Wednesday, September 18th, 2024
What’s nice, impressive and persuasive in this Jerusalem Post analysis by Yonah Jeremy Bob laying out the case that war with Lebanon is now closer, is that it’s due to eminently sensible rather than the media’s usual ludicrously cynical motivations. For instance:
Despite Netanyahu’s publicly threatening words and tone, another major reason that war has not broken out is that the prime minister was privately terrified of how many Israelis might die from an estimated Hezbollah onslaught of 6,000-8,000 rockets per day.
While “terrified” seems an unnecessarily disparaging choice of word, nonetheless the meaning is clear: Netanyahu is adjusting to the fluid situation that is war. What he deemed reckless and premature 10 months ago may be the obvious and inevitable now.
On August 25, the IDF did not just beat Hezbollah – it cleaned house … The military blew up the vast majority of the rockets and drones with which Hezbollah had intended to attack Israel before these threats could even be launched.
In this particular attack, Hezbollah neither killed nor damaged anyone or anything of significance, while the IDF destroyed thousands of rockets.
Suddenly, Netanyahu has a newfound confidence: that he actually can afford a major operation against Hezbollah – with much fewer losses to the home front than he had expected.
Bob’s editors might not like it, but there’s a way to describe this in two words: responsible leadership.
Monday, September 16th, 2024
Think about MSNBC and CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, AP, etcetera as a set of instructions for how to keep your job.
Eric Weinstein, Modern Wisdom podcast, Episode #833
What if the USA acted like the USA?
But of course, the US and all decent people worldwide condemned the Hamas murders. The Biden-Harris administration was “pained” by the murders (not outraged) and toothlessly jabbered that “Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.” But this was not followed up by any moves against the genocidal terrorist group and its regional backers: anything concrete that would impose “full accountability” on Hamas.
Rather, the Hamas execution of Israeli hostages was followed up by pressure on Israel to make concessions to the perpetrators and essentially concede defeat to them. President Biden took to the microphone to accuse Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “not doing enough” to secure a hostage deal.
Another scathing piece on Biden.
Monday, September 9th, 2024
Thursday, September 5th, 2024
By the UK Government’s own admission and statement regarding its prominently-stated suspension of some 30 export licenses to Israel, this is not about the actual items being sent nor even their past or future use. Rather it is a knuckle-rapping for Israel’s policies on humanitarian aid — “Israel could reasonably do more to facilitate humanitarian access and distribution” — and detainee conditions — “Israel continues to deny access to places of detention for the International Committee of the Red Cross”. Both of these are contentious. There’s a reasonable argument for allowing no humanitarian aid in at all as siege warfare is a complicated thing in international law and by the looks of it beyond simple legal interpretation, but to punish Israel because it could be doing more seems unreasonable. Second, Israel is under no obligation to allow Red Cross visits as Palestinian terrorists do not qualify as POWs. British government lawyers must know these things — is this the best they can do? What is going on here really?
Sunday, September 1st, 2024
Factoring the constraint into its own method allows us to give it an intention-revealing name that makes the constraint explicit in our design. It is now a named thing we can discuss.
Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design
Friday, August 30th, 2024
Ha ha! The Guardian reports that some special relationships are more special than others. Ok that’s not quite right. He’s saying to Starmer’s Britain: don’t be assholes. Knowing The Guardian, they probably view an arms boycott of Israel as a happy two-fer: boycott Israel, get disengagement from the US for free! Little Satan, Big Satan.
Thursday, August 29th, 2024
Versatility, simplicity, and explanatory power come from a model that is truly in tune with the domain.
Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design
Once again Herb Keinon is proving his worth as veteran Jerusalem Post diplomatic correspondent. For the first time I’m seeing argued that the October 7th invasion has changed Israeli doctrine: threats must no longer be allowed to metastasize but instead must be nipped in the bud, unpleasantness and opprobriation notwithstanding. So Israel has made the most powerful incursion since Sharon ordered Operation Defensive Shield in 2002.
