“If you live in Ukraine today, checking the news is your morning routine. You have to understand what is going on — how can you not? You have to understand which direction the drones are flying from, whether it is dangerous to go outside. If you want to protect yourself, you have to constantly monitor the situation. When the air raid alarm goes off, immediately everyone’s phones in the office start howling. Everyone has the alerts set up. The Russians have gotten more sophisticated with the air raids. … On the one hand, in Kyiv, the sheer number of drones — sometimes 150 per attack — makes it impossible to intercept them all. On the other hand, the cities closer to the front, like Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv, are simply defenseless.” (12/23/24)
“President-elect Donald Trump’s lawsuit against veteran pollster J. Ann Selzer for an off-target poll released just before last month’s election may be the first of its kind in a modern U.S. presidential election. In researching my book, ‘Lost in a Gallup,’ a narrative history of prominent polling failures in presidential elections since 1936, I uncovered nothing akin to Trump’s litigation, which accuses Selzer of ‘brazen election interference.’ The lawsuit may not survive what are likely to be sharp legal challenges. But its apparent unprecedented nature could have an uneasy effect on pollsters, given their checkered record of accuracy. It is not difficult to imagine their wariness and caution should pollsters face the risk of legal action when pre-election surveys go sideways.” (12/23/24)
“Secretary of State John Hay and the Colombian commercial attaché in the United States, Tomás Herrán, signed the treaty that would give the United States the right to resume construction of the Panama Canal that the French had abandoned when they were almost halfway done. Colombia would agree to cede a strip of land on its isthmus to the United States for 100 years in exchange for ten million in a single payment and $250,000 per year. A few miles off the coast of Panama, the warship Wisconsin remains stranded to provide moral support for the negotiations. Congress in Washington immediately approved the treaty, but it was rejected in Bogota. There were doubts about sovereignty and about the benefits derived from this agreement.” (12/23/24)
“We received an early Christmas present from the incoming Trump administration. The gift? The torpedoing of a continuing resolution (CR) supported by House Speaker Johnson that was full of concessions to the Democrat side of the aisle. Aside from the drunken-sailor spending, the 1,500-plus-page legislation — just something to tide the government over for a few months — contained many other horrific elements that made it worthy of deletion.” (12/23/24)
“Israel is getting ready to annex the occupied Palestinian West Bank. The annexation will be a major step backward on the road to Palestinian freedom and will likely serve as a catalyst for a new Palestinian uprising. Though annexation has been on the Israeli agenda for years, this time around a ‘great opportunity’ – in the words of extremist Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – has presented itself and, from an Israeli point of view, cannot be missed. … Two reasons make Israel’s far-right optimistic about Trump’s arrival: One, the Israeli experience during Trump’s first term in office, where the US president allowed Israel to claim sovereignty over illegal settlements, the Syrian Golan Heights, and occupied East Jerusalem; and, two, Trump’s more recent statement in the run-up to the election.” (12/23/24)
“Not too long ago, the most prominent force driving an ugly racial identity politics was the ‘progressive’ or ‘woke’ left. The main opposition to this movement tended to take a classically liberal form. It was driven by those concerned about the left’s overzealous celebration of minority groups to the exclusion of others, and their willingness to crush equality and free speech in pursuit of supposedly progressive goals. But over the past year or so it has become increasingly clear that a vocal minority opposes wokeness for very different reasons. They object not to identity politics or to the suppression of free speech, but to what they see as a woke attack on white identity.” (12/22/24)
“As if his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and refusal ever to acknowledge responsibility weren’t bad enough, now we learn that Joe Biden forced grieving military families to wait for hours on the tarmac of Dover Air Force Base while he took a nap on Air Force One. We already knew that he had continually checked his watch and talked about himself when he met the relatives of 13 military members killed by a suicide bomber during the chaotic evacuation from Kabul in August 2021. But this new report adds an extra layer of callousness to the story. Biden has long been renowned for being late for everything, well before the onset of his cognitive decline. World leaders at the G20 summit last month finally tired of waiting and took their group photo without him.” (12/22/24)
“A brief history of the systems we’ve inherited, and the story of two very different reactions to two murders, in a country founded on murder.” (12/22/24)
“After decades of building one of the largest and most heavily armed war machines in the Middle East, Assad’s Baathist regime crumbled like sand because that is precisely what Syria is. It is not a nation, at least not by the Spenglerian definition of a people united by common cause and culture. It is a series of lines that some Englishman drew all over the map in blood after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. You cannot expect anyone who isn’t a certified borderline personality to die for something so synthetic. The Islamic State was equally transparent beneath all the macho posturing which is precisely why it disintegrated beneath the boots of one-hundred-thousand peasants and America and Israel’s new and improved model can be expected to meet the same fate but only if the Syrian people give up on all this Westphalian nonsense.” (12/22/24)
