Commentary Culture Investigations

One has to wonder why President Trump is still negotiating with Iran. Mr. Trump has said that the cease-fire is over because Iran is still launching missiles and drones against our bases in Qatar, Bahrain, and Jordan and shooting at ships in the Strait of Hormuz. We have undertaken several nights of air raids against Iran, hitting dozens of military targets. But he has agreed with the Iranians that negotiations toward a peace deal will continue.
Why?
The regime in Tehran has threatened to assassinate Mr. Trump which is the rough equivalent of a declaration of war. Wars throughout history — including World War One — were started (or widened) by such assassinations.
Tear up the “Memorandum of Understanding” Mr. Trump and return us to what should have been our major objective at the beginning of the war: overthrowing the Tehran regime.
We cannot take those threats lightly as evidenced by the fact that the president returned from the recent NATO meeting not aboard the fancy new Air Force One that the Qataris gave him but an older aircraft which had better missile defenses aboard. Mr. Trump’s aircraft should never go anywhere without fighter escorts.
The Tehran regime is expert at stalling negotiations and then ignoring the result. They want to drag out negotiations as long as they can, then agree to some deal that they have no intention of abiding by. It’s what they do as the past 47 years have proved beyond doubt.
Many famous people are misquoted regularly. In the case of Albert Einstein, perhaps the most famous misquote that’s attributed to him is his definition of insanity.
Mr. Einstein purportedly said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” There’s no evidence that he actually said or wrote that, but it’s still called his theory of insanity.
So why is Mr. Trump living up to that definition? It is truly insane for the United States to do this.
Iranian officials have reportedly told the U.S. in private that the attacks on our bases and the ships in the Strait should be blamed on “hardliners in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)” according to CBS News.
The Iranians want us to think that they are divided among hardline factions and those who Mr. Trump said were more reasonable. And Mr. Trump is apparently falling for that line of nonsense.
The Iranians may well be divided but it is only between those who are total fanatics and those who may only partially be fanatical. It’s not up to us to discern the difference between fanatics, only to restore peace. And as this column has repeated ad nauseam, there can be no peace while the Tehran regime remains in power.
We may or may not be able to reopen the Strait of Hormuz but we can topple the regime with airpower as my friend, Lt. Gen. David Deptula (USAF, Ret.), wrote last month. But that would require Mr. Trump to realign his airstrikes with reality.
As Gen. Deptula wrote,
Sometimes those objectives require territorial control, regime removal, or long-term stabilization, in which case land forces may indeed be essential. But many successful campaigns seek something else entirely: to compel an adversary to stop an activity, to force a withdrawal, to halt atrocities, to abandon a course of action, to degrade a military program, to paralyze command structures, or to impose costs sufficient to change behavior. In such cases, coercion, denial, disruption, and punishment may be enough to achieve the desired end without conquest or occupation. In fact, “owning the ground” can also drive owning too many liabilities.
We don’t need to “own” Iran but we must defeat it.
And what should we do with New York Mayor Mamdani and his staff? One of them — or perhaps a team of them — were about to meet with the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations when Secretary of State Marco Rubio intervened to cancel the meeting. Remember the Logan Act, which precludes private citizens from interfering in foreign policy? It carries criminal penalties which should be enforced on Mamdani’s team.
As the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, the Trump administration is increasingly pessimistic that any peace deal with Iran can choke off its nuclear ambitions. As Mr. Trump told reporters on Wednesday, “They violate the agreement every day, they lie, they cheat, they kill people … They’ll never build a nuclear weapon under our deal, but I don’t know if we’re going to have a deal.” That is clearly contrary to Mr. Trump’s continuous assertions that Iran is desperate to make a deal. They obviously aren’t.
So what should we be doing? Instead of negotiating with Iran, Mr. Trump should cancel all talks — and we should be attacking Iran, re-imposing our blockade on Iran’s oil exports and the severest sanctions we can think of. We should bomb the rail line that resupplies Iran from Beijing. And we should not relent until the regime falls.
Tear up the “Memorandum of Understanding” Mr. Trump and return us to what should have been our major objective at the beginning of the war: overthrowing the Tehran regime.
READ MORE from Jed Babbin:
A Six-Day Funeral and a Long War
The Fall Guy
Trump’s Retreat
 
 

