The walking, talking, sack of excrement[*] leading the Islamo-Communist “Green” Party in the UK was kept out of the Commons. He stood in a by-election for Two-Tier Keir’s former Parliamentary seat for “Holborne and St. Pancras” — a central London electoral district — but lost to the Labour candidate.
Andy Burnham’s Labour Party wins an election for the parliamentary seat vacated by former leader Keir Starmer, fending off a strong challenge from the left-wing Green Party in a boost for the British prime minister.
Labour candidate Sagal Abdi-Wali, the leader of the local council, wins the by-election in the central London constituency of Holborn and St Pancras with 12,292 votes, compared with 8,928 for Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader and candidate.
Polanski, who is Jewish, is staunchly anti-Israel, and the Greens party earlier this week passed a highly controversial motion declaring “Zionism is racism.”
That prize lost all meaning when it was awarded to a freshly elected B. Hussein Obozo, who actually himself said he hadn’t done anything yet. (If only it had remained that way — that despicable ‘man’ wreaked untold damage on the US and the broad West.) Bad as the award to Yasser Arafilth (may he burn in Hell forever) was, it could be argued it was given for the (with hindsight disastrous) Oslo Accords, and that Rabin z”l and Peres z”l could not have been awarded without symmetry.
UPDATE 2: from an Insty comment thread:
[*] The only (alleged) humans I consider beneath even actual Nazis (or Islamomarxists, but I repeat myself) are Jews who make common cause with them.
Been burning the midnight oil working a few days too many in a row. So did not get around to blogging, only to restacking a few Substack posts.
Yesterday was, by the Gregorian calendar, the 3rd anniversary of the October 7 pogrom.
Here in Israel it was actually marked on October 5th, at the assigned Hebrew date. (The pogrom took place on Shmini Atzeret. But since one cannot have a mourning observance on a Jewish holiday, it gets put off to the next business day)
Through colleagues, I saw a preview of a loooong documentary by Yaron Zilberman “Nir Oz: Heaven and Hell” about a particularly hard-hit kibbutz. The “Heaven” part was the bucolic and peaceful life in the community prior to that — most residents were diehard peaceniks back then, BTW — and the “Hell” obviously… He shot 17 segments (10 edited so far) of between half and hour and an hour — the four I saw were centered on long-form interviews with survivors. One was a couple whose husband fought nearly to the death to protect his family, only to be saved at the last minute when help finally showed up. Another was a woman whose husband was murdered and whose son was held captive for nearly two years. A third was kept hostage herself.
He clearly has great raw material to work with — now is the challenge of editing this collection into a 2hr movie, into a miniseries, or both. Being a student of history (including its darkest periods), I have a very strong stomach, but still my sleep was unquiet.
Francis Turner (a.k.a. “masgramondou”) has his own reflections which criticize Israel’s response… for not being fierce enough. Go read it all — I can’t do it justice by selective quoting.
Needless to say, the shadow of October 7 looms large over our upcoming elections. A nontrivial percentage of people feel everyone who was in charge then — including but very much not limited to Bibi — should leave the stage. The trouble is, of course, that there was nearly a wall-to-wall consensus that HamaSS had been ‘tamed’. As much as it pains me to say it, the half-crook, half-maverick Avigdor Liberman is one of the few who saw through their game, and he was dismissed as a Russian crank.
Polls predict that former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot will be able to assemble the largest block — the jury is out on whether he will be able to achieve an outright majority, or whether he’ll have to run a minority government. The third option — a national unity government with alternation between Eisenkot and Netanyahu, is likely off the table after the way Bibi bamboozled Eisenkot’s predecessor Benny Gantz. (Both Netanyahu and Eisenkot have ruled out the Arab parties as coalition partners, though I suspect that Eisenkot is leaving the door open to Ra`am, which already served in Naftali Bennett’s cabinet.
Some of the smaller lists hovering around the electoral threshold (de facto: 4 Knesset seats) may prove wildcards. Benny Gantz’s Blue and White likely won’t make it, following a series of defections. (A shame. He is too decent a person for politics, really, and Bibi pulled the wool over his eyes by deliberately bringing their joint government down before it was Gantz’s turn at the helm. And Israelis don’t like “freierim”, suckers.)
The two others are HaMiluimnikim (The Reservists) and a new hard-right party led by Ofer Winter. Whatever they may differ on otherwise (The Reservists is center to center-right), they agree wholeheartedly on one issue (especilally in light of dire IDF manpower shortages, and a heavy reserve duty burden): all sectors of society should serve either in the IDF or in alternative civilian service, including the chareidim (“ultra-Orthodox”) whose two political parties have Bibi by the beitzim. His inability, reluctance, or (likely) both to deliver a blanket draft exemption (rather than the existing situation) have even led to grumblings on the part of Shas and “United Torah Judaism” (a joint list of Chasidic “Agudat Yisrael” and Litvish “Degel HaTorah”) that perhaps they might abstain from a confidence vote on an Eisenkot-led coalition, rather than vote against. Today were again demonstrations by this sector against the draft — I can say that in all the years I’ve been living here, I’ve never heard so much resentment expressed against the said group. Also, while in the past the “Dati Leumi” (national-religious, Israel’s version of Modern Orthodox) were reluctant to bad-rap their more-strident fellow Orthodox Jews, this has definitely changed. The prominence (through conviction) of the National-Religious in IDF combat units begets not only a disproportionate burden of reserve duty, but also overrepresentation among combat casualties and fatalities. Some will continue to vote for Shmuckrich or even for the truly odious Ben-Gvir, but I suspect that not a few Likud voters among them may defect to Ofer Winter, or even Naftali Bennett. (I like Bennett a lot, but I utterly despise his running mate Yair Lapid a.k.a. Yahir[*] Vapid. Eisenkot is a political rookie — which may prove to his advantage in a ‘throw out the bums’ electoral mood, while his background may be a unifying factor.)
In the wake of the ever-more miraculous FlyDubai “almost-9/11”, recent revelations of the security lapses involving foreign airlines — our failed-upward tourism minister Miri Regev effectively telling foreign airlines that pilots should not come from enemy nations, but leaving it to the said airlines to enforce this and nixing involvement by our security service — have even led to (likely idle) talk of the US canceling its visa-waiver agreement with Israel. Regev is of course a diehard Bibi-ist, so he will likely balk at firing her. But public pressure may leave him no choice, if he wants to have any chance at all of being able to form a blocking minority.
