Stop me before I install another game on my phone
Until last night, I had no games on my cellphone.
As of today, I have no games on my cellphone.
In between, in a moment of weakness, I installed a game that was being advertised. It was some sort of block game that involved spatial reasoning, and it was kind of fun.
And, as it turned out, highly addictive. That’s why I ultimately deleted it. It reminded me of something I now recall from years ago: I used to sometimes play solitaire – with real cards, prior to the internet – when avoiding homework or other disagreeable tasks. I don’t have any special problem with addiction to substances or to much of anything else, but the experience last night was an uncomfortable reminder that we all have our weaknesses.
Do I even like games like that? Not so much. But this one took my mind off a lot of things, at least for a few hours, and had its own strong compelling force.
Hostage deal announced
The main elements of a hostage deal seem to be in place. You can read about them here, but they’re essentially what I wrote about yesterday in this post. A few details remain to be ironed out, and Netanyahu’s cabinet has to approve.
I see this deal as a sort of iceberg, with the part we can see being the least of it. I’ve read a great deal of commentary about it already, and most is either merely descriptive or strongly negative. The negative opinions can be summarized as “Trump betrayed Israel.” But if that’s the case, it would represent a 180-degree shift from his previous position.
Is that possible? Yes; we don’t need a reminder that Trump is a loose cannon. Is it likely? I don’t think so. It’s more likely that Netanyahu has always known a deal is inevitable and necessary and he trusts Trump more than he ever trusted Biden – and Hamas fears Trump more than they ever feared Biden.
What did Trump promise Netanyahu in return? Help with Iran? Gloves off with Hamas after the hostage pressure is eliminated? Unequivocal support in places like the UN? I don’t know, but I hope it was something and it makes sense that it was something. It also makes sense that it’s a something we’re not going to hear about until it bears fruit in action.
How many hostages are alive? My guess is thirty or forty.
Open thread 1/15/2025
Meet the LA fire looters
At least, here are some that have been arrested so far. I bet they didn’t expect to be caught, considering the way California usually treats thieves, and considering the chaos of the situation. Still, they might just get a mild wrist slap.
I found the first word in this sentence from the article rather odd:
Remarkably, none of those arrested were actually living in the evacuation zone and seemingly travelled with the intention of taking advantage of the devastation.
“Remarkably”? I don’t find it the least bit surprising or remarkable. Did the author expect them to have been from toney Pacific Palisades?
When disasters occur, there are always human locusts to take advantage. I have read elsewhere that in the case of these fires the criminals are looting the intact houses whose residents have been evacuated, and therefore the homes are empty but the belongings are all there and ripe for the taking. This particular sweep didn’t just result in arrests for theft, because most were not caught in the act:
Officers arrested Kaliel Love, who was on probation, in an alley behind the 600 block of the San Vicente Boulevard after he tried to evade police by running away.
Dominic Pacheco Magana, 18, and Miguel Angel Dorantes, 22, are also accused of conspiring to burgle homes after they were pulled over driving a van displaying stolen registration stickers.
Officers scoured the vehicle and found black Nike nylon gloves, a black ski mask and three large freight tote bags and black t-shirts.
Pacheco’s phone had the Watch Duty app open. The app monitors fire and evacuation zones.
‘Based on the items located inside the vehicle, the location of the vehicle stop, the ski mask, and the attempt to conceal their identity and avoid detection by removing the license plate, officers arrested the duo for being in the mandatory evacuation area with the specific intent to commit residential burglaries,’ police said.
Santa Monica Police said two people were also arrested for being in possession of concealed handguns.
The rest of the detainees were arrested for violations including drug possession, driving violations, outstanding warrants, parole and probation violations.
They also caught some arsonists – although not in Pacific Palisades – possibly inspired with a contagion effect:
Two people have also been arrested for lighting fires, including Ruben Montes, 29, who was detained for arson on Sunday in Irwindale, roughly 16 miles away from Altadena, where the deadly Eaton Fire continues to rage.
Mexican national Juan Manuel Sierra-Leyva, was also taken into custody after allegedly being caught on video walking with a yellow blowtorch before he was confronted by residents in Calabasas, west of Beverly Hills.
I will add here that I know some people in Pacific Palisades whose house burned down. I knew them when they were just starting out and had nothing. They’ve lived there for close to fifty years, and are now old and ill. Harrowing.
