Saturday, April 4, 2026

"Think Tanks Have Defeated Democracy"

The fact that think tanks and NGOs insist they are, and represent, "civil society" gives the game away, in a "The lady doth protest too much, methinks" sort of way.

From Palladium Magazine, April 2: 

As a Canadian, studying the output of American think tanks has become something of an obsession for me. For better or worse, though mostly for the better, think tanks are a foreign commodity in Canada. Sure, we have organizations like the Fraser Institute and C.D. Howe, which are our Cato Institute and Brookings Institution respectively, but they fill a narrow niche. Broadly speaking, most Canadian think tanks are little more than PO boxes with a landing page.

The austere job market for policy wonks in Canada is downstream of the country’s robust party system. Governing parties don’t need to outsource their policy development and, when they do, ideas can be supplied by ad hoc committees, commissions, and consultants that evaporate into the ether when their work is done. The parties themselves are highly member-driven. Some of my earliest memories were from the stuffy basement of our local Liberal Party headquarters where my parents volunteered. Though I barely understood what was going on, I relished the ritual of staying up past my bedtime to watch election results come in while old Anglican ladies manufactured triangular sandwiches.

American politics is a completely different beast. The framers of the U.S. Constitution had an aversion to partisan politics and so designed a system of checks and balances that grants individual elected officials enormous free agency. While transaction costs and the game theory that pulls electoral democracies towards a two party system—termed Duverger’s law—made parties an inevitability, progressive anti-patronage reforms and the move to primary elections have long since eroded the social base for thick, membership-driven political parties and the efficient party machines which excelled at delivering votes for politicians. .

Modern U.S. think tanks, and the broader nonprofit advocacy world, emerged in their place. Ostensibly nonpartisan organizations such as the Center for American Progress and the American Enterprise Institute serve as holding tanks and convening spaces for Democratic and Republican functionaries while they are in and out of power. Yet because the parties themselves contain internal factions, the establishment’s grip on power is contingent on the makeup of Congress and the stochastic process behind party nominations. Given tight staff budgets, lawmakers outsource their legislative, communications, and networking strategies to whichever policy outfit overlaps with their political philosophy and electoral base. This ideas industry allows movement conservatives to turn to the Heritage Foundation, trade unionists to the Economic Policy Institute, libertarians to the Cato Institute, and so on.

Other countries’ political parties outsource to independent think tanks too, but usually within the context of a formal parliamentary relationship. The Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Germany, for instance, is an independent think tank that functions as the policy organ of the center-right Christian Democratic Union. Crucially, however, over 95% of its funding comes from the German government and they have no direct intraparty competitor. Such think tanks are thus more like adjuncts to the formal party system than genuinely independent policy actors. In contrast to the U.S. policy ecosystem, policy development is therefore far more aligned to party incentives, though at the potential cost of being overly conformist and deferential to the status quo.

Associations Without Members

In recent decades, ideological self-sorting and the consolidation of power under leadership has made Congress look and act more like a parliament. Yet without the complementary institutions that make parliaments work, it’s a tenuous equilibrium at best. The national parties, to the extent they still exist, are largely lifestyle brands attached to fundraising funnels. Unlike in actual parliamentary democracies, lawmakers have no direct obligation to vote with their party. Votes must instead be whipped through horse-trading and indirect sanctions, such as the denial of powerful committee assignments or the withdrawal of support on re-election campaigns.

The nonprofit advocacy world helps grease the wheel of party cohesion by mobilizing activists, lobbyists, pollsters, and grassroots outreach whenever a big vote is afoot. These are what Matthew Yglesias refers to as “the groups.” While the number of such organizations may appear large and unruly, they typically derive core funding from a countable number of upstream foundations or philanthropists. 

Funders are drawn from a similar social class on both the left and right, and are close enough to Dunbar’s number within any given area to enable interpersonal forms of coordination i.e. the sorts of communicative action governed by trust, reputation, and conformity to shared norms. Yet given the insulation of funders and advocates from electoral imperatives, there is nothing to prevent them from self-organizing around the sorts of self-defeating policy platforms that make pollsters like David Shor cringe. On the contrary: without the moderating forces of intraparty bargaining within a consolidated party superstructure, ideological clichés become the only viable Schelling point around which to organize collective action....

....MUCH MORE 

Also at Palladium, March 28:

How the Kurdish Offensive in Iran Unraveled

"Among the Private Spies: ‘The name’s Steele, Christopher Steele.’"

From Vadim Nikitin at the London Review of Books, Vol. 48 No. 6 · 2 April 2026:

Unredacted: Russia, Trump and the Fight for Democracy 
by Christopher Steele.
Mariner, 336 pp., £24, October 2024, 978 0 06 337343 3

‘The name’s Steele, Christopher Steele.’ That’s the way a former MI6 operative who wrote the notorious dossier alleging collusion between Trump and Putin introduced himself at a debate at the Cambridge Union last October. ‘And as you can see, sir,’ he told the union president to giggles from the audience, ‘tonight I’ve come dressed in my usual work clothes: black dinner jacket and the signature James Bond Omega watch.’

Less than a week later, Steele was denounced as a ‘reputation-mauler for hire’ and faced the prospect of ruinous legal action over allegedly feeding an MP knowingly false claims that a British businessman was a Kremlin agent. His investigations business, Orbis, was already reeling from spending $800,000 to see off a lawsuit from the US president over the dossier, and had recently suffered a huge exodus of staff. But that evening, Steele was determined to have fun. Reminiscing about his presidency of the union as a student in the 1980s, he hammed up his status as spymaster turned democratic crusader. It was an image Steele had perfected over years of largely uncritical media interviews (down to the quip about the watch), and it’s the image he presents in Unredacted, a self-exculpatory and score-settling memoir in which he represents himself as a truth-seeker standing up to a clueless cross-Atlantic establishment.

Steele was born on a UK military base in Aden and spent time as a child at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus – the base for British reconnaissance flights over Gaza, and in the news again after being attacked during the US-Israeli war on Iran – where his father worked as a climatologist for the British army. After studying social and political sciences at Cambridge, he unsuccessfully interviewed for a newspaper job and failed the civil service exam before being recruited into the secret intelligence service. Steele joined MI6’s Russia desk in 1987, just as Gorbachev was launching perestroika. Three years later, at the age of 25, he was posted to Moscow as second secretary at the British Embassy – a Foreign Office cover. The year after that, the Soviet Union collapsed. In 1993 he returned to London.

During his next posting, in Paris, Steele’s cover was blown after a list of more than a hundred MI6 agents working in embassies around the world was leaked on the internet. This public outing put paid to his career as a field agent. After his posting to Paris ended, Steele claims to have been appointed head of the MI6 Russia desk in London. By 2009, he had resigned and founded a business intelligence consultancy called Orbis with Chris Burrows, who was also on the leaked list.

