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Foreign Affairs Tulsi Goes Nuclear on the Warmongers  Opposing the atomic bombings of Japan is a great conservative tradition. Credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images A pack of self-styled conservatives this week piled on after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a mournful, humane statement on the reality of nuclear war. Her brief video speaks powerfully for itself. But I feel compelled to respond to her detractors, if only to smack down the poisonous self-confidence of the many war promoters who have insinuated themselves into the political right. The people who have jumped to dismiss and ridicule Gabbard’s warning against playing around with nukes are doing more to out themselves than to refute her point. For all their cockiness, they’re showing that they’re either simply illiterate when it comes to conservative thought, or, worse, cynically preying on a conservative audience that they believe to be illiterate itself. This despite the fact that, as I argued in my own policy white paper on disarmament, the aim of minimizing the nuclear threat to humanity’s future is rooted in the principles of a deeply conservative tradition known as Just War Theory. National Review senior writer Dan McLaughlin, who calls himself a “Reaganite Catholic,” made the childish point that “Japan should have thought about” the horrors of being nuked before it antagonized the world with its own aggression and atrocities. “You’d think someone who once represented Hawaii would remember that,” McLaughlin jeered, referring to Gabbard, a former congresswoman from the Aloha State. Next he added a little saber-rattling against Iran: “This is why an aggressive tyranny such as Iran should never be allowed anywhere near nuclear weapons.” Talk show host Mark Levin similarly outed himself as either a lightweight or a sinister enemy of Trumpism who aims to undermine the movement from within. After some fear mongering about Iran, he explained that the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki “were dropped because it was believed we’d lose perhaps hundreds of thousands of soldiers if we invaded Japan.” As if war crimes can be canceled out with a little arithmetic. “Imperial Japan refused to unconditionally surrender until Truman dropped the second bomb,” Levin said. “Much to learn from history. No forever war in WWII. Hard to tell from your video if you agree with Truman’s decision.” Like Levin, Noah Rothman of the National Review agreed with “Truman’s decision” as if it were a bedrock conservative principle to do so, writing that Gabbard “managed to summon more shame and self-doubt than even Obama could muster.” The implication is that Gabbard’s warning against nuclear war falls far outside the pale of conservative thought—and that anyone who speaks against the bombings is essentially on trial, bearing the onus to prove themselves moral by accepting that a Democrat’s order to kill civilians and wipe out cities is ethically sound. “Surely you don’t disagree with Truman!” goes the unspoken illogic between the lines. “That would make you guilty of being a traitor to conservatism. How do you plead?” In fact, the onus is on those rashly defending nuclear bombings at a time when, as both Gabbard and President Donald Trump have repeatedly said, we are more at risk of a nuclear World War III than ever before. The onus is on the hawks now more than ever, too, since they want to attach themselves to the coattails of a Trump movement that in November won all battleground states and earned the popular vote based largely on its rejection of the Washington establishment’s love of war. But the onus is also on them in light of a much longer-lived and more deeply rooted tradition of conservative thought. A tradition of thought that never came anywhere near to unanimous support for the nuclear bombings of Japan that these hangers-on are now trying to present as the consensus position among conservatives. Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, one of the greatest political thinkers of the 20th century, wrote a sharp critique of Oxford’s decision to award Truman an honorary degree in the 1950s. Her argument? The man who dropped those bombs should never be honored by an institution that claims to represent Western values. “For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder,” she wrote in part. “The dropping of the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were the clearest possible examples of such acts.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen, a tremendous champion of moral conservatism, identified the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a major inflection point in history—one that undermined all future conservative efforts to oppose immorality in politics. In fact, he marked August 6, 1945, as the origin of all the Leftist cultural and political revolutions that followed—and which America’s modern conservative movement was essentially founded to counter. “When we flew an American plane over this Japanese city and dropped the atomic bomb on it, we blotted out boundaries,” Sheen said. “There was no longer a boundary between the civilian and the military, between the helper and the helped, between the wounded and the nurse and the doctor, between the living and the dead—for even the living who escaped the bomb were already half-dead. So we broke down boundaries and limits, and from that time on the world has said ‘We want no one limiting me.’” President Ronald Reagan, another central figure to conservatives, decried nuclear bombings and