I’ve read some of Sasha Stone’s posts before, but that one was a real corker.
Heartily recommend; RTWT and at least sample the comments.

Here’s another of her posts that is relevant to today’s news about the SCOTUS hearings on Trump vs Colorado and the 14th Amendment.
https://sashastone.substack.com/p/riots-are-not-insurrections

Her posts are almost impossible to summarize or excerpt without losing all the flavor.

https://m.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-785834
Well, it could happen, in some parallel universe:

Israel will allow the exile of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar from the Gaza Strip in exchange for the release of all remaining 136 hostages, NBC reported on Thursday, citing six Israeli officials and senior advisers.”

However, the Hamas fighters, already irate that their other bosses are directing the carnage from very cushy safe places, may insist that he leave his bank account with them:
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/384908

The Defense Minister says that out of millions of dollars transferred to Hamas, the Hamas leader takes one million. ‘Out of tens of millions – he puts what he needs into his pocket.’

h/t Barry Meislin — don’t ya love it when a thread comes together in synergy?

Also from Barry: talk about a “changer!”
https://www.jns.org/son-of-hamas-joins-israeli-public-diplomacy-campaign/

In November, Mosab Hassan Yousef called on Israel to set a time limit for Hamas to release the remaining 136 Israeli hostages, and to kill his father and other Hamas leaders if they don’t.

“Hamas must have a timeframe—a month or two or six months—to return the hostages, and if they don’t return the hostages within the time frame, Israel must execute top Hamas leaders in prison, especially the mass murderers,” said Yousef in a video message posted online.

“When I say execute top Hamas leaders, I mean no exceptions. That includes my own father, the co-founder of the Hamas movement. In this war, there are no exceptions,” added Yousef. “I made a mistake, 10 or 15 years ago, when I saved his life many times…he was supposed to die for his actions. I saved his life. Things did not change, things got worse,” he added.

He warned that Hamas is intentionally dragging out negotiations to extend the ceasefire with Israel.

“Hamas is going nowhere, and if we continue to negotiate with them, they will continue stretching these negotiations, taking us into a rabbit hole that will never end. And this is their goal: to get away with their crimes. We cannot allow this to happen,” he stressed.

IOW, instead of promising to release hundreds of Hamas terrorists for each Israeli hostage sent home, Israel should be threatening to kill hundreds for each hostage NOT released.
Nobody would believe they would do it, but Hamas and Iran et al. would not balk at such a threat themselves.

If I were a blood-feud-minded pagan, I would already be executing terrorists for each dead hostage at 100-to-1, so it’s a good thing I’m not.

01:14 Null-T annulment. (Or de-de-designation.)

10:24 Them vs. U.S. (It’s their world, we just live in it.)

19:11 Trans child kidnap. (The Governor approves.)

23:34 Our troops in W. Asia. (Why?) (the segment Jordan quoted)

26:58 The United Nations racket. (Get us out!)

33:29 China (1): Struggling with demography. (Nothing works.)

37:15 China (2): Capital punishment. (A lot.)

39:13 The Navy’s recruiting problem. (Standards lowered again.)
“There has been a lot of tasteless jokes—I’ve made one or two myself—about the Federal Aviation Administration lowering standards for pilots and Air Traffic Controllers. Don’t be surprised, say the jokesters, if the plane you’re sitting in unexpectedly meets another one, in the air or on the runway.”

QED h/t miguel cervantes earlier in this thread:
https://twitter.com/FoxNews/status/1755607613776286090
BREAKING: 2 JetBlue planes collide at Boston Logan International Airport

As someone noted about most Babylon Bee stories:
They aren’t conspiracy theories, they’re spoiler alerts.

Report: Mitch McConnell Lied to GOP Senators About Ukraine Aid Being Tied to Biden’s Performance In Closing the Border

The report claims further that GOP senators are sick enough of this repulsive foreign agent that his “leadership” is “in jeopardy”.

