Welcome to the Sabbath for goyische cats: Sunday, March 16, 2025, and National Panda Day. Here are some your specimens on display: 25 young pandas making their first appearance this year at the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda (CCRCGP) and the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in southwest China’s Sichuan Province. I once visited the Chengdu Research Base and got to lightly pet a sleeping panda. Is there any cuter animal?
It’s also National Corn Dog Day (didn’t we just have that?), Freedom of Information Day, Buzzard Day, Curlew Day, and National Artichoke Heart Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 16 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*A federal court has blocked Trump’s attempt to deport Venezuelans, with the deportees reported to be gang members.
A federal judge on Saturday ordered the Trump administration to cease use of an obscure wartime law to deport Venezuelans without a hearing, saying that any planes that had departed the United States with immigrants under the law needed to return.
As of early Sunday morning, it was unclear whether any such planes had departed or returned.
On Saturday, the administration published an executive order invoking the law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to target Venezuelan gang members in the United States.
But shortly after the announcement, James E. Boasberg, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., said he would issue a temporary order blocking the government from deporting any immigrants under the law.
In a hastily scheduled hearing, he said he did not believe the law offered grounds for the president’s action, and he ordered any flights that had departed with Venezuelan immigrants under the executive order to return to the United States “however that’s accomplished — whether turning around the plane or not.”
This will surely wind up, along with all the other contested deportations, in the Supreme Court.
*Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish column is called “The return of the McCarthyites“, with the subtitle, “Trump and Vance say they are for free speech. Yeah, right.” And he’s with me that Mahmoud Khalil’s speech doesn’t warrant deportation:
It’s important to note that this is not about protection from woke professors or ideologically captured deans. It’s protection from direct surveillance by the federal government. The Trump administration has launched a massive, all-of-government, AI-assisted program called “Catch and Revoke,” which will scan every social media comment and anything online they can use to flush out any noncitizen who might be seen as anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist or anti-Israel or indeed just getting on Marco Rubio’s wrong side.
Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, has not been accused of a crime. And that is the point. A White House official explained: “The allegation here is not that [Khalil] was breaking the law.” A DHS spokesman elaborated to NPR:
“We’ve invited and allowed the student to come into the country, and he’s put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity. And at this point, like I said, the Secretary of State can review his visa process at any point and revoke it.”
“Pro-Palestinian activity” is the reason. The DHS document citing the law being used against Khalil — and thereby potentially every other noncitizen, including green card holders — has this legal formula:
[T]he Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe that your presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.
Note the astonishing breadth of this legal formula. You could, for example, be a Ukrainian exile who furiously opposes the Trump administration’s new policy toward Russia. Under the Rubio standard, if you do not have citizenship, merely expressing your views in a way that jeopardizes US foreign policy interests is now a deportable offense. The Trump administration, unless a court stops them, has effectively removed the First Amendment from tens of millions of inhabitants of this country.
It’s actually worse: if you merely potentially could say such a thing, you can be deported for a pre-crime, or rather pre-noncrime. Every noncitizen in the US now has to watch what they say about foreign policy — or else. You may have just arrived from Putin’s Russia, and are now being told by Trump: don’t think you now have free speech just because you’re in America. The US government is monitoring your every word and can deport you if you say the wrong thing. You have to wait until you’re a citizen to be free.
. . . .The White House mocked him from their X account: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” Take a second to absorb that monstrosity: the glib and spiteful use of a Jewish term for goodbye to a Muslim. And not from some nasty X nutter. From the president who is supposed to represent all of us, but is, in fact, a deranged, bigoted troll.
I’m going to pause now for the unnecessary paragraph that is yet somehow necessary. I despise Hamas for its North Korean-level brainwashing of children, its Nazi-level anti-Semitism, and its barbaric use of women and children as human shields. I have absolutely no time for campus protests that go over the line into intimidation of other students. If crimes have been committed, I have no problem prosecuting. But offensive speech? It’s allowed in America. Handing out fliers? It’s how America began! A campus can (and should) discipline its students; but the federal government intervening to seize a legal resident and trying to deport him for speech — along with a dragnet for finding others to throw out — is an outrage in a free country.
Can the Trump administration win this fight? I suspect they can. Rubio says he intends to deport any noncitizen who merely “supports Hamas” — not materially supports, but just supports Hamas — and not just in the past, but in the future.
