Socializing Error

On this day:
1520
Spanish conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés fight their way out of Tenochtitlan.
1559
King Henry II of France is mortally wounded in a jousting match against Gabriel de Montgomery.
1688
The Immortal Seven issue the Invitation to William (continuing the English rebellion from Rome), which would culminate in the Glorious Revolution.
1905
Albert Einstein publishes the article On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, in which he introduces special relativity.
1908
The Tunguska event occurs in remote Siberia.
1934
The Night of the Long Knives, Adolf Hitler’s violent purge of his political rivals in Germany, takes place.
1971
The crew of the Soviet Soyuz 11 spacecraft was killed when their air supply escapes through a faulty valve.
1997
The United Kingdom transfers sovereignty over Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China.

***

"IRAN HAS REQUESTED A MEETING. IT WILL TAKE PLACE TOMORROW IN DOHA!” Trump said in screaming caps in a social media post on Monday morning.
Buuuuttt.....
Qatar’s foreign ministry says US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are in Doha, but that no meeting is currently scheduled with Iranian officials.
Iran may be the first to win a fight after being knocked out.

***

Roberto Serrano, who is the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University, has detected a massive fraud in one of the classes he teaches, ECON 1170, an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics. He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam, making it the biggest known scandal at Brown and in the entire Ivy League.
The agent was AI.

***

How is a chronic defect in a program theoretically unreasonable and mathematically flawed--like Social Security-- suddenly an 'urgent' problem?

***

Socializing Error

Veronique de Rugy writes that the chief problem with government officials investing taxpayer dollars isn’t the inevitable economic inefficiency of such ‘investments’; it’s their moral corruption.

The problem is not merely that the government makes for a lousy investor. Government investing changes the moral relationship between risk, reward, and accountability.

In markets, investment is disciplined by consequences. Private investors deploy capital that belongs to them or that’s voluntarily entrusted to them. If they make bad bets, they lose money, reputation, clients, and sometimes even their careers. Prices communicate information. Profits reward value creation. Losses punish mistakes.

This discipline is central to what makes markets work. Government, however, invests under entirely different rules – rules that virtually eliminate discipline.

Government officials allocate resources extracted through taxation or borrowing backed by taxpayers. If projects fail, these officials rarely bear meaningful personal consequences. The losses, spread among unwilling taxpayers throughout the state, are socialized. The incentives, instead, are political. Success is often measured not by financial returns but by press releases, ribbon cuttings, strategic narratives, or vague, untestable claims about resilience, competitiveness, and national greatness.

Failure in government results in expansion, and they have quickly moved into 'softer' areas, like long -visioned evolution, virtue, and esthetics.

Trump's recent 'stakes' in companies perceived as nationally important should start a national evaluation of such government hubris. Ditto the government's ridiculous assessment of technological 'safety.'

AI might well be a crucial component of future culture and animosity, but a cold, rational technology is much more of a threat to governments than to the poor working guy.

Consensus

On this day:

1613
The Globe Theatre in London, England burns to the ground.
1956

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 is signed, officially creating the United States Interstate Highway System.
1974
Isabel Perón is sworn in as the first female President of Argentina. Her husband, President Juan Peron, had delegated responsibility due to weak health and died two days later.
1974
Mikhail Baryshnikov defects from the Soviet Union to Canada while on tour with Bolshoi Ballet.
1995
Space Shuttle program: STS-71 Mission (Atlantis) docks with the Russian space station Mir for the first time.

***

“[16th century Grand Duke of Tuscany] Cosimo I de’ Medici supported art because he worried about getting into heaven as a rich man. I wish our guilty billionaires would support great classical art instead of stupid social causes.”--John Cochrane, economist at Stanford University,

***

Jill Biden's former husband was arrested for murdering his second wife. No further info is forthcoming, and the story has not pushed the Guthrie disappearance off the front page.

***

The birthright citizenship decision is expected this week.

***


Consensus

Every once in a while, when the world is bound by silliness and stupidity, it is worth hearing a smart guy sensibly explain an important thing. It is calming and edifying. Here is a section of Crichton's address to the D.C. Press Corps on a basic science concept.

"In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

...(An example is puerperal fever of pregnancy.)... One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them.

In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management.