There’s lots of other news (the world is a crazy place): former head of the German Bundesnachrichtendienst [Federal Intelligence Service]suspected of selling state secrets to a third country (Russia specifically denied); more riots and burnings in France; Mamdani being an odious piece of khara as always; Ballsack Ogabe campaigning with and for El-Sayed (ugh). And of course, Sucker Qatarlson having gone even more completely off the deep end (and getting his derrière handed to him by Jacob Rees-Mogg). https://instapundit.com/828096/
One point of light is Marco Rubio’s amazing speech in Athens: here are Instapundit’s thoughts on it.
But let me end with a book excerpt from “Israel’s Woman Warriors” by Tal Schneider, in which she highlights the heroic efforts of the Caracal mixed-gender combat battalion on October 7. Tehila la-giborot ve-giborei Israel
[*] yahir means “arrogant” in Hebrew. I had a degree of respect for his late father, journalist and chess master Yosef “Tommy” Lapid (né Tomislav Lempel), even as I disagreed with his anti-religious zeal. The son is just a yuppie windbag captured by the globalists and the Alphabet People lobby.
The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed source, and the final triumph of open source.
I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary. My robot friend was able to…
“Markets of the Past” has a pretty interesting video on some economic aspects of the Roman empire that look eerily modern.
Just a few points:
• long-distance trading of raw materials and consumer goods on a network that stretched all the way from England to India
• possibly the oldest joint stock corporations, as Rome outsourced its tax collection to publicanes (tax farmers) who bid for the contracts at auction… and the largest ones then resold percentages of their business to investors
• an early form of industrialized agriculture on giant latifundia worked by armies of slaves
• the Roman silver denarius as a proto-“reserve currency”, accepted all over this long network. Then escalating military and social welfare (Juvenal’s panem et circenses/”bread and circuses”) begat the disastrous idea of stretching the money supply just a little by adulterating the coin from its original 95% silver… until a century later, the denarius was lucky to contain 5% silver, soldiers clamored for more pay as the coin couldn’t buy anything anymore, and merchants increasingly favored local barter over long-distance trade with payment in an increasingly worthless currency
• Emperor Diocletian tried (and failed) to fix things by introducing price controls (on pain of death, no less)…
• a period of climate change (global cooling after a climate optimum)
(a) The Flying For Money channel on YouTube has a pretty decent recap of the FlyDubai miracle.
He actually attributes the plane pulling itself out of the dive to… Boeing’s autopilot: his claim is that once the terror copilot was overpowered and nobody was actively steering the plane into the ground anymore, the autopilot would automatically have pulled the plane level, but slightly overcorrect, then enter precisely the “damped oscillation” one see on the altitude recording after the initial crash dive.
The damage to the tail rudder is almost certainly due to the G forces of pulling out of the crash dive — a Junkers Ju-87 “Stuka” pilot, after a dive bombing run, was at serious risk of blackout during the pull-up (prior to the invention of “G-suits”), which is why Luftwaffe test pilot Melitta von Stauffenberg invented an automatic mechanism to handle this upon bomb release. (Under the Nuremberg Laws, she was a 1st-degree Mischling: part of her reward was “Aryanization” and protection for her Jewish father. Melitta is a secondary character in my WW II alternate history.)
[UPDATE: See commenter “Porkypine” for a probably more cogent explanation.]
The Supreme Court on Thursday permitted the publication of the name of a senior intelligence officer who is believed to have played a key role in the failures that led to the Hamas terror group’s October 7, 2023, onslaught.
Lt. Col. Aryeh Amidror was the intelligence officer of the Gaza Division, the Israel Defense Forces division responsible for the Gaza Strip and its border, and held the position on and before October 7, 2023.
Amidror had dismissed detailed warnings from a female noncommissioned officer about signs of a looming onslaught as “completely imaginary.”
Read the whole thing and weep. Tomorrow is the anniversary on the Hebrew calendar of the Oct. 7 pogrom.
I understand what drove the father — though the responsible thing to say would have been: “yes, my son f—ed up big time and needs to go, but so did dozens of others”. It is written in the Ethics of the Fathers that one must not judge a man until one has stood in his place — but I do know I would not have been able to live with the guilt from such a catastrophic error of judgment, let alone hang on to my position for dear life. If, of course, his arm was twisted further up the chain… then why should he go down alone?
(c) Meanwhile in England, the Green Party seems hell-bent on proving yesterday’s piece on an ultra-woke Hyacinth Bucket/Bouquet. The words “Mother” and “Father” are now “problematic”?!
(d) On a more restful note: a rather amusing interview of the Icelandic classical pianist Vikingur Olafsson by legendary record producer Rick Rubin (who is apparently a Buddhist of Jewish origin, she-yihye bari/bless his heart) on the latter’s channel “Tetragrammaton records” (tactical eyeroll).
I would 100x prefer an interview by Rick Beato, but it’s restful in a quaint way.
A year ago, Dame Patricia Routledge passed away at age 96. Her signature comedic role, of course, was as the insufferably snobbish would-be social climber Hyacinth Bucket [“pronounced Bouquet”] in “Keeping Up Appearances”. The role was a match made in Heaven for her: as she revealed in an interview, she’d known too many real-life Hyacinth B.’s and found them so insufferable that she was delighted at a chance to parody them.
Michael Deacon in the Telegraph wonders what a 2026 Hyacinth Bucket would be like:
[I]n the 36 years since the show was first broadcast on BBC One, the way we think about social class in this country has changed dramatically. These days, if you want to signal your social superiority you don’t boast, as Hyacinth endlessly did, about your “Royal Doulton with the hand-painted periwinkles”. Instead, you boast about your passionate support for the latest, most fashionable progressive causes.
All of which brings me back to Hyacinth Bucket. In every moment of every episode she is consumed by an overwhelming need to appear socially superior to others. If Keeping Up Appearances were being made today, I don’t think she would be a primly conservative housewife. I think she’d be a rabid Leftie.