Just for shits and giggles, here is The Guardian addressing the same topic. Holding my nose, I quote two hall-of-mirrors sentences:
The world’s powers must ask why they seem incapable of finding an agreement to end the current bloodshed. Without a deal, faith in the global institutions risks withering away.
What does the first sentence even mean? Which powers? The implications here are multi-fold: 1) it is outside forces who must impose an agreement, rather than an attacked nationstate defeating the terror army that attacked it. 2) Such powers are actually able to impose this agreement but are just pretending they can’t due to certain reasons — presumably Jewish influence on them. 3) In the real world, global institutions are being eroded not by Israel fighting for its survival but by the cynical lawfare campaign being waged against it, with total disregard for the long-term viability of such institutions by submerging them in, yes, genocidal politicized mendacity.
I am annoyed with myself I even looked at this twisted stuff.
Friday, August 23rd, 2024
According to Gabi Siboni, the main reason why it’s taking such a long time to destroy Hamas is “the IDF’s unwillingness to take over the distribution of humanitarian aid, as required by international law.”
Tuesday, August 20th, 2024
Biden enabled this infamy too: in The Telegraph, Richard Kemp skewers the ICC on Israel.
Our assessment was that the IDF was complying with international law. We pointed out that they have been making greater efforts and employing more sophisticated procedures than any other armies to mitigate harm to civilians.
I am grateful that The Telegraph at least is promoting such common sense views to the great British public and beyond.
Thursday, August 15th, 2024
$100M Offers: How to Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No
Alex Hormozi
♦♦♦♦
I think I came across Alex Hormozi in my YouTube side recommended feed and he came across as impassioned and systematic about marketing and selling. And that is what I have enjoyed about his $100m Offers book: it is very schematic, which makes it easy for someone to whom perhaps marketing does not come naturally. I believe I will be relying on this book to formulate my own offer — so high praise indeed surely.
Thursday, August 8th, 2024
Wednesday, August 7th, 2024
What a grim and ghastly tale of the Jew as the Jonah. The Israeli team has been booted out of an international youth frisbee competition in Ghent, Belgium due to safety concerns after the Israelis were threatened. My nephew is in this team. Is it fear or fetish or both, this surrender to islamothugs.
Tuesday, August 6th, 2024
Former Labour (then Kadima) minister Chaim Ramon points out the Likud’s folly in tacitly supporting Hamas, partially in an effort not to interfere against Palestinian violent splintering. I admit guilty in supporting this in-retrospect-too-clever-by-half approach. The Right was guilty of supporting religious Palestinians just as before them the Left was guilty of supporting secular ones, misguided by the notion that they just want what we want, ie, to just get on with it, building things and having as good a time as possible.
The very special Mike Doran hints at why he votes based on a candidate’s Israel policy (in response to Elon Musk’s enumeration of why he will vote for Trump):
I vote on Israel. The Israel test is the simplest and most elegant. The candidate that is best on Israel will be best on all the other things. I guarantee it. There are profound political and cultural reasons for this fact.
Someone asked him to explicate this. Here’s one quick stab at a vector: Supporting Israel demonstrates both powerful intelligence and strength of character: to be able to power down through overloaded linguistic chimeras, ie, towers of lies big and small, then have the intellectual integrity to choose not to look away but digest the (many) resulting conclusions, and finally have the courage to express support despite local social disapproval, with the faith that it’ll be ok to do so.
Sunday, August 4th, 2024
“Too battle-minded” — Josh Shapiro seemed not only an insightful but also a polite 20-year-old. I hope therefore he will have a stab of conscience and not agree to make Harris any more palatable to reasonable Americans than she is suddenly becoming.
Saturday, August 3rd, 2024
A review of the new documentary How to Come Alive With Norman Mailer (A Cautionary Tale), this Atlantic staff writer cannot help in the end but laud Mailer. Though I find unforgivable Mailer’s asinine comments regarding the Twin Towers (“like two bunny teeth” or somesuch) after they were taken down on 9/11.
Wednesday, July 31st, 2024
Friday, July 26th, 2024
It is important to constrain relationships as much as possible.
Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design
Israel is the pivot, the axis, the litmus, the trial.
George Gilder
Friday, July 19th, 2024
Oversubscribed: How to Get People Lined Up to Do Business with You
Daniel Priestley
♦♦♦♦
Having enjoyed Daniel Priestley on a podcast, I resolved to read his book on sales. For the first time I listened to rather than read a book, taking advantage of a 3-month free Audible offer, and I’m sure that my recollection is even crappier when listening than reading. At any rate, I took few notes and now that it’s been 6 weeks or so since I read it, I remember nothing explicit I’m afraid except his nice Australian accent. I think though that he led me to Alex Hormozi, whose message is similar but more granular and recipe-like. At any rate, the experience was spoiled by the book being too blatantly a promotional device for Priestley’s impressive SaaS offering which I tried out, the name of which I also forget — ah yes, quiz marketing! Quiz marketing is his thing. ScoreApp. Daft — though I’m sure it works and the joke is on me. And I intend to use a toned-down version of it as the contact form on my new site.
Tuesday, July 9th, 2024
Thank you Rusto Reno, editor of Feisty Things, for this articulation towards the end of this podcast episode:
The liberation project is a utopian project that doesn’t have any limits. And moreover, if you can redefine husband and wife, why can’t you redefine men and women? I mean, if we can redefine marriage, the primordial institution of society that is more fundamental than any particular form of government, it’s universal across all cultures, then if you can redefine that, then I don’t see how you can object to people redefining what it means to be a man and a woman, or for that matter, to redefine anything.
Thursday, July 4th, 2024
Enterprise Ontology
Jan L. G. Dietz
♦♦♦♦
Well well, since reading this book I see that 18 years after the 1st edition, a 2nd edition was released in June 2024 — priced at £175, no less! I guess the topic is hot. Given that my work is now heavily engaged with modeling enterprises, and that I’m therefore quite fascinated by, well, enterprise ontology, I was eager to pick this up. One discouraging and prophetic moment came however in the Prologue, wherein author Jan Dietz writes:
I could have waited for another couple of years before having this book published, while continually adding and improving things. Instead I decided to do it now, for several reasons, of which the most important one is that I wanted to finish something.
Too much sharing perhaps — and perhaps unkind of me to quote this. We do start off nice and strong, with quotable sentences and some nice definitions and some philosophical care for humanity, but the book starts getting pretty esoteric, using Greek characters and a diagramming method familiar I think only to the author, and things seem to peter out.
There’s also more emphasis than there would be today about being a document management system — I wonder if the 2nd edition deemphasizes this. I like that he considers there to be two kinds of acts: production and coordination. But writ large, the theory seems to corroborate my own practice: the preeminence of roles. As I review the first few pages that preview the rest of the book, it does jibe a lot with my own thinking and perhaps a reread could serve to deepen things.
There is not one UK political party that expresses the main stances I value:
- Get back into Europe: Brexit is a silly nonsense; Britain’s historic role is offshore balancer to Europe, and how better than deep within its regulatory institutions.
- Be economically sensible: Look back at and reapply what worked in the 20th century: top-notch educational opportunities for less privileged people paired with business-friendliness.
- Support Israel properly: I mean not “staunchly” like the Conservatives say but barely do; I mean get ahead of the USA and Germany and be Israel’s most reliable ally as a fellow smaller world-historic democracy always working for true liberalism. And I also mean: find an independent way to be relevant and helpful in the Middle East. Both Jordan and the Gulf states look to Britain I believe as a senior partner; these are hugely important players who would do more if Britain had their backs; and France might see that and in turn play its part, maybe even in new Anglo-French joint initiatives with yes some boots on the ground.
- Jettison the bollocks: Rigorously and vigorously dispatch with the medievalist self-mutilation that is political post-modernism, including both the extreme rights-based Orwellianism eroding actual liberalism, and the climate apoplexy eroding actual science (there are less oppressive and destructive ways to foster energy innovation).