In its first few years, Orbis kept a low profile in London’s crowded field of private intelligence companies. That changed in 2016 when Steele was reportedly paid $168,000 by an American firm called Fusion GPS to investigate Donald Trump, who had recently won the Republican presidential nomination. Fusion GPS was founded by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, former reporters for the Wall Street Journal who had made their careers out of delving into Russian corruption. The project was originally commissioned by a conservative news outlet, the Washington Free Beacon, but ended up being financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The result was a collection of brief reports asserting links between Trump’s team and Russia. The dossier claimed that the ‘Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years’, and that ‘he and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.’ What made the dossier infamous was its declaration that, as a result of his ‘perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB’, the Russian state security service ‘has compromised Trump through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him’. But the most damaging allegation by far concerned ‘evidence of extensive conspiracy between TRUMP’s campaign team and [the] Kremlin’ – evidence that the dossier glaringly failed to provide.

In May 2017, Robert Mueller, the former head of the FBI, was appointed special counsel to oversee the official investigation into Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election. After nearly two years of exhaustive research, the Mueller Report found no evidence that Trump and his team had engaged in conspiracy or co-ordination with Moscow to interfere with the outcome of the 2016 election. However, the investigation did establish that the Russian government ‘perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome’, and that Trump had tried to impede the investigation.

Neither Mueller’s investigation nor any other probe found evidence to support the dossier’s other key allegations: the existence of the so-called ‘pee tape’ of prostitutes supposedly hired by Trump to urinate on the bed Obama had used on a visit to Moscow; that Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen had travelled to Prague for secret briefings with Kremlin officials and hackers; that another Trump staffer had discussed sanctions relief at a meeting with Igor Sechin, the head of Russia’s state-owned oil company, Rosneft; or that Trump had somehow been ‘cultivated’ by the Russian secret services.

Nevertheless, Steele has doggedly stood by the dossier. ‘Our 2016 Trump-Russia reporting has not been “discredited”,’ he writes in Unredacted, quoting his own statement on X. ‘In fact its main tenets continue to hold up well and almost no detail has been disproven.’ But its core assertions remain contested and unproven. Such was the amount of uncorroborated and implausible information in the dossier that many experts, including the former CIA officer Daniel Hoffman and Ben Macintyre, a journalist who has written books on Russian espionage, suspected that it was itself a product of Russian disinformation.

Why was the dossier so shoddy, and why, despite this, did it command such influence? Steele’s own apparent lack of expertise may be relevant here. He makes much of his linguistic prowess, boasting of having read Anna Karenina in the original ‘in two volumes from cover to cover’, yet he has a shakier grasp of Russian than he claims. He mentions, for instance, a chance encounter with Gorbachev he says he had while serving as a junior spy in Moscow. When asked by Gorbachev, who was on his way to a meeting with John Major, what he did for a living, he claims to have answered: ‘I follow you very closely.’ Alas, the formulation he includes in the text, ‘Я следую вас очень близко,’ is a clumsily literal translation that makes little grammatical sense. One former employee of Steele’s I spoke to described his grasp of Russian as ‘tragicomic’.

These are pedantic observations. But they underscore the fact that, for all his purported expertise, Steele possesses no academic background in Russian studies, lived there continuously for just three years of a 22-year career and, by his own admission, hasn’t visited the country since 2009. Significantly, at no point in his government service is he likely to have line-managed Russian field agents to any great extent – he would have been too junior in 1990 and too senior in 2006-9. And it is field agents, whether spies or subcontractors, who provide the critical raw information that differentiates human-led intelligence from the mass of much cheaper open-source research. Others in the business intelligence sector have cast doubt on Steele’s analytic abilities – a shortcoming that may have led him to place unjustified trust in unverified reports from his sources. ‘He’s very bad at distinguishing truth from fiction,’ one industry figure told me. ‘That’s why we didn’t hire him.’

Beyond​ the question of Steele’s competence, the structure of the business intelligence sector shares the blame for the dossier’s deficiencies. Steele frequently writes about the ‘collectors’ or ‘head agents’ whom Orbis hires to conduct its research. Such labels deliberately evoke the hard glamour of spycraft. In fact, these ‘collectors’ are simply subcontractors who, in turn, often pay their own sources for relevant information, which becomes ever more corrupted as it travels down the line. Many firms are founded by former spies, but few subcontractors are former intelligence agents, and those who claim to be are treated with suspicion. Some collectors run their own small firms, creating yet another layer of subcontractors.

At the business intelligence companies where I worked for several years, our subs tended to be bilingual ‘knowledge workers’ from think tanks and NGOs, freelance journalists, PhD students or former PhD students: in other words, those inhabiting the no man’s land between academia and the ‘real world’, between Russia and the West, between youth and adulthood, between journalism and being a gun for hire. They are often highly educated people who for one reason or another have left the paths followed by their friends and university roommates: from the Gubkin University of Oil and Gas to Gazprom, from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations to parliamentary aide or second secretary at a Russian embassy, from the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics to an oligarch-owned tech company. Since the banning of the late Alexei Navalny’s opposition network, many of his former activists, dispersed across Eastern Europe and needing to make a living, have become collectors.

What does the job mean in practice? As soon as a client’s project is taken on, often involving the investigation of a commercial rival, we start calling round the subs to see who has the relevant expertise and capacity. Usually, they receive about a fifth of the amount the company charges to the client. For routine projects, that’s between £2000 and £4000. For that sum, the sub is expected to deliver preferably verbatim commentary from between five and ten sources – known as human intelligence or HUMINT – alongside public records research, such as obtaining court filings and cadastral records.

What happens next varies from sub to sub but tends to involve the following. The sub rings up their contacts – friends, family members, former colleagues, ex or would-be lovers – and potentially offers them a cut of the fee if they or someone they know can say something about the subject of the investigation. Sometimes, the sub uses their income to keep a few people on retainer. Then it’s a race against time for the sub to secure the requisite number of source comments within the usual two to three-week deadline. Because they are generally paid per source, subs are incentivised to pass along all commentary, including things they suspect to be hearsay or even false. The most diligent compensate for shoddy content with detailed caveats. But many do not.

No subcontractor willingly reveals the identities of their primary sources to the analyst at the firm, who in turn often conceals the existence of the subcontractors to the client (though it is an open secret that business intelligence consultants do not usually conduct their own primary source work). The commentary found in business intelligence reports is thus several degrees removed from its original source, which is, in any case, unknowable to the commissioning analyst, just as it is to the client. All this makes such intelligence essentially unverifiable.

When I commissioned a sub to conduct source inquiries, I could never be entirely sure that they hadn’t at least partly made them up. The best way to guard against this is to triangulate the research from several different subs and sense-check it through extensive research in public records. In practice, however, deadlines and budgets are almost always too tight to allow such fastidiousness. It’s sometimes possible to spot signs of sloppiness or subterfuge: one sub became notorious for lifting ‘intelligence’ wholesale from Facebook walls; another would procure quotes from supposedly well-placed sources which, after some research, were more often than not found to resemble parts of articles published in local papers.

But even the most reliable subs aren’t above massaging or padding out their reports, sometimes as a consequence of unreasonable demands by clients. One of our clients once insisted on a minimum of ten sources in a highly complex and urgent report. Against the odds, my sub delivered the work, to the client’s great satisfaction. Months later, he confessed that while all the quotes were real, he had spoken to only four sources and ‘cloned’ the rest to comply with the request. I kept this information to myself.

