Theodore Roosevelt as Trump precursor

President Trump claimed his inner Theodore Roosevelt when he recently posted one of TR's best lines on Facebook:

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually the man in the arena."

To which one can only say to the man in our arena: It's about time. Some of my National Review colleagues have noted accurately that Trump's "remake the world" second-term debut resembles that of Franklin Roosevelt. Other commentators have pointed to the ways in which Trump resembles Richard Nixon. But the most glaring likeness among presidents is that of President Trump to the Bull Moose. Though a century apart — TR served from 1901 to 1909 — these two chief executives have favored the same modus operandi: using unpredictability to amass power. And the record of Theodore Rex, as Edmund Morris titled his TR biography, bodes ill for both the economy and the Republican Party.

Tucker Carlson's recent castration of Texas senator Ted Cruz produced several notable moments, one of which came when Cruz asserted that the Bible commands Christians to support Israel — by which he meant the political entity established in 1948 as the State of Israel.

To many Christians of Arab origin, this interpretation of biblical writ is simultaneously amusing and frustrating, eliciting more questions than scripture can answer. As arguably the oldest community of Christians in the world, are they called upon to embrace anything that could be interpreted as "support" for Israel, even if that means misguided intervention that kills innocents and leads to their displacement and destruction? One need not cite canon to know that the answer is "no."

Were this an internal belief held widely by American politicians — affecting only their private lives and philanthropic habits — perhaps there would be little need for analysis. But this is not the case. Using specious affiliations between Christianity and Zionism, American pols eagerly enact policies that often prioritize Israeli aims over American.

But what of the impact of such policy on actual Christians in the Arab world? What is the practical result on this group, of the sum total of intervention, military exploits, and steadfast support of Israel — seemingly without question or reciprocal responsibility — taken by the US over the last hundred years and, in particular, over the last thirty years?

700-year-old sword dating back to Warsaw's founding still bears cross mark from blacksmith

A 700-year-old sword was recently reeled in by a fisherman in Poland — offering a rare glimpse into warfare in the Middle Ages.

The discovery was announced by the Capital Conservator of Monuments in Warsaw last month.

In a Facebook post, the department said the lucky angler found the sword in the Vistula River.

"It was supposed to be this big a fish - but it turned out to be this big a sword!" the post read.

"As you can see, the Vistula hides some real treasures."

The ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Serbs by a US-backed Croatian leader was premeditated, according to newly-uncovered files revealing the operation's planning. After the bloodshed subsided, Richard Holbrooke, a top US diplomat, assured him: "We said publicly... that we were concerned, but privately, you knew what we wanted."

August 4 marks the 30th anniversary of Operation Storm. Little known outside the former Yugoslavia, the military campaign unleashed a genocidal cataclysm that violently expelled Croatia's entire Serb population. Dubbed "the most efficient ethnic cleansing we've seen in the Balkans" by Swedish politician Carl Bildt, Croat forces rampaged UN-protected areas of the self-declared Serb Republic of Krajina, looting, burning, raping and murdering their way across the province. Up to 350,000 locals fled, many on foot, never to return. Meanwhile, thousands were summarily executed.

As these hideous scenes unfolded, UN peacekeepers charged with protecting Krajina watched without intervening. Meanwhile, US officials strenuously denied the horrifying massacres and mass displacement amounted to ethnic cleansing, let alone war crimes. NATO member state governments were far more interested in the "sophistication" of Zagreb's military tactics. One British colonel heading a UN observer mission in the area gushed, "whoever wrote that plan of attack could have gone to any NATO staff college in North America or Western Europe and scored an A-plus."

The Muslim Brotherhood began as a moral movement morphed into a political machine — then, through the writings of Qutb, into an ideological precursor to jihadist extremism.
In 1928, in the colonial garrison town of Ismailia, Egypt, a modest schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna planted the seed of a movement that would shape the future of political Islam across the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood began as a religious and charitable society, preaching moral reform and Islamic revival. But it quickly evolved into something far more ambitious: a political project with transnational reach and ideological rigidity.

Al-Banna's vision was clear from the beginning. Islam, he declared, was not just a religion but a "faith, a worship, a nation, and a nationality; a religion and a state." That fusion of mosque and state — recasting Islam as the complete and exclusive foundation for political and legal life — was the cornerstone of the Brotherhood's ideology. It was framed as a righteous alternative to what al-Banna saw as the corrosive Western influence infecting Egypt: secularism, materialism, and cultural decay.

But here's where the story gets more complicated and politically useful for its critics.

There's a lingering, controversial claim that the Suez Canal Company, then dominated by British and French colonial interests, provided financial support to al-Banna in the Brotherhood's formative years. Whether it was a small grant, a local endorsement, or a tacit nod from colonial administrators, the implication is serious: that the Brotherhood may have emerged not solely as an indigenous resistance to empire, but as a British-tolerated — if not British-facilitated — movement, designed to fragment the nationalist opposition and weaken secular or leftist currents like the Wafd Party.