energetically pursued nuclear arms reductions even in the midst of the Cold War. “A nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought,” Reagan famously said. He expressed a desire that nuclear weapons would be “banished from the face of the Earth.” Even among Truman’s own cabinet and inner circle, numerous U.S. military officials had the moral sense to speak out strongly against the bombing. Future Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, then supreme allied commander, said after the war that it “wasn’t necessary to hit [the Japanese] with that awful thing… I voiced to [Truman] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary… Secondly, because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory.” Truman’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, outright condemned what he called “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” arguing it “was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.”  “The Japanese were already defeated,” Leahy added. “My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.” Truman’s commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces, Henry Arnold, made his own argument after the fact. “It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse,” he said. Now fast-forward to the statement from Gabbard and the flurry of commentary surrounding it: Who sounds more like the great Catholic philosophers, churchmen, Republican presidents, and World War II military leaders who have weighed in on nuclear war? I rest my case. The post Tulsi Goes Nuclear on the Warmongers  appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture The Cable Guy In matters of entertainment, serendipity beats control. Credit: brizmaker/Shutterstock To be a selective adopter of new technologies, as I am, brings certain annoyances, especially when it comes to carrying on conversations with my fellow citizens. For example, it is with dismaying frequency that I find myself fielding questions about why I retain a landline, why I decline to use a smartphone, or why I will never read a book on any sort of screen.  Yes, the life of a Luddite often feels like one of near-constant explanation, but when it comes to one of my most eccentric acts of technological resistance, I must concede that I simply have no good excuse. For more years than I care to admit, I have been a subscriber to cable television. You read that right: To this very day, I persist in sending a not-insignificant portion of my hard-earned money to a company that uses cable to bring me such novelties as ESPN, HBO, and TCM—which, to most people in the third decade of the twenty-first century, is not very different from saying that I use rabbit ears to bring me ABC, NBC, and CBS.  To be sure, I subscribe to a handful of streaming services, but I find that I make use of them intermittently and unenthusiastically—mainly when I have been assigned to review or write about a particular show or movie on a given service. I have concluded that this is not a reflection of the offerings on these streamers—to the contrary, no channel on any current cable lineup could match the extraordinarily rich mix of art-house and international cinema on the Criterion Channel—but their method of delivery.  To put it simply, I would rather stumble upon a show in the course of channel-surfing than to choose to watch a show by clicking a title on a streamer. My preference might best be explained in culinary terms: Most of us would rather eat a meal that has been chosen and prepared for us than one we have glumly prepared for ourselves. Food just tastes better when it is whipped up on our behalf—whether by a chef, a friend, or the participant in a potluck. By the same token, shows and movies are likelier to capture my interest if someone other than me has decided to put them on TV. Perhaps my preference for watching something that is being shown to choosing something that is merely available might have to do with my distinct feeling, in the former arrangement, that there are real live humans on the other side. In other words, someone else has made the call to show this baseball game or bowling tournament on ESPN, this series or documentary on HBO, or this classic movie or cult favorite on TCM. Obviously, I retain the freedom to watch or skip a given program, but I have no say in the nature or the timing of said programming. This results in a salutary push-pull that is entirely absent from streaming: The channel’s programmer has complete authority in choosing to show a game, series, or flick now. I decide merely whether to watch it or not. By contrast, streaming invites subscribers to become masters of their fate. When streamed rather than watched, scripted series no longer have to be viewed according to a schedule but can be “binged.” Time itself falls under streaming subscribers’ domain. Last fall, while watching live sports on a streaming service, I was unnerved when I realized that I could pause and rewind the action, and then, to regain my place, “fast forward” to the present moment. To gain control over sports coverage in such a manner reflects a society that has become too comfortable with the autonomy that inevitably accompanies technological progress. After all, no one who attends a sporting event in person would have the ability to teleport themselves to an earlier third-down conversion or missed field goal. Perhaps my eagerness to relinquish power to the programmers at various cable channels is a matter of sheepishness on my part. I simply do not want the responsibility of deciding what is on my TV. For example, following the writing and filing of this or other columns, I often unwind by watching whatever innocuous show happens to be airing in the wee hours: reruns of Forensic Files, American Justice, and a random assortment of shows on the History Channel are among my favorites. Yet I would never have the gall to actually dial up such shows were they available to stream (and I’m sure they are). For the purposes of my ego, it is better that someone else has chosen to air a trashy true-crime series—and that I have merely landed on it with the help of my remote.  