‘The team at Orbis,’ Steele writes, ‘had acquired – and retains – reliable direct access to Russian sources, allowing us to illuminate the workings of Vladimir Putin’s autocratic and closed regime.’ In reality, for the dossier Steele relied primarily on a single sub, a Russian-American researcher called Igor Danchenko. Before joining Orbis, Danchenko had worked as a senior research analyst at the Brookings Institution, where he distinguished himself by uncovering signs of plagiarism in Putin’s university dissertation in economic science. A lawyer by training, Danchenko is an expert in Russian energy politics and came to Steele highly recommended by Fiona Hill, once Trump’s Russia adviser and now the chancellor of Durham University.

It’s surprising that I had never met Danchenko. We both come from remote Russian cities (Murmansk for me, Perm for him) and served time as researchers at Washington DC think tanks in the 2000s before stumbling into business intelligence, mainly for lack of better options. Iggy, as he is widely known, has worked with several of my former colleagues in London and the US. They praised his diligence and were horrified by the toll the dossier had taken on his life: unmasked by an anonymous blogger in 2017, he was later charged with lying about his sources to the FBI but was eventually acquitted in October 2022. The ordeal left him financially broken and all but unemployable.

Steele ‘supported me after I won’, Danchenko told me. ‘But before that, I was alone. Nobody stood by me, apart from my wife and literally two friends.’ Steele had broken off contact once the dossier was published. ‘My wife thinks that he could have found a way to pass on a small message, to say “Take care, man,” just to do a human thing,’ Danchenko said. ‘But he acted like a true spy. He broke all communication. So as not to expose anyone. And so did I.’ Danchenko spent nearly five hours talking to me on the phone. He spoke in eloquent and profanity-leavened Russian, only occasionally segueing into mildly accented English. He struck me as thoughtful and idealistic, with scabrous humour and a strong sense of personal morality. Describing himself as a ‘typical masochist’ who relishes his ability to endure pressure, Danchenko quoted Joseph Brodsky and Eduard Limonov, invoked the Russian international relations scholar Alexei Bogaturov, recited the lyrics to a song by Grazhdanskaya Oborona, the USSR’s first psychedelic punk band, and riffed on Chomsky’s notion of universal grammar. Although he is not a drinker, talking to Danchenko in the early hours I felt like I was trapped in Venedikt Yerofeyev’s alcoholic fever dream Moskva-Petushki. There was something anachronistic about him, the aura of a Soviet-era intelligent from a previous generation.

By the time Steele asked him to unearth kompromat on Trump, Danchenko had completed, on his estimate, at least a hundred reports for Orbis. Most comprised open-source research for innocuous assignments relating to risk analysis or pre-transactional due diligence, but many also involved HUMINT. Although he had little experience in such a high-profile matter, he took on the job of investigating a US presidential candidate just as he would any other assignment, and wasn’t paid a special rate for it....

....MUCH MORE 

 Long-time readers might recall our thoughts upon reading the Dossier, January 13, 2017, three days after BuzzFeed broke the story and a week before Trump's inauguration: 

More Just as importantly, after reading the schlocky, amateur, borderline retarded "35 pages" thing, how could anyone ever again justify paying Orbis Business Intelligence actual money for anything they produce?
 

"Berkshire and Travelers Bring More Insurance Muscle to Hormuz Strait Plan"

From Barron's April 3:

Several big-name firms joined the U.S.’s reinsurance plan aimed at limiting losses to shippers who transport oil and other cargo through the Strait of Hormuz. As a result, any losses will be insured up to $40 billion, double the original amount announced in March.

Travelers, Liberty Mutual, Berkshire Hathaway,, Starr, and CNA have partnered with the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation to insure eligible vessels for damage to their hulls and cargo, as well as for liability involving injuries to people or other property.

The added coverage includes new protection specifically related to wartime conditions in the form of war hull risk insurance, protection and indemnity, and cargo insurance. This additional insurance wasn’t included in the original announcement.

“This public-private partnership brings stability to maritime trade at a critical moment,” Travelers CEO Alan Schnitzer said.

Chubb, which was the first insurer to join the program on March 11, will insure $20 billion of the losses along with the new partners. The DFC will insure the rest. Chubb will be the lead underwriter managing all claims. It will also “determine pricing and terms, assume risk, and issue policies for eligible vessels and cargo,” the DFC said.

Notably missing from the announcement is what makes boats eligible for coverage. What’s more, the program hasn’t yet commenced. The DFC said that an application portal will open soon....

....MUCH MORE 

When Chocolate Was A Lenten Dilemma

From History Today,Volume 72 Issue 3 March 2022:

The Theology of Chocolate
The introduction of chocolate to the Catholic world caused a dilemma: could it be eaten? Should it be given up for Lent?

Many Christians, and even post-Christians, give up chocolate for Lent. This self-denying act now sometimes seems to be simply part of a calendar of occasions for virtuous abstention: as with ‘dry January’, we do it because it is good for us. But the original theory behind the Lenten fast is that it helps those who undertake it identify with Jesus. After all, Lent originally commemorates the 40 days Christ spent in the wilderness before his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. 

In fact, the relationship between chocolate and the Lenten fast has been complex and fascinating, at least within Christianity’s Catholic tradition. Chocolate’s history is an important part of the story of early modern globalisation and the Catholic Church’s response to it, therefore, reveals much about how it adapted to a fast-changing world. 

Chocolate has a history but, for Catholics, it also has a theology. Long and learned treatises were written about whether it was licit to consume it – and when. Part of the issue was that the original Spaniards who travelled to the Americas quickly associated the drinking of chocolate with Aztec religious rituals. The Aztecs told those Spaniards that they valued the chocolate mixture they brewed not only as a source of nutrition but also as a sacred, even mystical, elixir, which altered body and spirit. The cacao pod was a gift from the gods, they declared, to be associated with the human heart and depicted as bleeding. Many Maya and Mixtec images of human sacrificial victims show those victims as anthropomorphic cacao pods. 

Such ideas and images hardly endeared chocolate to the first friars who crossed the Atlantic to convert indigenous peoples to Christianity. Some wondered whether it could be appropriate for Christians to drink something so intimately associated with idolatry and ritual murder? Others, on the other hand, saw chocolate’s potential as a substitute in indigenous communities for another sacred but more scarce liquid: wine. The Franciscan friar Toribio de Benavente (d.1569) wrote approvingly of a local custom in the Mexican town of Tlaxcala where ‘on the feast of All Souls in nearly all the Indian towns, many offerings are made for the dead. Some offer corn, others blankets, others food, bread, chickens and in place of wine they offer chocolate.’....

....MUCH MORE 

For some (there are many) of our non-theological posts see also:

https://climateerinvest.blogspot.com/search?q=cocoa

where you will find Warren Buffet and Chocfinger and Fat Marvin and Chinese communists and... 