In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the “pellagra germ.” The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory. Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called “Goldberger’s filth parties.” Nobody contracted pellagra. The consensus continued to disagree with him

South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology—until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2 . Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way." --from Crichton's Aliens Cause Global Warming lecture

Sunday/Versus the World

 

On this day:
1776
American Revolutionary War: Thomas Hickey, Continental Army private and bodyguard to General George Washington, is hanged for mutiny and sedition.
1807
Second British invasion of the Río de la Plata; John Whitelock lands at Ensenada on an attempt to recapture Buenos Aires and is defeated by the locals.
1896
An explosion in the Newton Coal Company’s Twin Shaft Mine in Pittston City, Pennsylvania results in a massive cave-in that kills 58 miners.
1914
Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria and his wife Sophie are assassinated in Sarajevo by young Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip, the casus belli of World War I.
1919
The Treaty of Versailles is signed in Paris, formally ending World War I between Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, the United States and allies on the one side and Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other side.
1969
Stonewall Riots begin in New York City marking the start of the Gay Rights Movement.
1987
For the first time in the military history, a civilian target was attacked by chemical weapons when Iraqi warplanes dropped mustard gas bombs on the Iranian town of Sardasht in rwo separate bombing rounds, on four residential areas.
1989
The 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević delivers the Gazimestan speech at the site of the historic battle, which is later interpreted as foreshadowing the Yugoslav Wars. 600 years.
1994
Members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult release sarin gas in Matsumoto, Japan; 7 people are killed, 660 injured.
2005
War in Afghanistan: Three U.S. Navy SEALs, 16 American Special Operations Forces soldiers, and an unknown number of Taliban insurgents are killed

***

"People talk about capitalism and socialism and communism. There’s only two kinds of economic systems: the market-driven and the government-directed. That’s it! The more you move toward a state-directed economy, the less efficient and more corrupt it becomes."--Smith

***

Psychology studies say one of the strongest predictors of everyday happiness isn’t income, status, or success — it’s the ability to be present in an ordinary moment without wishing it were something different. 

Vagueness criticisms aside, this is more interesting than it sounds. Is disinterest, imagination, idealism, or fantasy involved? Does engagement show a vital, rewarding quality?

***

In 2014, marketing veteran Amanda Lacaze took over the nearly bankrupt Australian mining company Lynas. Over a 12-year tenure marked by aggressive cost-cutting, operational fixes in Malaysia and crucial debt restructurings, she broke through China’s market monopoly and transformed the firm into a vital Western rare-earths powerhouse. Its stock price is now 15 times higher than when she arrived.

***

Sunday/Versus the World

Jesus said to his apostles:
“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,
and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
and whoever does not take up his cross
and follow after me is not worthy of me.
Whoever finds his life will lose it,
and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

A harsh gospel that unlinks us with the worldly qualities that we recognize today: Family, tribalism, identity, and self-determination. And one that the evangelists repeated. It demands more than self-denial and sacrifice, a difficult message in any land. It's a spiritual demand to put the world aside.

In a violent, commercial world, that is a difficult task.

Thomas à Kempis wrote that if there were a better way to salvation than suffering, Christ would have told us.

The Vatican softens this gospel, viewing it through a hierarchical 'quality' lens, such as overlooking nepotism as a filter for leadership when better options are available.

This is Herrick close to the topic:


To Keep a True Lent

Is this a fast, to keep
The larder lean?
And clean
From fat of veals and sheep ?

Is it to quit the dish
Of flesh, yet still
To fill
The platter high with fish ?

Is it to fast an hour,
Or ragg’d to go,
Or show
A downcast look and sour?

No; ‘tis a fast to dole
Thy sheaf of wheat,
And meat,
Unto the hungry soul.

It is to fast from strife,
From old debate
And hate ;
To circumcise thy life.

To show a heart grief-rent ;
To starve thy sin,
Not bin ;
And that’s to keep thy Lent.

Robert Herrick 1648

SatStats

On this day:
1759
General James Wolfe begins the siege of Quebec.
1844
Joseph Smith, Jr., founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, and his brother Hyrum Smith, are murdered by a mob at the Carthage, Illinois jail.
1905
Battleship Potemkin uprising: sailors start a mutiny aboard the Battleship Potemkin, denouncing the crimes of autocracy, demanding liberty and an end to war.
1941
Romanian governmental forces, allies of Nazi Germany, launch one of the most violent pogroms in Jewish history in the city of Iaşi, (Romania), resulting in the murder of at least 13,266 Jews.
1950
The United States decides to send troops to fight in the Korean War.
1954
The world’s first nuclear power station opens in Obninsk, near Moscow.

***

John Stewart said you should not have to be brave to be a comic.