I’m going to pause now for the unnecessary paragraph that is yet somehow necessary. I despise Hamas for its North Korean-level brainwashing of children, its Nazi-level anti-Semitism, and its barbaric use of women and children as human shields. I have absolutely no time for campus protests that go over the line into intimidation of other students. If crimes have been committed, I have no problem prosecuting. But offensive speech? It’s allowed in America. Handing out fliers? It’s how America began! A campus can (and should) discipline its students; but the federal government intervening to seize a legal resident and trying to deport him for speech — along with a dragnet for finding others to throw out — is an outrage in a free country.
Can the Trump administration win this fight? I suspect they can. Rubio says he intends to deport any noncitizen who merely “supports Hamas” — not materially supports, but just supports Hamas — and not just in the past, but in the future.
Sullivan asserts that “the reason this is happening is because the government being assailed on American campuses and streets is not any government, and not even the American government, but the government of Israel. It’s part of a much broader campaign to chill criticism of the Jewish state.” Okay, I’ll grant that this is the motivation, but there are those of us who will defend any speech, like Khalil’s, so long as it is First-Amendment protected, no matter how much we dislike it. He adds, “As for all those brave center-right defenders of free speech on campus these last few years? Just see if they are condemning this. And if they aren’t, never take them seriously on this subject again.” I am condemning it, though I deny being a “center-right defender of free speech.” Not all defenders of free speech, my dear Mr. Sullivan, are on the Right.
*I hadn’t realized that Daniel Kahneman had died, nor that he died by assisted suicide in Switzerland (probably at the Dignitas facility). The WSJ gives the details in a post called “The last decision by the world’s leading thinker on decisions.” An excerpt (article is archived here).
n mid-March 2024, Daniel Kahneman flew from New York to Paris with his partner, Barbara Tversky, to unite with his daughter and her family. They spent days walking around the city, going to museums and the ballet, and savoring soufflés and chocolate mousse. Around March 22, Kahneman, who had turned 90 that month, also started emailing a personal message to several dozen of the people he was closest to.
On March 26, Kahneman left his family and flew to Switzerland. His email explained why:
This is a goodbye letter I am sending friends to tell them that I am on my way to Switzerland, where my life will end on March 27.
Kahneman was one of the world’s most influential thinkers—a psychologist at Princeton University, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and author of the international blockbuster “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” first published in 2011. He had spent his long career studying the imperfections and inconsistencies of human decision-making. By most accounts—although not his own—Kahneman was still in reasonably good physical and mental health when he chose to die.
He doesn’t appear to have had a fatal illness, either, though he said his “kidneys were on their last legs.” And so he went to his death still fairly healthy:
I think Danny wanted, above all, to avoid a long decline, to go out on his terms, to own his own death. Maybe the principles of good decision-making that he had so long espoused—rely on data, don’t trust most intuitions, view the evidence in the broadest possible perspective—had little to do with his decision.
His friends and family say that Kahneman’s choice was purely personal; he didn’t endorse assisted suicide for anyone else and never wished to be viewed as advocating it for others.
Kahneman didn’t want that to happen to him. His final email went on to indicate that he felt that it soon would:
I have believed since I was a teenager that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief.
He seems to have focused intently on another issue. As the next paragraph of Kahneman’s final email said:
Not surprisingly, some of those who love me would have preferred for me to wait until it is obvious that my life is not worth extending. But I made my decision precisely because I wanted to avoid that state, so it had to appear premature. I am grateful to the few with whom I shared early, who all reluctantly came round to support me.
I often think that this way of going is sensible: avoid the long, painful, and inevitable decline. And then I think that I really want to be around to see what happens next. I have not nearly reached the point when I think my desire to see what happens is outweighed by my decrepitude. Indeed, I wonder if that day will even come, and I’ll at least keep reading (so many books!), even as I fall apart in a hospital bed.
*Trump is considering restricting travel to America from 43 countries, and banning anybody coming from eleven of them:
The Trump administration is considering targeting the citizens of as many as 43 countries as part of a new ban on travel to the United States that would be broader than the restrictions imposed during President Trump’s first term, according to officials familiar with the matter.
A draft list of recommendations developed by diplomatic and security officials suggests a “red” list of 11 countries whose citizens would be flatly barred from entering the United States. They are Afghanistan, Bhutan, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen, the officials said.
. . .The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive internal deliberations, cautioned that the list had been developed by the State Department several weeks ago, and that changes were likely by the time it reached the White House.
