Artificial Intelligence

The turnaround had perhaps begun, not a moment too soon: beloved Boeing sheds DEI. This pernicious practice may not have been the original source of the rot at Boeing but its acceptance at an engineering firm was at very least a symptom.

Jordan B on Donald J. You know what, i think it’s all gonna be okay.

By Armin Rosen in Unherd, the most important thing I’ve read about Sinwar and his passing:

A significant body of facts suggests that Sinwar believed he would succeed in destroying the state of Israel on or about October 7, 2023. A few years before the attacks, he co-sponsored a conference at a Gaza City hotel entitled “Promise of the Hereafter: Post-Liberation Palestine” in which participants discussed topics such as the enslavement of educated Jews and the mass execution of alleged Arab collaborators in the aftermath of Israel’s imminent violent destruction.

Tal Becker, a great thinker, on Call Me Back.

Goodness, Niall Ferguson on Bibismarck.

Push da buttons

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.

Efraim Inbar recaps the obvious: stand firm.

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.”

“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.

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.

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.

Niall Ferguson’s inaugural Free Press column: Are We the Soviets?

“I, for one, have had my fill of the old Bard of Stratford on Avon,” writes Joseph Epstein in Commentary. In the piece he relies on Tolstoy’s complaints of Shakespearean nullity ⁠— this as counterpoint to his quasi-review and ultimate dismissal as parlor game of a recent book comparing current political figures to Shakespearean monarchs.

I too have struggled to read such plays as The Tempest. But Shakespeare does two things: 1) what Tolstoy accuses him off, yet thereby solidifying the epoch-making shucking off of medieval piety and heralding modernity, taking his place among in the pantheon of modernity’s fathers along with Machiavelli and Hobbes and others; and 2) making us step back a little in admiration of and delight in the very method ⁠— language, our language ⁠— that we use in order to have all the ideas that Tolstoy accused him of lacking.

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.

Gadi Taub in great form while visiting with Mike Doran.

Eric Cohen’s Exodus project: American Jews need to contribute to renewal.

On Israeli food in London.

How heartwarming is this exchange between Hugh Hewitt and Yossi Klein-Halevi. Who better to thank HH for his steadfastness and engagement since Oct 7.

[Update 2024 May 7]: Hewitt is even reading out the names of the young Israeli fallen after the rocket attack on Keren Shalom. I hope when Hewitt gets over to Israel he is appropriately feted; how many people his erudite common sense must be reaching as they commute to and from mid-sized cities throughout the American heartland.

This is how the Associated Press presents the US intifada encampments:

The outcry is forcing colleges to reckon with their financial ties to Israel, as well as their support for free speech. Some Jewish students say the protests have veered into antisemitism and made them afraid to set foot on campus.

What a topsy-turvy whitewash.

There is also:

The protests have even spread to Europe…

What’s interesting is why they haven’t mainly been in Europe.

Every paragraph with its little bombshell: Edward Luttwak is in full elegant force in “Iran is weaker than we think” in Unherd. The opening paragraph:

It is only now, almost 16 years since Obama first entered the White House with the private determination to end Iran’s “death to America” hostility at all costs, that his Iran policy has achieved the exact opposite of what he had wanted: direct warfare, with US fighters intercepting Iran’s bombardment drones. All along, it was a policy that had two different faces: one perfectly reasonable, and the other perfectly delusional.

Such casual rhythm before the zing at paragraph’s end! Later we get a Luttwakian paradox of strategy:

The [Iranian] Revolutionary Guards finally failed strategically because their Arab recruitment policy was so successful that it overshot the culminating point of success: seeing the historic Sunni capital of Damascus under Shia domination, and Baghdad the very seat of the Sunni Arab Caliphate ruled by Iran’s agents, Sunni Arab states from Morocco to Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which had repeatedly fought Israel from 1948, moved to abandon their hostility, openly or discreetly.

And we end with striking, real-world evidence that demonstrates the strategic theories posited within. I won’t quote this evidence so as not to spoil the end of this masterful op-ed.

A rabbi on the Seder.

War and warming. What are the chances this bonkers piece is a hoax designed to embarrass its publisher The Nation. People took time and effort to ensure it is written in full sentences and well copy-edited.

Great lengthy interview with Giora Eiland, always with cogent orthogonal ideas on important Israeli geopolitical realities.

The Israeli story was, Hamas is like ISIS, and ISIS is like Hamas. No! That’s not the case. ISIS was a bunch of crazies from Baghdad who, unopposed, gained control of western Iraq and those who lived there. But it didn’t represent the people, not in Mosul or elsewhere. Gaza more resembles 1930s Germany, where an extremist party won elections, with the support of most of the people, and quickly unified the military and civil government into one entity. What happened on October 7 is that the State of Gaza went to war against the State of Israel. State against state. Now, the state of Gaza does have vulnerabilities. It doesn’t have sufficient fuel, food and water of its own. You can impose a legitimate boycott on that state until the state returns all of your hostages. Humanitarian for humanitarian.

I’m not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved that Eiland is granted the levers of power.

Cool, calm, collected, and with casually brilliant staging. IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi provides the official Israeli miltary speech in response to the massive Iranian missile attack.

The New Yorker does eVTOLs.

He’s very good, is Brendan O’Neill, and I’m glad The Spectator is publishing him. “The Truth About Friendly Fire”:

Across social media, the cry goes up: Israel did this on purpose. It seems Israel is the only state not allowed to make mistakes. Where us decent Westerners kill friends in error, Israel does it intentionally, with malice at its heart.

Who would have thought this would be published in such a well-known British magazine. There is hope.

It seems that some in the West are seeking to launder their reputations through attacking Israel. From Cameron to Biden, powerful men who have been involved in wars far more horrific and far less justified than Israel’s war on Hamas, are now pontificating against the Jewish State.

