I find time-lapse photography fascinating. One of my favorite examples is when someone in the far north points a camera at the North Star during winter and leaves it there overnight. The result is typically an image of silhouetted trees surrounding an array of circles made by the stars traveling across the sky as the Earth spins. Although that picture captures reality, there's no moment when you could ever actually see it simply by looking up. It doesn't actually exist as a single moment; it's only by seeing the time-lapse that you can perceive it.

A more consequential example, although I'm not sure it technically meets the definition of time-lapse, is when a parent takes an image of a child every day, or every Monday, for a series of years and then puts the images together so that they run in sequence. While each individual image might tell a story—"That was Janie at 12, when she first got her braces," or "That was Timothy at 8, when he decided to cut his own hair"—taken in aggregate, the sequence tells a completely different story, as a daughter grows from a scared kindergartner to a smiling college graduate in minutes.

The funny thing

In revealing the commonalities of the Reds and the Greens in the Red-Green Axis, we have elucidated their shared goals of violence, wealth redistribution, and inequality before the law. Here we explore their binary worldview.

Both Islamic political systems, as developed in classical jurisprudence, and Marxist-Leninist communism organize the world into a permanent binary division. One domain is the legitimate, correctly ordered sphere; the other is the external sphere that remains incomplete, illegitimate, or hostile until it is transformed or subordinated.

This division is not a temporary phase or a pragmatic map of power; it is a structural feature that generates a standing external mission, an ongoing obligation toward the outsider domain. The parallel is practical and political, not rhetorical.

Both systems reject a world of permanently equal, mutually recognizing sovereigns under neutral international law. Instead, they treat the external realm as the field of unfinished work, and both built durable institutions to prosecute it.

In classical Islamic political theory, the world is binarily divided into dar al-Islam, the domain in which Islamic rule and law prevail, and dar al-harb (harb: "war"), the domain of war or unbelief. The terms are juristic rather than directly Quranic, but

President Trump is a master deal-maker. Just ask him. And his balance sheet suggests he's right. But his actions toward Iran have a major problem. There is no deal to be made. Let's consider the situation.

In making a deal, both sides must gain something. Typically, neither side gets everything it wants.

If you are selling your house, you put it on the market at a price higher than what you are willing to accept. An offer comes in below that number, and at that point you start negotiation. There are many variations, but ultimately a deal will usually include a price lower than you had hoped for. The buyer will pay more than he wished to spend, but ultimately, there's middle ground on which you can agree. Or there may be no deal, and the whole dance starts again with a different prospective buyer.

The basic issue in this deal-making is that both parties have related interests, and each is willing to give up a bit to get most of what is desired. Bookmark that idea.

This is where Donald Trump is operating under a delusion. He thinks that the mullahs and IRGC actually want peace where their people will prosper. The

Who knew golfing, skydiving, and scuba diving were a "white" thing?

NBC seems to think they are in their piece "Scuba, skydiving and golf: Black adults embrace sports that defy stereotypes and bring joy."

Those sports and others like them (tennis, skating, gymnastics) always struck me as a disposable income thing not a race thing, requiring as they do the purchase of expensive lessons and/or expensive equipment and/or expensive travel/venue time. Cash and sheer merit — never race — were always what I thought about when I thought about who participates or excels in these sports.

Evidently not NBC News. NBC wrote the entire piece on the premise that these sports "were once inaccessible" to blacks but are just now becoming accessible because, as one "expert" interviewed accidentally admitted, blacks are now "giving themselves" permission to pursue them.

The piece then quickly moved along, but that single admission early on kinda blew the narrative and begged the question: If these sports are something blacks can now freely give themselves, then how is it whitey's fault? Why then even bring up the "once inaccessible" pre-civil rights era unless it's just to cast a long victim/oppressor shadow?

