I’ve been telling Israelis for two decades-plus that no, China is not their friend. It took the immediate aftermath of the October 7 pogrom for some to wake up, especially once they saw how Xi the Turtle-Botherer ran interference for HamaSS and Iran in all sorts of international contexts.
This is pure cynical geopolitics. There is no “grassroots” antisemitism in China — if anything, considerable cultural affinity exists between Jews and Chinese in most places. But the regime has one central goal: displace the USA as “the” global hegemon. To achieve this goal, they will do anything, including coddling islamist radicals abroad while brutally repressing them at home, sell weapons to the Mad Mullahs, and otherwise give aid and comfort to enemies of the West.
Chinese expat Melissa Chen, in a podcast with Haviv Rettig Gur, has the receipts and lays them out.
Via Sarah Hoyt on the night shift at Instapundit, an eye-opening article of how outsourcing-at-any-price, “[mis]management consultants”, and H1B visas ran FedEx into the ground. This is a case study of what happens at may other US corporations.
The comments are a bit of a cesspool and best ignored, but the anger being tapped into is real.
BONUS ITEM: Sarah Hoyt snarks: “It takes one to know one”… B*llsack Ogabe, a.k.a. Barack the Blightbringer. says “aliens are real”. I have honestly always suspected BHOzo was born on Sol VII, a.k.a. Uranus.
Am traveling for work, with rarely a moment to myself, and overwhelmed by all the news…
(a) Compare the shocked reaction to J. D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, with the standing ovation Marco Rubio got for… saying basically the same thing, but framing it differently.
Instead of (justifiably, but undiplomatically) listing the many faults and shortcomings of Euro foreign policy, Rubio basically packaged it as something like: After the fall of the USSR, we were all convinced that liberal democracy was unstoppable, we were seeing the end of history. Under the circumstances, it would have seemed a rational idea to wind down defense spending and instead spend the money on a lavish social welfare system.
Except history wasn’t finished, and a few bad actors were just biding their time.
We won’t stand by as you steer the West into “managed decline”.We can still reverse this, but you’ll have to pitch in: we can’t do this alone.
(c) About the piece of “Palestinian” propaganda that won the 2025 National Book Award (the jury probably r*mming congratulating themselves about how enlightened they are — NOT), Irina Velitskaya has a withering report. Except I think this book does not belong at the bottom of every closet, but at the bottom of every jora (cesspool).
(d) But… flying pig moment of the day? The British museum is removing the “Palestine” label from many early exhibits from the Land of Israel, lest anyone get the mistaken impression that there was an actual polity named “Palestine” in the millennia before the common era. (As better-informed readers will know, the first use of the term was after the failed Bar-Kochba Uprising 132-135 CE, when Emperor Hadrian punitively renamed Provincia Iudea into “Palestina”, Jerusalem into “Aelia Capitolina”, etc.)
(b) and speaking of “masgramondou”s other home country: just how “foutu” [scr*wed] is France? Economics Explained lays it out.
By French standards, I’m half a year from publicly funded retirement at 62. Come on. This makes no fiscal sense in an age when people routinely make it into their nineties.
Yet even the most limp-wristed attempts at reforming an unsustainable system (like raising the retirement age to 64) founder on mass protest and bring down governments.
(c) Watch and weep: this is what all the spending on “education” in the US has achieved: 40% of pupils functionally illiterate. I suspect that a nontrivial percentage of the remaining 60% learned to read despite the “best” efforts of the system.
But teachers who actually try to achieve something are essentially bullied into quitting, by a system that assumes the pupil and their parents are always right, even when blatantly wrong.
(d) and on a completely different topic, the indispensable Haviv Rettig Gur interview American Jewish actor Jonah Platt on the rising level of judeophobia among Generation Z. Platt is actually more optimistic than HRG is.
Lots going on on the geopolitical stage, as well as in the USA and UK, but… a couple of stories about AI.
