Tuesday: Hili dialogue

July 2, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Tuesday, the Cruelest Day, and it’s July 2, 2024, and it’s National Anisette Day, celebrating Italy’s version of the licorice (anise)-flavored cordial. Many countries have a version of it: in my time I’ve had plenty in Greece, where it’s called ouzo. Here’s a brand I’ve had plenty of, though it loses its appeal as soon as you return to America. It can only be drunk at a taverna in Greece with mezedes on the side:

AlMare, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also I Forgot Day, World Sports Journalists Day, Made in the USA Day, and World UFO Day, the latter marking the July 2 marking the Roswell UFO incident of 1947, which was really a spy balloon launched by the U.S. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 2 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The Big News, of course, is that the Supreme Court has said that Trump (and any President) is immune from prosecution for crimes committed while performing “official acts” as President, but not crimes committed as personal, non-official acts. There are lots of analyses, but the lessons are obvious. Aaron Blake, a political reporter, gives four at the WaPo. Three we already know: “It’s a clear victory for Trump,” “It’s likely to delay Trump’s case beyond the 2024 election,” and “The hits keep coming for panicky Democrats.”  But one deserves a bit more unpacking: “Liberal justices warned of dire consequences, ‘a king above the law.'” Blake:

Perhaps the most striking arguments in the case revolved around hypotheticals about just what a grant of immunity could mean in the future. Would a president be immune from prosecution for ordering Seal Team 6 to assassinate a rival? Could he order the military to conduct a coup and not be charged?

The court’s liberals say that’s now on the table. Justice Sonia Sotomayor went the furthest in her dissent.

“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune,” Sotomayor wrote. “Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”

Sotomayor added: “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was more measured, warning only that a president could now be immune from such charges.

“Thus, even a hypothetical President who admits to having ordered the assassinations of his political rivals or critics … or one who indisputably instigates an unsuccessful coup … has a fair shot at getting immunity under the majority’s new Presidential accountability model,” Jackson wrote.

The decision lands as Trump appears to be an increasing favorite to reclaim the White House in the 2024 election after President Biden’s poor debate performance Thursday, and Trump has at the very least demonstrated a tendency to push the limits of the law and presidential power.

The decision could provide Trump a road map for exploiting those powers, and the liberal justices clearly fear what he might do with that.

“With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” Sotomayor concluded.

And she’s not the only one who’s afraid! The Court seems to constitute the biggest impediment to moral progress among the three branches of government. Who is going to sort out what official acts are okay and which are not?

*Biden and his family are sequestered at Camp David, trying to figure out how to save his Presidency. Elsewhere, his Democratic compadres are fanning out, trying to spread the news that Biden is fine, and the best Democrat to run for office. His entire family is urging him to stay on:

President Biden’s family is urging him to stay in the race and keep fighting despite last week’s disastrous debate performance, even as some members of his clan privately expressed exasperation at how he was prepared for the event by his staff, people close to the situation said on Sunday.

Mr. Biden huddled with his wife, children and grandchildren at Camp David while he tried to figure out how to tamp down Democratic anxiety. While his relatives were acutely aware of how poorly he did against former President Donald J. Trump, they argued that he could still show the country that he remains capable of serving for another four years.

Mr. Biden has been soliciting ideas from advisers about how to proceed, and his staff has been discussing whether he should hold a news conference or sit for interviews to defend himself and change the narrative, but nothing has been decided yet. The campaign scheduled what could be a critical call with its national finance committee for Monday to calm nerves and take temperatures.

One of the strongest voices imploring Mr. Biden to resist pressure to drop out was his son Hunter Biden, whom the president has long leaned on for advice, said one of the people informed about the discussions, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations. Hunter Biden wants Americans to see the version of his father that he knows — scrappy and in command of the facts — rather than the stumbling, aging president Americans saw on Thursday night.

Other family members were trying to figure out how they could be helpful. At least one of the president’s grandchildren has expressed interest in getting more involved with the campaign, perhaps by talking with influencers on social media, according to the informed person.

