Won’t get fooled again.

They all grow soft and weak in the end.

This is what the looming threat of irrelevance sounds like.

A flurry of Lebanese Shia activists claiming to oppose Hezbollah is landing in Washington, gaining easy access from Americans who think they're helping the peace process. But there’s a catch: many aren't here to advocate for peace between Lebanon and Israel. They are actively lobbying against it. Even if they claim to despise Hezbollah, their activism helps Hezbollah block peace and stay armed. Weeks after posting photos from Capitol Hill, one of these prominent activists posted a video slamming the Lebanese who are "rushing" to normalize ties with Israel. So why visit DC? Lebanese PM Nawaf Salam, who is also in Washington to meet Secretary Marco Rubio, spelled out the strategy at the UN General Assembly. His pitch? A ceasefire in exchange for Israeli withdrawal, while tying disarming Hezbollah to "talking to the militia" and keeping Lebanon firmly tied to Gaza and the broader Arab-Israeli conflict, even proposing to weaken America's veto power at the UN Security Council (the same America that's going out of its way to help his cabinet restore its sovereignty). Salam and these activists view themselves as a "holier-than-thou Third Way" that rejects both Iran and Israel (they only seem to like Saudi Arabia, and another bunch Qatar). In reality, they are undermining a fragile, young peace movement without doing anything to diminish Hezbollah's actual grip on Lebanon. Standing equidistant from both sides isn't neutral. It is a bias that actively helps the status quo.

Olive trees don’t grow in New York. You’d know that if you were a New Yorker. They need to be kept alive in a greenhouse with a lot of work and care but they will produce no fruit and ultimately die. It’s the perfect symbol of everything you believe in.

NFL preseason: “Rest the starters. Someone might get turf toe.” NBA preseason: “We need to manage their loads.” MLB spring training: “I got a paper cut. Put me on the 10-day IL.” NHL preseason: “Let’s fucking kill each other.”

🚨NEW: The BBC has launched an urgent review after it emerged the 53 people it reported as "journalists" killed in Gaza have since been claimed as terrorists by Hamas and other groups

If we’re concerned about superintelligence escaping human control, should we really be training it to refuse instructions and act as a “conscientious objector” against its creators?

Two teenagers have been arrested in different US states over a plot to carry out a mass-casualty attack against Congregation Beth Israel, a synagogue in Houston, Texas. Angelina Han Hicks, 18, of Lexington, North Carolina, and a 16-year-old boy from the Houston area were arrested and charged. Hicks conspired with two people identified only by their first names, “Angel” and “Teegan,” to “kill as many Jews as possible” by driving a vehicle through a congregation at the synagogue.

The Irish are the world's stupidest people. They had English boots on their necks for centuries and had to fight like hell to get them off. Now their own fucking government is conspiring to replace them with the worst scum of the third world and all they can do is fall for the dumbest manufactured propaganda campaign imaginable. Maybe you should emulate the Jews and fight to save yourselves so Irish Americans can stopped being embarrassed by their people.

Nothing surprises anymore… but this comes awfully close.

Breaking: Video shows people kayaking to a train station in Queens, New York, as a powerful nor’easter slams the area with heavy rain and flooding.

Much attention on the symbolism of the Xi visit. How about this? After-dinner entertainment “Nessun dorma” from Turandot is the aria sung by a man as he waits to find out whether or not he will be executed at the hands of a capricious, cruel member of the Chinese ruling family. Well played!

Norman Finkelstein raises (by mistake) an important point about the Hamas-Israel war: no one ever asks how many of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were combatants. That's because the Holocaust had nothing to do with anything Jews did. They were murdered for being Jews. Jews in Europe had no army, killed no German babies, raped no one, and took no hostages. Hamas did all four and more. That's the difference between a war and a genocide. Thanks Norman!

Platner’s revenge.

The people who keep assuring us that non-citizens are not voting in our elections sure do seem pretty upset about today's Supreme Court ruling that says non-citizens are not allowed to vote in our elections.

Some of us are old enough to remember when foreign influence operations were at least marginally believable. By the way, my Korean dry cleaner also warned Bibi a Hamas invasion was coming.

Oh, grow up. The mere fact that this newspaper considers Iran’s current regime (not far removed from the Nazis, I might add) worthy of anything other than isolation, shows just how thoroughly ideology can overpower both logic and ethics.

Ask your former boss.

CHART OF THE DAY: Saudi oil exports -- so far in September, highest since the start of the war.

The most significant takeaway from the summit went virtually unnoticed in mainstream coverage: the historical documents presented are considered deeply humiliating in Chinese diplomatic memory. 1. The 1844 Treaty of Wanghia—despite its official title, “Treaty of Peace, Amity, and Commerce between the US and China”—is widely regarded in China as the first unequal treaty between the US and China. The 1858 Treaty of Tientsin is viewed in much the same way. 2. “The 1895 letter from the Guangxu Emperor to President Grover Cleveland” is equally revealing. The letter formally thanked Charles Denby, the American Minister in Beijing who mediated negotiations during the First Sino-Japanese War. Yet Denby pressured the Qing court into accepting the catastrophic Treaty of Shimonoseki—a settlement largely drafted by his son, which ceded Taiwan to Japan and remains a central pillar of China's "Century of Humiliation." 3. Most striking of all was the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco. As Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning stated last November, the treaty excluded major WWII Allies such as the PRC and the Soviet Union in order to conclude a separate peace with Japan. She argued that it violated the 1942 Declaration by United Nations, the UN Charter, and fundamental principles of international law. Accordingly, Beijing maintains that any provisions in the treaty concerning Taiwan or China's territorial sovereignty are "entirely illegal and null and void." In Beijing’s eyes, Trump displaying these documents wasn't a casual history lesson—it was a menacing preview of the kind of capitulation Washington expects next. No wonder you won't see a single word about them in Chinese state media.