Officials at embassies and in regional bureaus at the State Department, and security specialists at other departments and intelligence agencies, have been reviewing the draft. They are providing comment about whether descriptions of deficiencies in particular countries are accurate or whether there are policy reasons — like not risking disruption to cooperation on some other priority — to reconsider including some.
The draft proposal also included an “orange” list of 10 countries for which travel would be restricted but not cut off. In those cases, affluent business travelers might be allowed to enter, but not people traveling on immigrant or tourist visas.
Citizens on that list would also be subjected to mandatory in-person interviews in order to receive a visa. It included Belarus, Eritrea, Haiti, Laos, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Turkmenistan.
Here’s the entire list:
Now I get North Korea, Iran, and Syria, but not every other country on the red list, as I can envision good reasons for visitors to come here, like a Cuban who wants to collaborate with an American biologists (we send plenty of our scientists over there). And BHUTAN, for crying out loud? The happiest country in the world? What could be the reason for that?
*Trump is dismantling even more federal agencies, including two that are dear to my heart: the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.
It also instructs the heads of agencies to “reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law,” and submit a report to the Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought confirming full compliance within seven days.
A second executive order revoked 19 executive actions signed by President Joe Biden that promoted clean energy and environmental goals. The order terminates proclamations of national monuments created by Biden and ends the use of the Defense Production Act to expand the U.S. manufacturing of clean energy technology (including mandates for electric heat pumps and solar panels), among other Biden-era policies.
In a White House statement, Trump claimed the rules stem from “radical ideology” and were wasteful. One of the regulations that Trump canceled mandated a $15-an-hour minimum wage for federal contractors.
. . . . The U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) — the parent of VOA, Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia — is a congressionally chartered and independent agency, and Congress passed a law in 2020 intended to limit the power of the agency’s presidentially appointed chief executive.
The order also targets other lesser-known but broadly impactful agencies such as the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a nonpartisan global policy think tank; the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which supports and funds libraries, archives and museums in every state; Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which focuses on labor disputes; the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which centers on economically distressed communities; and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness.
Well, I remember the VOA and RFE when they broadcast independent news (not propaganda) to behind the Iron Curtain, and many people risked imprisonment for listening to them. Perhaps their days are over now that Communist Europe is largely gone, but those other agencies–the ones that promote clean energy, libraries, and museums–are they superfluous? Trump and Musk wield sharp knives, and they wield them widely.
*A guy just won $50 MILLION in a lawsuit against Starbucks when a cup of their hot tea spilled into his lap. Before you start saying that’s ridiculous, consider the circumstances:
A delivery driver has won $50 million in a lawsuit after being seriously burned when a Starbucks drink spilled in his lap at a California drive-through, court records show.
A Los Angeles County jury found Friday for Michael Garcia, who underwent skin grafts and other procedures on his genitals after a venti-sized tea drink spilled instants after he collected it on Feb. 8, 2020. He has suffered permanent and life-changing disfigurement, according to his attorneys.
Garcia’s negligence lawsuit blamed his injuries on Starbucks, saying that an employee didn’t wedge the scalding-hot tea firmly enough into a takeout tray.
“This jury verdict is a critical step in holding Starbucks accountable for flagrant disregard for customer safety and failure to accept responsibility,” one of Garcia’s attorneys, Nick Rowley, said in a statement.
Starbucks said it sympathized with Garcia but planned to appeal.
“We disagree with the jury’s decision that we were at fault for this incident and believe the damages awarded to be excessive,” the Seattle-based coffee giant said in a statement to media outlets, adding that it was “committed to the highest safety standards” in handling hot drinks.
U.S. eateries have faced lawsuits before over customer burns.
In one famous 1990s case, a New Mexico jury awarded a woman nearly $3 million in damages for burns she suffered while trying to pry the lid off a cup of coffee at a McDonald’s drive-through. A judge later reduced the award, and the case ultimately was settled for an undisclosed sum under $600,000.
Yes, that’s a bad injury, but in the end Starbuck’s is being sued for serving tea so hot that it could burn someone’s genitalia. I’m not so sure that warrants a penalty of $50 million. And aren’t you supposed to be careful with drinks in cars?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili thinks the flower are better on the other side of the fence:
Hili: Are our crocuses in bloom?Andrzej: Our neighbours’ have been in bloom for a week but here they are just starting.Hili: Discrimination.
