Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, January 13, 2026, and Korean American Day. Wikipedia has a long list of Korean Americans. I’ll pick one from each sex at random; can you identify them?
This person has been featured on this site and I recognized her name.
. . . and who is this?
It’s also National Rubber Ducky Day, National Peach Melba Day, and Public Radio Broadcasting Day. Here’s the world’s largest rubber duck. It’s HUGE (61 feet tall). It needs to be put in the water:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 13 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The protests in Iran continue, and now the death toll is said to exceed 500—but is undoubtedly much higher since the Iranian government doesn’t release names and many people are missing.
Iran’s 12-day war with Israel and the U.S. last June broke the regime’s carefully nurtured image of invincibility, many ordinary Iranians say. Now the aftermath is helping to fuel a wave of protests over the past two weeks that has left at least 500 people dead as the Islamic Republic attempts to regain control.
Footage seeping out of the country shows mass protests are continuing despite the crackdown. Human-rights-group assessments say security forces have already gunned down hundreds, and possibly thousands, of protesters. President Trump has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran if deadly force is used, and on Tuesday aides are scheduled to brief him on specific measures the U.S. can take to respond to the killings.
Iran’s leaders have weathered similar storms before. This time, the regime is in a far weaker position.
The ayatollahs’ rule was shaped by the bloody eight-year war that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq launched in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The social compact that endured since that trauma was that Iranians would acquiesce to hardship and restrictions in return for a strong state that protects them from foreign attack.
That assumption came crashing down when Iranian-backed Hamas and Hezbollah attacked Israel in 2023, triggering a regional war that brought death and destruction into the heart of Tehran last summer.
Israeli strikes across Iran destroyed much of its military leadership, and the follow-on U.S. bombing campaign struck a heavy blow against Iran’s nuclear program. It was a humiliation for a regime that had invested so much of the country’s national wealth into a proxy network that was designed to deter exactly this sort of assault on the homeland.
Now protesters are braving arrest or bullets as they demand not just changes in policy, but the downfall of the Islamic Republic itself.
“This was the last straw. The regime over the years had argued that although it has not been able to bring about prosperity or pluralism for the Iranians, at least it had brought them safety and security. Turns out, it didn’t,” said Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. “Now the people have reached the point of saying: Enough is enough.”
It looks as if the earlier protest against the U.S. and Israel after their previous attack on nuclear facilities wasn’t enough to keep the public allied with the theocracy. I hope with all my heart that this protest not only overthrows the regime, but replaces it with a democracy, and allows people to once again be secular and modern, as they were before 1979.
*The Washington Post has analyzed the footage of the ICE agent’s deadly interaction with Renee Nicole good, and concludes that the ICE agent killed a driver who wasn’t aiming to run over him (h/t Lou).
. . . . A frame-by-frame analysis of video footage, however, raises questions about those accounts. The SUV did move toward the ICE agent as he stood in front of it. But the agent was able to move out of the way and fire at least two of three shots from the side of the vehicle as it veered past him, according to the analysis.
Video taken by a witness shows Renee Nicole Good’s vehicle, a burgundy Honda Pilot SUV, stopped in the middle of a one-way road in a residential area of south Minneapolis on Wednesday morning. That footage and other videos examined by The Washington Post do not show the events leading up to that moment.
The agent, who has not been publicly identified, can be seen standing behind Good’s SUV, holding up a phone and pointing it toward a woman who also has her phone out. The two appear to be recording each other.
The agent then walks around the passenger side of Good’s vehicle.
A pickup truck pulls up, and two additional agents exit the vehicle and approach Good, the video shows. A voice can be heard saying to “get out” of the car at least two times. One of the agents puts a hand on the opening of the driver’s side window and with his other hand tugs twice quickly on the door handle, but the driver’s door does not open.
That same agent puts his hand farther in the opening of Good’s window, and almost simultaneously, the SUV begins to back up.
The agent who was first seen behind Good’s SUV reemerges in front of the vehicle, still appearing to hold up a phone. The SUV quickly pulls forward, and then veers to the right, in the correct direction of traffic on the one-way street.
As the vehicle moves forward, video shows, the agent moves out of the way and at nearly the same time fires his first shot. The footage shows that his other two shots were fired from the side of the vehicle.
Videos examined by The Post, including one shared on Truth Social by Trump, do not clearly show whether the agent is struck or how close the front of the vehicle comes to striking him. Referring to the officer, Trump wrote in his post that it was “hard to believe he is alive.” Video shows the agent walking around the scene for more than a minute after the shooting.
Good’s SUV travels a short distance before crashing into a car parked on the opposite side of the street.
There are more videos and photos from Twitter (X), but you can see them at the link above, or read the article that is archived here (videos don’t appear). All I can say is that the front wheels appear to be turned away from the agent as he fires the second and third shot through the side window. It’s not at all clear whether the car clipped him before that, nor whether Good was already hit (or dead) when the second and third shots were fired.