Friday, April 3, 2026

Your Mission: "place all major technological innovations in history on a timeline, together with the connections between them"

So, a mashup of Diderot, he of the Encyclopédie and James Burke who brought us Connections.*

That's rather ambitious; 

From Asterisk Magazine, Issue 10:

The Universal Tech Tree
Étienne Fortier-Dubois

When we try and pick out any technology in isolation, we find it hitched, in some way, to every innovation that preceded it. (Except for the Oldowan hand axe. We had to start somewhere.)

What do firearms and cameras have in common? One answer is shared vocabulary: load, aim, shoot. The etymological origins of this relatedness are murky. People likely borrowed language about firearms — which are over 500 years older than photography — to talk about cameras, which are operated in a similar manner.  But in the case of the movie camera, the connection is concrete.

The first movie camera is generally considered to be the kinetograph, invented in 1891 by Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Dickson, an inventor at the Edison lab. Two years earlier, Edison had travelled to Paris to the Exposition Universelle of 1889, a world’s fair, to showcase his company’s phonograph. There, he met with Étienne-Jules Marey, a French scientist who had begun his career studying blood circulation, and who had developed an interest in chronophotography partly out of his work on physiology. Chronophotography consists of taking multiple photographs in quick succession to capture movement. 

A famous early achievement of the technique is The Horse in Motion, a series of photographs taken by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878 that proved something Marey had asserted years earlier: For a brief moment in gallop, a horse has all four hooves off the ground. Encouraged by Muybridge, Marey developed an improved device to take chronophotographs. The resulting design, the “photographic gun,” featured a long barrel derived from existing firearms. We don’t know what transpired between Marey and Edison, but it seems likely that Marey’s design inspired the kinetograph. Coincidentally (or not), the Online Etymology Dictionary’s entry for “shoot” claims “the meaning ‘to photograph’ (especially a movie) is from 1890” — around the time of the kinetograph’s invention.

Marey himself had been inspired by the invention of another Frenchman, the astronomer Pierre Janssen. In 1874, hoping to capture images of the transit of Venus, Janssen created a device he called the “photographic revolver.” It looked like a large telescope. Inside, it hosted a complex camera that used a revolving apparatus to take several images in quick succession. The resulting eight seconds of the black dot of Venus moving across the sun disk are often recognized as the first motion picture in history. 1

Prior to Jansenn’s invention, revolving components had not been used in photography or astronomy. They came from the Colt Paterson revolver, a handgun popular in the U.S. since its mid-19th century creation by Samuel Colt. Thus, we can reconstruct a genealogical succession of ideas: Colt inspired Janssen, who inspired Marey, who likely inspired Edison (who then inspired the Lumière brothers and further developments in filmmaking). 

We can go further back still. Colt improved the revolver and made its mass production commercially viable, but he did not invent it. Nor was it a particularly recent development: Guns with a revolving barrel have existed since the 16th century. A German revolver dates from 1597, but there are even older specimens. The xun lei chong, a Chinese revolving musket, also dates from this period.

It makes sense: The 1500s were a time of great innovation in firing mechanisms for muskets and arquebuses, with developments like the wheellock (which used a spinning metal wheel against pyrite to create sparks), snaplock (which struck flint against steel using a spring-loaded arm), and flintlock (which improved on the snaplock with a combined hammer-flint holder). Volley guns made of multiple cannons existed in England since at least the 1330s. These were descendants, in turn, of simpler cannons that stem from the invention of gunpowder in China in the 800s. It stands to reason that eventually someone in Europe would think of making a spinning mechanism to allow a weapon to fire multiple shots in quick succession. 

And yet, if you’re anything like me, most of what you just read was probably surprising. We don’t typically associate revolvers with the 1500s, or, for that matter, with movie cameras. 

The reason I learned about this — and dozens of anecdotes around other inventions — is that I have been working on a quixotic project to place all major technological innovations in history on a timeline, together with the connections between them. The goal is to situate stories like that of the revolver and camera in their historical context, notice patterns, and understand the logic of the history of technology. The result is an interactive visualization that I call the historical tech tree....

....MUCH MORE 

On Burke:

November 2016 - "James Burke’s New Project Aims to Help us Deal with Change, Think Connectively, and Benefit from Surprise"

November 2013 -  When Storylines Intersect: China's Plenum Reforms Not Good For Australian Commodities

The first law of ecology: Everything is connected.*
-------
*The law made a small fortune for James Burke:
Connections explores an Alternative View of Change (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation.

Rather, the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting for reasons of their own (e.g., profit, curiosity, religious) motivations with no concept of the final, modern result of what either their or their contemporaries' actions finally led to. The interplay of the results of these isolated events is what drives history and innovation, and is also the main focus of the series and its sequels.

To demonstrate this view, Burke begins each episode with a particular event or innovation in the past (usually Ancient or Medieval times) and traces the path from that event through a series of seemingly unrelated connections to a fundamental and essential aspect of the modern world. For example, The Long Chain episode traces the invention of plastics from the development of the fluyt, a type of Dutch cargo ship.
Watch the full documentary now (30 episodes, each 45 minutes long)
Connections (1978)
1. The Trigger Effect details the world’s present dependence on complex technological networks through a detailed narrative of New York City and the power blackout of 1965.

2. Death in the Morning examines the standardization of precious metal with the touchstone in the ancient world.

3. Distant Voices suggests that telecommunications exist because Normans had stirrups for horse riding which in turn led them to further advancements in warfare.

4. Faith in Numbers examines the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance from the perspective of how commercialism, climate change and the Black Death influenced cultural development.

5. The Wheel of Fortune traces astrological knowledge in ancient Greek manuscripts from Baghdad’s founder, Caliph Al-Mansur, via the Muslim monastery/medical school at Gundeshapur, to the medieval Church’s need for alarm clocks (the water horologium and the verge and foliot clock).

6. Thunder in the Skies implicates the Little Ice Age (ca. 1250-1300 AD) in the invention of the chimney, as well as knitting, buttons, wainscoting, wall tapestries, wall plastering, glass windows, and the practice of privacy for sleeping and sex.

7. The Long Chain traces the invention of the Fluyt freighter in Holland in the 1500s. Voyages were insured by Edward Lloyd (Lloyd's of London) if the ships hulls were covered in pitch and tar which came from the colonies until the American Revolution in 1776.

8. Eat, Drink and Be Merry begins with plastic, the plastic credit card and the concept of credit then leaps back in time to to the Dukes of Burgundy, which was the first state to use credit
.
...MUCH MORE, although the original links to YouTube have been pulled, a bit of searching (cough*vimeo*cough) shows the vids are still on the web.

And Diderot:

May 2024 -  Work And The Encylopédie

March 2019 -  Diderot: "The Man Who Questioned Everything"

As noted in "So You Think You're Smart: The Last Person To Know Everything" the publication of Diderot's Encyclopédie probably marks “the end of an era in which a single human being was able to comprehend the totality of knowledge.” 

