Good morning at the top o’ the week: Monday, December 8, 2025.. It’s two weeks until winter arrives, but, as you saw, it’s already here in Chicago. It’s National Brownie Day, Here’s a Pillsbury brownie-mix ad from the 1950s. I could use some now, and yes, with a glass of milk.
It’s also National Lard Day and National Crossword Solvers Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 8 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*It looks as if the Supreme Court is about to hand Trump another victory. Stupid me for thinking that the Court, though conservative, would adhere to the law and in that way could curb Trump’s excesses. This time it’s about the President firing people and getting rid of agencies (article archived here):
As a young staff member in the Reagan administration, John G. Roberts Jr. was part of a group of lawyers who pushed for more White House control over independent government agencies.
The “time may be ripe to reconsider the existence of such entities, and take action to bring them back within the executive branch,” the future chief justice of the United States advised the White House counsel in a 1983 memo. Independent agencies, he wrote, were a “Constitutional anomaly.”
Once he ascended to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roberts joined other conservatives on the bench in a series of rulings that have chipped away at Congress’s power to constrain the president’s authority to fire independent regulators.
That decades-long project of the conservative legal movement collides on Monday, when the case is argued in the court. At stake is President Trump’s desire to oust officials across the government, in defiance of federal laws meant to protect their jobs and shield them from politics.
The result, the Supreme Court’s recent decisions suggest, is that the majority will likely side with Mr. Trump in a move that could significantly shift power from Congress to the president and usher in a dramatic change in the way the federal government is structured.
“This is not a bolt out of the blue,” said Deepak Gupta, a lawyer representing an agency official in a separate case who was also fired by the president.
“There is a tendency to see this as merely part of a recent short-term drama about President Trump, but really a majority of the justices have long been sympathetic to the argument that the Trump administration is making here — and that’s a view that transcends this presidency,” he said.
Monday’s case specifically tests whether President Trump can fire Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, simply because he says she does not align with his agenda — despite a law that says the president can only remove commissioners for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
The administration is asking the justices to toss a 90-year-old precedent that said the Constitution allowed laws like that one and let Congress put limits on the president’s authority to dismiss some quasi-independent government officials.
As I’ve said before, “stare decisis my yiddisch tuches!” Trump is adhering to an old battle command: “Fire at will”; he’s ditching people who don’t conform to his “agenda”, and that’s a violation of the law. Welcome to the beginning of an autocracy. The Court is expected to hand down its decision in June.
*Over at The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan’s column “The military as a murder weapon,” properly rages at the U.S. military’s killing of people in boats in the Caribbean.
“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement,“ – George Will.
It is not easy to be newly sickened in the “moral slum” of this era in American history, but Megyn Kelly pulled off something special the other day. She was talking to Mark Halperin about President Trump’s undeclared “special military operation” — is that what we call this kind of thing now? — in the Caribbean. A boat allegedly carrying cocaine was struck by the US military under orders to “Destroy the drugs, kill all 11 people on board.” When two men on board survived the strike, a second one was ordered 41 minutes later to finish the job. Kelly was mad that the murder was … too swift:
I really do kind of not only wanna see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.
At first I thought it was AI. No one, especially a lawyer like Kelly, would seriously air such a barbarous abandonment of the basic laws of war in America, would they? Russia? Sure. Iran? You bet. But the West? And then I reminded myself of who Donald Trump is, why he chose Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense (no, I’m not acquiescing to the new name), and what increasingly drives the post-liberal reactionism of MAGA.
The yearning for barbarism is real. It’s always been there in human nature, especially in this frontier country. But we have never had a president who emphatically embraced it as a virtue. From 2016 on, Trump loudly declared that he believed in torture techniques “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” His rationale was not intelligence, but vengeance: “Even if it doesn’t work, they deserve it.” That’s Megyn Kelly right there.
. . . There are legitimate controversies over various rules of engagement, but the laws of war are different. Killing civilians or unarmed soldiers or armed soldiers not posing any direct threat is not warfare; it’s murder. Killing enemy combatants who surrender or flee or are shipwrecked is what barbarians do.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with “wokeness”; it is as hard-headed and realist as anything can be. War is a terrible, terrible thing — and can spin easily into barbaric violence and cruelty, on all sides. That’s why the core principles are so clear and so vital in keeping some semblance of civilization intact. Americans, more to the point, have fought and won wars within these boundaries for over 250 years. And we have beaten regimes and terrorists that observed no moral norms at all. But now Trump has declared, like every boorish loudmouth at the bar at closing time, that core Western military ethics are just a bunch of pansy-ass piffle.
