Welcome to a Hump Day (“Горб нунал” in Udmurt): Wednesday, December 17, 2025, and the third day of Hanukkah. It’s also National Maple Syrup Day. Remember to get the darkest grade you can. That used to be labeled “Grade B,” but Big Syrup decided that was pejorative, so now it’s called “Grade A, Dark Color, Robust Taste.” All syrup is now “Grade A,” but with different descriptions. One good maple-y just, which I always order from Amazon, is here. (I love it drizzled on good vanilla ice cream.)
Here’s a guy distilling 100 pounds of maple sap into syrup. I think his final product is way too thin.
It’s also Wright Brothers Day, celebrating
. . . . the first successful flight of a mechanically propelled and heavier-than-air airplane. This feat was reached by Orville and Wilbur Wright on December 17, 1903, at a spot about five miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in what is now the town of Kill Devil Hills, on the Atlantic Coast.
The first flight was actually photographed, and here’s an analysis of that picture (analysis starts 50 seconds in):
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 17 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*This is deeply suspicious: the Pentagon will not release the full video of the September 2 boat strike, in which two surviving crew were apparently murdered by the military while clinging to a piece of their “narco-boat”. (We still have no proof that these boats carried drugs.)
The Pentagon won’t release the full, unedited video of a lethal Sept. 2 strike on alleged drug traffickers, said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, despite bipartisan calls to do so.
“In keeping with longstanding Department of War policy, Department of Defense policy, of course we’re not going to release a top secret, full unedited video of that to the general public,” Hegseth said Tuesday on Capitol Hill after he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed senators on U.S. operations in the Caribbean on Capitol Hill.
The video shows two survivors of an initial U.S. airstrike in the Caribbean clinging to the remnants of their boat, before being killed in the water by a second attack, according to lawmakers and other people familiar with its contents. The footage has become a flashpoint in the debate over whether the operation constitutes a war crime. Supporters of the action say the two men remained a threat and were possibly radioing for help.
The Pentagon will share the full, unedited video with members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, Hegseth said. The Pentagon didn’t immediately respond to questions about whether it would release an edited version of the strike to the public.
Both Republican and Democratic senators have called on the Pentagon to release the full video. The annual must-pass defense spending bill coming through Congress this week includes a provision that would withhold some Pentagon funds until Hegseth turns over the footage.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said DoD should release the footage because the strikes are “lawful.”
“The least of my concerns is this friggin video. Release it,” Graham said after Tuesday’s briefing, comparing the administration’s campaign against alleged drug smugglers to former President Bush’s invasion of Panama. “I have every confidence of what they’re doing is no different than what Bush did.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said the administration’s reason for not showing the video was that “it might give things away.”
What is so “top secret” about it? How can one not suspect that they won’t release it because it shows the American military committing a crime against humanity? Note that both Republicans and Democrats are calling for the release, but the government says no. Well, I wonder if the Senate and House members who see it will tell us what is so bloody secret about it.
This reminds me of the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, also involving U.S. military crimes against humanity, in which 350-500 civilians were slaughtered and only one soldier was convicted (William Calley). Calley spent no time in prison, only a few years of house arrest. Hegseth clearly doesn’t want the military to look bad, but that view is not flying well.
*Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget under Obama, has an NYT op-ed piece called “Why both Republicans and Democrats are wrong on health care.” (Article is archived here.) He states the problem of high-cost American health care, and suggests some solutions:
But the real solution to rising premiums isn’t backstopping Obamacare or haggling over what might replace it — because the real issue is the total cost of health care.
If more of the cost burden is carried by insurance companies, it will inevitably be shifted back to consumers as the insurers are forced to meet the demands of their shareholders. If more of the burden is placed on the government in the form of ever-greater subsidies, it will ultimately be passed back to taxpayers.
Giving patients more skin in the game — essentially what Republicans say they want to do — can help, but only a little.
. . .The path to greater affordability is clear: alter how physician decisions are made, reducing the amount of unnecessary care physicians call for without harming health outcomes.
The next generation of artificial intelligence that supports clinical decisions will need to be deployed more rapidly. Research published in recent years indicates that A.I.-integrated tools are already minimizing unnecessary procedures in specialties like oncology and cardiology.
On the legal side, that means making malpractice standards more uniform nationwide. The solution is not blanket immunity for physicians, which erodes accountability. Rather, physicians who follow certified, evidence-based guidelines should be presumed to have met the standard of care and be shielded from liability.
And we need alternatives to America’s fee-for-service model that compensates providers on an à la carte basis for visits, scans and surgeries — blood draws, bandages and much more are itemized, promoting volume over value. Building on earlier experiments, the Affordable Care Act piloted an alternative: a Medicare payment model that paid flat rates for a course of treatment, not itemized bills for every procedure. The results have been promising but modest, in part because the experiments have often been voluntary.
Estimates suggest that as much as one quarter of health care spending in the United States is wasteful. With premiums for a family of four with employer-sponsored health coverage amounting to more than $26,000 per year on average, eliminating waste through more evidence-based approaches to care could save such families thousands annually.
