The Weekly Sift

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear on December 22.

The degree to which America is clearly a country that is open for sale is also really remarkable. But countries that are buying your goodwill by bringing cash to the president, that is a different form of leadership than the kind where we’re guaranteeing their security and trying to have a decent world order for all of us.

– Robert Kagan

This week’s featured post is “A MAGA National Security Strategy“.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. Thanks to the Supreme Court, Texas will conduct its 2026 congressional elections with a racially gerrymandered map.
• Climate change. There are interesting and somewhat ironic developments in geothermal power. Details in a short note below.
• Both Gaza and Ukraine fell off my radar this week.

This week’s developments

This week the focus was on Pete Hegseth

Secretary of War Defense Pete Hegseth is under fire from two directions:

• Did he really give a “kill everybody” order that led to an attack on two men clinging to the wreckage of their boat? (If we’re not at war, that’s murder. If we are, it’s a war crime.)
• The DoD inspector general’s report on Signalgate says Hegseth violated military regulations and endangered pilots engaging in an attack, but apparently stops short of finding a crime. The loophole here is that Hegseth himself had the power to declassify the information he released, even if it was irresponsible to do so.

Thursday, members of the House and Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees were briefed on the September 2 attack where a boat was sunk and then a second attack killed survivors clinging to the wreckage. All the reactions I’ve seen quoted followed party lines. Democrats like Mark Warner said the video was “very disturbing”, while Republican Tom Cotton said:

I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for the United States back over so they could stay in the fight, and potentially, given all the context we’ve heard of other narco-terrorist boats in the area coming to their aid to recover the cargo and recover those narco-terrorists

To me, the phrase “stay in the fight” is telling. What fight? Who were the boatmen trying to fight against?

The bottom line here is that eventually the video will come out, and the American people can resolve this argument for themselves. The question is whether people will be able to simply use their eyes, or will they see the scene through a haze of dehumanizing labels like “narco-terrorist”?

As for the legality of the whole boat-sinking campaign, Ron Filipkowski sums it up well:

The US government is summarily executing people on a weekly basis without telling the American people any of their names or presenting any proof of their guilt, for alleged crimes that do not carry the death penalty in the US.

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Of course SNL had to get into the act.

and the national strategy

I discuss this at length in the featured post.

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An important related article: Overmatched by the NYT editorial board. It discusses how our big complicated and expensive military systems repeatedly fail us in war simulations where we try to defend Taiwan against China.

The basic problem was identified already in James Fallows’ 1981 book National Defense: We need small, simple weapons that are easy to produce in large numbers, but our procurement system favors big, complex weapons that are hard to keep running and hard to replace if they get damaged in battle.

It’s been decades since I read that book, but I think I remember one key example: how Nazi Germany lost the tank war in Russia. Individually, the Russian tanks were no match for the German Tigers and Panthers. But the Russian tanks (and the Shermans imported from America) were easy to make and maintainable by any good street mechanic, while the German tanks were much more complicated and much harder to fix if they broke down.

At some point, which may already have arrived, swarms of hypersonic drones will be able to overwhelm an aircraft carrier like the Gerald Ford, which we just deployed to the Caribbean.

and the Supreme Court

It shouldn’t be surprising when the Court ignores facts, laws, and precedents to give the Republican Party an advantage, but for some reason I still was taken aback when the Court OK’d the Texas congressional map that lower courts had found violated legal guarantees against racial gerrymandering.

I’ll leave the details of the case to Paul Waldman, but the gist is that the district court held extensive hearings about whether the new Texas map was drawn according to race, and found that it was. By precedent, higher courts are supposed to defer to a lower court’s findings of fact unless they spot a clear error. (There’s a reason for that: Higher courts don’t have as much time to devote to assembling and evaluating evidence. The district judge saw and heard the witnesses, while the justices could only read the transcripts.) But the Supreme Court ignored that provision, claimed that the lower court should have given more deference to the State of Texas, and then invoked the Purcell doctrine, that courts should not change maps on the eve of an election.

But of course, as Justice Kagan points out in her dissent, it was the Texas legislature that wanted to change maps, and the legislature that controlled the timing. Letting the old map stand would have disturbed nothing and confused no one.

If Purcell prevents such a ruling, it gives every State the opportunity to hold an unlawful election. The District Court, once again aptly, made the point: Were judicial review so broadly foreclosed, then to implement even a “blatantly unconstitutional map,” the “Legislature need only to pass” it on a schedule like this one. That cannot be the law—except of course that today it is.

