In their latest depraved move, the terrorist group/political entity Hamas released a “proof-of-life” video Saturday of American hostage Keith Siegel, a father of four and grandfather of five. Appearing alongside fellow hostage Omri Miran, the Chapel Hill, N.C., native looked strained and haunted, and his eyes welled up with tears during the nearly three-and-half-minute-long clip. …
The video is not dated, but the 46-year-old Miran says he has been held hostage now for 202 days. Siegel and Miran also say they are aware of the efforts to get all the Hamas captives released …
So these videos do seem recent enough to be considered “proof of life.” It doesn’t surprise me; I’ve said that some hostages are alive, perhaps as many as half – and I think it’s no accident that all the recent hostages shown are also Americans. All the hostages are highly valuable to Hamas and are more valuable alive than dead, as is evidenced from these videos which were met with renewed demonstrations in Israel demanding the hostages be released at just about any cost:
Thousands protested in Tel Aviv on Monday night, calling on the government to make a deal with the Hamas terror group for the release of hostages who have been held in the Gaza Strip since October 7, in a rally that later descended into clashes with police forces, arrests, and claims of violence toward a lawmaker and relatives of a hostage.
Amid heightened preparations for the military to launch an offensive in the Gazan city of Rafah, demonstrators lit a bonfire on Tel Aviv’s Begin Road, near the IDF’s headquarters, and spelled out “Rafah can wait — they [the hostages] cannot” in large Hebrew letters.
Relatives of hostages and captives who were released in the week-long truce in November took part in the protest, calling on the government to stop the war in order to bring the abductees home.
The rally came as Hamas was set to give a response to an Israeli offer that would see a 40-day pause in fighting and the release of potentially thousands of Palestinian security prisoners in exchange for 33 living hostages, and a second phase of a truce consisting of a “period of sustained calm” – Israel’s compromise response to a Hamas demand for permanent ceasefire.
When I read stories like that I experience sharply mixed feelings of sympathy for the families and anger at the extent of what’s being asked. Don’t they see that this only causes more suffering and more hostages being taken in the future? Don’t they see that their current suffering is the result of earlier lopsided hostage deals? Well, they might see, but right now they are suffering unbearably as are their kidnapped loved ones (those who are alive, anyway) and they desperately want that suffering to end.
It’s up to the government to do what’s best, but I think the government may be close to caving from the pressure. For example, I keep reading stories such as this:
Slamming the Netanyahu government for making what he said were dangerous “strategic concessions” in order to secure the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Tuesday appeared to threaten to bolt the coalition if it approves an agreement currently being negotiated in Egypt.
Speaking with the press following a meeting of his far-right Religious Zionism faction in the Knesset, the cabinet member said that while he would have received kudos for coming out in favor of a deal, he believes that such a course of action would endanger Israeli civilians and that he is “ready to pay the political price” to prevent an “existential threat” to the State of Israel — even if it means going to the opposition.
Smotrich skipped a cabinet meeting to attend the faction meeting, amid ongoing political disagreements within the government over the deal and Israel’s pending ground operation in Rafah.
There is little question in my mind that the goal of Hamas in releasing the video was to increase the pressure on the wavering and divided Israeli government on this issue, and to fuel more demonstrations. What will the government do? I don’t know. But I’m very worried.
NOTE: It’s not the case that all the hostages’ families are part of these demonstrations. Some do not want a deal because they realize the extreme dangers and have been standing against conceding to the terrorists. See this.
Today for some unknown algorithhmic reason, Google thought I’d like this story of a guy in a wildlife preserve sleeping next to a cheetah:
Imagine dozing off under the shade of a tree after a taxing day out in the sun, only to wake up to the gentle nudge of a wild cheetah snuggling against you. This isn’t the start of a fable or a campfire story. It’s what happened to Dolph Volker, a wildlife photographer and animal enthusiast, during one of his volunteering stints at Cheetah Experience, a sanctuary for endangered species in South Africa.
It’s an old story; the guy has a YouTube channel with videos such as this one:
Well, whatever floats your boat. The cheetahs seem pretty tame, but they are nevertheless wild animals and I’ll be taking my siestas somewhere else.