Car was clearly swerving away from him. Plus, moments early they were yelling at her to "move!" her car.
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) 2026-01-08T23:41:34.211Z
I’ll put the photo below in case Bluehair removes it; it shows the ICE agent firing the wecond two shots through the open driver’s-side window.
I’m not yet ready to join the chorus of people who call the ICE agent a murderer, and I would prefer to see a trial (remember, I was on O.J. Simpson’s defense team, and didn’t form an opinion until I saw the evidence). For in a trial both sides are fighting hard, though, as I found, often for different goals. The prosecution is often determined to convict (sometimes distorting the evidence), while the defense is trying to make the prosecution prove its case. This is supposed to keep the prosecution honest, though I found (always as an unpaid defense expert) that the prosecution, which is supposed to be interested in the truth, often seemed to be concerned not with the truth but with getting a conviction. If the ICE guy who shot Good goes on trial, the defense will have to make the state prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the ICE agent committed either manslaughter or murder, i.e., he wasn’t authorized to use deadly force because he didn’t have good reason to think he was endangered..
*Meanwhile, over at the Free Press, Jed Rubenfeld, professor of Constitutional Law at Yale, gives a legal analysis of the case, including the culpability of the shooter. I’ll reproduce a few Q&A’s, with Rubenfeld asking and answering. The Qs are in bold and the As in plain text. The name of the officer who killed Good was Jonathan Ross.
Does Ross have ‘absolute immunity’ from prosecution by Minnesota?
No, he does not.
Vice President J.D. Vance and other administration officials said Thursday that Ross cannot be prosecuted by Minnesota. “You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action—that’s a federal issue,” Vance said. “That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job.”
That’s not true. The Supreme Court rejected this exact argument in 1906. . . .
Can the federal government cut Minnesota out of the investigation?
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Thursday that Minnesota doesn’t “have any jurisdiction in this investigation,” and according to Minnesota authorities, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is preventing Minnesota personnel from participating in the investigation. Is that legal?
Yes, it is. The federal government can indeed cut Minnesota out, but only from the federalinvestigation. The feds can’t prevent Minnesota from conducting its own investigation.
However, the feds do have control of some of the evidence, like Good’s car, which they impounded. Minnesota won’t get to use evidence from the car.
What about the second and third shots?
Ross seems to have fired his first shot through Good’s windshield. At that moment, he may have been standing in front of or nearly in front of Good’s car—possibly right as, or right after, she struck him. But it seems that Ross fired the next two shots through the driver’s side window, at point-blank range, when he was standing to the side of the car and Good was trying to drive off.
If that’s true and if Ross’s second or third shot caused Good’s death, some legal analysts have said that he is guilty of homicide regardless of whether his first shot was justifiable. In support, they point to the general rule, announced by the Supreme Court in the 1985 case Tennessee v. Garner, that officers cannot use deadly force against a fleeing suspect unless “the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” Once Ross was out of the vehicle’s path and Good started to drive off, some argue, Good no longer posed a significant threat to Ross or anyone else.
But in some circumstances, an officer can keep shooting at a fleeing suspect even after the officer is out of immediate danger.
It is all very complicated, and only a trial, which I think will happen, can settle these issues, at least with regard to “reasonable doubt.”
*Finally (yes, we have three items about this), Jeremiah Johnson at The Dispatch says that the death of Renee Good was inevitable given the nature of ICE (and who they’re hiring), and that there will be more such tragedies.
There are a lot of things you could say about the shooting. You could say that it’s tragic in the plainest sense of the word: A woman is dead. You could point out that it is extremely unclear why ICE officials were stopping her in the first place, or what legal authority they were exercising at that moment. You could point out how unnecessary the entire incident was, how eyewitness accounts emphasize that Good was not acting in a threatening manner, and that she attempted to wave the agents past her vehicle (and did wave one vehicle past). And of course, you could emphasize that, even if she had mildly disobeyed an officer, even if she had driven in their general direction at 5 miles per hour, the penalty for that behavior should not be almost immediate execution via gunshot.
But what’s most important to say is how utterly predictable Good’s death was. This was not an unforeseeable tragedy or a freak accident. It was the inevitable outcome of an immigration enforcement apparatus that has been poorly trained, sheltered from consequences, and empowered to behave recklessly.
Reporting shows that ICE is filled with substandard agents. Its aggressive push to hire more agents uses charged rhetoric that appeals to far-right groups, but the agency has run into problems with recruits unable to pass background checks or meet minimum standards for academic background, personal fitness, or drug usage. One career ICE agent called new recruits “pathetic,” according to The Atlantic, and a current Department of Homeland Security official told NBC News that “There is absolutely concern that some people are slipping through the cracks,” and being inadvertently hired.