Look, I’ve started using professional-grade AI a while ago in my day job, first as a supercharged search engine (but I always check the references etc. it finds), like “I remember ThisGuy and ThatGal wrote a paper on SuchASubject sometime in the 90s, can you find it for me?”, then also for scut work (like “verify the metadata of all entries in this BibTeX file”) and for translation to/from languages I’m not (fully) fluent in (where I’m a big fan of DeepL). And I absolutely love the dictation capabilities — being able to quickly dictate a blog post on the hoof, or get my thoughts down in rough demo form for an academic paper. And I’ve been known to have it transcode my old Fortran programs from 30+ years ago into Python, or whatever, as well as use it as “lint on steroids” (lint is a venerable code proofreading tool). There is no doubt AI can be a boon for many things — and I’m not even getting into image analysis, at which it truly excels.
But as I kept telling the Arbel-daughter, “technology is a great servant, but a terrible master”.
(a) We already knew teachers were getting burned out and mass-quitting because of lack of classroom discipline (and some in protest at DEI dreck) and children “with the attention span of a fruitfly” (as the Arbel-daughter, born on the seam line between Millenials and Gen Z, put it). Now a new factor: “why do I need to learn to read when ChatGPT can just read it to me”? The teacher in the video also describes how the children of the senior tech people are (a) sent to private schools; (b) kept away from most tech (especially generative AI) until adolescence. She has a conspiracy theory that the new elite actually likes it that way: that only a few percent of humanity will have critical thinking skills. I’m not so sure it’s a conscious conspiracy, but it’s depressing none the less. Throwing money at the problem is not the answer.
We are no longer just amusing ourselves to death, we are abusing ourselves to death. [Both meanings, as the proliferation of AI girlfriend chatbots in places like Japan shows.]
(b) It used to be that management consultant companies (Bain, Boston Consulting Group, etc.) advised companies on how to cut their workforces. Alas for the analysts at these companies (the ones doing the research going into the reports for the “rainmakers” that deal with the clients), much of their work can be AI-ified — and yes, as some such firms learned to their chagrin, you do have to check everything or you get burned with hallucinated references etc.!
And more broadly, contrary to what middle and senior management thought, the jobs where AI-ification offers the greatest cost cots for the least reduction in performance may actually be… theirs. Imagine an army with a commander and soldiers, and almost no chain of command between them. In the AI age, might this become… feasible, at least in the corporate world.
(c) AI-assisted composition has been around for a while, but was restricted to niche academic applications, or to generative AI ambient soundscapes (what I call “sonic wallpaper”). But something like Suno has gotten good enough that not only can pop songwriters use it as an assist, the quality gap between the AI product and human composition is narrowing by the way.
A large part of this is, of course, popular music having become so musically vapid and formulaic that it’s very easy to emulate.
(d) and on a related topic, it’s a cliché to say “it takes a heart of stone not to laugh” at the predicament of the Washington Post journalists being laid off en masse.
Steven Hayward (away from Powerline) on his Substack has one for the ages — from a mathematician in Valencia, Spain. No, he’s not arguing gravity is a social construct (physicist Alan Sokalbeat him to that decades ago), nor babbling about dogs exhibiting toxic masculinity in dog parks (Lindsay, Boghossian & Pluckrosebeat him to that one), but…
[…] Pascual D. Diago, professor of mathematics at the University of Valencia, has successfully punked the Clinical Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology with a completely bogus article, submitted under a fake name. Forget the old cliche that pregnant women have cravings for pickles or ice cream. Prof. “Pascual Chiago” demonstrates that what pregnancy really generates is a craving for . . . prime numbers. And “abstract algebra.”
More here at RetractionWatch. Behold the abstract of the paper:
In an unprecedented quantum leap in interdisciplinary research, we introduce the concept of ‘Gyneco-Obstetric Algebraic Didactics’ (GOAD). This paper explores the impact of teaching mathematical models using obstetric metaphors on the cognitive flexibility of third-trimester patients and first-year mathematics students alike. Through the introduction of the Ovary-Function Theorem (OFT) and the application of the Cervix-Dilation Equation, the study reveals that explaining non-Euclidean spaces through pelvic retroversion significantly improves calculus test scores and reduces birth anxiety by 13.7%. A case study with pregnant mathematicians and aspiring gynecologists demonstrates that integrating the Fibonacci sequence into labor progression charts induces spontaneous appreciation for abstract algebra and mild cravings for prime numbers. These findings challenge the traditional boundaries between prenatal care and set theory, suggesting that mathematical didactics and obstetric gynecology, when merged, can birth new paradigms in both fields. Further research is encouraged, especially in the context of cesarean matrices and post-partum group theory.
