Last Call For Israeli Getting Serious Out There, Con't

 Israel is still holding off on that Gaza ground offensive after intense pressure from the US and EU.

The US and several European governments are quietly pushing Israel to hold off on launching a ground invasion of Gaza following Hamas’s release of two hostages, fearing that the incursion will all but scuttle efforts to secure additional releases for the foreseeable future, a senior diplomatic official told The Times of Israel.

The Western governments currently pressuring Israel each have citizens among those unaccounted for and believe that the more time that passes, the harder it will be to secure the hostages’ release, the official said.

The senior diplomatic official said that the governments recognize that a ground invasion is very likely and are not telling Israel not to launch one at all, but rather hold off to try and see if additional diplomatic efforts can succeed.

Israel says its offensive is aimed at destroying Hamas’s infrastructure, and has vowed to eliminate the entire terror group that rules the Strip and carried out the deadly onslaught on October 7 in which 1,400 were killed in southern Israel, about 1,000 of them civilians.

Israel says it is targeting all areas where Hamas operates, while seeking to minimize civilian casualties.

Meanwhile, the White House walked back US President Joe Biden’s apparent comment that Israel should delay its expected offensive in Gaza until more hostages held by Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups are released.

While boarding Air Force One earlier, Biden was asked by a reporter whether Israel should push off a military operation in Gaza, to which he responded, “yes.”

“The president was far away. He didn’t hear the full question. The question sounded like ‘Would you like to see more hostages released?’ He wasn’t commenting on anything else,” White House spokesperson Ben LaBolt was quoted as saying by Reuters.

Hamas on Friday night released two hostages — US-Israeli dual citizens Judith Raanan and her teenage daughter Natalie — who were vacationing in Israel from the US when they were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nahal Oz during the terror group’s assault.

It was the first release out of at least 203 hostages held in Gaza since Hamas’s infiltration and massacre in Israeli southern communities that started the ongoing war.

 

How much time Hamas can buy with international hostages, we'll see. Israel of course is not sparing the bombing campaign, with another evacuation order of Gaza City and norther environs issued Sunday, including two dozen hospitals.

Demands by Israel for the evacuation of Gaza hospitals amount to “a death penalty for patients,” according to the Palestinian Red Crescent

 

The organization said the Israeli military issued three evacuation orders for the Al-Quds hospital on Friday. Spokesperson Nebal Farsakh told CNN Sunday: “We do not have the means to evacuate them safely. Most of the patients are with critical injuries.”

A total of 24 hospitals, including Al-Quds, are under the threat of “being bombed at any second due to Israeli evacuation orders,” Farsakh said.

CNN has not independently verified this number. The Israel Defense Forces says Hamas frequently uses civilian facilities as cover for its military operations. The IDF told CNN Friday: "Hamas intentionally embeds its assets in civilian areas and uses the residents of the Gaza Strip as human shields.”

The World Health Organization has condemned “Israel’s repeated orders for the evacuation of 22 hospitals treating more than 2,000 inpatients in Northern Gaza.”

Farsakh said her team is counting on the international community to take action ahead and “stand for humanity.

 

Aid trucks continue to trickle in from the Egypt side of the Gaza strip, but the UN says Gaza will run out of fuel and water later this week.

Meanwhile here in the US, we're seeing rabbis murdered.

Investigators are searching for a motive in the death of a Detroit synagogue leader found stabbed over the weekend, the city’s police chief said.

The body of Samantha Woll, president of the board of the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue, was discovered with multiple stab wounds at her home on Saturday morning, the Detroit Police Department said in a statement. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Responding officers had followed “a trail of blood leading officers to the victim’s residence,” where it is believed the crime happened, the Detroit Police Department said in a statement.

Police have not identified a suspect in the case, and it’s still unclear what led up to the killing.

“Understandably, this crime leaves many unanswered questions,” Detroit Police Chief James E. White said in a statement on social media site X. “This matter is under investigation, and I am asking that everyone remain patient while investigators carefully examine every aspect of the available evidence.”

“It is important that no conclusions be drawn until all of the available facts are reviewed,” White added.

 

No suspects, no motive, but the Detroit PD, Michigan State Police, and the FBI are on it. The police continue to say it's not related to antisemitism, but a stabbed Rabbi is still a tragedy. Some 4,500 Gazans have been killed over the last two weeks. Those all are tragedies as well.

A ground offensive in Gaza will be a slaughterhouse akin to ethnic cleansing. The people loudly pushing for that are the people we should trust the least. And President Biden and the Pentagon are likewise sending another aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf, while Israeli Defense Forces are now attacking the West Bank and Syria.

The odds of a catastrophic misstep that leads to a massive regional conflict are ludicrously high at this point, and things are only going to get worse.

Mr. Jones Goes To Poverty

A federal judge has ruled that white supremacist whackjob Alex Jones cannot use bankruptcy to get out of his billion-dollar plus judgment for defaming Sandy Hook families.

 

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones cannot use his personal bankruptcy to escape paying at least $1.1 billion in defamation damages stemming from his repeated lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, a U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled Thursday.

Bankruptcy can be used to wipe out debts and legal judgments, but not if they result from "willful or malicious injury" caused by the debtor, according to a decision by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston, Texas.

Courts in Connecticut and Texas have already ruled that Jones intentionally defamed relatives of school children killed in the mass shooting, and they have ordered Jones to pay $1.5 billion in damages.

Lopez ruled that more than $1.1 billion of those verdicts, awarded for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, cannot be wiped away in bankruptcy. But he ruled that other parts of the verdicts, including $324 million in attorneys' fees that were awarded as punitive damages in the Connecticut case, could possibly be discharged.