The Pete Hegseth hearings
I’m doing a roundup for this.
Ace opines, with clips, in this post.
There’s a lot of coverage at RedState.
Legal Insurrection has this as well as this. From the former, the following Hegseth quote: “I support Israel destroying and killing every last member of Hamas.”
I doubt most people watch these things. I also think Hegseth will be confirmed.
What we know about a possible hostage deal
I consider it all rumor until it happens, if it happens – and one of the many things we don’t know is whether it will actually happen. But here are some of my thoughts on the matter.
Because it has come to the point where any attempt at rescue will cause hostages to be murdered by their guards, the only way Israel can get hostages back alive is a deal. The deal was always going to involve the release of enormous numbers of terrorists. The only way that wouldn’t happen is if Israel had considered the hostages as dead from the start, and had refused to negotiate with Hamas at all. I don’t think Israeli society would have stood for that.
Plus, even though theoretically such a no-negotiation policy would have discouraged the taking of hostages in the future, it wouldn’t have discouraged it enough. Why? Because although one reason for terrorists’ hostage-taking is a pragmatic one – the release of prisoners – there is another big reason, which is to inflict suffering on the entire Jewish people. The terrorists are also sadists, and so that motive might be enough in and of itself.
Therefore I think some sort of lopsided deal has always been inevitable.
The release of a thousand prisoners may or may not end up mattering, depending on what Israel does next. It may be hard to believe, but Hamas has been recruiting new people lately. There seems to be no shortage of Gazans willing to die for the noble cause of wiping Israel off the face of the earth. Whether these particular thousand prisoners are released or not, the Israelis are in this for the long haul, and they have to figure out a way to improve the situation enormously or it will happen again and again no matter what they do. They absolutely cannot go back to the way it was before. And so what is most important – and what always was most important, deal or no – is Israel’s long-term approach going forward.
And what of the role of the upcoming Trump administration in any deal that may be made? Certainly they have exerted some pressure, but I don’t know the extent of it. Trump has motivation for a deal to be made before he takes office so he can claim victory on that score, and Biden has motivation for a deal to be made while he’s still in office so he can claim victory on that score.
I don’t think Netanyahu will sell his country down the river, and I have to trust that the Israelis have more tricks up their sleeves than we know about.
With all that as background, here’s an article on the deal:
Key mediator Qatar said Tuesday that a day earlier it had presented both parties with a “final” draft of the agreement. Israel’s Channel 12 news reported Monday that Jerusalem considered it broadly acceptable, and senior Israeli officials said they were waiting for Hamas’s reaction.
The Associated Press reported Tuesday that Hamas accepted the deal as well, citing two officials involved in the talks. However, CNN later cited an Egyptian official as saying the mediating countries — Qatar, Egypt, and the United States — had not yet received a response from the Palestinian terror group.
Hamas did say the ongoing negotiations had reached their “final stage” and that it had held consultations with other Palestinian factions and informed them of the “progress made.”
See what I mean? Clear as mud.
Details:
The three-phase agreement — based on a framework laid out by US President Joe Biden and endorsed by the UN Security Council — would begin with the gradual release of 33 hostages over a six-week period, including women, children, adults over the age of 50, and severely sick and wounded civilians.
Israel believes most of the 33 are alive but that some are dead.
In exchange, Israel would release many hundreds of Palestinian security prisoners. The BBC put the number at 1,000 prisoners, including approximately 190 terrorists who have been serving sentences of 15 years or more.
On Monday, Israeli diplomatic officials, briefing military and diplomatic reporters, said high-profile “murderer” terrorists would not be released to the West Bank under the deal, and nobody who took part in the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught would be freed.
Time will tell.
Open thread 1/14/2025
I haven’t put up one of these in a long time:
Hostage deal rumors
It’s now a week till Trump’s Inauguration Day – which is also Martin Luther King Day, by the way – and once again there are rumors that a hostage deal is nigh.
We’ve heard such rumors before. Are they real this time? Beats me. I think there is a slightly greater chance of it happening now because of Trump’s impending presidency than before the election, but there are still major stumbling blocks. The main one is that Hamas wants Israel to give up way too much. That is my fear as well.
From the article, for what it’s worth:
An Egyptian official, meanwhile, said that there had been good progress overnight but also acknowledged that it would likely take a few more days, although the sides were aiming for a deal before Trump’s January 20 inauguration. A third official also assessed that a deal was possible before Trump enters the White House, and said that although they were not yet wrapped up, the talks were in a good place.