Last January, I went blind in my left eye, the result of a botched cataract surgery. One of my first thoughts was will I still be able to write? It was instantly followed by will I still be able to read? The concept of life without visually intaking or outputting words, stories, and books seemed to me an unbearable tragedy. I was spared this fate by God, only to learn about too many people choosing it for themselves. A depressing new cover story by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic, “The End of Reading is Here,” chronicles the cataclysmic decline in reading this century, which bodes ill for the rest of it.
The article cites a National Endowment for the Arts survey that found fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Just 38 percent read a novel or short story. The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.
And the books being read — like the films being released — are less intellectual than afore. “In 1958,” Horowitch wrote, “the English translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was the best-selling novel of the year … Last year’s top-selling novel was Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games young-adult series.”
You might think it’s positive that at least the kids are consuming books. But what Horowitch did not note is that a large percentage of the reading adults are now reading the same YA fiction, a trend started by the Harry Potter boom at the end of the 20th Century. So, a modern totalitarian state would not have to ban a stimulative novel like the Soviet Union did Doctor Zhivago. The masses would ignore it on the bookstore shelf in favor of the current adult fiction best-seller, Onyx Storm — part of the women-driven “romantasy” series, Empyrean.
That so many boys today will never know that experience — or later cherish memories of it — is truly lamentable.
Amazon MGM Studios is currently preparing a small-screen adaptation of Empyrean, as well they should for a popular female-oriented franchise. I wish that meant Hollywood feminists would leave male-driven literature such as The Odyssey and The Lord of the Rings alone, or in the library. But it’s not in their XX — or X-neutral — DNA.
Case in point, starlet Lupita Nyong’o, who ridiculously plays Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, last week mocked Homer in a YouTube interview since deleted because of the backlash. “So, Homer, how do you feel about the screen time given to these women considering how little you spent with them?” Nyong’o taunted. “Hmm? Remember us?”
Such ignorance and insult is made possible by the steep decline in men reading fiction, precipitated by the decline in fiction written (or produced) for men and boys. Which is practically every book over the last 3,000 years, from The Iliad through The Aeneid, Beowulf, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, and Robinson Crusoe to the explosion of the novel in the 18th Century, now dying fast in the 21st. Those novels created immortal characters that became more real than most living people — Gulliver, Frankenstein, Captain Ahab, Scrooge, the Three Musketeers, Huckleberry Finn, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, J. Gatsby, Philip Marlowe, James Bond, Don Corleone, and countless others.
One of my most precious childhood memories is of a hot DC summer day, opening a cardboard box I’d ordered for $12 from the back of a comic book. In the box lay all 24 Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I spent the whole summer in heaven, or in Africa, devouring each book, then passing it to my neighbor and still best friend, Victor. We still challenge each other with the names Tarzan called his animal friends and foes — Tantor the elephant, Numa the lion, Gimla the crocodile, Hista the snake, and I could go on.
That so many boys today will never know that experience — or later cherish memories of it — is truly lamentable. All because the liberal dragons at the publishing gate, like those in Hollywoke, deplore their masculine heteronormativity. Tarzan represents everything they detest — a toxic white male hero and leader (in anti-white Africa no less). Yet he inspired millions of men — and attracted millions of women — for over a hundred years. And that’s precisely the kind of hero I advance in my fiction — along with heroes and heroines of different races — in the hope that others will derive a fraction of the pleasure I got from reading great books.
Last week, I submitted to my publisher, Aethon Books — months late because of my eye trauma — the manuscript to my new novel, The Camelot Trail, the contracted sequel to my well-received political thriller The Washington Trail. As required in the relevance-dependent genre (READ MORE: The Impeccable Timing of a Political Thriller), I had to anticipate the imminent geopolitical future. The Washington Trail, for instance, required Donald Trump to be elected President, although I wrote most of it when he wasn’t even a candidate, and might have gone to prison. But The Camelot Trail really caught the wavelength of this article — the necessity of the classical hero for young men to save Western Civilization.
In it, my two Washington private-eye protagonists — plus their hot new Latina associate — must protect a British expat literary scholar and leader of the mushrooming Excalibur movement. Excalibur induces young men to resurrect Arthurian chivalry and Christianity against growing spiritual darkness and for the protection of the weaker sex. And young women to support them and the future as traditional wives and mothers. The exploding movement makes its leader the number one target of the Left, and to once great Britain.
I hope by this Christmas, there are enough readers left to enjoy the book.
READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:
Another Nail in the Hollywood Coffin: George Washington Beats ‘Supergirl’
Bastion America
Suffergirl

Rep. Eric Swalwell’s sudden political death was no accident, but a strategic hit job by an unethical California Democratic Party and its media enablers. “Swalwell was pushed out for strategic purposes,” says investigative journalist Peter Schweizer. Call it the law of the jungle. On the Drill Down podcast, Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers review the body count and identify which ethically challenged members will be next to go.

Oil refineries, depots and tankers have all been key targets of US-Israeli and Iranian drone and missile strikes in the first weeks of the war in the Middle East.The attacks have driven oil prices higher internationally, prompting the International Energy Agency (IEA) to announce the release of 400 million barrels of oil from its 32-member countries.

KUALA LUMPUR — Syarikat penerbangan kargo MJets Air yang merupakan anak syarikat kepada MMAG Holdings Berhad didakwa sedang

KUALA LUMPUR: Satu lagi transaksi mencurigakan melibatkan syarikat berkaitan individu yang sering dikaitkan dengan rangkaian mafia korporat kembali

KUALA LUMPUR — Suruhanjaya Sekuriti Malaysia (SC) dilaporkan telah mengeluarkan waran tangkap terhadap bekas Ketua Pegawai Eksekutif Serba

Waldman et al., Bloomberg

RCI In southern India, a new enterprise called Peer Publicon Consultancy offers a full suite of services to scientific researchers. It will not only write a scholarly paper for a fee but also…

RCI This is the first in a two-part series of the Great Dispersion of Americans across the country. For much of the past century, in both the United States and elsewhere, the inexorable trend…