Combined with the "questioning everything" he was either a blast at parties or an insufferable bore.... 
*****
https://c1.staticflickr.com/4/3635/3397858623_ff8e4ce060.jpg
Anatomy of a Blogger, after Diderot’s Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné 
des sciences, des arts et des métiers by Mike Licht via flickr

"El Niño to shape 2026 Atlantic hurricane season. US landfall threat remains: Accuweather"

It's possible we'll be reading "A tale of two hurricane seasons" by the end of November. 

From the cat bond (and ILS and re/insurance and...) mavens at Artemis, March 30:

The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season will be shaped by shifting climate patterns in the Pacific, as a developing El Niño may influence and perhaps depress tropical storm formation, but a forecast from Accuweather highlights the potential for rapid intensification and warns of three to five direct storm impacts on the United States. 

Waters are already warm in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf in regions where early tropical storm formation has tended to occur, which leads Accuweather to forecast a chance of an earlier start to the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season.

As a result, “It may not take much to have tropical activity fire up around the same time that the season officially gets underway,” Accuweather explained.

Adding that, “The early part of the hurricane season is when “homegrown development” is most frequent. This can happen if a storm or front that moves across North America stalls over the Gulf, western Caribbean or western Atlantic Ocean. As it sits over warm water, it may eventually transform into a tropical depression, tropical storm or even a hurricane.

“When storms develop so close to land, it means there is less time for coastal residents to prepare for potential impacts.”

But, El Niño conditions are expected to be the main influence to the overall season in terms of hurricane and storm formation, meaning storm numbers may be around or even below historical averages, Accuweather explains.

As a result, the Accuweather early forecast for 2026 Atlantic tropical storm and hurricane activity calls for 11 to 16 named storms, with between four to seven hurricanes and two to four intensifying to become major hurricanes of Category 3 or higher.

In addition, Accuweather forecasts between three and five direct storm impacts on the United States in the 2026 hurricane season, although these could be named tropical storms or stronger.

However, they also explain that, “A direct impact to land can occur even if a storm doesn’t make landfall. It can also include tropical-storm-force winds reaching land, flooding rain from a storm just offshore, or a storm surge of at least 2 feet along the coast.”

While El Nino is expected to continue developing, some forecasts suggest it could be quite strong by later in the year, and this can depress storm formation it does not mean the season will be uneventful in human and financial impact terms. Just one storm can cause severe impacts to lives and livelihoods, as well as to insured and uninsured assets....

....MUCH MORE 

"Iran state TV warns public against disclosing officials’ hiding places"

The story is probably not related to the fact there is a solo American Air Force officer on the loose in Iran

From Iran International, April 2: 

Iranian state television has escalated its messaging by warning citizens not to reveal the locations of officials hiding among civilians, while increasingly portraying dissent as hostile action and labeling protesters “enemy combatants.”

As the regional conflict involving Iran, Israel, and the United States escalates, Iran’s state broadcaster, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), has undergone a marked transformation in tone and language.

Once associated with rigid but largely diplomatic messaging, IRIB now frequently adopts rhetoric that is overtly confrontational, reflecting both wartime pressures and an effort by authorities to project defiance amid mounting military strain.

In a segment of a program on Iran’s state broadcaster, presenter Mohammad Jafar Khosravi acknowledged that officials are hiding in safe houses among ordinary citizens and urged the public not to reveal their locations, warning that otherwise they would be “finished” and targeted.

One of the clearest examples of the belligerent rhetoric emerged in the early days of the war, when Police Commander Ahmad Reza Radan addressed unrest linked to the war. Speaking on state television, he warned that anyone protesting “at the will of the enemy” would no longer be treated as a civilian but as an “enemy combatant,” signaling a sharp escalation in how the state frames internal dissent.

Alongside this shift, dehumanizing language toward foreign adversaries has become increasingly common. Following intensified strikes in late February, IRIB hosts and commentators repeatedly described Israeli officials as “rabid dogs,” portraying them as threats that must be eliminated.

Foreign-based Persian-language outlets were also targeted, with Iran International labeled a “satanic network” and its regional offices described as “legitimate military targets.”

The rhetoric has been accompanied by a growing dismissal of international legal norms. On multiple Press TV programs in March, officials and state-aligned analysts argued that institutions such as the United Nations and international humanitarian law serve Western interests.

Some suggested that commercial vessels, banks, and private companies linked to “belligerent nations” could be treated as military targets, rejecting long-standing principles of civilian protection.

The escalation in tone extends beyond broadcast television. On social media platform X, IRIB presenters have engaged in increasingly personal exchanges with Israeli officials....

....MUCH MORE 

Iran International front page

"Officials say crewmember aboard downed US jet has been found, search continuing for the 2nd"

Lifted in toto from the Times of Israel, April 3: 

One of the American aircrew members whose fighter jet was shot down over Iran earlier today has been rescued alive, US and Israeli officials say.

“One crew member from the downed jet was rescued by American forces,” CBS News reports, citing two US officials. An Israeli official also tells media in Israel that one crew member was rescued.

Search efforts are ongoing for the second crewmember.

The Israeli official also says the Israeli Air Force postponed strikes in areas of Iran where the search efforts are taking place.

A US official confirmed earlier that a fighter jet was shot down over Iran and that a search-and-rescue operation is underway for any survivors.

Times of Israel daily liveblog:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-april-3-2026/ 

Hmmm....The Latest Update To The Atlanta Fed GDP Estimate Does Not Satisfy

This is why I was thinking about stagflation in the post immediately below:

"The End of Artificial Employment" (special bonus: what causes stagflation?) 

From the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's GDPNow, April 2: 

1.6%

Latest GDPNow Estimate for 2026:Q1
Updated: April 02, 2026 

More troubling is how we got here:

Evolution of Atlanta Fed GDPNow real GDP estimate for 2026:Q1

Quarterly percent change (SAAR) 

https://www.atlantafed.org/-/media/Project/Atlanta/FRBA/Images/cqer/research/gdpnow/gdpnow-forecast-evolution.webp?w=1996&hash=4ED8555B4DFE79F8F63BD5413CD0A415 

The commentaries for the 75 most recent GDPNow updates are below, starting with the latest estimate.

April 02, 2026

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2026 is 1.6 percent on April 2, down from 1.9 percent on April 1. After this morning’s international trade report from the US Census Bureau and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, an increase in the nowcast of first-quarter real gross private domestic investment growth from 4.9 percent to 6.6 percent was more than offset by decreases in the nowcasts of first-quarter personal consumption expenditures growth from 1.5 percent to 1.4 percent and the contribution of net exports to first-quarter real GDP growth from -0.23 percentage points to -0.76 percentage points.

....MUCH MORE 

And even more troubling, as we've observed over the years, the Atlanta Fed's model tends to run hot until it converges with the first (flash) actual GDP report.

Hmmm... 

"The End of Artificial Employment" (special bonus: what causes stagflation?)

From Mises.org, February 23:

The real scandal of our time is not that artificial intelligence is replacing human labor. The scandal is that so much of that labor was misallocated to begin with. AI is not the killer—it is the coroner.

For decades, vast portions of the workforce have been diverted away from productive enterprise into roles sustained not by consumer demand, but by the state: artificial credit, regulatory protection, state contracts, and legal coercion. Entire departments and job functions endured not because they created value, but because they were politically entrenched and institutionally shielded from market forces.

