Author Archives: weeklysift

Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

The Euphoria Period

January 5, 2026 – 12:42 pm

We’re in the euphoria period of acknowledging across the board that Maduro was a bad guy and that our military is absolutely incredible. This is exactly the euphoria we felt in 2002 when our military took down the Taliban in Afghanistan, in 2003 when our military took out Saddam Hussein, and in 2011 when we helped remove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya. … Let’s let my Republican colleagues enjoy their day of euphoria, but they’re going to wake up tomorrow morning, knowing, oh my God, there is no plan here any more than there was in Afghanistan, Iraq, or in Libya.

– Rep. Jim Himes, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee

This week’s featured post is “The Venezuela attack is a constitutional crisis for the United States“.

Ongoing stories

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the attack on Venezuela

The featured post makes the case that the way the Trump administration ignored and even lied to Congress about its Venezuela policy constitutes a constitutional crisis, which a self-respecting Congress would answer with impeachment. (Not that I expect that to happen.) There’s still a lot we don’t know about what the administration intends going forward (or if they even have a clear intention). But a few things are immediately clear

  • The mission was a tactical success. Plucking a foreign leader out of his seat of power without killing him is never easy. The people who planned and executed this mission must be very good at their jobs.
  • Maduro was a bad guy. Critics of the attack shouldn’t fall into the trap of lionizing Maduro or making him a victim. He stayed in power by stealing the 2024 election (and probably the 2018 election as well), and has ruled as a dictator. Venezuelans running from oppression have created a refugee problem for several countries.
  • None of the administration’s justifications for the attack add up. Maduro was an illegitimate leader, but so are the leaders of many countries. He may have been involved in the drug trade, but Trump just pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández for convictions on very similar charges. Just about everything Trump has ever said about Venezuelan refugees or Venezuelan gangs operating in the US has been a pure flight of imagination.
  • The attack was illegal under international law. The UN charter recognizes two justifications for going to war: self-defense, and when the war has been authorized by the UN Security Council. As Oona Hathaway of Yale Law School and the American Society of International Law put it: “The dangerous thing here is the idea that a President can just decide that a leader is not legitimate and then invade the country and presumably put someone in power who is favored by the Administration. If that were the case, that’s the end of international law, that’s the end of the U.N. charter, that’s the end of any kind of legal limits on the use of force. And if the President can do that, what’s to stop a Russian leader from doing it, or a Chinese leader from doing it, or anyone with the power to do so?”
  • There is no plan for what happens next. During a press conference Saturday morning, Trump said: “So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. … [F]or us to just leave, who’s gonna take over? I mean, there is nobody to take over.” But Max Boot was unconvinced: “What is he talking about? There are no indications that U.S. troops are preparing to occupy Venezuela. … Maduro was not a one-man band. He presided over a large apparatus of oppression that includes the army, the national guard, the national police, the intelligence service and the Colombian guerrilla group ELN. All of those forces remain intact after the U.S. raid.”

If we learned anything from the expensive fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq, it should have been that you don’t take down a country’s government without having a plan for what comes next.

I wonder what’s going on in the minds of Trump voters who thought “America First” meant that we were done with pointless foreign wars.

Josh Marshall speculates on what’s going on at the White House:

I don’t think there’s any actual reason we’re invading Venezuela or trying to decapitate its government or whatever we’re doing. I think there are two or three different factions in the government each pushing a very hostile policy toward Venezuela for differing reasons. Meanwhile, Trump thinks it’s cool and has a personal beef with Maduro. That combination of factors created a lot of forward momentum within the U.S. government with nothing pushing back in the opposite direction. That gets you to today. My point is that it’s a mistake to think there’s a “real” reason mixed in with other subterfuges and rationales, or that it’s important to find out which one the “real” reason is. It’s not that linear or logical.

and the old/new year

Andy Borowitz and Anne Telnaes pick out the best editorial cartoons of the year.

TPM did its annual celebration of the year in corruption, the Golden Dukes. Best General-Interest Scandal: Trump’s $300 million ballroom. Biggest Journalism Fail: the NYT’s anti-Mamdani campaign.

Meanwhile, the NYT reviewed a year of Trump’s attempts to “crush dissent”.

In case you’re wondering how the other half thinks, conservative WaPo pundit Marc Thiessen lists the 10 worst and 20 best things Trump did in 2025. Second-worst thing: He didn’t give the Pentagon enough money. Sixteenth best thing: “He brought many of the nation’s elite universities to heel.” #4 is his mostly mythical “peacemaking” record, while #6 is his attack on Venezuela.

and the Supreme Court

A week ago yesterday, Face the Nation had an extended panel discussion about the year behind and the year ahead. In their final go-round (at about the 22:40 mark) about over- or under-reported stories, legal analyst Jan Crawford picked out the corruption of the Supreme Court — that it is “in the tank for Trump” — as an over-reported story.

Not only is that narrative over-reported, it is patently false, and it is dangerous for the institution and the public’s faith and confidence in the rule of law.

