, and legal standard that we have in this world—it was also a measure of the brazen collapse of our Constitution.

Is there a political system where one man decides the fate of another civilization? Is that how the American system works? Of course the answer is no. The founding fathers who rebelled against a mad King George III were very explicit in the Declaration of Independence, celebrated this year 250 years after its issuance. We’re in the 250th anniversary, one that Trump says is about our freedom. It was explicitly that King George arrogated, took on the authority to put the military above civil rule. And when the founding fathers wrote the US Constitution, they assigned specifically the power to declare war not to the commander-in-chief, but solely and exclusively—and not by choice, not if they care about it or want to or want to delegate it or not, but solely—to the United States Congress.

And Trump said yesterday he doesn’t care what the public thinks. He doesn’t care what the vote is. He says it doesn’t even cross my mind. And he said earlier this year, when he was asked, well, are there any limits on your power? He thought about it. He said Yes, my morality, but it’s my will. It’s what I want to do. Otherwise, no, there are no other limits.

What did our Congress do on that occasion? I can tell you, as we know, that the majority party in both houses simply remained silent. That is a violation of their sacred oath of office, which is to uphold the Constitution. Trump yesterday said he’s going to have the difficult choice of whether to annihilate, by the way, one of the most ancient civilizations in the world, 5,000 years old, twenty times older than the United States of America. And what did our Speaker of the House say? Well, he said nothing, of course. What did our Senate majority leader say? He said, of course, nothing. What did all of the party of the president of the United States say, the members of Congress? They said, of course, nothing. This is worse than the Roman Empire. There was a Senate that actually still said something. Our Senate says nothing.

We are so broken that not only do we have a madman in power, but there is no respect for our constitutional order. And the president can make statements as he made yesterday, unprecedented in the chamber of the General Assembly in front of the world leaders, speaking like the worst tyrant or gangster imaginable, and not a murmur from the Republican Party which dominates the House and the Senate. You know, I am not partisan. And a Democratic president who dared to be as absolutely mad and deranged as this president would probably find subservience in that party too. So I’m not even making a partisan point. I’m making a point about the collapse of our constitutional order.

Have we come to a point where one man, who I happen to think is utterly incompetent, utterly sociopathic, actually—when people are killed under his order, not a moment of reflection or remorse when 150 schoolgirls are murdered, and he knows the truth. He says, yeah, the Iranians probably did it. We’ll find out. No, not any control at all in our system of government.

So for me, you asked how I feel. I shudder at the last 24 hours, both at what the president said. It made my skin crawl. I was sitting there in the chamber listening to this madness. I mean it really, psychopathic madness, speaking in this way, with a vulgarity that is unimaginable. But then I’ve shuddered since then at the lack of response by the leaders, the majority leader of the US Senate, the Speaker of the House, Supreme Court justices, anybody to say no. In our system of government, it’s not one person who decides on the fate of another civilization.

We are a country, we say, first of all, of representation, and the American people are aghast at this. They oppose it overwhelmingly. They do not support this war of Netanyahu and Trump, which is a two-person war of murder and destruction and assassination of leaders of another country. They do not support it. And the constitutional order is that we are a representative government, and our representatives have an oath of office that only they can declare war. So where are they standing up to say No, you don’t have a penny to spend on this? We control the power of the purse. The tens or hundreds of billions of dollars that Trump has wasted of American income in this flagrant war of whim. Where is Congress to say you have no authority whatsoever to spend that because only we can decide on the spending and only we can declare war.

So this is the grim fact. It wasn’t just the awful statements. That was my first reaction. But then I thought, what have we come to when one person can make a statement like this and then remain essentially unchallenged in the United States system of government?”

Annihilation is not diplomacy. Congressional silence is not restraint. A constitutional republic cannot survive if one man claims the power to decide whether another civilization lives or dies.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

In 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655.

290 civilians dead. Families. Children. People on a scheduled commercial flight.

The United States never formally apologized or accepted legal responsibility.

The commander of the Vincennes was awarded the Legion of Merit upon returning home.

That same year, the United States was actively supporting Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the same Iraq using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians and Iranian soldiers.

Now locate Iran on the State Sponsor of Terror list.

Now locate the USS Vincennes commander's medal.

The designation was never about the dead civilians.

It was about which side killed them.

[Macklemore @macklemore]

What happened to me is bigger than one artist or one stage. When the billionaire class can decide which voices are allowed on stage and which ones are too dangerous to hear, everyone should be paying attention.