As Orszag says in the understatement of the year, “This won’t be easy”. But he adds, “Unless we actually address what makes health care so expensive, the fight we’re having today will keep coming back around.”
*Why does anybody pay attention to Candace Owens? She seems palpably insane, yet has a huge following. (Well, of course look at Trump. But she’s even nuttier.) There’s no incident that she can’t address with a conspirachy theory, and the latest is her “theory” on Charlie Kirk’s murder.
“Candace Owens is a f—ing evil scumbag,” the conservative podcast host Tim Pool shouted on his show last week, in a clip that has gone viral among the online right. “She is burning everything down, and she’s gloating and smiling while she does it.” In an interview with The Washington Post, Pool said the MAGA movement is “splintering” as Owens and others like her target a new audience with mushier politics.
Pool is one of several pro-Trump commentators who have accused Owens of sabotaging the MAGA movement in recent days. She retorted that they were colluding with “Zionists” to discredit her. Her comments have set off the latest in a string of internecine feuds over the future of conservatism as the right struggles to fill the void left by Kirk’s death and chart its course for a post-Trump future.
Among those Owens has irked with her theories is Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, who succeeded her late husband as chief executive of his powerful conservative advocacy group, Turning Point USA. The two women said they met privately Monday for 4½ hours in what observers were viewing as a bid by Kirk to bring Owens back onside. In separate X posts Monday night, both called the meeting “productive,” with Owens adding that “tensions were thawed,” though neither offered details.
“We’re seeing right-wing media at war with itself,” said Jared Holt, senior researcher at Open Measures, a platform for tracking online trends and threats. “There’s a sense that the future of this political movement is up for grabs.”
. . . . After months of dabbling in conspiracy theories about Kirk’s public shooting onstage at a campus event in Utah in September, Owens began suggesting in a series of recent posts and podcast episodes that someone inside Turning Point USA may have been involved. In a Dec. 2 post on X, she called for the organization’s supporters to pull their donations.
Taking aim at TPUSA, mainline MAGA and Israel is winning Owens unlikely supporters as influencers on the left endorse her or pick up her talking points. For some on the right, it has struck a nerve that was already raw from infighting in the wake of Kirk’s death.
. . . Owens’s latest break with conservative media power players began after Kirk’s assassination, when she quickly drew connections between the activist’s killing and what she claimed were his growing doubts about U.S. support for Israel. (Kirk never advocated publicly for the U.S. to stop supporting Israel.) Through a series of posts on X and videos in which Owens offered unfounded accusations against TPUSA and foreign governments, a narrative started to take shape — one where a shadowy cabal had targeted Kirk and was coming for Owens next.
She has 7.5 million followers on Twitter, and there’s no use arguing with her. As Jonathan Swift said, “You cannot reason a person out of a position he [or she, in this case] did not reason himself into in the first place.”
Have a look at this tweet:
. @RealCandaceO gleefully tells you how The Charlie Kirk Show has fallen in viewership while talking about how successful her show is.
Yeah Candace, THE HOST FUCKING DIED.
But don’t let that slow you down in promoting yourself you spiteful bitch. pic.twitter.com/uSrCxG2uG5
— The Older Millennial (@teameffujoe) December 12, 2025
*Bret Stephens was apparently hired to be a “heterodox” columnist, at least as far as the woke NYT thinks. But he really just writes common sense, as in his latest column, “Bondi Beach is what ‘Globalize the Intifada’ looks like.” (article archived here).
But the Hanukkah massacre also represents the continuing inability of the government of Anthony Albanese, Australia’s prime minister, to safeguard the country’s Jewish community. In October 2024, a kosher restaurant in Bondi was the target of an arson attack; six weeks later, an Orthodox synagogue was firebombed. Those attacks were attributed to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran, and the Albanese government duly responded by expelling the Iranian ambassador in Canberra and closing its own embassy in Tehran.
Sadly for Australia, foreign actors alone aren’t the problem. Last year, Jillian Segal, the government’s special envoy to combat antisemitism, warned that “antisemitic behavior is not only present on many campuses, but is an embedded part of the culture.” In the wake of Hamas’s attack of Oct. 7, 2023, the Greens legislator Jenny Leong went on a rant accusing “the tentacles” of the “Jewish lobby and the Zionist lobby” of “infiltrating into every single aspect of what is ethnic community groups.” Jewish homes, neighborhoods and a day care center have been targeted by vandals and arsonists. At least one of the alleged shooters in Sunday’s attack was known to authorities, “but not in an immediate threat perspective,” according to a top Australian intelligence official.
I heard an earful of alarm from Jewish communal leaders when I last visited Australia in June 2024, but nothing seemed to change. On Sunday, the Australian Jewish Association posted a message to Facebook: “How many times did we warn the government? We never felt once that they listened.”