A Hamas official said a number of contentious issues still need to be resolved, including an Israeli commitment to end the war and details about the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and the release of hostages and Palestinian prisoners. The official was not authorized to brief media and spoke anonymously. The Egyptian official confirmed that those issues were still being discussed.
Israel has previously insisted that any ceasefire must not prevent it from continuing the war at a later stage, and the matter has been a key sticking point between the sides. Israel has made the demolition of Hamas’s military and governance capabilities one of its war goals.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is.
Jen Rubin leaves the WaPo
I can’t say I’ve ever “gotten” Jennifer Rubin. Since I go back a long way in the blog world, I remember briefly meeting her around 2006 or 2007 at some PJ get-together. At the time, she was nominally on the right and was supposedly a political changer, having once been on the left or at least a Democrat. Her previous work was as a labor lawyer, but she wrote for the Weekly Standard and had a several-year-long stint at Commentary online. Her main topic back then, as I recall it, was Islamic terrorism. She was a hardliner on that, as well as pro-Israel.
I didn’t read her stuff much because I found it to be somewhat boring. But it seemed straightforward and there was nothing especially wrong with it. Then in 2010 she was hired by the WaPo and for a while things went on as before. But somewhere along the line Trump Derangement Syndrome set in, big-time.
My thought about Rubin back then – and it remains my thought – is that she never underwent a real political conversion to the right and never was a conservative. Her “conservatism” was focused on Islamic terrorism in general and also on Israel, and as far as I can tell she retains those views while otherwise being essentially a garden-variety leftist.
So now Rubin has said good-bye to the WaPo. Owner Bezos seems to be wanting to tack slightly more to the right, and she’s made this announcement:
Veteran Washington Post opinion writer Jennifer Rubin said Monday she is leaving to join a startup — and blasted the Beltway broadsheet’s billionaire owner on her way out the door.
Rubin, an outspoken critic of President-elect Donald Trump, had recently publicly attacked the paper and its owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, for appearing to seek to get into the Republican’s good graces.
“Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission — defending, protecting and advancing democracy,” Rubin wrote in her resignation note.
Here’s where she’s going: to a new site called “The Contrarian.” Of course, it is highly likely she left theWaPo because otherwise she’d have been booted. You can find a list here of others who are supposedly going to be writing at the site, too. It seems to be positioning itself as a rival or perhaps adjunct to The Bulwark, the anti-Trump group started by once-conservative Bill Kristol.
Here’s some of the flavor of what The Contrarian is about – self-righteous Trump Derangement all the way:
Our pre-election warnings that Donald Trump posed an unprecedented threat to our democracy were often treated as alarmist. However, the election of an openly authoritarian figure who traffics in conspiracies, lies, unconstitutional schemes and un-American notions, has moved the United States to an inflection point. The future of our democracy, and what Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth” hangs in the balance. And yet corporate and billionaire media and too many in the political establishment persist in downplaying the threat and seeking to accommodate Trump and his radical agenda. We refuse to follow the herd.
Unlike most corporate or billionaire media, The Contrarian will not offer Trump the benefit of the doubt. We will not normalize him. We will not engage in false equivalence. We will not excuse enablers in the media, government or business. We will not infantilize his supporters nor treat them as victims; we will confront them with the consequences of their presidential pick.
Trump is no ordinary politician and will be no ordinary president so the response must be extraordinary. His insane pronouncements—be it a premature and utterly false declaration that the New Orleans terrorist had just come over the border or a threat to annex the Panama Canal and Greenland—cannot be ignored or treated as hyperbole. They reveal a warped mind and dangerous agenda that would take America down the road of other authoritarian states such as Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
There seems to be some sort of market for this sort of thing. I’m not it, though.
[NOTE: This blog has made very little mention of Rubin over the years. All I could find were two brief references to her opinion on Obama – not in favor of him – and one on Romney when he was running for president.]
The two most informative videos I’ve seen on water for firefighting in California
It can be hard to sort out the wheat from the chaff in California fire news and information. But I highly recommend listening to the following interview with Brett Barbre, who is a Yorba Linda Water District board member. He really really seems to know his stuff:
And here is another video I find highly impressive. It’s about the question of using saltwater to fight fires in California. It’s not too long, but chock-full of information: