Good morning, and welcome to Sunday, April 19, 2026. Today is National Garlic Day—good, I have been thinking about Italian for a few days now.
We had nearly 80 degrees at the Florack Shack yesterday, and today is starting out below freezing and won’t get over 40. There was a ham radio get-together in nearby Palmyra yesterday that, sadly, I couldn’t get to. For their sake, I’m glad it was yesterday and not today, since most of it was held outside.
1770 British explorer James Cook first sights Australia.
1775 American Revolution begins in Lexington, Mass., with the “Shot Heard Round the World” fired later that day in Concord, Mass.
1782 John Adams secures the Dutch Republic’s recognition of the United States as an independent government; a house he purchased in The Hague becomes America’s first embassy.
1892 Charles Duryea takes the first American-made automobile for a test drive.
1904 Much of Toronto is destroyed by fire.
1927 Actress Mae West is found guilty of “obscenity and corrupting the morals of youth” in a New York stage play entitled Sex. She is sentenced to 10 days in prison and fined $500; the resulting publicity launches her Hollywood career.
1932 U.S. President Herbert Hoover suggests a five-day work week.
1933 U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt announces the United States will leave the gold standard.
1934 Shirley Temple appears in her first feature-length film, Stand Up and Cheer.
1940 Lake Shore Ltd derails at speed, killing 34 near Little Falls, New York.
1948 Chiang Kai-shek is elected president of Nationalist China.
1951 General Douglas MacArthur ends his military career.
1965 Whipped Cream & Other Delights, fourth full album by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, is released.
2011 Fidel Castro resigns his position of first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba after 45 years in power.
Birthdays Today Include:
Roger Sherman, American lawyer and Founding Father of the United States (Declaration of Independence, Constitution); Richard von Mises, Austrian scientist and mathematician (probability theory); Frank Fontaine, American comedian (Crazy Guggenheim); Hugh O’Brian, American actor (Wyatt Earp, Search); Dick Sargent, American actor (Bewitched); Jayne Mansfield, American actress (The Girl Can’t Help It); Dickie Goodman, American parody singer and producer (“The Flying Saucer”; “Energy Crisis ’74”; “Mr. Jaws”); Dudley Moore, English comedian and actor (10, Arthur); Alan Price, English rock keyboardist (The Animals – “House of the Rising Sun”); and Al Unser Jr., American auto racer (Indianapolis 500 1992, 1994).
Happy birthday to you, as well, if today’s your day.
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There’s an interesting piece from Lisa Daftari at Fox News this morning: Hormuz whiplash proves Tehran can’t honor any deal it signs.
Iran’s regime just told us everything we need to know. Within days, Tehran went from signaling that the Strait of Hormuz would remain open to threatening to close it. That reversal is a reminder that the regime cannot be trusted to uphold any deal it signs because its strategy depends on constant threats and keeping the world off balance.
The issue isn’t what they say. It’s who’s really in charge.
Iran’s regime does not operate as a normal state. Its leaders often signal calm to ease pressure or buy time. But the real authority sits with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC controls the missiles, the proxy networks, and the ability to disrupt global shipping. When it matters, they decide.
And they benefit from instability.The Strait of Hormuz is one of the regime’s most effective tools of coercion. A fifth of the world’s oil flows through it. Iran doesn’t need to shut it down to create a crisis. It just needs to make the threat believable. Even talk of disruption can rattle markets and drive up energy prices.
That’s exactly what we’re seeing now. Tehran signals restraint, then pivots back to escalation. It’s not meant to sow confusion. It’s meant to gain leverage.
Look, I’ve said it before — don’t trust anything Iran says, including that “water is wet.” The reasons behind that unreliability are a bit more complex, however, than many see.
With all respect, I think Lisa gives Iran too much credit for cohesive planning and action. The question nobody is answering is: are the people who signed onto the deal, and who were in Islamabad the other day, the same ones who are now escalating?
One faction in Iran might agree to peace terms for reasons of their own, but another — almost always one with a militia — will see any deal they had no hand in making as an opportunity. They’ll weaponize it. And their enemy, eventually, is quite literally everyone else on the planet.