It took me about 0.4 seconds to realize this was an obvious put-on. The reference list made it even clearer:
Sneakydez F, Trickón C, Sneakarez P. Calculus through uterine contraction models: fertility of metaphor in cross-domain learning. Didactic Surrealism. 2023;13(4):401–19.
A few minutes with a paid LLM querying publicly available company databases etc. suggested that we’re dealing with a one-person company based in CT.
POAs are a form of scientific “vanity press” fulfilling the needs of low-tier academics who need publication credits to get ahead. Sure, if you’re applying for a STEM faculty position at a Tier 1 university, POA-published entries on your List of Publications will be a black mark (we all know about POAs by now). [*] But at a 4th or 5th tier college in the developing world, where the papers are a mere box-ticking exercise? Or worse, when you’re applying as a “nonbinary POC” candidate to start an interdisciplinary program between the Music and Gender Studies department, focusing on “gay tromboning studies”?
Paraphrasing a commenter at Steven Hayward’s original post: in an era where “studies” academics seriously talk about men giving birth, it’s become impossible to tell parody from “serious” absurdity.
And alas… AI slop submission are starting to flood reputable journals as well, requiring ever greater vigilance from editors…
[*] A point of clarification. POAs should not be confused with “hybrid Open Access” as now practiced by most reputable journals. In such, publication is free and not in any way contingent upon payment, but the journal is behind a subscription paywall — and if you want the paywall removed for your specific article, you can pay a fee. Or your employer may negotiate a bulk open access fee, covering all papers accepted that year for a fixed amount. (In one case I’m familiar with, the discount reaches 80%.)
A good time was had by all. Being an avid follower of his channel, I’m familiar with much of what he’s saying here, but if you want an introduction to what this “honey badger unwoke” evolutionary psychologist has to say, this is a great summary, spiced up with his trademark outré humor.
I have pre-ordered his book, BTW, and urge you to do the same. Link below (no, I don’t do affiliates)
ADDENDUM: at the same event, an “Ask Me Anything” session hosted by former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Fleur Hassan-Nahoum. (Her father was Lord Mayor of Gibraltar, which interestingly has the largest percentage of Jews of any polity in the world outside Israel. Unsurprisingly given the location, the overwhelming majority of said community is Sephardic.)
“The Military Show” often sounds a bit overexcited, but there is no doubt that the basic message of this video is correct: “massively parallel” [to use a computer science term] drone warfare is dramatically changing the battlefield, and has changed the balance of power in the Russia-Ukraine war.
The video claims that about 80% of Russian losses of materiel and personnel can be attributed to drones, and most of these are locally manufactured or modified [from commercial-off-the shelf] small units — think not millions per drone, but a couple grand tops, times thousands upon thousands.
The process is even “gamified”. OK, confirming “kills” with gun camera footage, painting on little trophy swastikas on your Spitfire or Mustang for every confirmed kill, or trophy rings on a tank gun barrel… That’s at least as old as World War Two. But Ukraine took this several steps further: online leaderboards, tokens that can be spent in an online arms store — so the most successful drone operators/units can get more and better weapon systems (including electronic warfare capabilities) to do even better — and more. One use case is in fact anti-drone: against Iranian-built (or Russian-copied) Shahed drones.
While targeted pinpoint strike by individual Reapers/Predators, Herons, Bayraktars, have been around for a while, this conflict will enter military history as the first one where massive “unmanned aerial infantry” fleets have had a decisive impact, enabling Ukraine to overcome its manpower strategic disadvantage to hold a much larger invader at bay and reverse the odds in the ensuing war of attrition.
Naval War College lecturer Sarah Paine defines a “pivotal error” in strategy as one that creates a situation in which all possible outcomes are worse than the situation before the error.
Obvious examples are the attack on Pearl Harbor, Operation Barbarossa, and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In all three cases, the attackers kept doubling down because — once the initial gambit had failed — every possible outcome is disastrous, and hence even once it becomes obvious that victory has become impossible, they keep pressing on to postpone the inevitable.
As she puts it [from a strictly Machiavellian point of view]: if Putin had called it a day after the 2014 takeover of Crimea, he would be better off than any realistic outcome following his disastrous invasion of Ukraine. But he can’t undo his error, so he keeps b*ggering on [me recycling a Churchillian phrase].
Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto likely never spoke the exact words put in his mouth in the movie “Tora! Tora! Tora!”, that allJapan had achieved with his surprise attack was awaking a sleeping giant, but we know from historical evidence that those were likely his sentiments. Also, that he had warned his superiors that if Japan could not force a decision within six months, the outcome would be inevitable in view of America’s vastly superior production capacity (which just needed ramping up).
When the Japanese failed to destroy the US aircraft carriers (which were at sea); when Putin’s tank column on Kiev got stuck on a highway; when the Wehrmacht failed to force a decision before the winter; all three aggressors just kept going, because they were trapped in the results of their own pivotal errors.
Sarah Paine expressed her fears the US would be doing the same thing over Greenland: the video was recorded before we knew this was just a game of diplomatic hardball to get expanded basing rights, and no conflict was ever seriously on the table.
(a) Great video by one Jenny Holland on how she gradually realized the wokeism (at first named PC) arising around her was a social climbing game. And, to quote Neil Peart’s priceless phrase: “those who push us down that they might climb/Is any killer worth more than his crime?” (Rush, “The Weapon”)
(b) Remember the expressions: “None are so blind as those who do not care to see” or “if a man’s livelihood depends on not seeing it”? A 1942 essay “Ten Years Later” by the German Protestant theologian (and anti-Nazi resister) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, explains how pressure for social conformity, personal interest, and misplaced sense of duty can make otherwise intelligent people stupid: dismiss what’s right in front of their eyes as either lies, or true but irrelevant. (I’ve seen this umpteen times in completely apolitical scientific contexts, BTW. Confirmation bias taken to the extreme.)
ADDENDUM: I found a non-paywalled version of Bonhoeffer’s essay here (as the preview of an edition of Bonhoeffer’s collected writings in prison). Let me quote the relevant section in full:
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed—in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical—and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them. We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what “the people” really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly. The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.
But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from peoples’ stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.
On this episode of “Ask Haviv Anything”, Haviv Rettig Gur’s guest gives a fascinating look into the narco-terrorist business model of Hizballah/Hezbollah [romanization of Arabic/Farsi names, respectively], and what a key player in this Venezuela was.
I did a double-take when the guest described a fatwa (religious ruling) permitting the sale of drugs to kufar for the sake of financing “the cause”. The more I see, the more it looks like all the disgusting conspiracy theories about Judaism are actually true… for radical Islam.
PS: the other day a commenter bizarrely assumed that HRG was an American Muslim. (Sure, his guest on that episode, Hussetn Abubakr Mansour, was at least nominally a Muslim of Egyptian origin.) lIn fact, his father Ed Rettig was not only a Reform rabbi, but used to be the director of the United Jewish Appeal office in Israel. Rachel Gur is a lecturer at Reichman University (formerly the Interdisciplinary Center) in Herzliya, and the couple have discussed on X how despite not being fully shomer shabbat, they have turned Shabbat into a “device-free day”.
(a) One of my most read entries here has nothing to do with current affairs, but was an essay on the women of Renoir: models and muses. Pride of place there had the rags-to-riches story Suzanne Valadon, a onetime street urchin born of an alcoholic single mother who first became a circus acrobat, then an in-demand model for painters from Degas to Renoir, then an acclaimed painter in her own right (at a time when this was unheard of for women).
She had one son, the cityscape painter Maurice Utrillo, who alas appears to have been thoroughly mentally ill. Ultimately, she took up with another painter younger than her own son — thus becoming a pioneer in cougarhood as well as artistry. Along the way, she briefly became the only known lover of the eccentric composer Erik Satie.
Plenty of material for neuropsychiatrist Graeme Yorston, who has a fascinating channel filled with psychological profiles of artists and actors.
(b) Also at his channel, a fascinating profile of forensic medicine pioneer Dr. Joseph Bell. One of his star students, one Arthur Conan Doyle, was less successful at attracting patients for his practice than at exams in medical school, and out of boredom started writing stories featuring a fictional detective heavily inspired by his mentor. The rest is literary history…
(c) And now for something else entirely: the video here is clearly AI-generated (a fake Jensen Huang speaking and gesticulating), but the text is a very worthwhile reflection on how AI will fundamentally transform higher education, enabling personalized learning in a scalable fashion.