But, as Frank Bruni writes, “This is not Jill Biden’s problem to solve.” Indeed!

Jill Biden doesn’t hold an actual job whose description includes advising the president on the most sensitive matters and painful choices. She wasn’t elected to do that. She wasn’t elected, period. So how is it her obligation — and not the task of one of his many paid aides or one of the political operatives who have been counseling him for decades — to make everything right? She’s a spouse, not a sorcerer.

And yesterday’s Free Press daily email said this:

The Biden campaign sent a fundraising email that included a chart showing that Biden leads other Democrats in head-to-head matchups against Trump. (The extraordinary thing about this is not that it shows Biden outperforming various untested Democrats, but that Biden’s team decided to include it in a fundraising email at all.)

Note that many of these possible Democratic candidates are only a few percent behind Trump—and they’re not even campaigning!

*At Erasmus University in Rotterdam (much of the hatred of Jews and Israel is concentrated in the Netherlands), people are now required to dip their hands in red paint—a sign of solidarity with Palestine and Hamas—before entering parts of the campus. At Erasmus University! (h/t Malgorzata).

An anti-Israel protester approached this reporter while narrowly avoiding the guidelines of the 20-odd tents that dotted Erasmus University campus’s main square. Wearing a keffiyeh over her face, she asked about the purpose of my visit.

About 30 of her comrades watched while eating dinner: a rice and lentil dish served from a large pot atop a portable gas stove.

“It’s a Zionist,” she called out, upon learning the name of this publication, prompting the group to cover their faces with their keffiyehs and surgical masks. They encircled, screaming, “Intifada!” as they placed a Palestinian flag over the camera to prevent any filming of the events taking place at one of Europe’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning.

The protesters had a tray with red paint at the ready, which they use during blockages. Only those students or faculty who agree to dip a palm in the paint to show solidarity with Palestinians are let through to various campus facilities.

A man who sounded like a native Arabic speaker began drumming on a bucket. The other activists started chanting “From the river to the sea,” and the man shouted: “Falastin arabiyeh,” Arabic for “an Arab Palestine.”

Parts of the encampment were moved to a nearby park earlier in June, but sporadic unauthorized blockages and protest actions persist in what has become a part of campus life in Erasmus, an institution with tens of thousands of students, including hundreds of Jews.

. . .The blockages at the University of Amsterdam and Erasmus are part of an ongoing cat-and-mouse campaign by anti-Israel activists on campuses across the Western world. Protesters typically occupy campus grounds demanding the university cut ties with Israel or dismiss Zionist faculty. If they are removed or agree to disperse, they often renew the blockage within a few days.

Also last month, protesters beat up and chased away a man in Erasmus because he flew an Israeli flag on campus. Across campus, walls feature posters of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wearing demon’s horns, which Lisa and Nathan regard as echoing antisemitic imagery.

What do you expect? It’s the Netherlands, Jake, the place where three of us were deplatformed for wanting to discuss a paper on ideology and evolutionary biology. But because two of us had sympathies for Israel, they canceled our discussion at the University of Amsterdam.  Here’s a photo from the Times of Israel of some of the Erasmus students playing at being Hamas, but are too coeardly to show their faces:

(from ToI): Anti-Israel protesters conceal themselves from a photographer’s lens on the campus of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands on June 5, 2024. (Canaan Lidor/ Times of Israel)

*You might be aware that New York City planned an experiment in “congestion pricing”: you’d have to pay $15 to drive into midtown Manhattan. (London. Stockholm, and Singapore have plans in place.) Sounds good, right—reduced traffic and money for the city? Except it was, according to the WSJ, a miserable failure. It’s been deep-sixed by the governor.

Patrons at the Comfort Diner in Midtown Manhattan recently encountered an unexpected person working the tables: Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Rather than take orders, she went booth to booth seeking opinions about the city’s first-in-the-nation plans for congestion pricing—a $15 toll on vehicles entering the core of Manhattan.