But their finger-wagging attempt at rehabilitating their own reputations by slighting others’ ⁠— and hang the risk even unto civilization itself ⁠— does burnish at least one aspect of their respective reputations, ie being a sleazeball.

How gratifying, the plethora of common-sense comments reacting to this rather less-than-sensible Telegraph story “How international law could force Britain to stop arms sales to Israel” which furthers the tradition of latching on to that weird and mealy-mouthed “plausible” ruling by the ICJ.

Was this the Court’s intent, to say something with plausible deniability so that the very many people who want it to have said a thing can act as if it did? I in turn am latching on to that possibility to accuse it all of being quite transparent, truly despicable, and dangerously corrosive.

It’s most discomfiting, seeing prominent Israelis self-lacerate in foreign journals. Here Aluf Benn of Haaretz, whom I previously admired before he took up its editorship and thereby become responsible for its seditious bile, writes in Foreign Affairs a piece entitled “Israel’s Self-Destruction”.

He opens with Moshe Dayan’s now much-recalled eulogy for Roi Rotberg of Nachal Oz. Very quickly however two items give me pause. First, Benn refers to “Netanyahu’s effort to undermine [Israel’s] democratic institutions and turn it into a theocratic, nationalist autocracy” ⁠— this is obviously a very partisan view of the judicial reform bill. Second, Benn writes: “If they finally heed Dayan’s warning, the country could come together and chart a path to peace and dignified coexistence with the Palestinians.”

Tellingly, Benn does not link to the actual text of Dayan’s short speech, which is much more about advocating for a Jabotinsky-like iron wall than State Department-esque “risks for peace”. Dayan in fact refers to foreign mandarins quite colorfully as “the ambassadors of malevolent hypocrisy who call upon us to lay down our arms” and bleakly concludes that Roi himself was blinded by the notion that peaceful coexistence ⁠— of the sort Benn is implicitly pushing for ⁠— is possible.

In case anyone needs it spelled out (and outside of Israel it does seem almost everyone does), Elliot Abrahms lays out what the 2-state solution actually means.

At the same time that the US says it’s “devastated” at the killing of a young Palestinian with American citizenship, silence regarding the injuries to Americans in the Ra’anana attack.

Andrew Pressin, Professor of Philosophy at Connecticut College, asks the one simple question in order to articulate the bleedin’ obvious.

“Is it acceptable to slit babies’ throats, rape little girls, chop off of the hands and feet of teenagers, gouge out eyes, murder children in front of their parents, murder parents in front of their children then kidnap the children, bind entire families together then burn them alive, and livestream all the above ⁠— and worse ⁠— on a mass scale ⁠— in the pursuit of some political aim?”

In the wake of Israeli soldiers killing 3 hostages, Michael Oren reveals his own brushes with friendly fire and tries to rally us.

Here is a fascinating thing: Salem AlKetbi, A UAE columnist in a right-of-center Israeli paper. Reading his “What’s next for Gaza?”, I like his tone, calling it the “Palestinian file” like something one pulls out a cabinet somewhere. I like how he immediately attests to the Iranian angle ⁠— clearly what Emiratis care about ⁠— specifically warning that if a vacuum opens up in Gaza (as others have recommended) then Iran will obviously work to fill it.

Iran may even start helping Hamas more directly as it approaches destruction, AlKetbi argues, if only because once Israel vanquishes it, she’s free to turn to Iran’s crown jewel Hizballah. That is: while Hamas is around, Hizballah is safe.

AlKetbi is also worried that Iran will start attacking Israel given the perception of tepid US support for Israel. Actually I’d just been musing on the very opposite: Israel is tied down with Hamas, and America wants it that way so as not to expand the war, but the necessities of events could mean that the USA could inadvertently end up fighting Iran where it otherwise could have had Israel do this had it not leaned on Israel to leave Hizballah alone.

By the power of our example of the example of our power, either way… Walter Russell Mead towers over his lucky interlocutors on the Moment of Zen podcast.

Don’t fight anti-Semitism, rather, fuck ’em. This is the Global Jewish Future approach, which builds on tenets of Zionism: we work on ourselves chabibi not on others. I am so totally with this, and disappointed with myself for not realizing that my disdain for all the anti-Semitism decrying comes from this happy place.

The tone of this litany of complaints by Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting author (and Orlando resident, I remember being told by a local taxi driver), reminds me of Victor Davis Hanson. I wonder on how many issue this ostensible leftist and rightist might actually agree.

Some choice sentences regarding theses privileged medievalists blocking the way.

In his great book Where Is My Flying Car? author J. Storrs Hall suggests that perhaps the best way to measure the wealth of nations is in how much energy people in each country use. In a recent article at comparison site ElectricRate on the cost of electricity around the world, the table labeled “Percentage of Day’s Wages Needed to Buy Electricity” is perhaps an even better measurement. #1 is Norway, #3 is the USA, and Israel and the UK are #10 and #12.

At the Tikva Podcast, a national treasure, the fiercely smart Yehushua Pfeffer on the Haredi moment.

Gadi Taub and Peter Berkowitz on the Israeli moment. Whereas Taub thinks the opposition must make the next move, Berkowitz (and also Sharansky) thinks the government must reach across the aisle since it’s the one in power.

Seems like great news, Israel’s government and opposition reaching a compromise over judicial reform.

In an escalation, the world-historical anti-regime movement in Iran has taken its first regime victim, an IRGC commander shot outside his home.

Stratechery on Microsoft: So Teams is the new Windows. Ah, as so many movie villains have said, Why won’t you just die?!

TwIS on Twitter’s new podcasting.

Britons should be honored by this Palestinian diatribe against them.