I poke my head into what remains of the American and German peace movements every once in a while, and it’s always disappointing. For years the heads at demonstrations have been a sea of balding pates, white and gray (not that there’s anything wrong with balding or white haired heads). It’s very literally a dying bunch. I exchanged texts with Nuke Resister.org at one point years ago, commenting that everyone in one of their demonstration photos seemed to be over 60, and my correspondent wryly replied that they did have one woman there who was 50.

Like the ritualistic demonstrations the writing shows this decrepitude – it’s tired, formulaic stuff, regurgitating language from literally half a century ago, largely for a readership of a similar age, debating tactics from an anti-Vietnam War struggle which relied on the written word, on leafletting, letters-to-the-editor, in a 2025 world of social media, where young people are watching TikTok and other media in which videos literally never stop. Here Ralph Nader continues to proposition writing one’s congressperson as a form of political activism.

But this very obvious geriatric condition cannot/must not be discussed. I’m guessing Kovic’s response to me is an attempt at ironic dismissal. It seems so lame, so impotent, but more importantly, so trite. In response to my criticism of his writing as boilerplate he offers „thank you for your kind and thoughtful comments regarding my piece. I found them to be very helpful. Again, thank you! Best always“? Is this thought to be witty? Self-deprecating irony? This is very much a weak self-own.

This is less than a minute of video. The man speaking is the President of the United States. It’s really beyond words. People use this phrase „beyond words“ rhetorically, but here, for me, I mean it quite literally. Now English is my mother tongue. My university education was in liberal arts and I continue to read a great deal in several languages. Over my academic life as a young person I consistently performed in the top couple percent on standardized tests, so in a box somewhere I possess official documents to back my claim that I know a fair number of words in English. But I just don’t have words for this.

Also very cool of course! 🙂“die Kufiya wohl unter dem Mufti von Jerusalem und SS-Mitglied Mohammed Amin al-Husseini zu einem politischen Symbol gegen Juden, Briten und den Westen.“ Equally weird. 🤔“Equally“? Is American society, or German society, weirder? Can weirdness be spoken about this way? Is weirdness a scalar or a vector value?

Looking at train tickets for different classes I came across this disclaimer and thought it was pretty funny.

I read this headline, and read it again. Man, I just couldn’t believe it! And indeed, when one reads the secondary headline and the photograph caption everything becomes clear: being discussed is Iran, not Gaza.

Wikipedia:

Iran Air Flight 655 was a scheduled passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai via Bandar Abbas, that was shot down on 3 July 1988 by an SM-2MR surface-to-air missile fired from USS Vincennes, a guided missile cruiser of the United States Navy. The aircraft, an Airbus A300, was destroyed and all 290 people on board, including 66 children, were killed.^[1]

Brian McDonald:

Russia’s relations with Western Europe now lie in rubble; ending over three decades of attempts to build “a common European home.” That leaves a proud, wounded power available at a discount, ripe for Chinese influence in ways the Kremlin itself once worked hard to avoid.

What Nechapurenko shows — with all the vivid detail of red lanterns, panda statues, and Mandarin catchphrases on Moscow’s metro — is the cultural dimension of that pivot. And culture matters. It is the deeper loom on which long alliances are woven. If young Russians grow up seeing China not as the Other, but as the partner, the model, even the friend, then the West may have lost them for generations, not merely for an election cycle.

There is a temptation in Washington and Brussels to treat this eastward drift as a temporary marriage of convenience, born of sanctions and Russian fear. But that underestimates how much a new generation can internalise, and how economic dependence soon bleeds into military partnership and eventually a kind of spiritual alignment.

And it would be a strategic blunder of historic scale for Western Europe, in particular, to sleep through that transformation. For centuries, the Kremlin was a rival, yes, but a European rival. It played by broadly European rules, traded in European markets, shared a Christian cultural memory however faint at times. That left at least a possibility of dialogue. A Russia steered by Beijing’s priorities, bolstered by Chinese industries and Chinese political concepts, will be a different beast altogether.

That beast, if allowed to grow, will assist Beijing’s goals, not Europe’s. And it will carry with it not just Russian oil and gas, but Russian missiles, Russian resentment, and Russian manpower. Imagine a Eurasian bloc coordinated in its opposition to Western interests, stretching from the Pacific to the Baltic, with China in command and Russia as its willing lieutenant. Like the traditional US-UK “special relationship” on steroids.

That is a nightmare scenario for the West that its current policy all but invites.

Juan Cole:

China is emerging as the world’s first electrostate, the advanced superpower of this century, which could well be the Chinese century. Trump’s doddering old tattered America, blighted with toxic fracking pools and oil spills, crowned with opulence for the carbon-farting millionaires in their gated communities and with penury for harried workers in the minimum-wage strip malls selling poisonous micro-plastics as their wares, is staggering into the new century on arthritic knees, packing useless high-tech side-arms for a contest it has already lost.