They are probably listening now. But the problem for the Albanese government, which in September recognized a Palestinian state and has been outspoken in its condemnation of Israeli actions in Gaza, is that the moral line between the routine demonization of Israel and attacks on Jews who are presumed to support Israel isn’t necessarily clear. On Sunday, Albanese said that “the evil that was unleashed at Bondi Beach today is beyond comprehension.” In fact, it’s entirely comprehensible. For fanatics who have been led to believe that the Jewish state is the apotheosis of evil, killing Jews represents a twisted notion of justice. Even when the victims are unarmed civilians. Even when they are celebrating an ancient, joyful holiday.
There’s a larger lesson here that goes far beyond Australia.
Though we’ll probably learn more in the weeks ahead about the mind-set of Sunday’s killers, it’s reasonable to surmise that what they thought they were doing was “globalizing the intifada.” That is, they were taking to heart slogans like “resistance is justified” and “by any means necessary,” which have become ubiquitous at anti-Israel rallies the world over. For many of those who chant those lines, they may seem like abstractions and metaphors, a political attitude in favor of Palestinian freedom rather than a call to kill their presumptive oppressors.
But there are always literalists — and it’s the literalists who usually believe their ideas should have real-world consequences. On Sunday, those consequences were written in Jewish blood. History tells us that it won’t be the last time.
There is no doubt that the Albanese government, no matter how many crocodile tears it sheds now, has not taken the problem seriously. Unless it steps up, more and more antisemitic acts will occur, and Jews will leave Australia. But perhaps that’s what the government wants. It would be their loss.
*Elizabeth Weiss recounts the latest nonsense about repatriation in a post called “Rocks are people too?” at the site Reality’s Last Stand. Repatriation refers to the “rights” of indigenous people to claim as belonging to their tribe almost any artifact that have claim to, whether it’s credible or not. Now it’s rocks and plants.
Nevertheless, the latest push by repatriation activists, showcased at the webinar, goes well beyond human remains or cultural artifacts. It now targets natural history collections that contain no associated materials at all. Many of the items under discussion aren’t even archaeological and include objects collected from the natural environment, far outside the legal reach of NAGPRA. And yet museums and universities are being encouraged to “voluntarily repatriate” everything from seeds to fossils.
This activist campaign began in anthropology and archaeology, fields long vulnerable to ideological capture. It has since spread into botany, geology, and biology—disciplines once thought insulated from this kind of pressure.
At its core, this movement is driven by a postmodern worldview that treats scientific evidence as just one “way of knowing” among any. Repatriation activists insist that claims made by Native American “elders” or “knowledge keepers” must be accepted at face value, no matter how absurd their claims are and regardless of whether they conflict with established facts. Museums and universities are viewed as instruments of Western oppression that must be “decolonized,” and scientific collections as moral liabilities to be offloaded rather than repositories of knowledge.
Let me share with you some of the absurdities that I heard at the webinar.
. . .David Michener, a curator at the University of Michigan’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum, explained that his years of collaboration with local tribes—particularly Anishinaabe communities—had taught him that plants are not merely specimens. The term specimen, he suggested, is itself problematic, tainted by “Eurocentric” assumptions. According to his Naive American contacts, plants are “kin,” and curators therefore have an ethical obligation to treat them as they would human members of a family.
Natalie Patton, Curator of Collections at the University of Denver Museum of Anthropology, raised a related concern. Tribal representatives, she said, object to the word storage, preferring housing instead. Why? Because these collections are said to contain “ancestors,” not “things.”
Michener agreed. Plants, he insisted, are not “things”—objects without rights. They are people, and people have rights! To illustrate, he recounted a story about a woman being reunited with a corncob taken from her neighbor’s yard. One is invited to imagine the emotional toll she would have suffered had she never seen her beloved corncob again.
, , ,Plants, however, are not the only members of this expanded family tree. Responding to a question about minerals and fossils, Michener informed the audience that, according to Anishinaabe beliefs, “rocks are grandparents.”
That claim brought to mind an incident from my time teaching at San José State University. A large obsidian rock outside a building had long served as a doorstop until one day a handwritten note appeared beside it: “Please stop using me as a doorstop. I am a sacred, sentient object to many Tribal communities. I deserve better. Thank you.” At first, I assumed it was a joke. But no one ever fessed up, and the rock was no longer used as a doorstop, which made me wonder whether the note-writer was serious. Now I’m convinced that this anti-scientific, animistic approach to non-biological materials is being taught to students, and that many of them take it seriously. Universities are supposed to teach critical thinking, not the credulous acceptance of animistic superstitions from the Stone Age—pun intended!
Defenders of these practices will object that stone artifacts can indeed be part of cultural heritage, including funerary objects. That much is true, and NAGPRA [Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act] originally drew careful distinctions between grave goods and naturally occurring materials. What has changed is that unmodified stones—ordinary minerals found at archaeological sites—are now being retroactively and dishonestly reclassified as funerary objects.
. . .When an attendee asked whether fossils from deep time collections might also be subject to repatriation, Veronica Pasfield responded confidently: “Nobody understands deep time more than tribes.” As evidence, she pointed to a 9,000-year-old archaeological site in Michigan, which neatly illustrated the problem. Nine thousand years is not deep time! It is barely a blink in geological terms.
