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Iran is on fire — literally, again — and nobody knows why. A massive power plant and a "cardboard factory" caught fire bigly in Iran over the weekend. But there is impressive new video of Iran's port explosion from last week. Iran International reported that a "series of incidents unfolded in Alborz Province, west of Tehran, on Saturday evening, including two fires, reports of an explosion, and a magnitude 4.0 earthquake, according to official statements and eyewitness accounts." Israeli action? Typical authoritarian regime attention to maintenance issues? God just doesn't like the mullahs' regime? Who knows. For reasons yet unknown,...

LINK: Bill Whittle: Five Hole DiplomacyThis is a 15 min video (The Right Angle Series) on Bill Whittle's website where each episode (up to two or three a week if things allow) involves each participant (Bill Whittle, Scott Ott, and Stephen Green) the opportunity to choose the subject of discussion, and it is a free-flowing discussion of the issue that I have found both highly entertaining and informative.In this episode, they discuss Colombia's refusal to accept flights of illegal immigrants, and Trump's unique style of "diplomacy" which Bill Whittle has deliciously coined as "Five Hole Diplomacy".

Israel's Oct. 26 retaliatory strike on Iran "destroyed an active top secret nuclear weapons research facility," according to an Axios report. The news outlet spoke to various U.S. and Israeli officials about the strikes, including one on Iran's Parchin Military Complex, a nuclear research facility that was "previously reported to be inactive." "One former Israeli official briefed on the strike said it destroyed sophisticated equipment used to design the plastic explosives that surround uranium in a nuclear device and are needed to detonate it." Iran claims to have brought its military nuclear program to a halt in 2003, and yet...

"This entire administration is naifs, weaklings, idiots, and Marxists," I posted at Instapundit earlier this week about a different Middle East report, but today's news proves that my estimation was entirely too optimistic. In an Atlantic piece headlined "The War That Would Not End," Franklin Foer takes readers on a deep dive "inside the year-long American effort to release the hostages, end the fighting in Gaza, and bring peace to the Middle East." It isn't that Foer's peace isn't well-sourced or lacking details — it's that he needed to go back much further than one year to tell the story....The...

The good news is that Boeing was able to update the automated flight software on its troubled Starliner space capsule, allowing NASA to return it unmanned to Earth no sooner than Friday. The bad news — or at least the serious question — is whether Starliner will ever fly again. NASA decided last week not to fly astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams home on board the same ship they flew to ISS on due to safety concerns about the service module's malfunctioning thrusters. While an astronaut is sometimes scheduled in advance to return to Earth on board a different...

I used to enjoy the occasional Tucker Carlson monologue on Fox News. His content was usually pointed and amusing and delivered with a breezy charm. But I rarely bothered with a Tucker Carlson interview. As an interviewer, too often, I found him strangely incurious and glib instead of breezy. But his interview on Tuesday with Reverend Munther Isaac was so much worse than merely glib or incurious. Carlson chose to interview Isaac to find out how the Jewish State of Israel treats Christians. Isaac is a priest who neither lives nor works in Israel and who uses the loaded phrase...

The depopulation bomb imploding in China is more powerful than ever according to shocking new figures just published by Australia's Victoria University in Melbourne. It just seems like last month [It was just last month, Steve — editor] that I reported for you that Chinese women seemed to be voting against strongman Xi Jinping's return to True Communism™ with the only means available to them — their uteri. Live births were down in 2023 by another 500,000 under 2022's dismal figure. That puts the People's Republic fertility rate nearly at 1.0, or about half of the 2.1 required just to...

I somehow sleep through the midnight knock at the door and even the barking dogs barely get my attention — we get a lot of deer here on Monument Hill and the barking that accompanies their every visit to our yard. The strange man's voice in the foyer got me up and moving in an instant. The tone of the voice said "Cop." My brain immediately flashes to my niece, Naomi. Aged 19 and certainly partying on New Year's, I picture a car wreck before I even quite know what I was thinking. As I'm pulling on my robe, Melissa...

Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake now has a criminal referral against her for tweeting photos of actual voter signatures.Secretary of State Adrian Fontes — a Democrat — wrote in his referral, “The protections afforded by this subsection prohibit posting any information derived from voter registration forms or precinct registers to the internet, and under no circumstance may a person other than the voter or [a] statutorily authorized person reproduce a voter’s signature.”Fontes referred Lake for the class 6 felony — the least severe category, typically with sentences between four months and two years if found guilty — for this...

Young voters who are “critical to Democratic successes” are showing less enthusiasm for the party, according to a breathless Associated Press report. Well, so? I’m not discounting the power of young voters. Whatever their enthusiasm problem might or might not be, they showed up for the midterms in unexpectedly strong numbers. And as the AP story notes, “voters under 30 went 53% for Democratic House candidates compared with only 41% for Republican candidates nationwide.” Nevertheless, those young voters’ numbers are down significantly from the two previous elections: But that level of support for Democrats was down compared with 2020, when...