But the reason I’m writing this post is that it stirred up a memory I had pretty much forgotten, which is that as a teenager I very much liked this painting by Henri Rousseau:
I had seen the original many times at MOMA and there was just something about it that appealed to me – the sense of danger and yet safety, the mystery, the fact that the gypsy wouldn’t even have been aware of the visitation come morning, or that perhaps it was all just a dream.
I liked the painting so much that when I became a freshman in college, I bought a large print of it at the college bookstore and hung it over my bed in the dorm. I had a roommate who thought it a rather odd and disquieting choice, but I found it comforting.
I haven’t thought of that painting in many decades until today.
First, we have a lawyer who has been DA George Gascon’s third in charge. Once again, it’s a good idea to read the whole thing, because it’s complex and an excerpt really doesn’t do it justice:
LA County Assistant DA Diana Teran, who oversaw George Gascón’s efforts to prosecute law enforcement officers instead of criminals and to release thousands of felons from prison early, was arrested Saturday on 11 felony charges related to the “unauthorized use of data from confidential, statutorily-protected peace officer files.” Like many alleged felons in Los Angeles County, Teran was out on bail less than an hour after her arrest.
Unlike many alleged felons in Los Angeles County, the Diana Teran scandal has the potential to topple the county’s power structure, or to put a severe dent in it.
That potential exists because of the sheer volume of personnel and criminal cases Teran was involved with that might now be challenged in court, and because her actions at issue in the criminal case allegedly involve coordination with high-ranking county officials, such as Inspector General Max Huntsman, District Attorney George Gascón, and current and former members of the county Board of Supervisors. …
It’s more convoluted than any script Hollywood could come up with. …
[For example,] Between 2014-18, as Constitutional Policing Advisor for LASD, Teran withheld exculpatory evidence from Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB) investigations and findings, leading to the discipline and termination of deputies who should have been exonerated.
NOTE: Those deputies’ personnel files would then contain inaccurate information about their actions, and could improperly taint cases they were involved in.
As I said, much much more at the link.
And then there are private actors who think big. This one’s about counterfeit postage. Does that sounds like a small matter? It’s not:
A San Gabriel Valley woman who was accused of using counterfeit postage on tens of millions of packages pleaded guilty Friday to defrauding the United States Postal Service out of more than $150 million.
Lijuan “Angela” Chen, 51, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and one count of using counterfeit postage, according to a statement from the U.S. Justice Department.
Chen, a resident of Walnut, has been in federal custody since she was arrested in May 2023. A co-defendant, 51-year-old Chuanhua “Hugh” Hu — who authorities say is considered a fugitive hiding in China — has been charged with one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S., three counts of passing and possessing counterfeit obligations of the U.S. and one count of forging and counterfeiting postage stamps.
In all, authorities allege that the duo mailed more than 34 million parcels containing counterfeit postage labels from January 2020 through last May.
That’s a whole lot of parcels. Harness that energy for something good and you’d have something.
I don’t subscribe to the Times because I just don’t want to give them money. But I saw this post at Althouse discussing a recent piece by Bret Stephens, the Times’ resident Trump-averse “conservative.” It contains the following quote from Stephens:
What really worries me about this case is that, if Trump isn’t convicted, it is going to turbocharge his campaign.
Trump will be able to say, with some credibility, that the Deep State really was out to get him.
Althouse adds:
The Deep State should have thought about that before going out to get him. Also, if you think it’s credible that the Deep State is out to get him and that’s a reason for you to hope he’s convicted, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Well, yes – but (as Althouse almost certainly knows) they do not feel at all ashamed; they feel righteous.
That quote from Stephens is extraordinarily tone-deaf. Does Stephens think that the prosecutions/persecutions haven’t already turbo-charged Trump’s campaign? If so, he’s either not paying attention or fooling himself, or both. He seems to think that a kangaroo-court conviction gives people who weren’t already inclined to find Trump guilty the idea that he must be guilty.
I don’t know if that is so at all, but I know that the left and the Trump-haters are counting on it. Therefore they must at least state that they themselves of course believe he’s guilty, whether they actually believe it or not.