This was never sustainable. In a free market, every expense must be justified by service to the consumer. But under interventionist rule, firms become bureaucratic shells, propped up by privilege. Jobs no longer exist to produce, but to manage compliance, simulate productivity, perform DEI rituals, and coordinate ever-expanding layers of meaningless supervision.

What we’re witnessing today is not a disruption caused by AI: it is the terminal stage of the statist order. AI merely hastened the reckoning. It exposed the absurdity of arrangements that should never have existed. They are not being replaced by machines. They are being destroyed by truth.

Yet the deeper tragedy is not the liquidation of artificial jobs, it is that no real jobs are allowed to replace them. The economy is no longer permitted to reallocate labor. The state has rendered economic correction illegal.

In starting a small business, regulation and taxes strangle you before your first invoice. You cannot grow organically—compliance costs and reporting burdens scale faster than your revenues. You cannot hire freely—labor laws and credentialing barriers exclude the most productive and most willing. You cannot even work informally—licenses, audits, and fines ensure that peaceful production outside state channels is criminalized.

Meanwhile, the few mega-corporations still standing—capable of navigating the legal labyrinth—are bloated beyond reason, hemorrhaging staff they never needed but were afraid to cut. These firms are so deeply entwined with the state that they cannot function without its support, yet are simultaneously being suffocated by its mandates. The very system that once protected them is now destroying them....

....MORE 

Also at Mises Feb 23:

What Causes Stagflation? 

Mises Wire Frank Shostak

In the late 1960’s Edmund Phelps and Milton Friedman challenged the popular view that there can be a sustainable trade-off between inflation and unemployment. In fact, over time, according to Friedman, expansionary central bank policies set the platform for lower economic growth and a higher rate of inflation (i.e., stagflation). A famous case of stagflation occurred during the 1974-75 period. In March 1975, industrial production fell by nearly 13 percent year-on-year while the yearly growth rate of the consumer price index (CPI) jumped to around 12 percent.

Friedman’s Explanation of Stagflation...

On second thought, stagflation in your Easter basket may not be the special bonus I had first believed. 

"Older women set to inherit most of $54 trillion in ‘great wealth transfer’ to widowed spouses"

I wonder if the investment advisors who have been waiting twenty years for the "great transfer" understand that the great transfer will take place in two stages and that by the time the older women start passing on that the RIAs themselves will be retired?

From CNBC, March 14:

  • An estimated $54 trillion is expected to pass on to spouses during the so-called great wealth transfer, with $40 trillion of it going to women who are baby boomers or older, the research shows.
  • This is largely because the average life span for males in the U.S. is 76.5 years as of 2024, compared with 81.4 years for females.
  • Older women whose spouses have traditionally handled investments and long-term planning may want to make sure they at least know some basics, financial advisors say.

For many married women, one of the biggest financial transitions of their lives will come when it’s least welcome: after the death of their spouse.

Women, on average, live longer than men — a longevity gap that means many wives will outlive their husbands. At birth, the average life span for males in the U.S. is 76.5 years as of 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For women, that average is 81.4 years.

The gap shrinks once you reach age 65. At that point, life expectancy for men is another 18.4 years, or to age 83.4, according to the CDC data. For women, that average is 20.8 years, or age 85.8.

That difference in life span means women are expected to receive most of the spouse-to-spouse wealth that gets passed on during the so-called great wealth transfer. That’s a period between 2024 and 2048 when an estimated $124 trillion will be passed on largely by baby boomers — those born 1946 to 1964 — and older generations, according to research from Cerulli Associates.

Of that amount, an estimated $54 trillion will get passed on to widowed spouses — 95% of which will go to women, according to Cerulli Associates. And, $40 trillion of it will go to widowed women who are baby boomers or older, the research shows....

....MUCH MORE 

"One of Florence’s Oldest Families and Its 600-Year Archive"

From the New York Times Magazine, May 11, 2016:

The Corsinis kept a record detailing their every decision — and every ledger, bill and correspondence they ever produced.

“IN THE NAME OF GOD and of the Virgin Mary and all the Saints of Paradise,” the story begins, “this book belongs to Matteo di Nicholò Chorsini, and in it I, the said Matteo, will write down every thing of mine and other facts about me and my land and houses and other goods of mine.”

The year was 1362. A trader in woolen cloth, Matteo Corsini had just returned from years abroad with enough money to buy property around San Casciano, 11 miles south of Florence. From then on and for 600 years his descendants followed his example, writing down everything about themselves and preserving everything they wrote. Again and again, huge old books of accounts begin with an invocation to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then proceed to list endless incomings and outgoings, profits and losses. But mainly profits. By the 17th century the Corsinis would be among the richest families in Florence.

“At what point,” I ask Duccio Corsini, present head of the family, “did they start to think of their papers as an archive?” We are standing at the window in the grand villa that was eventually built on the land his ancestor bought and where all these papers have recently been gathered.

“From the very beginning,” he replies proudly. “It was a Florentine thing.”

In fact, all the Florentine merchant bankers of the Renaissance could be recognized, it was said, by their “ink-stained fingers.” Partly it was a matter of careful accounting, but also of passing on family identity and attitudes from one generation to the next. Up to the 17th century the papers in the Corsini archive were written by men who all bore the same half-dozen “Corsini names” — Filippo, Tommaso, Duccio, Neri, Bartolomeo, Andrea — as if they were hardly individuals but temporary representatives of an ongoing family project. 

Built in the 14th century but massively enlarged in the 16th, Villa le Corti is a half hour from Florence by winding road. The sweep of vineyards and olive groves is breathtaking, as is the view of the villa, a white stuccoed pile topped with two towers set in geometric lawns. Do not, however, expect comfort inside. When Duccio and his wife, Clotilde, moved here in 1992, the house had not been lived in for almost a century. “Because,” Duccio observes knowingly, “when you have so much it gets hard to use it all.” The couple renovated a small part of the building for themselves, transformed the cellars under the lawn into a restaurant and a shop for their wine and olive oil production and started arranging visitor attractions such as cooking lessons and wine-tasting sessions.

But the rest of the house stood empty. The decision last year to have the archive moved here from its previous home in the family’s grand palazzo in Florence was thus part of a business plan to bring the villa back to life — the papers attract a steady stream of scholars — and place it at the heart of the family enterprise. “In the end,” remarks Duccio, “it was mostly about money.”

Moving the Corsini papers was itself extremely expensive, the largest operation of its kind since Florence’s huge state archive was relocated in 1989. Four thousand feet of steel shelving had to be set up and more than 12,000 files resettled. Since the villa wasn’t in any way designed for this purpose, there is no specific entry point, nor any easily apparent order to the rooms. All the same, wherever you come in to the archive you are immediately overwhelmed by an intense awareness of paper. This is not the experience of an ordinary library where parallel lines of standardized print in neatly bound volumes seem to detach the words from the material they depend on. Here, bundle after bundle of raw papers are tied together with string and squeezed into shelves, from floor to ceiling. There is the thick sepia-toned, slightly porous paper of the 1400s and the ultrathin glossy correspondence paper of the 19th century. There are papers with elaborate watermarks, and with tiny cuts made in the 16th century to show that the surface had been disinfected against the plague. Some papers have been eaten away by silverfish; others have gotten wet and smudged. Scratchy nibs have poked holes. A name is missing. A date. At every point you are made conscious of the moment in which event was turned into document.

