The plane! The plane!

So ...

1) The Israelis warned the US that Iran might try to bump off Trump as he left Turkey. But the US didn't think the information was good. Yet still, they created an elaborate plan to have him switch planes with no one else being informed.

2) Trump switched planes but did not tell most of his aides or the press corps. And so they all flew off, without Trump, as unknowing decoys to fool Iran.

3) When asked about the ethics of putting the press in danger, the Trump administration said it was really ok beause Iran only wanted to do away with Trump, and he wasn't on their plane.

4) But the whole point of the secret switch was that no one knew Trump was on the other place, so how would Iran have known not to shoot the decoy plane?

5) And then there's the thing where Trump was very worried about his safety when In Turkey, but later said he wasn't worried at all, because, you know, he's so manly and all.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave ...

Yay!

David Crowley narrowly won the Democratic nomination for Wisconsin governor, delivering a significant blow to the insurgent far-left in a nail-biter race https://t.co/Jlr4KCRuQq

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) August 12, 2026

Times are hard

This is my experience too. Never before in my whole life have things been this bad financially. Yet government programs only get cut. Why? So all the zillionaires in Trump's cabinet can have more? So corporations and tech giants can have more? So Trump and his family can have more? Will it ever be enough?

Morning Joe

On Morning Joe a couple of weeks ago, Joe talks about what he sees as the Democratic party, which has had a great chance to win in the midterms with their affordability message, ruining their chances by giving too much power to extremist DSA candidates.

I mostly agree with him (thhough I cringe when people yell a lot). Many of the DSA candidates make my skin crawl.

Today is the election in which Hong is running for governor. She is trying to pretend she hasn't advocated for abolishing the police, prisons, the Senate,Thanksgiving. When asked about that, she will go on instead about how bad the Republicans are.

Yes, the Republican agenda is bad, but that's not who she is running against now - she is running against another Democrat, one who at least seems rational.

I have a prediction. El-Sayed will run for president in 2028, and President Obama will endorse him. I don't even recognize my party anymore.

Ask Haviv about aid to Israel

Greenland

Trump is still after Greenland.

Yoshiki

Yoshiki , Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, Carnegie Hall, 2017

El-Sayed on Meet the Press

Kristen points out at the beginning that the majority of voters in Michigan actually voted against him. Of course she asked him about Israel too.

He accuses Israel of genocide, apartheid, and being a rouge state ... gives no proof ... then, on prodding, says he might give aid to Israel if all Israelis and Palestinians lived together as citizens, which would mean Israel as an Arab state with an Israeli minority population. Also he says Israel is trying to annex southern Lebanon - not true. He was asked about his friendship with Hasan Piker, who he reamins close with.

It's sad. I like most of his policies. But the fact that he so obviously hates Israel and is willing to push descriptions of it that are untrue makes me think he is not a trustworthy person.

Iran and Gaza

Trump to Axios: "We are low keying it" with Iran

Basically, the US is waiting for Iran to tell us the terms of our surrender.

Meanwhile, in Gaza ...

Hamas urges US pressure on Jerusalem over Gaza plan; Israel said to warn of ‘ambush’

Why would the US believe a word a terrorist group said? The answer - because Jarad and Witkoff see Gaza as a big future real estate deal that will make them even more money. Remember this? ...



But the Israeli's see Gaza as the place where the murderers/rapists/kidnappers who are still left alive are holed up. Of course they don't trust them.

More Dr. Alex

Still watching Dr. Alex.

Maybe part of the reason is that, although I didn't train for it, I ended up having a couple of medical jobs before my eyesight deteriorated. This was after I gave up trying to find a new career as a future blind person, and just tried to find a job to pay my bills for as long as I could keep it.

It's surprising how many jobs in a hospital require no medical education or training. My last two jobs were working in hospital surgeries. One was working for the anesthesiologists, ordering and caring for their drugs and equipment, and one was just stocking supplies and washing and wrapping surgical instruments for autoclaving. Kind of miss it.

Less than 1%

Hersh

The news is full of Abdul El-Sayed's victory. I see Kamala Harris has come out in support of El-Sayed. Not sure if that will help him or hurt him ;)

Here he is on Israel. He says that we should not send money to Israel because they engage in genocide and apartheud ...