Nobody realized at the time that the Democratic governor was heading toward a blockbuster announcement: she was about to scrap the program after years of planning and hundreds of millions of dollars spent. In one of the most consequential decisions in decades for America’s most prominent city, Hochul soon said she was indefinitely pausing congestion pricing—less than a month before it was set to take effect on Sunday, June 30.

The abrupt reversal, which some attribute to Hochul’s reluctance to impose a new fee in an election year, leaves metro New York grappling with a historic missed opportunity and fiscal mess. There is no relief in sight for the city’s traffic congestion, which is the worst in the world, according to data published last week.

The epic collapse in New York shows how a fear of dramatic change can give the status quo stubborn power over those trying to solve some of America’s most intractable challenges. That leaves policymakers nibbling at the edges of deeply rooted problems, even after investing huge sums of money and political capital.

Blown up in a New York minute were plans for around $15 billion of planned improvements to the city’s ailing mass-transit system, the largest transportation network in North America. The reversal cast aside around $700 million in meticulous prep work, including a $555-million contract to install tolling cameras—which are already up and ready to go—and $33 million for a customer-service center with 100 employees who have already been brought on, officials said. Planners invested thousands of hours, including going to London and Stockholm to research their congestion-pricing programs, according to people familiar with the travel.

What was supposed to be a transformative moment when New York led the way and boldly tackled traffic congestion, air pollution and transit funding, has instead turned into a surprising loss for a broad coalition that includes major employers, real-estate developers and subway riders.

It was killed by lawsuits and complaints, despite it working in the other cities. And now the $700 million it took to plan for this change is down the drain, and Manhattan still has some of the worst traffic in the world.

*Sadly, several readers have informed me that the Virgin Mary Stingray in an Asheville, North Carolina aquarium, proclaimed but its owners as having gotten pregnant without being inseminated, has died. The owners, despite there never having been a stingray that reproduced parthenogenetically, and who acted weaselly when people asked them for proof, still insisted it was pregnant, but admitted at last that it had a “reproductive disease” of unknown character. (See an earlier report on this site here.)

A stingray that got pregnant at a North Carolina aquarium this winter despite not having shared a tank with a male of her species for many years has died.

The Aquarium and Shark Lab in Hendersonville said on Facebook late Sunday that the stingray, Charlotte, died after getting a rare reproductive disease. It didn’t go into further detail.

The aquarium, which is in the Blue Ridge Mountains, announced in February that Charlotte had gotten pregnant despite not having shared a tank with a male stingray in at least eight years. But it said in late May that she was suffering from a rare reproductive disease and announced in early June that she hadn’t given birth and was no longer pregnant.

The pregnancy was thought to be the result of a type of asexual reproduction called parthenogenesis, in which offspring develop from unfertilized eggs, meaning there is no genetic contribution by a male. The mostly rare phenomenon can occur in some insects, fish, amphibians, birds and reptiles, but not in mammals. Documented examples have included California condors, Komodo dragons and yellow-bellied water snakes.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is becoming antiwoke. But I think she means white-throated sparrows, not starlings. (This story, distorted by ideologues to say that sparrows have four sexes, is bonkers.)

Hili: What the hell?
A: What happened?
Hili: Starlings have become infected with gender ideology.
In Polish:
Hili: Ki diabeł?
Ja: Co się stało?
Hili: Szpaki zaraziły się ideologią gender.

And the loving Szaron is napping outside:

*******************

From The Dodo Pet:

From Science Humor:

From Cat Memes:

Lagniappe:  Here’s part of the application to attend the 2024 SACNAS conference (Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics & Native Americans in Science). Look at all those pronouns!

Masih is ticked off by Mohammad Zarif, the foreign minister of Iran. “Niac” (not “Nayak”) is the National Iranian American Council, which apparently takes stands like those of the theocratic regime. Is it any wonder that Iran keeps trying to kill or kidnap Masih, who appears to be in hiding, constantly moving from place to place.

Google translation:

Zarif, the greatest trowel, should kick Christ! See how Masih shouts when Nayak was against sanctioning Zarif that he is an accomplice of criminals and should be sanctioned!

