Humpty Dumpty: "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less," is now official US foreign policy
06.03.2026 20:15
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Humpty Dumpty: "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less," is now official US foreign policy
THE SPICE MUST FLOW
The Trump bailout for the Oil tankers is here, reports FT
"US Development Finance Corporation to create $20bn reinsurance facility for Gulf shipping"
www.ft.com/content/d1d6...
Evergreen:
danieldrezner.substack.com/p/american-f...
Russia is giving Iran intel to target U.S. forces, officials say (Washington Post headline)
And we move closer to WW3 with some tit for tat (US provided UKR with intel during Biden admin). Recall the Spanish civil war (much DEU/ITL help for Franco) and JPN-China (US Navy helped the KMT during the 1930s)
wall street journal headline: The Trillions of Dollars of U.S. Investment at Stake in the Gulf Turmoil in the region stands to upset an increasingly profound economic relationship with the U.S.
Last year, the richest countries in the Persian Gulf pledged to pump trillions of dollars of investment into the U.S. in a bid to charm President Trump and strengthen ties. Today that warm financial embrace is suddenly under stress. “Who gave you the authority to drag our region into a war?” prominent Dubai businessman Khalaf Al Habtoor asked Trump in a post on X Thursday. The president, he said, placed the Gulf states “at the heart of a danger they did not choose.”
how is it that so many smart (?) people forget (ignore) that not only does 🌮 destroy everything he touches but also that this is doubly true for his business partners. surprised pikachu face...
WSJ 06Mar26
a chart of the brent crude oil price going from $71 pre-war to $91.45 as of 6 march 2026 10h00 US EST
Brent crude up 28% (USD20/bbl absolutely) vs pre-war.
not yet in Russia-Ukraine 2022 territory (c. 50% to $130/bbl).
but of course Iran has not yet targeted (or more likely hit) key facilities aside from the Qatar LNG terminal. unlike RU-UKR the pressure on food supplies/prices is indirect.
So concerned while ignoring the massive run off of fertilizer and cowshit …
Waiting for typhus and cholera to show up.
Anyway, 1136 cases as of last week (CDC has not done its usual update for this week). Still on track to triple last year’s case load (or more)
You can’t run a country or institution on the principle of no consequences for anyone, anytime, anywhere when they break the rules.
Thread on the “shadow fiscal system” of the state - the underlying papers are great.
The Trump administration's plans to use the Development Finance Corporation to insure oil tankers in the Gulf to the tune of 350bn dollars has again drawn attention to how states try to respond to emergencies when they are subject to fiscal constraints. A 🧵
www.ft.com/content/6dde...
More pointedly: adding in FICA (social security/medicare), & state/local property, sales, and income taxes -> that the total tax burden in the US is basically flat across the income distribution these days (ie tax share ≈ income share & tax rate is flat 20th-95th %
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progres...
i'm not a "things were better in the past" boomer (despite writing about endogenous decay of schumpeterian growth waves) but it's a real challenge these days to maintain some semblance of optimism. not surprised though that the venn diagram here (feet, AI, MAGA) runs to 1m people (i.e. men)
No.
A legacy of USA historically being a food exporter (and even today most food imports are from proximate sources). UK imperial planners were never sanguine about reliance on imports for 40-50% of total caloric intake after roughly 1880. Also it’s the global poor who get priced out.
Lest you think i exaggerate:
bsky.app/profile/phil...
Don’t worry, they have concepts of a plan. I’m sure as soon as they finish up fixing US healthcare and then the ‘affordability’ (= income inequality) problem they’ll get right on this. But first, a little posting on Truth Social and preening for Fox News.
Hey that’s about the cost of the SSI Restoration Act, which would cut recipient poverty by 60%, eliminate marriage penalties, and modernize draconian asset limits.
this is your Republican Party, folks. sexual predators, pedophiles, nazis.
The purpose of a system is what it produces.
That said, the denominator is large here - about 67,000 in concentration camps. Not that that # is in anyway reassuring.
I’m sure the administration planned for this, just like they mapped out evacuation plans for USAians in the gulf region, and an endgame/goal for the war. Right?
@jennifer-clapp.bsky.social
War will be short because both sides will run out of munitions, particularly interceptors (US, ISR) and anything larger than a shahed drone (Iran)
@palmapolyak.bsky.social ’s work on EU battery policy is electrifying! No, seriously it is the best stuff you can read on this sector.
And when we run out of munitions we will… we will… we will do more push ups! and cow the surviving Iranian regime into submission bc of our amazing biceps!
1 Practically, any large-scale materiel sent to Iran is visible and strikeable by US military
2 US is burning thru its munitions stockpile w/ no replenishment capacity bc production base is limited and ramp-up difficult
= 3 strategic patience
PRC is helping Russia so a mixed message
#empiresuicidewatch 107
The 800 or so offshore US military bases globally are governed by Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) between US and host (as in Greenland, eg). But sure, let’s just set them on fire also. #25A
To all those colleague who told me repeatedly over the past year that Europe would never, ever move towards any sort of stand-alone military alliance or nuclear capacity--a reminder that we all need to unleash our political imaginations to even begin to grasp the world we live in today.
important to recall that TV broadcasters don’t usually write their own scripts so it’s not surprising that handing DoD (aka DoW) to a 2nd rate TV personality might mean some lack of attention to details besides hair and push ups
Not even a concept of a plan…
The social network analytics developed to target folks with ads were originally developed to target folks with drones. But anyway, what happens in the empire…