No they aren’t. This is America. We don’t murder; we don’t torture; we fight. The first two are not an intensification of the fight; they are its negation. Grown men, especially those who have seen war close-up, have always known this. But draft-dodgers like Trump and insecure boys like Hegseth cannot comprehend the deeper strength of restraint, or the enduring power of moral example. Washington did
So let us review. Wars conducted outside legislative control and international law? Check. Wars unbound by the moral, ethical, and legal restraints that have held for two centuries? Check. Wars that target defenseless civilians from miles away? Check.
Yes, murdering a few bad guys on a boat in cold blood may sound like a trivial thing. But the principles it violates are about as profound as you can get. This kind of murder is not a defense of the West. It’s an attack on it. And we have a right to see the tape of the murder — even if it means the removal of the fucking douche who authorized it.
Those readers who seem to be defending Hegseth should be calling for the tapes to be released and for a Congressional investigation, with anonymous sources interviewed as well (they can sit behind a screen). I’m with Sullivan on this one. We are murdering people without a proven cause in a war that hasn’t been declared or approved by Congress. And we’re murdering unarmed people who are asking to be rescued. That’s barbarism.
*On the same theme, Jeh Johnson, identified by the NYT as a lawyer and ” secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration, and, before that, general counsel of the Department of Defense” explains why “Not all targeted killings are the same. Hegseth’s boat strikes are illegal. ” When working for the DoD, Johnson had to sign off on any lethal counterterrorism operations, and was very careful about it, in apparent contrast to Trump & Co.
With its strikes on suspected drug couriers in the Caribbean, our government is conducting extrajudicial killings on the high seas — plain and simple. Some Americans may wonder how this is any different from the targeted killings of other bad guys around the world by previous administrations, including that of Barack Obama, in which I served.
There is a world of legal and moral differences.
First, President Trump has effectively unilaterally declared war against Mexican and Venezuelan drug cartels, without authorization from Congress. In contrast, following the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress authorized President George W. Bush and his successors to treat terrorist members of Al Qaeda as enemy combatants in war and to use lethal military force against them.
Second, implicit in Congress’s 2001 authorization was the understanding that terrorist members of Al Qaeda and its affiliates were hiding in places such as Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen, beyond the reach of law enforcement. But drug smuggling and drug cartels, even those international in scope, are routine targets for law enforcement. The Mexican drug kingpin known as El Chapo, Joaquín Guzmán, was arrested and brought to justice in a U.S. court. Before President Trump pardoned him last week, the former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted in a U.S. court and was serving a 45-year sentence in an American jail for drug trafficking. The Coast Guard, supported by the U.S. Navy, routinely interdicts and arrests drug couriers on the high seas.
Our military’s new precision weaponry allows for targeted lethal force with the single tap of a device. But that capability should never become a convenient and expedient substitute for law enforcement. That is the very definition of “extrajudicial killing.”
Third, there is a huge difference between the approaches of the Obama and Trump administrations to the use of lethal force. The Obama administration viewed lethal operations as necessary to protect American lives; officials in the Trump administration seem to revel in them.
., . . . We are told there is a legal opinion from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel justifying the lethal boat strikes, but the opinion is classified and the public has heard about its contents only through second- or thirdhand reports. Any such opinion must discuss constitutional law, and constitutional law is not classified. If the Trump administration has confidence in its legal position, it can and should declassify the legal analysis that supposedly supports the strikes. In the absence of this, our government creates the impression that it is shooting first and backfilling the legal reasoning later.
The general tenor of Mr. Hegseth’s comments suggests that he relishes, rather than agonizes over, the approval of these lethal operations, and that others below him should do the same. In his Sept. 30 speech at a large gathering of the military’s top brass, he called for creating a “warrior ethos,” promoting “maximum lethality,” and untying “the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.” He also ranted about “overbearing” and “stupid” rules of engagement. Such rhetoric encourages abuses of authority, and makes incidents like the “double tap” attack on Sept. 2 — in which our military struck a speedboat said to be carrying drugs a second time, killing the survivors of the first blast as they clung to the boat’s wreckage — almost inevitable. In its aftermath, Secretary Hegseth’s best explanation for the multiple strikes that day was the “fog of war.”
