Nagib G. Mimassi

@fmakhzoumi @hadimashmoushi @TheEconomist The problem is that Hezbollah is an occupation force that won’t disband gracefully, and the government is not strong enough to do it by force.

في مقالي في @TheEconomist، أطرح خطة حاسمة من خمس خطوات لاستعادة بيروت، تبدأ بإعلانها مدينة خالية من السلاح وفرض سلطة الدولة الكاملة على الأمن. In my op-ed for @TheEconomist, I put forward a decisive 5-step plan to reclaim Beirut,starting with declaring it a weapons-free city and enforcing the state’s full authority over security.

@thematidog @DanBurmawy @LauraPh27961838 Never witnessed what you are saying

In my modest experience with Lebanese Christians, I found that many of them are debilitatingly antisemitic in a medieval way. They would rather pay out of pocket the money they don't have, just to see another Jew hurt, rather than look after the future and prosperity of their children.

I lived for 15 years in Lebanon among Maronite Christians. Over the years, I built deep relationships with thousands of them due to the nature of my work. The systematic Islamization of the Lebanese mentality did not manage to turn them against Israel. The absolute majority of Lebanese Christians love Israel and wish they could separate from both Sunnis and Shias and join Israel in building a brighter future. Those Lebanese Christians who embrace the Islamic narrative and hostility toward Israel are communists, useful idiots across geographies, or followers of Michel Aoun, a Christian leader who betrayed Lebanon and helped save Hezbollah in 2005. Tens of Christian families in southern Lebanon personally expressed to me their regret for not leaving for Israel before its withdrawal in 2000. As long as Christians in Lebanon remain part of this failed project called Lebanon, they will remain trapped. They must separate from Islam, both Sunni and Shia, and rebuild a Christian nation. Before this happens, nothing will work, and a peace treaty with Israel would be a hoax.

@elonmusk Good engineering is magic, a visionary CEO that understands how technology works and connects to his vision produces 1,000,000 X the magic.

Big difference

@Naji_Hayek Do you want a new Tal el Zaatar?

هذا مجمع البيال المؤهل لاستقبال النازحين اللبنانيين، لماذا نراه مقفلاً ؟

@JebBush A much needed wake up call for the comatose in Europe and in the western media.

It does speak for itself

@NewSamawal @JY_LeDrian C’est une réalisation très tardive

C’est vous qui avez choisi l’Iran contre le Liban, @JY_LeDrian

@pmddomingos @Marian_L_Tupy The question that puzzles me is why ?

@Marian_L_Tupy Communism never collapsed in academia. It became more entrenched with every generation. And academia is very well insulated from the real world.

"All disciplines showed leftward movement between 1990 and 2024." So, the collapse of communism resulted in academia turning MORE left-wing. I welcome intelligent explanations as to why that may have been the case. link.springer.com/article/10.100…

@EylonALevy We should not thank before it is mission complete. However we should be very thankful that the world is waking up, and this will allow the mission to be compete.

The European Union is waking up to news that the Iranian regime has missiles that can reach the whole of Western Europe. It should say THANK YOU to the United States and Israel for destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons program and obliterating its ballistic missile industry.

@TonyBouloss Good cop, Bad cop

⚠️ كل من يراهن على نبيه بري وبقايا "الحرس القديم" في الدولة على أنهم قادرون على التغيير فإنه يبني أوهاماً. 🔴 نبيه بري هو ركيزة المنظومة نفسها التي تحكم لبنان منذ أكثر من 40 عامًا، وهو جزء عضوي من الدولة العميقة التي تشكّل الحليف الاستراتيجي لحزب الله، لا وسيطًا بينه وبين الدولة. 🔴 العلاقة بين بري وحزب الله ليست علاقة ظرفية ولا تكتيكية، بل علاقة بنيوية ثابتة. هما وجهان لعملة واحدة داخل منظومة السلطة نفسها. 🔴 لذلك، الرهان على أن يأتي التغيير عبر هذه الطبقة أو عبر أحد رموزها هو رهان عبثي وساذج سياسيًا. 🔴 التغيير الحقيقي يبدأ فقط بإسقاط كامل الطبقة التي حكمت لبنان طوال أربعة عقود، لا بإعادة تدويرها ولا بتجميل صورتها ولا بتسويقها كبديل إصلاحي. #لبنان_لا_يريد_الحزب

@MarioNawfal The problem is not why Elon owns to much but why why the 53% own so little

🇺🇸 Bernie Sanders slams Elon: "Elon Musk owns more than the bottom 53% of households combined." Extreme leftists love preaching about other people's money… but you’ll never see them empty their own pockets for “the people.” x.com/ThePatriotOasi…