Dear reader, I cautioned you at the outset that I had no good excuse for continuing to fill my cable company’s coffers, but just as I have become too old to ditch my landline, I find I have become too staid to cut the cord. The post The Cable Guy appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Don’t Get Involved in Another Persian Gulf War This magazine was established to oppose futile wars in the Middle East. We still oppose them.  Credit: Rokas Tenys/Shutterstock Nothing needs to be said about the war between Israel and Iran that wasn’t already said by my colleagues Andrew Day and Jude Russo. At the time of writing, Israel is targeting the Fordow nuclear enrichment plant, and Iranian ballistic missiles are hitting Tel Aviv.  Donald Trump won his mandate opposing wars in the Middle East. His instinct is still laudable, but it is baffling why he failed to seal a nuclear deal with Tehran, given that the Iranians agreed not to produce nuclear weapons. The administration has sought a ban on Tehran’s enrichment of uranium, though that is an Iranian redline and will continue to be. Any further military threats to the Iranian nuclear program will only incentivize them to seek further nuclear weaponization. The best we could hope for is oversight of the program. A clever rhetorical ploy can be seen in discussions about whether the U.S. will engage militarily with Iran. Before the current strikes, the U.S. apparently told Israel that it will not join an attack in any offensive capacity, though it seemed likely to defend against an Iranian retaliation and, soon after Israel’s strikes, promised to do so. This is clever but nonsensical. The distinction to be made at this stage isn’t whether the U.S. wants to invade Iran or not; it is whether the U.S. will be dragged into war regardless. Any journalist worth his salt should ask the administration whether and why the United States should have to defend Israel from Iranian retaliation, especially considering that Israel—per Trump’s own words before the attack—brought “ruin” to negotiations between Iran and the U.S. (And yes, any negotiation at this point is ruined. That much is guaranteed.) The Iranians saw what happened to Muammar Gaddafi in Libya (another war that wrecked a region and unleashed refugee crises in Europe, and that your humble correspondent opposed) and saw what didn’t happen to the Kim dynasty in North Korea. The lesson is stark. Deterrence is hard won, but once achieved, it remains in place. In the meantime, the Iranians have consolidated their ballistic missile program, and Tehran now has an enormous amount of conventional weapons in stock for overwhelming Israel. The Israelis, for their part, lack long-term sustained bombing capability of Iran without American support. Iran has enormous land depth (natural boundaries and terrain defenses) to make any invasion expensive. This march to war is similar to Ukraine, in the sense that it can stop the moment Washington, DC can muster the courage to say that, henceforth, anyone who opposes American intentions or strategy is on his own.  The fact that this is a sneaky way to engulf the U.S. in another conflict in the Middle East is evident to anyone with an above–room temperature IQ. And this is a region that remains totally peripheral to American interests, especially compared to, say, Asia, or Latin America, or even Europe. A U.S. war with Iran has bipartisan opposition from both right- and left-wing congressmen. The people hate the idea of it.  Moreover, Israel’s attack was not “preemptive,” as claimed in the media. A preemptive strike aims to stop an anticipated attack that is yet to happen. Even by Israeli claims, this is a campaign of decapitation and prevention—top Iranian leadership is being targeted. Israelis understandably don’t want a war of attrition, for obvious reasons. Throughout its history, Israel avoided long conflicts and opted for shorter wars. The questions are whether this time Israel will get into a long, attritional conflict anyway, and whether the U.S. will then have to be involved. The expected length of conflict is not irrelevant, but rather the starting point of a plan. If analysis assumes Iranian regime fragility, sustained conflict will not be needed; the regime will collapse. Then the question will be one of pacification of the country’s disparate factions. But if the regime is stable, Iranians will rally around the flag, leading to a war of attrition in which Iranian manpower dwarfs that of Israel. The last time Iranians were surprised by a leadership decapitating first strike, it was the 1980s and the perpetrator was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. That ultimately led to an eight-year war. Hussein and his regime are now long gone. One can only hope that this time, better sense prevails—and, more importantly for the U.S., that we have the prudence to stay out of it. The post Don’t Get Involved in Another Persian Gulf War appeared first on The American Conservative.

UTL COMMENT:- Some very good points made here. He does read it which is annoying however it's well written.