In Polish
Hili: Czy nasze krokusy już kwitną?Ja: U sąsiadów kwitną od tygodnia, a nasze dopiero zaczynają.Hili: Dyskryminacja.*******************
From the Absurd Sign Project:
From Cat Memes. Would you eat this?
From The 2025 Darwin Awards!!!/EpicFails:
From Masih, yet another brave Iranian woman:
This is what sisterhood looks like. While I was filming my wife #WalkingUnveiled in a crowded street in Tehran, as part of her #WhiteWednesdays protest against #ForcedHijab another woman took her hijab off & joined her.
این حرکت زیبا باید تکثیر شود تا روزی که اتحاد شکل گیرد pic.twitter.com/MCqQVjUFVm— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) May 8, 2019
From Malgorzata: This is at the University of Chicago, and it’s not good at all. This was certainly an approved installation, a memorial for the youngest Bibas child, who was murdered by Hamas as a hostage. What horrible people these Chicago vandals are! They really need to put cameras on stuff like this, or have a 24-hour watch on it.
University of Chicago: The pro-Israel group “Maroon for Israel” installed a memorial for Kfir Bibas, only for it to be desecrated just hours later.
Kfir was only 9 months old when he was kidnapped and strangled to death for being Jewish.
This must be investigated, with… pic.twitter.com/dFbDVlz3fF
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) March 14, 2025
Via Luana: The APA should be embarrassed. There are ONLY two sexes in all animals, for crying out loud:
Last week, the American Psychological Association released a statement about Trump’s EO on the biology of sex.
In a section titled “What the Science Says,” the APA makes several embarrassingly false statements due to their blind commitment to sex pseudoscience.
THREAD 🧵 pic.twitter.com/2jejUoz6lj
— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) March 15, 2025
From Reese: click to go to the totally adorable Substack video:
From my feed:
That smile. 🤗🤗
(ai) pic.twitter.com/2iVjXacqE0
— The Goddess (@TheGoddessF) March 15, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:
A French Jewish girl gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was seven.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-03-16T10:13:57.416Z
Two posts from Professor Cobb. First, all kinds of animals on the farm:
Greetings and good morning it’s the Saturday farm rush hour with Mo & Emerald #rushhour
— Chris, Caroline, Kara (@caenhillcc.bsky.social) 2025-03-15T09:03:58.872Z
Kakapos are the world’s only flightless parrot, with nearly all of them isolated on a predator-free environment in New Zealand. This sad post links to an article suggesting that they once were very widespread but were devastated by introduced Pacific rats between the 13th and 19th centuries.
Once widespread, now critically endangered: New study shows kākāpō are the 4th most common bird in NZ's late-Quaternary deposits (>1351 individuals from 274 sites), and occupied all forests and adjacent habitats, on the NZ mainland prior to human settlement authors.elsevier.com/c/1klUo-4PSD…
— Jamie Wood (@larusnz.bsky.social) 2025-03-12T23:18:42.412Z
The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defence against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad. -James Madison, 4th US president (16 Mar 1751-1836)
Re Kahneman: I doubt any of us know how we really feel about trying to go on or whether to bail out before things get bad, at least until we have a life-threatening illness. That tends to clarify things one way or another.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Thomas somehow gave me comfort at the death of my mother. I’m not sure how I would feel if she had walked into it with time on the clock.
Those of us who have taken oaths to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States” have not infrequently wrestled with the fact that we volunteer our lives—and some give them up—for the rights of despicable assholes to say extraordinarily vile things. This particularly strikes home when those miscreants would gladly destroy the very principles you volunteered to defend. Nevertheless, I remain about as much of a free speech absolutist that one can be.
That said, I do wonder how many people we should invite into our country who oppose core principles within our country. How many Islamists, for instance, who would overturn church-state separation is too many? One denouncing this principle will mostly pass unheard; several doing so becomes a nuisance. How many must you add before it becomes a threat? How many should we add who despise Western civilization? How many who refuse to assimilate? How many who stoke hatred against other ethnic groups already present? How many who would Balkanize the entire country? How many who rather than fleeing the dysfunction of their native lands seek to bring the dysfunction with them?
Should we protect their freedom of speech while they are either visiting or on a path to citizenship? Sure. But where is the corrective mechanism if we discover we have made a mistake in allowing them here in the first place? The fact that we allow such views from the native-born does not saddle us with an obligation to import those who would both wish and pursue the demise of our governing principles and of our culture. But I understand why some would want to import such people. I also understand some of the perils in policing this, but I do wonder whether in our attempts to not be judgmental we have surrendered our judgment, whether in shunning discrimination we have lost the ability to discriminate.
