Dwight occasionally sends me emails titled “The Most Dangerous Profession in America,” each containing links to news stories demonstrating that the rapper lifestyle is frequently not conducive to the “life” part. So I was happy to return the favor when this Nate the Lawyer video on the Young Thug trial popped up in my feed, since the stupidity on display there is off the hook.
“A juror was arrested and sent to jail. The judge slaps a potential juror with jail time. Her offense: shooting video of courtroom proceedings.”
“A defense attorney [Anastsios Mannettas] was arrested and sent to jail.”
“Even a court officer was arrested and sent to jail.”
“Fulton County Sheriff’s deputy [Akeiba Stanley] arrested earlier today and accused of trying to smuggle contraband to a defendant in the case.”
“We’re talking about Grammy award-winning rapper Young Thug in his Rico trial in Georgia. Now, he comes from a poor Atlanta neighborhood. He grew up in a housing project, and then made it to rap superstar, having the number one album in the country.”
May 2020: A Fulton County grand jury “handed down indictments to Young Thug and 26 other people under the state’s RICO statute.”
“Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffrey Lamar Williams, is one of 28 defendants charged in a sweeping 56 count indictment against the criminal street gang Young Slim Life, also known as YSL.”
“The charges [range] from conspiracy to violate the Georgia criminal racketing law, murder, armed robbery and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.”
“Also named: Sergio Kitchens, who performs under the name Gunna.”
Fulton County DA Fani Willis (she of trumped-up Trump charges) claims that gangs are responsible for 75-80% of violent crime in the area, which I rather doubt.
“According to the indictment, YSL is a criminal street gang. Started in late 2012 in the Cleveland Avenue area of Atlanta, prosecutors say Young Thug is a co-founder. He and his affiliates have played a role in some of the city’s most violent crimes.”
On RICO: “The only element that the prosecution would have to prove is that this gang is organized as a racketeering enterprise.”
“Now, after those indictments, people are looking at decades in prison, and the defendants start flipping like fish. Check this out:”
“Last week, Sergio Kitchens, better known as rapper Gunna, took the first plea deal, followed by Walter Murphy, an alleged YSL co-founder. Then Wunnie Lee (rapper Slimelife Shawty) and Martinez Arnold (rapper Lil Duke) cut deals. Now today Quantavious Grier (rapper Unfoonk) entered a guilty plea.” Grier is Young Thug’s brother.
“All five have been said sentenced between 9 and 10 years on probation. They will also have to testify at the YSL trial.”
Stanley: “Her arrest warrants detail her having an inappropriate relationship with an inmate: visiting his cell, communicating with an inmate through Instagram [Do prisoners in Georgia get access to Instagram? Is Internet access now a right? – LP] and trying to smuggle contraband to Christian Eppinger from one of his relatives. Eppinger is accused of shooting a veteran Atlanta police officer several times last year while he was being taken into custody.” Is Eppinger an aspiring rapper? Of course he is, under the moniker “Big Bhris.”
If you remember this SNL commercial, you’re officially old.
“A defense attorney for Young Thug and his crew was arrested for possession of prescription drugs and attempting to toss a phone to allegedly another attorney but missing it, hitting a deputy upside the head so they charged him with assault.”
“One of the defendants was caught passing Young Thug drugs in court.”
“Young Thug’s fellow defendant Khalif Adams [real name: Jeffery Williams -LP] passed Percocet to Young Thug under the guise of a handshake right in front of the entire courtroom. Adams is serving a life sentence per murder.”
The juror caught filming got three days for contempt.
“Things are getting so petty that a lawyer for one of the defendants was ordered by the judge to buy lunch for everybody from a nearby strip club, and, and, and with given the penalty of writing a 17 page essay or spending 20 days in jail for the crime of being late to court a couple of times he’s got to write a paper on being professional in court. I am not joking. It’s literally 20 days in jail or write this paper.”
The judge specifies “Papaer is to be published quality, in APA format, and at least 10 primary and 10 secondary sources.”
