Information is everywhere, Insight is power

From the Department of Unintended Consequences The possible endgames in Iran are starting to look like a Waffle House menu at 3am: Everything will probably give you heartburn, but booze and hunger make people optimistic. The administration is now using phrases like “degrade capability,” “strategic reset,” and “regional stabilization” for the same reason that CEOs do – use enough syllables and it’s less obvious that you’re pin-wheeling. The assumption is that if sufficient pre

Lose the Shock-Absorbers at Your Own Peril A few weeks after the attack on the US mission compound that killed US Ambassador Christopher Stevens, I was on a Turkish Air flight into Benghazi. “Qaddafi was a good ruler at first…” the doctor – a Libyan practicing in Ireland – told me, “…and the monarchy was corrupt and inefficient.” He was coming home for his brother’s funeral and thought the situation stable enough to bring his son, a restless lad of six or seven. The trouble,

If you want to look smart, be a pessimist; if you want to be rich, be an optimist.

What was supposed to be a “night in Caracas” operation to decapitate a regime has become a Mexican stand-off.

Pothole was published a year before what future historians may well mark as the start of World War III. Like the first world war, this conflict will have its aspects of jihad,

Tehran has discovered a deep vulnerability at the heart of the global order.

White House luxuriate in unpredictable chaos. Exactly what China’s current entrenched model needs to avoid.

Double whammy verdicts are barely a rounding error for Meta. The knock-ons will be worse.

Four weeks into the current war, the regime’s only hope to increase leverage on Washington is to isolate it politically and win the optics war. Which, given the unprovoked nature of the attack and the fact that all our allies hate us, shouldn’t have been too hard. Save for a glaring miscalculation.

On March 8, around the time that the Swedish navy was impounding its first Russian “shadow fleet” carrier, Britain was considering sending an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf. President Trump responded “That’s OK Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer. We don’t need people that join Wars after they’ve already Won!” Creative grammar aside, days later the White House was calling on Britain, along with France, Japan and South Korean – and China - to help the U

A Weekend Thought Experiment I was mooning around a hospital in the sunny Shi’a south of Iraq when a young doctor flagged me down and politely asked why were we - meaning Americans – there. He’d watched us invade his country twice before toppling the government and dismantling all the systems that ran the country. As far as he could tell, he gently explained, there had been no plan for after we’d blown the place up. The poor guy wasn’t even mad, he was just baffled on a cosm

“Iran doesn’t give into pressure – only a lot of pressure.”

Greenland upstages Davos. Military force is off the table, expect a trade war.

Why the White House really wants Greenland, and what is will cost you

The Oil Weapon has been fired, it didn't work...

Gunboat Diplomacy is a bad option... there aren't any good ones.

The best way to hack trust is honesty. Ironically, that means it’s not a hack.

This isn't about cocaine... it isn't really about oil.

Bitcoin had one job. It's failing. AI is here in all its hype and glory, triggering nationalism and trade wars. It. Is generating a hell of a lot of revenue and epic stock prices , but not a lot of ROI on AI investment. Build-out costs are soaring and the sector’s circular financing is nothing if not interesting. There is naturally a wall of talk about an AI bubble… but not yet. Buried in the chatter, though, is the long, quiet slide of crypto the precise moment it should h

It might be a small world after all... The most glaring feature of the post-World War II order was the free flow of money and capital across the borders of the free world increased both production and consumption to pull more people out of poverty than during human history. When the USSR collapsed, the experiment was scaled to the entire planet. By the turn of the century, communication was so open that I once got an email from London at may desk in Memphis faster than one co