WATCH: Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son speaks with President Trump after announcing a $100B investment in America over the next five years:
"My confidence to the economy of the United States has tremendously increased because of his victory. Because of that, I am excited to commit… pic.twitter.com/X4GgtvPgpk
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) December 16, 2024
A confession: I’d never heard of Softbank before this announcement was made.
… they don’t really give a rat’s patootie about gun violence. They just want it to be against the “right” victims and with the “right” – that is, young and telegenic – perpetrators.
While we’re at it, the presidency of Joe Biden also proves that the left doesn’t give a rat’s patootie about the dangers of electing someone elderly. Remember when they blah-blah-blahed about how old McCain was? I sure do. And even in 2024 they made an effort to do the same about the admittedly-elderly-but-still-sharp Donald Trump – an effort that was ludicrous considering how they ran the already cognitively-challenged Biden in 2020 and then propped him up for four years.
Yes, I know, hypocrisy is the name of the political game. But it’s amazing how brazen they are and how obvious it is. And it’s also amazing how many people seem to accept it and buy into it. That doesn’t mean that Republicans aren’t hypocrites at times. But it happens somewhat less frequently.
Israel may be getting a big Chanukah present – and more than eight of them. There’s room for very cautious optimism:
“We are the closest to a hostage deal since the last one,” Defense Minister Israel Katz told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday.
One-hundred-and-five captives—81 Israelis and 24 foreign nationals—were released during last year’s ceasefire with Hamas that lasted from Nov. 24 to Nov. 30. As of Dec. 16, 100 Israeli hostages remain in Gaza, with 36 having been declared dead.
An Israeli official, previously skeptical about negotiations, confirmed this week that progress has been made in talks aimed at securing the release of Israeli hostages held by the Hamas terror organization in the Gaza Strip.
Additionally, a source familiar with the negotiations told Israel Hayom that talks to formulate a hostages-for-ceasefire deal are expected to be completed by Chanukah, with implementation spread over an extended period.
There have been optimistic reports on this before. What has changed? One obvious thing: the election of Trump – and his ultimatum to Hamas. It’s a very different message than those conveyed by the previous US administration. Also, Iran is much weaker than before and that makes Hamas weaker. And speaking of Hamas being weaker, Sinwar is dead.
How many hostages are alive? No one knows. But I believe the number isn’t zero.
Even if you think you know a lot about what happened this election, this video may surprise you:
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau faced the biggest test of his political career after Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, long one of his most powerful and loyal ministers, announced Monday that she was resigning from the Cabinet.
The stunning move raised questions about how much longer the prime minister of nearly 10 years can stay on in his role as his administration scrambles to deal with incoming U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. Trudeau’s popularity has plummeted due to concerns about inflation and immigration.
Inflation and immigration, immigration and inflation – now, where have I heard that before?
And it’s amazing that so awful a leader has been in power for 10 years in Canada.
The issue seems to be this:
Freeland and Trudeau disagreed about a two-month sales tax holiday and $250 Canadian ($175) checks to Canadians that were recently announced. Freeland said that Canada is dealing with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to impose sweeping 25% tariffs and should eschew “costly political gimmicks” it can “ill afford.”
“Our country is facing a grave challenge,” Freeland said in the letter. “That means keeping our fiscal powder dry today, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war.” …
The resignation comes as Freeland, who chaired a Cabinet committee on U.S. relations, was set to deliver the fall economic statement and likely announce border security measures designed to help Canada avoid Trump’s tariffs.
Apparently, until now Trudeau has been contemplating running for a fourth term. Makes you appreciate our 22nd Amendment. It also would be fascinating if it were Trump who’d be indirectly responsible for Trudeau’s exit.
RIP.
I feel a weary sorrow every time I hear about a school shooting. They seem to come with regularity, and although they are all slightly different, they all seem somewhat similar as well.
Initial reports were that five were killed, including the shooter, and five injured. But a more recent article says the dead are a teacher and the shooter, who was a teenage student at the school, and six are injured (two of them in critical condition).
We don’t know many details at this point. It sounds to me – and this is a complete and total guess – that the shooter may have committed suicide after killing the teacher and injuring the students.
