Russia’s defeat and forced withdrawal from Syria has another aspect that I haven’t seen anyone mention yet.
To put it in a nutshell - it totally overturns all justification for Netanyahu’s Russia policy, or at least for continuing with it. In spite of very strong pro-Ukraine public mood in Israel, Israeli governments have been very careful not to upset Russia by giving open support to Ukraine, especially military equipment. Isreal has provided substantial non-lethal aid, and especially valuable medical aid

A little historical diversion.
Throughout history there have been very few military conflicts in which the Poles directly fought against the British. The few occasions when this did happen are not celebrated in either country therefore not well known. As the two countries are distant and do not have any historical disputes, this could only happen by involvement in some other country’s ventures. There are only two cases that come to my mind.

The Israeli left’s conspiracy theories about Netanyahu are really not very far from the most outlandish antisemitic ones (Candance Owens level). The difference is that the Israeli Bibi haters demonize only one person and not a whole nation.
I happen to have two (second) cousins, both patriotic Israelis. One is a distinguished physicist, a professor of physics at Tel Aviv university, with a doctorate from Caltech. He is a strong (although critical) supporter of Netanyahu. His younger brother, a former paratrooper and a successful businessman, is a Bibi

The problems facing those who think Trump is a terrible choice for POTUS but still can be made less bad (or perhaps even good) by good advice skilfully delivered is a much less acute version of the problem faced by those few decent German conservatives who tried to work with who tried to work with Hitler. The foremost among them was the famous mayor of Leipzig Carl Goerdeler.
(Those who do not know about him should definitely read )en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Frie…

Although it seemed like a somewhat risky decision, it now looks pretty clear that my daughter & her husband made the right decision to leave California for Japan. Everyone is very happy, especially the boys. They enjoy school (to which they walk alone - it takes about 20 minutes) and they enjoy after school activities. They both practice karate and attend a football (soccer) school. The school is run by a former professional Argentinian player, who opened it together with his two sons - also former professional players. It’s just one of the examples

From Russian Telegram channel “Vatnoye boloto”

Pay attention to this.
Absolutely all the “important details” about the terrorists and their detention have been selected in such a way as to make the maximum impression on a typical representative of the “deep masses”. First.
"Terrorists" are not Ukrainians. Ukrainians - that would be too direct. Yarosh's business card, Azov flags, cries of "Glory to Ukraine" would arouse suspicions of manipulation and deliberateness even among many ordinary people.

After listening to several interviews with Ukrainian senior artillery officer who goes under the pseudonym "Arty Green"

a rather obvious thought came to my mind.
Arty says that the war is not completely dominated by drones.

https://x.com/akoz33/status/1767842239009419477?s=20

Artillery, which has so long dominated it, is now very much in second place, or, as he puts it, it has already been defeated. Drones now dominate not just the battefield but the war. And a race is on, or rather several races. One is between drones and anti-drone measures.

So now that Trump himself destroyed another myth, that is, that he would be tougher on China than Biden (a myth, by the way, which was obviously false on the evidence of his Presidency), only one pro-Trump argument still appears to stand: that he would be better for Israel than Biden.
Ostensibly this is so. Undoubtedly Trump sounds much more friendly to Israel than Biden and in the short term his return would allow Israel to crash Hamas with fewer obstacles from the US.

After October 7th many observers, including myself, were convinced that Netanyahu's long political career was practically over. The Israeli public would tolerate him for as long as it took to obliterate Hamas, but would never forgive him for allowing the disaster to occur. But now his political survival looks increasingly likely and this is entirely (as usual) due to the Israeli Left.
After the terrible massacre it became clear that Israeli policies both in the political and military sphere had been terribly long. Netanyahu cannot alone be

More experiments with Wolfram Mathematica and ChatGPT working together and some surprising (for me anyway) discoveries. I don't know, but they may even be significant for AI in general. To put it briefly: it looks like it is overconfident. When it thinks it knows the answer to a problem (even if it is wrong) then, even if it has the means to check this answer with some external tool, it will chose to tell you its (wrong answer). And it will even lie and tell you that this is the answer it got by using the tool.

