Obama has Iranian blood

American we knew and Kenyan we knew, but Iranian? Trust me, now we know. Let me explain. Iranians famously don’t like to fight. I’m not talking about actual killing—since its inception 34 years ago, the Islamic Republic has amply demonstrated that it has no qualms about that. No, I mean street fights. On a Naples or Medellin or Peshawar street, no one would think twice about engaging in fisticuffs in retaliation for a perceived offense but when an Iranian male feels insulted, his first reaction is to look around to make sure there are enough buddies nearby to restrain him and prevent him from jumping on the offender. When living in Iran, I used to see any number of these displays—two guys yelling bloody murder at each other and occasionally turning to the people subduing them to say “hold me, don’t let me hit him” (begir mano, nazar bezanam), as the last thing on their mind is to actually fight.

G8: Won’t someone open a couple of windows?

The air is so stale around the G-8 meeting, it almost smells like the cigar-smoke-filled rooms in the all-boys’ clubs of yore. Just as we still rely on fossil fuel (“fossil,” shouldn’t the very word scare us away?) and fight wars over it—killing an amazing number of people, with no one batting an eye—just as we build enough nuclear energy sites, shown catastrophe after catastrophe to be lethal, to give cancer to half the world population, we keep on trotting out workhorses that should have been put to pasture a while back. Even a village idiot understands that if he holds his hand to the flame, he’ll get burned. That’s called experience. But our leaders start every day anew, not having learned anything from anything.

Don’t do it, Bibi

After his awkward meeting at the White House, Netanyahu is more determined than ever to nuke Iran, even if Israel has to go it alone in view of Obama’s sensible reticence. I understand his fear of Iran. More anti-Semitic than Iranians, you die ( though for a while now, the feeling has been conveniently repackaged and presented as sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians). The present Iranian regime loathes Israel and might well attempt to bomb it out of existence the day it finally has a nuclear weapon, so Netanyahu voices legitimate fear when he says that he “will never allow my people to live in the shadow of annihilation.”

Memo to casting director: Get me an Obama

Or who will I vote for? When the present Obama appeared on the scene, he was pitch perfect. A casting director looking for the first black U.S. president couldn’t have made a better choice. Looks? Check. (Denzel Washington has too much of an overbite, Will Smith’s ears are too big, Forrest Whitaker has a lazy eye. Obama? Tall, fit, excellent posture, great features.) Brains? Check. (Remember that when he appeared at the Democratic Convention in 2007, having brains was not yet considered a liability and “professorial” was not yet an insult.)

Thank you Mr. Putin, I am so relieved

For a while there, you had me worried. I’d been reading about your plans to retire from politics, to ponder more essential questions such as the importance of spirituality, our relation to nature, our place in the universe. I’d heard your interview about your modest datcha recently acquired near Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana. You said, if the translation served you right, that you wanted to spend your remaining days in meditation and among books in the shadow of the writer of “War and Peace,” deriving inspiration from his moral thinking and asceticism. You hadn’t lost your sense of humor, though, nor your justly celebrated manliness, when you added that you would also spend much time outdoors, riding horses as well as your beloved motorcycles, wrestling bears, chopping wood and rowing on a nearby lake.