The Swiss government announced its plan to deal with expected energy shortfalls this winter, and it sounds like a lot of fun — provided you’re a shut-in who likes reading by candlelight under multiple blankets. The alpine country — one of the wealthiest in the world — will severely restrict electric vehicles from its roads, according to a Daily Mail report. If the country runs out of power, EVs won’t be allowed out for anything but “essential” travel. But the restrictions don’t end there. The contingency plan calls for three levels of energy rationing. Under the least extreme, most buildings...

Russian losses in the eight-month-old Ukraine War could be wildly higher than anything Moscow will admit to — or anything I dared report might be possible. “Irrevocable losses,” Russian-language news site iStories claims, “may amount to more than 90 thousand people.” That’s according to iStories’ inside sources, reportedly “a former officer of the Russian special services, the second is an active FSB officer.” iStories was founded in neighboring Latvia two years ago by Russian journalists in response to the Kremlin’s growing crackdown on independent news. An irrecoverable loss, as detailed by the report, is a soldier “who died, went missing,...

Antonovsky Bridge, one of the Russian Army’s lifelines into occupied Kherson, was effectively knocked out of action in a perfectly timed missile strike — just one of many developments on an explosive day in the Ukraine War. What made the strike so timely was the presence of multiple Russian ammo trucks, headed north with supplies for troops in the Kherson region that Kyiv has vowed to take back. The exploding ammo only added to the destruction. https://mobile.twitter.com/lilygrutcher/status/1561720969630289925 https://mobile.twitter.com/PaulJawin/status/1561679383034830849? About 10 trucks loaded with ammunition were driving across the bridge. It's probably the detonation of one of them. Whether that was...

Dr. Mehmet Oz, who earned former President Donald Trump’s primary-race endorsement in April, is going down in flames according to a new GOP poll. Republican-affiliated Public Opinion Strategies reports that surgeon-turned-TV-host Dr. Oz trails Democrat John Fetterman by nearly 20 points!Trump gave Oz his “complete and total endorsement” before the wide-open GOP primary of six candidates, a move that probably sealed the deal with Pennsylvania Republicans. The doc won in a squeaker, barely beating out second-place finisher David McCormick, 31.2% to 31.1%. The former president praised Oz’s positions on abortion, crime, the Second Amendment, border security, the military, education, energy...

There is a lot of speculation about the Republican party’s chances of taking the momentum they have going into November and doing what was once thought unthinkable for this election cycle: flipping the Senate to red. The analyses I read — and I do read a lot of them — that break down how that just might happen all count Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) among the most vulnerable. My view from here in my native Arizona is that Kelly probably isn’t sweating too much. Last month, my friend and colleague Stephen Green gave his breakdown regarding the GOP’s Senate takeover...

America, in these halcyon days of Old Joe Biden’s foundering regime, is in free fall, and the whole world knows it. As PJM’s inimitable Stephen Green put it recently, “The alleged American president’s response to the Ukraine War has been so detrimental to America’s own interests that everyone sees him as weak. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that two of the Middle East’s richest petrostates wouldn’t even take Biden’s call,” that is, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The reasons for the unprecedented snub are clear: the Saudis and the UAE know that Biden is not a...

The last time anyone outside of Washington noticed alleged Vice President Kamala Harris it was probably on the side of a milk carton. I exaggerate, but not by much. On the rare occasions that Harris does make the news, it’s for all the wrong reasons, like when she unleashes her Kraken cackle when asked even mildly challenging questions. The rest of the time the bootlicking media is happy to keep Vice President AWOL under wraps because what else are they going to do? It’s been a long way down for the woman once touted by her own boss as one-half...

In an indication of their growing estrangement with the Bush administration, neoconservatives are slamming the White House for failing to stop what they describe as an antisemitic campaign to marginalize them being conducted by the CIA and the State Department. This view was outlined in a memo circulating among neoconservative foreign policy analysts in Washington. Obtained by the Forward, the memo criticizes the White House for not refuting press reports on the FBI's investigation of Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin that suggest wrongdoing on the part of Jewish officials at the Defense Department. "If there is any truth to any of...

Saudi Arabia might just bust OPEC by keeping its taps open, but right now the Kingdom's main concern is strangling American shale production. Read: Markets had been expecting Opec to announce a new ceiling on production after last Friday's meeting, but analysts at Barclays said the lack of any curbs in its announcement was a sign of discord. "Past communiques have at least included statements to adhere, strictly adhere, or maintain output in line with the production target. This one glaringly did not. " they said. Saudi Arabia needs oil prices of $100 a barrel to balance its budget, but...

The debate was everything we expected — and less. Nobody was willing to take on Clinton’s biggest weaknesses, and so Hillary didn’t have to get down in the dirt with the plebes — where she would have lost. Anderson Cooper had his thumb on the scale for Clinton like Candy Crowley with her entire self on the scale for Obama in 2012. The pundits can claim “X had a good night because of Y,” but none of that matters because nobody drew blood on Clinton. She’ll take a hit in Iowa, get creamed in New Hampshire — then come back...