I’m skipping over the question of using Young Thug’s rap lyrics in the trial.
Speaking of Dwight, he sent over a link that one of Young Thug’s co-defendants was stabbed in jail.
One of the five co-defendants on trial with rapper Young Thug has been stabbed at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, delaying the proceedings for at least a day, authorities said.
Shannon Stillwell was stabbed multiple times Sunday evening and was in stable condition, the county sheriff’s office said in a news release Monday.
Is Stillwell an aspiring rapper? Of course he is, being known as “SB” or “Shannon Jackson.”
Stillwell was stabbed by another inmate, Willie Brown, during a fight between the two men, who were housed in the same zone, the sheriff’s office said. The cause of the fight wasn’t known, the release said.
Brown, who was arrested in July 202O and was being held without bond, was charged with aggravated assault and possession of prohibited items in relation to Stillwell’s stabbing.
This is a very interesting clip of Dave Rubin interviewing the always-interesting Bret Weinstein on a variety of intertwined topics.
The main focus of this segment is a mystery: Why did Musk block Weinstein on Twitter right after spending a fair amount of time agreeing with him on the need to fight censorship, but they touch on a whole lot of interesting ideas in the process.
DR:
That’s why I talk about Elon as much as I do on the show. Because I don’t I think if you would have said to Elon 10 years ago: “You’d own Twitter, you’d be in this free speech fight, you’d have, you know, the ADL calling you an anti-semite,” like the list of craziness that everyone now knows. I think he’d say “What are you talking about? That’s completely insane. I’m trying to get us to Mars. I’m building this cool car, blah blah blah.” But he, I think, is sort of the avatar for what you’re talking about there, the brave person that doesn’t know exactly what they’re going towards, something like that. But then he’s like “I better buy this freaking Twitter thing because I see all the danger.”
BW:
I think you’re right about Elon. I don’t know for sure that you are, but I think you’re right about what he’s trying to do, and how he ended up there, and how it would surprise him. I had a meeting with him. I flew to San Francisco, and I had a meeting with him, and he said it had been a very good meeting, and he wanted to meet again. A series of events unfolded over the course of the next 24 hours. My Twitter account got commandeered. Maybe that was organic, maybe it wasn’t. I don’t think—I know Elon had nothing to do with it. But anyway, I reached out to him, and tried to alert him to this, because I was concerned that he and I had private communications, and he didn’t, want you know… I don’t think there was anything compromising in them, but he didn’t want them in the world, and he needed to know that this…and he ended up, uh, blocking me after having this meeting, and I remain blocked.
Curious.
BW:
Now, the reason I raise it is because there’s a defect in all of those players that I mentioned who have all been shoved onto the same team, right? They have some incredible strengths, and I have to tell you um there’s been a lot of pain inflicted on us for standing up. But the camaraderie, the discovery of people, people who were up to the challenge, their coming together as a coalition, has been extremely rewarding and dwarfs any suffering that might have come along with this.
DR: “Yeah, it sounds kind of corny, but I mean that those three days or whatever it was we had at ARC [Alliance for Responsible Citizenship] to see everybody together again, and all be, like, we’re still alive we’re still here it’s powerful.”
BW: “The problem is, that all of those people who have the characteristics that I listed, that are courageous, that are insightful, and that have integrity, they tend they have a lot of Lone wolfess in them. Which means that they have a defect they’re terrible at confederating.”
BW: “I see him as very strategically clever, but I don’t think he’s any good at confederating, either. And my little story where he blocked me, it’s like, look, hey Elon, there aren’t that many people out here trying to advance the ball who have something um meaningful to contribute to the team. We have to stop tripping over each other.”
BW: “What happened was…I believe that Dark Horse [podcast] that [wife] Heather [Heying] and I [do] have faced a whole bunch of suppression that that has not yet shown up anywhere.”
BW: “We are demonetized to this day. YouTube demonetized us. I believe they were going to throw us off. Joe Rogan held an emergency podcast, and you know YouTube hasn’t messed with us since. But they didn’t remonetize. More than half our income in a one fell swoop. And we know that decision happened in the C-suite at Google.”