Then there’s “Trump will be able to say, with some credibility, that the Deep State was out to get him.” He will be able to say with some credibility? Does Stephens think this statement of Trump’s has no credibility at present? That gives Stephens absolutely zero credibility, not only because of the extreme weakness of the cases against Trump, plus their suspicious timing in terms of the election, but also due to a host of other proven ways in which the Deep State has been out to get Trump ever since the campaign of 2016.
And yet this is what passes for Deep Thought on the part of Stephens and the Times.
In quantum mechanics, Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, of quantum superposition. In the thought experiment, a hypothetical cat may be considered simultaneously both alive and dead, while it is unobserved in a closed box, as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur. This thought experiment was devised by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 in a discussion with Albert Einstein to illustrate what Schrödinger saw as the problems of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. …
Although originally a critique on the Copenhagen interpretation, Schrödinger’s seemingly paradoxical thought experiment became part of the foundation of quantum mechanics.
Although I initially thought it was a joke, this seems to be a true story. And it’s got the closed box, and the dead-or-alive unknown:
A Utah couple accidentally shipped their pet cat in an Amazon return package, trapping it in the box without food or water for six days.
The cat, named Galena, was eventually discovered safe and well in California, Utah’s KSL-TV was the first to report. …
Carrie Clark, one of the cat’s owners, noticed the pet had gone missing on April 10, the outlet reported.
For nearly a week, Clark, along with family and friends, searched the couple’s house and neighborhood and plastered missing posters around town hoping to locate the cat, KSL-TV reported. …
Clark then received a text notifying her that Galena’s microchip had been scanned, and later that day, she received a call from a veterinarian in California. …
The vet told Clark the cat was found inside an Amazon return package, alongside five pairs of steel-toed work boots.
Alive.
It could happen to anyone, right? Maybe even Kristi Noem.
I think that Galena has used up more than one of her nine lives on that journey.
Lately there’s been a great deal of talk around the blogosphere about Khymani James, the student leader – if the movement can be said to have a leader – of Columbia’s anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and anti-Enlightenment demonstrations and encampments.
It makes me think of this sort of thing, updated for our own more messed-up era:
If you want to get up to speed on the sort of person who’s now considered a student leader, see this as well as this. From the former:
One of the most vocal student activists leading the anti-Israel Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University, Khymani James, openly stated in an live-stream of an official university inquiry in January that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”
James, who states in the hearing that he goes by “he/she/they” pronouns, live-streamed his meeting with Columbia’s Center for Student Success and Intervention, where he doubled down on an Instagram post that sparked the report. In the report, which he reads aloud at the start of the meeting, James warned Zionists who may want to “meet up and fight” and that he “fights to kill.”
“Do you see why that’s problematic in any way?” a Columbia employee asked James during the hearing, to which he responded: “No.”
And from the second link:
[James said] “We will always stand on business. Zionists, they don’t deserve to live comfortably, let alone, Zionists don’t deserve to live. The same way we’re very comfortable accepting that nazis don’t deserve to live, fascists don’t deserve to live, racists don’t deserve to live, Zionists, they shouldn’t live in this world. ”
That particular video then cuts to James speaking in a cult-like fashion to a group of “protesters” who then formed a human chain to block Jewish students from passing.
James wasn’t done, though. In another excerpt from his livestream, he can be heard suggesting that he has a desire to murder Jews but hasn’t acted on it yet.
“Be glad — be grateful — that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists. I’ve never murdered anyone in my life, and I *hope* to keep it that way.” This is a top leader of @Columbia’s encampment, with whom the school is “negotiating,” expanding on his thoughts about how Israel… pic.twitter.com/ugodO4O7M5
As the great poet Yeats wrote over 100 years ago, “the worst are full of passionate intensity.” He also wrote that “the best lack all conviction” – but I don’t think that’s the case here. “The best” have plenty of conviction – they’re just not in charge of our institutions.
But what especially interests me about Khymani James – aside from the fact that Columbia didn’t expel him under their no-hate-speech policy after they became aware of these remarks – is his personal history. Most recent articles I’ve read about him ignore that history, but I find it quite fascinating because this guy has been in a leadership role for a long time and has gotten many kudos for it. See this:
In 2021, the Boston Globe wrote a glowing article about James and his “confrontational approach.” It said that James was a high school student at the prestigious Boston Latin Academy, and a student member of the Boston Public Schools committee before resigning because the adult members were “racist and adultist.”