@AlinejadMasih

#نه_به_جمهوری‌_اسلامی

From Malgorzata: I’m always amazed at the degree of Jew and Israel hatred by the Irish (of course, not all of them are like this, but still. . . ).  They’re a heterodox people, and when I put this on Twitter, saying that it baffled me, I got a variety of explanations, the most cogent of which is that the Irish have a history of being oppressed by the British, and they analogize this to Palestinians being oppressed by Israelis, though the analogy is completely bogus.

Rachavi finds memes that are STEM in nature. A “PI” is a “principal investigator,” the head of a lab.  Simon, who sent this, asked, “Is this you in party mode?”  The answer is “Yep.”

From Barry, who captions this, “Goddam it; I was so close!”

From David; the thread after this tweet gives more crazy assertions and some evidence that this is a real course:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:

Two tweets from Matthew. Here David Attenborough gets a standing ovation at Wimbledon. He doesn’t look bad for 98, does he?

Translation from the Portuguese: “How does a scorpion defecate? Here’s a good momma having a poop.”  Oy!

 

48 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I would certainly never suggest that President Biden should send a Seal team to assassinate Trump….but, well….he could actually do that now, couldn’t he…..?

    1. This is the best idea ever. After Trump is taken care of, Biden could do the right thing and step down and then this country could have two new and hopefully decent candidates to choose between in the next election. It’s a best case scenario!

    2. He could order it with immunity but the SEAL commander would have to refuse the unlawful order to carry out a military action on American soil. Immunity applies only to the President, not to those bound by other laws, which is everyone else. “Following orders” is not a general defence.

      1. Well then, Biden could just do the deed himself at the next debate! Didn’t MTG accuse him of intending to do just that at the last debate? Maybe she’s smarter than we thought.

      2. And what if he found a SEAL team member who was willing to carry it through and face the consequences?

        1. You sell your military shorter than I do as a foreigner. Why would a soldier commit murder knowing that he and everyone above him in the military chain of command would go to prison or hang but the guy at the top who ordered him would get off scot-free? Not exactly the scenario to motivate a loyalty cult.

          Anyway, I don’t see the point in arguing about the Supreme Court ruling. You can’t change it even if you convince all your interlocutors it was wrong.

          2. It only takes one. Studies have also shown that the military is comprised of at least 5% of members that hold extremist views (the number is probably higher). Your faith in not well-placed.

          3. Way too much faith, Leslie. Don’t you know that we military guys are nuts? “Extremists,” at least 1 in 20; likely far, far more. Ask Ted. I’m sure he knows many of us. And then you have the PTSD nut jobs. Time bombs waiting to star in headlines and Hollywood flicks. Ask Rambo. I’m sure you could get him to do anything.

            I’m curious which official duty would entail “assassination of domestic political rivals.” In any case, news flash, if anyone really wanted to kill a president—or anyone else—they will not be deterred by possible consequences. This immunity ruling doesn’t change that. If one truly believes that Trump is a murderous bastard who has minions waiting to carry out his every evil desire, then why think that consequences would matter to any of them? And here’s another question: if Trump is Hitler in waiting, the guarantor of the destruction of democracy, then shouldn’t his opponents be taking EVERY means to keep him out of office? I mean, would you have been dissuaded by legalities if you could have prevented Hitler from ascending? The TDS-afflicted people either don’t believe there own BS or they are, themselves, a real danger to democracy. They run the real risk of becoming what they purport to hate.

            We are losing our collective mind.

          4. “The TDS-afflicted people”
            No such thing…that’s like saying people with cancer and are hyper concerned about it have “Cancer Derangement Syndrome.”
            We’re so far past that now…well, those of us who take his shit seriously, and project 2025 and SCOTUS on the side of Trump and Theocracy. You obviously don’t…no surprise, I know you like to normalize Trump…hell, I’d bet you voted for him and will again.