There is no definitive proof to resolve this allegation. But the Brotherhood's early growth in a British-controlled company town, coupled with its initially non-threatening posture, gave enough rhetorical ammunition to its later enemies — chief among them: Gamal Abdel Nasser.

After the 1952 Free Officers coup, the Brotherhood initially found common cause with Nasser's military regime. Both wanted to eliminate the monarchy, both wanted to expel the British. But this alliance was doomed from the start. The Brotherhood pushed for an Islamic state; Nasser envisioned a secular, Arab nationalist republic. The Brotherhood's wide grassroots support unnerved the new regime, and by 1954, the movement was banned, its members imprisoned or executed, and its leadership driven underground.

This is when the British-funding allegation re-emerged — not just as gossip, but as a Nasserist narrative.

Ukraine and the Greek-Cypriot experience

London, Washington, and Moscow guaranteed Ukraine's future in the Budapest Memorandum (1994). Berlin, Paris, and Moscow guaranteed civil peace in Ukraine in the Minsk Agreements (2015).

Today, Kiev accuses Russia of treason, a claim that the facts contradict. On the contrary, it was the United Kingdom and the United States who, reviving an old imperial habit, organized the current war in order to plunge not only Russia, but also Germany, into a destructive conflict.

Hassan Hamadé returns to the guarantees offered by imperial powers, supposedly in the interests of Lebanon, Iraq, and Cyprus, but in reality to destroy them.

"Beware of anyone who thinks he is rich by accumulating promises from people he considers his friends." This ancient Arabic proverb applies to the current situation in Ukraine and, before it, in Greece and Cyprus.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the party of laissez-faire and free markets — known today as "classical liberals" — often pushed a political program that included the adoption of written constitutions. The old liberals — such as the American revolutionaries and French bourgeois reformers — thought that written constitutions would offer a substantial barrier to abuses of state power.

The constitutional program of the classical liberals is not to be confused with its underlying ideology — what is today generally called "libertarianism." Nonetheless, constitutionalism has been an important tactic favored by liberals/libertarians historically. That is, it was thought that written constitutions, as a means, would ensure liberal ends. The ideology of the classical liberals favored minimizing state power so that the non-state institutions — known as "society" — could grow and flourish free of state intervention.

Unfortunately, written constitutions have failed to achieve this goal. Throughout the new liberal states that arose from the late eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth century, central governments grew rapidly to achieve powers that would have been thought unthinkable even under the old monarchical regimes of Europe.

Hawaiian petroglyphs dating back at least a half-millennium are visible on Oahu for the first time in years, thanks to seasonal ocean swells that peel away sand covering a panel of more than two dozen images of mostly human-looking stick figures.

The petroglyphs are easy to spot during low tide when gentle waves ebb and flow over slippery, neon-green algae growing on a stretch of sandstone. This is the first time the entire panel of petroglyphs are visible since they were first spotted nine years ago by two guests staying at a bayside U.S. Army recreation center in Waianae, about an hour's drive from Honolulu.

Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner Glen Kila, who traces his lineage to the aboriginal families of this coastal Hawaii community, said he believes the resurfacing of the traditional marvels are his ancestors sending a message.

A study of genomes from ancient Siberian people shows genetic linkages with people living in Estonia, Finland and Hungary today.
Present-day speakers of Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian have substantial Siberian ancestry, a new study of ancient genomes finds. These roots likely spread westward from a group of people living in the forest steppes of the Altai Mountains of Central and East Asia 4,500 years ago.

Ancient DNA revealed that this group was patrilineal, or organized based on descent from fathers.

However, while ancient DNA can show where a group moved over time, it's challenging to use genetics to track language. So experts have noted that the results do not definitively prove a link between speakers of these languages and the ancient DNA pattern.

Written to be performed live, a medieval minstrel's jokes poked fun at the powerful

Troubadours, jesters, minstrels, bards: Whatever you choose to call them, these wandering entertainers captivated medieval Europeans for centuries. Medieval bards possessed imaginations so fertile, and wits so sharp, that Westerners still remember them long after their jokes and tall tales have faded from memory. Indeed, as Cambridge University and Girton College historian Dr. James Wade writes in his recent paper, published in The Review of English Studies, most of the words actually used by these troubadours have been forever lost; for instance, no one has found "a single medieval English manuscript with plausible connections to an actual medieval minstrel."

Yet if Wade's new paper is correct, there is a collection of newly discovered texts at the National Library of Scotland that may shed some light into this dark corner of the past. In addition to containing the earliest known example of the expression "red herring," this late 15th-century booklet, known as the Heege Manuscript, appears to record the repertoire of an entertainer from that period. If so, denizens of the 21st century can rest assured of at least one thing — six centuries ago, comedians had very similar senses of humor.