Nixon is only partly right about Israel’s intelligence. In fact, Israel was well aware of Egyptian and Syrian mobilisation for war. The question was how to interpret it, because the Arabs were using a standard trick - repeated “exercises” that looked like preparation for invasion

https://twitter.com/simonmontefiore/status/1935401898724528523

To counter this, Israel would have to mobilise every time, which was very costly for its economy. So Dayan and ultimately Golda Meir had to decide what to do. However, Dayan believed that the Arabs were sufficiently deterred and would not initiate a real war but were only

I am inclined to think that Trump really wanted to make a deal with Iran (for which, in his mind, he would have deserved a Nobel prize) but as Khamenei would not go along, he agreed to go along with Netanyahu’s plans. I think Bibi has so far played this masterfully- in anybody in this affair is a chess player - it’s him. Winning over Trump was not easy as Trump is actually very risk averse but Netanyahu persuaded him that he would take all the risk of things going wrong and Trump would get the credit for success. I am inclined to believe that Trump’s

Paradoxically, the stinginess and slowness of the U.S. military air to Ukraine under Biden, has had several good consequences.
1. It forced Ukraine, in spite of many obstacles due to corruption, bureaucracy and incompetence of its politicians, to start developing its own weapons industry. On some areas, especially cheap drones it is now way ahead of what the U.S. can deliver (American drones have been one of the greatest disappointments). Moreover, in spite of all the obstacles put in their way by Ukrainian monopolies owned by powerful oligarchs,

You can really tell a lot about people on X by using the Sherlock Holmes’s principle of “the odd that did not bark”. All you need to do is to observe what topics people are silent about.
When Biden was POTUS, it was not uncommon for conservative Never-Trumpers to keep silent on topics that showed the Biden administration in a bad light. In some cases that included even the wave of antisemitism that swept over the Democratic Party after October 7.
Now, it’s the turn of Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives to keep silent.

If I record correctly, it was king Hassan of Morocco (of course, there were others before him) who expressed his disappointment after reading Machiavelli, because he found nothing there that he hadn’t known already.
And, of course, he was right: Machiavelli’s real importance was historical: he was the first major thinker to explicitly state that all the principles proclaimed and preached by the Church as well as philosophers, were contrary to what actually succeeded in real world politics.
By doing so he opened the way to modern secular ideologies,

Some thoughts on the Trump-Vance -Zelensky public spat.
It was certainly the most unusual public event involving heads of state I can remember and, in fact, I can't even think of a comparable event in history. Such acrimonious outcomes & meetings between leaders of states do not happen because one of the purposes of diplomacy is to avoid them.

The biggest winner of America’s abandonment of Ukraine could be Erdogan. European leaders are genuinely concerned and want to help Ukraine but their capabilities are limited. They certainly can’t provide money and some weapons, but they their military industries will take take years to reach the production levels of the Cold War era. Most importantly, they lack enough young men who are willing to fight, especially for the kind of things that Europe now claims to stand for. Erdogan, on the other hand, has everything that Putin has (except nukes

Trump, by character, intellect and experience is totally unsuited to be a modern politician. Even ignoring his other qualities (most of were correctly described by Rubio, Cruz, Graham and others during the 2016 campaign), he cannot control his emotions, which are completely dominated by purely personal issues. Sometimes it is actually a good thing. It is hard to explain in any other way why he has been so much better on matters concerning Jews and Israel than not only his Democrat opponents but also probably all previous U.S. presidents.

It's hard to tell people this, but when a Muslim (unlike an ignorant Western leftist) says that "Moses was a Muslim" or "Jesus was a Muslim", he is simply repeating a very basic tenet of mainstream Islam. In fact, what he is saying is both fundamental to Islam and makes any kind non hostile coexistence with the other "Abrahamic" religions very difficult if not impossible. It does not mean that Muslims cannot coexist with non-Muslims or even be friends with them, but only that they can do so by ignoring some of the very foundations of Islam -

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,