I am flying

January 16, 2025 • 9:34 am

Late this morning I fly from Burbank to Chicago (there’s a nonstop flight!) and will be home this evening. Yesterday was no-diet day, including a visit to Blinkie’s donuts, a homemade cake for me, lunch at In-N-Out Burger, and dinner at a nice Asian restaurant.

There was a disaster in my hotel room, with water suddenly spouting up from the bathroom sink drain and flooding the room (the cause is unknown). I had to flee to a new room before everything got soaked, and in the rush threw my back out! Oy! I had to sleep on the wrong (left side) to ameliorate the pain.

But I kvetch.  Today I’ll ask readers to discuss the Issues of the Day, foremost among them being the on-again off-again ceasefire deal to end the Gaza War. It looked all wrapped up, but now the Israeli cabinet has held up finalization, saying that Hamas added extra demands.  My main concern about this deal is that it appears to leave Hamas in power, which would be a disaster for Israel.

But I have to pack, so please discuss any issues you want today, and I should be back in action by Friday, or Caturday at the latest.

Bonus photo taken by Carole Hooven: Luana Maroja (right), Julia Schaletzky, and I during our discussion at the USC conference.

57 thoughts on “I am flying”

    2. Sadly, I did. A bit too much force applied to recalcitrant 3rd-world plumbing led to a similar room-emptying eruption.

  2. Yes. The fact that Israel is negotiating with Hamas implies that Hamas remains the power of record in Gaza. There needs to be a mechanism by which Hamas no longer remains in power. Otherwise, Israel has not achieved its most important stated objective, which is to remove Hamas from power and prevent it from ever establishing power again. This transition from power must be buried in the not-yet-completed details to be hashed out in phase two. It worries me that the removal of Hamas from power is not front and center. Indeed, Hamas remaining in power would be a disaster.

    1. Hamas will not voluntarily give up power. And they HATE the Palestinian Authority, which is now supposed to run Gaza (the PA of course runs the “pay for slay” program).

      1. Yes. Secretary Blinken’s speech the other day* called for a revitalized PA to govern in Gaza. I was afraid that his speech might scuttle the deal. He seems so utterly naive to me. Hamas has to go, and there needs to be some way to make that happen. If they won’t relinquish power through negotiation, it’ll have to be by force.

        https://www.state.gov/office-of-the-spokesperson/releases/2025/01/secretary-antony-j-blinken-toward-the-promise-of-a-more-integrated-middle-east

    2. I had viewed the cease fire deal to be a temporary stage. A time to bring back some hostages, and a time to open up more channels for aid to the Palestinians.

  3. Here are some back stretches that work well if done on a regular basis and can prevent back problems. Take 10-15 minutes and make it a habit. They come from the book “Stretching” by Bob Anderson. There are pictures that explain them better but I have words that I use as I keep it as a “Contact” on my phone.

    Hold only stretches that feel good. Do not overstretch. Do just before bed.

    Stand upright. Hands on hips, arch back 2x 10-12secs
    In sprinters blocks. Arch back. 15-20 secs earch leg.
    Lying on front/elbows. Arch back 2x 5-15 secs
    Lie on back. Feet touching groin stretch. 30 secs
    On back. Pull knee to shoulder.20-30 secs each leg.
    Crunch position. Neck stretch. 2x 3-5 sec contract/relax
    Crunch position. Arch shoulder blades & buttocks. 2x 5-8 secs & relax.
    On back. Feet touching. Rock side to side 15-20 times.
    On back. Knees up. Crossover 1 leg & use knee to pull down. 15-30 secs each leg.
    Lying on side. Top knee 90 degrees with hand on it. Rotate back.10-15 secs each leg.
    Lie on back. Overhead arms stretch 2×5 secs
    Lie on back. Knees pulled to chest. 2x 10-15 secs.

      1. Cat Cow is a yoga pose. It’s probably easier for you to google it than for me to explain it. But basically you start on hands and knees on the floor with a flat back. Then round your center back upwards like a scaredy cat (gentle stretch) then round your back down to a sway back shape. That’s the cow part. I hope that’s understandable, I do this one a lot, it keeps me off the pain meds.

    3. I’ve had great results from the simple exercises in “Treat Your Own Back” by McKenzie, and good results from “Treat Your Own Neck” and “Treat Your Own Hip”. There are also TYO Shoulder / Knee / Ankle & Achilles Tendon, which I will try if/when I have any problems there. Be well.

  4. A very nice candid of the three of you by Carole. I thought that it was very good discussion with Julia as an excellent participating moderator…something that is difficult to pull off effectively. Looking forward to the posting of the videos from the entire conference.