At the same time, ICE and its partner agencies like Customs and Border Patrol have been put in charge of a massive immigration crackdown of unprecedented scope. To carry out that mission, they’ve been empowered to act with near total impunity. They routinely violate the rights of observers, protesters, and citizens. They often operate masked and without proper identification, deliberately obscuring who they are and whom they answer to. Combine a massive new mission with anonymity and poor training, and you have a recipe for violence.
For the past year, ICE has been involved in a series of escalating incidents that rarely result in repercussions for anyone involved. ICE agents have recklessly caused traffic accidents and then, in one incident, arrested the person whose car they hit. They’ve tear-gassed a veteran, arrested him, and denied him access to medical care and an attorney. They have attacked protesters merely for filming them in public. They’ve pepper-sprayed a fleeing onlooker in the eyes from a foot away. They’ve pointed guns at a 6-year-old. They’ve knelt on top of a pregnant woman while they arrested her. They have arrested another pregnant woman, then kept her separated from her newborn while she languished in custody. They have repeatedly arrested American citizens, and they’ve even reportedly deported a citizen, directly contradicting court orders.
As these violent acts keep occurring, the response from the Trump administration is to propagandize and lie as flagrantly as it can. J.D. Vance, offering absolutely nothing whatsoever to back up his words, has called Renee Good a deranged leftist. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s claim Wednesday that Good was a “domestic terrorist” was said without a shred of evidence. But it’s part of a pattern. The administration and its agencies claimed they are not arresting citizens when they are. They claimed an Iraq veteran assaulted officers when video shows he plainly did not (and no charges were filed). They denied pepper-spraying an infant, when they did. And far from trying to cool tensions or prevent further violent incidents, the administration routinely employs bombastic language on social media, in an attempt to normalize brutality, violence, and lawlessness as standard operating procedure.
*The NYT summarizes the winners of the Golden Globes, with the award often considered a precursor to an Oscar.
At the 83rd Golden Globes it was a big night for Brazil, Hamlet and Paul Thomas Anderson.
The period drama “Hamnet,” which looks at the family life of William Shakespeare, took the big prize of the evening, best motion picture drama. Jessie Buckley won best actress for her role as Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes. In the other major movie category, “One Battle After Another” won best picture, musical or comedy, and Paul Thomas Anderson took home awards for best director and best screenplay. “The Secret Agent” won best foreign language film and its Brazilian star, Wagner Moura, won best actor in a motion picture drama.
The medical procedural “The Pitt” took home best television show in the drama category and its star Noah Wyle won best actor for his role on the show. Additionally, “Adolescence” won in multiple categories including for best limited series. Owen Cooper took home best supporting actor and both Stephen Graham and Erin Doherty won acting prizes for their roles on the show.
And after five nominations, Timothée Chalamet finally won his first Golden Globe, for his role in “Marty Supreme.”
I must must must see “Hamnet,” which was vigorously recommended by every friend I know who’s seen it. I am not into awards so much, but I did expect Jennifer Lawrence to win for her performance in “Die My Love,” a movie that got pretty good reviews, but despite their verdict on the movie itself, all of them mentioned Lawrence’s star turn. However, “Hamnet” cleaned up. See it, and of course read the book by Maggie O’Farrell, which was superb. I haven’t seen either movie but still predict that Hamnet will win a Best Movie Oscar. For one thing, its subject is less dark than that of “Die My Love.”
If you want to see all the winners, the list and rest of this article are archived here. There’s even a Golded Globe award for podcasts, for crying out loud (“Good Hang with Amy Poehler”).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is peeved at Andrzej (again):
Andrzej: Why did you look at the ceiling?
Hili: I’m praying to regain my patience with you.
Ja: Czemu spojrzałaś w sufit?
Hili: Modlę się, żeby odzyskać do ciebie cierpliwość.
*******************
From Clean, Funny, & Cute Animal Memes:
From Give Me a Sign:
From Stacy:
Here Masih goes one on one with Ana Kasparian from The Young Turks. While I don’t think regime change should be effected by American or Israeli intervention, it can be promoted by that intervention in a nonmilitary way (e.g., withholding oil). But maybe Masih would also want me to STFU. Masih is quite exercised, but that’s no surprise given what’s going on (in addition to Iran trying to kill Masih several times). All I can say is that for several years I’ve been backing Masih and her call for regime change.
Please listen to this. #FreeIran1/2👇🏻 (📹 Masih Alinejad)
— ⚫️🐦⬛ 🇬🇪🇺🇦🇪🇺 (@theskyisnotblue.bsky.social) 2026-01-12T08:33:21.601Z
. . . and I didn’t know that this happened:
We the people of Iran, welcome the European Parliament’s courageous decision to bar representatives of the Islamic Republic from its premises.