The near impossibility of keeping these papers in any kind of order makes you realize how dense and elusive real life is.

I arrive at Villa le Corti at 9 a.m. Clotilde orders coffee and I am soon settled down in a tepidly heated room and introduced to the archivist, Nada Bacic, originally from Croatia. As she pours espresso from a silver pot, we speak Italian, each with our foreign accents, and then set off into the past. The archive is spread through a half-dozen rooms, some little more than cubbies, others as grand as they are cold, one with a taxidermied eagle hanging from the ceiling. Stone stairs and oaken doors abound.

In the bottom left corner of the smallest room are Matteo Corsini’s “Recollections” but this is a copy, made in 1475. The difference between a merchant’s handwriting and a scrivener’s is clear enough, the one scrawled and bold, the other neat and careful. In any event, Italian calligraphy has changed so much since then that both are largely illegible to anyone who isn’t an expert. To digitize here would cost a fortune and take an age.

Opening an early tome, I stumble on the last will and testament of Cardinal Pietro Corsini who died in 1403. Written in both Latin and Italian, it fills a thick book 18 inches tall. The fine clothes he is dressed in for burial, the cardinal warns, must not be removed from his body. Two hundred gold florins are left to a monastery, on condition that the monks recognize a “solemn obligation” to say prayers for the cardinal’s soul “in perpetuity.”

After various commercial ups and downs the Corsinis consolidated their fortune in the 16th century when three brothers, Filippo, Bartolomeo and Lorenzo, simultaneously ran three merchant banks in London, Lyons and Florence. Bacic asks my help to shift a 15-foot-long bench, behind which the brothers’ correspondence is stacked in a dozen mammoth white-and-gold folders. Some of the messages are coded, substituting numbers for letters, to protect business secrets. In 1579, I read, a consignment of wool has disappeared from a ship in Lisbon. In 1583 Bartolomeo in Lyons reports being feverish and sweating through three shirts every night. “But our business in Naples is going well,” he assures Filippo in London....

....MUCH MORE

U.N. "FAO Food Price Index Rises For A Second Consecutive Month..."

From the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, April 3:

» The FAO Food Price Index* (FFPI) averaged 128.5 points in March 2026, up 3.0 points (2.4 percent) from its revised February level, marking a second consecutive month of increase. Price indices across all commodity groups—cereals, meat, dairy, vegetable oils and sugar—rose to varying degrees, reflecting not only underlying market fundamentals but also responses to higher energy prices linked to the conflict escalation in the Near East. Compared to historical levels, the FFPI stood 1.2 points (1.0 percent) above its value a year ago but remained as much as 31.7 points (19.8 percent) below the peak reached in March 2022.

» The FAO Cereal Price Index averaged 110.4 points in March, up 1.7 points (1.5 percent) from February and 0.7 points (0.6 percent) from its year-earlier level. The increase reflected higher quotations for all major cereals except rice. International wheat prices rose by 4.3 percent, supported by deteriorating crop condition ratings in the United States of America amid drought concerns and expectations of reduced plantings in Australia in response to anticipated higher fertilizer costs. These upward pressures were partly offset by generally favourable crop conditions in Europe and strong competition among exporters, underpinned by still comfortable supply levels. World maize prices increased by only 0.9 percent, as ample global availability continued to weigh on markets, despite some support from fertilizer affordability concerns ahead of northern‑hemisphere planting and indirect support from improved ethanol demand prospects linked to higher energy prices. Prices of barley and sorghum also increased. By contrast, the FAO All Rice Price Index declined by 3.0 percent in March 2026, reflecting price decreases across all major market segments, driven by a combination of harvest pressure, weaker import demand, and currency depreciations against the United States dollar.

» The FAO Vegetable Oil Price Index averaged 183.1 points in March, up 8.9 points (5.1 percent) from February and marking a third consecutive monthly increase. The index also stood 21.3 points (13.2 percent) above its level one year ago. The continued increase was driven by higher quotations across palm, soy, sunflower and rapeseed oils. International palm oil prices reached their highest level since mid-2022 and moved to a premium over soyoil, largely reflecting spillover effects from the sharp increases in crude oil prices, while lower-than-expected production estimates in Malaysia provided additional support. World soyoil prices edged up only marginally, as expectations of stronger biofuel uptake in the United States of America were partly offset by seasonally rising export supplies from South America. Meanwhile, international sunflower and rapeseed oil prices were underpinned, respectively, by lingering supply tightness in the Black Sea region and prospects of stronger feedstock demand amid substantially elevated world energy prices.

» The FAO Meat Price Index averaged 127.7 points in March, up 1.2 points (1.0 percent) from February and 9.4 points (8.0 percent) above its level a year ago. The increase was mainly driven by higher pig meat prices, alongside a modest rise in bovine meat quotations, while ovine and poultry meat prices softened. Pig meat prices surged, underpinned by rising quotations in the European Union ahead of strengthening seasonal demand. World bovine meat prices also rose, led by Brazil, where tightening cattle availability curtailed exportable supplies against the backdrop of solid global demand; this was partly offset by stable prices in Australia, supported by ample availability. By contrast, ovine meat prices declined due to increased export supplies from New Zealand, although firmer prices in Australia—supported by sustained demand in key markets—partly mitigated the decline, despite higher tariffs imposed by the United States of America and logistical constraints affecting access to the Near East markets. World poultry meat prices edged lower, reflecting weaker quotations in Brazil amid ample supplies and steady import demand, with shipments to key Near East destinations rerouted through the Red Sea.

» The FAO Dairy Price Index averaged 120.9 points, up 1.5 points (1.2 percent) in March, but remained 27.8 points (18.7 percent) below its level a year earlier. This marked the first increase since July 2025, driven primarily by higher quotations for skim milk powder (SMP), butter, and whole milk powder (WMP), while lower international cheese prices limited the overall rise. SMP and WMP prices extended the upward trend observed since January, supported by firm global import demand and a seasonal decline in milk supplies in Oceania as the production cycle moved past its peak.  International butter prices also edged up, with stronger gains in Oceania reflecting tightening milk fat availability, while increases in the European Union remained moderate due to comfortable cream supplies amid improving seasonal milk flows. By contrast, cheese prices declined further in the European Union, where increased milk availability, higher cheese output, and subdued export demand weighed on quotations, while prices in Oceania firmed, supported by tighter supply conditions and relatively strong demand....

....MUCH MORE 

Thursday, April 2, 2026

"Iran and Oman drafting protocol to ‘monitor’ Hormuz Strait traffic: IRNA"

From CNBC, Apr 2:

  • Iran and Oman are drafting a protocol to “monitor transit” through the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian state news agency IRNA reported.
  • Tanker traffic through the key global oil transit route “should be supervised and coordinated” with the two countries, said Iranian official Kazem Gharibabadi, according to the report.
  • U.S. stock indexes, which were trading sharply lower after President Donald Trump’s national address on the Iran war, suddenly turned higher following the report. 

