Welcome to the Sabbath for goyische cats: December 7, 2025, and the 84th anniversary of the attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor in 1941, which drew the U.S. into WWII. It was, as Roosevelt says below, “a date that will live in infamy.” It is thus National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.
There are also 17 shopping days left until Koynezaa, celebrated from Christmas to December 30, which is PCC(E)’s birthday.
Here’s a clip reconstructing the attack from the 2001 movie “Pearl Harbor“. WARNING: DEATH AND DESTRUCTION!
And here’s a moving video of an eloquent Franklin Roosevelt in Congress, declaring war on Japan on December 8:
It’s also Letter Writing Day (how long has it been since you wrote one to a friend and mailed it?) and National Cotton Candy Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 7 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
For two reasons I’m adding more articles than usual on the U.S. attack on boats said to be ferrying drugs to the U.S. in the Caribbean. First, because we’ve murdered more than 80 people without tangible evidence that there were any drugs (I suppose there often were, but even so this is capital punishment without a trial), and, second, if the U.S. military really killed two defenseless survivors, that would appear to be a war crime.
*New information seems to show that Defense/War Secretary Pete Hegseth did indeed give a verbal order to kill everyone involved in a U.S. attack on a boat presumed to be carrying drugs. And that included the survivors (article archived here).
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.
The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any ofthe men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.
Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.
This report is based on interviews with and accounts from seven people with knowledge of the Sept. 2 strike and the overall operation.
If these people testify before Congress—and they will—Hegseth would have the charge of a war crime pinned on him. It’s even more serious if the report in the next aticle is true:
*And the WSJ reports that the two survivors, clinging to a piece of their shattered boat and trying to flip it over, waved as U.S. aircraft passed by.
Two survivors of a lethal U.S. strike Sept. 2 in the Caribbean struggled to flip a remnant of their capsized boat over the course of an hour and waved as an aircraft passed overhead, according to lawmakers and other people briefed on the attack.
Watching the morning attack unfold on live video from his command center at Fort Bragg, N.C., Navy Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley ordered a second strike on the alleged drug boat that has become a flashpoint in a debate about whether the response constituted a war crime.
The details of the video were described by the lawmakers and people who attended multiple briefings Thursday with Bradley on Capitol Hill.
Some lawmakers claim that the men appeared helpless with no weapons or communications devices. But Trump administration officials and some Republican lawmakers say the second attack was justified because the survivors might still have sought to deliver their shipment and threatened potential rescuers.
Two lawmakers who viewed the video said the survivors’ wave appeared to be an appeal for help from a U.S. military aircraft. Bradley told the members of Congress that they could have been signaling to other vessels to help them finish their drug run, but noted a surveillance drone detected no other boats in the immediate vicinity.
Bradley’s defenders say the attack was legal and aimed at eliminating drug traffickers who President Trump has said are in “armed conflict” with the U.S.
“The only reason the narco-terrorists didn’t flip their boat back over and continue their mission is because our military didn’t give them the chance,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Friday in a social-media post.
They were clearly waving to call attention to themselves, asking for help. Instead, the U.S. murdered them.
From another article in the same paper:
“There is no way you could have looked at that video and found a lick of evidence that there were drugs anywhere around the tiny little piece of that boat that was still sticking above the surface of the water,” [Democratic Representative Adam Smith] said in an interview. “There was nothing, nothing to see.”
The Pentagon and the White House were in discussions Thursday about releasing the video, according to one of the defense officials.
Why would they not release the video, unless it suggested that there was a war crime? After all, the U.S. released plenty of video showing boats getting blown to smithereens. How could showing two survivors clinging to a boat fragment be redacted? It surely doesn’t contain national security information. Nearly everyone, including many Republicans in Congress, want to see all the footage. Why is the government refusing to release it? I can think of only one explanation.
The Post also says that, according to the law, a Cabinet Secretary can be impeached. It’s in the Constitution:
Article II, Section 4:
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Time to impeach Hegseth.
*I’m surprised at this, but in an unsigned opinion, the Supreme Court allowed Texas’s recent politically-based gerrymandering, designed to create more districts that would translate into more Republican seats in the House (5 more, people say). The article is archived here. Since Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson dissented, one supposes that the t0tal vote was the usual 6-3, though there were only three concurring opinions. The Court’s reversal of its stance in recent times is striking:
Only two decades ago, all nine Supreme Court justices agreed that extreme partisan gerrymandering could violate the Constitution, though they differed on what courts should do about it.