The next step must be clear and decisive: European governments should expel the regime’s diplomats from their soil. Those who wage war… pic.twitter.com/3E8kp3pnrD
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 12, 2026
From Malcolm. This doesn’t show me, though, why the rings don’t fall into Saturn from gravitational attraction. Perhaps a nice reader will explain.
A simple demo showing how Saturn’s rings formedpic.twitter.com/yidr7GtW2M
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 2, 2026
Some news from Emma:
Supreme Court To Grapple With the Role of Transgender Athletes in Sports
I report for @NewYorkSun: On Tues, the justices will hear oral arguments about Idaho & West Virginia laws that restrict those born male from sports specifically for girls and women.https://t.co/wcmyxTJkT0
— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) January 12, 2026
One from my feed. Don’t ask me if it’s real, ’cause I don’t know.
When your favorite music video comes on. pic.twitter.com/aZbIXPqcXe
— Planet Of Memes (@PlanetOfMemes) January 11, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was five years old, and would be 87 today if he had lived. https://t.co/goFAKhW44y
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) January 13, 2026
Two posts from Dr. C. O. (Corn Onthe) Cobb. He says of the first one, which he composed, “Here’s a depressed tweet from this morning. Mainly due to the situation in the USA but also the threat to Greenland…”
Increasingly when I wake up and read the news I feel we are in the 1978 remake of INVASION OF THE BODYSNATCHERS. Unlike in the original (double spoiler alert), there are no cops, no grown-ups who will step in to fix things. The rot is everywhere.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-01-12T07:11:00.062Z
. . . and some real science:
We used to do real science
— Paul Fairie (@paulisci.bsky.social) 2026-01-12T01:59:23.341Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Sometimes laughter hurts, but humor and mockery are our only weapons. -Cabu (pen name of Jean Cabut), cartoonist and co-founder of Charlie Hebdo (13 Jan 1938-2015)
The Left narrative on ICE requires that this be a bad shooting. (It’s interesting how little illegal immigrants appear in this story.) I am reminded of Kyle Rittenhouse. I am sure that, after being told by partisans over and over that this shooting was unjustified, there will be suitable outrage if the officer isn’t convicted.
Whether the first shot was justified or not, the second and third ones were not. LOOK AT THE PHOTOS!!! As the car passes him, he is practically reaching into her car through the (lowered) side window to shoot her in the head, twice, when he and the other agents are not in any danger at all.
You keep complaining about partisan blindness on the left, but you should consider the possibility that the partisanship of the right-wing media and the administration’s demonstrated lies might also be biasing people.
It looked to me that all three shots were fired within about a second.
A Toronto police officer fired three shots in rapid succession, causing the knife-wielding suspect to collapse on the floor. After a pause, the officer fired six more shots into the suspect’s prostrate body. Investigators ruled the first three shots were justified and had killed the suspect. The subsequent six were not justified because the suspect was obviously incapacitated — he was lying motionless on the floor at the officer’s feet, (not half hidden in a moving vehicle.) Because the victim wasn’t legally dead, the officer was convicted of attempted murder. If the first three justified shots had inflicted survivable injuries, the charge would have been murder for the second six.
A young police officer in a small city was called to a second-floor townhouse for the report of an agitated, intoxicated person. The young woman (who was indeed HAF on methamphetamine) surprised him and attacked him with a knife on the back balcony. He fired seven rounds into her without pausing, killing her. The shooting was ruled justified.
I mention these well-known Canadian cases because they illustrate that “justified” reflects the danger to the officer at the time he decides to shoot, even in a culture where criminals don’t often use guns to confront police. Even against “little knives” and against women whom he could physically overpower without shooting, maybe, he can reply massively and lethally to eliminate the threat. In neither case was the officer expected to have evaluated the state of the suspect’s health or the risk to his own safety after the first shot and before firing again. Indeed in the first case, it was the pause to evaluate that earned the officer an attempted murder conviction. In the second case, the officer might have been criticized for not leaving himself an escape route, as some commenters are criticizing ICE Agent Ross, but this didn’t reduce his entitlement to shoot the woman in self-defence when she attacked him.
Based on what I know of how gun-squeamish Canada treats police shootings, if three shots are fired in a space of a second, there is no difference in culpability no matter where the officer was standing when he squeezed off the second two. If the first one was fair, so are the next two. If the first wasn’t justified, then obviously none are.
Thanks, Leslie. That supports what’s been my working assumption.
“We cannot repeat too often that men do not lead the Revolution; it is the Revolution that uses men.”
Joseph de Maistre
Considerations on France
1796
Should the cops have opened fire on the Jan. 6 rioters? They certainly were threatened.
One did. See Ashley Babbitt.
And the MAGA narrative appears to require that the decedent be a bad person who is at fault for it. Horseshoe extremisms.
Being in space there is no friction, so there is nothing to dissipate the energy or the angular momentum of the particles making up the rings, so they just keep orbiting.