Congress needs to assert its oversight responsibilities. . . Congress should demand public release of the video of the second strike on Sept. 2. The House and Senate Armed Services Committees should demand public, sworn testimony from those in the chain of command about the events of that day and the boat attacks generally. Lawmakers should not be content with closed-door, unsworn briefings by select administration officials. The public has a right to hear the explanations for the extrajudicial killings the Trump administration is committing on our behalf.
Agreed, agreed, agreed, and agreed. What is wrong with the solution above? Nothing that I can see. It is the presence of Republicans in Congress that is preventing this oversight, but extrajudicial killing is not something to be used as a political weapon. It’s bad enough for those who are subject to real weapons.
Indeed Trump insists that every boatload of drugs that’s incinerated saves 25,000 American lives, but we don’t know if there are drugs in the boats, the boats could be stopped, asked to surrender, and their inhabitants arrested, with firing only if there are drugs and resistance. And the 25,000 figure is pure hooey.
*Steve Pinker gave the Orwell Lecture on Dec. 4 in London, and wrote a précis of it in the Sunday Times called, “1984 revisited: George Orwell would be relieved at how we’ve done.” (The subtitle is “It’s common to suggest the great dystopian novel was full of warnings that have largely come true. But the evidence shows otherwise.” And that’s what it says:
We are now more than 40 years past the time in which the book was set and almost 80 years after it was written. This raises an irresistible question: how much is the world of 2025 like the world of 1984 as imagined in 1948?
Of course, Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four not as a prophecy but as an extrapolation and a warning. As he explained: “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive. But I believe, allowing, of course, for the fact that the book is a satire, that something resembling it could arrive.”
Did it arrive? It’s instructive to assess Orwell as a prophet. For one thing, it can be a reminder of the limits of prophecy. Even the predictions of the world’s most accurate forecasters, when tested against prespecified dates and outcomes they can’t weasel out of, fall to chance levels about five years out. It would be unreasonable to expect Orwell to do much better.
Comparing 1948 with 1984 and 2025 is also a way to understand the history we’re living through beyond the short time horizon of journalism. If the news came out once every 50 years instead of every day, it surely wouldn’t cover celebrity gossip and politicians’ gaffes but rather sweeping developments we might be oblivious to as they gradually unfold. Looking back at the future is a way to see our era in historical perspective.
. . .How do we assess the state of the world with suitable perspective rather than with anecdotes and hyperbole? I suggest we look at data. Measured with a constant yardstick, what was the world like in 1948, in 1984, and today? Let’s focus on the four spheres of totalitarian control in the novel, each represented by a ministry.
The four areas are plenty vs. scarcity (the GDP has risen strikingly since 1900 for both the UK and the world), “peace in our time” (“The rate of battle deaths has fallen unevenly but unmistakably, from 19 per 100,000 people per year in 1948, to 5 in 1984, and to 1.6 today — even with the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and east Africa”), the supposed recession of democracy (the “liberal democracy index” for governments had actually doubled in both the UK and the world since 1900), and the supposed increase in disinformation (every index of knowledge and invention has risen dramatically since 1900). According to Pinker, Orwell’s predictions are wrong, and this is all documented in the article with statistics.
So why did Orwell’s prophecies, when taken literally rather than rhetorically, turn out so wrong? One obvious answer is that he was only human and inevitably bound to the world of postwar England in which he lived. Another is that history is full of surprises, occasionally pleasant ones, so all prophecies are fallible.
But Orwell himself laid out a corridor of hope in the debate between O’Brien and Winston in the book’s harrowing final section. [O’Brien, the villain, claimed that humans were infinitely malleable and there was no such thing as a human nature that they couldn’t manipulate to go along with Big Brother and his minions.]
. . . .O’Brien had the advantage of being able to shock his debating partner while he was strapped to a table, and then sending him to room 101 where he would be fitted with a cage filled with starving rats. With the benefit of 77 years since Orwell imagined his dystopia, and 41 years since the time it was set, we can say that it was Smith who won.