***

The Silurian Hypothesis asks: if an industrial civilization arose millions of years ago — say, during the Devonian or the Paleocene — would we find any trace of it today?

Ocean crust, where much sediment settles, recycles every 170 million years or so. On land, surface preservation is even rarer. “The current area of urbanization is less than 1% of the Earth’s surface,” the researchers note, and ancient surfaces that remain intact are scarcer still.

So aliens--or early great earthly civilizations--can never be disproved.

***

There are front porch concerts in Morningside this summer. Shows are July 24, Aug. 21 and Sept. 18. The September show begins at 6 p.m. Others start at 7 p.m. Corner of Jancey and Hampton.

***

Commonplace opened in the old Georgie's on Monday

***

New Data Suggests Social Security Cut Benefits “by 30.3%” for New Retirees as Trust Fund Collapse Accelerates

***

SatStats

China’s consumer spending dropped for the first time since Covid

*

As many as 30,000 English-language books have been written about Donald Trump since 2016.

*

Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, who has accumulated over 1,110 days across five spaceflights and who is now, by the same calculation, approximately 0.025 seconds younger than people born at the same time as him.

*

10 years after Brexit, Britain has had 7 PMs, a population decline, and a 6%-8% shrinkage in its economy.

*

O2, Trees and Water:
Prochlorococcus, the smallest known photosynthetic organism, is so abundant that, by NOAA’s account, it alone produces up to a fifth of the oxygen in the entire biosphere. That is a larger share than all the world’s tropical rainforests combined.

These organisms do much the same thing a tree does. They use sunlight to turn carbon dioxide and water into food, releasing oxygen as a by-product.

A mature forest consumes almost all the oxygen it makes. Yadvinder Malhi, an ecosystem scientist at the University of Oxford, has put the Amazon’s net contribution to atmospheric oxygen at close to zero.

*

Fast Food
From a government survey (why the government would pay for this is unexplained), in the peculiar "most considered" field:
McDonald's was the No. 1 "most-considered" restaurant for both males and females, as well as among age groups 18-29, 30-44, and 45-64. People 65 or older said they'd most consider Wendy's as a fast-food dining option.
McDonald's was first with 39.6%, Chick-fil-A came in second at 35.5%, while Wendy's was third with 33.2%.

McDonald's was the No. 1 "most-considered" restaurant for both males and females, as well as among age groups 18-29, 30-44, and 45-64. People 65 or older said they'd most consider Wendy's as a fast-food dining option.

The survey also ranked America's top burger, sandwich, and taco spots.

Five Guys was America's favorite burger (15.5%), followed closely by Burger King (15%) and In-N-Out Burger (12.1%). Wendy's took fourth place (10.2%), while McDonald's came in fifth place (8.7%). Subway was selected as having the best deli sandwich (22.9%) and Taco Bell the best taco/burrito (30.3%).

For French fries, McDonald's earned 39.2% of the vote, followed by Five Guys, with just 9% of the vote.

Chick-fil-A was most people's favorite chicken spot (25.3%), while Pizza Hut earned first place for people's preferred pizza (19.1%). Chick-fil-A was the top-ranked fast-food brand based on quality, while McDonald's did not make the top 10.

Wendy's (21.6%) ranked No. 1 based on value, while McDonald's came in at No. 8 (12.5%). i

30% eat fast food at least once a week, according to the report.

Among weekly fast-food eaters, 55% are male and 45% are female; 49% are middle-income (earning 75%-200% of the median income); and 51% are younger than 45 years old, the study found."Value and discounts are the biggest drivers for weekly fast-food diners, followed by a clean dining area," the report said.

*

The U.S. national debt crossed $39 trillion on March 18, 2026. The U.S. had already suffered credit downgrades from all three major ratings agencies — S&P in 2011, Fitch in 2023, and Moody’s in May 2025. The dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves had fallen to 56.9%, its lowest level since 1995 and down from a peak of 72% in 2001.

American Hezbollah

 On this day:

1284
The legendary Pied Piper leads 130 children out of Hamelin, Germany
1409
Western Schism: The Roman Catholic church is led into a double schism as Petros Philargos is crowned Pope Alexander V after the Council of Pisa, joining Pope Gregory XII in Rome and Pope Benedict XII in Avignon.
1848
End of the June Days Uprising in Paris.
1917
The first U.S. troops arrive in France to fight alongside Britain and France against Germany in World War I.
1948
The Western allies begin an airlift to Berlin after the Soviet Union blockades West Berlin.
1948
William Shockley files the original patent for the grown junction transistor, the first bipolar junction transistor.
1996
Irish Journalist Veronica Guerin is shot in her car while in traffic in the outskirts of Dublin

***

“Watch out for allies and creditors losing confidence, the loss of its reserve currency status, the selling of its debt assets, and the weakening of its currency, especially relative to gold.”--Dalio in an article comparing the US adventure in Hormuz to Britain's inflection moment in Suez.

