Ukraine expectations vs. reality 🦁

Over 75 senior retired 🇺🇸U.S. generals, admirals, and military lawyers have signed a new open letter rejecting claims that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. The signatories include those who have commanded U.S. armed forces in combat, applying the laws of armed conflict. Their conclusion: based on the facts and applicable legal standard, the conduct of Israel’s war against Hamas does not constitute genocide. As the letter states, “Civilian deaths occurring during combat, however tragic, are insufficient, by themselves, to support a finding of genocidal intent.” The standards used to judge military conduct matter precisely because war is tragic and imperfect. “The precedent established today regarding Israel will shape the conditions under which American forces fight tomorrow. Protecting civilians and preserving the ability of our nation to defend itself requires us to defend the truth when the laws of war are being distorted to make false charges of genocide.” This is not an argument for minimizing the suffering of civilians. It is an argument for applying the law faithfully and maintaining the distinctions that matter: between the tragic consequences of war, violations of the laws of armed conflict, and the specific crime of genocide. Read the full open letter here: jinsa.org/open-letter-from-m…

"Anti-Zionism is the only contemporary political movement whose goal is to destroy a country." theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1…

In potentially the most serious spy scandal in German history, August Hanning is suspected of alleged treasonous espionage, the disclosure of state secrets, attempted treason and intelligence activity. 🔗:telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2…

Life imitates @TheBabylonBee

54% of Russell 3000 stocks have dropped by 20% or more since June

BTIG: “.. the $SOX continues to track extremely close to the boom/bust cycle of the 2000 peak. .. it’s quite striking .. .. This would imply we are about at the peak of this counter-trend rally and embarking on a slower drawn-out decline over the next several months.” [Krinsky]

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'We are children, both of our parents have just died' Three years after Oct. 7, the Idan family releases the chilling call Michael, 9, and Amalia, 6, made to police after their parents were murdered in Kfar Aza. Their younger sister, Avigail, was abducted to Gaza.

Probably nothing…

What a chart:

Sure, saving everyone aboard Flight FZ1073 was nice. But Mehdi Hasan getting absolutely pulverized by the internet in response is still far and away the best part of this whole thing

Upgraded to buy

new quant indicator: mortgage rate + gallon of gas

Yesterday marked one year since the last rocket fired from the Gaza Strip crossed into Israeli territory. A full year without rockets or missiles from Gaza, for the first time this century.

Like a clock..! The man is the magician

“Overall, the probability that a plane full of Israelis will contain a trained assault team, two additional pilots, and, statistically, at least one cardiac surgeon, psychologist, lawyer, and diamond dealer is substantially higher than 50%.”

Palestinianism is a Soviet product line that turned a lost war into a religion. Academia, media, and the Western left now treat the liturgy as history. The KGB did not invent Arab grievance. It rebranded it. After Soviet-armed Arab states were routed in 1967, Moscow needed a story that could hit America, isolate the Jews, and keep the Arab street pointed west. Stop saying “throw the Jews into the sea.” Start saying “decolonization.” Stop making it a war against a sovereign state. Turn it into a struggle of “indigenous Palestinians versus European settlers.” It did not matter that half of Israel’s Jews came from Arab and African countries, or that the Arab war against Jewish sovereignty was obvious to nearly everyone before 1967. The conflict was recoded as racism. In 1975 the UN made the recoding official: “Zionism is a form of racism” (repealed only in 1991 after the fall of the USSR). The hinge of the faith is the “Nakba,” and the word’s history gives the game away. Syrian historian Constantin Zureiq coined it in 1948 in “The Meaning of the Disaster.” He was not writing about refugees, but was expressing the humiliation felt by the Arab world as seven Arab armies failed to strangle the Jewish state at birth: they “declare war on Zionism ... stand impotent before it, and then turn on their heels.” Decades later, the same word was given a rebrand and became about refugees. The religion of Palestinianism has a very specific dialect. For example, “occupation” can describe Gaza with zero Israelis and zero Israeli soldiers in it. “Resistance” can mean blowing up a bus, a disco, or pizza shop filled with civilians. Somehow “nonviolent popular resistance” includes a knife attack on a random civilian. Bayt al-Maqdis is Arabic for the “Jewish Temple,” but in the new liturgy, the Temple never existed. Arabs who were simply called Arabs (a people who arrived with the 7th-century conquest) were reintroduced as Canaanites, a population that vanished more than 3,000 years ago. Zuhair Mohsen, on the PLO executive committee, said the quiet part out loud in 1977: there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese. A separate Palestinian identity “serves only tactical purposes ... The establishment of a Palestinian state is a new weapon in the ongoing battle against Israel.” Once you see the theology, the immunity to evidence stops being mysterious. Palestinianism promises “return” and issues the same instruction, generation after generation: the Jews leave or die, and until then the wound must not close. You cannot negotiate a people out of a faith that made Jewish existence the original sin. You can only refuse to speak the dialect.

An inside look at future Treasury strategy meetings.

In the early days of Trump’s second term, his economic advisers laid out a simple theory: Show the bond market that Washington was serious about closing its gaping deficits and long-term interest rates would fall on their own. Trump could leave the Fed alone. It hasn’t worked out that way. The White House theory rested on fiscal restraint that never arrived and overlooked how much of Trump’s own agenda would feed the price pressures now pushing rates higher. Tariffs raised the cost of imported goods. The war with Iran sent oil and diesel prices soaring. wsj.com/economy/trump-econom…

We’re launching the Army of Robots. In 2022, we launched the Army of Drones. Today, drones account for over 95% of battlefield strikes, and Ukraine has more than 700 UAV manufacturers. Now we need the next technological breakthrough: the robotization of warfare. The goal is simple — save lives. Robots should take on the most dangerous missions: evacuating the wounded, delivering ammunition, mining and demining, reconnaissance, defending positions and engaging targets. The Army of Robots is not one company. It’s an ecosystem. We will invest in defense tech companies, launch our own technology projects, test them with the military and scale what works on the battlefield. We’re now looking for defense tech companies and engineers working on robotic technologies — as well as a CTO / Tech Lead for the Army of Robots. Join us: thearmyofrobots.com/en