    The hostage deal is too heavy for me to comment on but I am pretty much in Norman’s camp. Hamas cannot even think that it can negotiate let alone be recognized by others as such. Think more like Japan and Germany surrenders of WWII, not negotiations. I am afraid that Israel has only extinguished half of the fire and the other half will rekindle a continuing blaze. Negotiate over hostages? Really?

  5. So what about The Village People as entertainment for Trumps’ inaugural? I for one was rather gob-smacked!

  6. Israel should wait until Trump is in office, then repudiate the deal and proceed to persecute war until Hamas is destroyed, Gaza is under full occupational control, and all hostages are freed.

    Otherwise, Israel will have lost the war.

    Biden.Dem blocks this. Trump will support it.

    1. I saw an IDF brig gen on you tube who said that was basically his view of the matter. I think it was Einat Wilf, but not sure, who recently proposed a cordoned off territory in northern Gaza where Gazans who were willing to surrender, ie no right of return, no elimination of Israel, land for peace/two state solution, volunteer to enter, and the rest (people outside that territory) will be fully fought as the enemy.

    2. The Israeli leadership has a difficult choice to make. If they wait until Trump takes office or hold out for an agreement on all the hostages, it’s quite possible that more hostages will die in captivity. The clock is ticking. The families are demanding that their loved ones be returned. Netanyahu and the leadership need to thread a needle by degrading Hamas sufficiently while at the same time bringing the hostages home. I think that the leadership is doing an amazing job under intolerable circumstances. Netanyahu has not agreed to end the war; he has only agreed to phase I (as far as I understand). He knows that he may need to go back into Gaza after phase I—after rescuing 43 living and dead hostages—to eliminate Hamas entirely.

      That’s it from me. The Roolz loom…

    3. It is Trump, via his envoy, who forced Netanyahu to make this deal. Unfortunately, that suggests that he won’t allow Israel to further prosecute the war.

      1. That might be a trick. Trump.Bibi could be bluffing.

        I’ve said many times, Israel should deceive: negotiate or use force to get the hostages, then repudiate all agreement and crush Hamas into the ground.

        The initial error was not declaring the hostages “already dead” on Oct7. All Israelis are combatants, even teens at a rock concert.

  8. There is (to my knowledge) no easy answer to ‘who will run Gaza’. Israel doesn’t want to (for good reason). The Arab states don’t want to (for good reason). The PA is probably not capable. Hamas is a terror organization.

    My suggestion is Singapore. Why Singapore? Because it is really far away. Vietnam would be another choice (for the same reason). Vietnam and Singapore have the advantage of being outsiders, which is a plus in this case.

      1. I believe Israel should run Gaza, for the simple reason that Gaza is the sovereign territory of Israel since May 14th, 1948.

        We have already seen what happens to the sovereign territory of Israel when Israel dithers about asserting its rightful sovereignty – look no further than Judea and Samaria. These areas were also clearly within the legal 1948 borders of Israel. Now, the International community – led by the decades-long duplicity of the UN – believes that these territories somehow belong to the Palestinian Arabs who somehow deserve their own state there, and that Jews have no right to settle there.

      2. The question about motivation is quite reasonable. Several possibilities come to mind. Of course, I would not expect Singapore or Vietnam to run Gaza for free. Other motivations might include a sense of obligation (why would Asian countries feel any sense of obligation?), prestige, military practice. This question has come up before. There have been suggestions that Canada take on a colonial role in Haiti. I opposed this idea. Canada and Haiti are too close and they share (in part) a common language (French). Unsurprisingly, I suggested Singapore instead. Kenya has actually provided forces for Haiti. Kenyan leaders describe the mission as a moral obligation.

      1. Your references to Kuwait are exactly on track. Very, very bad house-guests to put it mildly.

  9. The news footage from Gaza that I saw was disturbing, there was no sign of relief, they were dancing as if victorious. With the obligatory chants of “Allahu Akbar.” It was not a crowd that looked defeated by any means.

    2. Yes it was very weird to see the genocides famine starved ones leaping for joy looking pretty healthy. The calls for the repeat of Oct 7 and the ultimate destruction of Israel was really disheartening especially from the children.

      The claims of Hamas victory did not ring true to me. To go from we are suffering in the worst way possible to we won and will fight on was dystopian. Of course Hamas are pathological liars so anything they said can be taken with a grain of salt.

