I haven’t written anything about the Azerbaijani airplane crash and Russia because I’ve been waiting for more clarity on the story.
But so far, clarity hasn’t come. So I’ll link to this:
Early indications suggest a Russian anti-aircraft system may have downed the passenger jet that crashed in Kazakhstan on Christmas Day, a US official told CNN, as authorities recovered a second black box that they hope will shed light on the cause of the disaster that killed dozens of people.
The signs point to a Russian system striking Azerbaijan Airlines flight J2-8243 before it crashed near the city of Aktau, the US official said Thursday.
This is the first time the US has offered an assessment of Wednesday’s crash, which killed at least 38 of the 67 people aboard the plane.
If the early indications are ultimately confirmed, it may have been a case of mistaken identity, the US official said, in which poorly trained Russian units have fired negligently against Ukraine’s use of drones.
Officials from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia urged people not to speculate about the crash until investigations have concluded.
Of course people are going to speculate. There are all sorts of conflicting stories and possibilities; read the link for more of the details.
There are some survivors:
At least 38 of the 67 people on board the plane were killed in the crash, Kazakh authorities confirmed, including two pilots and a flight attendant.
Some 29 survivors, two of whom are children, were pulled from the wreckage, Bozumbayev said.
My guess is that Harris was so unused to being expected to answer hard questions on her way from high position to high position that she thought the ultimate high position – the US presidency – would be hers if she just continued along that path.
And you know what? She came way too close to winning the 2024 election, considering her abysmal performance.
Anyway, here’s the story that sparked these reflections of mine:
Vice President Kamala Harris stormed out of a meeting with powerful Teamsters President Sean O’Brien while campaigning, arrogantly telling him she didn’t need his support because she’d “win with you or without you” — just before her crushing loss to Donald Trump.
O’Brien recalled the episode on “The Tucker Carlson Show” on Monday as he discussed his union’s historic decision not to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in nearly 30 years.
O’Brien said Harris finally agreed to sit with the Teasmstars for a roundtable after President Biden dropped out of the race, just to only answer a quarter of their 16 questions. Other candidates, including Trump, answered them all.
Harris apparently didn’t even think she needed to court unions, which used to be a stronghold of Democrat sentiment. No more.
Also, here’s a one-minute segment from the interview:
I don’t think Harris had ever before had to face the consequences of conveying an obnoxious attitude of entitled arrogance. Finally, she has. Of course, she’ll probably land on her feet anyway, with some sort of cushy position and lots of money. Hey, maybe she’ll even be the Democrats’ presidential nominee again, but I don’t think so.
[NOTE: This is a slightly edited version of a previous post.]
This is the second night of Chanukah, and I wish everyone a happy one. Chanukah is about a successful revolt and a miracle of light:
The miracle of the one-day supply of oil miraculously lasting eight days is first described in the Talmud, committed to writing about 600 years after the events described in the books of Maccabees. The Talmud says that after the forces of Antiochus IV had been driven from the Temple, the Maccabees discovered that almost all of the ritual olive oil had been profaned. They found only a single container that was still sealed by the High Priest, with enough oil to keep the menorah in the Temple lit for a single day. They used this, yet it burned for eight days (the time it took to have new oil pressed and made ready).
The words of this Chanukah song are in Yiddish—written by Morris Rosenfeld in 1924 before the Holocaust and before the establishment of Israel—and they are not happy. But I didn’t know that when I first heard it, and I post it anyway because I think it’s a very beautiful song:
O little lights of mystery
You recall our history
And all that went before
The battles and the bravery
And our release from slavery
Miracles galore.
As my eyes behold your flames
I recall our heroes’ names
And our ancient dream:
“Jews were learning how to fight
To defeat an awesome might
They could reign supreme”
“They would rule their own domain
When the enemy was slain,
The Temple cleansed and whole.
Once there was a Jewish land
And a mighty Jewish hand.”
Oh, how it moves my soul!
O little lights of mystery
You retell our history
Your tales are tales of pain.
My heart is filled with fears
My eyes are filled with tears
“What now?” says the haunting refrain.
Written in 1924, and it seems prescient.