All good questions, in my view. And not easy ones to answer.
Good questions, Doug. The answers are for Americans to come up with.
I will say that those who are fleeing oppression and persecution in their home countries don’t necessarily deserve a welcome. Lots of people are fine with oppression and persecution as long as they are the ones doing the oppressing and persecuting. And by coming to a free, open country that persecutes nobody, they hope to be able to do just that.
Thought provoking questions and comments.
As to how many should be allowed in who oppose our core principles: zero. If they are not happy with the way things are done here, why did they leave their homeland? Why are they here? What are they contributing? Anyone who arrives at our doors must be willing to assimilate, to support or, at the very least, to not oppose the status quo. And I make these comments as the spouse of a naturalized citizen, so my comments are not those of a xenophobe.
As for freedom of speech, what kind of sense does it make to allow speech which, for example, would promote the destruction of the U.S.? While some might argue that that is a slippery slope position, why would you permit something which, in the end, might destroy that very right (and others) for all other citizens? Is the principle more important or the reality?
At some point, Western societies the world over must address such issues. Better done sooner than later, and better be done before it’s too late. We don’t want to find ourselves making the comment I recall being made by Mikhail Gorbachev around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union: “We have strangled ourselves to death on our own ideologies” (paraphrase).
Well put. I share your concerns. I think about such things daily as I watch the tides turning.
OK – The Kahneman thing is sticking in my mind.
The adjectives anodyne and depressing, come to mind – implementing in his own life insights – remarkable insights! – gained from colonoscopy anesthesia surveys, etc. … and a certainty of how everyone else feels about it and how it will work in practice.
But 90 is a very great run, a great writer for a general audience. Glad for him.
Regarding the many lawsuits against Administration policies, I have only seen this Executive Order (“Ensuring the Enforcement of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c)”) mentioned in one place.
I’m curious who has standing to object to the deportation of Venezuelan gang members? The gang leader?
As the linked article explains, the plaintiffs are men accused of being gang members who both deny membership and have not been adjudicated as gang members.
Via Perplexity:
The ACLU established legal standing in this case through multiple avenues, most critically through their direct representation of individuals facing imminent deportation. This standing was then significantly expanded through class certification, allowing the organization to effectively challenge the Trump administration’s unprecedented peacetime use of a wartime authority.
The Gang Leader, indeed.
Perhaps Bhutan was added to the sanctions list “by mistake”? The Trump administration has already managed to fire hundreds of US nuclear safety officials, only to hastily reinstate them.
Or she deleted photos of the B-29 bomber “Enola Gay” from databases because of the (now forbidden) “woke” word “gay”.
Doug (comment 4) asks many enlightened questions that I think the country is now ready to debate. Fundamentally what should be the goals of our immigration policy?
Today, they are essentially humanitarian. The open borders this country has tolerated has led to a black market labor pool that distorts key sectors of our economies, as well as fuel crimes in narcotics, human trafficking and extortion.
Trump and the GOP is failing us by focusing on deportation and border security. Those goals will be met. When they are, we need to know, as Doug asks, what’s next?
Difficult one for me with Mahmoud Khalil. Whilst I agree with the idea of protecting speech, particularly from government, it’s harder when it involves a non-citizen. Of whatever type.
It might be my own sensibilities, but I wouldn’t dream of going to another country and leading protests.
Should non-citizens, even green card holders, be offered the same protections, especially when provoking unrest and supporting terrorist organisations (as Hamas obviously are and are designated as such by the US), as citizens?
No, Craig, you are correct. The rules for visitors, even green card holders and citizens are slightly different thankfully. Mr. Khalil is deservedly deportable.
With citizens it is all the same – as it should be – but with aliens the question “Is this person’s presence a benefit or threat to the United States” does come into the equasion.
A lot of our immigration debates are based on most people not understanding the subtleties of immigration law. I’d say the main one is “Foreign accent/look? Gotta be an illegal” which is one I’ve heard a lot over 30 years here as an accented foreigner (though nobody thinks I’m illegal personally prob b/c I’m white/Aussie. …. and have good looks. 🙂
D.A. (J.D.)