The other week, the President of Brandeis University had the shocking (to those not paying attention) prediction that one-quarter of US colleges will disappear in the next five years. Only one-quarter?
Eliezer Tsafrir, a senior Mossad and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) official whose career spanned Israel’s formative decades and who served as the last Mossad station chief in Tehran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, died on Sunday at the age of 92. […]
[In 1975], Tsafrir was appointed Mossad station chief in Tehran. He assumed the post during a period of close Israeli-Iranian strategic cooperation and remained in place as Iran entered its most turbulent phase. His family lived in Iran, and his son remembers a country that, at the time, felt open and familiar.
“Warm people. A big country. Very comfortable living,” Raz Tzafrir recalled. “It was the only place besides Paris with an Israeli school. There was a huge Israeli community.”
That world collapsed in 1978. As protests spread, Tsafrir’s mission shifted from cooperation with Iranian intelligence to monitoring unrest and eventually to evacuating Israelis as the revolution gathered force.
The defining moment came when Tsafrir was summoned to meet the Shah himself.
“They told me the Shah wanted the Mossad to kill Khomeini in Paris,” Tsafrir later recounted. Israel refused.
“In retrospect, I regret it,” he said decades later, regarding that decision. “We could have saved the whole Iranian nation from this situation and Israel from the nuclear threat.”
There is an infinity of Pasts[…] At each and every instant of Time, however brief you suppose it, the line of events forks like the stem of a tree putting forth twin branches[…] One of these branches represents the sequence of facts as you, poor mortal, knew it; and the other represents what History would have become if one single detail had been other than it was. — ANDRÉ MAUROIS (1931)
The whole brouhaha about Trump trying to force the Danish to sell Greenland (not clear if it even could, since Greenland is an autonomous territory) struck me as one of two things: either a “squirrel” to deflect media attention from something different, or a maximalist demand to force a deal
Incidentally, the last POTUS offering to buy it (for $100M at the time, about US$1.7B in 2026 dollars — with some oil rights in Alaska thrown in to sweeten the deal) was Harry S Truman in 1946 — as the Cold War was ramping up.
Now the Telegraph reports that a “framework of a deal” was reached at Davos.
In a nutshell, the island’s status will remain what it was — an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, but the US will be allowed to put additional bases there for long-range missile defense, as part of its “Golden Dome” project against Russian and Chinese intercontinental missiles — and these bases will be sovereign US territory. This is a similar arrangement like the British bases on Cyprus.
There may also potentially be mining rights for rare earth minerals. Details are to be worked out in further talks.
And of course the whole business with punitive tariffs on Europe has now been scrapped.
As explained in this video by Business Basics, China has been trying to buy its way onto the island, one decommissioned Danish installation at a time, with Denmark rebuffing these attempts. Having a bigger US presence on this giant island may actually help the Danes in this regard.
The turtle-boys for Xi de schildpaddeneuker will of course be disappointed.
At my day job, I’ve been saying for a while that it’s not a question if AI is a “dotcom 2.0 on steroids” bubble that will pop, but when it will pop. Remember: the issue with the first dotcom bubble wasn’t that internet commerce had no use, but that a ton of investment was made into things that had no viable business case. The same is happening again: AI clearly can do many things well and some very well, and is here to stay — but the upcoming “pop” will separate the sheep from the goats.
(a) The Times (of London, not the AWFL fanzine from New York) interviews a tech analyst with the priceless name Ed Zitron (meaning “lemon” in German)[*] who is making a convincing argument for my theory.
(b) Howling at the Moon in ii-V-I (priceless title for any music theory geek):
I was in court a while back testifying before a judge who ultimately issued a verdict based on a very novel concept. While I’m not qualified to question this judge’s legal acumen, I am qualified to evaluate their math. The verdict rendered in the case was based on the unlikely concept of the number 36 somehow being less than the number 25—something that is not mathematically possible in any base or domain less than R10 (you never know with those string-theory rapscallions).
This reminded me, not in a good way, of one of the most notorious high-profile professional faceplants of this century—occurring just a few years ago—when New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay and MSNBC anchor Brian Williams demonstrated their incomprehension of fundamental math on national television by ciphering that $500 million divided among 327 million people would give each American citizen $1 million, replete with explanatory on-screen graphics courtesy of a crack team of producers at MSNBC.