On Thursday, by contrast, the court’s conservative majority allowed Texas to use voting maps made to disadvantage Democrats in the 2026 election, without a hint of constitutional difficulty. To the contrary, the majority chastised a lower court for not taking the state at its word that politics, not race, motivated the maps. The court, it said, had “failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith.”
In the space of a generation, then, the Supreme Court’s attitude toward partisan gerrymandering has shifted from tolerating it as a necessary evil to embracing it as savvy politics.
Things looked different in 2004, when the justices split 4-1-4 in Vieth v. Jubelirer over whether federal courts were capable of separating ordinary politics from intolerable power grabs at odds with democracy.
Four justices said that federal courts lacked the institutional competence to decide which gerrymanders were unacceptable. In a series of dissents, four other justices proposed three different standards to decide when gerrymanders had crossed a constitutional line.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy was in the middle, writing in a concurring opinion that he had not yet been able to find “a manageable standard” to determine when lawmakers had gone too far. He said he was unpersuaded by the standards the dissenters proposed but open to identifying suitable ones.
“I would not foreclose all possibility of judicial relief,” he wrote, “if some limited and precise rationale were found to correct an established violation of the Constitution in some redistricting cases.”
But he said he did know one thing.
“If a state passed an enactment that declared, ‘All future apportionment shall be drawn so as most to burden Party X’s rights to fair and effective representation,’” he wrote, “we would surely conclude the Constitution had been violated.”
That hypothetical enactment anticipated a real one in Texas over the summer. The state told the justices in an emergency application that “two primary goals motivated the map drawing: protecting Republican incumbents and finding five new strongly Republican seats.”
In an unsigned opinion on Thursday, over the dissents of the three Democratic appointees, the majority protected the state’s new maps, overturning a lower court’s finding that race was improperly used to draw them. Indeed, the majority chastised the lower court for not taking the state at its word that politics rather than race inspired the maps.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch, wrote with seeming approval that Texas was motivated by “partisan advantage pure and simple.”
Even the Chief Justice had previously questioned political gerrymandering:
“We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the court in 2019 in Rucho v. Common Cause. The vote was 5 to 4.
But the chief justice did not say the practice was desirable. To the contrary, he indicated that extreme partisan gerrymandering was a violation of the Constitution, just one that could not be remedied in federal court.
“Excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust,” he wrote. He added, quoting from an earlier decision, that “such gerrymandering is ‘incompatible with democratic principles.’”
The majority’s attitude seems to be “Stare decisis my tuches!” And how can a violation of the Constitution NOT be remedied by the highest federal court? I’m gobsmacked.
*A rare and well-preserved Roman sarcophagus, 1700 years old, was uncovered in Hungary, giving a rare glimpse into life during that period. \
A remarkably well-preserved Roman sarcophagus has been unearthed in Hungary’s capital, offering a rare window into the life of the young woman inside and the world she inhabited around 1,700 years ago.
Archaeologists with the Budapest History Museum discovered the limestone coffin during a large-scale excavation in Óbuda, a northern district of the city that once formed part of Aquincum, a bustling Roman settlement on the Danube frontier.
Untouched by looters and sealed for centuries, the sarcophagus was found with its stone lid still fixed in place, secured by metal clamps and molten lead. When researchers carefully lifted the lid, they uncovered a complete skeleton surrounded by dozens of artifacts.
“The peculiarity of the finding is that it was a hermetically sealed sarcophagus. It was not disturbed previously, so it was intact,” said Gabriella Fényes, the excavation’s lead archaeologist.
Keeping with Roman funerary customs, the sarcophagus held an array of objects: two completely intact glass vessels, bronze figures and 140 coins. A bone hair pin, a piece of amber jewelry and traces of gold-threaded fabric, along with the size of the skeleton, point to the grave belonging to a young woman.
The objects, Fényes said, were “items given to the deceased by her relatives for her eternal journey.”
“The deceased was buried very carefully by her relatives. They must have really loved who they buried here,” she said.
