He dodged an ambush by avoiding it.
Iran can be defeated, but we’ve gone forty years now with no national will on the part of anyone to defeat it. Including Reagan.
He dodged an ambush by avoiding it.
Iran can be defeated, but we’ve gone forty years now with no national will on the part of anyone to defeat it. Including Reagan.
Clark Lindsey has quite a round up of links from this week.
[Update at noon]
What is the role of the Space Force? A long essay from (USAF Colonel — ret) Peter Garretson.
Before they could betray America, they first had to betray their own people:
Marxism-Leninism, ideologically incompatible with Judaism, specifically required the Jewish people to dissolve into the international proletariat. As part of its need to eradicate both the Jewish religion and Jewish nationhood, the Soviet Union forbade the teaching of Hebrew, a language essential to both. The “Jewish sections” of the party, the yevsektsii, enforced this program of Sovietization. As the historian Yuri Slezkine writes in his The House of Government, while Polish, Latvian, and Georgian high-ranking members of the party “seemed to assume that proletarian internationalism was compatible with their native tongues, songs, and foods,” high-ranking Jewish members did not speak Yiddish at home or try to pass anything Jewish on to their children. Many proved their new loyalty by pursuing their fellow Jews with special vigor.
When it came to Zionism, the Communist party under Stalin hailed the 1929 Arab pogroms against Jews in Palestine as the start of an Arab Communist revolution and created the watchwords of 20th-century anti-Zionism: a leftist version of anti-Semitism that condemned Jewish national aspirations as a crime against the international order.
Barry Sanders, who honeymooned in the USSR, is an example of this. And of course, the Left continues to blame the Jews for the problems of the Middle East.
Ten movie ideas for screenwriters.
A biopic of Norman Borlaug could be good, too.
During the past week I’ve spoken to a number of skilled and experienced observers of the region, and every one them is hard put to make sense of Iranian motives. In the absence of a rational explanation, let me offer this one: The mullahs are nuts. I don’t mean that they are nuts in the way that a power-mad tinpot dictator is nuts, but rather that they are world-historically, existentially, and metaphysically nuts. Their character and circumstances, that is to say, impel them toward actions that would be irrational for another character under other circumstances.
The treatment of Iran by the Obama administration was probably the biggest (among many) of its foreign-policy disasters.
There is a new report out from the Reason Foundation, by Jeff Greason and James Bennett, on how it needs to be rethought and reorganized. I haven’t read it yet, but I expect it to be good (I saw Jeff today at the Space Settlement Forum, where I gave a talk on space property rights).
There are a bunch of new ones out as part of the fiftieth anniversary. Here’s a list (including some old classics as well).
80% of Mexican territory, including the border regions (natch) is controlled by drug cartels.
There is one, and only one way (or at least it’s a necessary if not sufficient condition) to deal with this: Legalize drugs.