Rabbi Wolicki Looks At Traddy Catholics -- II

I'm continuing to discuss Rabbi Wolicki's arguments against the traddy (mostly) Catholic anti-Zionists, which I started yesterday. I've embedded the same video above, but I'll be talking about the second half of it, which begins at 6:51. I used to teach rhetoric over 50 years ago, and his argument here is one of the best pieces I've ever seen. I admire it simply as an astonishingly good argument, separate from its subject matter, which I also find compelling. It's reminiscent of Aquinas, in that it spends a great deal of time considering opposing arguments, but it doesn't follow Aquinas's formal stucture.

Beginning at 6:51, he summarizes the position he's taken in the first half of his argument, in which he agrees with the contemporary position of the Catholic Church, "that the Jews are participants in God's salvation is theologically unquestionable. How can that be possible? . . . How that can be possible remains an unfathomable divine mystery."

The official position of the Catholic Church is that the Abrahamic Covenant was never revoked. He goes on to quote Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI supportng this position. But then he moves to the objections from the Catholic anti-Zionists, especially their assertion that the Jews in Israel today aren't the Jews of the Old Testament. At 10:25:

So, let me sum this up. You have a new theological reality. OK, the Jews are no longer just witnesses in exile, because that just doesn't hold water any more. The Jews are now acknowledged by Pope John Paul II, by Pope Benedict, by the Vatican itself in official documents, as a living people who still have a covenant. OK, and here's the key point. Once you accept that the Jewish people of today are the same Jewish people and still have a covenant with God, you can't just ignore what has happened in the history of the 20th century.

You can't ignore the survival of the Jewish people in exile. You can't ignore the return, and the ingathering, and the sovereignty in the land of Israel. . . . You don't have to jump all the way to full theological endorsement of Christian Zionism in the modern state of Israel, and the Vatican itself has not done that. The Vatican says it's still a mystery to be worked out. But you also can't go back to Augustine as if nothing has changed.

Let me say this a slightly different way. If Augustine was alive today, with a state of Israel, with millions of Jews ingathered from the four corners of the Earth, living in a prosperous, independent state in the land of Israel, he never would have said what he said, it woulld have been incoherent, it would have made no sense. But that's what some of these traditional Catholic voices are trying to do. They're trying to say that Augustine is still true, that the doctrines they've inherited for centuries are still true.

But they have a problem. What do they do? The Jewish people are back in the land of Israel. Reality contradicts that theological position. If they accept that the Jews are still the Jews, if they accept that the covenant is still in force, then Augustine's entire framework starts to fall apart, in light of current events. So what's the work around? The work around is to say that the Jews of today aren't the real Jews. Now, you notice from what John Paul II said, and what Benedict said, obviously that's not the opinion of Catholic leadership.

But these podcasters and public noisemakers who are saying that the Jews of today aren't the real Jews. . . . the reason they're doing it is that if they accept that the Jews are the Jews, then they have to face the fact that. . . the actual Jewish people from the Bible have returned to their land in mass numbers, ingathered as the Bible predicts [e g Isaiah 11:11-12]. They have to deal with that. They don't want to deal with that. So, rather than adjust their theology, as the Vatican is trying to do, and as, frankly, Christian Zionists have also done, they also would inherit this theology from Augustine.

It took different forms. It's also known as replacement theology or supersessionism, that the church has replaced Israel, the Jews don't have a covenant any more, Protestants believed that, too. Luther believed that, too. But what Christian Zionists have done is they've adjusted their theology to the reality. They said, "Hey, wait a second. It looks like the Jews actually still do have a covenant." OK, so you don't have to go all the way to where they are, but this denial of Jewish identity, understand where it's coming from. It's not just crass anti-Semitism.

It's coming from a place of trying to hold onto their theology in the face of a reality that denies it. So they claim that today's Jews aren't really Israel, and therefore the modern state of Israel is completely meaningless. In other words, they're protecting their theology by rejecting reality, even though the Catholic Church itself, its leadership going back decades, as I've just shown you, is moving in the opposite direction. Now, it hasn't fully worked out all the implications yet, but it has already taken the most important step. It has afirmed, as you saw from those quotes, that the Jewish people are still in covenant with God.

And once you say that, you've opened the door to a question that can't be avoided forever, which is, "What does it mean?" If the covenental people of God are back in their land and no longer scattered among the nations, what does it mean? That's the question. And that's the tension you're seeing play out right now. That's why they're throwing this temper tantrum and screaming at Christian Zionists that they're heretics. I kind of feel for these Catholics, because they have a theological construct, and it's crumbling.

At the beginning of this video, I said this has to do with theology versus eschatology. Let me explain what I mean. Theology is trying to understand God. OK? So we could have a different theology and coexist with each other forever. So, for example, I as a Jew don't believe in the Trinity. A Christian who believes in the Trinity has a different concept of the Godhead than I do, and we don't need to sort out that difference. You believe what you believe, I believe what I believe, and we can coexist. It doesn't have to come to a head at any point.