Humans are not infinitely malleable. There is something called human nature. For all its flaws and stains and crookedness, it includes capacities for sympathy, for justice, for knowledge, for truth. And no civilisation can endure unless it allows these capacities to flourish.
*The AP’s reliable oddities section has some good news: a Fabergé pendant swallowed by a Kiwi thief trying to hide it has been recovered (see here for earlier report). At the time, authorities said, wryly, “The evidence has yet to emerge.” Well, now it has, literally:
New Zealand Police said Friday they have recovered a James Bond-inspired Fabergé pendant after six days of closely watching the man accused of swallowing the jewelry in an Auckland store.
They said the pendant was recovered Thursday night after it exited the suspect’s gastrointestinal tract naturally without medical intervention.
The limited-edition, Fabergé egg pendant was inspired by the 1983 James Bond film “Octopussy,” in which a jewel-smuggling operation involves a fake Fabergé egg.
A less glamorous photo supplied by New Zealand’s police Friday showed a gloved hand holding the recovered pendant and its long, gold chain with an intact price tag showing the jewelry’s 33,000 New Zealand dollar ($19,000) value. [JAC: that photo is in the article.]
The man was arrested inside Partridge Jewelers in Auckland on Nov. 28 shortly after the alleged theft.
He made a court appearance Nov. 29, when he didn’t enter a plea to a charge of theft. Since then, he’s been in police custody and officers had been stationed round the clock with the man to wait for the evidence to reemerge.
The 32-year-old man has not been publicly named. He is due to appear in Auckland District Court on Monday and will remain in police custody until then.
“Given this man is in Police custody, we have a duty of care to continue monitoring him given the circumstances of what has occurred,” Inspector Grae Anderson said in a statement Wednesday.
Well, of course I know what you’re thinking. Who was the poor slob that had the job of digging through the excreta of the accused thief to find that pendant? Who cleaned it up? And will anybody even want to guty it now? I wonder whether, if it didn’t emerge, they could have been justified in operating on the guy if X-rays showed the thing stuck in his system. I doubt that, but then what would they do?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is having strange visions!:
Hili: I see Archangel Gabriel.
Andrzej: So?
Hili: I think he has fleas, he’s scratching himself a lot.
In Polish:
Hili: Widzę archanioła Gabriela.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Chyba ma pchły, bo bardzo się drapie.
*******************
From Stacy. Shapiro is, of course, making fun of the Left:
From The Language Nerds: a clever meme that I love.
From Cat Memes:
From Masih: First Iran tried to stop the marathon on the country’s Kish Island and when they failed, with 5,000 women running without hijabs, they arrested two marathon organizers.
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
Titania has posted (a spoof, of course, though 2/3 of this is real). She’s always right–in her own mind:
A STORY IN 3 ACTS…
Sept 2019: I argue that we cannot know whether skeletons are male or female
July 2022: Activists seek to ban the labelling of skeletons as “male” or “female”
Dec 2025: A man is jailed for saying that men and women have different skeletons
— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) December 6, 2025
From Luana. This wouldn’t be ironic in the U.S. as freedom of speech does not allow for the “heckler’s veto”: shouting down a speaker:
EU President Ursula Von Der Leyen says the EU protects freedom of speech
She told a crowd protesting against her they should feel lucky they’re in the EU where you can protest freely
At that very moment a man was arrested for protesting
You couldn’t make it up pic.twitter.com/zQzDHqJ94g
— Basil the Great (@BasilTheGreat) December 6, 2025
From Malcolm; a cat planning foul deeds:
— cats with powerful aura (@PowerfulAuraX) November 13, 2025
One from my feed, and I love it:
When 2 groups of penguins meet on the road, they stop for a short exchange of information. When one of them moves in with the wrong group, a friend goes after him to bring him back 🙂🐧 pic.twitter.com/p47iP4KQou
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) December 7, 2025
And one I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
8 December 1936 | A Czech Jewish boy, Petr Epstein, was born in Teplice. He was deported to #Auschwitz from #Theresienstadt ghetto on 23 October 1944. He was murdered in a gas chamber after the selection.—Children at Auschwitz: https://lekcja.auschwitz.org/dzieci_EN/
— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2025-12-08T06:00:09.134763963Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, something I saw in Iceland, and it’s very sad.
TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque:"This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".
