Unnecessary Risk

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Israel is taking one, and it’s doing so, I speculate, under pressure from the Biden administration.

Israel will start four-hour humanitarian pauses in parts of northern Gaza every day, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Thursday.

This is an extremely foolish risk to run. The only reason Israel should be taking any sort of cease fire pause, whether “humanitarian” or operational, would be to allow logistics to catch up with Israel’s advancing forces and to reestablish/reinforce coordination among the leading elements and between them and follow-on units. Furthermore, pause(s) never should be scheduled, nor should they occur with advance notice to the terrorists, as these pauses are.

On top of that, four hours is plenty of time for Hamas to recover, rest to an important degree, get its own logistics caught up, and relocate its terrorists for resumed combat along axes of its choosing and with the Israeli momentum broken by the “pause.” Four hours also is plenty of time for Hamas to relocate and hide anew the victims it has kidnapped. That’s especially the case if the four-hour periods are routinely repeated at regular and prior-notice times.

Not Possible

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Qatar and Egypt are, supposedly, working with Hamas to get 15 of Hamas’ 240 and more kidnap victims released in return for a 48-hour “cease” fire.

This shouldn’t be possible. Hamas refuses even to tell these two nations—or anyone else—how many kidnappees they’re holding, much less who they are or what their condition is.

Beyond that, any cease fire won’t involve the terrorist Hamas ending its attacks. Such a foolishness would only enable the terrorists to rest, regroup, and refit to continue fighting from replenished fortifications and from renewed positions behind Gazan human shields.

Such a foolishness also would enable the terrorists to relocate the kidnappees they’re holding, making it more difficult to locate and free them.

There can be no cease fire until there are no more of Hamas at which to fire.

Full stop.

“Just Another Use of Fossil Fuels”

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There’s a move afoot to produce hydrogen as an energy source by fracturing natural gas into its hydrogen and carbon and oxygen components, the latter two typically as CO2 (and then capturing the CO2 and sequestering it). The foolishness of trying to use hydrogen as an energy source is for another day. What interests me here is the beef from the Global Warming Know Betters who see [fracturing natural gas] as just another use of fossil fuels.

Those august persons, then, must object to our several materials industries, in which natural gas, oil, and coal are major inputs to plastics.

Oh, wait—they hate plastics, too.

A Censure

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Representative Rich McCormick’s (R, GA) proposed censure of Michigan Progressive-Democrat Representative Rashida Tlaib was passed by the House Tuesday night 234-188. Twenty-two of Tlaib’s fellow Progressive-Democrat Representatives voted to approve the censure, so rank is her bigotry.

Included in the censure resolution that was voted up were such bigotries as these:

Whereas Representative Rashida Tlaib, within 24 hours of the October 7 barbaric attack on Jewish citizens of the State of Israel, representing the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, defended the brutal rapes, murders, be-headings, and kidnapping—including of Americans—by Hamas as justified “resistance” to the “apartheid state”

And

Whereas on October 18, 2023, Representative Tlaib continued to knowingly spread the false narrative that Israel intentionally bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on October 17 after United States intelligence, Israeli intelligence, and President Biden assessed with high confidence that Israel did not cause the explosion

And

Whereas on November 3, 2023, Representative Tlaib published on social media a video containing the phrase “from the river to the sea”, which is widely recognized as a genocidal call to violence to destroy the state of Israel and its people to replace it with a Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea

Tlaib also is on two subcommittees each of the House Financial Services, Natural Resources, and Oversight and Reform committees. She needs to be removed from those committees and consigned to the back bench.

The Censure Resolution can be read here.

FISA and Search Warrants

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The House Judiciary Committee is moving to seriously revamp FISA, the Act that was set up to deal with    widespread privacy violations by the Federal government during the Nixon administration.  It was intended to enable the government to surveil foreign persons and to limit the government’s surveillance to those foreign persons, and it includes a secretive and secret court to enable issuance of search warrants supporting that surveillance. The Act was promptly abused by the FBI and the Feds’ intelligence agencies to spy on us ordinary Americans, also, most recently during the runup to the Trump administration and continuing throughout that term, and since.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court earlier this year declassified a report revealing that FBI agents had inappropriately searched Americans’ phone records more than 270,000 times over a two year period, alarming civil liberty experts and generating bipartisan condemnation.

Bad as that abuse is, it’s also bad that that secret FISA court had been hiding that abuse behind its “classified” wall. This secret, Star Chamber court has been contributing its own abuses to the Act: it has acknowledged that the FBI had overtly lied to it on a number of those warrants, but then it had not only exacted no punishment, it continued blithely to accept FBI agents’ word on subsequent warrant applications. All of that is on top of the fundamental abuse that is the secret nature of this court, which aside from violating the spirit, if not the letter, of our court system, allows it to inflict those other abuses on us ordinary Americans.

Any suitable reform of the FISA Act must include disbanding altogether FISA’s Star Chamber Court. To the extent that the government worries about getting a warrant would tip off the bad guys—and it’s a legitimate concern—Article III courts and State courts all know how to seal and protect warrants when that’s…warranted.