??✈️ WHO orders the spraying of cabins in planes arriving from Spain with some type of poison, with the cabin crew calling it a "harmless product". Claiming to "stop insects" Immediately after the spraying, people start to feel a sore throat and cough. Man challenges the airline staff

As the old saying goes, you are what you eat, so our diets play a tremendous role in how we feel from day to day. Food can give us energy, vitality, and mental clarity or make us feel listless and drained. A person who spent two weeks in Italy shared an incredible revelation they had while living in the Bel Paese. Even though they ate healthily while living in America, they felt great after spending a few days in Italy.The traveler felt so much better living the Italian lifestyle that they pledged to leave America one day, possibly in five years, and move to Italy. They felt so much better abroad because Italians are much more conscious about their food quality. An American woman in Italy.via Canva/Photos“I'm just so mad at the food in the US. I left for 2 weeks to Italy. My mood was better, my awareness was better. I could eat wheat (I'm extremely gluten intolerant and it messes with my autoimmune disease if I eat it among a multitude of other symptoms) with gluten pills with minor bloating,” they wrote on Reddit. “I had some of the best food, best health feelings (other than muscle soreness from walking so much) I've ever had in my life. It's made me have so much resentment for US food. I mean, even my skin cleared up quite a bit overseas.”American food has a lot of sugarThe big realization they had is that American food is loaded with sugar. “It just makes me so mad that having any kind of sugar is just too much here. Sugar and wheat and what ever else is just so much harder on my body here than in Italy. I want to move,” they wrote. An American woman in Italy.via Canva/PhotosIt’s easy to criticize the traveler by saying, “Well, why don’t you just eat differently when you return home to America?” But it can be tough to eat healthy in America because it's nearly impossible to escape the food system. “There is sugar in f**king everything. It's so bad,” one of the top commenters wrote. “I've pretty much stopped eating anything that isn't home-cooked using whole foods. Even all the bread products I consume are baked at home. Everything from bagels to dinner rolls.”How do Americans and Italians eat differently?The attitude towards food in Italy and the United States couldn’t be more different. First, both cultures treat shopping completely differently. Americans go to large grocery stores where a lot of the food is processed and the produce is available, whether in season or not. Italians prefer to go to small markets for fresh meats and produce, and only eat the foods in season. A big table of American food.via Canva/PhotosFurther, the Italian government has much stricter rules about food consumption. Italy is one of the top food producers in the European Union, and the government has banned GMOs for commercial use. The Italian diet is healthier because it skips processed foods, added sugars, and refined carbs. Instead, it follows the Mediterranean approach, which supports heart health, better sleep, weight control, and mental well-being, while also reducing the risk of cancer and diabetes.On a deeper level, Italian people place a high value on food, and meal time isn’t something to be rushed but a time to enjoy a multi-course meal with friends and family. Americans have an on-the-go lifestyle, where meal time is what we fit in between working and relaxing in front of the TV. So, if Americans took a page and put food back in the center of their lives, it may help with their mental, physical, and social well-being.

More Americans are becoming parents at older ages. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the average age for women in the United States who have their first child is 27.5 years old. In another study from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), between 1990 and 2023, the fertility rate for women ages 35 to 39 increased 71%,. For women ages 40 to 44, the rate increased 127%.Yet, having kids after 35 is a unique experience. In a Reddit forum, member @rainybitcoin posed the question: "Parents who were over 35 when your kids were born—how is it now?" They went on to add, "What was it like being the 'old mom' or 'old dad' (or were you?) and what is it like now your kids are older?" Parents who had kids later in life offered their firsthand experience and advice on what it's really like. These are 15 of the most honest (and real) responses. Tired Episode 2 GIF by Friends Giphy "I had mine at 40/42. Now they are in their 20s and everything is fine. I still have strength to help them move into new flats or whatever. Only problem I had was in primary school when collecting my son and his friend shouted to him: 'Your grandad is here'." —@Key-Interaction-6281"I had my kids the same age you did. Mine are all still under 10. I've been called their grandmother a handful of times now, but I find it hilarious. I turn 49 later this year, and my youngest just finished kindergarten." —@Strawberrywaffles001 Mood Grandma GIF Giphy "I feel like a salmon that went upstream, spawned and is now so tired I'm happy to drift back downstream while my body decomposes. Maybe a bear will eat me if I'm lucky." —@spiteful-vengeance"It worked out very well. He is 20 now and in college and I just retired at 65. And it’s been such a wonderful part of my life. I think my wife feels the same way." —@No-Savings7821"38 and 42 when kids were born, 48 now, kids are 6 and 11. It's kind of heavenly. I sometimes wonder if I’m actually in heaven." —@Guitar-Nutt"My daughter was born just in time to help us celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. I was 40, my husband 42. Other than my husband once being mistaken for her grandfather while on a walk in Yosemite, our age was never an issue. I look younger than I am and my daughter definitely kept me active. I was the go to mom who took her and her friends to amusement parks and concerts. My husband and I took her on many vacations. By the time she was born, we were settled in our careers and financially able to provide her with experiences she wouldn’t have had when we were young. Today she is 32, happily married and thriving. We talk every day and have a great mother/daughter relationship. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t change a thing." —@OPMom21 minka kelly love GIF by Hallmark Channel Giphy "I was 39 and 42 when my kids were born; and I'm now 66 and they are 27 and 24. We were ten years older than the other parents in our childbirth class and our baby group. But my kids went to a preschool where there were lots of older parents -- I was probably the mean age of the moms there. It was in a community (Evanston, IL, suburb of Chicago) with lots of older parents. I was more of any outlier as my kids grew older, because we tended to be older than many of the parents. I used to joke that I didn't look old I actually was old. Or sometimes people thought I was younger because of the ages of my kids. One of the other parents told me Now most of the friends I grew up with are grandparents, even though none of their kids had kids young. I have a good relationship with both of my kids -- although it was strained at times when they were teens, particularly my eldest. I work hard at getting, staying healthy so I can be around for them for a long time. My own mom died when she was 50 and I was 20, so I've already made it past that frightening point on both sides of it. I didn't want my kids to be motherless children until they were well into adulthood. I'm not sure what else you want to know. I have two nieces who both had kids when they were older than 35 in San Francisco, which, I just read has the oldest mothers in the country. They are fine about it." —@here_and_there_their"I certainly was not ‘the old mom’ because like my peers, I got my career going first before having kids after 35 and then when my kids went to school, the other parents were also in their early 40s. We were all well educated and professional and so our kids attended a private school where younger parents would have been unusual." —@leatclowns Tired The Middle GIF by ABC Network Giphy "Here I am, ready to burst the "everything is amazing" bubble! ...Although I don't fit the brief 100%... I had my youngest at 34. But close enough? It's horrible compared to the kids I had in my early and mid 20s! I am healthy. I am fit and active. But there is NO comparison to how much more energy I had ~10 years ago! Please don't get me wrong! I love all of em to bits! All of them were planned and so very much wanted! But I have so much less energy, so much less patience,...like, there really are no words to describe it! The worst though, is when it comes to injuries. Since I am, and always was, very active - injuries do happen from time to time. That's just the way things go, when you're running, skiing, horse riding, biking,...,...In my 20s, that would be a sprain, some bruises or such... but now? I was out 6 weeks (!!!!) due to a stupid tumble in the snow! It wasn't even a bad fall! My body just isn't as flexible anymore, my reflexes aren't as fast anymore. I feel so sorry for my youngest, who will never meet the super active, high energy, up for anything person, that I was for my older two. I'm sorry folks, but there's a reason professional athletes mostly retire in their 30s. It's because your physical abilities start to decline. Even for professionals!" —@Alone_Lemon"I’m 48(m) my wife too, we have 11, 7, and nearly 3 year old. We are in the thick of it with trying to raise 3 kids, prime of careers, but yet worrying about saving for retirement at exactly the same time as saving for college. Don’t have time to feel old or tired, it’s all go around this place. The mostly grey haired wrinkly face guy I catch a glimpse of sometimes reminds me of our age, but luckily I spend more time looking at my much younger looking wife than myself. She on the other hand has the raw end of the deal. :)"—@ Realist1976 Border Patrol Europe GIF Giphy "I'm male - I was 41 when my daughter was born and 43 when my son was born. I was living in a big urban city, so 'older parents' weren't that uncommon. When I talk to younger people about having kids my advice is always the same: Have them when you are young. There is a biological reason a 25-year-old can stay up late and still get up for work in the morning. It's not for nightclubbing. It's for parenting infants & small children. By the time I was 18 my parents were in their mid-40s. They could still travel together and live life. You will feel you will never have enough money or enough time to have kids. So if you are in a relationship and want to have them, then have them." —@StoreSearcher1234"I had a easy time when I had my daughter at 19 yrs old. Not that easy when I had 2 sons back to back at 36 and 37. Everything was harder especially recovery. I had C Sections with all and i was running around and cleaning house when I got home with daughter. With sons it took weeks to recover. But I have to say the boys got easier as they got older and I’m proud to say we all lived thru it!" —@debbiedo2019"I do not know anyone who intentionally had kids before 35. We’re all doing great lol. However, my friends who had kids before 35 struggled with financial and relationship insecurity…" —@AdmirableCrab60 Aging Season 9 GIF by Friends Giphy "I was 40, everyone around me has had kids about the same age so socially it’s not a big deal, but personally I feel old and tired." —@strumthebuilding"I'm probably never going to meet my grandchildren. Other than that, things are pretty good, I still see both of my kids every week." —@blinkyknilb