The particles (or anything in orbit, such as our moon orbiting Earth) are indeed being pulled inwards by gravity, but they also have transverse motion (at right angles to the inward pull). One can think of an orbiting body as having just the right transverse speed to keep missing the planet.
Note that, in the video, there is friction between the orbiting bodies and the rubber they are rolling on, so they lose energy and fall inwards.
But there should be collisions in the ring material, sending some of it into a slow death spiral to the planet. I could be wrong, but I think the rings will slowly disappear.
Yes, that’s correct, but the timescale for that is estimated as tens of millions of years.
I think they are also stabilized by the pull of Saturn’s many moons, and there are even “shepherd” moons that orbit within the rings themselves. But I’m not sure of the specifics.
My understanding was that the rings formed when a satellite’s orbit went too close to the Roche radius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Saturn#Formation_and_evolution_of_main_rings , where the tidal forces caused it to disintegrate.
I don’t think the simulation is all that accurate.
Another hypothesis is that a collision of satellites occurred, but the Roche limit one seems to be the more favoured.
“It is all very complicated, and only a trial, which I think will happen, can settle these issues, at least with regard to “reasonable doubt.”” Could you say a few words re why you think there will be a trial?
A trial seems to me quite unlikely with the investigation under the supervision of Patel (FBI) and Noem (DHS). Noem and VP Vance have already stated the shooting was justified. And there were resignations yesterday after DOJ Civil Rights Division decided not to investigate (which might have resulted in a civil trial).
Are you thinking that Minnesota might prosecute?
Yes, I think if the feds don’t prosecute, Minnesota will try, but they’re handicapped by not getting the evidence that the Feds have, like Good’s car.
Can the state force the feds to turn over evidence?
The transgender sports case to be argued before the Supreme Court today is simply summarized in the questions one-pager at
https://www.supremecourt.gov/qp/24-00043qp.pdf
Thanks for the link.
To listen to the oral argument (with some commentary), in about 20 minutes (on the half-hour):
https://www.scotusblog.com/
Here is a link to oral argument feed, which will begin just after 10 EST.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/live.aspx
I like that it uses the correct phrase “determined at birth”, not “assigned at birth’. I hate that I noticed that.
Thanks for the link.
I would have preferred “observed at birth” – your sex is determined at conception.
Re: Renee Good. Most people I’ve said this to agree:
“I’ve had more dangerous encounters with vehicles in grocery store parking lots, including with drivers who, as they drove away, had no idea they almost hit me.”
How do you know that? Were you there?
I will wager that the people you have said that to are your friends. They either share your eagerness to blame the ICE agent (because Trump), or inwardly roll their eyes in silent hope that “agreeing” will forestall an acrimonious pointless argument that means nothing. The Authorities, not the “democratic” mob of you and me and your friends, will determine what happened there and what is to be done about it.
I have friends and family who are across the political spectrum. Watch it in real time. Oooh. Bumped by a vehicle. My shopping cart dinct.
Sorry, I do not understand this comment. Dinct?
Re public radio broadcasting day, and today’s Supreme Court case, this from All Things Considered the other day:
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/11/nx-s1-5671203/supreme-court-weighs-bans-on-trans-athletes-in-womens-and-girls-sports-teams
We were public radio Day sponsors for many years, and my daughter interned one summer at the local affiliate. It’s painful see such misinformation from an institution I enjoyed and supported.
Pretty much a carbon copy on PBS News Hour 1/13/26.
There some reason trans males are not featured in these news reports and court cases.
So, is one of those Korean Americans a trans-woman?
Interesting question, as Jerry said he would pick one from each sex at random. The first one is Sarah Jeong, who I’m not familiar with and the second picture looks like comedian Margaret Cho, both women, I’m thinking.
Sarah Jeong is a legend in a bad way. She was hired by the NYT in spite of her long record of crass racism. Indeed, her dark record may have actually been a qualification. A typical statement (on X) from her was “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men”. The story actually get worse. She was a big fan of Jackie Coakley (of UVA fame) after the Coakley story blew up.
Sorry to “hang over” this comment from yesterday re Hizb ut-Tahir but I read WEIT late and I feel this to be important.
Elder of Zion is indeed VERY Zionist and quite old. Good guy though and we communicated a few times (he only publishes his own stuff, he is prolific!).
I disagree with him here though. Once you mess with free speech, it is a slippery slope with all sorts of 2nd order effects (see UK)
Hizb ut-Tahir is about the most horrible group on earth that doesn’t actually fly planes into buildings I work(ed) in.
That said.. let them say what they will, but there’s no law against cops/FBI watching who listens to them, paying attention and arresting those who take their “advice”.
In this, Hizb ut-Tahir could be very, very useful.
D.A.
NYC/FL
My advice would be to not let such people into your country in the first place.