Chance Ward, the NAGPRA coordinator for History Colorado, took the idea further. He explained that the Lakota have oral traditions involving dinosaurs and ancient monsters, and suggested that these stories can strengthen our understanding of paleontological discoveries. He then joked that he would like to repatriate Sue—the famous Tyrannosaurus rex curated at the Field Museum in Chicago—as culturally affiliated with his tribe.
Although Ward said he was joking, the attendees loved this idea and the chat box quickly filled with enthusiastic calls to repatriate Sue.
Many of these Native American claims are palpably absurd (read Weiss’s and Springer’s book, especially about the warnings museums must give when displaying objects with “spiritual powers”), but fear of speaking up has given tribes huge latitude to control what can be kept in museums or not, and, even if so, how items can be displayed. Here’s a link to the Weiss and Springer book, Repatriation and Erasing the Past.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is thinking about his first Christmas without Malgorzata:
Hili: I know what’s on your mind.
Andrzej: Sadly, I do too.
In Polish:
Hili: Wiem o czym myślisz.
Ja: Niestety ja też wiem.
*******************
From TherionArms:
From The Language Nerds; variant phrases for a downpour:
From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:
Masih documents yet another killing of a nonviolent Iranian protestor:
Based on a true story…
Abolfazl Adinehzadeh was a passionate teenager. On his way to school, right where his father dropped him off, he made a sudden choice to join his people in the street and stand with them.
Khamenei’s forces fired at him from just five meters away, shooting… pic.twitter.com/yAhvhutYg4— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) December 16, 2025
Retweeted by J. K. Rowling; hypocritical behavior of the Taliban:
In case you were wondering: the Taliban leaders send their daughters to fancy schools in Qatar and Pakistan.
“Just for the record do your two daughters go to school?
Head of Taliban Office in Qatar – Of course they do.This sums it all up. For their own daughters nothing is… pic.twitter.com/Egu2u6XaAO
— WDI.Afghanistan (@WDIAfghanistan1) December 15, 2025
From Luana. This immigrant Iranian speaks damn good German, and her message is scary:
An Iranian woman in Germany :
“I come from Iran and am in Germany because political Islam destroyed my life there. Now I am afraid that Sharia will come here.”
— Azat (@AzatAlsalim) December 15, 2025
One from my feed. This is stunning, reminding me of the Tuvan throat-singers:
Singing two controlled vocalized notes at the same time!
German singer Anna-Maria Hefele stunned the world with a viral video showcasing polyphonic overtone singing, a vocal technique that lets her sing two notes at once.
By skillfully shaping her mouth, tongue, and throat,… pic.twitter.com/8SCbLYVKU2
— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) December 16, 2025
A longer video of Hefele from Bryan:
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
17 December 1931 | Dutch Jewish boy, Emile Joost Jacobs, was born at the Hague.
He was deported to #Auschwitz from #Westerbork in October 1942. He was murdered in a gas chamber after the arrival selection.
—Video about the first two gas chambers created near Auschwitz… pic.twitter.com/GJe38Cy8UL
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) December 17, 2025
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First a tree that, says Matthew, is not an AI picture:
Rainbow Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus deglupta) 🌳It has smooth, orange-tinted bark that sheds in strips, revealing streaks of pale green, red, orange, grey, and purplish brown
— The English Oak Project (@thekentacorn.bsky.social) 2025-12-14T20:39:47.362Z
Matthew calls this “grimly appropriate”:
“Rachel Posner, the wife of a rabbi, took a photograph of her family’s menorah in 1931 in Kiel, Germany, with a Nazi flag hanging in the background”
— Phil Mandelbaum (@philmandelbaum.bsky.social) 2025-12-14T19:28:30.810Z
A TOUGHT FOR TODAY:
For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: “It might have been!” -John Greenleaf Whittier, poet (17 Dec 1807-1892)
A favorite line of Vin Scully, the great Dodger baseball announcer!
More sad (and even having fuller rhyme):
“Seemed such a good idea at the time.”
© 2025, no charge for noncommercial use, all other rights reserved.
“Carpe Diem.”
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”
“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp; else, what’s a heaven for?”
– Robert Browning
“Take the cash and let the credit go.” – Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
“In the world’s great field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb driven cattle,
Be a hero in the strife!” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The absolutely gorgeous title song of the James Bond movie:
“You only live twice, or so it seems,
One life for yourself and one for your dreams.
You drift through the years, and life seems tame,
Till one dream appears and Love is its name.
And Love is a stranger, who beckons you on,
Look out for the danger, and the stranger is gone.
This dream is for you so pay the price,
Make one dream come true, You Only Live Twice.
(To quote Hitch, “I just got my trousers off.”)
Hmmm. In the novel, Bond’s actual sentiment is “You only live twice: once when you’re born, and once when you look death in the face” (IIRC). Death, not lurve.
The maple guy isn’t using the normal species of maple tree. The normal syrup maple is Acer saccharum, the Sugar Maple of the northeast US, not the Bigleaf Maple of the Pacific Northwest. The normal maple tree has twice the sugar content of the species he is using, so he needs to boil down his sap twice as much. It looks like he has boiled it down as if it were a real Sugar Maple. It’s twice as watery as it should be.
