A whole lotta 2s in that date.
More on Trump, Zelensky, Putin, and the Ukraine peace talks
Today I’ve already written one post on my concerns about Trump’s recent statements on Ukraine, and his dissing of Zelensky. One of the things that has kept me wondering what’s really going on is that Rubio is Trump’s Secretary of State, and I don’t see Rubio as part of the pro-Russia camp – what I call the Tucker Carlson wing of the right. And yet he’s in the position of being heavily involved in these negotiations, which makes me a bit more hopeful.
So just now I saw this [my emphasis]:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff met in Riyadh with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and President Vladimir Putin’s foreign affairs advisor Yuri Ushakov to hash out ways to end the conflict. Ukraine was absent from the negotiations in Saudi Arabia.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declined to provide specifics about the discussions, but she said the Trump administration was committed to brokering a peace deal to end the conflict between the two countries. …
Zelenskyy has stressed that Ukraine must be involved in negotiations and said Sunday that Ukraine wouldn’t accept a peace deal if his country was absent from negotiations.
But Leavitt said everyone would have a seat at the negotiating table — including other European allies — as the Trump administration seeks to advance a peace deal.
“We’re ensuring that all parties are heard,” Leavitt said in an interview with Fox News’ “America Reports” on Tuesday. “But you have to speak to both sides of the war in order to truly negotiate a deal and problem-solve. And this is a significant first step toward peace.” …
Trump and Zelenskky also spoke over the phone Wednesday about the negotiations, and Zelenskyy said he relayed that he believes Putin isn’t interested in peace with Ukraine.
“I said that [Putin] is a liar,” Zelenskyy said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired Sunday. “And he said, ‘I think my feeling is that he’s ready for these negotiations.’ And I said to him, ‘No, he’s a liar. He doesn’t want any peace.'”
While Zelenskyy voiced gratitude for U.S. support, he said there is no “leader in the world who can really make a deal with Putin without us, about us.”
This news from Leavitt indicates that Trump is at least indicating that Zelensky will have a voice, and that these first moves are efforts to soothe Putin.
Of course, if it’s just a question of presenting Zelensky with a done deal for him to sign, one that gives him none of what Ukraine wants and needs, then it’s trouble. Here’s where Trump’s unpredictable nature, and his bobbing and weaving when negotiating, get in the way of properly analyzing what the end point will be.
Six living hostages are due to come back on Saturday [UPDATED]
[UPDATE 8:18 PM]: Israel has announced that the Bibas family’s bodies are due to be returned Thursday:
Israel has confirmed that Hamas’ youngest hostages, Kfira and Ariel Bibas, and their mother have been killed in Gaza — and their bodies will be returned to the Jewish state.
The news came as a crushing blow to the Bibas family, who continue to hold onto hope that the brothers and their mother, Shiri, are still alive until they return home.
Ofri Bibas, Shiri’s sister-in-law, said the family’s faith would not waver as she slammed the Israeli government for publicly naming her loved ones as dead on Wednesday before recieving their bodies.
“For 16 months, we have been waiting for certainty that they couldn’t provide us, and now it’s being decided before they’re even here?? Before they’ve undergone identification??,” Ofri wrote on Facebook.
The announcement by Israel is somewhat confusing to me. It’s been clear for a long long time that it’s highly likely the mother and her two children are dead – Hamas had announced it many many months ago. But Israel kept saying it couldn’t be confirmed. Are they actually confirming it now? And based on what new information? If there is no new information, why not wait till the bodies are identified?
There is a fourth person whose body is being returned Thursday. It is Oded Lifshitz, 84, “a veteran peace activist.”
So a mother in the prime of life, a baby, and a toddler; plus an elderly man. Hamas must be so proud. And it shouldn’t escape notice that Lifshitz was a peace activist. Not only has Lifshitz died, but that dream died, too – on October 7. His elderly wife was also kidnapped, but she was released in one of the first exchanges. Now she must deal with the knowledge of his death in captivity.]
The plan is for six living hostages to be returned to Israel on Saturday. After that, it will be just dead bodies being returned, to end Phase I over two more weeks. Six living hostages in one day represents a doubling of the usual number, although I don’t know what that may signify.
There’s also a report that Hamas has said they’ll release all the hostages in Phase II if Israel promises a permanent ceasefire (and basically, a Hamas win). That’s not an acceptable offer, of course. But so tempting, to get all the hostages back.