Weinstein believes that the real push to demonetize and silence him came when he started to examine alternatives to the consensus Flu Manchu narrative.
When we started to take it out of the realm of “Here’s a bunch of stuff you can’t understand and leave it to the virologists and the epidemiologists and the public health authorities” and the answer was “No, actually you can understand it and some of what you’re being told isn’t right.” Right when we started to do that and then we started to interact with people like Robert Malone and Peter McCullough, Pierre Kory, and then those people went on to affect a huge audience, largely on Joe Rogan’s program. That changed the narrative, and so I think something has meddled with us in a particular, in a unique way, because frankly there weren’t that many people who could bridge the scientific to public.
Rubin brings the subject back to Musk. BW: “You talked to Elon about the things he was discovering inside of the crime scene that he bought. And one of the things that he discovered was that there were lots of mechanisms that caused things to be deboosted that weren’t labeled as such. And so he kept finding more and more levels and I was trying to convey to him, ‘Look, I think you will find something special when you figure out what happened to us.'”
When Musk blocked him over these, he said “Stop spamming me!”
DR: “What you’re really saying, in essence, is that you were a little too ahead of something in the game at which the speed is played that he may not want to be involved in that just yet.”
BW: “On Dark Horse we have the phrase ‘Zero is a special number.’ What that means is if you can turn a single social media platform, a single newspaper, or a single university so that it functions towards its stated goal, you actually stand a chance of fixing the, system because if there’s one social media platform on which you’re treated like an adult and you can exchange ideas freely and discuss them back and forth, nobody’s going to want to be on the ones in which you’re treated like a child.” I would like to think he’s right here, but I see an awful lot of people on the left acting as though the only good thing about the pre-Musk Twitter was the ability to banish users for WrongThink.
It’s an interesting conversation with a lot to chew on. Just why is their such a strong nexus between Social Justice and wanting to force conformity on Coronavirus?
But I also wonder: Just how much of a remnant is there on the left in favor of free speech? Are are any significant advocates for it under the age of, say, 50?
Hey, remember that whole “Sam Altman fired as CEO/reinstated as CEO of OpenAI” thing a couple of weeks ago? Here’s the archive story.
Sam Altman was reinstated late Tuesday as OpenAI’s chief executive, successfully reversing his ouster by the company’s board last week after a campaign waged by his allies, employees and investors, the company said.
The board would be remade without several members who had opposed Mr. Altman.
“We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo,” OpenAI said in a post to X, formerly known as Twitter. “We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.”
The return of Mr. Altmanand the potential remaking of the board, capped a frenetic five days that upended OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot and one of the world’s highest-profile artificial intelligence companies.
“i love openai, and everything i’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together,” Mr. Altman said in a post to X. “with the new board and w satya’s support, i’m looking forward to returning to openai, and building on our strong partnership with msft.”
OpenAI’s board surprised Mr. Altman and the company’s employees on Friday afternoon when it told him he was being pushed out. Greg Brockman, the company’s president who co-founded the company with Mr. Altman and others, resigned in protest.
The ouster kicked off efforts by Mr. Altman, 38, his allies in the tech industry and OpenAI’s employees to force the company’s board to bring him back. On Sunday evening, after a weekend of negotiations, the board said it was going to stick with its decision.
But in a head-spinning development just hours later, Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor, said that Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and others would be joining the company to start a new advanced artificial intelligence lab.
Nearly all of OpenAI’s more than 700 employees signed a letter telling the board they would walk out and follow Mr. Altman to Microsoft if he wasn’t reinstated, throwing the future of the start-up into jeopardy.
Four board members — Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI founder; Adam D’Angelo, the chief executive of Quora; Helen Toner, a director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology; and Tasha McCauley, an entrepreneur and computer scientist — had initially decided to push Mr. Altman out.
Well, here’s Patrick Boyle to provide some context:
A few takeaways:
There are two OpenAIs: “The non-profit OpenAI, Inc. registered in Delaware, and its for-profit subsidiary OpenAI Global, LLC.”
