Lyle Menendez denied parole after 35 years in prison for parents' shotgun murders.

Trying to live in two worlds is like trying to pitch a tent in no man’s land during a battle. You’re setting yourself up for constant bombardment. You’ll face spiritual battle after spiritual battle, and your enemy will have the advantage in every one of them.

BRILYN HOLLYHAND: White House Joins TikTok

A man out for a walk with his family discovered a Bronze Age dagger near the village of Gudersleben in Thuringia, central Germany. It is a plate-tanged dagger from the Bronze Age and is approximately 3,500 years old. Plate-tanged daggers are characterized by their flat tangs that widen at the top. They have two rivet holes piercing the shoulders of the tang where the handle was mounted. Handles were made of organic materials like bone, antler or wood, which is why only the blades typically survive. Ancient dagger blades like this one don’t often emerge on their own for random passersby to find, especially in such good condition. Archaeologists speculate that heavy rains in recent days dislodged the soil that covered it and washed the dagger to the surface. Finder Maik Böhner did not attempt to recover it himself, even though it was simply sitting on top of some leaves. He reported it to the mayor and the local monuments preservation officials who then relayed the news to the Thuringian State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology in Weimar. The dagger is now at the restoration workshop of the State Office in Weimar where it will be cleaned, conserved and analyzed. When conservation is complete, the artifact will go on display at the Ellrich Local History Museum.

Foreign Affairs Heaven Is No Place for War Criminals  The newly afterlife-concerned Trump betrays his peacenik promises with effervescent Netanyahu praise.  President Donald Trump couldn’t help himself.  Speaking with the unabashed Israel apologist Mark Levin on Tuesday, Trump, who is coming off arguably one of the strongest weeks of his second administration, threw away any goodwill earned from his cross-country peace summits by lavishly praising Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “He’s a war hero,” Trump said of Netanyahu, a man who has been charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. “I guess I am too,” Trump added with a chuckle.  Levin, who has used his platform to openly advocate for the genocide of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, loved every second of Trump’s sparkling praise for Netanyahu. Levin, who this month accused Netanyahu critics of attempting to “incite Kristallnachts all over this country,” chuckled along with the president. Two genocidal peas in a pod. The question of Gaza is the haunting specter of Trump’s second term in the Oval Office. No matter what comes of the proposed stalemate along the Ukrainian border, Trump will have to answer for his derelict and thuggish approach to the desperate, degenerating situation in Gaza where men, women, and children are being systematically starved and bombed every day by an Israeli war machine backed by the power of Trump’s American empire. Despite repeated attempts by pro-Israel outlets to question the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, even Trump admitted in July that the people of Gaza are experiencing “real starvation.” Trump’s celebratory praise of Netanyahu, who received multiple red-carpet rollouts from the Trump administration in the first eight months of 2025, is indicative of a president who has loudly promised peace but time and time again supported Netanyahu, a man who ranks among the worst of today’s war criminals. According to the Gaza Healthy Ministry, more than 60,000 Palestinians have been ruthlessly snuffed out by the Israeli war machine since Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing more than 1,200 Israelis. And new numbers from a classified Israeli military intelligence database that were corroborated by the Guardian suggest that 83 percent of those killed in the Gaza Strip these last two years were civilians. Tens of thousands of innocents have died in the past two years, and 100,000 more are estimated to have been injured in the same time frame.  These numbers are staggering. To accuse Netanyahu of war crimes is not the same as absolving Hamas of its dreadful role in the killing fields, an accusation that American media members such as Levin have recklessly assigned to anyone who questions the ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians in Gaza. During his primetime speech at the Christians United for Israel conference in July, Levin framed the genocide in Gaza as “God’s war” and accused European skeptics of Israel’s wrath as being the same “stupid” people who gave rise to Adolf Hitler. Miriam Adelson, who contributed more than $100 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign, was spotted cheering in the crowd. So, for those who have closely followed the Trump arc this past decade, especially with regard to Israel, the president’s open-mouthed tongue-bathing of Netanyahu shouldn’t come as a surprise. But it does help shed light on an open-ended question that the president pondered during an appearance earlier that same day on Fox and Friends—the question of Heaven.  “I want to try to get to heaven if possible,” Trump said, only hours before calling Netanyahu a war hero.  “I’m hearing that I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole,” he added in jest. It was the sort of comment that has made Trump such a generational enigma. There appeared to be a striking humility in his admission that he was at the “bottom of the totem pole.” But was it humility or simply a stark admission of what Trump, the man, must question of himself when he peers into his gaudy, gold-leafed mirrors at the White House? How can a man, any man, who supports the continued starvation and systematic destruction of poor, helpless people who were unlucky enough to be born into an ancient blood feud thread the eye of the needle?  Furthermore, how can a man who has promised to end wars but has consistently signed off on bombing campaigns realistically believe he is a true peacemaker? As then-Rep. Ron Paul warned throughout his numerous presidential campaigns, “They attack us because we’ve been over there.” Paul’s righteous message ironically helped fuel Trump’s ascension; Trump smartly adopted, if in speech only, Paul’s belief that our indiscriminate war campaigns in the Middle East have sowed more war the planet over.  The promise of heaven and the idea of divine intervention have infused Trump’s rhetoric ever since the president survived a would-be assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania in July of 2024. Now, Trump often suggests he was saved that fateful day so he can lead the country through a time of deep secularism; never mind the fact that the assassin’s bullet struck down firefighter Corey Comperatore, a loving husband and father of two, who was killed protecting his family only feet behind Trump at the speech.  “I felt then and I believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason,” Trump said during his inauguration in January. “I was saved by God to Make America Great Again.” It’s worth noting that in this scenario, the same God who saved Trump permitted Comperatore to be killed for reasons which aren’t exactly clear. Evidence of Trump’s turn toward the evangelical wing of the Republican Party was further exhibited later that month when he appointed Paula White, a millionaire televangelist who speaks in tongues, to become the senior adviser for Trump’s newly created “White House Faith Office” at the start of Trump’s second term. When Trump attacked three Iranian nuclear facilities in June, he credited the Lord. “I want to just thank everybody, and in particular, God,” Trump said in a televised address following the bombings. “I want to just say, ‘We love you God’ and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel and God bless America.”  A month before American bombs rained down on another Middle Eastern enclave thousands of miles from our shores, the Catholic Church selected its next Pope. They chose an American. Amid all the war, and it’s been decades of unrelenting war now, the cardinals chose a pope who in his words and deeds has prioritized the message and salvation of peace. Leo XIV has been vocal in his opposition to the brutal violence and starvation in Gaza that dominates today’s headlines without criticizing Trump directly.  Nor is the pope alone. On Thursday, Matteo Cardinal Zuppi, the head of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, spent seven hours reading the names of all 12,211 children killed in Gaza during Israel’s multi-year destruction campaign. “They ask us all to commit ourselves to finding or pursuing the path to peace with greater intelligence and passion, starting with a ceasefire and offering the conditions for doing so, from the release of hostages to not taking an entire people hostage,” stated Zuppi.  It’s not only the Catholic Church that is witnessing a surge in visibility as the ethnic cleansing continues apace. The antiwar wing of the Republican Party is also suddenly in the ascendency as its members watch Israel ramp up its offensive in the Gaza Strip. Some of Trump’s most vocal and ardent supporters have found their own brave voices and courageously broken from the president, despite real concerns it may cost them future campaign money and alienation in key parts of the MAGA base. After an Israeli shell struck the only Catholic church in Gaza this July, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) pulled the ripcord. In a series of tweets and interviews, Greene, who has long questioned the Israeli influence on America’s foreign policy, dropped any pretense that she would continue to support a state that has its hooks deep in the halls of our American Congress.   “Israel is the only country I know of that has some sort of incredible influence and control over nearly every single one of my colleagues,” Greene told Megyn Kelly. That “incredible influence” was on full display when a group of bipartisan Congressional members visited Netanyahu in Israel in early August. The meeting was hastily organized after House Speaker Mike Johnson quickly recessed the House in July amid calls for the Republicans to release Department of Justice files on Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex criminal and onetime friend of Trump.  As if America’s unending financial and military entanglement in the Middle East and Eastern Europe isn’t enough, the Trump administration is also eyeing new incursions in Mexico and Venezuela to slow the cartels and the onslaught of drugs and human trafficking through our southern border. And though we do witness the substantial risks of the cartels’ influence on the health and wellbeing of our American public, and though there is a responsible argument for curbing the chaos that emanates from regions either partially or fully attached to our great land mass, any military strike against our southern neighbors will only further ensnare our nation’s children in the sort of forever wars that bleed our people and its Treasury. It’s the exact opposite of what Trump the candidate promised Americans and especially his war-weary voters— an end to the relentless bloodshed and misery that has made us into new imperialists.  