— Helen Czerski (@helenczerski.bsky.social) 2025-12-07T17:17:02.843Z
. . . and a magnificent ibex on a roof (screenshot; click to go to original). Look at those horns!
Winter also below the Mason-Dixon line here in southeastern Virginia with 2-3 inches snow forecast for today with freeze into mid-20’s (F) overnight for morning commute.
I call readers’ attention to yesterday’s edition of TWiV with Stanford infectious disease clinician/prof Jake Scott MD as guest discussing recent vaccine edicts from feds, including ethics of double blind, placebo control studies and saline placebo for certain situations. It is over an hour and a little slow for the first 15-20 minutes, but gets going after that and is really informative overall…at least for me, a non-medical type guy. Jake had also just gotten beat up by a Senate Committee that he was invited to testify before and he discusses that experience. If you are about to be homebound by a winter storm today and are looking for a good read to curl up with for an hour, the Url for this episode #1277 is
https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-1277/
It’s a good’un.
Agree on the TWiV episode. Worth a listen. And get advice before appearing before a senate committee!
Most damning about his experience with the committee was that no Dems, except for Blumenthal (who had “invited” him) showed up for the hearing…and Blumenthal was out of the hearing room for a vote when Jake was testifying! Years ago, I went to a Senate hearing for Dubya’s nominee for director of Ostp (President’s Science Advisor) and the only dem present was Ron Wyden (D-OR). The Dems need to get their minority asses in the committee dais seats and show some support for the good guys who usually end up just being punching bags for the majority. I have not testified to Congress but have to our state’s general assembly and as a witness I can sure say that it was always comforting to have a friend or two in the room running interference.
Yep, I watched that one last night. Disgusting how Jake Scott was treated. Scientifically trained people are not used to taking on the pompous ignorati.
They had a small discussion toward the end of what to do. Staying active is critical. Vincent noted that he missed protest songs. But scientists must arm the entertainment notables with facts. I also recommend Anne Applebaum’s recent book “Autocracy, Inc” in which she points out that the current band of autocrats are really kleptocrats, not bound by a common political ideology, but, rather, a common interest in self- and family- enrichment. She also gives a shout-out to Masih.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The real index of civilization is when people are kinder than they need to be. -Louis de Bernieres, novelist (b. 8 Dec 1954)
I don’t think it’s an errant penguin being pulled back into line. I think it’s enticement. Seven penguins enter at left; eight exit at right.
Humans, and thus courts, are fallible and so stare decisis has its limits. The principle of precedent should not be a straightjacket in the face of bad precedent. The idea that Congress can set up little executive agencies of its own and limit the President’s power over them is a violation of the separation of powers.
It shouldn’t be a straitjacket nor should it be thrown off as if it were a mere suggestion.
The essay by Pinker is typically balanced and erudite, and gives Orwell a generous write-up, without going overboard in hagiography.
This is the first entry in Winston Smith’s diary:
“April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea around him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank, then you saw a lifeboat of children with a helicopter hovering over it, there was a middle aged woman might have been a Jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms, little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms around him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him, then the helicopter planting a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood then there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up into the air helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats…”
Pete Hegseth would surely approve.
That’s a great quote, Mr. Pollard. Apt.
HA. Read that book so many times I could almost recite it!
best,
D.A.
NYC
OBL is an example. 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.
‘…Joe Biden who opposed the raid that killed OBL.”
News to me.
I googled it and found that Obama had this so say about Biden’s advice;
Leaves a different impression than I believe you intended.
Biden may have been thinking of the failure of Operation Eagle Claw in April, 1980. We’d be thinking of him differently if he had not decided to seek a second term as President. But he did & here we are.
Biden’s opposition to the raid was widely reported. From the Guardian
“Joe Biden advised against Osama bin Laden raid, Barack Obama writes”
The Wikipedia AI overview reads
“In his memoir A Promised Land, Barack Obama wrote that Joe Biden weighed in against the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound during White House deliberations, arguing for more certainty in the intelligence before proceeding.”
Lemme guess. Little Megyn Kelly has a little cross around her neck.
PPC(E) long and winding argument – legalistic in part (I like that… ) is dispositive in terms of interrupting Venezuelan maritime hi-jinks. It is un-American … while we also have to understand it isn’t “unprecedented.” Sadly.
-Megan Kelly – while bright – has been bonkers for a while.