So we're going on tour. All proceeds will benefit organizations supporting the Palestinian people and movement.

Sign up at https://t.co/2na35y8pQ5

[JonnyUtd @Fx1Jonny]

So it turns out that when the hostages were taken on Oct 7th, Hamas informed Qatar that we’re ready to release them at 7pm on the same day and the only thing they wanted in return was to start negotiations.

israel flat out refused, because the whole point of Oct 7th was to manufacture consent to demolish Gaza.

The more we learn about Oct 7th, the more it indicts israel for allowing its own citizens to be used as collateral damage, to further their own demonic agenda.

Pure evil.

Source: @zeteo_news

[Reza Nasri @RezaNasri1]

President Masoud Pezeshkian came to New York with a written text. After hearing Donald Trump at the same rostrum the day before, he set it aside, telling delegates he had prepared a speech before the US president called Iran a terrorist state. He was, by most accounts, the first leader to speak at the UN in person in the middle of a war with the United States. Speaking from the heart is why the historic address will be heard well beyond the hall. It should not hide how precise it was - legally, morally and strategically.

He opened with photographs of dead children, victims of American and Israeli bombs, and a direct reply: "We have been the victims of terrorism." "We have only defended ourselves. We are not terrorists." Palestinians know this inversion well. A people defends itself, and the aggressor calls the defence terrorism. Anyone who has watched the last seven months with clarity will recognise it.

He answered the bullying Trump had put on display, musing aloud about annihilating Iran, by standing on the ground of law. Everything said against Iran from that podium, he argued, contradicts the UN Charter. He is right. Article 2(4) forbids not only the use of force but the threat of it, and a head of state weighing the annihilation of a fellow member state before the General Assembly is as plain a threat as the Charter's drafters could have imagined.

Iran asks for no special treatment, only the sovereign equality the Charter promises every member. On the nuclear file his formula was "no nuclear weapons, and no limitations to peaceful nuclear technology." That is the NPT's own bargain: the treaty bars non-nuclear states from acquiring the bomb, and its Article IV guarantees the "inalienable right" of every party to peaceful nuclear energy "without discrimination."

He was equally plain that Iran built its defences to guarantee that any strike on its cities is answered. In Nicaragua v. United States, the ICJ held that international law places no limit on a sovereign state's armaments beyond what it accepts by treaty.

He also took apart the Israeli-made story that Iran's political establishment is on the verge of collapse, and that Iranians would welcome foreign invaders. For seven months people have been in the streets daily in support of the defence effort. The same fact answers Trump's claim that the Iranian state has killed tens of thousands of its own people. A population does not rally under bombardment behind a government it regards as its killer.

Then he named the war crimes. He showed images of the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab and of a sports hall in Lamerd where children had been playing. A weapon that scatters tens of thousands of tungsten fragments cannot be used on a school or a gymnasium without striking indiscriminately. A UN fact-finding mission reported this month that there are reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed war crimes in the February 28 strikes. The US delegate left the hall during this passage. Pezeshkian drew the parallel with Gaza, where the ICJ has ordered Israel to prevent acts of genocide and the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for its prime minister and former defence minister.

He turned next to Israel's nuclear arsenal. Israel stays outside the NPT and accepts no comprehensive safeguards, although the Security Council called on it in Resolution 487 of 1981 to place its facilities under IAEA safeguards, and the General Assembly repeats the call every year.

Israel has struck the capitals of its neighbours in breach of the Charter and carries out a documented pattern of war crimes, yet keeps its weapons with impunity. Iran, which has acted only in self-defence for two centuries, is sanctioned and attacked instead, although its facilities remain under an IAEA safeguards agreement.

On Hormuz, he described a strait closed to Iran even as it serves to ship missiles and weaponry into the surrounding region. The law of the sea does not allow this. The 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, which Washington invokes but has never ratified, requires ships passing through a strait to refrain from any threat or use of force against the states bordering it. Under the older rule of innocent passage, a ship serving an attack on the coastal state is no longer in innocent passage at all. Iran will not be shut out of its own waters while others use them to make war on it.

He closed on the indivisibility of security: it exists for everyone in the region or for no one. The idea has a long pedigree. European states wrote it into the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 and restated it in 1999, pledging not to strengthen their own security at the expense of others. "We want strong neighbors," Pezeshkian said. Iran has always been open to diplomacy, "without accepting the language of force."