            Edit: this didn’t fall into the correct place and is in response to Doug’s comment above

      3. The military brass are too professional and bureaucratic. I’d use someone like Oliver North, the CIA, or the Mafia.

      4. Sorry Doug, you need (imo) to lay off PTSD sufferers as nut jobs. PTSD also applies and includes domestic, sexual abuse and road accident victims.
        They’re not likely any more than you and I to carry out such an act. Sufferers generally want to hide and lock the door.

        1. Laingholm, It is unfortunate that sarcasm does not always translate in text. I am well aware of the facts of PTSD, military and other. But, if I were mocking such people who suffer, then I would be the first to approve your calling it out.

      5. Yes. Thank you Leslie.
        I think the “official acts” thing has been widely misconstrued.
        Wish ol’ Ken was here to be a better lawyer than me!

        D.A.
        NYC

    3. But even if he could send a Seal Team without legal repercussions (is that part of his official job?) there’s no guarantee that the Seal Team would carry out the assassination fearing their own prosecution for an act unprotected by Presidential privilege.

      No, I’m afraid the Presidential immunity is not as broad as the conspiracy nuts would have you believe. Indeed the whole concept is going to be tested in the cases against Donald Trump.

      1. See above. How hard would it to be to find a willing member of the military? Probably not hard at all-lots of people lots of extremists too. Of course this isn’t going to happen but it points out how dangerous and illogical this ruling is.

    4. Not legally.

      He’d face impeachment and there’s a strong argument that assassinating a political opponent is not an official duty.

      Not that he’d get prosecuted anyway, for the reasons Hur’s outlined.

      1. That’s my question. In what sense can an act of pure politics–running for re-election, fundraising–be considered an “official” presidential act?

  2. Some European readers might correct my impression from Wikipedia, but Erasmus Uni seems to have been found(ed) in 1913 as a commerce/business entity and over the years, except for a medical school, added in some soft social studies and other studies areas. I see no real hard science or engineering in even their current remit. Unless they are contained in philosophy writ large as was the sense in the 17th and 18th centuries, hundreds of years before this uni was created.

  3. Personally, I’m disappointed that we can’t now prosecute President Obama for his extra-legal drone strikes, some of which were against U.S. citizens.

    1. The one that I know of was the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. The U.S. District Court for D.C. ultimately dismissed the case against the Obama administration. The legal issues are interesting and complex, and are not unrelated to the status of detainees at Guantanamo, which the Bush administration opted, controversially, not to handle in a civil criminal framework, but as a matter of the rules of war. If you are aware of other Obama-initiated drone killings of U.S. citizens, I’d be interested to know what they were. (The case of Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki involves a different set of issues, since the Obama administration claimed that he was not a target, but was an unfortunate bystander….)

      1. The ACLU and CCR have filed a lawsuit challenging the government’s targeted killing of three U.S. citizens in drone strikes far from any armed conflict zone.

        In Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta (Al-Awlaki v. Panetta) the groups charge that the U.S. government’s killings of U.S. citizens Anwar Al-Aulaqi, Samir Khan, and 16-year-old Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi in Yemen last year violated the Constitution’s fundamental guarantee against the deprivation of life without due process of law.

        The killings were part of a broader program of “targeted killing” by the United States outside the context of armed conflict and based on vague legal standards, a closed executive process, and evidence never presented to the courts.

        https://www.aclu.org/video/aclu-ccr-lawsuit-american-boy-killed-us-drone-strike

          3. You are correct, but note that Obama was not a defendant, so it is unclear what point you are trying to make:

            The case, Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta,was filed in July 2012 and argued in July 2013. It names as defendants former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta; former CIA Director David Petraeus; Adm. William H. McRaven, Commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command; and Gen. Joseph Votel, Commander of the Joint Special Operations Command.

            https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/court-dismisses-lawsuit-challenging-us-drone-killings-three-americans#:~:text=The%20court%20dismissed%20that%20case,for%20the%20court%20to%20decide.

          4. @Lysander:

            My point was that the pursuit of a case against Obama would fail for the same reasons that the case against the actual defendants failed, with or without any presidential immunity. Look, I am not defending Obama or the policy of extra-legal killing of anyone — there are political remedies for such actions that could have been pursued, but the Rule 50 got in the way.

