timelets

Peggy Noonan:

They [two Trump's posts on Iran: 1. open the f-ing strait; 2. civilization will die tonight] constituted hitting a new bottom, a new and infernal, face-lit-by-flames bottom, in world communications. The posts weren’t showbiz, they were sinister. You destabilize the world when, as the American president, you say such things. You make all the babies in this delicately poised, always knock-down-able world less safe. You rob your own nation of a claim to moral seriousness in the military action in which it’s engaged: You are saying we’re not trying to protect life but plan to attack, and in the attacking kill noncombatants who are members of the targeted civilization. The moral high ground is relinquished. You lower the bar for all potential response. You encourage violent action by trumpeting your readiness for it.

It bolsters the position of your enemies—their animus is justified, their commitment deepened. It allows them to pretend they’re fighting for the continuation of their people and not only the continuation of their regime.

Donald Trump plays the part of the madman every day. His head fake would be sanity. If his advisers thought this was a good negotiating tactic—“Give ’em a little madman theory, Mr. President”—they really are hicks.

Mr. Trump’s trust in his gut seems to have grown overwhelming—not in his reasoning power, not his analysis of intelligence data, but gut.

A lot of gut instinct is pattern recognition—I’ve lived long, experienced much, and know how this movie ends. But that means gut is weighted toward past experience.

Sometimes gut is mere emotion dressed up as instinct. Sometimes it’s wishful thinking that feels like conviction. Sometimes it conveniently pre-empts hard reasoning.

You can trust your gut straight into catastrophe.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/in-gut-we-trust-dde164b6

_Hick_ is the right term for describing Trump's supporters of the Art-of-the-deal flavor.

What started as a tongue-in-cheek observation that “Trump always chickens out” has become a consistently profitable pattern. It works especially well when there’s a specific deadline like Tuesday night’s Strait of Hormuz ultimatum since there’s less danger of being right but getting the timing wrong.

Over the 300-plus trading sessions since Trump took the oath of office last year, nine of the S&P 500’s 10 biggest gains have had to do with relief over tariffs or Iran. Owning stocks on just those days would have earned an investor 52% on their money compared with 12% for buying and holding an index fund throughout. Wednesday’s cease-fire rally might crack the top six.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/iran-bounce-these-tacos-are-getting-stale-1f69dd3a

Also of interest:

A Trump insider opened a $51,000,000 oil short position — hours before Trump announced a ceasefire with Iran. This guy is now 16 for 16. $170 million in profit. A perfect streak.

"We placed the bet." "The ceasefire dropped." "We cashed out." Sixteen times in a row.
https://x.com/JamesTate121/status/2041908860576002256

Trump is considering whether to join Putin and Netanyahu in the race to become the next Nobel Peace Prize winner Hitler. The WSJ makes a halfhearted argument against it.

The U.S. has a strong interest in causing chaos for Iran’s military, and targeting can allow it to do so without bombing every power plant in the country.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/iran-donald-trump-ultimatum-strait-of-hormuz-dan-caine-john-ratcliffe-4f9d3372

"Well, isn't that special."

In internal deliberations before the war’s launch, Hegseth had pointed to Iran's muted reaction to Trump’s past attacks as evidence that calibrated force could impose costs on Tehran without triggering a broader war. Hegseth “was caught off guard.

The Administration also appeared to be taken by surprise when Iran reached for a source of leverage: control over the Strait of Hormuz, which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes through each day. In response to U.S. strikes, Tehran implemented a de facto blockade, declaring the channel effectively closed and restricting passage to non-hostile vessels. The resulting economic shock had domestic reverberations that went beyond the expectations of Trump’s inner circle.

https://time.com/article/2026/04/02/trump-iran-off-ramp/

Now, Hegseth is firing generals because they know he is the clueless amateur who got the country into a quagmire.

Now, before each class I give Claude a particular narrative I'd like to cover and ask it to generate jokes within the overall context of the lecture/course. Every time, it comes up with at least one or two good ones, which I wouldn't be able to make myself. That didn't work last year.

“Ultimately, the task of parenting hasn’t changed, despite the demoralization of AI. It’s still about: How can we raise adaptable, grounded humans, who can respond to disruption—and, even more important, who believe they can respond to disruption,” says Dr. Elkins.

Resiliency is the key to functioning in a world moving so quickly under their feet.

Dr. Elkins assures me this will be easier than I think. “If you see your kid is doing a great job tolerating frustration, say, the videogame console breaks and instead of throwing it against the wall they fix it, that’s an opportunity to be like, ‘Hey, you dealt with that really well,’” she says. “Or when you notice flexibility—they were supposed to go to a friend’s house and someone got sick, but they pivoted nicely. You can say, ‘I saw you rebounded really well.’”