On jewelry muncher in NZ. “Toilet stand offs” with international drug couriers is an airport thing. I learned this doing defense – apparently at JFK (and other big airports) there are “glass toilets” effectively which await passage of “evidence.” Many years ago a Columbian guy waited several weeks (!) to… surrender the pellets. Not my client, thankfully.
They’ve got machines and stuff… quite a (smelly) job for young customs officers.
D.A.
NYC
If the pendant hadn’t passed but became lodged in the bowel somewhere it would have produced a mechanical bowel obstruction requiring emergency surgery to prevent gangrene and perforation. That little piece — note finger tip in the news photo for scale — should pass easily. I’d be more worried about the long chains which could become knotted or snare things along the way.
No one can be compelled to have surgery against his will. But a foreign body that’s not progressing in the expected direction will eventually force the issue. Presumably the magistrate wouldn’t grant bail to a suspect with stolen goods still in his possession.
I have to say someone has done a great job lovingly cleaning the jewelry piece for its photo. All those little links! I guess that’s what ultrasonic jewelry cleaners are for. I’d certainly buy it. It’s famous now.
Yes for some kinds of artwork the, um, provenance is often a large part of the value. The Gemini AI definition is apt: “Provenance is the object’s entire documented history of ownership, custody, and location after discovery.” I especially like the distinction between ownership vs. custody (temporary for the thief) and location (slowly changing at the pace of peristalsis).
Pinker is, of course, right. Compared to 1900, or 1950, very few people can resaonably argue that things are worse. In fact, from the former date, the difference is huge; the germ theory of disease, sanitation, penicillin, and vaccination, all these account for much of our current well being; our children today can expect to live. It most definitely was not prayer that got us here.
But if you narrow the focus and ask has the trajectory in the past two or three decades been the same? I think it has turned markedly down, at least in terms of sustainability. I dunno. Like Pinker says – what does the data say? One has to be careful and not cherry pick or focus too narrowly. Nevertheless, I do believe, given the struggles I see everywhere around me with everyone I know, coupled with our fatally poisoned politics and toxic social media, that the trajectory that Pinker rightly exhorts us to see has reversed direction. I’m afraid I’ve lost hope it will again, but other still have it. And -weirdly- THAT gives me hope. Stupid, I know. But there it is.
Re our poisoned politics, there is a reasonable chance that it’s not fatal. Nixon / Vietnam / Kent State / Watergate felt fatally toxic at the time. But the shock of it all rebounded to produce Sen. Church’s committee, widespread concern with government ‘ethics’, etc. I personally am not optimistic about that happening this time — the zeitgeist of revenge politics seems too well established. But YMMV.
Ben Shapiro? Because proclamations from a 4-year-olds are Thoughts, Clear and True. …then she said she felt like a boy today, so I called the clinic and…
Washington called it the ‘Department of War’. FDR called it the ‘Department of War’. Truman called it the ‘Department of War’ until 1947 when it because the ‘Department of Defense.
They changed the name after WW2 because there was no longer an active war.
Hegseth’s change is weird in contrast to Trump desperately wanting a Nobel Peace Prize
The name ‘Department of War’ was used for decades before and after the US Civil War. For most of that time, there was no active war. Woodrow Wilson called it the ‘Department of War’. When WWI ended, it was not renamed.
I still maintain the current name is ridiculous given that this administration is doing nothing at all to prevent Russia from taking Ukraine. Department of War my a$$. Department of Surrender would be more appropriate.
The new DOD combined two previously separate Departments, the Department of War and the Department of the Navy. The purpose was to have all the military branches under a single civilian secretary.
Is this some kind of schoolyard taunt? What are you, 12?
The stolen/swallowed pendant story brings to mind an example from my past life. I began my career as a cop in the 1980s. On one particular occasion, an arrestee managed to swallow a balloon filled with heroin before we could stop him. He refused medical attention, so there was no retrieving the drugs. He was placed in an isolation room with a bucket, no plumbing fixtures, and was put under monitoring. He passed the balloon the next day. Then he did the unexpected. He hastily retrieved the balloon himself, wiped it off as best he could and swallowed it again. At that point it was decided that if he wanted it that bad, he could have it. He was moved into the general population without any other attempts on our part to recover the drugs or, having no evidence, charge him with possession.