During the Roman period, much of what is now Hungary formed the province of Pannonia, whose frontier ran along the right bank of the Danube River less than a mile (1.6 kilometers) from the site. A short distance away stood a legionary camp guarding the empire’s border, and the newly found structures are believed to have been part of the civilian settlement that grew around it.
. . .The sarcophagus and its contents “definitely make it stand out,” said Gergely Kostyál, a Roman-period specialist and coleader of the project. “This probably means that the deceased was well-to-do or of a higher social status.”
“It is truly rare to find a sarcophagus like this, untouched and never used before, because in the fourth century it was common to reuse earlier sarcophagi,” he added. “It is quite clear that this sarcophagus was made specifically for the deceased.”
Yes, the family must have been well off. I wonder how old the woman was, and if they can determine why she died. It’s clear that she was very important to the family, a note that touches the heart, even across the centuries. Here’s a video showing the sarcophagus and some of the remains.
*“A baby seal wanders into a bar. . ” Well, that sounds like a joke but it isn’t, as it really happened in New Zealand. The WaPo reports:
Co-owner Bella Evans said she was working behind the bar, putting up Christmas decorations, when the young seal entered shortly after 5 p.m.
“Everyone was pretty shocked,” Evans said in a phone interview Thursday. “A lot of people thought it was a dog at first, because we are a dog-friendly establishment.”
“It was a mix of shock, excitement and everything all at once,” she said.
The seal seemed “pretty relaxed” and was in the pub for around 25 minutes, including visiting the bathroom, Evans said. Video posted online by the bar — and set to the “Mission Impossible” theme tune — shows the seal waddling between tables as a customer tries to usher it outside.The seal eventually settled under a dishwasher before staff members managed to lure it into a customer’s dog crate — with the help of some salmon from a pizza special on the menu. Conservation rangers then came to collect it.
“Everyone was joking it was so popular that even the seals heard,” Evans said about the pub’s pizza.
Helen Otley, a principal ranger for the New Zealand Department of Conservation, said the agency received “numerous” calls Sunday about the young fur seal, known as kekeno in Maori, which had been spotted in the area.
“The pub staff did a great job keeping the seal safe until the DOC ranger could get there,” she said in a statement to The Washington Post.
Otley said it was “not unusual” to see young fur seals in the Tasman Bay area, at the top of New Zealand’s South Island, as they explore their environment after being weaned. The pub is about a mile from the coast.
Very clever to lure it with salmon. But the pup is okay:
Otley said the seal has since been released at Rabbit Island, a small island in the Tasman Bay area, which she described as “a safe location due to its dog-free status.”
and of course there’s a video, since there are closed-circuit cameras and cellphones everywhere. It’s adorable!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a religious question:
Hili: Do people personalize their gods?
Andrzej: I think most of them try to.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy ludzie personalizują sobie swoich bogów?
Ja: Myślę, że większość próbuje to robić.
*******************
From CinEmma:
From Jesus of the Day:
From Give Me a Sign (I’m the raccoon, excuse the sign’s misspelling):
Here’s an old and prescient clip from Saturday Night Live. The reader who sent it says, “It was filmed in 1987, with Bill Murray, Phil Hartman, and a young Jon Lovitz.” It’s truly “sex assigned at birth.”
More stupidity and misogyny from the Iranian regime, who arrested runners for not wearing hijabs. There’s a video as part of the tweet:
Iran’s regime just arrested two marathon organizers…
Why? Because women were running without hijab. Yes, in 2025.The Islamic Republic is basically treating hair and jogging as “national security threats.” Total madness.
Videos show women running freely. The regime’s response:… https://t.co/cVAyDytV0E pic.twitter.com/TtRGvPPLHy
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) December 6, 2025
From Emma. The article being touted, the new one about puberty blockers, is here, and of course there is no control group given placebos, which can’t really be constructed.
This is one of the best bits of journalism I’ve ever read. Super clear for non-specialists, depth and richness for those already deep in the weeds, plus unique and insightful reporting that sheds light on the abdications of responsibility that caused this catastrophe. https://t.co/ybgvvTC4O4
— Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) December 6, 2025
From Luana; ANOTHER University of Oklahoma professor removed for “viewpoint discrimination”. This one, however, did do something wrong, while the first one, who gave a student a straight-up “zero” for a religious essay, while seemingly a bit harsh, does not to me justify removing the instructor. (The first one should have been given a talking to and then allowed to give a failing grade that was not zero.