***

A rather startling assertion from Adam Tooze in his book, The Deluge. "Unless the political leaders of Europe could shake their populations out of their usual 'political thoughtlessness', Hitler warned in 1928, the 'threatened global hegemony of the North American continent' would reduce them all to the status of Switzerland or Holland." The other Axis powers felt the same. He writes, "the future dominance of American capitalist democracy, that was the common factor impelling Hitler, Stalin, the Italian Fascists and their Japanese counterparts to such radical action. ... Whatever comforting, domesticated fantasies their followers may have projected onto them, the leaders of Fascist Italy, National Socialist Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union all saw themselves as radical insurgents against an oppressive and powerful world order."

***

A British tabloid reports a man woke from a coma after a horrific car crash thinking he was Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey and speaking fluent French - despite only having a basic grasp from school. So French is pretty easy--maybe inside us all--and can sort of be released by a blow to the head.

***




American Hezbollah

"Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."--From Abraham Lincoln's Lyceum Address, delivered to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, on January 27, 1838, titled "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions". He was 28.

Wars in Europe are often distinguished by time, like decades or centuries. Someone casually questioning how the wars in history--countless and purposeless and unending--could possibly occur might well start here. Who wants this confrontation? Iran wants to obliterate Israel, and Israel does not want to be obliterated. Certainly, Israel's citizens don't want to be obliterated. But do Iran's citizens want to risk death to obliterate Israel?

This conflict has been simmering, with the occasional outbreak of murder, torture, and despair, for decades. This is beginning to look more and more like Iran has strapped on the traditional Middle East dress, the suicide vest. And Israel will not have some unresolved conflict with its sworn enemy. They will not take a standing eight count or stagger away, bloodied and damaged, having "learned their lesson". If they fail, they will take the entire Middle East with them to perdition.

Ahab to Ahab.

How could reasonable men reach this point? How could leaders of innocent civilians allow confrontations to progress to threaten themselves--even the whole world--with destruction?

The history of man has been a conflict between those who work and those who would rather steal from those who work than work themselves. Those who work gradually built up their defenses so that those who would not work would find stealing others' production too dangerous.

Enter ideology--philosophy, nationalism, and religion--that taught that stealing from others was just. And the death of others was deserved, even demanded, even inevitable, and that suicide was infinitely superior to certain mundane life situations. The tremendous advantages of the cohesion of family and community have become distorted and dangerous.

Madmen, ideologues, and morons will have their moment. And, despite Lincoln's confidence, even America may not be safe.

Your SpaceX IPO

On this day:

1876
Battle of the Little Bighorn and the death of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer.
1906
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania millionaire Harry Thaw shoots and kills prominent architect Stanford White.
1910
The United States Congress passes the Mann Act, which prohibits interstate transport of females for “immoral purposes”; the ambiguous language would be used to selectively prosecute people for years to come.
1950
The Korean War begins with the invasion of South Korea by North Korea.
1960
Two cryptographers working for the United States National Security Agency left for vacation to Mexico, and from there defected to the Soviet Union.

***

"The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition." --G K Chesterton

***


At least 164 people have been killed and 971 injured after Venezuela’s most powerful earthquake in more than a century, according to the country’s acting president. The 7.5 magnitude quake struck just 40 seconds after a 7.2 magnitude foreshock. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable, and the disaster is likely widespread,” the USGS warned — estimating that the death toll could climb to at least 10,000, and potentially 100,000.


***

Astronauts coming home from long stays on the International Space Station have, for years, described a strange perceptual aftertaste: a sense of watching their own lives from a half-step outside the frame. They sit at dinner with family and feel like a guest. They drive on a familiar street and feel like they’re piloting it. The room is loud, and they are in it, but a part of them is hovering near the ceiling, taking notes.