But hey, I’m a math and science kind of guy. Perhaps my expectations are simply too high in this regard. What, after all, is a mere five orders of magnitude or an errant “>” sign between friends, eh? Otherwise, this all smacks of the elitism of competence. We can’t have any of that.
Unfortunately, for better or worse, we do. In the case of my mathematically challenged judge, the pièce de résistance was that they employed AI to write a decision containing the most unctuous affront to math-based reasoning that bad dreams are capable of conjuring—in a simple case that required less than a day to argue. I couldn’t decide whether to cry or tear my hair out.
Read and weep.
(c) then somebody sent me this screenshot that made me despair of humanity:
(d) And meanwhile, as we are both “amusing ourselves to death” and “abusing ourselves to death”, islamofascism and its useful idiots continue their march, from the horrid tragedy in Iran to the “merely” disgusting and farcical in the UK.
[*] The Ashkenazi surnames Zitron (German), Cytryn (Polish spelling), Citroën (French, as in the car manufacturer), and Citroen (in my youth) likely refer to the ceremonial etrog fruit (a “citron” in English) we acquire for the Sukkot holiday.
A French (non-Jewish) journalist went underground for a year in France’s so-called “anti-Zionist” movement. She has now published her findings. Read the whole thing, but the key takeaway is this:
The various anti-Israel groups are a motley coalition that would normally be at loggerheads: neo-Marxists, extreme ecologists, LGBTQWERTY activists, and Islamists. The only thing they can agree upon, she says, is their blind hatred of Israel and Jews.
I would add a second: their pathological hatred of Western civilization, for which they see Israel as an outpost.
Lots to unpack in this panel discussion hosted by Rafaela Sievert from the Free Press.
One of the panelists, Michael Doran, recently laid out three alternatives for what could happen in Iran:
the regime collapses
the IRGC (a state within the state, the way the SS was in the Third Reich) will throw Khamenei and other mullahs to the wolves, put up a more “reasonable” leadership as window dressing, amd make some other cosmetic changes, so they can keep their corrupt-to-the-bone business empire going. This will work best if a gullible West is persuaded to drop sanctions because “now we can do business with them”
the regime somehow keeps b*ggering on, at the expense of thousands and thousands of lives
Ed Morrissey quotes left-wing German and American academic Yascha Mounk, bemoans the lack of silence from his own camp on the mullah regime’s atrocities — a regime, he hastens to point out, that suppresses everything the left professes to love.
This silence has been evident in mainstream media outlets, from the British Broadcasting Corporation to National Public Radio, that have been oddly slow to grasp the importance of this moment. Worse, when those outlets did deign to cover the events, they often downplayed the significance of the protests; in a few especially egregious cases, reporters even seemed to harbor sympathies for the country’s brutal regime. (At the outset of the protests, The Guardian even published an op-ed by Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister.)
The silence has been even more deafening in the left-wing newspapers and magazines of the anglophone world. On Saturday morning, I searched the principal publications of the American left for any mention of Iran. There was nothing on the websites of The Nation or The New Republic or Jacobin or Slate or even Dissent.
[…]
Why is the Left ignoring this uprising on behalf of not just liberty, but also liberalization of perhaps one of the most repressive regimes in the world? Mounk offers the usual excuses: Trump, Venezuela, Minnesota, the lack of access in Iran, and “various outrages perpetrated daily by the White House.” Mounk does explain that he approaches this question as “a man of the left,” and this paragraph expresses a few rational excuses from that perspective.
However, Mounk eventually settles on an explanation that comes closer to the truth:
For far too many progressives and leftists, their founding commitment is not to some principle or aspiration for the world. It is to believing that their own countries and societies are at the root of profound evil. This creates in their minds a simple demonology: Anybody who is on “our side” must be bad, and anybody who is on the “other side” is presumptively good. As Orwell said about some of the intellectuals of his day, their “real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of Western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism.”
This is remarkably honest, but it needs some expansion. The Left has sold itself on the “occupier/occupied” explanation for the world as it is, and sees the West as exclusive to the former. That misses the fact that (a) Islam has been a colonizing force, both militarily and culturally, including in Iran; (b) the Islamic Republic and its IRGC have acted as occupying forces in Iran for 47 years; (c) their proxies have colonized places like Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, Syria, and even Venezuela to an extent, right under the Left’s noses and without a peep of protest. The Left is so lost in their false paradigm that they overlook the fact that the only people to worship the same God and live in the same land for the last 3500 years are in fact the Jews in Israel, not the Arabs and Muslims that colonized the Levant, North Africa, and parts of Europe over the last 1400 years.