Apologies to heap on the ad nauseum pile of videos, here is an example of a vehicle being used as a weapon against law enforcement personnel : https://x.com/policelawnews/status/1915230523955568965?s=46
Because there were two weapons in plain view on all these depressing videos we’ve seen, but a background intuition for only one of them as a weapon.
One thing that I never see noted in coverage of the Minnesota shooting is the fact that the ICE agent who did the shooting was severely injured last year after being dragged along the road by an illegal alien (sex offender), after the agent’s hand/arm got caught in the door. It’s hard to discern from the photos, but at least some of them seem to indicate a similar situation, or at least the possibility of a similar situation (with his colleague who’d tried to open the door). If that was his perception (along with having to jump out of the way), I could see him wanting to stop the driver at all costs. The whole thing is tragic for everyone involved. But I’m afraid I also can’t help shaking my head at the stupidity of the woman for putting herself in that situation, especially with three underage children at home.
I saw that dragging video and hospital photo.
IMHO (can’t help it) it’s is simply a consequence of known occupational hazards. This is what putting oneself in harms way looks like.
And if he was still so distressed from the first incident it would be reasonable and prudent to remove him from his duties until he could demonstrate that it was no longer affecting his ability to carry out his job. We don’t want trigger happy agents in the field.
For some values of ‘we’.
” … reasonable and prudent remove him from his duties until he could demonstrate that it was no longer affecting his ability …”
Exactly what occurred to me.
What are the rules here – clearly, this is a thing everyone should want and would benefit from :
Sitting players on the bench in athletics – coffee breaks – lunch breaks – this common sense stuff IMHO is the same … dynamic.
I agree with you that he may have legitimately thought he was in danger initially, though she was turning away from him and he appears to have fired the first shot after the front of the car had passed him. But whatever the justification for the first shot, the second and third shots were clearly not in self defense (see the photos) and violate standard law enforcement regulations and Supreme Court criteria about the use of deadly force. Civil disobedience is not a capital offense.
I completely agree. She should never have been out there engaging in a dangerous activity with (three) small children at home.
What, then, do you think of the parents who allowed their children to march in the “Children’s Crusade” against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, that started on May 2, 1963? Commissioner of Public Safety “Bull” Connor ordered the children to be arrested and attacked by dogs, fire hoses, and billy clubs:
. Media reports of the event brought about the collapse of legalized segregation.
Reprehensible to take your children to a
riot, sorry, “mostly peaceful demonstration” so they can be injured for the TV cameras. “Content of character” indeed.@Loretta Michaels
But I’m afraid I also can’t help shaking my head at the stupidity of the ICE officer for putting himself in that situation, especially with his past experience.
Are you saying that due to past experience the ICE shooter should not have been in the field?
Yes, that too. His previous experience would make his future judgements perhaps not as rational as hoped for. But ofcourse I also meant that his own training and handbook told him not to approach a car from the front.
Plus I found the victim blaming a little annoying. I copied Loretta Michaels’ sentence and altered it a bit.
sorry, i thought mine would show up as a reply to loretta, implicitly blaming his superiors
I believe she gave up custody of two children or was forced to as her wife was known to abuse the children and put out cigarette with burns on their arms.
She also celebrated or mocked Charlie Kirk’s death.
https://x.com/Breaker1111Girl/status/2010289936138989894?s=20
Clearly not nice people but also not deserving of death. I am unconvinced that anybody could have made the right decision to shoot or not with split second choices.
Kelcy
There is absolutely no evidence supporting your “beliefs.”
https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/topstories/renee-nicole-good-partner-rebecca-ever-arrested-for-child-abuse-heres-complete-truth-about-claims-made-against-minnesota-ice-shooting-victim-family/ar-AA1TUAlc?media_id=3808682247902849552_74974694076&media_author_id=74974694076&utm_source=ig_text_post_permalink&apiversion=v2&domshim=1&noservercache=1&noservertelemetry=1&batchservertelemetry=1&renderwebcomponents=1&wcseo=1
Below is an extended Substack post addressing numerous legal aspects of the Minneapolis ICE shooting. The writer, Bill Shipley, was a prosecutor in the Department of Justice for 22 years and has been in private practice for eight years, during which time he defended nearly 100 of the January 6th suspects. He is staunchly conservative, sometimes insultingly so, but if you believe that the ICE agent is guilty of a crime or you simply cannot decide, I recommend reading Shipley. He raises several points of law that I have not seen addressed elsewhere. For readers who are knowledgeable about the relevant case law, I would be interested to hear if you believe his account guilty of substantial distortion or omission.
https://shipwreckedcrew.substack.com/p/minneapolis-is-not-even-a-close-call
Thanks for that suggestion. It’s a convincing read.