But he does know more about mousetraps than any one person ought to!
(Search YouTube for Mousetrap Monday).
You weren’t kidding!
Thank you — informative.
I just learned that when you freeze maple sap like he did, the water freezes first, so he could have removed a large fraction of the water by removing the first ice.
That reminds me of applejack — freeze distillation of fermented cider to produce a stronger (% v/v alcohol) drink.
I spent my childhood making maple syrup with my uncle. We would go around his property with a tractor and a wagon carrying five gallon buckets that we’d fill from smaller buckets hanging from his many maple trees. I remember it took 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. My uncle boiled it down in a huge vat he had hung in a fire pit he built just for it. We’d fill it with the sap and he’d tend the fire. My brother-in-law has carried on the tradition, but he uses a modern setup. He calls it his “sugar shack”.
Dr PCC(e) is dead right; the darker the better. That’s from yummy Maillard reactions going on!
Thanks for the interesting short video on the Wright’s first flight; never noticed the wing imprint in the sand before. The technical narrator, Tom Crouch, wrote what I think is a really interesting biography of Orville and Wilbur, “The Bishop’s Boys “, which looks into their background, family, and the continuing legal and social conflicts with “the system” as well as the technical aspects of their very important innovation.
Originally published in 1989, it was re-issued on the 100th anniversary of the flight in 2003 and is advertised as available from Amazon if not available at your local brick and mortar shop.
Just yesterday I happened to read this article about the Wright brothers, the development of The Flyer, and most interestingly, the experiments in powered flight going around the world at the time. It’s… complicated!
Thanks for the article Peter. The political nastiness told at the end was particularly obnoxious I have always thought. For more than thirty years I worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center, thinking from time to time that this was the guy who spent a lot government money, only to crash and sink, while my colleagues in Dayton, working at the Air Force’s Wright Labs carried a different, more successful history in their namesake. As often is the case in engineering, the bringing of a new technology to a practical use, Langley did provide several examples of paths not to take.
I have a vague (and possibly erroneous) memory of reading some omniscient critic’s negative take on the lengths to which the Wright brothers would protect their patents and intellectual property. I’m hard-pressed to blame the Wrights. There will always be those con artists who will try to claim credit for and exploit the entrepreneurial and intellectual heavy lifting of others.
A TOUGHT FOR TODAY:
For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: “It might have been!” -John Greenleaf Whittier, poet (17 Dec 1807-1892)
“I tought I taw a puddy cat!”
-Tweety-Bird
(Just kidding here! – typo “TOUGHT” 😆)
Actually Tweety said “I tawt I taw a puddy tat”
😆
Old school!
I went 100% from memory … I wonder if the later ones were different… lemmee check …
Nope – Tweety says it the same : https://youtu.be/k-tzTsbWswY?feature=shared
Awww man, that was good!
I think any healthcare reform has to start with price transparency for all services and drugs. This is probably best achieved on a pay-as-you-go model.
Good luck with that. You’re right, but no one wants to pay, regardless of the price. Hence, cost shifting. That’s why healthcare prices NEVER come down. It amazes me that most people have an idea of the cost of a car, an airline flight or a house, but have no idea how much a yearly medical check up costs, other than “that’s too much.”
The problem with the American health care system is we, the consumer, want someone else to pay for it. And we openly admit we want young people, who are generally poorer, to subsidize health care costs for older people, who generally are much richer.
Madness.
We have this headline: “Pentagon Won’t Release Full Video of Sept. 2 Boat Strike.” And then we have this sentence in the article: “The Pentagon will share the full, unedited video with members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, Hegseth said.”
I’m fine releasing classified materials to elected representatives who have oversight of the Armed Services while withholding those materials from the public. “We” see it through them, and they should assess for us whether the materials are overclassified. Videos that are simply longer versions of what the public has already seen should be released even if context is lost; ones that incorporate contextual signal, imagery, and other intelligence—along with those from which technical capabilities can be deduced—should not. That potential for lost context is likely the real reason for the hesitancy, but I value suspicion of government motives—no matter the party in power.
One unintended consequence of selectively releasing low-resolution strike footage is that people draw faulty conclusions. For instance, can you identify what that boat is carrying or who those people are from the public footage? Neither can I. These grainy videos are how you get people in public saying silly-but-understandable things like “How do we know these aren’t fishing boats?” Given our technical capabilities not manifest in the released videos, there is exceedingly slight chance that we identify fishing boats as drug boats. That doesn’t mean that in identifying Boat A as a target we can’t mistakenly strike innocent Boat B; that happens, but it is unlikely in this operating environment.
The bigger issue—as many of us have pointed out—is that Congress needs to force the Administration to make its case. One point I don’t see often raised is that if these are drug-running boats, they are simply one point in a complex system of manufacture, logistics, recruiting, communications, etc. Disrupting that network will generate a great deal of activity elsewhere in the network—and could provide an intelligence bonanza. Bring the intelligence to the oversight committees. If these are drug-running boats, justify the use of military strikes over other methods. If there is a demonstrable connection to state-sponsored or known terrorist organizations, then ask for authorization to strike. If Congress rejects doing so, then the issue is settled—no matter whether Congress be wise and pragmatic, or shortsighted and foolish.