She suggests encouraging your kids to take initiative rather than waiting for instructions, to take healthy risks and do things more independently. “These are core skills that research tells us over and over are related to long-term adaptability,” says Dr. Elkins.

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/relationships/ai-parenting-anxiety-c054a54b

The school of hard knocks is back in favor. In education, it's a lot less about a specific skill than general adaptability. Everyone is an explorer now and from that perspective building a team of explorers is the key skill. Also, once you find something valuable, you should switch into the _exploit_ mode as fast as you can (per Alison Gopnik) and rebuild your team.

For many years, I meditated using the Serenity Prayer without really thinking through what _serenity_ actually was. I kind of knew what the dictionary meaning of the word was. Also, I could relate to typical dictionary examples explaining it: sitting on a secluded beach and watching the waves; staring into a moonless night sky, with the Milky Way thinly stretched and partially torn by darkness. But only after my mom passed away I discovered in my childhood memories what serenity could feel like in my own life.

During the first few months after her death, memories of the past began flooding in. Suddenly, I remembered lots of different slabs or layers of time, both good and bad. Because of their association with a recent death, they were not enjoyable, but satisfying nevertheless. They were bringing the sense of closure to the end of life of someone who I realized I loved dearly. Of course, in a medical sense her death was not unexpected . We all knew that she's getting really old and the death would bring relief to her age-related suffering. But that expectation didn't stimulate memories, especially the good ones. Everything that surrounded the dying person was wrapped in care and mindless routine partially designed to squeeze out the dread of the coming death, partially to prevent yourself from mentioning it to her by accident — when you think about someone dying every day unwelcome words eventually roll off your tongue.

Anyways, a while after the funeral, I remembered some early summer days, right after the start of school vacations when thousands of daisies seemed to rush into bloom behind our house. As a kid, I was mostly indifferent to flowers. Why would a boy growing up on a military base care about flowers? Tanks, guns, ammo for sure. But flowers? Although, daisies were a tiny bit different because you could use them for guessing: she loves me, she loves me not (at the time I had a secret crush on a girl from the 5Б class — Lilly C.). But my mom had a different and very practical use for daisies. She believed in their medicinal properties and would send me to collect the flowers, so that she could dry them out in the sun and store for the winter.

In the morning, I would land in the middle of a daisy patch, then start ripping off flower heads, sticking them into a bag; slowly one by one. Sometimes I'd play a guessing game, sometimes watch a bumblebee hovering next to me, sometimes pick up an ant and race it through my fingers. But eventually, I'd forget everything and just sit quietly among the daisies, enjoying the gentle sun, the soft early summer breeze, thinking of nothing, feeling ... At the time, I didn't realize that this very feeling had a special name – serenity.

Lord, grant me the Serenity
To accept things I cannot change,
The Courage to change things I can,
And the Wisdom to know the difference.

Most of the remaining staff at X, in addition to concentrating on cost-cutting, have been told to focus on growing X’s revenue.

X’s U.S. ad revenue is expected to grow 1.5% to $1.27 billion, while global ad sales are anticipated to rise 2.2% to $2.19 billion, according to estimates from Emarketer. In 2021, the last year in which X disclosed annual financials before Musk took the company private, Twitter said it generated $4.51 billion in advertising revenue.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/elon-musks-x-restructures-ahead-of-spacex-ipo-6aab5673

Growth targets are below inflation. Musk spent $40B+ of investors' money on a vanity project, sucking up to Trump and promoting his own Nazi salute heroics.

This could end up as another Watergate moment in US history

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-500-nasdaq-03-24-2026/card/mystery-jump-in-oil-trading-ahead-of-trump-post-draws-scrutiny-56sgwdXtlOlonqIKDsL6

During the two-minute period between 6:49 am and 6:51 am ET on Monday, about 7,200 contracts in Brent and West Texas Intermediate oil futures, with a notional value of more than $760 million, changed hands, according to Dow Jones Market Data. There was no apparent news that prompted the surge in trading activity. About 15 minutes later, Trump’s post triggered a huge drop in oil prices and a jump in the S&P 500.

A similar burst of activity took place at the same time in S&P 500 futures. It’s impossible to tell from the public market who was behind the trades, or how many traders were involved. Oil prices didn’t move appreciably during the 6:50 am ET volume jump, which was dwarfed by the tidal wave of trading activity that followed Trump’s post.

Similar bursts of trading volume have preceded other market-moving Trump posts. Last April, a flurry of activity in bullish call options took place just minutes before Trump announced a pause of his sweeping "Liberation Day" tariffs.