      2. Exactly. This guy has an agenda which basically is not really related to the discussion at hand.

  4. The freak-out over the Supreme Court immunity ruling is completely disingenuous and bogus, except to the extent that the whiners never believed there were limits on government in the first place. What the Supreme Court said is that a President is immune from prosecution for acts committed in his official capacity. People are acting like that means he can do anything, if he claims it’s official. The Constitution (remember that?) defines not only the President’s power but the power of the Federal government. The President does not have the authority to order the murder of a citizen (unless the President is Obama), or to throw someone in jail without trial, or to do any of the other nefarious acts the pundits are trying to scare us with. So, for example, if the President ordered the National Guard into a city where rioting was out of control and the police were overwhelmed, he could not be prosecuted if a protestor dies. It does not mean that Biden could have Trump killed. It does not also mean, sorry President Trump, that the New York hush money case is covered by official acts.

    1. Sorry the freakout is totally warranted. This is probably the most damaging ruling I can remember:
      1.Presidents like all others can commit real crimes under “official” capacity as defined here. There is absolutely no reason why they should be shielded. The constitution makes no provisions for “official” executive action at all and implies in other places that the president should not have these protections.
      2.It is ahistorical. Of course, people throughout history knew that if you committed crimes in an official capacity as president you were subject to prosecution. That’s why Ford pardoned Nixon. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be necessary.
      3.Trump gives the single most obvious example already. Forget the hypotheticals about assassinations (and BTW Obama/Bush examples would never be prosecuted anyway because the justice department concocted exceptions that were never challenged so no lawyer would bring a case and expect anything, while the killing of protestors has happened tons of time-even at Kent State charges were brought against guardsmen, not those who called them in,and nothing ended up happening to them), we already have an example of grave malfeasance. Trump tried to get his acting head of justice to proclaim, without evidence, that the election was fraudulent, and then concocted a scheme to subvert the transfer of power. This is as bad as possible. Why does this even fall under “official” activities?

      This ruling is extreme. It would be mitigated if some of the things Trump did wrt to Jan.6 did not fall under the official designation. However many of the worst ones seem to, and there is no good reason for that. Why conversations with other officials that concern non-official presidential action (e.g. stealing an election) should fall under the protections of this extreme ruling are baffling.

      1. So, no problem with prosecuting Obama as a war criminal?

        During his presidency, Obama approved the use of 563 drone strikes that killed approximately 3,797 people. In fact, Obama authorized 54 drone strikes alone in Pakistan during his first year in office. One of the first CIA drone strikes under President Obama was at a funeral, murdering as many as 41 Pakistani civilians. The following year, Obama led 128 CIA drone strikes in Pakistan that killed at least 89 civilians. Just two years into his presidency, it was clear that the “hope” that President Obama offered during his 2008 campaign could not escape U.S. imperialism.

        The drone operations extended to Somalia and Yemen in 2010 and 2011, resulting in more destructive results. Under the belief they were targeting al-Qaida, President Obama’s first strike on Yemen killed 55 people including 21 children, 10 of which were under the age of five. Additionally, 12 women, five of them pregnant, were also among those who were murdered in this strike. These blundered acts of murder by not only President Obama, but the U.S. government, are morally reprehensible.

        Even more civilian casualties came out of Afghanistan throughout Barack Obama’s time in office. In 2014, Obama began removing troops currently deployed in the country. However, instead of this action by the president being one in a pursuit of peace and stability in the region, it only acted as an opportunity to drastically increase air warfare. Afghanistan had war rained upon them by U.S. bombardment, with the administration viciously dropping 1,337 weapons on Afghanistan in 2016. In total that year, the Obama administration dropped 26,171 bombs (drone or otherwise) across seven countries: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. The U.S., in cooperation with its allies including the Afghan government, killed 582 civilians on average annually from 2007 to 2016.