NBC never proffered a single person who'd

There is a frustrating contradiction when it comes to the way public information is assessed for factual truth.  For decades, prominent news organizations have steadily lost credibility.  Fewer Americans than ever believe what The New York Times, CNN, NPR, or even the AP publishes as the "objective" record of current events.  At the same time, however, alternative, competing descriptions of current events are almost entirely ignored.  No matter how compelling or factually sourced a story might be, it is largely disregarded until mainstream corporate news institutions are willing to recognize its validity.

This annoying state of affairs was highlighted last week after Dr. Anthony Fauci refused to testify before the Senate.  Although the man holds one of Joe Biden's get-out-of-jail-free autopen pardons, Fauci cowardly asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than a hundred times.  With a general pardon in hand that presumably allows him to get away with past acts of mass murder, he could put himself in legal jeopardy only by not telling the truth while under oath at the hearing.  So long as Fauci avoided newly committing perjury, there was no risk to his liberty.  The fact that he nevertheless remained mum

Ever since the 1979 Iranian Revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah to usher in the Islamic Republic, Iran has presented the United States a difficult and very often frustrating foreign policy challenge.  Successive U.S. administrations — both Democrat and Republican — have deemed Iran, and more specifically its radical militant Islamist leadership, a threat to the United States and its interests.

Despite this longstanding adversarial relationship, often marked by violent, subversive, terroristic episodes — and now war over whether Iran will possess nuclear weapons — both Republican and Democrat administrations have, in good faith, reached out to Iran over the years with substantive deeds and diplomacy with hopes to restore and normalize relations.

There are precedents in U.S.-Iran relations for "disaster diplomacy," with the intention that providing humanitarian assistance during calamities might be the impetus for cooperation, conflict resolution, and international relations.  In June 1990, a private American relief airplane landed in Iran after the Manjil-Rudbar earthquake in the north and then again in June 2002 during another earthquake in northwest Iran.  As U.S. aid arrived indirectly in early July 2002, President George Bush would publicly declare, "Human suffering knows no political boundaries."

Earlier, in 1991, thousands of Kurdish refugees who fled

In November, the suburbs of New York City will be the pivotal arena for whether the Democratic Socialists of America cement their takeover of the entire state from their New York City stronghold. The decisive issue is not crime, deteriorating quality of life, or high taxes, but one that is arousing significant suburban anxiety: the DSA's vendetta against the American Dream of homeownership.

Residents of Westchester and Nassau counties, which abut the northern Bronx and eastern Queens, and of whom 80% own their homes, are watching with increasing unease Mayor Zohran Mamdani's mounting attacks on the city's homeowners, and logically assuming that they are next.

Despite Westchester County's nearly 3-1 Democrat voter registration advantage over Republicans and a 15% advantage in Nassau, the DSA's Marxist belief that property ownership is evil may elect a Republican governor for the first time in more than 20 years. The electoral math is such that if Republican challenger Bruce Blakeman can earn a five-point swing in the metro area over Republican Lee Zeldin's statewide 6% loss to Democrat Kathy Hochul in 2022, he clinches a Republican victory. Some political analysts believe that Zeldin lost because he failed to focus more on the threats to single-family

One of President Donald Trump's defining campaign themes was refreshingly simple: America should stop fighting endless wars.

He repeated that message across three presidential campaigns. Iraq was a mistake. Afghanistan became a twenty-year quagmire. America had spent trillions of dollars, sacrificed thousands of lives, and, too often, had little to show for it beyond instability and nation-building projects that rarely fulfilled their promises.

Image created by ChatGPT

During a 2016 presidential debate, Trump called the Iraq War "a big fat mistake."

Eight years later, while campaigning for a return to the White House, he promised, "I will not send you to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never end." 

In his 2024 inaugural address, he declared, "I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars." 

The Iran conflict has been underway for only five months, a far cry from Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, which dragged on for years or even decades. American casualties, while tragic, remain comparatively limited compared with those in those wars.