Bikel translated the song that way in order to make the rhymes come out in the English version. But a more literal translation of that last verse might be this [NOTE: that link isn’t working anymore, but here’s the translation I had found there]:
Oh little candles,
your old stories
awaken my anguish;
deep in my heart there
stirs
a tearful question:
What will be next?
Last year the words of the song had an extremely ominous quality. Chanukah that year came only two months after 10/7, and Israel was struggling to recover from the terrible blow as well as to fight back on many fronts and against rising worldwide anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitism is still there, but Israel has experienced not only “battles and bravery” but “miracles galore.” The future remains uncertain, but things have certainly been looking up, particularly since this past September.
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the ‘sphere
Bloggers were glad to see Christmas draw near.
Their laptops were turned off and all put away
The bloggers were swearing to take off the day.
Their children were nestled all snug in their beds
While visions of extra time danced in their heads
With a father or mom not distracted by writing
No posts to compose, and no links to be citing.
But we all know that vows were just meant to be broken
And the vows of a blogger can be a mere token.
There’s always a chance that some sort of temptation
Will rise up to make them of fleeting duration.
For instance, there might be found under the tree
A sleek Mac; well, what better sight could there be?
And who could neglect it and wait the whole day?
It cries to be tried out, one just can’t delay.
Or maybe somewhere there’s a fast-breaking story
Important, and possibly leading to glory.
It can’t be ignored, there’s really no choice,
So add to the din every blogger’s small voice.
And then there are some who may just like to rhyme
(I’m one who at times must confess to this crime),
And it’s been quite a while since Clement Clarke Moore
Wrote his opus (though authorship’s been claimed by Gore).
So it seems about time it was newly updated
And here’s my attempt – aren’t you glad you all waited?
Forgive if it sounds a bit awkward to read.
In writing, I set a new record for speed.
I had to get under the wire and compose it
Before Christmas Day. Now it’s time that I close it.
But let me exclaim (or, rather, I’ll write)
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!
Here’s a video of the original, with some 50s-type nostalgia for those who remember. There are a few odd anomalies (“safe in their beds” instead of “snug in their beds”). But it brought back memories of pincurls, and the days when parents were assumed to sleep in twin beds (even though I don’t recall that most people did).
I’m pretty sure I had the book on which this is based. The illustrations look very familiar:
A president’s pardon and commutation power only extends to federal convictions and sentences. Now Biden – or the people telling him what to do – has commuted the life sentences of almost all the federal lifers, with three exceptions. The reason he gives is that he’s against the death penalty, but the ordinary and usual way to deal with such a policy change would be through statutory means.
But hey, who needs a legislature, when we’ve got a sort-of-president?
And of course, the logic of the rationale falls through because of the three-person exception. If the death penalty is wrong, why keep it for those three?
It’s not as though the 37 whose sentences were changed to life in imprisonment are sympathetic characters, either:
In the stunning act of clemency just two days before Christmas, Biden, 82, gave the reprieve to some of the nation’s most violent murderers — nine of them found too dangerous to live after butchering fellow inmates — as part of his effort at “ensuring a fair and effective justice system,” the White House said. …
The three men on federal death row did not get a commutation were Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who along with his brother killed three people in 2013; Robert Bowers, who killed 11 at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, and Dylann Roof, who killed nine black Charleston churchgoers in 2015.
Among those getting some holiday cheer is Thomas Sanders, who in 2010 kidnapped and then shot 12-year-old Lexis Roberts four times and cut her throat in Louisiana — days after the girl watched as Sanders murdered her mother on a road trip near the Grand Canyon.
Christmas also came early for Anthony Battle, who murdered an Atlanta prison guard with a hammer in 1994 while serving a life sentence for raping and murdering his wife, a US Marine, in 1987 at Camp Lejeune, NC.
Jorge Avila-Torrez, another clemency recipient, sexually assaulted and stabbed to death two girls — Laura Hobbs, 8, and Krystal Tobias, 9 — who had been riding their bicycles in their neighborhood in a suburb north of Chicago in 2005.
Four years later, he strangled naval officer Amanda Snell, 20, inside her barrack in Arlington, Va.
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous Christmas Eve post.]
… a creature was stirring.
