If you’ve got the time, these two videos are rewarding. I ordinarily listen to these sorts of “talking heads” videos at a faster than normal speed.
The first is a Caroline Glick interview on the topic of Lebanon and the IDF:
And here’s a guy who does not pull his punches:
(1) Zuckerberg rediscovers his inner libertarian and does away with fact-checkers, planning to replace them with “X”-style community notes.
(2) It turns out that neither the press nor Biden and company seem to think that Trump is really Hitler. Fancy that. But unfortunately many people – including some I know – took it all to heart and believe it at this point. The people I know who believe this are quite smart in other respects and are not especially gullible, either. I’m not sure why the “Trump is Hitler” propaganda took with some people and not with others.
(3) Karen Bass, current mayor of Los Angeles, is in big trouble:
Honestly, between the taxpayer-funded Ghana trip, the deer-in-headlights look in front of the reporter, and the awkward press conference, I don’t see how Bass survives this politically speaking. Because after all the smoke clears, the harsh glare of the media spotlight is going to shine down even brighter on her bigger failures which will include questions about funding for the fire department.
But Los Angeles is a Democrat-dominated city and they’re known for routinely voting for the same people/political party and yet expecting improved results each time.
(4) Many Democrats appear to be prepared to join with Republicans in voting for the Laken Riley Act.
(5) Biden’s corruption is actually the big “underreported story” of the last five years.
Everyone is waiting for January 20th, when Trump takes office again.
Those who voted against Trump are waiting with dread, terror, or resignation.
Those who voted for Trump are waiting with eager anticipation and hope.
And I get the impression that the waiting isn’t limited to those in the US, and that most of the world is relieved that Trump will be in charge soon rather than the addled Biden and his faceless handlers.
Trump’s task will not be easy, however; not at all. I wrote of uncontained actual fires in California earlier today – well, there are a lot of uncontained metaphorical fires all over the world and in this country that will need his attention.
Every now and then lately, this blog has been slowing down or even going down, fortunately only for short periods of time. I’ve talked with the host and they don’t really know what’s happening, except that they say it seems to coincide with some bot attacks. And yet bot attacks have happened regularly for ages and haven’t caused slowdowns and outages, so I tend to doubt they’re the reason.
If it continues for long, I will have to consider another host. I really don’t want to do that, not only because it’s an annoyance but also because no host is perfect and it wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem. But please bear with me and let me know what you’ve been experiencing.
Recently Trump has reissued his warning to Hamas about the hostages:
When pressed by American political commentator Hugh Hewitt on the specific meaning behind his warning, Trump elaborated with characteristic intensity: “If those hostages aren’t released by the time I get into office, there will be hell to pay.
“I don’t think I have to go into it. … But it won’t be the word ‘don’t,’ you know. I heard the word ‘don’t,’ you can add that into it, but that would just be a small part of it. … Those hostages have to get out. They have to get out now.”
And now this news:
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, is scheduled to be in Doha, Qatar, on Wednesday to advance multilateral negotiations aimed at securing the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
During a press conference on Tuesday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, Witkoff, a Jewish businessman and longtime friend of the president-elect, expressed optimism about the ongoing discussions.
I’d love to be privy to Witkoff’s instructions.
Meanwhile, the bodies of two of the hostages have been found in Gaza by the IDF. They are Yosef Al Zaydani and his son Hamzah, who until now were among the hostages believed to still be alive. The two were Bedouins, which is a reminder that Hamas also warred on Israeli Arabs as well as Israeli Jews:
RIP.
If memory serves, large California fires don’t ordinarily happen at this time of year, which is usually California’s rainier season; they happen in the fall and are usually over by early December. And I think that memory does serve, since because of Gerard I am intimately familiar with the Paradise fire. Not only that, but I lived in California for a while and have witnessed a few, as well as having a good friend whose mountain home in Malibu – looking out on the Pacific – was totally destroyed in 1993.
Large and destructive fires in California usually occur in the drier seasons and are often wind-whipped. The wind is definitely a factor in the current ones:
The Palisades Fire started burning around 10:30 a.m. Tuesday and scorched nearly 3,000 acres between the beach towns of Santa Monica and Malibu. Around 6:30 p.m., the Eaton Fire broke out in Altadena near Pasadena and swelled to more than 2,200 acres. By 10:30 p.m. a smaller blaze named the Hurst Fire had ignited in Sylmar, in the San Fernando Valley northwest of downtown Los Angeles and consumed about 500 acres.
The cause of all three blazes are still under investigation, according to Cal Fire. But the powerful Santa Ana winds are likely driving their rapid growth.
“The combination of low humidity, dry fuels and shifting winds has heightened the potential for spot fires and rapid expansion,” Cal Fire said in an update.
Governor Newsom and others on the left are of course blaming climate change. The story is far more complex than that, but it’s not politically expedient to emphasize the other reasons. I’ve written a lot about California wildfires, their causes, and how to control them: for example, see this and this. See also this article from 2017.
More about the present fire situation:
Jon Keeley, a senior research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, previously told USA TODAY climate change isn’t the only reason for the increase in large fires.
In California, population growth, increasing fire ignitions and the Santa Ana winds are bigger factors in wildfires, Keeley said.
This is from James Woods:
I took this last night from our beautiful little home in the Palisades. Now all the fire alarms are going off at once remotely.
It tests your soul, losing everything at once, I must say. pic.twitter.com/nH0mLpxz5C
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) January 8, 2025
Having been very close to two people who “lost everything at once,” I’m well aware of how catastrophic it is. However, it pales in comparison to losing one’s life in a fire. RIP to the two people who have died in the present fires, which are as yet uncontained.