@davidsenra @pmarca x.com/mimassi/status…

Marc Andreessen (@pmarca): Airbnb could have been boutique booking software. Uber could have been taxi dispatch software. Tesla could have been self-driving software. They decided to take over the entire industry instead: "Silicon Valley between 1950 and 2010 was primarily just in the tools business. You'd build a tool like an operating system or a disk drive, sell it to people, and they'd figure out what to do with it. Then something changed. Alternate universe Airbnb is just boutique booking software. A tiny little business building spreadsheet software. But Brian Chesky decided: we're going to go into the hospitality business and compete with hotels directly. Uber and Lyft in the old world were just taxi dispatch software. In the new world, they're full transportation providers. Tesla in the old world would have just been software for self-driving cars. In the new world, it builds the entire car. Facebook, same thing. Prior to Facebook, if you built online ad software, you were selling it to media companies. Mark said: no. We're just going to beat the media company. We're going to build the entire thing. That was the pivot point when the Valley's ambitions went from just building tools to going directly into incumbent industries. And then AI makes that crystal clear. The winning AI companies are raising billions, tens of billions, in some cases hundreds of billions of dollars. The old world of $10,000,000 or $50,000,000 — where VCs tap out — is just not relevant anymore."

@davidsenra @pmarca Timeless principle. “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” — Mark Twain In business: majority = status quo. Great founders and great investors don’t optimize within the existing system. They rewrite it.

Timeless principle. “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” — Mark Twain In business: majority = status quo. Great founders and great investors don’t optimize within the existing system. They rewrite it.

@Rainmaker1973 💯

Thoughts?

@a16z @vishalmisra Brilliant

The Einstein Test for AGI. @vishalmisra: “You take an LLM and train it on pre-1916 physics and see if it can come up with the theory of relativity.” “If it does, then we have AGI.” “It’s a high bar, but we should have high bars.” “At the time of Einstein, there were a lot of clues that Newtonian mechanics, there was something missing.” “But until Einstein came up with a new representation of the spacetime continuum, we were stuck.” “If you had a model that just looked at correlations and such... it would not have come up with the beautiful equation that Einstein came up with.” Vishal Misra with @martin_casado

@pmddomingos Diffusion models will start to replace transformers

My advice: use tensor-logic.org

@a16z Talent attracts talent

"It's like being dropped into a zone of shocking competence." Marc Andreessen on working at one of Elon Musk’s companies: "Everybody is like ultra competent... If they're not, Elon sniffs it out and fires them." "The best engineers in the world want to work for him because he's the one CEO like this who's able to work with them as a peer." "So he just has this incredible positive selection where the smartest people in the world want to work for him and anybody who can't cut it gets fired." "The world sees this as raw aggression." "But it's beyond that. It's a very systematic way of optimizing these companies to be able to take on these profound challenges and then being able to actually solve all the problems... at a speed that's just completely unmatched." @pmarca with @davidsenra

@pmddomingos And problems is that a large number of Europeans are not aware of their decline