***

Your SpaceX IPO

The SpaceX IPO has given a booster rocket to a very virulent popular myth, the Zero-Sum Game of Personal Finance. It states that Elon Musk's grotesque financial worth is actually yours. This stunning declaration is usually followed by the equally unsupportable, "He didn't earn it, you did." (By 'you,' the professional pot-stirrer and amateur economist does not mean the guy working in the dark underground in a mineshaft or the woman working a 12-hour shift in an E.R. with drunks, criminals, and armed illiterates. No, she means the drunks, criminals, and illiterates. Only circumstances have prevented them from issuing their own IPO.)

Fortunately, the selfless politician is there to balance the scales.

It would be different if such a redistributionist fever arose in a kind, burning heart, but, as history has shown, envy works better, especially when bred with revenge. So, not only is inequality unjust, but it is someone's fault. And he will pay in more than coin.

Just as original sin begs for spiritual shepherds, and chaos demands divine rights and hierarchies, inequality cries out for retribution, often against the most unlikely criminals against humanity. Pensioners and skinflint retirees, the wide-eyed daughters of the tsar, the well-dressed passerby--all have unknowingly created or inherited their malicious part in the world's imbalance. 

Like 'slavery reparations', where people who have no connection to slavery are taxed to give their money to people who were never slaves, it is faith-based. And in our world of ubiquitous information, any cult can have its day.

Report from Hell's Heart

 On this day:

109
Roman emperor Trajan inaugurates the Aqua Traiana, an aqueduct that channels water from Lake Bracciano, 40 km north-west of Rome.
637
The Battle of Moira is fought between the High King of Ireland and the Kings of Ulster and Dalriada. It is the largest battle in Irish history. The high point of Irish warfare.
1374
A sudden outbreak of St. John’s Dance causes people in the streets of Aachen, Germany, to experience hallucinations and begin to jump and twitch uncontrollably until they collapse from exhaustion. In the modern day, this is called Middle East Negotiations.
1916
World War I: The Battle of the Somme begins with a week-long artillery bombardment on the German Line.
1947
Kenneth Arnold makes the first widely reported UFO sighting near Mount Rainier, Washington.

***

Equality of outcomes or opportunity is the hope of simple denial--or worse, ambition.
Equality of permission, in contrast, is quite feasible. Achieving in practice something close to such equality requires only that the state abandon all efforts to dispense privileges.--McClosky

***

The socialist success in New York yesterday does not simply rearrange the landscape of political personalities, it resurrects the age-old question of the competence of the agent of democracy, the voter.

***

Stephanie Hockridge is still not in jail.

***

The Five Eyes cybersecurity alliance, which includes intelligence agencies from the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, warned that AI models capable of taking down businesses and governments are mere months away. But the assumed global government-business conspiracy has control of all this, right? Right?

***  

According to the DSA website, there are about 95,000 dues-paying DSA

members. That's the size of the American Institute of Architects.

***

France-based Prix Versailles announced this week that PIT was named to its World’s Most Beautiful Airports list, joining only six other airports from around the globe. The honor is one of the most prestigious architecture and design recognitions in the world, presented in association with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, better known as UNESCO. PIT is one of only two airports in the U.S. to make the list.

***

Report from Hell's Heart

"Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!"

                                                    *

Fight for peace. Buy more, save more. We blockade your ports; no, we blockade our own ports. Our world reverberates with Orwellian weirdness, but nowhere as much as the Middle East, where the intensity of feelings overrides all logic and practicality. Iran has had the very purpose of its government removed by the American air attack. The nuclear destruction of the hated Israelis is no longer possible, and the inability to recreate the circumstances necessary to attempt it again has been revealed.

Now Iran is fighting off its back, violating ceasefires, and allowing Israel to rationalize restarting Iran's punishment. Iran must be convincing even the dithering Press of the danger they present. Iran's willingness to suffer for an unachievable goal should be alarming to all. But their enemies are paralyzed by success. Battered, leaderless, smoldering in smoking defeat, Iran arrives at the negotiating table trim, powered, cologned, and with a condescending smile, like Caesar requesting his daily calendar after his final wound. 

If anything, it proves Trump's point and justifies his actions. Iran is beyond all restraint in its obsession. The sensible argument that Iran would not destroy the Straits of Hormuz because that would destroy their own economy and their own people clearly does not apply.

Conniving Israel may be the only reasonable player in the field: Iran cannot be hurt too much.

Ahabism is not in the OED, so we are not constrained by a definition. Our definition of Ahabism: narrow, focused, monomaniacal, tyrannical, homicidal, and single-minded pursuit of a goal that results in self-destruction and risks the ruination of all.

Ahab's destruction is probably deserved, but he does take the Pequod with him.