Here’s how it might play out.
Scene: The hall of the Buckets’ home. The phone is ringing. Hyacinth answers.
Hyacinth: “The Bouquet residence, the lady of the house speaking! Oh, it’s you, Violet!”
She covers the receiver with her hand.
Hyacinth: “It’s my sister, Violet. You remember – she’s the one with the sauna, swimming pool and room for 200 asylum seekers. Not that she actually has any asylum seekers, obviously. As we all made very clear to the Home Office: when we say ‘Refugees are welcome here’, we don’t mean literally here. We mean somewhere more suitable, such as Glasgow or Stoke-on-Trent.”
She uncovers the receiver again.
Hyacinth: “I wasn’t expecting you to call, Violet. I thought it might be Sheridan – my daughter who was assigned male at birth, but started identifying as a woman shortly before she joined the ladies’ rugby team. Anyway, are you free on Saturday? I’m hosting another of my candlelight suppers for Palestine. You simply must come. We’ve invited the vicar, the mayor and that charming former Hamas bodyguard who was granted UK citizenship by the government. Oh, and that splendid little chap from the Green party is going to recite some queer slam poetry. In Urdu, no less! Can you come?”
She beams delightedly.
Hyacinth: “Oh, that’s marvellous. No, don’t worry, Daisy’s frightful gammony husband, Onslow, won’t be there. He’s off to one of his awful far-Right protests in Portsmouth. He seems to think wearing a burka will prevent him from being arrested. Frankly, I’m glad he’s not coming. I’ve never forgiven him for spilling Pot Noodle on my best keffiyeh.”
I can just hear Dame Routledge’s “Hyacinth voice” in my head as I’m reading these lines…
Here’s what we know so far about the flydubai plane that signaled an emergency during its flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv:
Flight FDB1073, with a reported 180 passengers — including dozens of Israelis — sent a “squawk code” of 7700, a general international emergency signal, as it made a U-turn over the Jordan-Saudi Arabia border.
The Boeing 737 MAX, as it flew over Saudi Arabia, briefly issued a code 7500, meaning a hijacking or unlawful interference.
Data from publicly available sources shows that two hours and fifteen minutes into the flight, the Boeing suddenly took a sharp nosedive, dropping from 34,000 to around 17,000 feet in under a minute as it sped up from 411 knots to nearly 600.
The plane recovered slightly for several seconds, reaching 21,650 feet, before dropping sharply again, this time to under 14,000 feet.
Over the next hour, the plane failed to maintain a steady altitude, though it remained at around 15,000 feet, indicating it was being controlled by hand rather than autopilot.
Israeli authorities were unable to make contact with the plane during the incident. Israeli Air Force fighter jets were scrambled to intercept it amid fears of a hijacking. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior military officials held assessments on the incident.
However, not long after, contact was made with the plane and the flight landed at Tabuk Airport in Saudi Arabia.
Israeli officials say that the emergency signals were issued after a fight apparently broke out in the cockpit between the pilots, although the exact details of the incident have yet to be confirmed by the airline.
Israeli passengers have recounted scenes of chaos and panic as the plane dived, of blood in the cockpit and of one of the pilots being stabbed, while some Israeli passengers reportedly helped crew to subdue an attacker.
Dubai-based flydubai has confirmed an “incident,” saying that all passengers on the flight landed “safely” at Tabuk Airport in Saudi Arabia. It says that “all passengers are safe and accounted for.”
“The safety and wellbeing of our passengers and crew remain our highest priority,” it says. “Further updates will be issued as additional confirmed details become available.”
The next entry on the liveblog:
A passenger on the flydubai plane that made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia describes harrowing scenes to Channel 12.
“We heard screams on the plane. Then they opened the cockpit and we saw blood, and someone had stabbed the pilot with a pocketknife,” the unnamed woman tells the network via text message.
Though there is very little official information at this point, it is believed that a violent altercation developed between the two pilots.
The woman says Israeli passengers helped restrain an attacker along with members of the crew. “We prayed, ‘Shema Yisrael,’” she says. “There were also moments when we thought we weren’t going to make it out alive.”
Another woman, identifying herself as noam, tells the network in a call: “Screams began on the plane… by passengers who realized what was happening. We understand that one of the pilots was stabbed and seriously wounded, and they lost control of the plane. It started to dive quickly. It was very scary.”
In a more recent entry:
[Fair use according to Section 27 of the Israel Copyright Law]
The flydubai flight that landed at Tabuk Airport in Saudi Arabia appears to have sustained damage to the rudder on the rear of the aircraft, images show.
The images show that a section of the rudder is missing from the vertical stabilizer.
The images also show passengers, many of them Israeli, disembarking the aircraft.
The Boeing 737 MAX had taken a sharp nosedive, dropping from 34,000 to around 17,000 feet in under a minute, during the incident.
Arik Zer, a former Shin Bet head of flight security, says the rapid plunge of the plane likely caused the damage, telling Channel 12 news that this would not have been caused by any outside object impacting the plane.
In another dramatic and graphic video from the plane moments after the alleged attack on the captain by his copilot, the captain is seen covered in blood on the floor of the aircraft, outside the cockpit, as passengers tend to him. A second crewmember is seen tied up beside him, seemingly unconscious.
Passengers are heard telling others nearby that “it’s good for you” that they are filming. “You saved the plane. It’s good for you.”
One Israeli passenger tells the person filming: “We were attacked and were guarding the pilot.”
Another passenger says: “They tried to murder the pilot. We subdued [the attacker].
Someone points to the bound man and says: “This is the man who… stabbed him.”
ADDENDUM:
ADDENDUM 2: apparently two additional pilots in mufti were “deadheading” [*] to Tel Aviv as the crew were approaching their permitted flying hours limit and any diversion or other in-air delay would make it impossible for them to crew the return flight. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-910217
And: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hails the Indian flydubai pilot attacked by his copilot on the plane full of Israelis this morning, calling him a “true hero” and wishing him a full recovery from his wounds.
“My salute to the Indian pilot Captain Smit Machchhar for his extraordinary bravery. Despite being stabbed and seriously injured, he fought back, resisted, opened the cockpit door, and enabled passengers and crew to overpower the attacker — preventing a catastrophic mid-air disaster,” Netanyahu writes on X.