And
How should I put this ..
Everyone in the world can view the declassified/released information. That covers a lot – a lot that do not need to be given more help to carry out their objectives.
There’s no reason for it to be classified. The department is spreading other videos of strikes on social media. They’re all over YouTube. Classified my a$$.
I think the “it” here could benefit from definition, as there are many “its” in play. Some of “it” is, indeed, highly classified (for good reason); and the classified can be integrated with the unclassified. Public release videos are generally sanitized; that’s why you find them all over YouTube.
Here is one AI explanation that I pulled to ensure the explanation is itself unclassified: “Raw military videos, including cockpit footage from aircraft or drones, often integrate classified information directly into the recording or display. This can include elements like heads-up display (HUD) overlays showing real-time sensor data, targeting coordinates, intelligence feeds, communication logs, or metadata that reveals technical capabilities, sources, and methods. For public release, the Department of Defense sanitizes these videos by editing, cropping, blurring, or removing such integrated classified details to create an unclassified version while still providing some transparency.”
I already made clear in my earlier comment what I thought should be released and to whom. That said, we should always retain a healthy skepticism about “It’s classified” claims. Here are some rules of thumb independent of this particular case: Secret materials are far more likely to be overclassified than are Top Secret. (I never encountered instances of the latter that should have been unclassified, but the former is not uncommon.) Policies and paperwork can get classified without much thought involved—bureaucratic CYA plays far more of a role than does government machinations; nobody ever gets fired for OVERclassifying. Technical capabilities and procedures—whether intelligence or operational—virtually always warrant their high classifications. And, finally, if you want classified material to make it into the public domain, the quickest way to get it there is to brief members of Congress and their staffs. That’s why highly sensitive briefings tend to be limited to House and Senate leadership.
No, they are sharing short, low resolution videos that do not expose the identity of military units or personnel involved, or the limitations of the weapons systems used.
One reason that videos are released at all is to send a message to the cartels and their terrorist sponsors. I would choose to have the boats just vanish, and leave them guessing. However, I am not in charge of this operation.
I should mention that I am one of the few regular posters here who have actually participated in military missions to interdict vessels engaging in smuggling and piracy. Of course when we did it, we intercepted them by helicopter and fast boat launched from a larger mothership. The boats the smugglers are using now were designed to elude such methods. A loitering drone does not have the same limitations, but of course it cannot seize the vessels or take prisoners.
From my perspective there are a number of possible good reasons why a second strike might be needed and why an uncut video of the whole event might contain sensitive information.
Until Trump, these boats were typically intercepted and no one was killed.
Trump’s policy is wrong. The drugs in these boats is bound for Europe, not the US. There is no need to kill people under these conditions.
But that’s not your call, Fr Katze, as a foreigner. President Trump doesn’t care what you think of his Executive policies, or what truths you know about these boats getting shot and why it’s not necessary to shoot them, unless he’s worried you might convince your Prime Minister to invade the United States, arrest him, and render him to The Hague. Americans here are probably too polite to tell you that, so I will. Or maybe they agree with you and appreciate the endorsement, I dunno.
Not even the American voter can do much to control the Executive because it is independent of Congress and relies on that autonomy to do whatever it thinks necessary to defend the Constitution and cause inconvenience to the enemies of the United States. “No Kings” notwithstanding, the Office of the President has a power much closer to a King as he was in 1787, frozen in amber. The method of selection and removal is different, is all. The role of the Prime Minister as a head of government based in and responsible to the legislature and superior to the King emerged in Parliaments after the Revolution. (The hated Lord North, a king’s man, was Prime Minister in 1776. Not the model any of the Founding Fathers wanted.)
If the President can nuke Russia, I think it’s safe to assume that he can shoot foreigners in boats at sea without being guilty of murder. States (and their Executives) don’t have morals. They have interests.
If Congress doesn’t like what the President is doing, it can use its taxing power to cut off his money, in 17th century English style, or it can impeach him and remove him from office. Then the Justice Dept can proceed with a criminal indictment against him. (That’s assuming the new President doesn’t immediately pardon him, which he will. Checkmate.) But Congressmen don’t listen to foreigners who don’t vote for them or donate to their re-election campaigns.
FWIW, Max and Doug have moved my thinking about this, not that it matters. I’m a “defer-to-the-experts-before-judging” type of guy. If the President can shoot any foreigner he wants, this may be one of those situations where he should.
Came from a family, on my fraternal grandmother’s side, that was Flemish-Belgian.
Medium rain was “like a cow pissing on a flat rock.”
Heavy rain was “it’s raining pitchforks and axe handles.”
In the UK we have ‘raining stair rods’. Does anyone have their stair carpet secured with brass rods these days?
I say ‘raining elephants’. I don’t know if anyone else says that.