“That’s why the core principles are so clear and so vital . . . Americans . . . have fought and won wars within these boundaries for over 250 years.”
I had these sentences of Andrew’s in mind yesterday when I mentioned that it was the generation of our fathers and grandfathers who incinerated several hundred thousand civilians when we firebombed Tokyo and over 50 of Japan’s largest cities. We never denounced these men as war criminals; we welcomed them home as heroes. It seems that victory is a more certain principle than the others and the moral boundaries slide to accommodate it.
It is vital that we distinguish between the overall drug-boat campaign and its execution. First, if I sat in Congress I would vote against these strikes barring evidence of a state-sponsored campaign to poison and destabilize America. But if Congress did authorize the strikes (or refused to stop the President), then at the three-star level and lower, I would have accepted the mission and executed it as lawful; at combatant commander or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff level, I would have pushed back on the entire policy.
That is a different matter from recognizing that the killing of shipwrecked survivors who do not pose a threat to Americans remains a war crime. If such can be demonstrated, then responsible parties should be prosecuted. It is a line many of you believe was crossed. Fair enough. That many others disagree—to include people in Congress who heard testimony under oath—shows things aren’t as clear as Sullivan would have us believe. I need more information to decide; I hope Congress seeks and releases it.
So, why would I not support these strikes as a member of Congress or as a four-star? Principally, for many of the reasons outlined by Jeh Johnson: because they dangerously blur already fuzzy lines—a blurring compounded by Hegseth’s public rhetoric. The moral calculus of military action is harsh: when does destruction of a material object outweigh any expected loss of life—both our own and those of adversaries? What is proportionate “collateral damage”? How do we define “direct participants in hostilities”? How do we estimate the value of the target when the mission is to destroy drugs rather than to defeat Japan, or kill Osama bin Laden, or incapacitate Hamas? When are men the primary target as opposed to being collocated with the target? It depends—and there is little moral or legal agreement on the matter. The “it depends” is why I would never place a senior military officer in the position Admiral Bradley finds himself—and that applies even if there had not been any survivors. We wouldn’t be having this discussion about survivors if the boat had been carrying WMD destined for terrorists in America.
Stopping drug boats pales in significance to a war for national survival, the killing of terrorist leaders, or even strikes against cartel leaders. The deaths of others that one would willingly accept are likely far different in each case, not only because the consequences of failure differ, but also because in the drug-boat campaign we have other effective means to interdict the drugs. This is why Congress must get involved: to voice what moral price, if any, we are willing to pay to achieve this mission—and how best to achieve it.
It seems that Hegseth doesn’t comprehend, that his orders make his extended family legal targets for the cartels. If one side of a conflict targets non-combattants, they cannot complain if the other side responds in kind. A drive-by from the cartels would no longer be terrorism – it would just be the logical continuation of the war.
‘….the generation of our fathers and grandfathers who incinerated several hundred thousand civilians when we firebombed Tokyo and over 50 of Japan’s largest cities. We never denounced these men as war criminals; we welcomed them home as heroes. ‘
The first Geneva Convention happened in 1949, four years after the crimes committed by all sides were over; and they were crimes, no matter what hagiography of the period you ascribe to. The US is a singatory to those conventions and if what is alleged to have happened is even close to the truth, then it was outright murder, full stop.
I do agree with comments elsewhere that there will be no justice for this, only outrage. Hegsleth may lose his current job but he will just enter the ever-present revolving door and will wind up being an ass in some other high paying job. No way he – or any one else- is going to face justice for the crime(s). It’s just the way it is.
Nothing necessary can be a crime, no matter who says it is either in real time or after the fact. That’s why no one was punished on the Allied side for the crimes you accuse them of. They had committed no crimes to face justice for. If the other side had won and had been in a position to arrest Allied leaders, different story.
This isn’t a comment on the current Venezuela thing, because necessity hasn’t been demonstrated. It’s a comment on war generally.
Dear host,
This is the second day in a row that you propagate the misinformation that the Swiss man was jailed for saying that there are differences between male and female skeletons. This is wrong on two levels:
1) He voluntarily chose jail in place of paying the fine he was ordered to pay. So he wasn’t sentenced to jail.
2) His trial was not about the skeletons but about calling or at least heavily implying that trans people are all mentally ill. He disparaged a minority group.