From that first link:
… [Four of the living hostages to be released], all of whom were taken on October 7, 2023, include father Tal Shoham and three young men kidnapped from the Nova music festival: Omer Shem-Tov, Omer Wenkert and Eliya Cohen.
The other two of the living hostages due to be released were taken about a decade ago. Yes, a decade: 2014 and 2015. It’s amazing that they’re alive. Their names are Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, both entered Gaza voluntarily, and both have long-term mental health issues:
According to his family and Israeli officials, Mengistu crossed into northern Gaza from the beach at Zikim in September 2014.
The then-28-year-old was spotted by IDF security cameras, but made it through the fence before troops could reach the scene. He was picked up by a Hamas patrol and was not heard from until the terror group released a video purporting to show him alive in early 2023.
Mengistu hails from Ashkelon’s working-class Ethiopian-Israeli community. According to his family, he suffered from mental illness, and was given an exemption from military service. …
Al-Sayed, a 28-year-old Bedouin Israeli from the village of Hura in the Negev desert, entered the Strip near the Erez Crossing in April 2015.
According to his father, this was not his first time going into Gaza, but in this case he was stopped by Hamas and taken into its custody. …
Like Mengistu, al-Sayed suffered from mental illness [schizophrenia, in his case], though he briefly served in the military before being discharged. …
The stories of the other four are much like ones we’ve heard before: they witnessed terrible things prior to being kidnapped, and they have been mistreated while in captivity. Just to take one story, Wenkert’s last text to his parents said he was “scared to death.” He also suffers from colitis, a very serious bowel disorder, and back in November of 2023 was already described by some of the freed hostages as being “dangerously underweight” and in need of medical care. And yet he is alive.
I have saved the most sorrowful news for last: Hamas says that tomorrow it will return the bodies of Shira Bibas and her baby and toddler sons. Hamas has said long ago that they were killed by IDF bombs; getting their bodies may or may not tell a different tale. But it is obscene that Hamas would blame Israel for the death of these three in a war that was started by Hamas murdering over a thousand Israelis and kidnapping about 250, including many children, among them the Bibas boys. Obscene, but typical of their propaganda.
The Bibas family has not given up hope, because Israel has not confirmed the deaths. But I think that their deaths have been fairly clear for a long time, and the return of the father without the rest made it almost certain.
Trump’s not fond of Zelensky
I find some recent Ukraine moves of Trump’s potentially alarming. Are we looking at an example of Trump’s mutable opening negotiation positions, meant to make Putin think he’s with him all the way, but expected to change? Or is Trump really with Putin all the way? With Trump, you can’t tell until the fat lady has finished singing.
But he issued statements that seem so personally insulting to Zelensky that I think Trump may really be intending to shut him out of all the negotiations for the fate of his own country, and also to call for a new election in Ukraine:
… Secretary of State Marco Rubio [had] sat down with a Russian delegation in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to start mapping out a path to peace.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had made headlines in recent days over his ire at not being invited to participate in the Riyadh negotiations, saying:
“We were not invited to this Russian-American meeting in Saudi Arabia. It was a surprise for us. I think it was a surprise for many people,” Zelensky said …
[Trump said] “Well, [Ukaine has] had a seat for three years and a long time before that. This could have been settled very easily — just a half, a half-baked negotiator could have settled this years ago without the loss of much land …
“Well, we have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law, essentially martial law in Ukraine, where the leader in Ukraine — I mean I hate to say it but he’s down at 4 percent approval rating — and where a country has been blown to smithereens. …
And, yeah, I would say that when they want a seat at the table, wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have to say, “It’s been a long time since we’ve had an election?”
Russia apparently wants to force a special election as part of a peace deal. And if Russia wants it, it’s not out of any concern for Ukraine, that’s for sure. Then again, we’ve had elections here in wartime.
So, what gives? My hope is that – as I’ve said before about many moves of Trump’s – this is just an opening bid made to soothe Putin enough to bring him to the table. And that Ukraine’s needs and protection will not be ignored.
There’s also this proposal of Trump’s as described by John Hinderaker. Again, I’m not sure what Trump’s actual goal is or what the fine print of any such agreement would be. Here’s an excerpt Hinderaker offers from the British Telegraph, which he characterizes as “one of Europe’s most pro-Trump papers”:
Donald Trump’s demand for a $500bn (£400bn) “payback” from Ukraine goes far beyond US control over the country’s critical minerals. It covers everything from ports and infrastructure to oil and gas, and the larger resource base of the country.