I was puzzled by raining like chair legs and raining like tractors. ????
I wonder why the video of the first strike on the alleged drug-running boat wasn’t top secret but the video of the second strike is top secret? The first strike video wasn’t classified at all – it was shown to the public.
Good point
“That is, they were taking to heart slogans like “resistance is justified” and “by any means necessary,” which have become ubiquitous at anti-Israel rallies the world over. For many of those who chant those lines, they may seem like abstractions and metaphors, a political attitude in favor of Palestinian freedom rather than a call to kill their presumptive oppressors.”
Bret is being kind here. MOST people who chant these lines want harm to come to the “Jewish oppressors”, but they just want someone else in their group to take on the risks of inflicting the violence.
We know this a) because this is the most obvious and logical meaning of terms like “by any means necessary” and b) by the often gleeful reactions of many members of the Muslim community after these atrocities.
This retreat into metaphor by the ringleaders and more sophisticated radicals is a motte and bailey tactic. It is extremely effective on midwit woke liberals. Charlie Brown will keep trying to kick the football over and over again apparently…
This Wright Bros. flight was in 1903. By 1961, humans had achieved space flight.
So in less than 60 years, heavier-than-air, powered flight technology had advanced from a 12 second flight traveling 120 feet to putting a human in space!
Also, by the 1960s you could fly on a commercial jet that flew under the speed of sound. But in 2025, you can fly on…a commercial jet that flies under the speed of sound.
Seems like we aren’t progressing at quite the same rate as earlier generations….
“Putting a human in space AND bringing him safely back to Earth!”
“Also, by the 1960s you could fly on a commercial jet that flew under the speed of sound. But in 2025, you can fly on…a commercial jet that flies under the speed of sound.”
I daresay it’s a materiels science problem. Air resistance and resultant heat go up exponentially with air speed. The Concorde SST expanded by about a foot when cruising.
The Blackbird spy plane was made out of titanium alloy, because at Mach 3 the outer skin temperature hit 600 Celsius. Aluminum alloys can melt from 463 – 671 Celsius.
I guess 7 hours from JFK to Heathrow is fast enough considering the alternative by boat takes a week.
Progress proceeds quickly within the limits of physics and economics. But when one of those limits is encountered, then progress slows right down.
We are still waiting for practical flying cars and commercially viable fusion energy.
And yet, the computers of today are vastly more powerful (and vastly smaller) than those from the 60s. So apparently the physics and economics problems were more surmountable in IT?
So what you (and Roger above) seem to be saying is that all of the low-hanging fruit in flight technology was picked from 1900-1960ish, and any remaining advances are much more difficult, due mainly to the physics challenges of supersonic flight and the attendant economic costs of overcoming those?
Air travel is immensely safer and cheaper today than in the 1950s. There have been many advances that maintain the profitability of the aviation industry and make flight available to far more people at a greater juice per squeeze than just going faster. The future seems to have been won by the Greyhound bus that goes everywhere and not by the gee-whiz high-speed train that’s great if you happen to live on the route.
Forget flying cars, I’m still waiting for warp drive!
Not in our lifetime, but may be possible?
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a69663990/scientists-say-physical-warp-drive-now-possible/
Meanwhile, where’s my robot housekeeper!?
Throwing away the yoke of old religious and political restraints, fueled in part by the scientific revolution begun in the late 19th century, resulted in a release of pent-up creativity in the 20th century*. There was a lot of basic ground that had to be covered in the early years, but as we all know, very complex things can arise from simple rules, which themselves needed to be worked out first.
So it’s not surprising to me that the rate seems to have slowed; the first changes were huge! We recently had a discussion here at WEIT on the fact that today we can expect all of our children to survive. That’s not something my great grandparents expected (or got). Right there, that’s hard to improve on. The next steps are incremental.
*a century that will also be known for its contempt for human life.
“Earlier this year Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 became the first privately developed jet to break the sound barrier.”
“Importantly, nobody on the ground heard a thing, thanks to Boom’s application of a concept called “Mach cutoff.” By flying at the right altitude and using AI software to measure atmospheric conditions, Boom ensured the loud sonic boom curved upward and dissipated into the sky, rather than disturbing people below.”
These quotes are from The Rational Optimist substack site.
Btaodly speaking, the post goes on about regulation being the hand break to development, which is true to some extent, if the activist hadn’t strangled nuclear power use we would be some 40 to 50 years ahead in R & D.
It is Pope Francis’s birthday. Happy birthday Jorge! Also born today, Christopher Wray.
Candace Owens? I’ve heard a few of her clips, mostly because one news outlet or another posted them to illustrate how outrageous she is. She is that, and she may even be insane, so why listen to her? Apparently, some people don’t get enough value out of life without adding a little crazy to the mix. It’s scary that she gets so much attention.
Yes, as Bret Stephens says, Bondi Beach is what you get when you ignore the call to “globalize the intifada.” It’s not a slogan. It’s a mission statement. As I opined yesterday, weak leaders are willing to sacrifice the Jews in the vain hope that the intifada will stop there. It will not.