      1. All of Gaza is an enclave of militarized Hamas combatants and indoctrinated children, mostly illegally non-uniformed, who are pathologically incapable of making a trustworthy surrender because they don’t obey a state authority, only an anti-Semitic religious death cult. They could be starved and the water cut off without it rising to the definition of genocide or even a war crime. Can we not change The Prophet’s mind as the Emperor of Japan changed his in 1945, and put a stop to this?

  10. All I wanted to note – since PCC(E) mentioned it – is how I recall Bugs Bunny saying Burbank with his accent – like “Buoy bank”.

    It’s funny.

    Otherwise, sorry to hear about the soaking – miserable.

      1. That is a good talk!
        I don’t understand the claim that there are “modules” in the brain for anything, let alone for gender identity. But perhaps it isn’t intended to mean a physical structure that one can point to. Rather, perhaps it’s jargony way to say “states of mind”. But that term could imply a degree of fluidity and impermanence, while a module is a mental state that is lasting and not discardable.

        1. I think the evolutionary physiologists who used the term had in mind some sort of functional neural network without necessarily a specific physical location.

  12. I don’t support a ceasefire unless all hostages are returned. That said, if one happens, I have to trust the IDF has a plan. A dark thought crossed my mind—what if they implanted tracking devices in released terrorists that would detonate if they crossed into Israel or entered a war tunnel?

    I know, this is probably why I’m not in the military. But still, I have to believe there’s a plan.

    1. I don’t know how they could plant anything without the former prisoners knowing it.
      But the IDF forces presumably had their way with many of the tunnels, and they could imbed monitoring devices and even remotely controlled explosives in them.

    2. As Mark says, hard to do surreptitiously. But imagine the mistrust the very rumoured possibility would sow amongst the colleagues and families into whose loving embrace the prisoners were returned to. Remember that repatriated operatives are already untrustworthy as presumed double agents, being selected for return, and resented by the families of those who remain in jail. The thought, even if unfounded, that one of them might blow up if you got too close to him would have a salutary effect on morale.

      And can you imagine the effort involved in trying to find an implanted device in someone’s body, especially if it wasn’t there? Give each prisoner a mild sedative before putting him on the truck back to Gaza and only Allah knows what the Jews did to our brother via colonoscopy while he was asleep. The Hezbollah pagers are a gift that keeps on giving.

      1. Letting a single prisoner out is entirely unacceptable.
        Last time this happened Y. Sinwar was one of them released.

        And the world things Israel is letting go of old ladies who hucked rocks at a tank or waved the ugly (British designed) Pal flag. No. Damn it. They’re hardened criminals.

        see my comments below here also.
        Onwards Israeli heroes.

        D.A.
        NYC
        my column with Middle East politics:
        https://democracychronicles.org/author/david-anderson/
        and at Jihadwatch.org of late. 🙂

      2. Bin Laden was terrified the Iranians who had imprisoned one of his wives had implanted “stuff” in her dentistry before she returned to his hideout.
        The Bin Laden Papers, published last year I think. Good read.

        D.A.
        NYC

  13. Sam Harris posted an article on his Substack giving some insight into the dissolution of his friendship with Elon. There is no paywall and I would encourage people to spend five minutes reading it. It’s amazing how Musk can be so brilliant at building incredible companies and yet so dumb in other areas of science. Briefly, Sam and Elon bet that Covid cases would not exceed 35,000 in the US. Elon was supremely confident that he was correct and gave Sam 1000 to 1 odds that cases would stay under. Sam referenced Elon’s lack of awareness of exponential curves and the beginning of a pandemic. Plus the empirical reality of Covid spreading through Italy at the time of the bet. Hubris and impulsivity has never caused a greater drop in IQ.

    1. I was amazed and shocked at the obviously low public understanding of exponentiality during covid. And some other concepts as well – not wildly difficult math. MANY things I’d just assumed were well understood by most people at large…
      There was a terrifying angle to realizing this, 54 years into my life. I had to rejigger my view of the world.

      Now, I have basic stats (from my undergrad degree) and I was a proprietary options trader but what got me was that not even complicated stuff – sometimes even the most basic of things seemed to go over the heads of SO MANY people!

      I quite like Elon but as usual, I’ll take Sam Harris’ argument over nearly all others.
      As a general proposition.

      D.A.
      NYC

      1. We learn in school that exponential growth doesn’t go on forever because negative feedbacks kick in, even if it’s just exhaustion of food or some other resource the process needs to keep going. These always stop exponential growth, we say.

        Except when they don’t, because the resource was everyone on the planet, all susceptible to this novel virus.