Even Daftari halfway acknowledges that point, saying:
Washington cannot afford to treat diplomacy as an end in itself. An agreement that is not backed by real enforcement, credible military deterrence and a clear understanding of who holds power in Tehran will not hold.
Washington has to stop pretending this regime can be “managed” with better communiqués and slightly tougher clauses. The problem is not the wording of the deal. The problem is the nature of the regime that signs it.
That’s a point people like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, along with nearly the entirety of the Democratic Party here in the United States, will never publicly acknowledge.
This goes directly to what I said on Easter Sunday: “Peace, real, lasting peace, is not a product of disavowing war, or of thinking peaceful thoughts. Nor is it the product of negotiated settlements. Peace, real peace is the product of winning the war brought against you, with sufficient force to prevent any ideas of trying it again.”
The core problem with that equation in the case of Iran is the question of what “sufficient force against them” actually means because, obviously, we’re not there yet.
Oh, it’s true—commitment, Iran’s got, even if blessedly little else. The thing is, Iran isn’t fighting to win on the battlefield—they’re fighting on conviction, on Islamic ideals (jihad), betting that sheer dedication outlasts us. Sound familiar? It should. Pre-Hiroshima Japan knew it was beaten too and kept fighting anyway.
You’ll recall that it was in that framework that I brought up, about a month ago, LeMay’s axiom: “Kill enough of them, and they stop fighting.”
It’s obvious that Iran hasn’t crossed that threshold. We’re in a pause now, but when this ceasefire collapses in three days, we will go right back to playing Whack-A-Mole—albeit with some good intel about where Iran’s remaining assets, such as the remaining fast boats or any missiles, are hidden, assuming there are any.
As for killing off their leadership, as the top ranks are turned into bad memories, the ones under them keep reshuffling and lining up for the same cliff dive—lemmings with titles in Islamic cleric garb.
The current leader in Iran reportedly doesn’t have a leg to stand on, and even that assumes he’s still alive—a point we still have no confirmation on; he hasn’t been seen in public since he was injured in the same attack that killed his father. The confusion over who is actually running that circus is one explanation for the about-face. Put simply, it wasn’t about tactics, it was about the power struggles and the constant reshuffling of players over the last month.
So, the exact point of reaching the LeMay Threshold in Iran remains an open question. I called that too a couple weeks back. Though honestly, predicting it wasn’t hard—not with 47 years of Islamic Republic history as the most reliable guide.
How “hot” things get over there will be revealed in the next 48 hours. That may involve players who have been less active in all this thus far.
For one, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan condemned both sides and said Ankara is making “intense” diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict at the negotiating table. But as usual, it’s a complex issue, given Turkey is being pulled in multiple directions. Iranian missiles have been intercepted over Turkish airspace multiple times, and Turkey has deployed F-16s and air defense systems to Northern Cyprus.
Let’s not forget Iraq, whose militias are fractured between ideologically driven cells continuing attacks in Tehran’s name and power brokers embedded in the Iraqi state who increasingly see confrontation as bad for business.
Yemen leaps to mind as well. The Houthis have managed to retain power and influence over the majority of Yemen, and opposition to them has been at best divided. At the moment, they remain Iran’s most intact proxy and a continued threat to Red Sea shipping. It’s my take that they’ll be involved in controlling the straits, if they’re not the ones doing it already.
Azerbaijan, Hezbollah, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Qatar are other somewhat less likely regional players in the short term, but keep in mind they’re not all of one mind, either.
Going outside the region, there’s both Russia and China. Qui bono seems applicable here. China particularly seems most threatened by its lack of oil shipments. Something on the order of 80% of its crude comes from Iran. Russia, meanwhile, doesn’t have much ability to deal with the Iranian situation militarily, given the beating they’ve taken in Ukraine, particularly in the last few days.
Any of these players can fundimentally change the dynamics of all this.
As I say, we’ll know in 48 hours.
Thought of the day:
“You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.” – Lady Margaret Thatcher
Take care of yourselves today. You’re worth it.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
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