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a post of mine from 2015. Why? Because I feel like it, that’s why.]
I’m not all that fond of precious jewels. That’s very fortunate, because I don’t own many.
Richard Burton would have gotten off easy with me. When I got married, I wore a plain gold wedding ring, one that had been in my family since the 1800s, and never missed or thought of a diamond engagement ring. It just wasn’t my thing.
I have plenty of non-precious pieces of jewelry, though, and I’m particularly keen on this guy’s work (if you’re interested in a gift for somebody—they look better in real life than in the photos, for some reason). On reading the maker’s bio [link broken], it occurs to me that the following may be the underlying reason I’m so fond of his jewelry:
I was inspired as a young boy by visiting the great art museums in New York City, and spent many hours in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking at the gold jewelry.
Aha! Ancient jewelry was his inspiration. Now that, I’ve always liked. And the thing that has long fascinated and amazed me about very ancient jewelry is that the design of most of it could be easily worn today; it never dates. And what’s more, jewelry that is thousands of years old and displayed in museum collections looks, for the most part, practically new.
For example, please take a look at the stunning examples here and reflect on how very old most of them are.
Care to guess the age of this one?
Hint: it’s from Ur.
Which makes it about 4500 years old, give or take a few.
Here’s one that’s practically modern:
And to the inhabitants of Ur, it would be futuristic. But to us, it’s a bit old: it’s made of emeralds, garnets, and gold, and is a Helenistic piece from about 200 BC.
And of course, the whole thing also reminds me of poetry, in this case Yeats:
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Although neither Grecian nor Byzantine (the latter being the site of where Constantinople and now Istanbul lies), and made in the late 1700s in India, this is something akin to the way I always pictured the artifact in the last verse of the poem:
Or this, also from India and the same period, which includes enamel and gold (as in the poem):
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
It’s an understatement to say that Alan Dershowitz sounds unhappy with Democrats these days. He is especially unhappy with their lawfare against opponents and particularly with their lawfare against lawyers who make arguments they don’t like. And he’s not the least bit keen on Kamala Harris, either.
I am convinced that Dershowwitz actually voted for Trump in 2024, although he’ll never tell.
Somehow I’d missed this news until right before it was about to go into effect. I had noticed something similar in European cities the last time I visited Italy, which was six years ago – either fines or surcharges for driving within what once was the city’s heart. Well, now it’s come to New York.
Here’s how it works in New York:
The decision Friday evening by U.S. Senior Judge Leo Gordon clears the way for the MTA to begin charging the toll as scheduled on Sunday, the culmination of a years-long planning process for a program designed to decrease traffic in Midtown and Lower Manhattan while raising billions of dollars for the MTA. …
Passenger vehicles with E-ZPass will be charged the base $9 toll from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends. Overnight, the toll is $2.25. The toll is higher for commercial vehicles like trucks and buses, and lower for motorcycles.
Uber and Lyft trips into the tolling district will be charged $1.50, while taxis and cabs face a charge of $0.75.
Trump is against it, and it required federal approval so that might matter.
Of course, Manhattan traffic has been awful for a long time. Then again, the NY subway has gotten more dangerous. Will people feel forced onto it?
And it’s not just going to affect Manhattan. Here’s what’s also predicted:
Commuters to the Big Apple will be turning neighborhoods across the city into their own personal parking lots beginning this week, ditching their rides to save their wallets because of the $9 congestion pricing plan, concerned residents told The Post.
The plan is expected to upend neighborhoods closest to the 60th Street tolling zone with nightmarish gridlock as a surge of drivers begin scouring for free parking spots. …
The Upper West Side and Harlem are also expected to get slammed — a problem when parking spaces are already a precious commodity. …
Communities such as Long Island City in Queens, the South Bronx, and ritzy Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Park Slope in Brooklyn are fearing their quality of life will be uprooted — not only by their own drivers but also those schlepping to the Big Apple from New Jersey, upstate New York, Long Island and Staten Island.
Here’s a caption to a photo at the linked article:
“My constituents who still have no real public transit connection to Manhattan are looking forward to treating the posh, transit-rich, gentrified, brownstone Brooklyn as their new park-and-ride,” quipped NYC Council Minority Leader Joe Borelli (R-Staten Island).
I’m not sure what Borelli means by “real.” Staten Islanders have the ferry, which is plenty real but drops them off at the southern tip of Manhattan. They also have various buses that journey across various bridges.
As I said, driving in Manhattan has been a nightmare for a long time. This is an attempt to discourage people from even trying it. But the law of unintended consequences may make things worse. Actually, that may be the goal – making it so bad that cars are banned altogether in Manhattan.
I hadn’t heard of any other city in the US adopting this method, and in fact New York is the only one. So far:
It’s been very cold in New England for the last few days. Having returned recently from visiting family who live in climes with less chilly winter weather, I found it a shock to get to the Boston airport very late at night and wait outside for transportation. Somehow, I’d forgotten to bring my gloves and scarf along, too, although I had meant to.
Brrrr.
To top it all off, I’d caught a cold from my grandkids. I love my grandkids very much, but they’re at that age where colds are common and expected. And when I get a cold, it doesn’t last just a few days. It segues into sinus congestion and a cough that usually endures, all told, for about a month. I’m not usually very sick, fortunately, but I wonder why my colds linger that way and have done so since I was a teenager.
I’ve tried those zinc lozenges and all they seem to do is delay the amount of time I feel as though I’m getting a cold but haven’t really gotten it yet. I take Vitamin C. I inhale steam. Decongestants make me sicker so I avoid them. None of it seems to matter.
And yet I like the weather in New England. I enjoy four dramatic seasons – as long as the ice storms are kept to a minimum. So here I stay – so far.