But eschatology is different. Eschatology is what we believe religiously, or in terms of our faith, about how the end is going to play out. Right? How is history going to play out. When you make an eschaological assertion that contradicts my eschatological assertion, . . . someone's gonna be right, and someone's gonna be wrong. So if your eschatological assertion is that the Jewish people have lost their covenant, and instead are going to remain in exile in perpetuity, . . . and at the same time, I as a Jew would be saying, for all those 2,000 years, "Nope, we are going to return one day. . ."

So, picture it's . . . 500 years ago, and there's a Christian saying, "You've been in exile for 1500 years, and you're going to remain in exile forever, that's my tradition, that's what I believe." And a Jew says, "No, I believe that no matter how long we've been in exile, we are going to go back." So at the time, they have a dispute that doesn't come to a head. But what happens when history plays out, and it does come to a head, and one belief about the future, that the Jewish people will come out of exile back to their land, suddenly is true?

When you make an eschatological assertion, you have to be ready for the possibility that history might move in a different direction. And then, what do you do about it? . . . That's what this whole thing is about. That's why these traditional Catholics are lashing out. . . . They want, out of a sense of piety, somewhat, they're looking at their traditions and saying, "Listen, these are our great theologians, this is the faith tradition that we've inherited. . ." But unfortunately, that includes this eschatological assertion by Augustine that has turned out to be refuted by the facts on the ground.

So when the Vatican is grappling with that and adjusting their theology, they're actually being humble. They're looking at what God has done in the world and saying, "OK, we need to reassess this." But it's these traditional Catholic podcasters and loudmouths that we're seeing on line . . . rather than adjust their theology to the new reality, they're denying the reality on the ground, they're denying that the Jews are the Jews. I hope this made sense.

Again, he's focusing on people like Candace Owens, who, as I'm gradually learning, seems to think Rabbi Lowicki was a key member of the Jewish conspiracy to assassinate Charlie Kirk, nor Megyn Kelly. But neither Candace Owens, who married her husband after a week's courtship and seems to have "converted" with him to Catholicism soon after, apparently without going through RCIA/OCIA, or Megyn Kelly, a cradle Catholic who nevertheless only decided to become observant enough in her mid-50s just to start to secure a decree of nullity for her first marriage, is an especially good Catholic.

And Tucker Carlson isn't Catholic at all, though he seems to be the sort of Episcopalian who thinks he sorta-kinda is. If these are the only people Wolicki is singling out, this might almost be a straw man argument. But what of more serious-seeming Catholics who claim to be traditionalist, like, say, Edward Feser and his circle? Holding Wolicki's perspective up to them might be closer to a steel man argument. I want to look at Feser and some of his arguments against Israel tomorrow in the context Rabbi Wolicki has given us.

Rabbi Wolicki Looks At Traddy Catholics

Lately I've been following US-born Israeli Orthodox Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, because he puts me onto new trains of thought that take off from issues that have been sitting at the back of my head for a while. In the video embedded above, he offers some insights into traddy Catholics that I'd been wondering about myself -- now, he has no opinion on the Latin mass; he's into Hebrew. He doesn't care if you receive the sacrament kneeling or standing, in the hand or on the tongue; the sacraments aren't his thing.

But he brings up a strain of opinion that he attributes not to Catholic leadership, but more exclusively to traditionalist Catholics:

What you're hearing more and more are claims that the Jews of today aren't really the Jews, that the state of Israel has no significance, and of course, from those same circles and in the same conversations, attacks on Christian Zionism and calling it a kind of heresy. And this is a very serious issue, and it points to something very deep going on here, because it's not really about politics. There was something about Christian theology that is being argued about, debated about, that's what this is really about, and I'm gonna unpack that here.

I'm an outsider, I'm a Jew, I'm a rabbi, but I have spent many years involved in Jewish-Christian relations, and I would like to share with you my take on what's going on with Christian theology, specifically Catholic theology today, about the Jews, cuz it explains a lot of what is going on. You see, for most of Chnristian history, going back to Augustine of Hippo, this is over 1500 years ago, there was a very specific way of understanding the Jewish people, which became the mainstream accepted doctrine of the church.

Augustine famously taught that the Jews were meant to survive, but in a very particular condition. In his magnum opus City of God, he writes that the Jews, like Cain, were marked. He writes this in Book 15, Chapter Seven. OK? What he basically says there, I'm not gonna read you the whole passage, he says, quote, Cain was marked, so that no one should kill him, and thus, that people, meaning the Jews, had been marked, not slain, but dispersed.

. . . So Augustine explains that the Jews are dispersed through the lands, and thus by their own scriptures are a testimony to us. In other words, the Jews were to exist, but scattered, powerless, and serving as witnesses to Christian truth. And elsewhere in City of God, Book 18, Chapter 46, he comes back to this topic, and there he frames it around a verse in Psalms, and here's what he writes there: "A prophecy about this thibng was sent before in the Psalms, which they also read. And he quotes a verse, this is Psalm 59, verse 11 or 12, depending on if you're going with a Jewish or Christian translation,

My God, His mercy shall prevent me.
My God has shown me concerning mine enemies,
That You shall not slay them, lest they should at last forget Your law:
Disperse them in Your might.