        In his recent self-aggrandizing memoir “A Promised Land,” Obama defends his drone program through a messiah complex; he writes, “I wanted somehow to save them … And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.” President Obama would have the reader believe he wanted to help the suspected terrorist but simply couldn’t. In reality, he consciously and undemocratically decided the fates of thousands of lives, without due process.

        https://harvardpolitics.com/obama-war-criminal/#:~:text=During%20his%20presidency%2C%20Obama%20approved,many%20as%2041%20Pakistani%20civilians.

        1. Give me a break. US history is replete with activities of presidents that were greatly damaging. In recent years none more criminal that Bush’s Iraq invasion. We have sponsored numerous coups in Central America, prosecuted wars under bad pretexts (Vietnam, Iraq). Just recently I watched a video where Nixon, while interviewed, claimed he told Kennedy to make up a pretext to invade Cuba to “get rid of Castro.” He said this with a straight face as if it was a good idea.

          None of this is to say that *any* of these things are good-they have all been damaging to us and the countries affected. But that is a different thing altogether. The point is this has always been part of US presidential purview for better or worse. Obama’s actions are not near the top of the list here, and there was a legal basis (one I disagreed with) for the killing of an Americal citizen on foreign soil. He will not, would not, and was not every prosecutable just on historical precedent alone, let alone the views of the justice department. This is a completely disingenuous claim that has been made here like 5 times over the last 24 hours.

          Now contrast that with what Trump did. No president in history has every tried this. It is an extreme attempt to fundamentally alter our democracy (for all its good and bad), and it is based on outright falsehoods that Trump promulgated even in 2016 (in each election cycle he has basically said the election is illegitimate unless he wins, in 2016 after he won he put Kobrach in charge of finding vote fraud and made outlandish claims about why he lost the popular vote, Stone even trademarked “Stop the Steal” in 2016, etc) which is an outright assault on the way things work and should work in this country. It is not even “official” presidential activity and the fact that it is protected as such is incredibly damaging.

          3. Indeed. Anyone who cares about “no one is above the law” is or should be outraged. Unfortunately, the MAGA cult wants Trump to be above the law…shiver. SCOTUS basically changed our entire country with this ruling, and it was for the specific benefit of people like Trump and the 2025 project. It’s simply another example of (when it comes to the destruction of American Democracy) “the fix is in.”

  6. It’s sick that in Cork, Ireland, children are being indoctrinated into supporting Hamas. Another generation of Jew hatred is being nurtured right before our eyes.

    1. I wonder what he did to deserve that punishment? Attenborough, obviously!

  9. About the pronouns: Why would someone wish to include ‘They’ as a pronoun, while many of the more unusual sorts prefer to not use that one?

  10. My suggestion to the SACNAS conference organizers would be to include an option to select: “FFS” as a response. I suspect they would have many takers and also suspect those selecting “prefer not to say” are just trying to be polite.

  11. That medical school curriculum is a real shocker. I guess getting sick in the USA is really not a good idea in the future.

    1. I can remember seeing some years ago a claim that ‘Fat Activisits’ were claiming being grossly overweight was a ‘progressive political act’.

      I looked into it and found nothing. To see something like it appearing now is disturbing.

      1. People have a natural tendency to try to convince themselves that their vices are actually virtues.

        I suppose the morbidly obese, excepting those with unusual medical conditions, are exhibiting sloth and gluttony.

        The people tearing down statues and defacing art and historic monuments are not doing it because of whatever cause is trending this week, but because of the cause gives them an excuse to do those things they want to do anyway. Is it based on envy, or some combination of that and wrath?

        I don’t think we can really say this is about religion, but more a system recognizing the sorts of attributes that people need to be healthy and get along in large populations. The Romans had a really interesting set of virtues. Virtues generally need to be taught, and require self discipline to practice. Vices come naturally.
        I recently heard someone describe the art vandals as “toddler people”.

  12. One of the many things that annoys me about the pronoun list is that it’s illogical. The first pronoun should be nominative (he/she), the second should be objective (him/her), and the third should be possessive (his/her). So what are we to make of “she/her/they”? Or “they/them/elle”? Or the ones that list four pronouns?

Comments are closed.