It was not clear whether those punitive damages were attributable to "willful" and "malicious" lies, or whether they could instead be attributed to merely "reckless" conduct, Lopez wrote. Lopez said he will hold a trial to sort out the precise amount of the damages that could be discharged.

Attorneys for Jones and the Sandy Hook families did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

Jones is going to owe these families the better part of hundreds of millions, and he's going to have to pay up. The system works, at least in this one case. 

We'll see what the judge comes up with as a figure, but I'm hoping it's enough to break Jones completely, both his back account and the shriveled raisin he calls a soul.

Sunday Long Read: Sky Scrapers

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes to us from Outside Magazine's Brad Rassler, who spent some time on the barnstormer circuit and attender the annual High Sierra Fly-In as recreational bush pilots and hobbyists across America take to the wild blue yonder in the age of social media, influencers, and follower counts.

Throughout the lower 48, recreational bush pilots are using their nimble planes and social media influence to spread the word about bold frontiers in flight: touching down on remote federal lands, flocking to little-used runways in designated wilderness, and drag racing one another for pure sport. Their capstone event each season, the High Sierra Fly-In, never fails to deliver hair-raising thrills.

n early August of 2022, 69 days before the 12th annual High Sierra Fly-In—an event known as American aviation’s Burning Man—Trent Palmer hoisted himself into the cockpit of his red, white, and blue bush plane, the Freedom Fox, and fired up the engine for another cruise into the valleys north of Lake Tahoe. Palmer, wearing flip-flops, shorts, and a Trent Palmer limited-edition trucker hat (“Fly Low, Don’t Die,” $40), is not your typical bush pilot, hauling mountaineers and machinery. Thanks to a prodigious YouTube following, he’s one of the most prominent of a new breed of lower 48 adventurers who are landing their fat-tire planes on and in mountaintops, ridgetops, river canyons, mountain meadows, dry lake beds, and grass and dirt airstrips, mainly in the American West, and mostly on land managed by the federal government.

Here was Palmer, 34, his handsome face smooth of whiskers but strong of jaw, moving through his preflight checklist, which included ditching his flip-flops in favor of bare feet, both of which were hovering over the rudder pedals. He jiggled the center control stick, rising up from the floor between his legs, which he used to tame the Freedom Fox’s direction and pitch. He said “Clear” and pushed the starter button, and the propeller coughed and revved, eventually producing a throaty thrum. The plane’s wings and fuselage were the color of Old Glory; several dozen stars spanned the cockpit’s exterior. An observer would be forgiven for mistaking Palmer’s craft for an Air National Guard stunt plane.

Palmer tweaked the throttle and steered toward the runway. He spoke into his headset: “Stead traffic, Freedom Fox, taking runway two-six at alpha two. It’ll be a westbound departure.”

I sat to Palmer’s right, a motion-sickness bracelet on my left wrist, anti-nausea gum in my mouth, and a gallon-size ziplock at my feet. The copilot’s control stick started bobbing around between my legs in sync with Palmer’s. The Freedom Fox, an immaculately maintained, high-wing, single-engine tail-wheel plane with burly 29-inch bush tires, monster shocks, extended wings, and a 140-horsepower fuel-injected turbocharged engine, climbed from Reno-Stead Regional Airport at 1,500 feet a minute. The stamped alkaline flats of the Great Basin gave way to the dense pine forests of California’s Lost Sierra, a huge swath of mountainous backcountry about an hour north of Reno. On the horizon, the jagged crest of the Sierra Buttes came into view. Palmer, who was piping a Shakey Graves tune through the headsets, exuded competence, bonhomie, and (in the confines, I couldn’t help but notice) a pleasant, soapy smell.


He had agreed to take me along as he executed a series of “short takeoffs and landings”—STOL, for short—which epitomize bush flying, whether the assignment is depositing researchers onto a remote airstrip in Alaska’s Brooks Range, competing in STOL competitions, or landing “off-airport”—on ungroomed terrain, nowhere near a runway—as we were about to do next to California’s Stampede Reservoir.

Palmer seemed happy to be flying without cameras and a YouTube agenda. “How are you feeling?” he asked, this polite ambassador and evangelist of his winged pastime, this member of a band of nine bush-pilot buckaroos called the Flying Cowboys, social media influencers all, using their platforms to spread the bush-flying gospel to the uninitiated.

In one 2018 video, Palmer and two other young pilots fly to a northern Nevada mountaintop and set up base camp. One pilot paraglides off the summit. In a voiceover keyed to uplifting synths and soaring drone shots, Palmer says, “More often than not, we work away all the golden years of our lives, years we’ll never get back, all in an attempt to enjoy the remaining few.”

“I say it doesn’t have to be that way,” he continues. “What I’m saying is to stop waiting, stop dreaming, and start living. Life is too short to eat dessert last.”

“You know the drill,” he concludes. “Like this video if you do, subscribe if you haven’t, [and] come be my wingman.” Then he whispers “Peace,” flashes the V, and slaps his hand over the lens.

The result? Followers. Half a million of them. Palmer grosses about $150,000 a year from various income streams, including YouTube.

He gestured at the twitching control stick. “You might get punched in the nuts when I’m landing,” he said, “but don’t worry about it.”

 

Some 100 years later after pilots and aviators became household names, it feels like there's a whole Amelia Earhart /Howard Hughes vibe around these YouTube aces and TikTok flyers. Whether or not that's a good thing, well, the EPA is trying to crack down on the leaded fuel these planes guzzle, and new regulations may put the chocks on many of these fliers. 

And frankly, in the era of climate change, it's getting more and more difficult really to justify recreational flying anyway.

Maybe Snoopy had it right with his doghouse.