On Christmas Eve I was expecting a visit from my son, who was flying in as a rare treat. I had tidied up, and was putting on the finishing touches while waiting for him to arrive from the airport. As I was poised at the top of the staircase on my way down from the second floor, I saw a movement on one of the lower steps.
A dark shape. A small dark shape—very still, and then in motion again. With tiny little ears, and a long tail.
A mouse. Very much stirring.
I let out a shriek, like in the cartoons. Yes, I know that mice do not hurt people. But yes, they give me the willies when they startle me and scurry around—like—mice. The few times when this has happened before, they’ve always sought the little opening from whence they’d come and scurried away, hardly ever to be seen again.
But this mouse seemed to be lost and disoriented. Maybe because it was almost midnight on Christmas Eve, and no creature was supposed to be stirring. In the midst of my unreasonable fear was a sort of amusement. What was it doing here, this evening of all evenings?
The mouse was still on the staircase landing, and although I assumed that somehow it had managed to climb the three stairs to where it was, it appeared to be perplexed about how to get up or down from there. I watched it from what I considered a safe distance at the top of the stairs, and I could see it moving back and forth, back and forth, first towards the wall and then towards the edge of the step, but it could not seem to get the courage to make a break for it.
What did I do? I called my son and asked how far away he was. Forty-five minutes. And then I settled in, not for a long winter’s nap but for a long viewing from a good vantage point to monitor the mouse’s position till my son would arrive. For the moment, the mouse seemed quite well-contained on the stairs, but I didn’t trust that—and sure enough, slowly but surely, with many fits and starts, it managed to get back down those three stairs to the ground floor.
Now, it turns out that watching a mouse is actually sort of interesting. This one darted from stair-bottom to hall to bathroom to bedroom and back again (my place is built upside-down, with the bedroom and bathroom downstairs and living room and kitchen upstairs). I had a special horror of the mouse being in the bedroom—so after its one foray into the bedroom for five minutes and then out again, I slammed the bedroom door shut and placed a thick towel to block the crack at the bottom. The towel seemed to act as an effective barrier, like a small mountain range, and the mouse didn’t venture into that room again.
But back and forth it went—along the wall in the hall, into the bathroom, up a few stairs and then back down them again. I noticed that it seemed to get smarter and smarter; each time it climbed the stairs it was better at it, until it seemed as though it had been doing this all its little life.
And then by trial and error it found the molding along the side of the stairs, which then acted as a sort of ramp by which the mouse could easily climb all the way to the top. This filled me with dread. I was conceding the downstairs for now, but the upstairs was my territory! But what to do? That molding-ramp made it so easy; the mouse was coming up in a determined sort of way, till I could look into its beady little eyes and it could look into mine. I let out another involuntary yelp, stamping my feet and clapping my hands, trying to make enough noise to frighten it off.
I looked and sounded completely and utterly ridiculous.
And yet it was effective; the little thing stopped in its tracks, then turned and went back downstairs again, to my great relief. Then a few minutes later it came up the ramp-molding again, and I re-enacted the same stupid pantomime I had before. The mouse kept coming—up up up, light and fleet of foot, relentless and implacable. I actually thought of throwing something at it to head it off—perhaps my shoe, like Clara in “The Nutcracker.” But oh, for a platoon of tin soldiers like hers! (I’ve cued up this video to start at the right spot, although it’s mistitled because these are not meant to be rats, they’re mice):
But alas, we were alone, just the two of us, mousie and me. And I didn’t really want to hurt it, which I thought might happen if I threw my shoe, so I reached for a pillow—and at that moment I heard the key turn in the lock and my son walked in.
I’m always happy to see him, but perhaps never so happy as this time, as I stood at the top of the stairs in a semi-crouch, clutching a small pillow and making silly-yet-hopefully-scary noises at a mouse that was climbing a molding-ramp on the edge of the staircase.
My son managed to keep his disdain under control long enough to catch the mouse in a plastic container and escort it outside to be released, but not before we took a photo though the plastic. Yes, the mouse is kind of cute. But no, I don’t want him in my house, not on Christmas Eve or any other time.