. . . What Augustine posited was that the Jewish people are to exist perpetually in exile, scattered and powerless wherever Christians are, so that they could serve as a testimony to the punishment that comes upon a people for rejecting Jesus. . . . This framework held for well over a thousand years. It explains a world in which the Jews are in exile, the Jews have no sovereignty, and they're scattered everywhere, dependent on everyone else. That's Augustine's model, and it is called "witness theology".

But here's the problem. That model only works if the Jews are scattered and powerless. And today, they're not. Today, the Jewish people are back in our land, we've been ingathered from the four corners of the Earth, we are sovereign, and we have power. So in other words, the reality on the ground no longer fits Augustine's theology, and this creates a problem for traditionalist Catholics who look at Augustine's theology as the axiomatic, unassailable truth.

Here I think Rabbi Wolicki is probably giving traddies a little too much credit: I simply can't imagine that Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, or their fellow-traveling Episcopalian Tucker Carlson knows that Augustine even wrote City of God, much less ever read a word of it. Still, for those more familiar with Augustine, this is a telling point. But the rabbi goes on,

Now, the official Catholic Church, its actual leadership, has been grappling with this question for decades. And that's what's led to numerous pronouncements, starting with the Second Vatican Council in 1965, but it has accelerated in recent years, they're dealing with this problem. Let me take a step back and explain the problem very simply again. In the work of theology, we're trying to understand God. Augustine himself referred to theology as faith seeking understanding, not achieving understanding, but seeking it.

And what a theologian does is they look at the word of God, they look at everything God said in scripture, and they then look at the world and try to make sense of it and explain God. And Augustine looked at a world where the Jews were powerless and weak and scattered in exile, for centuries already, and they were going to remain that way for centuries after him, and he was grappling with the question, what to do with the Jews. So he posited that the Jews had lost their covenant of ever returning to their land. . .

Now, the Vatican has been adjusting their theology to the new reality. You see this very clearly in the Vatican's 2015 document, which was issued on the 50th anniversary of Vatican II. . . . This is a quote from that document, from 2015:

"From the Christian confession that there can be only one path to salvation, it does not in any way follow that the Jews are excluded from God's salvation. God has never revoked his convenant, "for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable. (Romans 11:29)"

In this post last month, I traced this view to Lumen Gentium, "which taught that the Jewish people 'remain most dear to God, for God does not repent of the gifts he makes nor of the calls he issues.'" I should reiterate that I have little choice but to be a Vatican II Catholic. I was converted to the post-Vatican II Church after 30 years as an Episcopalian, whose 1979 Book of Common Prayer was itself heavily influenced by the Vatican II mass, with its three-year lectionary and alternate forms of worship.

But what I've transcibed here isn't quite half of Rabbi Wolicki's argument, which goes on to insist that the reeestablishment of Israel is an eschatological question. If nothing intervenes, I'll talk more about this tomorrow.

This Is Actually Starting To Look Like A Governing Paradigm

I've been saying for the past few days that the US-born Israeli Orthodox rabbi Pesach Wolicki has some of the best insights into the issues surrounding the Iran war. Here's what he had to say yesterday about the off-again on-again negotiations in Pakistan: At 19:50:

They're trying to create uncertainty, to slow down the US decisionmaking. . . . Donald Trump is driving them nuts because of how fast he moves. He gives an ultimatum, and it's just like 48 hours or a couple days, or, you know, a short ceasefire, two weeks, negotiate, come to the table, you don't come to the table, boom. Open the Straits of hormuz. Oh, you didn't open them? Boom, blockade. . . . It completely counteracts their usual strategy, Westerners are usually so easy for them to deal with.

They just drag things out, and they have another summit meeting and another negotiation in a different European city, and the American diplomats love that, getting on planes and being negotiators. And that's what we've always seen in previous administrations. And the speed at which they're doing things is not to their liking. So they're trying to slow down US decisionmaking by creating uncertainty under which they'll negotiate in the hopes that the Americans might say, "Well, OK, you know, we do want a deal, and we can get them to the table if we do X, Y, and Z."

That's what they're hoping for. . . . And it all comes back to what I was saying from the beginning of the war, from before the war. . . . The regime's number one fear . . . what they're ultimately concerned with, is will they be in power when Trump is finished with whatever he's doing. Cuz even if they're badly battered, even if the people and the infrastructrure is destroyed, they know that the Chinese money will be there, . . . even if it takes a decade, or two decades, they will rebuild, they will suppress their people, and they will remain in power. They want to survive.

. . . The number one threat to the regime is not American and Israeli military action. The number one threat to the regime is the Iranian people. . . . We also have to remember we're talking about Twelver Shiite Muslims who believe that the adversity they undergo and the defeats that they undergo are, you know, obstacles that are put in their way, and they need to persevere. This all goes back to the origin story of Shiite Islam, so they're not deterred by all of the destruction. . . . Trump keeps waiting for them to cry uncle. Because, come on, how much damage can you handle? The answer is a lot.