NYC
There is a specific provision in the law that prohibits non citizens from serving as spokespersons for organizations that promote terrorism. Mahmoud Khalil has been a spokesperson for a Hamas-affiliated organization.
The standard of proof is not criminal conviction, but the Attorney General or other officials having “reasonable grounds to believe” that they fit these disqualifications.
People act as though this is terribly inhumane and cruel. All it really amounts to is sending them back to the country that they are a citizen of.
I suspect most of this is just reflexive opposition to anything the current administration does. The same almost certainly applies to the MS-13 and tren de aragua gang members being sent away.
I’m pretty sure the baby monkey is AI. Watch its hands, for example.
You might well be right. I was suspicious because I seem to recall that the “smile” in at least some monkeys and apes is a threat gesture.
At the top left of the image is this (ai)
Trump either doesn’t understand American “soft power”—whereby the U.S. projects power via such inexpensive measures such as Voice of America and USAID—or maybe he doesn’t regard it as valuable. It’s hard to know how much impact soft power programs have, but they are cheap, so why not keep them going? I daily visit the VOA web site for news. Despite the fact that all VOA employees were, I read yesterday, put on leave, the VOA web site still seems to be operational: https://www.voanews.com/. There is no indication on the web site that VOA is being eliminated. With everyone on leave, I wonder if it’s running itself and how long it will be there.
VOA employees out in leave: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-signs-order-to-cut-staff-at-voice-of-america-media/
I think soft power is best achieved by setting an example. Law and order, livable cities, civil rights. Building a civilization that we can be proud of.
In contrast, asking Afghans to celebrate LGBTQ Pride does not increase our soft power, but comes across as cultural arrogance and may even decrease our soft power.
The benefits of VOA is that it projects our democratic values into areas that do not have democracy, without it being blocked by totalitarian regimes.
I don’t know, but I’d hope that programming from VOA is different for different places, so that what is heard in Afghanistan is not like what is heard in Belarus.
Abso-damn-lutely Lysander. Rainbow flags outside our embassies did nothing to help any local gays, just empower blowback and give fuel to our enemies (Putin).
And BLM flags just made us look stupid.
D.A.
NYC
I don’t understand that one either. I didn’t think VOA and RFE/RL were propaganda or woke.
I guess he wants to save money for his tax cuts.
Yes Norm, Trump doesn’t understand soft power – or reciprocity. Narcists never do – there’s no cooperation with them.
I’m a big fan of VOA’s foreign analysis – particularly in Asia and Africa. Their foreign analysis is old school – I fear their domestic stuff is insufferably woke, like the unlistenable to PBS, etc.
D.A.
NYC
It looks as though the U.S. is moving closer to the U.K.’s policy of not tolerating visitors whose presence is “not conducive to the public good.”
Via Perplexity:
The United Kingdom has a history of denying entry to individuals whose presence is deemed “not conducive to the public good,” including several American citizens whose anti-Muslim rhetoric or activities were considered potentially harmful. These cases highlight the tension between free speech concerns and the UK’s efforts to prevent what they consider to be extremist or hateful views from being promoted within their borders.
Some of the countries on the new banned list are there for reasons we don’t think of.
Some are there because their passports aren’t any good (promiscuously issued or forged, used too often in crimes, etc). Last Trump admin Chad ran out of paper stock for passports and they got on the restricted list for that.
Syria fell apart – even before that – during the civil war they lost control of their passport facilities – a journo from a british magazine BOUGHT one and lots of terrorists got hold of them (Balaclan, Paris massacre comes to mind).
Some are on the list (Laos and Cambodia, VN I think) b/c they don’t accept their own citizen criminals back (“returnees”) when we try to deport them (My experience doing a bit of immigration law). Commie puke countries are the worst for this.
— *possibly b/c commies have no souls. 😉
And face it – some of the countries there are just international hooligans: the drunks, the junks, the punks of the international order and reciprocal policing. (No names, Yemen!).
Bhutan is a bit of a mystery. The Trump admin is so personal and grievance based it is hard to know. An apartment building near the UN – also near a Trump building – had a problem with the Bhutanese delegation/embassy’s air conditioner noise a few years ago. This KIND of thing wouldn’t surprise me.
For most of the national bars there are good reasons, but this is Trumpworld so there’s always the x factor. Most are not unreasonable and in keeping with reciprocal obligations and I’ll hand it to Trump for not taking any cr*p from global outliers.
D.A.