In a widely posted video apparently recorded shortly after the shooting, Becca Good can be heard yelling at people in the street (including ICE officers) expressing her grief and shock, “Why did you have real bullets?”
https://x.com/TheOfficerTatum/status/2011042240781599230
That doesn’t speak to who was responsible for Renee Good’s death, but it captures something about the state of mind of both women. They seem to have been completely unaware of the crimes they were committing (at least in Shipley’s understanding) or the danger they put themselves in. I don’t know what would prevent someone from seeing such danger – possible the conviction that one’s views were so correct that no harm could come from acting on them. She didn’t deserve to die, and the whole thing seems tragically avoidable.
And with insufficient awareness of current trends in shoot-to-kill.
…the conviction that one’s views were so correct that no harm could come from acting on them.
I agree with Mike H— nice was no match for ICE. But as long as we have a wildcard President who is liable to say or do almost anything, I see this as unavoidable. With both Left & Right will creating heroes or villains out of any body they can. (Re: Ashli Babbitt).
I can’t speak to the legal issues. However, I found his descriptions of the events to be very misleading or just wrong. In particular he incorrectly describes her turning as if she were aiming the car at him. She was clearly turning the wheels to the car’s left, away from him. Based on the initial information presented, I wrote in a comment here that he might in good faith have not seen the turning wheels since he was so close to the front of the car. But now I think that the car was already turning away before the first shot, and he should have seen this, and observed the car’s turn. The proof that she had no intent to run him over is that the turn continued, and the car went left, away from the officer, after she was hit.
He also writes insults about people who distinguish between the lawfulness of the first shot and that of the second and third shots. He claims that the officer was justified in thinking that she would be a dangerous threat to the community if she escaped, so the second two shots were justified. The courts will have to decide that, but his analysis builds on his false statements about her intent. In my inexpert opinion, he is engaging in motivated reasoning here. He ends with a claim other commenters have also made here on this website:
“What the driver’s intentions might have been are irrelevant. The one thing she clearly did not intend to do was to comply with the lawful orders she was given. As a result, she opened herself up to the consequences of the reasonable decision by the ICE Officer to eliminate the threat she posed to him as well as others.”
I do not think this is true. It is not a capitol offense to disobey an officer, and after she began to drive past the officer, she was not a threat to anyone. There was no one in front of her at that time.
It is telling that he reproduces the early frames but not the ones of Shots 2 and 3, where he approaches the car and sticks the gun in her face at point blank range and kills her as she drives past him into the open road.
I agree.
He also did not show photos of her wheels turning to hard to the right before she drove forward.
The cases presented were not remotely similar to this 3MPH “chase.”
I wrote “left” when I meant “right”, sorry
The Iran protests are bigger and angrier this time for sure. I came to the USA to study M.E. politics (Islam in Iran and Algeria) and this time it is diff – largely due to (info) technology.
And different to recent protests b/c the Islamic Republic is essentially broke. And AMAZINGLY corrupt, an economy maybe worse than communism.
They peed Iran’s wealth away on nukes (fiendishly expensive) and adventurism abroad wrecking Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Syria. David Frum asserts that without the revolution, on a 70s projection Iran SHOULD be as rich as southern Euro countries.
Further, 45 years ago, with a huge youth population (and big oil bucks), they could do a million death war with Iraq, a hostage drama, harass the Great Satan and other hooliganism. Now, with no money and a terrible demographic decline, they’re out of options and have lost touch with their youth who… hate the mullahs. No projections, randomness and chaos theory rule Iran’s near future.
My 0.02 cents.
D.A.
NYC/FL
“The ayatollahs’ rule was shaped by the bloody eight-year war that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq launched in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The social compact that endured since that trauma was that Iranians would acquiesce to hardship and restrictions in return for a strong state that protects them from foreign attack.”
Not having a WSJ subscription, I was unable to read where the writer stated what foreign country supported Iraq in this war (at least to the extent that Iran would not win and Iraq would not lose); specified from what foreign country’s prospective attack Iran was protecting its citizens; and whether any portion of citizens’ hardship was attributable to foreign sanctions. The writer surely did mention that, eh?
Breaking news: Scott Adams, creator of the “Dilbert” comic strip, has died of cancer at age 68.
An atheist, he accepted Jesus on his death-bed, citing the “risk/reward” rationale.
Oh, how sad. So young. I always loved how Dilbert’s tie was permanently bent upwards. I haven’t read the strip for many years, but I do recall it fondly. A friend of mine, an engineer at Electric Boat in Groton CT, and some of his co-workers tried to replicate a “Dilbert” cartoon in a business meeting. They tried to use acronyms instead of nouns for the whole meeting. Being enginerds, (sic) who use acronyms for everything, he said they got pretty far into the meeting before everyone cracked up laughing!