Musk was an early, and big, investor in the non-profit. “The founders pledged over one billion dollars to the venture, but actually only contributed around $130 million dollars- the majority of which came from Elon Musk.”
When he felt OpenAI was falling behind in 2018, he wanted to take over OpenAI himself. When the board rejected that, he resigned and took future pledged money with him, which blew a huge hole in their budget. (Whatever you think of Musk, I don’t think not being busy enough is his problem.)
Then came the for-profit doppelganger.
“The profits being capped at 100 times any investment.”
“The company explained this decision saying, ‘We need to invest billions of dollars in the coming years into large-scale cloud compute, attracting and retaining talented people, and building AI supercomputers.’ This transition from nonprofit to for-profit required OpenAI to balance its desire to make money with its stated commitment to ethical AI development.”
“This unconventional structure meant that Open AI had a board of directors, which in theory controls the entire corporate structure (which includes the charity and the capped profit company) – but which unlike other boards is not accountable to shareholders. The directors are in fact not allowed to own any stock to prevent a conflict of interest, because they are specifically not supposed to be aligned with shareholders.”
“The companies operating agreement – to investors – says – in writing: ‘It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world.’ Documents like this – that were written by an actual lawyer – highlight the problems we are starting to see from the combined popularity of science fiction in Silicon Valley and widespread microdosing of hallucinogens.”
“In the real world, where the role of money is reasonably well defined, Open AI is an unprofitable company and is expected to need to raise a lot more money over time from investors like Microsoft, to keep up with the high costs of building more sophisticated chatbots.”
“Despite this lack of profitability, the company is valued by investors at 86 billion dollars, and Bloomberg reported last weekend that ‘some investors were considering writing down the entire value of their OpenAI holdings to zero.'”
“Former colleagues would have an open door to follow and join a new AI unit, according to Microsoft chief Satya Nadella. As much of a win as this might have appeared for Microsoft (people were saying that they had managed to buy the hottest AI firm for zero), this might not have been the optimal outcome for them, as they would likely have had to deal with antitrust regulators and lawsuits from other Open AI investors.”
“The majority of Open AI’s 700 or so employees signed an open letter to the board demanding that the board resign and that they rehire Altman. The letter stated that the board had told the employee leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed ‘would be consistent with the mission.’ The employees said that unless their demands were met, they would resign from Open AI and join the new subsidiary of Microsoft being headed up by Altman and Brockman.”
“You have to wonder what the employee contracts at Open AI look like that the entire staff could leave to work for a major investor in the company leaving Open Ai as an empty shell.”
“Typically, executives like Altman would have contracts that prevent them from hiring away key staff once they are no longer at the firm, and staff would have signed NDA’s preventing them from taking any technology with them.”
“The OpenAI story is a bit of a crazy one, where Microsoft and a number of other sophisticated investors agreed to put billions of dollars in, and employees got stock grants, all at an $86 billion valuation, without the contractual or fiduciary rights that investors might normally expect.”
Rival Anthropic has a similar structure.
“Bad corporate governance has been a growing issue particularly in Silicon Valley where companies like Google, Facebook and Snap structured their IPO’s such that founders were left with unchallenged power to do almost anything that they want.” Google and Facebook are garbage companies, but there are some scenarios where only founders can keep the company on a long-term vision rather than goosing quarterly profits (Jobs at Apple comes to mind).
Warren Buffet has a similar mechanism (A shares of stock only he controls) to keep control of Berkshire Hatheway.
“Since you are buying shares of companies in perpetuity, leadership who are not accountable to shareholders can take value destructive paths without answering to anyone. Meta’s Reality Labs division, which houses its efforts to build the metaverse, has lost around $46.5 billion dollars since 2019. Would Mark Zuckerberg have been able to waste this much money if he was accountable to investors?” I have a fairly strong suspicion that division is being used to hide all sorts of shenanigans.
