TOC Ready Room 7 March 2024: Bridge to Gaza, Bag checks in NY; UPDATE

[See update on pier-off-Gaza story below. – J.E.]

Reporting that ramped up from 6 to 7 March 2024 indicates President Joe Biden is to announce in his State of the Union (SOTU) address Thursday night that the U.S. military will be building a temporary pier off the Gaza coast to facilitate delivery of aid by sea.  (Update: he did announce it.)

Reaction to this news is decidedly mixed.  Critics point out, among other things, that aid delivered by sea will face the same hurdle it faces when delivered by land.  Hamas will seize it first.  It won’t get to Gazan non-combatants who may need it.

There is no reason to hope otherwise.  The reports on this development state that the Biden administration won’t be putting U.S. personnel ashore, which means the U.S. won’t have a security presence for escorting the aid.  Reactions suggest most Americans don’t want that anyway.

Rogue uranium, China’s infrastructure burrowing – Things predicted: The “Told ya so” edition

In the past decade and a half, I’ve had occasion to perceive some significant trends and express concern about what they would predictably lead to.  These have been specific sets of developments involving both politics and technology.  They go beyond predicting human moral and societal train wrecks, although I’ve done my share of predicting those too.  In some ways, the latter are easier to see.  We are all expert in them at some level.

But the more specific and contingent trends, like the ones linked to the emergence of technology and its ability to fulfill motive (but not limited to that category), take more work to perceive.  For some time, perhaps the chief example I had to offer was the roiling of the Middle East set in motion by Obama in 2009, which led pretty much exactly as I envisioned to what Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev called the “tectonic” perturbations of the Arab Spring.

Bump Trump: Guide for the perplexed to last week’s Russiagate/Spygate contribution

[Note:  in the interest of getting this work in progress posted, I am dispensing with most links in the text.  Every assertion is documented, and the documentation will be found in the series of my articles appended at the end.  It’s a first-ever compilation of such a list of articles, and I hope will be of use for bookmarking.  One thing it settles is the date hacks for when I – and others – recognized the official narrative about Crossfire Hurricane was invalid:  not a reflection of reality.  I want to emphasize that references to the indispensable work of others – the Brigade of Musketeers who have labored long over Russiagate and Spygate – are credited in those articles. I am responsible for the judgments I include in this article; they are not to blame. – J.E.]

All this, and we still didn’t find out why Nellie Ohr got a ham radio license in May 2016.

My bottom-line assessment of this past week’s reporting by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi up-front:

First, this has served as a good taking-stock moment.

Biden and special forces: A series of unfortunate events

It’s hard to know what to make of this.  Many readers will be familiar with the recent social media posting by President Biden’s staff in which the faces of Delta Force members were shown, and on two men’s arm tattoos were exposed that could be service-identifying.

The Whitehouse media team shared this picture last night (I added the black boxes) without blurring or censoring the faces of the “Delta Force” (CAG) operator’s faces. They deleted it an hour later after hundreds of thousands had already viewed it.

This is a massive failure on… pic.twitter.com/ROegvYWzit

— Sam Shoemate (@samosaur) October 19, 2023

The White House took the image down quickly.  However, it was up long enough to be seen by hundreds of thousands of social media users (or “millions and billions,” as our Democratic senators might say) before it was removed.  It was no doubt saved for posterity by many users who didn’t bother to blank out the exposed faces of the Delta Force members.

Meanwhile,

These are the times that try men’s souls

It seems to be a perennial condition for the United States, with our experiment in liberty, limited government, and equality before the law.  Times that try men’s souls, so evocatively described by Thomas Paine in 1776, recur with us.

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

I submit that this is not because America is worse than other countries, as the modern Left’s agenda would too often have it, but because our experiment is better.  When we say “liberty,” we really mean liberty.