The war in Gaza shows the limitations of hybrid warfare. Hamas‘s tactics was initially very clever. It managed to completely mislead the Israelis by pretending to have become more “moderate” after the Israelis relaxed restrictions on transfer of funds to Gaza and allowed more Gazans to travel to and work in Israel (some of these workers provided Hamas with the information it needed to carry out the attack). Hamas also successfully used the old “cry wolf” tactics - by staging 9 or 10 “practice assaults“ before the real one.

Oh , I just found something that should be interesting for some of my followers who do not speak Russian. Here is a short video of my favourite political philosopher, Andriy Baumeister (he has been for 30 years a professor of philosophy at the University of Kyiv, but has just resigned, having decided to live by his own wits, like Roger Scruton did once). He is a truly brilliant and very precise mind. I greatly admire him although our views don’t coincide - his are too “Aristotelian” for me, his world picture is too well ordered. He is, of course,

@DStrungk @CarlEdman First of all, I would say, it was completely to be expected. No surprise at all. So the fact that people are behaving like if it was some kind of surprise I can only explain as either due to them being completely out of touch with reality (wishful thinking or it’s opposite) @DStrungk @CarlEdman or that they are engaging in propaganda (most often all these things at the same time).
First of all, let me remind you that when PiS won the parliamentary elections in 2015, Jarosław Kaczyński predicted that they would stay in power for two parliamentary terms.

Romanenko and Arestovych criticize sharply Ukraine’s position in the “grain conflict” with Poland (also a few words about Volhynina)
1/3 2/3 Romanenko on the Polish elections

At the time when Prigozhin unexpectedly made a deal with Putin instead of continuing the seemingly unstoppable advance on Moscow, Arestovych made a prediction, which turned out to be pretty accurate (he mentioned this yesterday). He predicted that something would happen to Prigozhin probably in September, once the problem of the “African succession” was dealt with. Well, he seems not to have been far off - September is almost here.
Obviously Prigozhin, who was not entirely stupid

Israeli officer and military analyst Yigal Levin published on Telegram his advice to Ukraine on how to deal with the United States. It is based on Israel’s history and is exactly the same as what @arestovych has been saying for a long time, but particularly recently. I am translating from Russian & I have not tried to find the original quotes from Forrestal and Kissinger so the double translation may have slightly changed the wording.

A lot of people have suddenly become experts on the Wagner Group and a lot of false or half true information is circulating.
So a few facts that don’t appear to be so well known. The Wagner Group was created about 10-years ago by Dmitri Utkin (whom I call “Frankenstein’s Monster”, because of the way he looks. Perhaps I am guilty of “lookism” 🤔).
Utkin was a lieutenant colonel of GRU - Soviet & later Russian, military intelligence.

Several observations about the Prigozhin rebellion so far.

1. It seems that the Wagnerites did not hesitate to fire on Russian army personnel or shoot down Russian army helicopters, while there is no evidence that even one shot was fired at them. In particular, the Kadarovites took for ever to reach Rostov on Don and when they arrived waited carefully outside never making contact with the Wagnerites.

From Michael Nacke’s Telegram:

Putin's speech is just awful. I think he wrote it himself, because he just played Prigozhin’s game. I can say a lot about it, but I will focus on only two points. 1) Weakness. A dictator must exude strength and confidence; any dictatorship rests on faith in the power of the ruler. He should have said:

"Prigozhin rebelled, will be destroyed in the near future." He could also have tried to drag Budanov in, saying that he had recruited him.

Today I had an exchange of e-mails with Alexander Gogun, the very talented young Russian historian living in Berlin, the author of a number of fascinating studies related to WWII. @YLatynina called him the third in the trio of great Russian historians of WWII: Suvorov (Rezun), Solonin and Gogun (Gogun is, of course, much younger than the others).

Our exchange was about possible Polish translations of Gogun’s books. I don’t need any translations, as I

One more comment on the claims by Washington Post, based on alleged “leaks” from US intelligence, that Ukrainian military planned and perhaps carried out, the destruction of the Nord Stream 2. This was very strongly denied by Zelensky. But there is an even better argument. Mikhail Krutikhin has given very detailed technical arguments why such an action would be extremely difficult and costly to carry out. I won’t repeat these arguments but it’s basically due to the fact that the pipeline was carefully built to protect it from acts of terrorism