Finally, that photograph by Rachel Posner is chilling. I went back to it several times while writing this.
The family that owned the menorah escaped to what became Israel in the 1930s. There was nowhere else they could have gone. A few went to other European countries but that usually wasn’t any better.
I understand the concerns of the Iranian woman. Unfortunately, political Islam has not always been taken seriously in Germany in recent years. Criticism of it has been met with accusations of Islamophobia or Islamophobic racism from the left-wing political camp and also from identity politics activists.
The black-red government has now set up a new »Beraterkreis Islamismusprävention und Islamismusbekämpfung (Advisory Group on Islamism Prevention and Combating Islamism), which is to scrutinize political Islam more closely and develop measures to combat it. This was promptly met with fierce attacks from left-wing politicians, activists, and the corresponding media, who fabricated stories about “Islamophobic researchers” in this committee, even though several members are of the Muslim faith.
Unfortunately, the announcement is currently only available in German, as is the list of advisors.
https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/pressemitteilungen/DE/2025/11/beraterkreis-islamismusbekaempfung.html
https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/downloads/DE/veroeffentlichungen/nachrichten/2025/mitglieder-beraterkreis.html
Did you notice who made the video? It was PAX Europe – a very right wing organization. I was struck by the irony of them publicizing the video and her using the phrase “as a queer woman”.
So the girl by her language is firmly on the left – yet the left undermines her.
Thanks for the information. I did not know PAX Europe.
I read, that it is a German right-wing anti-Islam organization, which is committed to “preserving Christian-Jewish culture in Germany and Europe and maintaining the free democratic basic order.” Such organizations tend to have a mental block. A queer woman is then considered a lesser evil than Islam.
Yeah… but a Muslim queen woman of color ist hitting all the bases 😉
I guess the need for content is strong in those ones…
In a legal sense, the indigenous people may be right. The rights to lands recognized inchoately by King George III and (much) later developed in Canadian Courts as the sui generis concept of aboriginal title do involve literal ownership of the land surface and all things in or under it. This puts it in opposition to Crown title (which claims the same things) and is a superior type of title to private fee simple property rights which we in Canada get as deeds from a Crown grant. Very important, we “own” (but not literally like a cow or a washing machine) only the transferable rights to use the land, but we don’t own the resources under the land. Those rest with the Crown, who charges mining companies royalties (which go into tax revenues) to extract them.
Aboriginal title is communal, say our Courts, and can be transferred only to the Crown, not to individuals, said King George (thus precipitating the American Revolution). If aboriginal title over a tract of land has not been extinguished (by conquest or cession), then yes, the aboriginal descendants do collectively own the rocks and plants taken from it.
The only way around this for Americans is to be sure that you have extinguished aboriginal title, which you did in large part by seceding from Britain and her king, and then simply taking the rest of it during the Westward Expansion. Then you own the land absolutely and everything on and under it. Including the rocks.
Re Wright Brothers Day.
Orville Wright was the pilot the first time that a man was killed in powered flight. The man was Thomas Selfridge and the Selfridge Air National Guard Base is named after him.
I’m fascinated by flight crash investigations and the advances in flight safety they trigger. I follow Mentour Pilot on YouTube and here is his video about that accident.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WewINizOEkM
Bret Stephens does not know what he is talking about. The Bondi terror attack occurred after two years of kill-the-Jews and globalize-the-intifada demonstrations by Muslims, starting at the Sydney Opera House the day after the Oct. 7 atrocity. The Labor government realized that there are a million Muslims in Australia compared to only 100,000 Jews, so to hold on to those imported Muslim votes Labor abandoned the party’s longstanding support for Israel, instead taking the side of a fictitious state of “Palestine”. Sure there are radical anti-civilization lefties who join the Muslims in celebrating Jew-hatred but the problem here is primarily one of mass Islamic immigration, which the general public has long opposed just as in Europe. What Australia needs now is new leadership.
Douglas Murray provides some context regarding Australia’s rather selectively enforced “hate speech” laws:
“When I last did a speaking tour of theaters in Australia, in the summer of 2024, I received a letter warning me about the terms of my visit. Though they granted this British-born, American-based author the right to speak in Australia, they made it clear that if I said anything, or was even reported as having said anything, which could cause community tensions (a supremely vague concept), then I would instantly have my visa revoked and be removed from the country.
This is standard in modern Australia. Yet calls for “Jihad,” “Intifada,” “gassing,” and more have been tolerated and gone unpunished.
In 2019, there was a terrible attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, by a lone gunman. It was a vicious, appalling attack. Outpourings of sympathy issued from all communities.
But imagine for a moment that there had not been. Imagine that immediately after that attack there had been huge crowds of Australians outside the Sydney opera house calling for Muslims or Arabs to be “gassed.”
Does anyone think that the Australian authorities would have taken this lightly? Does anyone think that if there had been anti-Muslim or anti-Arab demonstrations on the streets every week for the two years following the 2019 attack—expressly celebrating the attack and calling for it to happen again—that the Australian authorities would have stood by, or actually placated the mob? To ask the question is to answer it.”