In 1958, during the cold, relentless New York City winter, the legendary jazz pianist Bill Evans penned a beautiful, pastoral improvisation he would later title “Peace Piece.” It’s a strange tune that instantly recalls the lushness of Satie and the bitterness of Chopin. On its surface, “Peace Piece” is a lovely tune but underneath there lives a somber, deeply unnerving energy. An extreme dissonance in the sweet song suggests what peace might fully encompass—a peculiar, widening fault between unfocused lines of harmony and violence and an earnest appreciation for the deeper reality: None of us are perfect. Our meager attempts at peace within our souls and beyond our doorsteps requires monotonous, everyday dedication, despite our animalistic tendency to strike out against one another in rage.  I believe that God knows that we are not perfect, that we are born to sin; I believe that we may be forgiven if our heart is dutifully molded, through loss and love and time, to become pure and true. I believe that is what heaven is, the measure of progress on our lifelong, winding paths to personal purity.  So it’s difficult to believe that the true Lord of all would gaze kindly upon two men who sheepishly chuckle over the war-hungry Netanyahu. None of us can know who enters heaven, or whether God will reward tyrants, men who traded and bargained in the currency of innocent lives amid strip-mall aesthetics and callous appeals to “life and liberty”? When the day comes, as everyone’s day does, only Trump will know his eternal fate.  Hope it’s not too hot.  The post Heaven Is No Place for War Criminals appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Warfighters, Not Crimefighters Ecuador is rolling out the welcome mat for U.S. troops. Washington should ignore the invitation. The idea of using warfighters as crime fighters is finding favor in Washington, as the White House tees up the use of military force against cartels. However, using the U.S. military to police drug traffickers in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America would be ineffective, lead to endless mission creep, and ultimately endanger the Trump administration’s other foreign policy goals. While talk of deployments to counter cartels often focuses on Mexico, the U.S. has quietly been preparing to actually test this disastrous idea in Ecuador. Ecuador has a major crime problem. The homicide rate has rocketed from one of the region’s lowest to the highest on the continent as gangs openly battle over control of cocaine shipments. Now, Ecuador is looking abroad for help. President Daniel Noboa has loudly lobbied for American boots on the ground, stating he “would love to have U.S. forces helping” Ecuador in a “transnational war” against criminal organizations. Ecuador’s legislature recently voted to lift a nearly two-decade constitutional ban on foreign military bases, with a final popular referendum expected to ratify the change within a few months. “The expectation is that these will be eventually occupied by U.S. troops,” an Ecuadorian official said of new barracks under construction in the coastal city of Manta. Washington has tried this before—just next door to Ecuador, in fact—and the results were poor. Colombia received Special Forces trainers and over $10 billion to fight narcoterrorist organizations beginning in 1999. After two decades of effort, the net supply of cocaine destined for the United States actually increased. American officials concluded that degrading the capabilities of such groups was a temporary victory at best. The lucrative drug demand simply invited new hydra heads to sprout. Ecuador has already militarized the fight against gangs. Noboa has issued several emergency decrees and secured legislative reforms to deploy Ecuadorian military forces alongside police, with mixed results. His argument that simply “more soldiers” are required is the same as claiming that a failure to eat soup with a fork simply requires a bigger fork. Ecuador suffers from weak institutions for administration of justice. Military force is the wrong tool for the job of strengthening investigative capacity and reforming riotous prison systems. The U.S. military’s multi-decade effort to combat drug production in Afghanistan failed to produce lasting reductions, but did provide this hard-earned lesson. Without “non-corrupt judicial and law enforcement institutions in place,” noted a special inspector general’s report, U.S. forces are just wasting their time. After Afghanistan, President Donald Trump rightly stressed that “victory will have a clear definition” when U.S. troops are deployed. Yet Ecuador is already expanding the potential mission beyond drugs, with Noboa hoping U.S. troops will crack down on crimes ranging from unpermitted mining to illegal fishing. Even if military force could displace criminal organizations from one geographic area or source of revenue, Washington would soon face an endlessly expanding mission as gangs seek refuge in another area or industry.  