Boyle is deeply suspicious of “stakeholder capitalism” as opposed to the old-fashioned, profit-maximizing kind.”
The thing missing from this summary, and all the coverage of the story I’ve seen, is why Altman was originally let go, and none of the principals involved seem to be talking about it…
…don’t need any of that newfangled computerized vote fraud. No sirree! They do things the old fashioned way: By handing out cash to homeless people.
“Videotape shows individuals being dropped off in black Suburbans and Expeditions and entering City Hall to vote. When they exit, a man takes out what appears to be a large bundle of cash and peels off a bill for each individual.” Old school!
Bonus: The man dropping people off appears to be Springfield Democratic mayoral candidate Justin Hurst himself. It’s not often you get candidates with the pluck, verve and raw stupidity to commit their own hands-on election fraud. Usually they delegate that sort of thing to underlings. (More experienced criminals call that underling “the cutout.”)
“According to sworn affidavits from the election workers, many of the people who came in they listed their address as being being a local homeless shelter. Furthermore, the affidavits claim that many of these voters who came inside were noticeably either drunk or under the influence of drugs, and many of them were confused about why they even came to City Hall in the first place.”
“One of the election workers wrote in her affidavit that she saw a man hovering over some of the voter shoulders while they were standing at the voting booth. At times he appeared to be pointing at the place on the ballot where the persons should vote.”
“Many of these individuals came up to them multiple times throughout the day and asked them where they’re supposed to go in order to get the $10 that they were promised as payment.”
“I had seven people ask me directly where they their $10 payment was. One man said in Spanish vote for Hurst and you’ll get $10.”
And yes, the exchange of money outside City Hall is on camera.
Five poll workers signed sworn affidavits attesting to the voting fraud.
Naturally, Hirsch swears up and down not voting fraud occurred.
“It is patently illegal to exchange money for votes within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Here’s specifically what the relevant part of the relevant statute: ‘No person shall directly or indirectly pay, give, or promise to a voter any gift or reward to influence his vote, or to induce him to withhold his vote.'” I’m pretty sure every state in the union has similar statutes.
At the current time, it does not appear that Mr. Hurst has been indicted…
London mayor Sadiq Khan’s much-hated, rent-seeking “Ultra-Low Emission Zone” scheme uses cameras and vans to catch and fine people using gas-powered cars a hefty £12.50-per-day in order to make clear to ordinary Londoners of limited means just how much he holds them in contempt “fight climate change.”
But a group of Londoners has found an innovative and amusing way to nullify the snooping cameras:
It turns out those dinosaur costumes are just the right height to block the snoop cameras.
A herd or pack of T-Rexes is evidently called “a terror.”
The ULEZ has recently been extended even to outer boroughs like Bexley. “There are lots of people in this sort of borough that are low income. So the reality of this is that if you have a vehicle that isn’t compliant, you may not be in a position where you can afford to: A.) Pay the charge, or B.) Buy a vehicle that’s compliant.”
“I’m shocked it’s come to this.”
“In central London you’ve got tubes, you’ve got trains. We simply don’t have that out here.”
“The people that this affects most of all [are] people at the bottom end of the social ladder.”
“I’m 75 and I’m coming out to to help the people that can’t afford to pay the £12.50. This is why we’re doing this.”
The usual fuzzy-headed leftist types are trying to argue for a false moral equivalence between Benjamin Netanyahu, the elected Likud leader of Israel that leftists hate because he’s friendly with Republicans and thwarted Obama’s attempts to defeat him, and Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. Never mind that Netanyahu has never celebrated beheading babies.
Since this moral idiocy pops up time and time again, let us once again explicate the obvious: Hamas isn’t just in favor of “liberating Palestine” (i.e., destroying the state of Israel), or even simply of slaughtering every Israeli. Hamas, by charter, deed, and statement, explicitly seeks the death of all Jews on earth.
First, lets look at the Hamas’ original 1988 charter, which makes no secret of it’s goal of worldwide genocide against the Jews.
This Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS), clarifies its picture, reveals its identity, outlines its stand, explains its aims, speaks about its hopes, and calls for its support, adoption and joining its ranks. Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realised.
The struggle is not against Israelis or “Zionists,” it’s against Jews.
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).
Note that those trees crying out for Jews to be killed are not limited to Palestine.
Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. “May the cowards never sleep.”
The Islamic Resistance Movement consider itself to be the spearhead of the circle of struggle with world Zionism and a step on the road. The Movement adds its efforts to the efforts of all those who are active in the Palestinian arena. Arab and Islamic Peoples should augment by further steps on their part; Islamic groupings all over the Arab world should also do the same, since all of these are the best-equipped for the future role in the fight with the warmongering Jews.
Etc.
Hamas revised their charter in 2016 to cut down on the Jew hatred, but the die was already cast, and taqiyya (deception) is not just allowed in Islamic doctrine, but is obligatory in the struggle of jihad against Dar al Harb (i.e., the House of War against non-Muslims).
How about Fathi Hamad, the political leader of Hamas? “Seven million Palestinians outside, enough warming up, you have Jews with you in every place. You should attack every Jew possible in all the world and kill them.”
Or this journalist who interviewed several Hamas officials. “They never refer to Israelis, they always refer to the Jews. Their plan is to kill all the Jews. All the Jews are the ones they want to wipe out.”
This reclamation of Islamic dignity through the ultimate defeat of the Jews occupies a great deal of Hamas’s political thought, permeates its rhetoric and profoundly shapes its thinking about Israeli Jews and its strategy in facing Israel. Israel is more than a mere occupier or oppressor in this narrative, it is a rebellion against God and the divinely-ordained trajectory of history. And by showing Israelis in their weakness, the thinking goes, Israelis are somehow actually made weak. Redemption requires only the faith of its believers to be fulfilled, and seeing is believing.
The footage from Saturday, the snuff videos shared gleefully by Hamas supporters, including in some Western far-left circles, weren’t an aberration. Hamas gunmen didn’t get “carried away,” as some explained. They were the essence of the whole enterprise. They were Hamas’s basic message to Israelis: That they weren’t being killed and kidnapped just for tactical advantage in the struggle for Palestinian independence, but rather were being humiliated and dehumanized as traitors against God.
What other penalty can prescribed for literal treason against the will of God but death?
This is why Hamas and their jihadist fellow-travelers believe that every Jew everywhere must be exterminated.
Turns out Hamas was always doing what Israel and opponents of jihad terror accused them of doing: Operating out of hospitals to avoid being bombed (in violation of international law). I was already going to write about this when I saw that Jim Geraghty had already done the heavy lifting.
What would you like Israel to do about the Hamas operations under the Al-Shifa hospital complex and other hospitals in the Gaza Strip?
A lot of those currently demanding a cease-fire would likely answer, “Leave those operations alone.” That’s a good way to ensure that the threat of Hamas continues. This is the same dynamic as the proposal to deploy U.S. Naval hospital ships off the coast of the Gaza Strip to treat Palestinian children discussed yesterday. Anytime you declare, “Israel will not strike in this spot,” Hamas will move its forces and its equipment to that spot.
The decision before Israel is to either attack the Hamas targets underneath hospitals while attempting to avoid civilian casualties, or to leave the Hamas operations intact. Attack, and you run the risk of higher Palestinian civilian casualties, even greater outrage on the world stage, and even more propaganda victories for Hamas, painting the Israelis as cruel monsters. Hold back, and Hamas gets to keep more of its men and arms safely in place to fight another day and plot more massacres.
For those who wonder if Hamas really does operate underneath the Al-Shifa hospital, here’s an account from Taghreed El-Khodary and Ethan Bronner of the New York Times, back in 2008:
At Shifa Hospital on Monday, armed Hamas militants in civilian clothes roved the halls. Asked their function, they said they were providing security. But there was internal bloodletting under way.