The terms of the contract that landed at Volodymyr Zelensky’s office a week ago amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity. It implies a burden of reparations that cannot possibly be achieved. The document has caused consternation and panic in Kyiv. …
Washington will have sovereign immunity and acquire near total control over most of Ukraine’s commodity and resource economy.
More at the link. What’s it all about? It seems to be based on a draft of what the Telegraph calls a “pre-decisional contract.” Is that a wish list, or ironclad demands? Is it just some kind of trade agreement? Why does the author of the article, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, call it “reparations”? Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to be that. Could this just be a proposal for the US to invest in Ukraine and get something back?
I don’t read the Telegraph often enough to say whether it’s actually “one of Europe’s most pro-Trump papers” – or what that actually might mean, since I doubt Europe has many pro-Trump papers. But I did look up the author’s other pieces about Trump, and he clearly detests the man. That doesn’t mean that his reporting is wrong on this issue, but it means that I’m withholding judgment on what’s going on here. Which I was planning to do anyway.
[ADDENDUM: I hadn’t seen this story yet when I wrote this post, but it’s more very disturbing stuff from Trump today. He has doubled down on the rage against Zelensky. He seems to have gone full Tucker Carlson on this, which has me very worried. On the other hand, all the caveats I put in the article still stand.
If this is really Trump’s position, it is an example – the only one I can think of so far – of deception on his part in his campaign promises, which weren’t exactly pro-Ukraine but which were much milder than what he’s saying now.]
[ADDENDUM II: I have put up a new post on the subject.]
NOTE: As soon as I read the name “Ambrose Evans-Pritchard,” that hypenated surname rang a big bell from my anthropology minor in college. And yes, his father was the famous anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, whose studies of the cattle-raising Nuer of Sudan were featured very heavily in my coursework. Alas, most of the minutiae of Nuer life is gone from my memory, but I do recall that cattle were everything to them.
Question about the blog
A few days ago I did a couple of more tweaks on the blog that – hopefully – may have ended that periodic “too many requests” glitch. So my first question is whether you’re had any problem with that in the last day or two.
However, one of my adjustments has caused a possible cache problem, but only on cellphones and not on desktops or laptops. Weird, but my cellphone doesn’t always update the blog when I go to it. Sometimes I have to hit “refresh,” and then it updates just fine. I’m curious whether any of you have encountered that problem. Thanks!
Open thread 2/19/2025
From Dr. Birx: I fooled that stupid poopeyhead Trump and idiot Pence, and the American people
I missed this at the time Birx’s memoir came out, but it was highlighted on “X” recently. Birx must think this is something to brag about – otherwise, why would she be admitting it in her memoir?:
On Monday and Tuesday [March 9th and 10th, 2020] … we worked simultaneously to develop the flatten-the-curve guidance I hoped to present to the vice president at week’s end. Getting buy-in on the simple mitigation measures every American could take was just the first step leading to longer and more aggressive interventions. We had to make these palatable to the administration by avoiding the obvious appearance of a full Italian lockdown. … No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.
I don’t know if lying about this is actionable, but it’s certainly abominable. She freely admits to hiding the fact that she had a long-term lockdown in mind right from the start, and that the “two weeks” thing was just a ploy to get the administration to fall into her trap.
What may be just as bad is this part: “I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.” Let’s just start with a conclusion, and cherry-pick the data to fit that conclusion. The consequence – long-term lockdowns – were absolutely devastating and we are still feeling their pernicious effects on society, the economy, child development, mental health, and social interaction.
And this is from today:
“The messenger RNA vaccine should have been rolled out for the people that were at risk for severe disease because that’s what the vaccine was developed for,” Birx said.
She also confessed the COVID shot was never “designed” to prevent infection:
“That is not what the COVID vaccine was designed to do. It wasn’t designed against infection.”
Now you tell us – now that people lost jobs, were censored, were coerced, and were misled into believing if they got the shot they’d have a low chance of COVID infection.
We have always been at war with Eurasia.
Bookkeeping: this isn’t even good enough for government work
And yet apparently it was considered just fine:
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) said on Feb. 17 that a total of $4.7 trillion worth of payments from the Treasury Department are almost impossible to trace because of missing account identification codes.
DOGE said the Treasury Department has assigned identification codes called Treasury Access Symbols (TAS), designed to note which account a Treasury payment is linked to, which DOGE said was a “standard financial process” for bookkeeping. However, the codes were not assigned for trillions of dollars worth of payments as the field was considered optional, according to the agency.