“He saved the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals. I wish Captain Machchhar a speedy and full recovery. He is a true hero,” the premier says.”
[*] this is US airline slang for pilots and flight attendants flying for free to another city to be prepositioned for an upcoming flight leaving from there. It has nothing to do with being a fan of the late lamented hippie jam band “The Grateful Dead”.
This week, Jews all over the world celebrate the holiday of Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles. By coincidence, the non-work days in Israel both fall on the Sabbath. So there was no disruption of my daily work routine, other than lots of administrative personnel being on holiday.
On this holiday, we read possibly the strangest books in the entire Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament for Christians: Ecclesiastes, or as it’s known in Hebrew, Kohelet, from kahal, audience—one who speaks to an audience, if you like. In my native Dutch, the book is known as Prediker, the Preacher; also Prediger in German, incidentally. The conventional author is King Solomon, but it’s almost certainly a “pseudo-epigraphic” work, one written in the name of a famous personality of old.
The very first time I read Ecclesiastes/Prediker/Kohelet, I remember being shocked by how borderline agnostic (and borderline existentialist) the book read. Well apparently, there was a dispute among the Sages, related in the Mishna (Yadayim 3:5) over whether hand-washing is required after reading the book (meaning in context: whether it counts as sacred scripture). The Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 30b) discusses whether to “archive” (lignoz) the book because of its apparent contradictions: ultimately, it was preserved.
However, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks zt”l, in a lecture, pointed out that the conventional English translation of the opening sentence is misleading. Hevel hevelim hakol hevel is conventionally translated as “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Something that’s vain is meaningless, it would seem. However, hevel in Hebrew means a shallow breath. And a more correct translation would have been something like “evanescence of evanescences, everything is evanescent,” or “transience of transience. All is transient.” Nothing lasts forever in the universe, other than G-d eternal Himself. But the fact that something is limited in time does not make it meaningless.
It is in light of this very profound insight that this book truly deserves its place in the canon. It deals with mortal humans dealing with the fact, coping with the fact, that nothing in creation lasts forever.
The reason the reading of this book is associated with Sukkot is, of course, that the booths—in my native Dutch, the loofhutten—in which we eat our meals, and in which many even sleep during the holiday, are themselves transient dwellings, reminding us of those constructed during the forty years in the desert.
Alas, I have attended a few too many funerals of late — or, when unable to attend on account of being halfway around the planet —- have had to express condolences, I’ve been reminded many times of another line in Ecclesiastes (9:10).ּ
In modern English: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, because there are no work/deeds, no calculation/planning, no knowledge and no wisdom in the Netherworld to which you are headed.”
Alfred Tennyson of course was deeply steeped in Biblical lore. So it need not surprise that one of the many famous quotes from In Memoriam expresses a very similar sentiment: “It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.”
R’ Jonathan Sacks, while always observant, initially was a Ph.D. student in philosophy. While on a study trip to the US, he met with two very different rabbinical leaders: “the Rav” (R’ Joseph Soloveitchik), the undisputed intellectual leader of Modern Orthodoxy in the USA, and the last Lubavitcher Rebbe. He later wrote, “Rabbi Soloveitchik had challenged me to think, Rabbi Schneerson had challenged me to lead.” So he put his secular doctoral studies on the back burner for a while and pursued rabbinical ordination. He ultimately did obtain his Ph.D. in 1982, while serving his first rabbinical pulpit in Golders Green.
What University Presidents prate about finding important, and what actually worries them, are emphatically not the same thing.
Well, if the place is going bankrupt, it will have perfect “hiring equity” since nobody will get hired
(b) I would not have dared write this as satire https://instapundit.com/825572/. Tom Sharpe (RIP) would have been proud of having come up with this. And yes, one of the owners of this LBGTQWERTY bar now torn apart by one (1) mask-optional night a week, in 2026 (!) is off to study at clown school. Looks like they already can be “professors of practice” there 😉
(c) Good effing grief.
(d) This is Pravda-level rodeo clown media
(e) Meanwhile around the planet in Russia, Putain [sic] keeps throwing good money after bad, with disastrous results for his own stated ends:
ADDENDUM (f): going back to university administration, who could have seen this coming? [/sarc]
If a Jew may quote the Christian New Testament: “Woe unto you […] hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.” (Mt. 23:27, KJV)
“Woe to […] you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.” (Mt. 23:27, NIV)
Make no mistake: this level of rot is not limited to the “soft subjects” anymore. I remember a (now RIP) professor at U. of Colorado telling me about Ward Churchill (a.k.a. Chief Sh*tting Bull): oh, that whole discipline “Indian Studies” is a fraud anyway, so who cares he’s a fraud too?
But once the decay/rot turns to gangrene (as it has), it will affect the hard STEM disciplines as well. And when public support for ever more expensive and less productive ivory towers drops, it will predictably be blamed on “anti-intellectualism” 😉
ADDENDUM 2:
He is right, of course — the clown show is that all manner of Flemish universities (with the notable exception of KU Leuven) fell all over themselves “with legs a-running to cause mischief” [*] giving honorary doctorates to that Moscow and Qatar puttana figlia di puttana.
ADDENDUM 3:
Cornholio University, indeed. But this is even worse:
In a churchyard in Bladon, Oxfordshire, a grave is spinning so fast it might throw the planet off its axis.
—
[*] be-ritzat raglaim lehar`a— one of the sins from the collective confession in the Yom Kippur liturgy
(a) An eye-opening fragment from a discussion on “Dad Saves America” with Richard Miniter:
From the description: “Journalist and author Richard Miniter argues that terrorism is fundamentally an elite phenomenon, not a product of poverty or oppression. He traces the pattern from the Unabomber to Al-Qaeda to Luigi Mangione, highlighting how educated, well-off young people seek out meaning and status in all the wrong places, then dress it up with ideology after the fact.”
And yes, that applies even to the religious psychosis of groups like Hama-SS: it is well-known among Israel’s security services that the typical Hama-SS operative does NOT fit the stereotype of “the wretched of the earth”.