In the fourth-floor orthopedic section, a woman in her late twenties asked a militant to let her see Saleh Hajoj, her 32-year-old husband. She was turned away and left the hospital. Fifteen minutes later, Hajoj was carried out of his room by young men pretending to transfer him to another hospital section. As he lay on the stretcher, he was shot in the left side of the head. A bit of brain emerged on the other side of his skull.
Hajoj, like five others who were killed at the hospital in this way in the previous 24 hours, was accused of collaboration with Israel. He had been in the central prison awaiting trial by Hamas judges, and when Israel destroyed the prison on Sunday he and the others were transferred to the hospital. But their trials were short-circuited.
Another account from El-Khodary in 2009 described a young Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighter demanding he be treated first, ahead of civilians, even if their injuries were more severe:
A car arrived with more patients. One was a 21-year-old man with shrapnel in his left leg who demanded quick treatment. He turned out to be a militant with Islamic Jihad. He was smiling a big smile.
“Hurry, I must get back so I can keep fighting,” he told the doctors.
He was told that there were more serious cases than his, that he needed to wait. But he insisted. “We are fighting the Israelis,” he said. “When we fire we run, but they hit back so fast. We run into the houses to get away.” He continued smiling.
“Why are you so happy?” this reporter asked. “Look around you.”
A girl who looked about 18 screamed as a surgeon removed shrapnel from her leg. An elderly man was soaked in blood. A baby a few weeks old and slightly wounded looked around helplessly. A man lay with parts of his brain coming out. His family wailed at his side.
“Don’t you see that these people are hurting?” the militant was asked.
“But I am from the people, too,” he said, his smile incandescent. “They lost their loved ones as martyrs. They should be happy. I want to be a martyr, too.”
Like everything else in the Gaza Strip, it appears that the hospital’s operations were intertwined with Hamas — a deliberate strategic choice to make the line between military operations and innocent civilians as blurry as possible.
So the left has known that Hamas was committing war crimes for decades, but was willing to ignore it in service of the holy cause of slaughtering Jews.
Here’s an Israeli soldier narrating what they found in a Gaza hospital, namely weapons and a prepared area for hostages.
Speaking of Al-Shifa hospital, there’s quite a lot of military activity happening there right now:
There should be no cease in Israeli operations until they’ve finished the tasking of killing or capturing every Hamas terrorist they can lay their hands on.
I didn’t intend to make this an All Mark Felton Weekend, but these came up in my feed, and I have friends as interested in aircraft as I am in tanks. So here are the number of surviving World War II fighters and bomber, and how many are still airworthy.
When we watched Twelve O’Clock High (which I highly recommend), we marveled that there were still enough B-17s around when they made the movie that you could crash some just to get it on film. Alas, that’s no longer the case…
To observe Veterans Day, here’s a Mark Felton piece on World War II veterans who not only became celebrities, but are still alive:
They are:
American actor William Daniels, most famous for St. Elsewhere and the voice of KITT in Knight Rider, but the roles I enjoyed him most for were in 1776 (playing John Adams) and The President’s Analyst, plus an appearance in Kolchak: The Night Stalker as that week’s Police Lieutenant Who Is Fed Up With Kolchak’s Crazy Questions. “Born in 1927, Daniels enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1945 and was stationed in Italy just after the war working as a DJ in an army radio station. William Daniels is currently 96 years.”
American low budget movie king Roger Corman. Most famous for cheap science fiction films and pretty good Edgar Allen Poe adaptations in the 1960s (I just watched The Raven this Halloween season, and it has Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Jack Nicholson). But my favorite Corman film is The Intruder, which features William Shatner as a racist rabble-rouser in the South during desegregation, and which was filmed in the South during desegregation. The low budget is evident, but Shatner just burns off the screen. “Born in 1926, he enlisted in the V12 Navy College training program and served in the US Navy between 1944 and 1946. Roger Corman is currently 97 years old.”
Stanley Baxter, a British actor and comedian I am unfamiliar with.
He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and began as a child actor on BBC radio’s Children’s Hour initially recruited as a Bevin Boy, that is a conscripted mine worker, towards the end of the war he was recruited into the Seaforth Highlanders, and with this unit went to India and then to the war in Burma. Being promoted to Corporal and acting as a headquarters company typist, he then wrangled a transfer to the British Army’s Combined Services Entertainment Unit, serving alongside other future British stars such as Kenneth Williams, actor Peter Vaughan, and director John Slesinger. For his war services, Baxter received the 1939 to 45 star, the Burma star, and the usual War medals. He is currently 97 years old.
American comedy legend Mel Brooks, justifiably famous for Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, but also co-creator of Get Smart.
Born Melvin Kinsky in 1926, the son of Jewish immigrants to New York City, he started out as a drummer and comedy act with Sid Caesar before the war. In 1944, while in college, Brooks was sent to the US Army specialist training program at the Virginia Military Institute, and later inducted into the US Army. He received basic training as a radio operator and was sent to Europe in February 1945. He served in the campaigns following the Battle of the Bulge as a combat engineer with the 1104 Combat Engineer Battalion, and was part of teams clearing German booby traps and abandoned ordinance in towns in Western Germany, his specialism being the location of landmines. His unit also placed the first Bailey bridge over the Ruhr river, and would go on to build several bridges across the Rhine, serving through to May 1945 when they reached the Harz mountains following the end of World War II. Brooks joined special services as a comic, being promoted to Corporal, and ran the US Army’s entertainments in Wiesbaden in Germany. Brooks was himself honorably discharged in June 1946 as a Corporal. Mel Brooks is currently 97 years old.
Canadian Director Normal Jewison, most famous for In the Heat of the Night, Fiddler on the Roof and Moonstruck, but my favorite film of his is the original Rollerball.
Born in 1926 in Toronto of British immigrant parents, Jewison served in the Royal Canadian Navy between 1944 and 45. He was a signaler aboard a Canadian corvette escorting merchant ships up the East Coast from Maine to Newfoundland, from where the freighters and tankers would gathered to cross the Atlantic to Britain. Though German U-boats remained a serious threat until war’s end, he never saw any action, his only contact with the enemy being escorting German uboatman who had surrendered in May 1945. For his war service, Jewison received the 1939 to 45 star, the defense medal, the Canadian volunteer service medal and the war medal. Norman Jewison is currently 97 years old.
American acting and comedy legend Dick Van Dyke, famous for The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mary Poppins, etc.
Born in 1925 in West Plains, Missouri, he left school in his senior year to enlist in the United States Army Air Force, hoping to train as a pilot. But being underweight, Van Dyke instead became an army radio announcer, then transferred, like Mel Brooks, to the special services as a troop entertainer. Van Dyke did not serve overseas, and was discharged with the rank of Staff Sergeant in 1946, receiving the army Good Conduct Medal. Dick Van Dyke is currently 97 years old.
American actor Mike Nussbaum, with roles in Men in Black (the alien that owns the cat), Fatal Attraction, Field of Dreams, and House of Games. “Born to a Jewish family in Chicago in 1923 he served in the US Army in Europe in World War II. Assigned to General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s message center, which he headed and famously dispatched the official notification of Germany’s surrender in May 1945. Mike Nussbaum is 99 years old.
American TV producer and director Norman Lear, of All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons etc. fame, and was also a producer on The Princess Bride. (And speaking of Dick Van Dyke, Lear also produced and directed a movie he was in called Cold Turkey that I remember thinking was hilarious at the time, but I was pretty young…)
Born in New Haven Connecticut to Russian and Ukrainian Jewish parents, he enlisted in the United States Army Air Force in September 1942. He served in the Fifteenth Air Force in the Mediterranean theater as a radio operator and air gunner aboard Boeing B-17 flying Fortresses, completing 52 combat missions and reaching the rank of Technical Sergeant. His service earned, him amongst other honors, the Air Medal with Four Oakleaf Clusters, and he was discharged in 1945. Norman Lear is currently 101 years old.
Lear’s liberal politics are not to my taste, but we thank him, and all the other gentlemen on this list, for their service.