The costs of this misuse of U.S. troops are not only financial. Pressuring Beijing and Moscow to respect the sovereignty of Taiwan and Ukraine will be much harder if they can point to U.S. troops likewise “restoring law and order” in our “backyard,” especially if anti-cartel raids ever ignore the host country’s consent. American military forces should be used only as conventional war fighters, not crime fighters. Using military forces to kinetically “solve” criminal organizations is ineffective, unstrategic and diplomatically fraught. The right answer to Ecuador’s request for U.S. troops is the same in both Spanish and English: no. The post Warfighters, Not Crimefighters appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs In the Short Term, There Will Be No Peace Neither side wants to compromise, and we shouldn’t try to secure a fragile and unnatural equilibrium.  The most important piece of history of the ongoing war in Ukraine was perhaps written by Barry Posen in February 2025, exactly three years from the start of the conflict. In “Putin’s Preventive War: The 2022 Invasion of Ukraine”, Posen articulates the structural causes of the conflict and cautions against undue optimism. It is worthy advice, and one that I second. In the recent podcast episode, I mentioned why I am not very optimistic about the ongoing peace process, and why I think this might only lead to disappointment.  Consider that there need to be three things for a peace process to succeed. First, both sides must feel that they are incapable of reversing the gains of the other side. Second, both sides must make a compromise, and the best compromise would leave both sides furious and disappointed. Third, the external agents and parties must appeal to their best instincts and try to stop the ongoing carnage. The current peace talks show that none of those three conditions are satisfied.  None of the variables currently match. There is no evidence that either Russian or Ukrainian strategists believe that they want a negotiated settlement, contrary to public polls in Ukraine. (The much-ballyhooed polls are practically meaningless in a country where normal political processes have been suspended.) Both sides are under the impression that they can prevail in a conflict and attrition of arms. On top of that, President Volodymyr Zelensky thinks he can outlast Trump and the Republicans, at least two more years. While the Russians are technically winning in a battlefield, it’s not in a scale or scope fast enough to coerce a rapid collapse of Ukrainian arms. Consider that the Russian Pokrovsk campaign started in July last year: not a pace of advancement one can consider decisive. Russia is also fighting the combined GDP of Europe and America, and to prevail over that is a tall order. Second, both the Ukrainians and the Russians have a grudge, and it appears the Europeans want to continue the conflict or at least guide the Trump admin towards a war aim where the conflict is continued in some form.  At the time of writing, the Russians have already vetoed the idea of peacekeepers from any NATO country, which includes the major powers such as Germany, Turkey, France, and Britain. I am unsure if anyone is proposing “neutral” peacekeepers but from countries which have heft, such as India and China, but if President Donald Trump’s peace overtures bank on a contingent of troops from the two countries he is currently in a trade war with, it would be one of history’s ironies indeed. Consider the worst-case scenario. The war aim of the U.S. is extracting itself from this conflict. Forget public opinion—it’s incoherent anyway. The strategic concern is that we are spending too much in foreign aid, and emptying the stockpiles needed for the time when the real hammer blow lands in the Far East. The war aim of Ukraine is reconquest. The war aim of Russia is conquest and permanent neutering of the central state in Ukraine. The war aims of Europe, while not united, are generally to punish Vladimir Putin. These are not compatible.  The only way out of this, from the American vantage, is to either double down in this war of attrition or walk away. Coerce Ukraine as we did Armenia to accept a genuine hegemonic peace—a Yalta 2.0, if you will. Regardless of whether we would actually do it, we should at least mention to Ukraine that this is their last chance to agree to this equilibrium or risk losing all American support. The tested alternative, coercing Russia for over three years, failed due to Russian heft and size and our (very justified) unwillingness to risk a Third World War over the Donbas. My advice to the Trump administration would be to lawyer up, draft an agreement, bring the parties to the table, and give an ultimatum that this is it. Remember what the Norwegians did to the Sri Lankan peace process, when the Tamils proved too intransigent? They walked away (by Sri Lanka’s request), letting Sri Lanka essentially destroy the Tamil enclave without any adherence to the laws of war.  I also think, with my colleague Jude Russo, that that is unlikely simply because we have seen no such realism from the administration so far, despite the principal’s interest in earning a Nobel prize. We are also not completely amoral. And this isn’t 1815, with only a handful of monarchs deciding the fate of a continent. Most importantly, neither side wants peace or compromise, and it will be futile for Trump to spend his political capital to try to prop up an unsteady scaffolding.  The post In the Short Term, There Will Be No Peace appeared first on The American Conservative.

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