“In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible,” DOGE stated on the social media platform X.
“As of Saturday, this is now a required field …”
Sloppy is an understatement. Then again, I guess they thought no one would ever check.
Well, someone did check:
DOGE reported that it found an estimated total savings of $55 billion on Feb. 17, which it said would come from a mix of “fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings.” …
As of Feb. 17, DOGE placed the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) first in its list of top 10 agencies based on total contract savings, followed by the Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management. DOGE said its reporting website will be updated twice per week.
Why are Democrats protecting government waste and fraud, when most voters are against it?
PALANTIR CEO ALEX KARP DELIVERS PAINFUL TRUTH TO DEMOCRATS
'Fighting against Elon Musk and DOGE is political suicide.'pic.twitter.com/heRJlnZ4hj
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) February 18, 2025
The most simple and obvious reason is that it is Democrats who profit most from some elements of what others consider waste or fraud. Many many of their “progressive” programs depend on government funding, particularly of the hidden type. They don’t want the details revealed.
But there are plenty of other reasons, such as:
(1) Government workers are overwhelmingly Democrats.
(2) Anything Trump does must be opposed. If he found a cure for cancer, it would be the wrong cure. If he is seen doing even one good thing, it casts doubt on the Hitler comparison on which they rest so much of their campaigning and rhetoric.
(3) Anything Republicans support must be fought against. They may not all be full Nazis like Trump, but anyone onboard with him certainly is. The merit of what they might be doing is irrelevant.
(4) Musk is an apostate and cannot be forgiven.
(5) Billionaires are evil, unless they’re billionaires who are earning virtue by supporting Democrats.
(5) As a result of the cuts, jobs will be lost and lots of them. Sympathy for that has long been considered by Democrats to be a winning issue: hard-hearted Republicans versus kind-hearted Democrats.
(6) Another long-held message of Democrats: the federal government is your helpful friend, and it should grow rather than shrink.
I will add that I think that Karp (the man speaking in the video), as a former Democrat, makes the error of still believing that Democrat leaders are capable of dropping these agendas and trying to appeal to the voters with logic and good will.
Open thread 2/18/2025
Will people sympathize much with laid-off government workers?
This is one of the approaches of the left and the MSM – to highlight the plight of laid-off government workers. For example:
60 Minutes gave laid-off employees a platform, allowing them to cry about paychecks and other difficulties they will face.
“Twelve days ago, people knew where their next paycheck was coming from. They knew how they were going to pay for their kids' daycare, their medical bills. And then, all gone overnight,” says Kristina Drye, who was fired in the USAID shutdown. https://t.co/cysOqteb8p pic.twitter.com/bUcOAnhMjs
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) February 17, 2025
Will many people weep for the government workers? I’m sure many of them really are encountering hardship, at least at the moment. But most have good skills and probably are quite employable elsewhere.
I think the sentiment towards government workers is generally not especially sympathetic. People at large are also hurting economically, and they blame the government in large part.
Biden insisted on aid for the Gazans, but where did it go?
I know; I know – we already knew this. But here’s more evidence that the aid went straight to Hamas:
The humanitarian aid that entered the Gaza Strip at the beginning of 2024 reached Hamas leaders instead of Gaza citizens, according to recordings of communications between Hamas operatives revealed by Channel 12 on Sunday.
Israel presented the recordings to the US, Channel 12 claimed; however, the Biden administration was adamant that 250 trucks of aid enter Gaza on a daily basis.
It is one of the bizarre elements of the war against Hamas that the West insists on humanitarian aid, knowing all the while that it helps Hamas much more than it helps the people of Gaza. It also ignores the fact that the vast majority of the people of Gaza back Hamas, terrorism, and the destruction of Israel.
Today is day 500 for the hostages, and it’s been marked in Israel by intense demonstrations and demands for the hostages’ return. I’ve written many posts about the hostages, so I won’t belabor the point again. I’ll just briefly repeat that the demands and pressure should be focused on Hamas and Gaza, and that those demands should come from the entire world. But that’s not at all the way it is. Instead, most of the world is silent or even in sympathy with Hamas, and the demands in Israel seem to be aimed only at the government of Israel to capitulate. It’s understandable, considering the horror the captives and families are experiencing, so I don’t blame the families and friends. But I think these demonstrations also play into Hamas’ hands, and Hamas does its best to encourage the pressure on Netanyahu’s government rather than on itself.