Wow — a second University of Oklahoma instructor has been removed for alleged viewpoint discrimination.
She offered excused absences to students who attended a protest supporting the first instructor who was placed on leave but not to those who wanted to counterprotest. pic.twitter.com/lV2knOZfgT
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) December 6, 2025
From Malcolm; who says this is amazing. It pretty much is:
Michael Winslow, the man of 10,000 sound effects replicating Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin.pic.twitter.com/qFWnhe9Plh
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 21, 2025
One from my feed, and sound up for this one. Pure cacophony!
This donkey loves his new peg leg pirate chicken toypic.twitter.com/Wbrahve5rd
— Wolf of X (@tradingMaxiSL) December 5, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Polish boy, a Jew, was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was twelve years old.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-12-07T11:41:43.716Z
And two from Dr. Cobb. First, a long thread of complicated cat names: multiple names bestowed on single cats. (Thread is here.)
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. -Noam Chomsky, linguistics professor and political activist (b. 7 Dec 1928)
Funny story about the seal in the bar. I once had occasion to make friends with a trained sea lion. Consider me a pinnipedophile.
LOL. Be careful.
I gave my respiratory oncologist pause when I called her a pneumerologist. I think she referred to her hocus-pocus as immunotherapy. It worked!
I have repeatedly asked myself when I have read that Hegseth might be accused of a war crime due to ordering the killing of the survivors of the first strike: Why a war crime? The US has not declared war on Venezuela, nor vice versa; nor is the US at war with any country in the region. Why not simply (presumably first degree) murder?
Jerry, rather than being new information, that appears to be the original WP story from November 28th, which Hegseth and Bradley have both denied.
Folks, the idea that a four-star is going to put his career, reputation, pension, and personal freedom on the line for a 40-year-old former weekend-warrior major is highly unlikely. And even if he were so inclined, there were scores of witnesses; the VTC was likely recorded; the orders to the troops in the field are exhaustively documented; there are paper and electronic trails longer than a Biden-era immigrant convoy. So, he and the lawyers sitting next to him would be both war criminals and jaw-droppingly stupid.
If the strike truly was overly aggressive, if a double-tap strike was seen as normal protocol, then one might want to go back several Administrations when those senior special operators came of age in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. I wonder what the standard procedures for JSOC and CIA were under President Obama, particularly regarding drone strikes. Inquiring minds might want to know—or refresh their memories. I wouldn’t excuse it either way, but the current one-directional media outrage is telling. It’s simply going to prompt the Republicans in Congress who are not named Rand Paul to double-down on support of the President and the entire drug-boat interdiction campaign.
There are two sources for that verbal command, so even if Hegseth denied it, you’d have to ask the sources. And OF COURSE Hegseth would deny it, not convincingly, either, saying he left the room before the carnage was over. And no, the Republicans are among those raising questions about this issue: about the boats carrying drugs and the double-tap strike.
If the video was recorded, why won’t they release all of it.
The sources were anonymous. We have no idea whether they are civilian or military, their positions or ranks, their proximity to the action, or their motivations. Their proper channels were to go to the IG and/or Congress; that they went to the press raises issues about motivation and veracity.
The Republicans were questioning the strike—as they should have—but the ones who I saw after Bradley testified to Congress mostly doubled down and applauded his action. I hope they do not rest content with a single hearing; I would like to see them request all documentation pertaining to the strike. (And I would like Rand Paul to continue pushing for a vote on the drug-boat campaign.) But my original statement stands: anyone who thinks some general or admiral was either cowed by Hegseth or kissing his ass over a supposed “verbal order” has no idea how the system works. If the strike occurred as reported, then it likely wasn’t a one-off—I would look at it being a cultural matter with roots in the Bush and Obama eras.
I have been consistent in calling for an investigation into this matter and advocating for Congress to bring the overall drug-boat campaign to a vote. If the second strike deliberately targeted survivors, then the senior leaders should be held accountable. The bigger issue is that this is a mission ill-suited for military engagement, but that is something Congress must take up with the White House. In the meantime, people can spare me the selective outrage, as though similar tactics have not been used under presidents of both parties. I have been critical of them for the last 22 years.