And now I see this confusing report that a teacher and a teenage student were killed in addition to the shooter, and that the shooter killed himself but the police aren’t revealing the student’s gender at this time. And yet the article uses the term “himself.” Which makes the situation seem to resemble that of the Nashville trans shooter Audrey Hale. But I have no idea what the true story is.
UPDATE 9:30 PM:
I can report that the deceased mass shooter at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisc. is a 15-year-old girl named Natalie Lynn Rupnow.
She carried out the mass shooting in the school library, according to a source. She did not identify as trans.
The teen girl used the name “Sam” online and the username “crossixir.” She had an extensive online obsession with school shooters and death, particularly the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. Rupnow was a big fan of the KMFDM rock band, which was also referenced by one of the Columbine shooters. (She often wore the shirt of the band.) …
A purported “sneak peek” of her manifesto was posted on her Discord account, where she discussed a desire to kill all males in a rant inspired by fringe extremist online culture.
The Columbine killers expressed hatred for just about everyone, and most of their victims were killed in the school library. In addition, they died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
Is there anyone who trusts the government anymore? That’s a rhetorical question.
Their explanations about this latest drone business remind me of something from a farcical comedy, but they’re not really funny. Something like this: We don’t know what the drones are but they’re nothing to be concerned about.
However, logic would indicate that reassurances aren’t particularly reassuring if they’re based on ignorance. Therefore, either you know and aren’t telling or you don’t know and therefore cannot reassure.
President-elect Trump goes with the “they know and aren’t telling” explanation, and I agree:
TRUMP ON NJ DRONES: “The government knows exactly what’s going on, they should tell the public”
— ALX ?? (@alx) December 16, 2024
I was in high school when I first read a Russian novel; it was Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The book immediately grabbed my attention – here was something to really sink my teeth into, something that dealt with the Big Questions. Later in high school we also read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which did nothing for me. I think maybe I didn’t understand it at the time.
In college I took a course in Russian literature (in translation; I can’t speak a word of Russian except da, nyet, and dacha). That was a very deep dive into writers both famous and to me obscure. I can’t remember all the books we studied, but one of them was Demons by Dostoevsky. Our translation was titled The Possessed. Here are the themes, and I think you’ll see their relevance to both the late 1960s, when I took that course, and now [my emphasis]:
A fictional town descends into chaos as it becomes the focal point of an attempted revolution, orchestrated by master conspirator Pyotr Verkhovensky. The mysterious aristocratic figure of Nikolai Stavrogin—Verkhovensky’s counterpart in the moral sphere—dominates the book, exercising an extraordinary influence over the hearts and minds of almost all the other characters. The idealistic, Western-influenced intellectuals of the 1840s, epitomized in the character of Stepan Verkhovensky (who is both Pyotr Verkhovensky’s father and Nikolai Stavrogin’s childhood teacher), are presented as the unconscious progenitors and helpless accomplices of the “demonic” forces that take possession of the town. …
Dostoevsky’s nihilists are portrayed in their ordinary human weakness, drawn into the world of destructive ideas through vanity, naïveté, idealism, and the susceptibility of youth. In re-imagining Nechayev’s orchestration of the murder, Dostoevsky was attempting to “depict those diverse and multifarious motives by which even the purest of hearts and the most innocent of people can be drawn in to committing such a monstrous offence.” In A Writer’s Diary, he discusses the relationship of the ideas of his own generation to those of the current generation, and suggests that in his youth he too could have become a follower of someone like Nechayev. As a young man Dostoevsky himself was a member of a radical organisation (the Petrashevsky Circle), for which he was arrested and exiled to a Siberian prison camp. Dostoevsky was an active participant in a secret revolutionary society formed from among the members of the Petrashevsky Circle. The cell’s founder and leader, the aristocrat Nikolay Speshnev, is thought by many commentators to be the principal inspiration for the character of Stavrogin. …
Dostoevsky wrote that “Communism will conquer one day, irrespective of whether the Communists are right or wrong. But this triumph will stand very far from the Kingdom of Heaven. All the same, we must accept that this triumph will come one day, even though none of those who at present steer the world’s fate have any idea about it at all.”