Bradley Devlin:
To ensure real border security, “I pushed for making the Ukraine funding contingent on actual border metrics,” like threshold and performance measures over a number of months, [Senator Ron] Johnson told TAC. “We definitely had a majority of our conference support that.”
“The only way you can get border security with a lawless administration is you have to tie it to something they want,” which was aid for Ukraine, Senator Rick Scott of Florida told TAC in a phone interview. “So a lot of us, and Ron Johnson was probably the most vocal on this, said we’ve got to have metrics and the numbers need to come down to the Trump numbers, or you don’t get the Ukraine aid over a period of time.”
…
The reason the bill failed to secure the border, however, is because McConnell, after deputizing Lankford, prevented the senator from Oklahoma from attaching Ukraine aid to any real, concrete metric of bringing down the number of migrants entering the United States.

“Without telling anybody, apparently, McConnell, on his own, told Lankford that’s not even on the table,” Johnson said. Later, “we had that confirmed by Sinema, who said that James never asked for that.” For Johnson, it was “a breach of [McConnell’s] leadership position” by blowing off the consensus view of the conference.

McConnell is now pushing a standalone bill for Ukraine funding — and abandoning any pretense of wanting to protect America’s border at all.

Pivoting from one failed supplemental to likely another makes it “obvious that Mitch’s top priority is to provide aid to Ukraine–to secure Ukraine’s border before ours,” Johnson claimed. As for the Senate, Johnson says “this is not the world’s greatest deliberative body. We hardly deliberate at all.”
…

“I have no idea why we’re doing it except for this: Senate leadership is obsessed,” Vance told Bannon. It’s “a borderline fetish with getting Ukraine money and they’re willing to give away all of our leverage to get it. Everybody needs to say this is a no-go. Vote no on this package. It is the single most important thing to kill in the U.S. Senate since I’ve been here. The worst piece of legislation, I think, in the U.S. Senate since I’ve been here and we’ve got to absolutely get it out of here.”

I don’t see any quotes by Senators calling for McConnell to be deposed. The closest they come is to imply it:

“I am hoping my colleagues are really taking a close hard look and asking themselves, ‘How did we get in a position where we’re being blamed for a problem that was 100% caused by Biden and his Democrat allies in Congress?'” Johnson said. “McConnell led us into that.”
…

“There needs to be a change in how we manage and govern the conference,” Scott said. “Everybody I talk to basically agrees. I don’t know people who don’t agree with me that we have to govern the conference a different way.”

I derived a small speck of amusement from the drone shot at 9:24; at that moment, the drone was stationed directly (or close enough to make no difference) above the notorious Central Warehouse, the ugliest building in the Hudson Valley. (BTW, apparently there is perhaps some real movement in the last few weeks toward demolition at last. But when precisely? Who knows?)

The other major weak point of the video was the short shrift given to the shrinkage of the major cities on the central I-90 backbone: Albany, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo. The narrator puts up rather eye-popping population figures from a century or so ago, then spends all of one-half sentence to point out that later, these cities shrank dramatically… and that was that. For a video supposedly about “why ‘nobody’ lives in Upstate New York,” that’s a rather serious lacuna. [‘Lacuna’ sounds like it should be a Chilean highland ruminant or something.]

Well, thanks to videos like this one, at least Upstate gets some attention somehow, I guess.

Another aside: southern Michigan was settled to a considerable extent by people who had originally settled in central New York. I wouldn’t have expected even an expert to take the time to mention this in a video of only twelve minutes and change as it would have been rather peripheral to the larger issues, but it does explain a little bit of the population shifts in the nineteenth century.

P. S.: it was surprising to me that Ogdensburg and Massena are so much larger than A-Bay or Clayton. But then I’ve been only to the latter two so far.

“Feed me Seymour!”

To be precise, the Apple store is in Emeryville, a small city at the eastern foot of the Bay Bridge nestled between Oakland and Berkeley.