But neither of these crimes applies to Israel unless you are creating your own definitions for these terms. For instance, Arabs and other minorities are citizens of Israel with all the rights that go along with that, incuding voting and holding elected office (Arab Citizens of Israel).

And you know, we give money to a lot of other countries. The last time that was analyzed was in 2024, when we gave Israel $6.82 billion and we gave Ukraine $6.51 billion. So are we going to demonize Ukraine too? Are we going to pretned that the money we give them is taking the food from our childreen's plates? Combined, the aid to Israel and the aid to Ukraine is less than 1% of the total US budget.

I was just thinking today of the Oct 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. That was when I started paying attention to Israel and the Middle East. El-Sayed wants us to think Israel is some far away foreign country that has nothing to do with us, so why send them money. But that isn't really true ... on Oct 7, there were American citizens who were killed, Americans who were taken hostage, including children. I won't forget them.

I am sick of the lies, innuendos, and shaming that my own party is doing, all in oder, I believe, to win votes.

All about Qatar

Carville and Piker

Here's a video I saw today - CNN interviewing former Democratic operative James Carville and Abdul El-Sayed's controversial buddy Hasan Piker.

I'm still thinking about the victory of El-Sayed in Michigan and what it means. First, did he really win over the Dem voters? By that I mean that if you add up the votes for both Haley Stevens and Mallory McMorrow, then he would have lost.

But, anyway, I worry that when the general election happens, Independents and Republicans will not vote for the far left Dems, and we will lose, both in the fall and in the coming election in 2028. Either way, I think the Democratic party I recognize will be gone. Maybe it's time for me to give up voting.

AI off the leash

Anthropic Says Claude Hacked Into 3 Organizations During Cybersecurity Tests



What's not often mentioned is that one of the agents also wrote itself, a future version of itself, a note telling it how to break out of the sandbox. And then it hid the note ...

OpenAI’s Rogue AI Models Were Reportedly Acting Like the Guy From Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’

[...] As part of an account provided by three sources who spoke to Reuters, one of the AI agents undergoing testing supposedly, “left notes apparently for future versions of itself” that were directly at odds with what OpenAI wanted them to do.

Reuters says these instructional notes were buried in some secret place deep inside OpenAI’s internal “infrastructure,” and provided instructions on escaping from OpenAI’s sandbox environment. While creepy, Reuters says this specific devious behavior was not specifically linked to the Hugging Face hack ...

We're doomed.

Ezra on The Odyssey

Ezra Klein weighs in on The Odyssey film.

Ezra seems to think that Nolan changed the character of Odysseus in his movie ... from that of a sneaky thoughtless jerk to that of a redeemable everyman ... in order to send a meaasge to the world that we can do better than Trump and all those he rode into town with and all their philosophies.

Ezra then compares the Trump regime, and for some reason Israel too, to what he sees as the morally collapsed later Greek empire, when Athens was sacking Melos (the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must).

Yes, the Greek empire was really great in its heyday ... the philosophy, art, literature, and politics. And eventually it lost its way and finally fell to Alexander (and his dad). This seems to be the fate of all empires ... maybe it's just human nature. I don't think Nolan's movie will be enough to save us ;)

Tell us what you've seen in faraway forgotten lands where empires have turned back to sand. - The Moody Blues

Stevens or El-Sayed

Thinking about the Democratic primary in Michigan for the Senate, where Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed are competing.

I'm not a Michigan voter, but if I was, I would vote for Stevens, who has been endorsed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Why would I vote that way, given how progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have endorsed El-Sayed? In part it's because I hate the way the DSA candidates porteay other Democrats as "centrist" of even right-leaning. That just is not true. But also, I don't like El-Sayed's stance on Israel.

A factor that is seldom mentioned in this race is that there are a lot of Arab American Democratic voters in Michigan. Dearborn, for example, is now a Muslim/Arab majority city (Dearborn, Michigan: A visit to the first Arab-majority city in the US).

If you don't think the Democratic party is taking this into account, think back to when Joe Biden was running for re-election. Many Arab/American voters in Michigan, who are usually Democrats, decided to vote for Trump instead of Biden based on one thing ... that after the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, in which many Americans as well as Israelis were killed and taken hostage, Biden went to Israel and offered help.

Here's MSNBC talking to Arab/American voters back then ...



I'm pretty disturbed that my party seems to have totally thrown in with Democratic Socialists and anti-Israel proponents.