. . . They're still at the point where they believe that giving in to American demands and projecting weakness and submission to American demands, if they project that to their people, that's a greater threat to the regime . . . than the American attacks themselves. And therefore, I don't believe that they are going to come to the negotiating table.

This analysis, especially the part about the Muslim strategy of rope-a-doping negotiations, matches what's been at the back of my head for some time. But Rabbi Wolicki is tying it to the basic need of the Islamist regime to control its people. Then it dawned on me that the Western Left is actually finding this appealing. They're starting openly to root for Iran:

Year of our Lord 2026: Democrat US Senator openly rooting for Iran to defeat the US in battle. Every Dem on the Hill ought to be hounded today by every reporter to answer for this lunatic. pic.twitter.com/8ixSVsGFRo

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) April 21, 2026

Put this in the context of Barack Obama warming up to Zohran Mamdani, who seems to be at minimum a closet Islamist, not just a socialist:

Barack Obama met with Zohran Mamdani for the first time on Saturday at a childcare center where the former Democratic US president and mayor of New York City read to preschoolers and led a sing-along.

. . . Obama and Mamdani did not take questions after reading the book Alone and Together to the children – and leading a sing-along of The Wheels on the Bus.

Obama, a standard-bearer for the Democratic party, has offered to be a sounding board for Mamdani, 34. Mamdani’s star power, youth and progressive agenda has made him stand out in Democratic politics.

In fact, "right-thinking people" appear to be moving in this overall direction. Alan Dershowitz notes this morning:

The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times editorial writer, Tom Friedman, says he is “torn” between his wish to have Iran defeated and his unwillingness to see Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump, who he regards as “awful human beings,” “strengthened.” He worries that a victory over the nation he correctly describes as being “a terrible regime” would benefit the leaders of the two democracies that the mullahs regard as “Satans”.

. . . All criticism of countries should be comparative in our imperfect world, and a single standard is essential to all moral and legal judgments. Being torn between the victory or defeat of wildly non-comparable countries and their leaders is dangerous and wrong. Comparing Israel and the U.S., on the one hand, with Iran, on the other and being “torn” about who should win is like comparing Churchill to Hitler and being torn about who should have won World War II. Churchill was a deeply flawed colonialist, but Hitler was the worst butcher in history. Even if Netanyahu and Trump were both “engaged in anti-Democratic projects” (as Churchill had been) that would not justify being torn about defeating the most dangerous, anti-Democratic and anti-semitic tyranny since Nazi Germany.

By putting them in the same category and being “torn” over who should prevail, Friedman makes Iran seem like just another imperfect nation whose victory – which would entail its acquisition of a nuclear arsenal – would not pose an existential threat to Israel and a growing danger to the United States and its other allies.

The reason Friedman and those who think like him are "torn" is that they're looking at Iran and actually starting to like what they see. I'm not sure if Dershowitz, or even Wolicki. quite recognizes this. The cause is that the Marxist-Leninist model, based on the idea of a proletarian world revolution, was never workable and demonstrably failed, especially as a means of state control. The main intellectual counterstrategy, as I've been noting here, was Fabian socialism, but with the failure of the proletarian revolution model, Fabian socialism became a solution without a problem.

So the intellectual left has been casting about for a new governing paradigm, one that will succeed in keeping the working and lower middle classes under control, when Fabian socialism failed to do this. It's looking at the mullahs, who, love 'em or hate 'em, so far seem to be effectively controlling their people in the face of overwhelming American and Israeli force. They're starting to like what they see.

In My Lifetime, Avant-Garde Jews Have Done A 180

From Alan Dershowitz in yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

I am a lifelong Democrat. I started campaigning for the party’s local candidates as a teenager in Brooklyn, N.Y., have been a registered Democrat for 67 years, made speeches for John F. Kennedy as a college student, and can count on one hand the number of Republicans I’ve ever supported for any office.

I still disagree strongly with the GOP on abortion, the separation of church and state, immigration, healthcare and taxes, among other things. Yet I’ve decided to bite the bullet and register as a Republican.

. . . I intend to work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate, and I urge those who share my concerns about the increasing influence of radicalism in the Democratic Party to vote, campaign and contribute for continued Republican control of Congress. I will contribute money to Republican candidates, campaign for them, make speeches at Republican events, and urge pro-Israel Americans to change party affiliation or at least vote against Democrats. Until something changes, I will vote Republican for representative, senator and president.

I wish I could designate myself as a “foreign-policy Republican,” but there’s no such option, so I have to go whole hog. By registering as a Republican rather than an independent, maybe I can have some influence on moving some Republican policies toward the center. I have given up on trying to change the Democratic Party. My main goal is to send a message that many traditional Democratic voters can’t accept what it is becoming—a replica of left-wing European parties that are hurting their countries.

This is the Alan Dershowitz who served as an appellate advisor in the 1969-70 Chicago Seven trial and helped the defendants develop a legal strategy of "political theater", disrupting the courtroom to turn the trial into a condemnation of the Vietnam War and the US government. This is the Alan Dershowitz who secured a 1976 reversal of adult film star Harry Reems's obscenity conviction.