@drpezeshkian

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The specific genius of calling resistance "terrorism" is that it makes the original violence invisible.

If you begin the story at the moment of resistance, the resistance is the cause.

The resistance is why there is conflict.

The resistance is what must be stopped.

The violence that produced the resistance: the occupation, the extraction, the propped-up government, the sanctions, the slow structural suffocation of a people's ability to determine their own future. That is background. History. Context that reasonable people debate.

But the resistance is present tense. Active. Dangerous.

This is not accidental.

Every system of domination needs a way to talk about the response to domination that doesn't require talking about the domination itself.

"Terrorism" is that way.

It is a word that starts the clock at the moment that is most convenient for the people who control the narrative.

Vietnam was called many things by the Americans.

The Vietnamese kept fighting regardless of what they were called.

What they were called was never the point.

What they were doing was.

[Ryan Rozbiani @RyanRozbiani]

Iran's President CALLS OUT that Israel has NUCLEAR WEAPONS at the UN

Dr. Pezeshkian: Israel has the bombs, has weapons of mass destrcution. They KILL, We are SANCTIONED.

The choice of words is WOW. Powerful speech

[Korobochka (コロボ) 🇦🇺✝️🇷🇺 @cirnosad]

When we finally render them all extinct, know that it was one great man who followed a premonition that he saw in a dream who set it all in motion by becoming a martyred hero along with his entire city.

[InfoGram @_InfoGram_]

🇮🇷Reporter: "Are you rebuilding nukes?"

🇮🇷Araghchi: "Nope, we are committed to peace."

🇮🇷Reporter: So you accept Trump’s request for inspection?

🇮🇷Araghchi 🔥: "Sure — only if we can send our team to Israel to see if they have nukes. If Israel has them, then Iran should too."👏

Araghchi is playing 7D chess. Strategic genius 💪

[MenchOsint @MenchOsint]

SAUDI ARABIA LOST THEIR MOST ADVANCED FIGHTER JET TO ANSARALLAH.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

I strongly encourage everyone to read the speech that Chan Chun Sing, Singapore's Defence Minister, just gave in Beijing: it's basically the polar opposite of a Hegseth speech - immensely wise and a refreshing proof that thoughtful statecraft still exists.

You can find the speech here: https://t.co/alGUQGK7J4 Below a summary of the best parts of the speech, in my opinion.

Much of the speech addresses the crucial question of the so-called "security dilemma", a key concept in international relations theory whereby one country's efforts to make itself safer almost inevitably make others feel less safe, triggering a spiral where everyone ends up more insecure.

As Chan Chun Sing puts it in his speech: "The true test of statecraft is this: how do we strengthen our own security without weakening the security of others, or without aggravating the insecurity of others?"

He says there are "three fundamental principles worth bearing in mind" in this regard, but that, first and foremost, it raises the question of "what 'winning' means": to him, defining "winning" as "outgunning or outlasting a rival" isn't sensible, it ought to be defined as winning others through the "power of our example", rather than "the example of our power."

It's extremely wise, when you think about it: do you actually "win" if you submit others by force, or do you merely prove that, for now, they simply lack the strength to resist? You've imposed your will, yes, but the principle you've imposed is that the strongest gets his way, and strength is expensive and it wanes.

Chan Chun Sing quotes Mencius, the classic Chinese philosopher, to illustrate this: "Power may compel others to comply. But in the end, it is trust that truly wins others over" (which is a trimmed version of the true original citation: "Those who subdue others by force do not win their hearts; they submit only because their own strength falls short. Those who subdue others by virtue win hearts that are glad and sincerely submissive, as the seventy disciples submitted to Confucius," 以力服人者，非心服也，力不赡也；以德服人者，中心悦而诚服也，如七十子之服孔子也。)

This is very core to Chinese strategic thinking (yes, Chan Chun Sing, as are most Singaporean leaders, is ethnically Chinese): the notion that legitimacy, not force, is the real currency of power.

A state that has to coerce is following the "hegemonic way" (badao, 霸道) - which is brittle and unsustainable. The only sustainable long-term way to lead is the so-called "kingly way" (wangdao, 王道), where others follow you and emulate you voluntarily. Two concepts which incidentally come from Mencius too: "he who uses force while borrowing the name of benevolence is a hegemon (ba); he who practises benevolence through virtue is a true king (wang)."

Concretely, Chan Chun Sing say that states should pursue the following 3 principles to apply this in practice.