I don’t agree with the ruling and I don’t agree with the law. It is bad enough without the constant distortion of the facts around this case. Nobody has to lie to make it worse. It is bad enough on its own merits. If anything, it makes the case against the ruling weaker if you don’t stick to the fact.
Respectfully, FXK
I take your point. Mentally ill people in Switzerland should be up in arms that the Government there takes the view that being “heavily implied” to be mentally ill constitutes “disparagement.” I thought progressive European Utopias wanted to remove stigma from mental illness. Adopting it officially as a term of disparagement seems a retrograde step.
Couldn’t the defendant have taken the view that all trans people are indeed mentally ill but that’s no shame or slur on them? (That was the position of all the top psychiatrists about homosexuality until 1973.) They should be treated with sincere compassionate efforts to ameliorate their condition, if they wish it, but that doesn’t mean we have to believe what they express in their delusions.
How can you “take my point” and then completely miss it? It is completely irrelevant if being called mentally ill is negative. I explicitly stated that I don’t agree with law or ruling and calling a sane person mentally ill is an insult.
So how about you reply to the point I made, if you reply to my comment?
Edit: tagging error. Meant as reply to FX Kober
OK, I’ll agree with the host here, and disagree with you, that for all intents and purposes Mr. Brünisholz was fined for saying that there are only male and female skeletons inside their gender-spirited living bodies. That’s what riled them up enough to get him in trouble because he denies that gender counts in this determination, when it is everything to them. His throwaway statement that such an idea was mentally ill triggered the letter of the law they used to get the state to whack him. Note he didn’t say that trans activists, not all of whom even profess to be trans themselves, just “allies” — at least in North America they are often just ordinary homosexual men and cisgendered queer activists in the Omnicause — were mentally ill, just that someone who professed this belief were it to be put to him in that manner would be indulging in a fantasy. If you believe what he says here, he described on Facebook the fantastical idea as mentally ill (which is not strictly accurate: delusion would have been better), not any individual human being or a minority group.
From Mr. Brünisholz’s own account, posted at WEIT on Saturday last,
Fighting the good fight for freedom of speech against hate-speech laws that can be used for precisely this pernicious purpose obligates us to ridicule them wherever we can, even if the punches don’t always land on the nose.
One part of our rules of engagement that I never agreed with was blowing up a truck believed to be carrying terrorists, then blowing up first responders as they arrived to help the folks injured in the first strike.
I have no issue with second strikes on bad guys who survive initial strikes.
Warfare is not conducted successfully by taking turns, like a game of chess.
The boats getting exploded are not really “alleged” drug boats. They are purpose built for precisely that one task. The logistics of building and launching those boats at scale indicate state sponsorship to me, especially when coupled with loading so many of them with drugs and trained crews.
Once they have been defined as terrorists engaging in terrorist acts, they become fair game. The boats are built expressly for the purpose of outrunning Coast Guard and police vessels. Chasing them conventionally does not usually work.
If, after the first strike, they still have the ability to communicate with their buddies or salvage some of the cargo, then they rightfully get whacked.
I wish the terrorists in the desert had been so easy to identify.
Terrorists in the desert are now the same as drug runners on the ocean? As if cocaine is some deadly drug and as if these drugs are even intended for the American market. What a ridiculous comparison. Drug running is not a capital crime and it’s not terrorism. Is this so hard to understand? There is no war. Who declared war? Just some whacked madman in the White House and his deranged henchmen? Give me a fucking break.
Worries about narco terrorism and the links between Central American governments/cartels and Middle Eastern terrorist orgs is not new.
https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2016/02/01/dea-and-european-authorities-uncover-massive-hizballah-drug-and-money
There is plenty of evidence, going back decades, that recognized terrorist organizations are partnered with cartels and some Central American governments. This relationship has only grown stronger over the years.
Drug trafficking activity as a means to fund terrorism is itself considered terrorism. Flooding the US with drugs can even be a terrorist act, intended to destabilize US cities. Senator Biden in 1989 proposed similar actions, as he believed this was “the number one threat to National Security”
Again. the boats targeted are part of logistically complicated, well funded and organized system. The boats are purpose made for the task, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to manufacture.
This is not about sending a reaper drone to vaporize some hippie who has a little weed hidden on his sailboat. It is an escalation of force against multinational organizations hostile to the US and Europe.