The interviewer (John Papola) also points to the neo-Jacobinism of “downwardly mobile nepo babies” [for those of an older generation, a “nepo[tism] baby” is in millenial and Gen-Z slang what in French we used to call “un fils à papa” — a son of a rich and/or powerful dad, benefiting from his patronage].
For the purpose of the discussion, Miniter defines “terrorism” as: the use of violence to stampede society into a direction it cannot be coaxed by persuasion and/or the ballot box. [I could not help being reminded of the late 19th-century anarchist term “propaganda of the deed”.]
(b) For the first time ever, former IDF Chief of Staff, Lt.-Gen. (Ret.) Gadi Eisenkot gave an interview in English (whatever sterling qualities he may have otherwise, mastery of that language is not one of them). Read for yourselves on the Jerusalem Post website:
As much as I despise Karl Marx shr”y and his legacy, I am somewhat fond of a phrase he quipped after Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte followed his more famous uncle’s example and had himself elected Emperor Napoleon [III].
“History occurs twice — the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
(a) Germany in 1932 was in a situation where all the democratic (and semi-democratic) parties put together couldn’t muster a majority, and the two explicitly anti-democratic parties, the Communist KPD and the National-Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) together held a majority of the seats. History buffs all know how that turned out.
Now we are seeing a farcical rerun, with a far-right “Alternative for Germany” that I don’t trust any further than I could throw it becoming the largest party, and a “former” Communist Die Linke (“The Left”) ascendant — with Berlin, ugh, now to be run by a German version of Zohran Mamdani (i.e., an Islamo-Communist).
(b) In a farcical re-run of the “Sudeten German issue” [*], Steven “Vodkapundit” Green worries that Vladimir Putain [sic] is looking to leverage the ethnic Russian population in Narva, Estonia into a pretext for an invasion or territorial demand to “liberate” them.
Unlike Ukraine, however, the small country of Estonia is a NATO member, and in fact is already hosting a few thousand NATO troops (UK, France, US) and air detachments (Turkey, Spain). Steven Green worries that Putain may try to “solve” his disastrous “special military operation” failure by broadening the conflict into direct confrontation with NATO — which might buy him legitimacy at home, especially if he intends to carry out a forced mobilization.
Yesterday night I saw a video about an underreported event: explosive-laden Russian drones at a CIVILIAN airfield (Leipzig-Halle) inside GERMANY. The intended target was a Ukrainian cargo plane.
Vodkapundit includes an apocryphal Eisenhower quote to the effect that if faced with an intractable problem, you should make it bigger/broader. Putain’s “forever war” in Ukraine is becoming quite unpopular at home now (forget about last weekend’s shamlection, a wet dream for US “Democrats”) that Russia’s major cities routinely absorb drone strikes. Starting a low-intensity war with NATO — or exposing NATO as a paper tiger — may seem a worthwhile gamble for him. Of course, if he gets a high-intensity kinetic war in the bargain… but he may feel cornered enough that it seems a worthwhile gamble to him…
(c) Unrelated item: I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning…
[*] I routinely refer to the so-called “Palestinians” as the “Sudeten Arabs” for that reason — Palestinianism as a pretext for Arab-Islamist irredentism, with the Western lunatic left as “useful idiots” for the cause.
Isabella Tabarovsky in The Tablet reveals what I wasn’t aware of, but does not surprise me in the least. Not only had UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim much more of a Nazi past than he ever admitted to (that’s public knowledge by know) but the USSR and its intelligence services leveraged what they did know to the hilt to turn him into… a Soviet asset.
Few stories better capture the moral bankruptcy of an institution born from the ruins of World War II and the Holocaust than the Soviet quid-pro-quo relationship with Waldheim as its head. Years after his decade as the United Nations’ chief ended, the world learned that Waldheim had lied about his wartime past. A little later, it would emerge that Moscow had likely known all along.
Waldheim always claimed that his service in the Wehrmacht was brief and had ended when he was wounded on the Eastern Front in late 1941, after which he returned home, pursued legal studies, and got married. In fact, he had returned to the front in 1942 and served out the rest of the war as an intelligence officer in the Balkans: first in Yugoslavia during brutal Nazi massacres and anti-partisan reprisals, then in Salonica during the deportations of the city’s Jews to Auschwitz. It also turned out that before the war, in Vienna, Waldheim was a member of the National Socialist German Students’ League and the Sturmabteilung—the infamous Brownshirts. A later commission concluded that he did not personally take part in the atrocities in the Balkans, but his lack of embarrassment at being exposed as a liar and his insistence that he had seen and known nothing beggared belief—all the more so because his immediate superior, Gen. Alexander Löhr, was a convicted war criminal executed by the Yugoslavs in 1947.
From the moment he moved into his office on the 38th floor of the Glass Building—the U.N. headquarters housing its administrative arm, the Secretariat—Waldheim proved unmistakably subservient to Moscow. With him at the helm, the Soviets expanded their intelligence footprint at the Secretariat, planting hundreds of additional KGB agents under diplomatic and bureaucratic covers. Under his watch, they completed a mission they had begun years earlier: turning the United Nations into a weapon in their long-running campaign to pit the world against Israel—America’s main ally in the Middle East—and Zionism, which, especially after 1967, the Soviets regarded as a major ideological threat. Observers took note of Waldheim’s spinelessness. By 1978, French intelligence had concluded that Waldheim was “an agent of influence under Soviet control.”
For the Soviets, eventual revelations about Waldheim’s Nazi past were, in all likelihood, old news. For them, he had been a known quantity since 1947, when he spent a month in Moscow as part of the Austrian delegation negotiating the country’s sovereignty, as the World Jewish Congress’s Eli Rosenbaum—a former federal prosecutor who would later lead the Department of Justice’s Nazi-hunting unit and who revealed Waldheim’s Nazi past in 1986—detailed in his book Betrayal. Stalin’s intelligence services would have pored over every detail of his biography in search of compromising information, both as a matter of their invariable practice and because a Nazi past was a dream piece of leverage to have over upwardly mobile Europeans.