Whether or not one agreed with Trump on every issue, his criticism

The Berlin Wall's fall is one of history's most recognizable examples of a rapid, largely unforeseen cascading failure. On November 9, 1989, East German spokesman Günter Schabowski mistakenly announced that new travel rules would take effect "immediately." Crowds rushed the checkpoints, overwhelmed confused border guards, and within hours the wall that had divided Germany for twenty-eight years had effectively fallen.

While the writing was on the wall (pun intended), what no one foresaw, including Western intelligence services and most scholars, was the speed and the trigger: a single bungled press conference that sent border crossings into bedlam. Twenty-four hours later, the world had changed. In retrospect, all the signs were there that East Germany had become systemically fragile. Collapse was possible and, ultimately, likely.

Engineers describe this as a cascading failure: a system that appears stable until one relatively small event reveals weaknesses that have accumulated over time. In geopolitics, authoritarian governments can behave much the same way. They often appear strongest immediately before they become most vulnerable because they suppress the very information that would reveal how fragile they have become.

Iran (especially) and Russia are exhibiting many of those characteristics today.

East Germany's problems were hardly a secret. Economic

Lately, conservatives have achieved incredible political victories across Latin America. These political reversals for good are on par with the Fall of the Berlin Wall, but with lasting effect across the entire continent. Conservative pundits have longed for these developments for years, and now they are here. President Trump deserves credit for helping this resurgence of freedom and prosperity to manifest across a region of the world which had fallen into the thralls of communist dictatorships.

With all the celebrations among conservatives, witnessing the incredible reversal of good fortune of our cause, I want to explore another political, cultural, and most importantly spiritual development sweeping South America: the growing realignment of Latin American countries with the Jewish State. This change is manifesting concurrently with conservative political victories, all declaring not only the rise of freedom, conservatism, constitutional rule, and a restoration of Law and order, but a massive defeat against abject communist tyranny.

Twenty years ago, left-wing commentators identified, analyzed, and celebrated the rapid rise of left-wing governments across Latin America, often referred to as "The Pink Tide." Communist leadership took the helm in these countries, insistent on reestablishing the failed policies of the Soviet Union and of communist China.

Why do our lefty friends talk about "black folks, queer folks, indigenous folks"? Answer: it all goes back to the Nazis and das Volk. The whole point of Nazism was to inspire das deutsche Volk to rise up against the punitive Treaty of Versailles after Germany's defeat in World War I. In the end, it didn't go very well, of course.

But now we have the Global South, and instead of  Nazis singing a song of völkisch oppression, we have lefties singing a song of postcolonial oppression to get the global Volk to rise up against the Western colonialist enemy. Call it "The Rise of the Völkisch Left," writes Ashley Frawley.

Postcolonialism does not simply swap out the working class for some other group of the oppressed. Its object is a mystic unity of culture, collective memory, fraught relationships to race and place, and inherited victimhood. Blood and soil in these formulations are only slightly obscured by a thin rhetorical dust.

Concerning this worldview, we can say that Marxism did not arise out of rationalism and the Enlightenment but from just another mystic origin: the mystic emergence of the working class from the bottomless depths of exploitation.

Let's universalize this. Every political

In revealing the commonalities of the Reds and the Greens in the Red-Green Axis, past essays have elucidated their shared goals of violence and wealth redistribution. Here we explore their legalization of inequality.

Both classical Islamic political jurisprudence and Marxist-Leninist communism reject a fundamental constitutional premise of the United States: that individuals possess equal legal rights because they are persons, not because they belong to a favored religious, political, or social category. Instead, both systems construct political order by dividing society into privileged insiders and subordinate outsiders.

Membership in the preferred category—not equal personhood—determines legal rights, political authority, and social standing. Rights are therefore derivative. They flow from status rather than equal personhood and are embedded in the foundational texts and institutions of both systems. Although one defines membership by religion and the other by class, both organize political authority through the same mechanism: differential rights based upon categorical belonging rather than equal legal personhood.

In the Islamic political order, the distinction begins in the Qur'an itself. Qur'an 9:29 commands Muslims to fight those "who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day" until they pay the jizyah "while they are humbled." The verse establishes a