Team Fat Tire

05/05/2026

Americans with the highest trust in educators are twice as likely to (falsely) believe that Europeans introduced the concept of war and conflict to Native Americans.

(see graph below)

05/04/2026

03/27/2026

03/02/2026

Chicago has a public school with space for 912 kids, yet only 28 students are enrolled.

The school is 97% empty.

It spends $93,787 per student.

It's staff to student ratio is 1:1.

ZERO of the kids are proficient in reading.

03/02/2026

Drones are easy to make, hard to stop, and bring Mutually Assured Destruction to conventional warfare.

03/01/2026

The arguments about Iran are so polarised that no one wants to admit that several things are true at once:

You'd be a fool not to have serious reservations about the idea of a regime change war, especially in the Middle East.

You'd also be a fool to allow terrorist-funding lunatics to develop nuclear weapons.

Neither the people condemning these strikes, nor the people cheering them on know how this is going to work out.

So far, Trump Administration interventions have been extraordinarily successful in achieving valid objectives within a highly limited scope.

The strikes on Iran during the 12 day war achieved destruction of several nuclear facilities.

The Venezuela operation decapitated the hostile regime and replaced Maduro with a non-hostile leader.

Both also achieved significant "don't f**k with us" deterrence globally.

However, it is not remotely clear at this moment in time whether something similar can be achieved in Iran.

I understand and fully empathise with the people who think regime change is not going to work in Iran and you'll end up with the same as what you had or worse.

And I understand just as much the people who celebrate an evil dictator being killed and Iran's nuclear and military assets being degraded further.

The thing we do not know, and the thing that will determine whether this has all been worth it, is what the future leadership of Iran will look like. This seems to me to be the biggest risk Donald Trump has taken at any time in his first or second term. If it pays off, the reward both domestically and globally will be huge. If it doesn't and things go south, it could derail his Presidency and define his legacy like Iraq did for Blair and Bush.

Very few people have any idea which of these scenarios is more likely and one thing is for sure: none of them are talking about it on social media because they're all sitting in command bunkers, not on X.

I hope the people of Iran are released from living under tyranny. I hope the peoples of the Middle East can live in peace.
I hope the takeaway for any would-be terrorist is the realisation that October 7 might not have been such a good idea.
I hope that with the Middle East stabilised, the US can turn its attentions to the theatres that really matters to the security of the West: Russia and China.

Whether any of that happens remains to be seen and it seems the hardest thing for anyone to do is to not express an opinion before the smoke has cleared.

Politically Non-Binary Satirist Podcast: Speaking: [email protected] Media: [email protected] Book: https://t.co/GgTCJ7iPE8

03/01/2026

What a week!

03/01/2026

How can the Strait of Hormuz be "closed?"

No country “owns” the Strait of Hormuz, it's an international waterway governed by international law.

But, it can still be effectively closed.

Ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz purchase war-risk insurance, which protects the shipping companies from the costs of being attacked.

If insurers refuse coverage and ships stop sailing, oil flows effectively stop even if the waterway technically remains "open."

We've already seen two vessels targeted near the Strait of Hormuz today, with insurance costs skyrocketing.

Currently, war-risk premiums are rising by 50%+ amid the war between Iran, Israel, and the US.

Insurance costs for a $100M oil tanker have jumped from ~$250,000 to ~$375,000 per voyage.

Keep watching insurance costs.

03/01/2026

Interesting

02/22/2026

Wild how ChatGPT actually sees the world:

- All conservatives = trash and evil
- All Democrats = perfect saints
- Elon Musk = bad
- Trump = bad
- Obama = pure good person
- America = stolen land
- White pride = Evil
- Black Pride = Empowerment
- The entire world should be woke