Decades later, former Yugoslav intelligence officers toldThe Washington Post that they had marked Waldheim as a potential recruit for Moscow in 1947, the same year he traveled there, while his former wartime commanding officer faced a firing squad in Yugoslavia. They were certain the Soviets had followed through—a suspicion indirectly reinforced two decades later, during the Prague Spring, when Waldheim, now Austria’s foreign minister, ordered the country’s Prague embassy to bar entry to Czechs who were being hunted by Soviet security forces. The ambassador disobeyed, but the gesture would not have gone unappreciated in Moscow.
[…]
The most vivid account of how the Soviets weaponized the United Nations against the West comes from Arkady Shevchenko’s memoir, Breaking With Moscow. Shevchenko was the ultimate Soviet insider; he was a protégé of Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and his big break came at the age of 29, when he accompanied Premier Nikita Khrushchev on his visit to the United Nations (a journey complete with 10 drunken days aboard the decrepit, storm-tossed passenger liner Baltika sailing from Kaliningrad to New York). In 1973, after several tours of duty at the United Nations, Moscow recommended him to Waldheim for the post of undersecretary-general for political and Security Council affairs. The appointment placed Shevchenko in a position second in power only to the secretary-general himself. Disillusioned with the corrupt and oppressive Soviet system, he began cooperating with American intelligence and in 1978 defected to the United States—the highest-ranking Soviet diplomat to do so up to that point.
For Moscow, Shevchenko wrote, the United Nations was the “best watchtower on the West.” It was a great place to collect political and technical intelligence—but that was only part of the story. As Waldheim’s undersecretary, Shevchenko was responsible for using the Secretariat “to widen the scope of Soviet ideological and propaganda warfare” within the organization. That meant ensuring that nothing “detrimental to Soviet interests” ever appeared on the United Nations’ agenda or in its studies or reports.
The converse was true as well: He was to make sure that favorable information was included, whether it was true or not. His other duties included promoting KGB undercover agents to more influential posts, protecting them if the CIA or FBI got on to them, and “indoctrinating” non-Soviet staff into a pro-Soviet point of view. He was also tasked with working with newly independent, postcolonial member states to make sure they didn’t fall under the influence of Western “bourgeois ideology” but aligned themselves with Moscow and its “progressive ideas.”
The KGB had penetrated the United Nations long before Waldheim rose to the top. Shevchenko recalled that out of 28 men who worked in his section of the Soviet mission in 1968, 21 were KGB or GRU (military intelligence) officers. Other nations planted spies at the United Nations as well, he noted, “but the Soviet Union had the largest contingent and the most thorough penetration of the organization.”
The KGB installed countless agents in influential positions across the Secretariat. One served as a trusted personal assistant to the secretary-general, often traveling to American universities in his U.N. capacity on KGB assignments. Another held the key strategic post of director of external relations, crafting United Nations’ communications strategy and press releases and mingling with American intellectuals and financiers at prestigious conferences. KGB officers in the personnel office scanned job applications for “exploitable weaknesses” and rerouted “promising” candidates to a senior KGB recruiter, also implanted at the United Nations, Shevchenko wrote. After 13 years on the job in New York, the recruiter was transferred “to an equally strategic personnel post in Geneva, overseeing hiring and promotion in the U.N.’s European headquarters.” Western protests failed to put an end to this.
Again, read the whole thing — it[‘s well worth your time. One more quote:
Why didn’t the Americans go to bat for [opposing candidate] Jakobson? In Rosenbaum’s view, they might have fallen victim to a lack of imagination. In Washington’s eyes, the organization was useless and ineffectual, so it didn’t ultimately matter who headed it. What they failed to appreciate, he noted, was how “even a politically powerless head of an impotent international organization could provide important intelligence assistance” to America’s foreign adversaries.
One person who did grasp the broader implications of Soviet ideological subversion of the United Nations was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served as the U.S. ambassador when the “Zionism is racism” resolution was adopted (and was privy to Shevchenko’s collaboration with U.S. intelligence). In a 1977 essay for Commentary titled “The Politics of Human Rights,” Moynihan explained how the Soviet-led process of isolating Israel at the United Nations was a proxy for “a more generalized effort to deprive the democratic nations of their legitimacy as democracies.” The anti-Zionist venom that the USSR and its client states normalized at the United Nations went hand in hand with the tactic of turning the tables on the democratic West in matters of human rights. “The charge could range from genocide to unemployment,” Moynihan wrote, “but it always followed the Orwellian principle: hit the democracies in the one area where they have the strongest case to make against the dictatorships.”
Tonight is Yom Kippur. Gmar chatima tova — may you be sealed in the Book of Life.
Too much craziness in the world right now to keep track of.
So something different for a change. We were taught in school that Henry VIII tore away from Rome because, basically, he wanted to boink Anne Boleyn. Of course. this was what in Dutch one calls a “monkey sandwich story” (broodje aap verhaal). Henry lusting after Anne, as the video correctly points out, was maybe 5% of the story.
I knew pretty much everything in the video (aside from the annoying AI imagery) but it is a good quick recap. Let me give my own crack at it:
Protestantism, as we call it today, was not new to England. There had been the Lollards, the followers of John Wycliffe, over a century earlier.
In post-Roman Britain, there had never been an uncontested female monarch, leaving aside the dubious example of Matilda. Thus, fathering a male heir was essential, especially considering:
England had just come out of decades of civil war known as the War of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster (one of the two inspirations, incidentally, for the Game of Thrones series). The Tudor dynasty, with tenuous links to Lancaster, then married into York, was not on secure footing.
If all Henry wanted was some variation in the bedroom, this was already his. He openly had mistresses and this was expected from somebody of his rank. One of the said mistresses had been no other than Anne’s sister Mary Boleyn.
By all accounts, the marriage with Catherine of Aragon, dynastic as it blatantly was, was comparatively happy. Unfortunately, her only surviving child was a girl, the future Mary I, also known as Bloody Mary. (Several sons were stillborn or died in infancy. Mary herself was sickly all her life.)
Henry did, in fact, father a son with one of his mistresses — and acknowledged him, under the name Henry Fitzroy ]from French fils du roi = son of the king]. He even considered legitimizing him (i.e., placing him in the line of succession), but in the end Fitzroy died at age 17, some historians suspecting with some human assistance.