Theoretically the party closest to all this are the Conservatives, but in practice not so much; moreover they are the cause of the top mess with their Brexit business — Britain is a European nation, not a semi-continent unto itself like a USA or an India, and now that the Britain-led industrial revolution and resulting empire is long gone, it’s folly to presume and proceed otherwise.
Saturday, June 29th, 2024
Archly-written summary of the Trump-Biden debate by Jenny Holland in Spiked:
Call me naïve, but I don’t think sister-on-sister rape – and the resulting offspring – is the national problem that Biden seems to think it is.
But she concludes more darkly:
The media’s complicity in the disaster that America now finds itself in must never be forgotten. Or forgiven.
Sunday, June 23rd, 2024
1948
Benny Morris
♦♦♦♦♦
First bought and read a dozen years ago, and mostly forgotten, I returned to Benny Morris’s 1948 now during the post-October 7th Israel-Gaza conflict, for which 1948’s War of Independence serves in a number of ways as a distant mirror. Although 1967’s Six Day War seems to loom larger in consciousness, 1948 was the big one, the epoch-definer.
Even back then, Israel labored under a diplomatic situation where it was held back from victory. This time around the Palestinians have different weapons: no Arab armies, but lopsided savagery, projectile warfare, a dedicated sponsor and participant in Tehran, Western cultural cognitive decline, and lawfare from a corrupted globalist establishment. The book, with its encyclopedic ambitions, suffers from one sin of history: it does not elicit mental images of many of the events it describes, such as the battles around Gaza between Israel and Egypt. That said, it’s a vital primer.
Saturday, June 22nd, 2024
I used to be an intellectual but now I’m a conservative.
Mike Doran
Tuesday, June 18th, 2024
Monday, June 17th, 2024
Sunday, June 16th, 2024
At a meeting between US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and a group of senior Arab officials about a month ago, a shouting match reportedly ensued between the UAE and Palestinian delegates. I find it so encouraging that there is a body in the Arab world that seems insistent on calling a spade a spade and treating people equally and with respect no matter who they are, and not instrumentalizing the Palestinians to some nonsensical end, nor fatally coddling them no matter their viciousness. The UAE’s path-beating instills me with hope.
Tuesday, June 11th, 2024
MacRumors summarizes Apple’s announcements at WWDC 2024 in 9 minutes. Onboard AI and ChatGPT integration. More configuration and multiple screens in Control Center. Sending even regular messages via satellite. And so much more, for real. A huge raft of announcements!
Maybe the single killer feature of the Apple Vision Pro: entire home not desk as office:
Walking around my entire apartment with Vision Pro on my head, strolling between large windows that cover different walls in each space, with specific rooms dedicated to certain kinds of work activities, felt like a radical extension of the standing desk.
Especially useful for those who work at home and have it to themselves for the workday.
I’ve heard people such as Dan Senor not understand the electoral logic behind President Biden’s pandering to Hamas supporters in Michigan. Like others, Senor cannot even imagine the only logical conclusion: it comes not from cynicism and expedience but rather ideology and belief (as much as this ethics-challenged pol can muster at any rate). In a devastating list-like article akin to a mordant Victor Davis Hanson column, Morton Klein reminds that Biden is not an Israel-friendly president. If he is not the architect of our current woes he is at least the midwife.
Biden has been hostile to Israel since day one of his administration before Michigan was a twinkle in his eye. Moreover, Biden stands to lose more Jewish and pro-Israel votes than he gains from anti-Israel communities, as 80% of Americans support Israel over Hamas. I thus believe that the real reason for Biden’s anti-Israel policies is Biden’s longstanding and sinister hostility to Israel.
In the last few days John Podhoretz has been coming to this conclusion, but sees it as the ranting of a senile old man, rather than long-held tendencies.
Thursday, June 6th, 2024
Salem Alketbi in The Jerusalem Post on Arab do-nothing-ism vis-a-vis Gaza. It’s great to hear this pragmatic, humanist voice coming from the UAE.
