Ummagumma

[ Read Part One ] No leader in the world has accomplished more in the last few weeks than Benjamin Netanyahu. Two hundred Israeli fighter jets, some flying great distances, probably over airspace belonging to countries that officially forbid it. The largest air strike operation in Israeli military history. Ali Khamenei dead along with much of his regime. Decapitated. Netanyahu managed to marshal, through Trump whom he totally played, full U.S. intelligence support, two carrier groups, massive American air power, Trump publicly owning the whole thing. Trump made it about himself. Predictable. And Netanyahu knew this was the best way for him to get it done. Praise Trump and let him fire some rockets at live targets protecting the Israeli air force. Israel ran this operation. Netanyahu built toward this moment for decades — maneuvering, pressuring, waiting, leveraging every U.S. administration that came through, and finally finding one so supportive of Israeli strategic preferences tha...

Every week there's another headline about AI detection. Universities buying software. Publishers running probability scores. Startups promising to tell you whether something was written by a human or a machine. Ninety-two percent likely AI. Flagged for review. Is this the right response to what's happening? Detection treats writing like contraband. It assumes there's a pure human product out there that needs protecting from algorithmic contamination. The detector becomes a customs agent inspecting sentences for statistical residue. It's already losing. Generators improve. Detectors update. Generators improve again. The surface patterns that once betrayed AI output are disappearing. Even when detection works, it doesn't work for long. And even when it catches something — what exactly has it caught? If I draft a paragraph, run it through a model for tightening, then reshape it in my own voice, what is the detector actually measuring? If a historian dictates notes in...

I was watching George Will a couple of weeks ago. Or I thought I was. The tone was grave. Measured. That particular establishment conservatism that sounds like it was written with a fountain pen. He was delivering a sweeping indictment of Trump --- the cognitive decline, the monument obsession, the shadow handlers. Operatic. Certain. The old guard, finally snapping. But something was off. George was landing too many direct hits too rapidly. At first I thought he was fired up in a way I'd never seen him before. Then realized that's exactly what it was. This was from something called The George Channel. So I went there and found a couple of dozen similar videos all by George Will. Except it wasn't. Plain as day in the channel description I found the necessary orientation. Fan-created channel. Not affiliated with George Will. Synthesized voice. I actually laughed out loud. George Will has become a matter of replication. Not counterfeit, exactly. Modular. His cadence, his...

I sat down yesterday afternoon just to quickly check the news and see if anything major was happening. I was shocked by the reports I was reading. We seem to be witnessing something that has not happened in modern Western history since 1986: an overt attempt by the United States, alongside Israel, to kill the sitting head of a sovereign state. Not a militia commander. Not a transnational jihadist. Not a general operating in the gray zone between war and proxy conflict. A head of state embedded in the constitutional and theological architecture of a recognized country. The last comparable moment was 1986, when the United States struck Libya and targeted Muammar Gaddafi. He survived. Since then, Western powers have toppled regimes through invasion and attrition, but they have not openly executed a decapitation strike against a sovereign leader. Saddam Hussein fell after a ground invasion and regime collapse. Gaddafi died in the chaos of civil war. Osama bin Laden was not a head of sta...

The film opens quest-like with a vast landscape.  A man in a red cap alone in the desert. One of many marvelous shots to come, it is a visual feast. Avery and Carter were visiting us in mid-December. As usual, Carter and I spoke of films for a moment. I mentioned to him that I had recently watched a YouTube video by this guy featuring “ the 100 best shots of all time. ” I can think of several iconic shots from older films like Dr. Strangelove, Casablanca and Citizen Kane that do not appear. The 10-minute video is still worth watching. I recognized maybe 80 out of the 100 shots shown. Of note, the video wins points in my book for beginning and ending with a shot from Barry Lyndon.  D eservedly so, it is the most beautiful movie ever shot . He even chooses the Barry Lyndon soundtrack for the introduction. There is plenty of Kubrick, Malick, Tarkovsky, and lots of shots from this film I had no idea about.  The musical choices are wonderful for this presentation,...