Between my sophomore and junior years in high school, my family moved from a white-bread Republican New Jersey suburb to Bethesda, which in contrast was very, very upscale Jewish. My first day in the new high school, two young Jewish ladies took me under their wing as a sort of project, insisting I was a "monolith" and needed a thorough re-education.

They introduced me to subjects like Bob Dylan, Paul Krassner, and Jules Feiffer, and things went on from there. It continued in college, an Ivy, where there were far more Jewish students than there are now. I'd studied German, and I got pretty good at Yiddish.

In other words, I got to know avant-garde Jewish culture of the 1960s pretty well. I lost touch with my high school mentors long ago, but thinking of them now, I wonder what they would say about what the Jewish avant-garde seems to be in the process of becoming.

Let's take another contrast, between the avant-garde Jewish comic Lenny Bruce (no relation) and the current comic Ben Bankas, who makes it plain that he's half-Jewish on his father's side but frequently identifies as Jewish in his monologues. The avant-garde Lenny Bruce of the 1950s and 1960s

eventually appeared on television on the Steve Allen Show and other programs. Yet as his fame grew, so did the edge to his comedy and social commentary, which led to his legal troubles.

Bruce was arrested at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco in 1961 for using sexually explicit language. Although he was acquitted, law enforcement agencies put him under greater scrutiny, resulting in drug arrests in Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

In a December 4, 1962, performance at the Gates of Horn club in Chicago, Bruce was arrested for and eventually convicted of violating a state obscenity statute. On appeal, he was defended by distinguished First Amendment scholar and law professor Harry Kalven Jr.

. . . Undercover police detectives attended his two 1964 appearances at Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, and they arrested him on obscenity charges after each show. His trial attracted media attention, and artists including Woody Allen and Norman Mailer testified on his behalf. A three-judge panel convicted him of obscenity and sentenced him to serve four months.

After Bruce’s conviction, nightclubs across the country blacklisted him for fear they would face obscenity charges.

It's worth pointing out that at the time, Bruce was defended for in effect being "art", as opposed to his characterization by police as essentially a pornographer. In other words, Bruce wasn't a low class smut merchant, he was a bourgeois artist whose work was intended to appeal, and did appeal, to the bourgeoisie -- nothing low-class about him. Following his death of a drug overdose in 1966, he's nevertheless been celebrated as a martyr for all the right bourgeois reasons, freedom of expression, freedom from religion, civil rights, blah blah blah:

What is certain is that no comedian has proved more culturally significant without moving into TV and films - the means by which the likes of Woody Allen and Adam Sandler achieved wider fame.

The 1974 biopic Lenny, in which Bruce was portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, was nominated for six Academy Awards.

There was a further Oscar nomination for the 1998 documentary Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth, narrated by Robert De Niro.

Bruce has inspired or been name-checked in songs by numerous artists including Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Nico, REM, Steve Earle, Simon and Garfunkel and Genesis.

He is also one of the celebrities immortalised on the cover of the Beatles's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, in the distinguished company of Marilyn Monroe, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Albert Einstein and Gandhi.

But let's turn to a similar avant-garde comic of our time, Ben Bankas, one of whose routines is embedded above (language warning). A native of Canada, not long ago, he moved to Austin, TX, but especially when he returns to Canada, great efforts are made to have his venues cancel the engagements. (Of one such organizer, he quipped, "He got my show canceled. I guess he's finished his bucket list. Now he can apply for MAID.")

Bruce's supporters in particular argued that his shows effectively represented bourgeois liberal values; Bruce himself doesn't appear to have represented any particular class identity in his on-stage persona, other than perhaps a timeless gadfly.

Ben Bankas is a very different matter: he represents himself as working class: he wears jeans, with a wrinkled shirt over a prominent belly and a scruffy beard. In his routines, he often holds and sips from a beer can. In effect, he's the non-collegiate worker championed by Mike Rowe, blurting out uncomfortable truths not too different from Lenny Bruce's, but in effect saying Bruce's bourgeois supporters are themselves as hyopcritical as they were in Bruce's time.

But of course, Ben Bankas's audiences are bourgeois themselves. I asked Chrome AI mode, "How much do Ben Bankas tickets cost?" It replied,

Ben Bankas tickets typically start as low as $24.00, with an average price of around $44.29. However, prices vary significantly depending on the city, venue, and seat location. For example, some shows in major markets like New York City can start much higher, between $116 and $169.

That leaves aside parking and drinks at the clubs, not a cheap date by any means. Now that I think of it, I wonder what my avant-garde Jewish-girl mentors would say now about Ben Bankas.

I actually think I'd have a pretty hard time convincing them he's in the same league as Bob Dylan, Paul Krassner, and Jules Feiffer, but I think the case can be made.

The Missing "Scientists"

Via the New York Post (which also carried the diagram above):

The deaths or disappearances of 11 top US scientists and researchers is a matter of urgent national importance, a member of the House Oversight Committee insisted Friday.

Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) said his office had already been eyeing some of the “too coincidental” disappearances a year before President Trump told reporters Thursday that he had ordered an investigation.

The lawmaker argued the fate of the scientists is almost “certainly” linked to the access some had to classified aerospace, defense and UFO information — and may involve bad actors from China, Russia or Iran.

Why stop there? I'd be looking at the Men in Black. According to Chrome AI Mode:

The Men in Black urban myth has existed for nearly 80 years, tracing its roots back to the "Summer of the Saucers" in 1947.

The legend evolved through several key stages:

First Appearance (1947): The myth began with the Maury Island incident on June 21, 1947. Witness Harold Dahl claimed that the morning after he saw six doughnut-shaped aircraft over Puget Sound, a man in a dark suit met him at a local diner and warned him not to speak of the event.

And on through the Men in Black film franchise:

Mainstream Media (1990s–Present): The myth was reimagined as a heroic secret organization in the 1990 comic book series by Lowell Cunningham, which later inspired the 1997 Men in Black film starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones.

The current fascination with this subject seems to have begun with the disappearance of retired General William N McCasland, whose overall career is covered here. However, he retired in 2013, at age 55, so at minimum, he would be 13 years out of the loop. Leaving everything else aside, why would any bad actor, Chinese, Russian, Iranian, man in black, or space alien, see the need to eliminate some guy who was 13 years out of the loop?

Now, I'll grant that a competent thriller writer could cook up some sort of explanation -- he'd stumbled on some big deal secret, the men in black told him he'd better retire, but his conscience kept bothering him, and he was about to reveal it 13 years later -- but outside fiction, you've got to apply a reasonability check to any such explanation. It's too complicated, when any number of simpler explanations would work.

While we don't know why someone on such a high-level career path would have taken early retirement, one explanation could be health issues. In addition, 68 is by no means too young for Alzheimer's, and one symptom of Alzheimer's is wandering off:

Alzheimer’s disease causes people to lose their ability to recognize familiar places and faces. It’s common for a person living with dementia to wander or become lost or confused about their location, and it can happen at any stage of the disease. Six in 10 people living with dementia will wander at least once; many do so repeatedly. Although common, wandering can be dangerous — even life-threatening — and the stress of this risk weighs heavily on caregivers and family.

I'm not claiming this is definitely the explanation, but it's one factor that needs to be ruled out before we bring in any sort of bad actors. While Rep Burlison says Gen McCasland tried to contact him twice about UAPs (or something like that) the Post link says

Investigators claimed McCasland had experienced “mental fog” before disappearing from his home in Albuquerque, NM.

Another issue is that these cases involve 11 people out of 2.1 million civilian and military aerospace workers. We're talking about a very small number of these, in highly diverse roles at scattered locations, some deceased, some missing, over a two-year period. And the actual connections between some on the chart above are tenuous: For instance, Monica Jacinto-Reza disappeared in Southern California while hiking on June 22, 2025, while apparently employed by a contractor for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

However, she is said to be connected with Gen McCasland because from 2011 to 2013, he was Commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson AFB. But Jacinto-Reza was working forJPL in Pasadena, not Wright-Patterson, and she disappeared in 2025, long after McCasland retired in 2013. In addition,

Reza was hiking [with] "male and female companion[s] from her yoga group," which blends "physical yoga practice with spiritual and philosophical elements, including astrology and traditional Vedic teachings from ancient India." According to LA Mag, "Reza and her male companion oddly began running on the terrain, which is uncommon given how steep and uneven it is."

The man "confirmed Reza was behind him, reportedly running, when he eventually called out to her and received no response," LA Mag added.

No Russians, Chinese, Iranians, men in black, or space aliens appear to be involved, but if I were a homicide detective, I'd sure be talking to her male companion on that hike.

Actually, in my tech career, I was in and out of that industry, especially working for contractors in data security. I know some of the agencies mentioned, like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and people who've phased in and out of there. I would say on the whole that the level of work done at such places, and the caliber of people employed, either directly or via contractors, are both highly overrated in the public mind. On one hand, the level of waste, fraud, and abuse is pretty much what you'd expect among government-funded entities.

On the other, the 80-20 rule applies as much as it does anywhere else: 20% of the people do 80% of the work, and among the 80%, you'll find folks engrossed in stuff like yoga, astrology, and traditional vedic teachings. Just sayin'. Even if these people disappeared or passed away under mysterious circumstances, this doesn't mean that any of them was involved in doing important work, and several have titles like "researcher' and "administrative assistant".

So this is just one side issue in the whole UFO-UAP boondoggle -- and a boondoggle it all is.

What's The Current State Of Play In Iran?