NYC
Maybe the United States shouldn’t accept Canadian passports because the probative value of the sex indicated on the birth certificate used to generate the passport is nil. For that matter, maybe the U.S. State Department shouldn’t issue passports to U.S. citizens who produce birth certificates from states that allow frivolous changes to the sex marker registered at birth.
It is OK Leslie – we do still love you maple syrupy guys to our north. We’ll let you in even if the new Canadian passports look like some kinda cartoon joke. 🙂
THOUGH — I’ve had some questions and ideas about how “X” gender passports work in places that don’t recognize that “gender”. Germany, maybe the UK and the Netherlands have issued them for years (we in the US just stopped issuing them).
Is lying about sex with gvt approval an “inadmissible” prerequisite I wonder….
Theoretically (my lawyer hat on here…) this is fraud and fraught with intercultural misunderstanding that could have the “X” person automatically barred from parts of the world. Probably parts of the world where they’d be thrown off buildings but let’s put it this way: An “X” gender on your pp won’t HELP your mobility.
.
A few of the countries there on Trump’s list are because they blatantly sell passports / citizenship to famously shady people, including Iranians. Countries like St. Kitts and Nevis (the oldest citizenship by investment program) and Vanuatu (utterly craze rules, a disaster like Nauru’s fore into this scam years ago) are examples.
I’m a bit of an amateur connoisseur of citizenship by investment schemes.
D.A.
NYC
local WEIT loudmouth
The UK’s Supreme Court ruled against the introduction of X markers on passports, thankfully. Nevertheless, it is possible – and doesn’t require the possession of a Gender Recognition Certificate – to get your sex changed from M to F (and vice versa) on your passport, driving licence, and NHS records. Ludicrous – and in the case of medical records positively dangerous!
Edited to add: The Supreme Court ruling was on December 15, 2021. (Coincidentally, my birthday.)
The last two paragraphs of the article explains some issues that can arise:
Such issues could include failing to share with the United States information about incoming travelers, purportedly inadequate security practices for issuing passports, or the selling of citizenship to people from banned countries, which could serve as a loophole around the restrictions.
That list, the officials said, included Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Gambia, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Vanuatu and Zimbabwe.
When interlocutors online complain about the rightward shift announced for the editorial pages of the Washington Post recently, I ask them: Were you upset when James Bennet was fired from the editorial page of the NYT?
I don’t care for that shift either; but knock off the special pleading.
Wonder where the weird obsession with possessing both Panama and Greenland simultaneously came from? Wonder no more. El*n’s grandfather was part of Technocracy, an oddball movement from the early ’30s that lingered into the late ’40s with sporadic flareups since. In particular, have a look at the map near the end of the W’pedia page.
Interesting. Sounds like something Musk would like.
I think that might be stretching things a tad far my friend Mr. Hempenstein. It seems too remote for a very “in the moment” person like Elon.
Just a personal reflection. best,
D.A.
NYC
I’m not so sure. An old Swedish friend, who was quite astute, once commented, “Allting beror på mans referensrammar.” Everything depends on one’s frame of reference. It depends on what you grow up with.
El*n’s father seems to have been a pretty devout racist, and it sounds like Technocracy has a good streak of that running thru it. If you grew up knowing that your grandfather was involved in a movement that championed a twisted science-based effort at world domination, you might start off on a Grand Scheme Science plan with rockets, telecom satellites and electric cars, and transition over into the political sphere aimed at some sort of global plan.
And one more thing. Did you note that part about the caravan of Technocracy types, all in grey cars. Can you think of anything that looks more like something designed by a cult than one of those Cybertrucks? And they’re grey, to boot.
I’m just curious why he went to Switzerland, where there are at least two such organisms, Dignitas and Exit, instead of to someplace like Oregon. Maybe just because he was already in Paris. I started his book a few months ago, but was not convinced (seemed simple to me) and so dropped it. Should I try again?
“The White House mocked him from their X account: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” Take a second to absorb that monstrosity: the glib and spiteful use of a Jewish term for goodbye to a Muslim.”
I would ask Sullivan: what, exactly, makes this a “monstrosity”?
Bhutan doesn’t have formal diplomatic relations with the US (or the UK), so perhaps that’s a factor? It seems that the most recent country it has established diplomatic relations with is Israel (in December 2020).
FWIW, Bhutan opposed Russia’s annexation of Crimea and has an on-going dispute with China over their mutual border.