But let’s also not forget that it was our fathers and grandfathers whose generation torched Tokyo and over 50 other cities full of women, children, and other innocent noncombatants while many of them slept—killing several hundred thousand and leaving millions homeless. How many of our greatest generation did we eulogize as war criminals?
The current Mass Line is “illegal orders”.
That’s all that matters, even if Poirot (portrayed by David Suchet – accept no substitutes) himself materializes to crack the case with a precision – for this – that rivals Holmes.
The rest is dialectical agitation.
Never knew what good that toy for, but clearly it was meant for donkeys. Such joy from something so simple.
On the Iranian marathon girls…. Kish Island, where it seems to be held, is in the Arabian Gulf, a kind of liberal resort where, like Tijuana for us, “God isn’t watching”.
All sorts of licentiousness available there, an hour’s flight from Tehran.
Makes sense they’d have such whorish displays of vileness like bare headed women.
D.A.
NYC
“over the course of an hour”
So these weren’t ‘heat of the battle’ deaths, they were slow and deliberate killings that eliminated the only witnesses on the boat.
To claim survivors “might still have sought to deliver their shipment” is absurd when they didn’t have a functioning boat, and you don’t even know if they have a ‘shipment’ at all.
I don’t know the law around war crimes, but it certainly sounds like state sanctioned, cold blooded murder to me.
State-sanctioned murder is a contradiction in terms, Joolz. If the state sanctions it, it can’t be murder (or any other crime), because only the American state has the authority to charge and convict Secretary Hegseth, or any other American citizen, with a crime. If it doesn’t, and it’s not going to because all the actors in the chain were following the state’s line of command, then no one is guilty of any crime. Nobody in the field went rogue.
British public opinion even at the time was deeply troubled by the state-sanctioned “murdering” by firebombing of German civilians during the Combined Bomber Offensive. Air Marshall Harris was passed over for a peerage but was never charged with any crime. Of course not. He did the King’s bidding. (And, to Doug, I typed this in a draft before reading your post about the US Army Air Force over Japan, which is also à propos.)
Only when a high military or civilian official is captured by a (victorious) enemy state does the concept of state-sanctioned murder have any validity. Russia’s many war crimes are simply irrelevant unless Ukraine conquers Russia and occupies the Kremlin.
You may be outraged that the state would kill survivors of shipwreck. You may be outraged that the state is shooting civilian boats in international waters at all. Americans were outraged that the Royal Navy was stopping American merchant ships on the high seas to hunt for deserters and impressing any English-speaking sailor it found, and they went to war over it in 1812. Go ahead. Be free to express outrage. But the state has the power to do those things. That’s what states that can and want to just do, unless some state more powerful tells them they can’t.
If any of the Americans involved ever visit Venezuela, they will likely be arrested, assuming Venezuela mourns the deaths of its nationals enough to bother. But failing that they are likely home free, at least until the Democrats take over in Washington. Then they might want to take their chances in Venezuela.
Kinda with you on this Leslie, though morees (sp?) and war culture change.
I’m not for blowing up boats…. but there’s a larger issue here which is this is SO NOT about drug interdiction. It is squeezing the Venenzuelan commies – a shot across the bow if you will.
The purpose and intent matter here.
best,
D.A.
NYC
The Saturday Night Live clip was chilling! Also, yes, prescient, including the capture of parents. Donkey and seal cute.
Auschwitz…
The New York Times (!) in 1979: https://archive.is/TZzx7
That old Saturday Night Live skit was creepy!
But the peg-leg chicken video is precious. That is a very robustly made toy!
The question is, who decides if it’s a violation of the constitution. If the body that is the ultimate authority on matters of the constitution decides by due process that it’s not a violation, then it seems like it is not. But I suppose it is not that simple. It is not as if the SC carries out a measurement of natural law. They vote. And there is the possibility of dissent. Things would get interesting if the SC were to take a position that a vast majority of the population thinks is in flagrant violation of the constitution.
You’re right. The question is a category error. The Constitution is whatever the Supreme Court says it is. That’s its job. Progressives disappointed that the Supreme Court doesn’t see it their way were perfectly happy for the Supreme Court to invent out of thin air a Constitutional right to abortion, same-sex marriage, contraception, and de-segregated schools, even if those had been the Constitutional prerogatives of the several States.