There really hasn't been much insightful commentary on the current state of play in Iran, at least in the US, since Vice President Vance walked out of the negotiations a week ago. On the other hand, some foreign observers seem to have a better handle on what's really going on, in particular the US-born Israeli commentator Pesach Wolicki. He talks like the Northeastern suburban Jews I grew up with, whch may be one reason I like him, but his discussion also reflects the respect the Israelis have for his negotiation skills, which US observers generally lack. At about 7:15 in the video embedded above [it may have since been made private], he begins:

I'll remind you that a week into the war, we saw this: "Trump demands 'unconditional surrender' from Iran", OK? and he put out a Truh Social post, "There will be no deal with Iran except unconditional surrender. After that, and tbe selection of an acceptable leader, we'll make wonderful and brave allies that will make Iran great again." OK, but he said there's no acceptable outcome to the war, there's no acceptable end to the war other than unconditional surrender. OK, Iranians are . . . begging for a ceasefire. Ttrump says, if you open up the straits, we'll have a ceasefire.

Now, think about unconditional surrender. What does unconditional surrender look like? It doesn't mean you kill every last member of the IRGC, end the siege, and there's no more regime. What is unconditional surrender, what was it in Germany, whar was it in Japan? It means that one side says "uncle", capitulates, and surrenders to all of the demands of the other side. Obviously that happens in a negotiating room where they surrender. There's a meeting, and they surrender, right, and the guns go silent.

And that's what Trump was trying to accomplish. He was saying, "OK, we're pummelng you, you closed the Straits of Hormuz, open up the Straits, and come talk to us", and he wanted to get an unconditional surrender. So they all get into the room, and what does Trump say about those negotiations, just to hammer home this point? . . . Well, this is actually right after the negotiations fell apart. . . we all know what happened, the Americans laid out their demands. . . everyone went home, because the Iranians weren't willing to agree to the American demands.

What did Trump then say? Listen to this. [Trump recording] "Think of it. They're allowed to say, 'Death to America! Death to this, death to -- I just make one statement, they say, 'Oh, such a big deal!' Let me tell you, that statement got them to the bargaining table, and they haven't left. They haven't left the bargaining table. I predict they come back, and they give us everything we want. And I told my people. I want everyhing. I don't want 90%, I don't want 95%, I told them: I want everything. . ."

. . . So let's underatand what just happened here. Trump saw the ceasefire as an opportunity to put the guns down, bring them to the table, and have them surrender. . . unconditional surrender. . . . This isn't really a negotiation. It's for the Iranians to capitulate and agree to the American demands.

Wolicki makes a pointed reference to "unconditional surrender" as it applied to Germany and Japan. Let's recognize that after the German military surrender on May 7/8, the Allies found it convenient to leave the Flensburg Nazi government under Admiral Dönitz in place for several weeks, simply because some sort of civil authority was needed to clean up all the loose ends prior to a complete Allied takeover. In particular, the police powers of the Dönitz government could be used to help round up war criminals. Once that government had served its purpose, Dönitz himself and those around him were arrested.

In Japan, negotiations were conducted via Switzerland and Sweden to determine just what conditions would constitute "unconditional" surrender, in particular, whether the Emperor could retain some sort of constitutional position. However, even when a satisfactory resolution for the Emperor was secured, there was a last-minute attempted coup that failed only when the insurgents were unable to locate and seize the pre-recorded copies of the Emperor's surrender announcement scheduled for broadcast.

In other words, "unconditional surrender" is something for which the conditions are negotiated, and it takes place within a more extended window of time following the practical military defeat. As best anyone can determine, what's going on in Iran now is similar to the uncertainties in Japan even after Hirohito broke the tie in his war cabinet in favor of surrender. This is outlined in he video embedded below:

It begins,

Massive crowds have taken to the street in Tehran. But these aren't protesters against the regime. These are regime supporters. Now they're losing their minds, because they can't believe that Iran just surrendered. That's why they're protesting against the people in power, people who are negotiating with the United States, and they're calling on the Supreme Leader to finally make a statement. It's been more than a month since the Supreme Leader has been elected, and the Iranian public still hasn't heard from him or seen him. And now it seems like the regime has fallen into a full-on civil war.

Apparently in response, those surrounding the Supreme Leader issued a written statement:

In a statement carried by Iranian state media, he said the military had resisted what he described as America’s “sinister schemes.”

He went on: "With its strong divine and popular support and in dense, fortified ranks, it [the army] stands shoulder to shoulder with other mujahideen of the armed forces against the two armies at the forefront of the front of kufr (disbelief) and arrogance, clashing with them hand-to-hand and exposing their weakness and humiliation to the eyes of the world; just as its drones strike like lightning against the American and Zionist criminals, its brave navy is ready to make the enemies taste the bitterness of new defeats."

The final sentence, boasting about how the Iranian navy is ready to unleash "new defeats", comes after Iran this morning said it was closing the Strait of Hormuz again.

However, the remarks are entirely pro forma, and they aren't accompanied by any proof that he's alive or not comatose. All they establish is that the hard-liners are able to issue statements on his behalf, while they're apparently also in a position to force Mohammad-Bagher Qalibaf to confirm that the IRGC has closed the Strait of Hormuz again. In return, Trump reiterated

If negotiations with Iran fail and Trump gives the green light, the U.S. military in the U.S. Central Command region is prepared to conduct strikes against the regime’s military targets, a source familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal military planning, told The Hill on Saturday morning.