First of all, he points out that too many states "externalise domestic issues" as opposed to putting their own house in order. The idea being that a leadership confident at home doesn't need foreign enemies to hold itself together, and can therefore act in its "enlightened long-term interest" abroad. Whereby an insecure one uses foreign policy "for political gain."

No prizes for guessing what country he is referring to here...

The second principle is that "interdependence breeds stability" as opposed to being "a source of vulnerability."

Which makes sense: mutual exposure turns competitors into stakeholders in each other's stability. Cut exposure in the name of "resilience" or "de-risking" and, really, the only thing you've achieved is to make confrontation and conflict cheaper.

Lastly, and this is perhaps the most important principle: "first, do no harm."

Chan Chun Sing again quotes famous Chinese sayings: "turn big problems into small ones, and small ones into nothing" (大事化小，小事化了), which is what happens when there's trust between states, versus "turn small problems into big ones, and make trouble out of nothing" (小事化大，无事生非), which is what happens when there isn't.

The idea is that every unnecessary provocation, every "freedom of navigation" stunt, every gratuitous sanction is a withdrawal from a trust account that is very expensive to fill and, as he says, can be emptied "in a single instant."

Chan Chun Sing ends his speech on what being a “responsible major country” - a key concept in contemporary Chinese international relations - means, and how, "the more responsible major powers are, the less concerned small countries will be."

Besides the above three fundamental principles, he says that "strategic patience" is also crucial, defined as: "Not every capability needs to be advertised; not every advantage needs to be immediately pressed; and not every provocation demands an immediate response."

In other words, true confidence doesn't need to prove itself and restraint is a form of strength: a great power that feels compelled to respond to everything is, in effect, letting its rivals set its agenda. And whoever needs to constantly show force is in fact projecting its own fear that without the show, nobody would believe it.

As Margaret Thatcher once brilliantly put it (I hate to quote her but this is too good): "Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't."

That's it, if you want the rest, I truly encourage you to read the full speech: pure undistilled wisdom, from a man who runs the defence of a country smaller than Los Angeles and obviously understands power far better than the man in charge of the largest military on earth. Which is its own form of tragedy.

[Iran Observer @IranObserver0]

⚡️BREAKING: 31 Million Iranians have Registered themselves for Mobilization

12.4 Million People have chosen Military Training

They will be trained to use FPV Drones, receive Sniper Training, and master Standard Weaponry such as the AK-47

Ultimately, only One Million will be Selected to form 1,000 Battalions

[🦢 @timetravellla]

@mb_ghalibaf Iran is 1 week away from producing Weapon Of MATHS Destruction

[محمدباقر قالیباف | MB Ghalibaf @mb_ghalibaf]

Straits Taylor Rule:

i = r* + π* + 1.5(π−π*) + 0.5(y−y*) + α(SOH−SOH*) + β(BEM−BEM*), α,β > 0

Let’s see if a hike could open SOH or produce a single barrel :)

You can’t 25bp a chokepoint and r* isn’t neutral. It’s SOH risk premium, and We set it.

Stay unanchored !

[JH @CRUDEOIL231]

Hands down one of the greatest dark memes I’ve seen in my entire career.

I know folks on the commodity desk already knows how this math works, but just for the broader timeline and the math-challenged folks out there...

The Taylor Rule is traditionally used to calculate a central bank’s optimal policy rate:  i = r* + p* + 1.5(p - p*) + 0.5(y - y*)

(i = nominal rate, r* = neutral rate, p* = 2% target, p - p* = inflation gap, y - y* = output gap).

Dr. Ghalibaf basically jammed two brand new variables into this classic framework, the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab-el-Mandeb.

He's flexing that global CPI and terminal rates are dictated by their maritime choke points...

Honestly crown the man Meme King already. And the wild part? He’s not even lying. Does today's Fed decision even matter in the grand scheme?

Give it a few days, and we’ll all be recalibrating the next FOMC print purely around energy prices—which ironically are being priced by Tehran and the Houthis.

The guy isn't wrong. Welcome to the new macro regime.

#oott #iran

[Sulaiman Ahmed @ShaykhSulaiman]

JUST IN: YEMEN SUPREME COUNCIL PRESIDENT RESPONDS TO ANSAR ALLAH ATTACKING MECCA CLAIMS:

“Whoever gifted the covering of the Kaaba to the criminal Epstein is the one who targets Mecca and the Islamic holy sites.”