🧠 Notes from the Entropy Desk — March 9, 2026

The Strait of Hormuz is closed and twenty million barrels a day have vanished from global supply — a shock larger than the next five oil crises combined, per Exponential View’s weekly data pull. Graham Allison, Harvard’s dean of managed apocalypse, told All-In this is “Bibi’s war,” a two-decade obsession with the white whale finally harpooned through a mesmerized Trump. The Supreme Leader is dead, the regime is holding on by its fingernails, and Allison sees no evidence for the three justifications — imminent attack, nuclear breakout, ICBM threat — that were sold to the Oval Office. The US military and intelligence community performed a “spectacular” decapitation strike, but Allison’s cold water is simple history: Afghanistan was ruled by the Taliban when we arrived and when we left. Breaking is cheap. Building is bankrupting. Drone strikes have already hit three Amazon data centers in the Gulf, and the $300 billion AI infrastructure spending spree across the Gulf monarchies now looks like a bet placed on a table that’s on fire.

Xi Jinping is purging the People’s Liberation Army with a line that reads like a threat carved into the wall of a detention cell. “There must be absolutely no place in the military for those who harbor disloyalty to the Party, nor any hiding place for corrupt elements.” Sinocism flagged this from his address to the PLA and PAP delegation at the NPC, alongside orders to reform military expenditure management and embed supervision into every major project from day one of the 15th Five-Year Plan. Meanwhile, Liberty’s Highlights surfaced Gregory Allen’s argument that China’s dependence on TSMC is no longer a strategic shield — it’s a countdown timer. Allen told Stratechery that Xi has already decided dependence is unacceptable, and a country with China’s industrial scale, political will, and espionage apparatus is not Japan. The silicon shield is made of glass, and the man holding the hammer has a schedule.