It's hard to avoid thinking we're in a situation comparable to Japan in the unstable period after the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaski.

The UK Is Poorer Than Mississippi

As we say in Mississippi,
“Bless Your Heart.”

Or as you say in the UK,
“As-Salamu Alaykum.” https://t.co/oCajoT8LQ7

— Governor Tate Reeves (@tatereeves) April 16, 2026

There's been yet another set of stories over the past few days saying that if the UK were the 51st state, it would be the poorest, below even Mississippi:

When Brits are asked how wealthy the United Kingdom is compared with the United States, most believe the country still ranks near the top. In reality, the U.K. is poorer than every single U.S. state—something that comes as a shock to many when they learn the truth.

That disconnect is laid bare in a new report by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), which finds that Britons significantly overestimate the U.K.’s economic standing both globally and relative to the United States.

But this headline is actually evergreen. A quick web search brings up:

Mar 31, 2025 Britain—Like France and Spain—Is Poorer than Mississippi
Aug 10, 2023 Is Britain Really as Poor as Mississippi?
Mar 7, 2016 It Is Still True That Even Mississippi Is Richer Than Britain
Aug 25, 2014 Britain Is Poorer Than Any US State: Yes, Even Mississippi

This shouldn't be a surprise. Last month, I looked at the origins of the UK's open-borders immigration policy, and I found that it can be traced to a post-World War II "labor shortage", whereby immigration from the UK's Caribbean territories was encouraged to fill jobs, or viewed a little differently, to keep wages down. But UK attitudes date back farther than that:

A general strike took place in the United Kingdom from 4 to 12 May 1926. It was called by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in an unsuccessful attempt to force the British government to act to prevent wage reductions and worsening conditions for 1.2 million locked-out coal miners. Some 1.7 million workers went out, especially in transport and heavy industry.

. . . In 1924, the Dawes Plan was implemented. It allowed Germany to re-enter the international coal market by exporting "free coal" to France and Italy, as part of their reparations for the war. This extra supply reduced coal prices. In 1925, Winston Churchill, the chancellor of the Exchequer, reintroduced the gold standard. This made the British pound too strong for effective exporting to take place from Britain. Furthermore, because of the economic processes involved in maintaining a strong currency, interest rates were raised, which hurt some businesses.

Mine owners wanted to maintain profits even during times of economic instability, which often took the form of wage reductions for miners in their employment. Miners' weekly pay had been lowered from £6 to £3 18s. over seven years. Coupled with the prospect of longer working hours for miners, the industry was thrown into disarray.

The Dawes Plan, named for US banker and vice president during Coolidge's second term Charles G Dawes, was developed as a way to resolve the economic and political problems resulting from the reparations payments imposed on Germany in the Versailles Treaty, itself a consequence of UK policy miscalculation. In turn, however, the UK economy depended on continued reparations payments, which were intended to repay the loans the UK owed for financing its role in World War I -- but the return to the gold standard put new stresses on the economy.

In tbhe US, the Federal Reserve acted to support the UK's return to the gold standard. This led to

the Fed's decision to raise interest rates in 1928 and 1929. The Fed did this in an attempt to limit speculation in securities markets. This action slowed economic activity in the United States. Because the international gold standard linked interest rates and monetary policies among participating nations, the Fed's actions triggered recessions in nations around the globe. The Fed repeated this mistake when responding to the international financial crisis in the fall of 1931.

This was a result of yet another UK policy miscalculation that primarily hurt the working class. The 1926 General Strike appears to have solidified bourgeois attitudes against the workers:

[A]s with most strikes, the general public' hostility to being inconvenienced outweighed much of the sympathy they might have felt for the miners' plight. Most people tended to fear rather than applaud the sympathetic relationship among the labour unions, for a general strike (by the end of the stoppage, labour leaders were also using this term), carried to its logical extreme was and is a workers' revolution.

. . . Upper and upper-middleclass university students, society women, titled people, and young businessmen drove trains and buses, ran canteens, printed and delivered emergency newspapers, worked in the docks, and had a great time "carrying on".

. . . The very condensation of the volunteers' role into an upper-class masculine image was what has enabled it to be so easily invoked as a symbol of eccentric Britishness, of good humour in a crisis, of the gentleman amateur par excellence. That image represented the continuity of a nineteenth-century paradigm that categorized life as a sporting competition not to be taken too seriously and English lads of a certain class as the ones capable of winning it - and showing others how to play the game.

The brevity of the actual strike also contributed to its success as a social paradigm. Chrome AI notes,

Many volunteers lacked the technical skills for the jobs they replaced. For example, rail services were shambolic and often operated at only 1% of normal capacity, leading to months of equipment repairs afterward.

But this was lost in the general celebratory air of bourgeois self-congratulation. In other words, the UK seems to be a special case, in which 19th-century paradigms of the working class vis-a-vis the bourgeoisie have persisted into the 21st, allowing long-entrenched policy miscalculations to persist and keeping the country poor.