RIP
Regarding the death of Renee Nicole Good, the frame-by-frame pictures will probably not change the narratives much, as how people view the incident is strongly influenced by their expectations and political beliefs. Kristi Noem, for instance, is part of the administration so can be expected to defend ICE operations. She will also maintain her stated position because she doesn’t want to admit that she’s wrong. Similar motivations will apply to those who are critical of ICE.
One interesting comment I heard last night is that some people may not understand that ICE agents are law enforcement personnel who have powers similar to police. Some apparently think that ICE officers are administrative agents with lesser authority. This, according to the commentator, might explain why some of the protestors think they can impede ICE operations directly without potentially deadly consequence.
Per my comment below: I don’t think an armed police officer in Europe would think about unloading their clip under those circumstances.
First, think about your own safety. If that’s ensured then think about the safety of others. The ICE agent was able to avoid the threat so I have no idea why he was shooting. Besides, opening fire can be a danger to bystanders.
He could simply have chosen not to shoot – a choice that other cultures find easy to make.
Yet I’m from a culture where avoiding a threat doesn’t immediately give us moral or legal license to bring harm to someone else. Could he have saved himself without shooting? Why did he shoot then?
Well, I suspect that even in your culture, the police are trained to defend not only themselves but others around them. IOW, they are trained to prevent harm to themselves or others. I am NOT defending the ICE agent here; the courts can decide if his actions were legal. But if people are trained to use deadly force in these very situations, we cannot be surprised if they do use deadly force. The trick is to ensure that the officers are properly trained and that they use that training appropriately.
I will say one thing, an echo of Jeb Rosenfeld’s final comment in his Free Press article; when you’re in that situation and a police officer tells you to get out of your car, GET THE HELL OUT OF YOUR CAR.
I learned to shoot a gun at about 9 or 10 years old when my father took us down to the range and taught us all we needed to know in a single afternoon. Besides learning the 3 rules of firearm handling, he also taught us something that imprinted forever: if you take your gun out, someone is going to die. Message received. Never take your gun out.
In echo of your final comment:
https://youtu.be/uj0mtxXEGE8?t=12
Sorry, but in contrast to your single afternoon of firearms training, in which you learned everything you need to know, I have received nearly 100 hours of training in defensive firearms usage from a cadre of elite law enforcement instructors.
If you think you can learn “everything you need to know” about firearms in one afternoon, then I agree that you should never take your gun out. However, when faced with a potentially deadly threat, drawing your gun to the ready position and communicating command presence is standard practice used to persuade an assailant not to attack, preventing a shot from ever having to be fired.
Two outdoor workshops on Felony Traffic Stops arranged by cops/veterans from our Jujitsu dojo instantly showed us everything they had to be aware of at all times. Not just the high-stress situations, but ones that seemed like they should be easy stops… but weren’t. So many things I’d never thought of before, because I didn’t have to. (Now I do.)
I just watched the youtube video you linked to. Man, that is awesome. (Still, leave your gun in the closet, okay?)
And, if as reported, One agent reportedly told her to drive away? How do people deal with conflicting orders (this would not be the first example) in your culture?
The point of “Good Trouble” — thanks, Bryan — is to introduce chaos into the machinery of the state, which the Good couple did by deliberately driving into the middle of a police operation, the idea being to mess things up enough that the operation fails. Two officers issuing contradictory instructions to an interloper/shit-disturber, plus her wife goading her from the sidelines, is exactly what you would expect would happen as the officers try to figure out what is going on here and to what extent it affects what they are supposed to be doing. It is also exactly what the “Good Trouble” is meant to accomplish.
In this case, the chaos resulted in a Blue-on-Blue shooting of a harmless pawn. But it caused “Great Trouble”!
Rehabbing the shabby public opinion of CDLs (criminal defense lawyers)!
The prosecution is often determined to convict (sometimes distorting the evidence), while the defense is trying to make the prosecution prove its case. This is supposed to keep the prosecution honest, though I found (always as an unpaid defense expert) that the prosecution, which is supposed to be interested in the truth, often seemed to be concerned not with the truth but with getting a conviction.
German news is reporting over 2,000 protesters in Iran killed. Trump will have to do something now.
Whatever Trump does, I contemplate what if any consideration he thinks he owes Iranian civilians vis-a-vis that he extended to Venezuelan civilians killed in the U.S. operation.
Might Good still be alive and well had her wife not yelled “Drive baby drive” when the officer told her to stop and get out of the car? These women were play-acting at revolution when trying to prevent ICE agents from deporting illegals convicted of crimes including rape, child sex abuse, and murder. They did not think the situation was serious, but in fact they were the ones who weren’t serious. It was just a game to them. That’s my take anyway and subject to change with further info.
The worst outcome would be if the poseur revolutionaries became serious ones. Under extreme circumstances some might. IMO the ongoing crises in Iran may provide some examples.
IMO, hypocrisy is surprisingly often a feature not a bug.