However, the truth may be even more basic and fundamental. The Left hates the West and wants it destroyed. They are willing to ally with all of those who want the same outcome, no matter the nature of the regime involved. That is their highest priority, and the deafening silence in response to the yearning of the brave Iranian people can only be understood in that context.
[unquote]
And then Ed links an amazing essay:
The Western liberal media is ignoring the Iranian uprising because explaining it would force an admission it is desperate to avoid: the Iranian people are rebelling against Islam itself, and that fact shatters the moral framework through which these institutions understand the… https://t.co/4G0UEvL0YO
It is so good that I’m quoting it in full for the “X-less” (as Sarah Hoyt calls them):
The Western liberal media is ignoring the Iranian uprising because explaining it would force an admission it is desperate to avoid: the Iranian people are rebelling against Islam itself, and that fact shatters the moral framework through which these institutions understand the world.
Ideally, to cover an uprising is not just to show crowds and slogans. It requires answering a basic question: why are people risking death? In Iran, the answer is simple and unavoidable. The people are rising up because the Islamic Republic of Iran has spent decades suffocating every aspect of life—speech, work, family, art, women, and economic survival—under a clerical system that treats liberty as a crime. There is no way to tell that story without confronting the nature of the regime.
Western media refuses to do so because it has fundamentally misunderstood Islam. Or worse, it has chosen not to understand it.
Islam, in Western progressive discourse, has been racialized. It is treated not as a belief system or a political ideology, but as a stand-in for race or ethnicity. Criticizing Islam is framed as an attack on “brown people,” Arabs, or “the Middle East,” as if Islam were a skin color rather than a doctrine.
This confusion is rooted in historical illiteracy. Western liberal media routinely collapses entire civilizations into a single stereotype: “all Middle Easterners are Arabs,” “all Arabs are Muslim,” and “all Muslims are a monolithic, oppressed identity group by white European colonizers.” Iranians disappear entirely in this framework. Their language, history, and culture—Persian, not Arab; ancient, not colonial; distinct, not interchangeable—are erased.
By treating Islam as a racial identity rather than an ideology, Western media strips millions of people of their ability to reject it. Iranian protesters become unintelligible. Their rebellion cannot be processed without breaking the rule that Islam must not be criticized. So instead of listening to Iranians, the media speaks over them—or ignores them entirely.
There is another reason the Iranian uprising is so threatening to Western media [:] economic issues. As you know, Iran is not only a religious dictatorship. It is a centrally controlled, state-dominated economy where markets are strangled, private enterprise is criminalized or co-opted, and economic survival depends on proximity to political power. Decades of price controls, subsidies, nationalization, and bureaucratic micromanagement have obliterated the middle class and entrenched corruption as the only functional system. The result is not equality or justice. It is poverty, stagnation, and dependence on government’s dark void of empty promises.
Covering Iran honestly would require acknowledging that these policies are harmful. They have been tried. They have failed. Catastrophically.
This is deeply inconvenient for Western media institutions that routinely promote expansive state control, centralized economic planning, and technocratic governance as morally enlightened alternatives to liberal capitalism. Iran demonstrates where such systems lead when insulated from accountability and enforced by ideology. It shows that when the state controls livelihoods, non-conformity becomes existentially dangerous. That lesson cannot be acknowledged without undermining the moral authority of those who advocate similar ideas in softer language. Western liberal media prefers not to hear this. Acknowledging it would require abandoning the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, white and non-white. Iranian protesters do not fit. They show that authoritarianism is not a Western invention imposed from outside, but something many societies are actively trying to escape.
That is what terrifies Western liberal media. And that is why the Iranian people are being ignored.
So the silence continues. I hear Pink Floyd’s “Sorrow” in my head:
… And silence that speaks so much louder than words
People talk a lot about the Shah’s son. An analyst from the Middle East Forum claims he’s unqualified to lead Iran (yes, I know, even rule by my late lamented dog would be an improvement over the theomafiocracy)— because supposedly the Pahlevi dynasty only ever represented the Persians who make up a bare majority of the Iranian population. https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-882760
***
We already know that the banu sittim alaf sharmuteh of Qatar have been trying to buy everybody — left, right, and center.