Iran and Oman are drafting a protocol to “monitor transit” through the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian state news agency IRNA reported Thursday morning, citing an official.

Tanker traffic through the key oil-shipping route “should be supervised and coordinated” with the two countries, said Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister of legal and international affairs, according to a translation of IRNA’s report.

“Of course, these requirements will not mean restrictions, but rather to facilitate and ensure safe passage and provide better services to ships that pass through this route,” Gharibabadi reportedly said.

U.S. stock indexes, which were trading sharply lower Thursday morning after President Donald Trump signaled that the Iran war will continue for weeks to come, suddenly turned higher following IRNA’s report....

....MUCH MORE 

"Bypass the Strait of Hormuz with nuclear explosives? The US studied that in Panama and Colombia in the 1960s"

The Gingrich story dropped out of one of the feedreaders in mid-March and my first thought was "How very Soviet."*

From The Conversation, April 2:

With the world struggling to get oil supplies moving from the Middle East, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich raised eyebrows with a social media post highlighting a radical idea: Use nuclear bombs to cut a new channel along a route that would avoid Iranian threats in the Strait of Hormuz.

Gingrich’s March 15, 2026, post linked to an article that labeled itself as satire. Gingrich has not clarified whether his endorsement was serious. But he is old enough to remember when ideas like this were not only taken seriously but actually pursued by the U.S. and Soviet governments.

As I discuss in my book, “Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal,” the U.S. version of this project ended in 1977. At the time, Gingrich was launching his political career after working as a history and environmental studies professor.

Improving global trade and geopolitical influence 
The idea for a new canal to move oil from the Middle East had emerged two decades earlier, in the context of another Middle East conflict, the Suez crisis. In 1956, Egypt seized the Suez Canal from British and French control. The canal’s prolonged closure caused the price of oil, tea and other commodities to spike for European consumers, who depended on the shipping shortcut for goods from Asia.

But what if nuclear energy could be harnessed to cut an alternative canal through “friendly territory”? That was the question asked by Edward Teller, the principal architect of the hydrogen bomb, and his fellow physicists at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, California.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration had already begun promoting atomic energy to generate electricity and to power submarines. After the Suez crisis, the U.S. government expanded plans to harness “atoms for peace.” 

Project Plowshare advocates, led by Teller, sought to use what they called “peaceful nuclear explosions” to reduce the costs of large-scale earthmoving projects and to promote national security. They envisioned a world in which nuclear explosives could help extract natural gas from underground reservoirs and build new canals, harbors and mountainside roads, with minimal radioactive effects.

To kick-start the program, Teller wanted to create an instant harbor by burying, and then detonating, five thermonuclear bombs in an Indigenous village in coastal northwestern Alaska. The plan, known as Project Chariot, generated intense debate, as well as a pioneering environmental study of Arctic food webs.

Teller and the Livermore physicists also worked with the Army Corps of Engineers to study the possibility of using nuclear explosions to build another waterway in Panama. Fearing that the aging Panama Canal and its narrow locks would soon be rendered obsolete, U.S. officials had called for building a wider, deeper channel that wouldn’t require any locks to raise and lower the ships along its route.....

....MUCH MORE 

Much less exciting via al-Arabiya, April 2:

"Gulf states considering new pipelines to avoid Strait of Hormuz: Report"  

*And the communists? As noted introducing June 2020's Big Time Logistics: "Novatek orders the world’s largest floating LNG storage unit for transshipment of Arctic gas"

There's something almost Soviet about the size of these infrastructure investments:
"Boris, do you really think you can reverse the flow of the giant rivers that flow to the Arctic?"
"Da"
[didn't happen, lot of planning, little action]

"Boris, are you really going to create reservoirs with nuclear explosions?"
"Da"
[happened*]

*****

*From Knowledge Stew:

....The USSR’s PNE Program
The USSR conducted 124 PNEs from 1965 to 1989. Their program was called Peaceful Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy and was also known as Project 7. The first PNE was conducted by the USSR in 1965 and was also the largest PNE by either country.

The site was at the Chagan nuclear test site in Kazakhstan and was 140 kilotons. By comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons. The Soviets wanted to know if it was possible to create an artificial reservoir using a PNE. They placed the nuclear device deep in the ground under a dry portion of the Chagan River, and the blast made a crater 100 meters deep (328 feet) and 400 meters across (1,312 feet). The lip height of the newly formed crated was between 20 and 38 meters (65 to 124 feet). Some nuclear material was detected over Japan, and since the test happened before the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty, the United States questioned whether the USSR had violated the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

The crater became a lake because of a channel that had been carved to the area before the test had taken place, but the radioactive levels of the water in the newly formed lake were found to be almost 100 times that of standard water levels more than 25 years later. That is why the reservoir has sometimes been dubbed, the “Atomic Lake.”....MUCH MORE 

And Stalin's dream of nuclear powered trains. Here's one version of the story:

Forgotten Russian projects 1950-60: a panorama from the cockpit of a nuclear locomotive and a flying ekranoplan with a hovercraft effect.

And a couple others that have slipped my mind but yeah, very Soviet, Comrade Gingrich. 

"The stock market has trust issues right now"

Same. 

From Yahoo Finance, April 2:

In normal times it's hard to know who to believe. The stock market tends to go up in the long run, but its gyrations and rhythms on shorter time scales are a mystery, even to the podcasters and YouTubing chart analysts who say otherwise.

Wartime complicates everything, and the ripples of expensive oil mean that every headline has the power to whipsaw the market.

An eager market has proven itself primed to turn on every new detail from the White House, even as investors and analysts remain skeptical of what President Trump says and the administration's timelines for a conclusion.

Even people outside the finance world are familiar with the TACO ("Trump Always Chickens Out") trade, where Trump boldly proclaims something only to back down. (Though it sounds pejorative, the phrase has been co-opted by apolitical Wall Street analysts as a trading framework.) The market has tried to get ahead of all of that by pricing in the president's anticipated reversal.

But in the Iran war, Tehran has a vote too.

This is perhaps one of the strangest things in the current environment: A key source of market-moving information — Iran itself — is also the US adversary. It takes two to tango, and two to open the Strait of Hormuz. Thanks to social media, we can now read their metaphorical newspaper from here, propaganda or fact, to get a sense of their willingness to do so.

On Wednesday, the Iranian president even published a message to the American people, defending its position directly.

Recently, Iran's parliament speaker, Mohammad Ghalibaf, has been getting in on the stock action, using his X account to dole out investment advice and counter Washington's efforts to steer market sentiment. It's a new kind of geopolitical trolling and social media warfare that's also inflected with finance influencer lingo.

"Out-of-context quotes + manufactured FOMO = War profiteering 101. Do Your Own Research," Ghalibaf wrote in a post Wednesday....

....MORE 

 Ancient Persian investing advice.