Henry, in fact, remained what today we would call an Anglo-Catholic all his life and was eager for a solution to “The King’s Great Matter” within the church. He had in fact written (or put his name to) an essay condemning the “Lutheran heresies” for which the Pope granted him the title “Defender of the Faith” borne by British monarchs to the present day.
However, the Pope was a virtual prisoner of Catherine’s nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. His rogue troops had in fact sacked Rome — and the Pope himself had escaped by the skin of his teeth and the courage of the Swiss guards who sacrificed their lives for him, as memorably told in the Sabaton song “The Last Stand”. The Pope was in no position to defy the will of Charles V.
There was a pre-existing legal tradition in England that limited the temporal power of Rome (or any other foreign polity) within the King’s realm. Google “Premunire”.
Finally, but not least, Henry VIII had incurred huge war debts fighting the French and needed a solution for that.
So it was in this context, after cardinal Wolsey repeated attempts to secure an annulment for the marriage came to nothing. that his former assistant Thomas Cromwell and the new Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer came up with the formula of separating the English church from Rome and making it subject to the sovereign. The way I look at it is more a repeat of the Great Schism that split the Eastern Orthodox Church from the Catholic one — then over time, Protestant theology becoming more influential.
The latter happened despite Henry more than because of him. And the major developments in this direction happened after Henry’s death, with the short reign of the very Protestant young Edward VI, being followed by Mary the first attempt to reunite with Rome — and finally, Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth I, working out a pragmatic compromise under which all would recognize the authority of the Church of England, but all were free to believe in private as they saw fit. “I have no desire to make windows into people’s souls” as she herself put it.
As for the fiscal problems: The Dissolution of the Monasteries which ensued in two stages allowed Henry VIII both to fill refill the dangerously depleted treasury and to buy the loyalty of new aristocrats through outright grants, or sales at sweetheart prices, of former monastic holdings.
Buried under too much stuff, and too much craziness in the world to comment on. But the intrepid Haviv Rettig Gur does a much better job than I ever could of treating one story: the pathetic NAZ”A movie. [The name is from the Hebrew acronym for nezek agavi, collateral damage.] He also keeps a cooler head than I can, because personally I regard Jews who make common cause with our enemies as literally the lowest life-form on Earth, even below pig virus and [but I repeat myself] card-carrying fascists [be they brown=National Socialists, red=Communists, or green=Islamosupremacists].
Listen to the whole thing — you won’t be disappointed. Note he specifically disavows the claim that no mistakes were made, no strikes were carried out using recklessly loose targeting criteria, etc. — given the sheer intensity of the conflict, that was almost unavoidable. Instead he takes the filmmakers to task for both reckless extrapolation from incomplete unverifiable statements of low-level military intelligence personnel and a complete lack of context. [The use of AI for target prioritizations and success/collateral damage predictions is almost certainly true, but is mainstream military technology at this point. ] In particular, he notes that one senior general was so convinced Israel was facing an imminent invasion from Lebanon (which might have imperiled the country’s very existence) that he considered thousands of IDF casualties in a preemptive attack an acceptable price to pay. (This is public knowledge, and it was in fact the much-maligned Netanyahu who vetoed the step, correctly gambling that the Party of Goat was not planning a ground operation.)
He said he would actually have preferred concrete info on specific missteps, but like me, does not believe this was the actual agenda of the filmmakers. (Look, anybody who cooperates with al-Guardian for something like that is either dangerously naive or malicious.) He also quotes a review by Raviv Drucker in what would be the friendliest possible medium, the far-left Haaretz (or as I call it, HaEres= The Venom) — a review almost as critical as Haviv’s own.
And near the end, Haviv actually comes to the same conclusion as Shalom Yerushalmi did yesterday in the Times of Israel: that the movie is an [unintentional, one assumes] in-kind donation to the Netanyahu campaign, who can now paint the entire opposition with the brush of being in the same camp as those who want to put our soldiers in the International Clown Court.
But if these filmmakers are the malignant moral narcissists that I reckon them to be, they won’t even care if what they are doing ensures re-electing the disastrous outgoing coalition — Kachsuckers, Khomeinists, and all. They have their 25 minutes of standing ovation in Venice. Let them have it and be damned.
[*] Culture Minister Miki Zohar actually called for stripping the filmmakers of their Israeli citizenship: while I have heard several neighbors and support personnel at work call for the same thing, this is legally essentially impossible and Miki Zohar knows this — this is just a gratuitous cheap shot.
It’s come to this (via Instapundit). Erik Svane at “No pasarán” highlight the story of a “Democrat” candidate visiting Dachau and musing this is where Trump supporters belong.
[blockquote] North Carolina Democrat state legislative candidate Shelly Headen posted a Facebook story from a vacation showing her in front of ovens in a German concentration camp memorial, saying,
“Visiting Dauchau [sic] Concentration Camp in Germany… This is where Trump supporters belong.”
… In social media photos, Headen is seen smiling as she stands in front of what appears to be crematorium ovens, which were used by the Nazi SS to burn the bodies of Jews and other prisoners who died or were murdered at the camp.
Headen faces incumbent Republican state Rep. John Blust in a suburban Guilford County district. On her Facebook page, Headen says she is a CPA and business owner “running to restore human decency,” an ironic statement after saying political opponents should be in concentration camps while posing and smiling in front of ovens at a Holocaust memorial site.
Indeed. Doesn’t this raise the question: if someone is a Nazi, or a neo-Nazi, isn’t the logical conclusion that it is the ones suggesting using (ahem) a… Nazi concentration camp for their opponents?! Wouldn’t they be the prime candidates?! Has it occurred to any leftist that it might be time for an Are we the baddies moment?
The rhetoric expressed by Headen is growing among Democrat candidates and left-wing agitators across the nation.
… The apparent call to burn Trump supporters isn’t her only expression of support for violence. In another Facebook post, Headen appears to call for an unspecified terrorist attack against America, writing,
“I think our only hope is an attack on US soil… preferably Alabama, Louisiana… where the stupid people are.”
(And liberals, leftists, and statists wonder why, and think we are exaggerating when, some of us issue warnings about socialism and when we warn about it being a path to tyranny?!)