Just a few months later, he called into a school committee meeting and stated, “I, too, hate white people,” while defending two members accused of anti-white racism.
So that was in 2021, about three years ago, towards the end of his high school career. No wonder he’s so full of himself. The world has rewarded him over and over for his racism and hatred. He probably considered himself immune from any negative consequences, and why not?
And here’s an excerpt from that 2021 Globe article. What a lot of heady power for a 17-year-old [emphasis mine]:
As a global pandemic raged last fall, and battles over school reopening plans turned bitter, a 17-year-old high school senior named Khymani James was sworn in as the student representative on Boston’s School Committee.
From the confines of his bedroom, where he logged into marathon School Committee meetings on Zoom and peppered Twitter with his sharp critiques and pointed questions, James became an unlikely force in Boston politics last winter as he advocated for the city’s 50,000 students.
Outspoken and relentless in his quest for answers, the teenager’s direct approach at times contrasted starkly with the more cautious, guarded takes of his School Committee elders, all of them political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the mayor. …
The passion James brought to his public service began with his own turbulent personal history, the traumatic losses he rarely mentioned, even to close friends. It also reflects a generational shift, according to experts. Across the country, younger leaders are moving toward more confrontational approaches, forged in an era of historic social upheaval and destined to clash with an older, more conservative brand of leadership.
“This generation of young people is no longer satisfied with incremental change,” said Chris Buttimer, a researcher at the MIT Teaching Systems Lab who has studied student activism. “They want to fundamentally change structures.”
More background of a personal nature:
Known for his scathing critiques of Boston’s schools, James is also a sterling example of the system’s potential: A young Black man raised by a single, immigrant mother in a South Boston housing development, nurtured by teachers who recognized his potential, accepted by one of the city’s best public high schools, and then by a prestigious Ivy League college, Columbia University.
He attributes his lack of fear to his upbringing by a Jamaican mother of uncommon strength, who taught him to reject societal “rules” put in place to oppress the powerless. But tragedy and trauma made James fearless, too: When, at 12 years old, he lost his mother and his world collapsed, it felt like he had nothing left to lose.
Until then, it had been the two of them against the world, their feisty natures so closely entwined, James thought of them as two halves of the same person.
“Colors looked different after she was gone,” he said. “The sky looked darker.”
After his mother’s sudden death at age 31, James shuttled between relatives and family friends, enduring episodes of emotional abuse and struggles with his mental health, he said. Just beginning to identify as gay, he encountered intolerance in his own family.
After a relative abruptly kicked him out of their home on Easter morning in 2016 — in part for identifying as gay, James said — he recalls walking to a nearby T stop, carrying his few belongings in a garbage bag and wondering where to go next. He was still just 12.
He admits to having mental health “struggles” – and I believe him. The enmeshment with his mother and then her death at a young age would certainly be traumatic. However, plenty of people have terrible childhoods and don’t turn into raging balls of hatred because of it. He might have been thrown out of the relatives’ house because of being gay, but note that “in part” statement. My guess is that he was a rebellious and difficult young adolescent and they’d had enough. I wonder whether the Globe independently corroborated the story, as well.
More:
His close friend Charlene Adames-Pimentel recalls rampant homophobia in their middle school, where James was a target who constantly fought back. (“How’s your GPA?” was one of his favorite comebacks.)
“He was that person that everyone wanted to break, and you can’t break him,” Adames-Pimentel said. “He was intimidating in the sense that he was always right, and always himself.”
“Always right?” Hardly. But I don’t doubt he’s actually smart in the academic sense; James got into Boston Latin when it still was an exam school. Then he had a court internship, and then the prestigious Committee appointment:
Keenly observant and unafraid of conflict, James called out hypocrisy where he saw it: in budget cuts that threatened his teachers and mentors; in school reopening plans that failed to address aging ventilation systems; in leaders who claimed to value student voices, but failed to give the School Committee’s lone student representative, elected by their peers, equal standing as a voting member.
