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

Anthony Fauci spent nearly four decades running the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

In that time, he became the face of public health in America.

Yet the record now shows he inflicted lasting harm on the very people he claimed to serve, especially the young. His private writings and public actions reveal a pattern of deception that paved the way for lockdowns, school closures, and social isolation whose scars will stretch across generations.

In late July, Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, released more than 1,000 pages of Fauci's personal diary. These ranged from December 2019 through December 2022. Those entries strip away an image which had been polished for the public year after year. On Jan. 26, 2020, Fauci noted that the first COVID-19 infection appeared early in December and had no link to the Wuhan market. He called the market an amplifier, not the source.

Days later, on Feb. 1, he recorded a conference call with a dozen scientists. Most of them saw laboratory engineering of COVID as a real possibility. Only two favored a purely natural origin.

Fauci never shared that private judgment with the public. Instead, he steered grant money toward

Gas prices are rising again in Germany. The main culprit is the state with its towering levies. In the EU, a mechanism has become established that artificially restricts and drives up the cost of energy in order to tax it more effectively afterward.

Holiday season is travel season. Once out on the road, many German tourists experience a nasty surprise at the gas stations of their destination or while passing through: Whether in Austria, Poland, Italy, or Spain -- filling up here is sometimes 25 to 40 percent cheaper than at home. The reason is the systematic tax rip-off by the German Treasury. Germany is, after all, a frontrunner in this area -- up to 55 percent of the price of gas flows from the pump into state coffers.

Rising fuel prices please the chief treasurer of the debt disaster, Lars Klingbeil. In Berlin, people do not think in large cycles and broad lines -- what matters is the quick euro. Consumers are both a milking cow and political disposable asset -- there is nothing left to be seen of the ideal of the sovereign citizen who was supposed to be freed from fiscal overload and overregulation in the current

To many Americans, the people of the Middle East appear culturally and ethnically similar. Yet those outward similarities mask profound religious, historical, and political divisions that have shaped the region for more than fourteen centuries. These divisions are rooted in the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

For decades, much of the world's attention has focused on conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors or between Islam and the West. In recent weeks, however, the center of gravity has shifted back toward one of the region's oldest rivalries—the struggle between Sunni and Shia Islam.

I believe there are two reasons for this shift.

First, Iran's military capabilities have been significantly degraded. Second, Iran's leadership must now decide which adversaries pose the greatest long-term threat to its revolutionary ambitions.

A Fourteen-Century Divide

The Sunni-Shia split began after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in A.D. 632 over who should lead the Muslim community.

Sunni Muslims, who represent approximately 85 to 90 percent of the world's Muslims, believe the leader, or Caliph, should be selected by consensus among the Muslim community and should follow the traditions (Sunnah) established by Muhammad and his earliest companions.

Shia Muslims, who represent roughly 10 to 15 percent of Muslims worldwide, believe leadership

Many American Jews are uncomfortable with violence. The problem begins when every use of force is placed in the same moral category.

An attacker uses force to control, punish, or injure. A person acting in self-defense uses force to stop the attack and reach safety. The physical movement may look similar, but the intent is very different. One comes from the desire to hurt. The other comes from accepting responsibility for self-preservation.

As a lifelong martial artist and self-defense instructor, I have taught people how to protect themselves for more than two decades. I meet people who want protection without preparing to cause pain. They want to get fit without ever getting sore. They support awareness and professional security, then pull away when training requires resistance or even minimal discomfort.

Jim Rohn said, "We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment."

That choice applies to self-defense. I would rather accept controlled discomfort in training than discover my first physical reaction while someone is trying to hurt me. Discomfort in training can be stopped, examined, and repeated. A real attack gives you none of that control.

A violent person does not judge our restraint

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.