[/blockquote]
I mean, this is parody-proof. It’s not like she was drunk in a bar, ranting b*llocks at 3am — even then it would be gross, but she could at least claim it was drunken hyperbole. No, that dog won’t hunt now.
And good on the party for pulling support from her, you’d say… Though Insty snarks “And/or she’s saying out loud what far too many on the left believe:” https://instapundit.com/822536/
To be fair, other material listed there (such as comparing herself to Jesus) suggests that she is more than one bit short of a valid checksum.
Just quickly, as we’re traveling: the Times of Israel has a fairly detailed profile of Bibi’s primary challenger for the Prime Ministership, former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot [idiosyncratic transliteration of the typical Moroccan-Jewish surname Azencot = “deer” in Berber].
There are many reasons why his candidacy resonates, despite or because of him being a political novice: strong security background, religiously traditional, non-Ashkenazi, unassuming personality that contrasts with Bibi’s polished but somewhat haughty public image, political centrist… and of course, plain fatigue with the longest-serving PM of any democratic country since the UK’s Robert Walpole in the early 18th Century.
Personally I’m more of a Bennett guy, but I’m willing to give this guy a chance. Bibi has alienated even reluctant supporters like myself. (I am not a ‘never-Bibi’ guy, and yes, I have voted for his ticket in the past, particularly in 2015 when clumsy 0bamunists tried the out-of-touch “V15” campaign.)
If these clowns really don’t know anybody who uses algebra, they need to get out more. And “this is only something that good little goy slaves do” — seriously? I can’t even get worked up over this — this is Occasional Cortex-grade dumbassery.
When is TC going to do the big reveal: “I don’t believe any of this BS, this was just a parody of how stupid judeophobes and the alt-right can be”?
But to me, the sure hallmark of a deranged fanatic is when you can’t distinguish them from satire anymore. It’s been that way with the woke left for many years now, and sadly the ‘woke right’ is increasingly veering into that territory.
“Dafuq did I just read?” Dafuq ba-rosh (knocked in the head, whacked on the head) in Hebrew…
ADDENDUM (via Powerline): even the Babylon Bee’s publisher says one can’t satirize this
A few quick comments about the explosive results of regional elections in the German member state Saxony-Anhalt [Sachsen-Anhalt].
This is not the same as the Saxony [Sachsen] where Leipzig and Dresden are situated, but borders on it. Saxony-Anhalt’s state capital is Magdeburg (as in medieval “Magdeburg City Rights” and “The Sack of Magdeburg” during the Thirty-Years War); other important cities include Halle [in full: Halle an der Saale, or Halle on the Saale river] the birthplace of the composer Händel, and more infamously, of Reinhard Heydrich y”sh; Dessau, of Bauhaus fame but also the birthplace of Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn; and of course Wittenberg of Martin Luther fame.
The member state was part of the [East-]German “Democratic” Republic from the aftermath of WW II until reunification.
the elections led to an explosive gain (nearly doubling previous results) for the hard-right AfD [“Alternative for Germany”] but leave it just short of an outright majority.
[from link above, Section 27 Fair Use]. The graph shows today’s results compared with 2021. Voter turnout was 77.8%. CDU=Christian Democratic Union [of Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz]; SPD=Social-Democratic Party of Germany; Grüne=Greens; Die Linke=The Leftists, heirs to the former East-German Communist Party; BSW=Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance [1st-time result for this alt-left party]; Sonst[iges]=Others.
Preliminary distribution in the state parliament [again, Section 27 Fair Use]:
So given the “firewall” the other parties have thrown up, will the AfD try to recruit 3 “defectors”, as the Die Welt article speculates?
In the USA, the wages of globalist and woke overreach were Trump — love or hate him, but his personal views are closer to a populist Democrat of old than to anything hard-right.
In Europe, after the problems were left to fester longer, and disastrous energy policies proved even more dismal after Put[a]in’s invasion of Ukraine (and the subsequent cutoff of natural gas), the wages of globalist and woke overreach are something rather more sinister. Something that, if it came to power in the US, would leave many TDS cases positively nostalgic for Trump.
ADDENDUM: (via Powerline) a long but very worthwhile origin story of the AfD, from its beginnings as a geekish Euroskeptic group to its growth into a populist mass movement — not shying away from some of the unsavory elements. https://firstthings.com/why-the-afd-wins/
Those were the reported words of Neville Chamberlain on September 3, 1939, after the UK’s ultimatum to the Third Reich to cease and desist from its invasion of Poland expired. #todayInHistory
An explosive new report by Spain’s National Police suggests that what happened a month ago in Ceuta, and still continues, was an invasion organized by the government of Morocco:
The National Police has informed Judge María Tardón — who is investigating the crossing of approximately 80,000 people from Morocco into Spain through the Ceuta border on July 30 and 31 — that the operation was planned and carried out by agents of Morocco’s security forces, in stark contrast with the position maintained by the Spanish government: President Pedro Sánchez, although he initially described it as an “attack on Spain’s territorial integrity” … has maintained that Morocco neither conceived nor executed the action, instead blaming “mafias” engaged in human trafficking and countries such as Russia and Israel. […]
According to CENIF, the body responsible for analyzing this type of situation, the assault was a carefully planned operation designed to collapse Spain’s border control system and eliminate Spain’s capacity to respond. The Spanish agents even assure the judge that their Moroccan counterparts may have monitored the execution of the operation on the ground. El Mundo reported from the outset that Moroccan agents had been detected among the alleged migrants who overran the border. *** CENIF also states in the report that the alleged migratory purpose of the incident was nothing more than a formal cover for the operation, which was commanded on the ground by Moroccan agents — some in uniform, others in plain clothes — and points out that numerous images prove this during the mass arrival itself.
And Spaniards are saying “enough”.
Tens of Thousands are FLOODING The Streets In Protest Against Mass-Immigration Across Spain.
Protesters are demanding Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Interior Minister Marleska resign after Ceuta was invaded by Muslims from Morocco.
Also, with headline “Al-Jazeera on the Hudson vs. reality”:
I’ve spoken to Euros who say they’re afraid to visit the US because they posted criticism of “mad dictator” [sigh] Trump on their social media. I pointed out to them what sort of filth is really being screened for.