Europe is the sick man of the world: peterturchin.substack.com/p/sick-man-eur…

Letter to @EmmanuelMacron Mr. President, I salute your diplomatic efforts and your sincere commitment to preventing Lebanon from sinking into chaos. Your exchanges with President Joseph Aoun, Prime Minister Salam, and Parliament Speaker Berri demonstrate a genuine desire for de-escalation. However, I fear that direct negotiations with a Lebanese government that does not hold the monopoly on decisions of peace and war are doomed to failure. Hezbollah is militarily and politically far more powerful than the State itself. Motivated by an expansionist religious fervor that aspires to create an Islamic order extending beyond Lebanese borders and to annihilate the State of Israel — an objective inscribed in its ideology and its charter — Hezbollah will not view any ceasefire as an end in itself, but only as a tactical pause. This will allow it to reorganize, rearm, and resume its “divine struggle.” Any agreement will be respected only as long as it suits them, then renounced as soon as it becomes convenient, in accordance with the principle of taqiyya. The Mar Mikhael agreement concluded in 2006 with former President Michel Aoun is the perfect illustration: Hezbollah obtained political legitimacy without ever contributing to the establishment of the rule of law, because that would have meant the end of its parallel army. Estimates indicate that Hezbollah has approximately 80,000 fighters ready to die for their cause, facing a Lebanese army of only 60,000 men, of whom 20,000 are Shiites, a significant portion of whom could abandon their ranks in the event of direct confrontation. Poorly paid and ideologically unmotivated soldiers will never prevail against 80,000 to 90,000 ultra-fanaticized militiamen. Before any mediation, one must coldly analyze each party’s BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement) and put oneself in the other’s shoes. What would you do if you were Benjamin Netanyahu? You would likely fight until the complete annihilation of Hezbollah, because you know that a simple ceasefire would give it time to prepare for a new offensive. And if a future Israeli Prime Minister were less determined, Israel would risk the unthinkable. Totalitarian religious ideologies do not change through the signing of a treaty. For Hezbollah, it is victory, taqiyya, or death — never surrender. As for President Joseph Aoun, an upright and honorable man, he probably knows that the only lasting solution to free Lebanon requires the complete elimination of Hezbollah and its ideology. He will never have the political courage to say so publicly, because he currently lacks the means. France, Lebanon’s historic friend, could play a decisive role by providing him with concrete assistance in this mission: massive reinforcement of the national army, international pressure, and uncompromising political support. Without the full and complete restoration of Lebanese sovereignty over its entire territory, any ceasefire will be nothing more than a parenthesis before the next cycle of violence. It is very important to note that the end of Hezbollah is not a threat to the Lebanese Shiite community — quite the contrary: it is their only hope of salvation. Freed from this militia that has dragged them for decades into devastating wars in the service of Iran, they will finally be able to live in peace, rebuild the South, and reclaim their place within a sovereign and prosperous Lebanese State.

🚨🇱🇧🇮🇱 BREAKING, EXCLUSIVE: Lebanese-Israeli talks in Paris fall apart; Israel scoffs at Macron offer, calling it unserious. According to multiple sources in each of the countries involved, the offer placed on the table yesterday in Paris largely regurgitates terms agreed upon in the ceasefire agreement of November 2024, and Israel is “not interested.” Hence why the Americans and French have now largely retreated, palms up. The issue? Every three to four weeks, hand-in glove proposals - that have included generous resources and funding - go stale by changing facts on the ground. Today Hezbollah members are being forced north of the Litani river, hiding in mixed sect and Christian areas, where helpless disenchanted neighbourhoods, like the Armenian enclave of Bourj Hammond, are sitting ducks. Meanwhile, the supposedly neutral Lebanese Armed Forces are still 40% made up of Shiites, whose loyalties are fast evolving with more violence. So fears are for a remake of the civil war of 1975-1990, unless very decisive actions are taken immediately. Sources on the ground point to Commander of the Army, Rudolph Haykal, being the real obstacle to trust and credibility, having claimed that over 95% of the Hezbollah depots and assets had been disposed of. This claim is laughable, as seen by the realities and results of Hezbollah’s newly launched attack on Israel. “How can you say job done when there was an active Hezbollah drone factory still operational in the Bekaa?” Ironically, nobody is blaming the Lebanese forces themselves, but rather Haykal is so fearful of being decisive, and President Aoun is shielding him. Israelis know they can’t finish this war alone should Hezbollah spread into non-Shiite locations to launch attacks, and attracting a global crisis when they are forced to hit Christian, Sunni and Druze locations. Just as Iran wants to hold strategic assets like the Strait of Hormuz hostage, Hezbollah wants to hold Lebanese neighbourhoods hostage when clearly the majority of the population is against them. So this conflict may get very ugly and chaotic, quickly. What’s the path forward for Israel to accept a new ceasefire, before entering a peace deal along the lines of what was proposed in Paris? All (or most) of the most popular leaders of the biggest sects - Geagea, Berri, Hariri, and Joumblatt - need to immediately call a meeting with President Aoun and PM Nawaf Salam and demand: 1) The appointment of a new Commander of the Army. 2) The beginning of active kinetic dismantling of Hezbollah assets, not just South of the Litani, but also in the North and in the Bekaa. As for the fear of Shiite soldiers rebelling, most Shiites are no longer pro the actions of Hezbollah, and the moment there’s a firing back on soldiers (who remain immensely popular and trusted) the blowback on Hezbollah should crystallise. 3) Immediate funding, readily available, so long as there is immediate usage of friendly nation intelligence assets, led by the U.S., France, U.K., Syria and Gulf states, all of whom are champing at the bit to help. 4) Usage of already installed peace pillars, guided by the penta-lateral cooperation path, coupled with the French peace mechanism and 10,000 UNIFIL troops already in place. If this happens in the next few days, an all-out conflagration in Lebanon may be avoided.

@SecKennedy Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food Hippocrates

The Dietary Guidelines send a clear message: EAT REAL FOOD.