Since the Russian Revolution, many commentators have remarked on the prophetic nature of Demons. André Gide, writing in the early 1920s, suggested that “the whole of (the novel) prophesies the revolution of which Russia is presently in the throes”. In Soviet Russia, a number of dissident authors found a prototype for the Soviet police state in the system expounded by Shigalev at the meeting of Pyotr Verkhovensky’s revolutionary society. …
Dostoevsky biographer Ronald Hingley described the novel as “an awesome, prophetic warning which humanity, no less possessed of collective and individual devilry in the 1970s than in the 1870s, shows alarmingly few signs of heeding.” … In his book Dostoyevsky in Manhattan French philosopher André Glucksmann argued that ‘nihilism’, as depicted in Demons, is the underlying idea or ‘characteristic form’ of modern terrorism.
There are patterns of human behavior, and this appears to be one. I recognized that even in the 1960s, and it somewhat inoculated me against some of the worst excesses of those times, and of leftism in general.
This is what I’m referring to:
As chief counsel, Patel had no idea [between 2017 and 2018] that the subject of his investigation — the FBI — was collecting his data and increasing the visibility of witnesses he was communicating with, including whistleblowers.
At the time, Patel was demanding to see FBI documents and depose FBI witnesses to find out if the bureau had abused its power in obtaining a FISA warrant to spy on Trump aide Carter Page.
But Patel remained in the dark until 2022, when Google finally was cleared to send him a copy of the subpoena. Outraged, he told me at the time: “The FBI and DOJ subpoenaed my personal records while I caught them doing this to Page back in 2017.”
He said the McCabe FBI didn’t want anybody to find out that it “literally copied and pasted” Democrat opposition research, wholesale, into wiretap-warrant applications.
He added that he hoped those behind the abuses would be prosecuted by a future Trump administration: “They must be held accountable or they’ll only abuse their power again.”
The IG probe reveals that the FBI had renewed the subpoenas each year, snooping on congressional staffers for up to five years. That means McCabe’s successor, Christopher Wray, signed off on the continued collections.
Some would call it revenge. But I think it more rightly should be called justice, and perhaps even poetic justice, that Patel is poised to become FBI director.
The FBI has been out of control for a long time regarding Trump and the right. The people who have been participating have long believed there will be no serious negative consequences for them, and so far they have been correct. Perhaps that’s about to end.
First of all, a disclaimer: I make no predictions about Pelosi’s recovery from a hip fracture she sustained in a fall the other day. But anything is possible.
I read these musings:
Statistically, when a woman in her mid-80s breaks her hip, the consequences are cataclysmic. Up to 33% of older adults with hip fractures die within a year. 50% are unable to bathe, feed, wipe their butts, or dress themselves.
About one in five end up in a long-term care facility.
During the first three months after a hip fracture, older adults have a five to eight times higher risk of dying. And this elevated mortality rate lasts nearly a decade.
An untreated hip fracture is even worse. 70% of victims are dead within a year.
It’s not a trivial thing.
Often, it’s not that the broken hip itself is so medically dangerous, but it’s an overall indicator of physical frailty: if your grip-strength, stamina, balance, and bone density have all severely deteriorated, you’re more likely to fall and break your hip. It could be more correlation than causation.
All that may be true, but I don’t see it as having much relevance to Pelosi’s situation. A great many people who fracture their hips are already in bad shape, and it’s not my impression that that’s the case for her. The article actually points this out.
But what I’m thinking about is my own mother. She fell and fractured her hip (or did she fracture her hip and then fall?; sometimes it’s that way around) at the age of 96, and that was a couple of years after having a stroke. She was pretty darn frail at the time, although she could still walk with a walker.
At 96 her prognosis was awful. The hospital hesitated to even operate, which would have left her in terrible shape. They did a bunch of tests on her cardiovascular system and pronounced her strong enough to at least withstand the surgery, and so some sort of hip replacement was performed.
She bounced back. It was uncanny. There was a 65-year-old woman with a similar injury sharing a room with her who had a lot more post-op pain and a slower recovery. And it’s not that my mother was so cooperative with rehab; she was not. She just recovered quickly and no one knew why.
I remember being stopped in the hallway of the hospital by one of her doctors, who said in a between-you-and-me way: “You know, your mother is a very strong woman.”
My answer was, “I guess she is, but I never knew it before.”
My mother lived to be 98, and during those two years, up until the final month or two, she was walking around as before with her walker. The broken hip didn’t seem to have much effect on her.
That’s just one person. And of course, she did die two years later. But considering the age she was when she broke her hip, that amount of survival was a pretty good deal.