But I think it’s a special kind of Arschhurerei (*ss-wh*ring) when the former director-general of the Foreign Ministry (and past Consul-General in New York), turned Haaretz (ugh) columnist, takes large sums of money from Qatar to write articles on its behalf in the said far-left rag. (Haaretz did fire him.)
One good news item of the day: Ashley Rindsberg’s campaign to expose the “gang of 40” cabal of Wikipedia editors that have been sowing pro-HamaSS and pro-islamist poison weeds in Wikipedia apparently reached some result, with the most egregious violator being banned by unanimous vote by the executive committee.
Haviv Rettig Gur has Hussein Abubakr Mansour on his podcast. Lots to unpack here, but one nugget stuck out: the theory of how wokeism on the Left emerged from an internecine struggle between the faction at the top and factions from the middle trying to displace the top. The top faction trumpets identity politics and “diversity” as a diversion to protects its own position, while the upstarts out-woke each other trying to climb the ladder and pushing competitors down. Hence also the obsession with “canceling” — not just of the “far right” (i.e., anyone to the right of Lenin) but especially of those in their own camp who fail ever more extreme and arbitrary purity tests.
As they diagnose it, once the right got its second wind, the same phenomenon has now set in there.
And yes, Qatar et al. are playing a toxic role, but HAM (heh) sees them less as instigators but as pouring gasoline on an already burning fire.
Joel Kotkin contextualizes the rise of that failed (c)rapper nepo baby Zohran Mamdani as part of the same phenomenon. His electoral base, as he sees it, are graduates of “studies” programs working at nonprofits or in the circling-the-drain-media, who feel they are entitled by their “superiority” to a certain lifestyle, but by their choice of careers (think they) cannot leave one of the world’s most expensive cities to live in.
Meanwhile, the mad mullahs have cut off the internet in Iran, but they are playing that media Arschhure Sucker Qatarlson on TV. You can’t make this up.
I’ll say it again: both Putin and the Mad Mullah’s regimes have been prematurely obituarized so many times that I’ve become very hesitant to pile on. But this does look… different.
It is not the first time that the Islamic Republic of Iran (or, as some call it, the Islamofascist Occupation Regime of Iran) has been rocked by major protest.
But this time, it looks like things are a quantum leap above all previous instances, in both scope and intensity. The regime (like that of Put[a]in [fils de putain] or of Xi the Turtle-Botherer) has been prematurely eulogized numerous times — and it is quite possible that they may (perish the thought) somehow be able to hang on this time. But the very fact that the senior leadership is even considering an exit plan speaks volumes.
Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has a back-up plan to flee the country should his security forces fail to suppress protests or desert, according to an intelligence report shared with The Times.
Khamenei, 86, plans to escape Tehran with a close circle of up to 20 aides and family, should he see that the army and security called on to quell the unrest are deserting, defecting or failing to follow orders.
“The ‘plan B’ is for Khamenei and his very close circle of associates and family, including his son and nominated heir apparent, Mojtaba,” an intelligence source told The Times.
Beni Sabti, who served for decades in Israeli intelligence after fleeing the regime eight years after the Islamic revolution, told The Times that Khamenei would flee to Moscow as “there is no other place for him”.
Khamenei also “admires Putin, while the Iranian culture is more similar to the Russian culture”.
The getaway plan is based on the escape of his ally, the fallen Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad who fled Damascus aboard a plane to Moscow to join his family before opposition forces stormed the capital in December 2024.
“They have plotted an exit route out of Tehran should they feel the need to escape,” which includes “gathering assets, properties abroad and cash to facilitate their safe passage”, the source said.
[…] Khamenei is known to hold a major network of assets, some under one of the most powerful organisations in Iran, Setad — part of a system of semi-state charitable foundations known for their financial obfuscation. Estimates put the total holdings at $95 billion, according to a Reuters investigation in 2013, including properties and companies, all held and controlled by Khamenei.
Many of his closest aides, including the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council, Ali Larijani — who warned President Trumpto stay out of Tehran’s affairs — have family members already living abroad, including in the US, Canada and Dubai.
Spin, strangeness, and charm 