A migrant from Guatemala has been arrested for allegedly lighting a sleeping subway rider on fire in Brooklyn on Sunday morning — then watching as his innocent victim burned to death in what the New York’s top cop called “one of the most depraved crimes one person could possibly commit.”
The savage killing — which happened at about 7:30 a.m. on an idling F train at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station — shocked commuters, MTA workers and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who said Sunday that the heinous crime “took the life of an innocent New Yorker.”
There’s much much more at the link. But one thing I don’t see is whether there were witnesses, and what they did or didn’t do. After the Daniel Penny arrest and trial, it would be hard to fault them for holding back.
The alleged perp was identified through photos and three high-schoolers called police because they saw him and recognized him on another subway. Also:
Officials said the 33-year-old suspect came to the US in 2018 from Guatemala. He was detained by border patrol agents in Arizona in June of that year, sources said. His legal status wasn’t immediately clear Sunday night.
He received a transit summons in May 2023, but his criminal record in New York City was largely clean otherwise, sources said. He was living at a shelter on Randall’s Island at the time of the infraction.
Take your pick: psychopath, drugs, psychotic, or some combination of the three?
One of the goals of the exploding pagers planted by Israel’s Mossad on Hezbollah operatives was to cultivate fear. I think that goal was met. The exploding pagers have seemed like a turning point from more conventional urban warfare against terrorists to something previously unheard-of in its creativity and audacity.
Two anonymous and disguised ex-Mossad agents were recently featured on 60 Minutes, describing some of the details. We have no way of knowing how much they said was true, but it certainly should send a shiver through every terrorist bent on harming Israel. For example:
One of them said the psychological effect the attack had on Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who he asserted saw pagers blow up operatives right next to him, was a “tipping point of the war.”
That agrees with my perception that it was a turning point.
More:
One agent said the operation started 10 years ago using walkie-talkies laden with hidden explosives, which Hezbollah didn’t realize it was buying from Israel, which it has sworn to destroy.
“We created a pretend world,” said the officer, who went by the name “Michael.”
Phase two of the plan, using the booby-trapped pagers, began in 2022 after Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency learned Hezbollah had been buying pagers from a Taiwan-based company, the second officer said. …
The second agent, who went by the name “Gabriel,” said it took two weeks to convince Hezbollah to switch to the heftier pager, in part by using false ads on YouTube promoting the devices as dustproof, waterproof, providing a long battery life and more.
He described the use of shell companies, including one based in Hungary, to dupe the Taiwanese firm, Gold Apollo, into unknowingly partnering with the Mossad. …
“When they are buying from us, they have zero clue that they are buying from the Mossad,” Gabriel said. “We make like ‘Truman Show,’ everything is controlled by us behind the scene. In their experience, everything is normal. Everything was 100% kosher including businessman, marketing, engineers, showroom, everything.” …
“We create a pretend world. We are a global production company. We write the screenplay, we’re the directors, we’re the producers, we’re the main actors, and the world is our stage.”
If you saw this in a movie you would not believe it. Except, now you would.
More:
He asserted that the veteran Hezbollah leader saw pagers exploding and injuring people who were right next to him in his bunker. Asked how he knows that, Gabriel said, “It’s a strong rumor.”
Two days after the attack, Nasrallah gave a speech.
“If you look at his eyes, he was defeated,” Gabriel said. “He already lose the war. And his soldier look at him during that speech. And they saw a broken leader.”
And Israel doesn’t want terrorists to think that anything they do or anything they touch is safe:
“We want them to feel vulnerable, which they are. We can’t use the pagers again because we already did that. We’ve already moved on to the next thing. And they’ll have to keep on trying to guess what the next thing is.”
Hezbollah’s recruiting probably isn’t going all that well these days.
Not long after 10/7, when the war in Gaza began, I recall reading that, hard as the Gazan campaign was, the inevitable future war against Hezbollah in Lebanon would be far more difficult. Hezbollah had more weapons and more forces, and were thought to be a far more formidable enemy. That’s why it was so stunning to see how quickly the tables were turned, and with what shocking innovation in the tactics of waging war against terrorists. Not only that, but it was astounding to realize that this plan had been hatched ten years ago and expanded on two years ago, and yet the Israelis had been patiently biding their time and waiting till they needed to execute the scheme.