    2. Meh, Sam Harris is put out about the loss of face caused by Musk posting negatively about him. Musk embarrassed Harris, which I suspect is the primary reason Harris retreated from X (nee Twitter). I don’t like Musk calling Harris mentally ill. But Harris does have TDS and did get on TRIGGERnometry basically giving his blessing to lying and worse to keep Trump out of office again. Harris claims Musk didn’t watch the video. Well, I have. Harris made a misstep that was indeed taken out of proportion, though not out of context: Harris did argue everything had to be done to prevent Trump. Then Harris melted down and left X when criticism came his way, which I understand as I did the same when mobbed repeatedly.

      Some of Harris’s points about Trump are valid. But what Harris keeps spreading about Musk is unbecoming. He should stop if he wants Musk to back down. Musk is defending himself from attacks from Harris.

      Harris resents that a non-public intellectual has intellectual reach wider than his own. Harris isn’t alone in this. I bet many I respect feel the same way. Musk’s influence has dwarfed the influence of public intellectuals. But to some degree shouldn’t STEM dwarf the humanities? As a pioneering engineer whose products are changing and saving lives, Musk out to have a voice that trumps even Harris’s and others’ who spend more time penning than doing.

      It’s not that I don’t value public intellectuals. I do. But actions speak more powerfully than words. Musk has done more for humanity than Harris.

      1. “As a pioneering engineer whose products are changing and saving lives”

        Do tell. Are Space X and Tesla cars changing and saving lives? Exactly how?

        (Twitter? OK, StarLink is good (except when he threatens nations with shutting it down on them); we have it in a very rural area. Has Neuralink had a single commercial implant?)

        I admire Musk’s achievements in business. But he seems like a troubled human with a poor moral compass.

        1. Elon Musk’s innovations across multiple industries are reshaping society, improving lives, and expanding human potential. His acquisition of X has exposed and disrupted government-backed censorship, reviving free speech debates in Western democracies. SpaceX’s Mars ambitions reflect humanity’s drive for survival, exploration, and resilience, ensuring a future beyond Earth. Tesla is revolutionizing transportation with AI-driven safety, clean energy, and autonomous mobility. Neuralink has already demonstrated brain-computer interface technology, restoring communication for a paralyzed patient and paving the way for future treatments of neurological disorders. Meanwhile, Starlink is bridging the digital divide, providing critical internet access to remote regions and disaster-stricken areas. Collectively, Musk’s ventures are not just technological feats—they are shaping the future of freedom, survival, and human progress.

  14. Jerry and Luana gave a great talk at the conference this weekend. I was thrilled to be there.

    There were some other wonderful talks such as Elizabeth Weiss and Carole Hooven. I look forward to hearing the talks again on Youtube when they are released.

    I am very disturbed Israel is in the position of negotiating with terrorists to get civilians back. How many terrorists will be freed for this? Really???

  15. Some hostages will be returned. Ceasefire won’t last. Trump will greenlight the destruction of Hamas.

  16. The “ceasefire”. No.
    Hamas is backed, voted for and has been admired by the ENTIRE population of Gaza. They (all) specifically took the civilian-combatant distinction off the table. Generations ago actually in one way or another.

    We degrade ourselves to take their moral claims seriously.
    We – in the west/Israel ignore reality playing by modern “rules.”
    The Middle East doesn’t work like that.

    The hostages are almost all dead and they are casualties of war.
    Gaza must be levelled. Inspiration from the Holy Koran – further instructions therein.
    Read it, it is an interesting and informative read. All you need for war is in it.

    https://democracychronicles.org/author/david-anderson/ – my column

    D.A.
    NYC

    1. 5:55pm est update. Looks like a successful catch/capture of the booster by the tower back at launchsite, BUT comms with starship lost at about 150km altitude. Data looked like it showed an early shutdown of some starship engines. Right now assuming vehicle lost but engineers will review data in hand to analyze and assess what happened.

      1. Old news now, but the upper stage failed big-time, disintegrating on re-entry and causing airline flight disruptions. So a bit of a PR disaster in that.

        1. Videos from ground-based observers were frightening reminders of loss of Shuttle Columbia. Nothing more sickening than the words “we have lost telemetry from the vehicle”.

  18. The Aufheben der Sam Harris thought development above is astonishing – especially the evasion of his revolting argument nobody – including me – is even reproducing here from Triggernometry – which we are supposed to take seriously.

    Recall, demoralization is stage 1 in the decades/long strategy for destroying a country without firing a shot.

    “As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell him nothing, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. …he will refuse to believe it… That’s the tragedy of the situation of demoralization.”

    -Yuri Bezmenov
    1983

    Sorry, but I had to say something. Harris’ good writing/work isn’t erased by acknowledging he said one sentence which I’m not sure can be corrected by any sane context.

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