This is yet another abuse of the Court’s “shadow docket”, a preliminary finding that applies in this case only and may be reversed eventually. But a temporary finding is all Texas Republicans need to deliver more House seats to Speaker Johnson.

Waldman goes on to argue that Democrats have to start running against the Supreme Court.

Any Democrat who says “Voters don’t really care about this stuff” needs a good smack in the head. The answer to that problem is to make them care. Republicans do this all the time; if they have something they wish was on the agenda, they force it on the agenda, no matter how ridiculous it is or how removed it is from people’s lives. How many Americans cared five years ago about whether some middle school trans kid a hundred miles from where they live wanted to play softball? But they care about it now, because Republicans made them care.

Democrats need to do the same with the Supreme Court — loudly, angrily, personally, relentlessly. If they don’t, the next Democratic president is utterly screwed.

and geothermal power

Normally, you think about geothermal power in places like Iceland or New Zealand — places with volcanoes, where hot lava is close to the surface. But the center of the Earth is 5000 degrees Celsius, so you can find heat just about anywhere if you drill deep enough.

For years that’s been considered impractical, but maybe not much longer. Ironically, the technology to make this work has been developed by the oil and gas industry. Want to drill deep as cheaply as possible? The oil companies know how. Want to get water through rock so you can heat it in the depths? That’s been solved by the fracking companies.

Check out this New Yorker article for more detail.

and you also might be interested in …

The fundamentally anti-Christian nature of the Trump regime is being pointed out in Christmas nativity scenes all over the country. This one is from Dedham, Massachusetts:

The small print below the “ICE WAS HERE” sign says that the Holy Family is safe inside the church’s sanctuary, and gives the number of a hotline to report local ICE activity.

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At a time when there is a ridiculous backlog of asylum cases, Trump has been firing immigration judges. The immigration courts that decide such cases are not part of the judicial branch, but belong to the Department of Justice. So DoJ is looking to recruit.

DHS is trying to help by posting DoJ recruitment ads on its Facebook page. The scary thing is what their ads tell you about the kind of people they’re looking for. Here’s one:

The text that goes with it is: “Deliver justice to criminal illegal aliens. Become a deportation judge. Save your country.”

If you’re not up on comic-book-based movies, that’s Judge Dredd. Wikipedia describes him like this:

Judge Dredd is a law enforcement and judicial officer in the dystopian future city of Mega-City One, which covers most of the east coast of North America. He is a “street judge”, empowered to summarily arrest, convict, sentence, and execute criminals.

So if you fantasize about summarily arresting, convicting, sentencing, and executing “criminal illegal aliens”, the Trump regime has just the job for you.

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I’m not sure what to make of this theory, but it sounds plausible: James Throt, who claims to be a neuropathologist from the UK, says that the lasting neurological effects of Covid changed our brains, reducing our executive function and making us less empathetic. He claims you can see the change in behavior on dating apps.

Since 2020, apps report the same pattern: shorter messages, less reciprocity, fewer follow-ups, lower meet-up rates & a collapse in sustained conversational ability. This isn’t just “people being tired”. It’s a measurable degradation of attention, initiative & social cognition.

It might also explain why the public so easily falls for the regime’s depersonalization of vulnerable groups like immigrants or the trans community.

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Speaking of depersonalizing attacks, Jamelle Bouie looks at Trump’s smearing of all Somali immigrants.

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It’s hard to let go of the Trump MRI story, because what he says about it doesn’t add up. There’s no such thing as a “routine” MRI, and it’s hard to believe doctors did one without telling him what they were looking at or for.

Joyce Strong, a nurse, puts clues together and says he probably got a CT-based vascular imaging with contrast. She’s speculating, but her guess is that the testing was motivated by what I’ve been calling Trump’s symptoms of dementia — babbling, falling asleep at meetings, random outbursts, and so on.

and let’s close with something feral

The Washington Post newsroom had to be smiling when it published this: “Drunk raccoon passes out in bathroom after ransacking Va. liquor store“.

A Virginia state-run liquor store was ransacked by a masked bandit on Friday evening, authorities said, leaving a trail of broken spirit bottles strewn across the shop floor.

Apparently this kind of thing happens from time to time. The article also includes a 2016 video from Tennessee of another racoon doing something similar.