What remains unspoken about the Arab role in Gaza is the lack of a collective political vision for a solution to the crisis, despite the fact that it has been ongoing for over seven months. Instead, they have settled for official face-saving statements, while refraining from calling a spade a spade and without playing any real role in saving the Palestinian people from the ruthlessness of the Iran-backed Hamas faction.
Gaymen and ladies in San Francisco, your true colors shining through…
Gadi Taub hosts Gabi Siboni [Hebrew]. Total common sense that seems in short supply. With the North empty and on fire, an invasion of South Lebanon is very overdue. I think the country understands that. I am long along the road of losing faith in Netanyahu, who pays way too much mind to the Biden Administration’s inanity.
Monday, June 3rd, 2024
Only now, after calling an election, do the Conservatives say a woman is a woman. And that is why they will lose: because they have not been governing as conservatives. The only caveat to this prediction is that they are the worst except for all the rest. Or, as Allistair Heath writes in “Nigel Farage has driven the Tories to a state of near-total psychological collapse”, also in The Telegraph:
Aending out strong Right-wing vibes at one minute to midnight in a desperate bid to deflect the oncoming Nigel Farage tsunami isn’t enough: after 14 years of talking as conservatives but governing as social-democrats, the Tories have run out of excuses. They broke their promises on migration, legal and illegal, and never had the guts to pull out of the ECHR. They increased taxes, and are planning to do so again as a share of GDP.
This is why I blame the Tory wets, in charge for almost all of the past 14 years, for the Starmer-ite calamity that is about to befall Britain.
It is the wets who jettisoned free-market economics, deregulation, tax cuts and supply-side reforms, who crippled the City, who increased immigration, who ignored the collapse of community and family and the baby-bust, who failed to fix the Civil Service, who refused to scrap the BBC licence fee, who had no interest in properly reforming the public sector, including the NHS (and who promoted even more cultish reverence for a failing system), who vetoed prison building and a real crackdown on crime, who embraced net zero and the neo-Blairite quangocracy, and who wanted to surrender to the woke stormtroopers.
Tuesday, May 28th, 2024
Sunday, May 26th, 2024
Friday, May 24th, 2024
Yossi Klein-Halevi: We have to own the strangeness of our story. I’ve been having similar thoughts; there is no comparable nation to Israel. Right from the get go we endemically punch way above our weight — this small nation sandwiched between bigger empires declared its god to be the only one, negating everyone else’s! It’s a world religion that — unlike any other world religion — doesn’t proselytize because it’s the religion of a nation, so grows through the womb not the meme. Always being small in one’s arena means always being a target.
Thursday, May 23rd, 2024
The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board cuts through the miasma:
Though Israeli liberals won’t like to hear it, Israel probably will need to fill the vacuum in Gaza for a time. Though Israeli right-wingers won’t like to hear it, the purpose would be to make way for local governance. The politics, there and here, explain why it has been easier to pretend there’s no plan at all.
Monday, May 20th, 2024
Saturday, May 18th, 2024
Sense from John Spencer as reported by CNN of all outlets.
By going slowly, I can argue through history and through metrics, it gives your enemy more time to defend, more time to prevent your plans, more time to prevent you from achieving surprise. We, as in the world, are also responsible for some of the destruction that’s happened in Gaza.
Friday, May 17th, 2024
We are at a moment where what’s morally indefensible is becoming socially acceptable.
Tal Becker, “Call Me Back”, May 16th
Tuesday, May 14th, 2024
David Wurmser at the Center for Security Policy, the first I’ve come across to synthesize Israel’s Eurovision popular vote win:
Israel seems to be casting some light that is shining onto populations and peoples far away, triggering in them a rediscovery of themselves and what made those distant lands and cultures great.
He notes the dichotomy between the popular vote and the judges:
Many of the nations in which Israel won the popular vote by wide margins had their judges award Israel zero points. Western European elites led the trend: the UK, Switzerland, Luxembourg, San Marino, Spain, Finland, Australia, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Andorra, Belgium, and Sweden all had been won by Israel with 12 points on the popular vote, but all had the judged award Israel zero points. Four of the five UK judges had ranked Israel as the worst song of the 35.