I had wondered how he got the position and that answers the question: other students elected him. More – and note that word “passion” again:
[Superintendent] Cassellius said she admired James’s passion and tireless preparation for meetings, and believed deeply in his potential, as she wrote in a glowing recommendation to Columbia. But she said she worried that the traumas of his past, and of the pandemic, were affecting him as his tone grew harsher.
It’s a trajectory that appears to have gotten steeper while at Columbia, and grown to include Jew-hatred.
More:
James said he was fully aware of committee conventions, and ultimately made a conscious choice to reject them. “I chose not to practice respectability politics because it wasn’t getting anyone anywhere,” he said.
“Respectability politics.”
James finally resigned from the School Committee. He then continued in the same strident and verbally combative vein. The following person gets bragging “I told you so” rights for warning Columbia prior to James’ becoming a student there [emphasis mine]:
After a June 16 School Committee meeting where James used inflammatory language to defend Oliver-Davila and Rivera, the two former board members accused of antiwhite racism, one Twitter user posted a video of his comments [apparently the ones bout hating whites] and tagged Columbia, suggesting that the school reconsider James’s admission. “Is this the type of student you want at your school?” the tweet asked.
Columbia administrators may be sorry they didn’t heed that particular tweet.
By the way, the comments to that Globe article, from 2021 when it was written, are quite something. Here’s one, for example: “Racism is the exploitation of people of color by white people and our white institutions. Prejudice against whites is not racism.”
Khymani James has probably been told that for most of his life.
And guess what? Now that all of this has gone public, Columbia has finally acted a little bitty bit:
Columbia University has banned the student protest leader, who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” from the campus, a university spokesperson confirmed to The Hill Friday.
Is that the same as being expelled? I don’t think so. And it’s not as though Columbia has just learned any of this. They were told of warning signs before James even entered the school, but they’ve certainly been aware of his rabid Jew-hatred for many many months.
Even James himself seems to have noticed that his usual exemption from consequences seems not to be operating quite the way it used to, because – very uncharacteristically, as far as I can see – he has apologized:
James apologized for the heated language Friday, saying in a post on social media platform X that his comments were “wrong.”
I was curious to read for myself what this apology consisted of, and sure enough, it’s accompanied by a “poor me” blaming of the nasty old right and the playing of the ever-present intersectional victim card. Here it is:
James has been playing this sort of game for a long, long time, minus the surface apology. It would be nice if he stops being rewarded for it. But I have no doubt that, if he fades into the background, he’ll be easily replaced by others playing a similar game.
The Guardian’s article describes a section of Noem’s book, set for release next month, in which she recounted shooting her dog after deciding it was “less than worthless” and “untrainable.”
In her account, Noem grabbed her gun and led the dog, named Cricket, to a gravel pit.
“It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done,” Noem wrote.
She then went on to kill a family goat, which she called “nasty and mean.” Noem also led the goat to a gravel pit, where she said her first shot wounded but did not kill the animal. She got another shell for her gun and killed the goat, according to the book. …
Noem was lambasted Friday on social media; some said they were “horrified,” while others posted pictures of their dogs.
Although I’m fond of dogs, my first thought was about something I learned when I first moved to New England over a half century ago: the fact that back then, outside of cities, many people considered their dogs working animals and if they weren’t up to snuff they were shot. I’ve heard many stories from people in my generation about that sort of thing happening to them as a child: a parent taking the animal somewhere out of sight and killing it because it was worthless for work.
Now I see that Noem herself gave the same explanation:
“We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm,” she said in a post to X …
Nevertheless, it’s not something that’s going to endear her to most voters today, to say the least.
The White House took the opportunity to post photos of the president “walking with the family dog Commander, who has had various biting incidents.” Apparently Commander is a serious serial biter who probably should be put down, so this is quite the contrast.
In addition, Noem is – or was – considered a contender to be named as Trump’s VP, and so this certainly seems a counterproductive revelation on her part. What’s more, Trump isn’t keen on dogs, although I doubt anyone is using that as the deciding factor in whether or not to vote for him. But Noem may now be out of contention.
The background to all of this is that plenty of untrainable (or untrained) dogs or just surplus dogs are euthanizeed all the time in the US, it’s just that people outsource the coup de grace now. Here are some animal shelter statistics.