Congress and the State Legislatures could amend the Constitution to abolish the Supreme Court, if the “vast majority” of the population thought that was necessary to prevent a cabal of appointed fallible judges from interfering with the popular interpretation of the Constitution. (There are calls to do this in Canada, where some scholars say Parliament by itself could abolish the Supreme Court without needing to amend our written Constitution, an almost impossible task given that one province has a practical veto.) Congress could also impeach “difficult” justices who failed to get with the program. Analogous to the Constitution itself, “high crimes and misdemeanors” are whatever political (not criminal) offences Congress says they are. Like a vote of non-confidence.
Federations need some sort of Court to adjudicate disputes between the senior national government and the constituent subdivisions over the who-does-what? turf. Can the States apply tariffs? No. Can the federal government tell the States what shall be murder? No. But the authority of the new Court could be circumscribed so as to have no authority to rule on the validity of laws per se. In the specific Texas gerrymandering case, the Court would have no authority to rule on it, unless the Federal Government claimed for itself the authority to set Congressional district boundaries in the States (which it doesn’t) and was suing Texas over that (which it wasn’t.) The claim that the Texas law violates some aspect of the Constitution over racial rights or whatever would simply have no merit.
More cynically, the President and the Senate can pack the Court by appointing enough additional partisan hacks to obtain whatever interpretation they desired. There were calls from the Left for President Biden and heir-apparent Harris to do this in their second term. Then decisions would have been reliably 7-6 for the progressives instead of 6-3 against.
Ultimately the majority will always win out if its diffuse interests can be pressed long enough against the focused interests of energized minorities.
The excellent TheAttagirls X account features a heroic nurse who led the treatment of injured servicemen during the Pearl Harbor attack. Her Purple Heart was later withdrawn retrospectively after the requirements were changed to specify that the recipient had to have suffered an injury. It was replaced by a Bronze Star Medal, which some commenters below the post say was an upgrade:
https://x.com/TheAttagirls/status/1997568551805173789
It’s also Letter Writing Day (how long has it been since you wrote one to a friend and mailed it?)
Christmas and birthday cards excepted, I really can’t remember. In Denmark, even that is soon not going to be an option at all and this is the last year that Danes can post Christmas cards: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg8jllq283o
I hate this Jez. In Japan they live in the past (seals, faxes, business cards). Excellent.
I’m emotionally invested in paper, letter, (red Japanese) ink seals, wax seals embossers. I have a bunch of lovely stuff I can’t find an excuse to use. Modern times are better for sure – on every metric – but I miss an aerogramme or a postcard written in ink.
D.A.
NYC
Given the predilection of this administration for showing off (non)evidence, it seems to me that, if there had been real evidence of drugs in any of these attacks, the administration would have collected it, then paraded it in front of the world to prove how justified they are in committing these attacks. So how many times has that happened???
The Administration knows you wouldn’t believe the paraded drugs came from those boats anyway, so why bother? It knows you would say, “Ha. How could there be any evidence? It surely sank to the bottom of the sea or went up in flames.”
Besides, it doesn’t care what the world thinks. The world can pound salt (water).
So why does the administration parade equally questionable “evidence” in other cases?
Yes, many would be skeptical, but the supporters of the administration would have something to point to. Even bad props are better than “trust me bro”.
The administration clearly cares what the world thinks, since last I checked their voter base was part of this world.
For what it’s worth:
https://www.newsweek.com/video-shows-coast-guard-sniper-eliminating-major-drug-boat-operation-11167216
This is not really relevant to the discussion of the smaller boats in the Caribbean. If you are trying to justify that U.S. blowing boats to bits there, this does not do it.
There is no need for a reply.
A raccoon would do a better job at loading a dishwasher than a Scandinavian architect.
Maybe. But given the prevalence of alcoholism in arctic regions, it should be fairly easy for a racoon to get a Scandinavian architect loaded.
“but even so this is capital punishment without a trial”
The citizens of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg, and Dresden didn’t get trials either
OBL is a better case in point. Obama killed him without a trial. This is not a criticism of Obama. I think he acted properly. This is a criticism of Joe Biden who opposed the raid that killed OBL.