The people making the in-the-tank charge did not take that criticism lying down. On his Law Dork blog, Chris Geidner described Crawford’s statement as “shockingly devoid of substance”. She gave no examples and did not point to any specific case where someone has criticized the Court unfairly.

In particular, she did not account for the obvious corruption of Clarence Thomas, who has taken literally millions of dollars worth of favors from people (like Harlan Crowe) who want to influence the Court. (Thomas has tried to hide behind a “hospitality from friends” loophole in rules about reporting gifts. But Crowe’s “friendship” only manifested after Thomas ascended to the Court.)

Josh Marshall fleshes out that response to Crawford, observing that defenders of the Court like to use a very narrow definition of corruption that focuses on bribery in exchange for specific favors.

The secondary and older definition is the act of taking something in its healthy form, in its prescribed and proper form, and pervert it into something different. The corruption of the Court is bound up with both those definitions. What the current Supreme Court has done is take the proper and constitutional role of the Court and wrench it into something very different. That very different thing is corrupt, unconstitutional and undermines democratic self-government itself. It has moved from a final Court of appeal, which reviews cases and renders decisions by a range of possible jurisprudential philosophies — more conservative or liberal, progressive or libertarian — and changed it into a body which follows no consistent or coherent mode of interpretation or even the most basic procedures and processes for how cases are supposed to make their way from trial courts and finders of fact up through the appellate process. It is a “choose your own adventure” jurisprudence, mixing and matching doctrines based on desired outcomes, frequently manufacturing entirely new ones based on ignoring the explicit language of the constitution itself. And all for the consistent purpose of advancing the partisan and/or ideological interests of the Republican Party.

What both writers find most dangerous about Crawford’s statement is the implication that the Court’s corruption itself does not threaten democracy, but pointing out the Court’s corruption does. Yes, the rule of law is less secure when the public doubts the honesty of the courts. But the solution to that problem is to call the Court back to honesty, rather than cover up its dishonesty.

and Jack Smith

You can tell that former Special Prosecutor Jack Smith performed well during his closed-door testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, because the committee’s Republican chair released the transcript on New Years Eve, hoping no one would notice.

In his more-than-eight-hour of testimony, Smith insisted he had no political motivations in indicting Trump, and said he believed “we had proof beyond a reasonable doubt in both cases” that he brought.

“If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat,” he said in his opening statement. Smith later told an unnamed committee staffer he would have indicted Biden or Barack Obama over similar evidence.

Trump wants to keep harassing the people who investigated him, but all he’s doing is keeping the story alive. And that’s bad for him because all the investigations were justified and he was guilty.

and fault lines in the MAGA movement

MAGA is struggling with the question of Nazis and antisemitism inside itself. It first arose in late October after Tucker Carlson interviewed avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes on his show, prompting considerable disagreement about whether Fuentes should continue to be held outside the pale.

Now, just weeks later, after the Carlson/Heritage fiasco appeared to have blown over, it bubbled back up in spectacular fashion at the main stage at Turning Point USA’s mega conference, dubbed “AmericaFest.” Podcaster Ben Shapiro used his speech to attack his fellow conservative influencers, from Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens to Megyn Kelly and Nick Fuentes himself. That led others to clap back at Shapiro, turning “AmFest” into a circular firing squad of grievance among the right’s top influencers.

Owens responded on her podcast by proving Shapiro’s point, referring to dangerous Talmudic conspiracies.

The Heritage Foundation’s president defended Carlson’s Fuentes interview, causing more than a dozen staffers to defect to Mike Pence’s rival think tank.

Vox finds a proximate cause in Elon’s changes to X/Twitter. Musk took down the guardrails at Twitter, encouraging the growth of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and personal attacks. Once, these changes helped right-wing posters “own the libs”. But liberals have largely left X for BlueSky and other greener pastures. Now, the best way to raise traffic (and get payments from Elon) might be to goad rival right-wingers.

It’s hard not to laugh at someone like Christopher Rufo being hoisted by his own petard.

“On the right, the public mind is now shaped by the X algorithm,” right-wing activist and X power-user Christopher Rufo recently wrote, arguing that X has usurped the role formerly held by Fox News. But, he went on, “the platform’s algorithm seems increasingly hijacked by bad actors who peddle baseless conspiracies” for “clicks, dollars, and shares.”

but I want to talk about the future of small towns

In mid-December, I made a trip back to my hometown (Quincy, Illinois), a small city of about 40,000 people that is the regional center of a rural area stretching about 50 miles in any direction. That radius takes in smaller cities like Hannibal, Missouri and Keokuk, Iowa, but if you need any citylike service — from a hospital to a good Indian restaurant to a big box store — probably you go to Quincy.

My community within Quincy is comprised almost entirely of people from the local Unitarian church. I didn’t grow up in that church, but it includes nearly everybody I go back to visit (now that my parents are gone). The church is a left-leaning citadel inside a county that voted 70% for Trump every time he ran. People attend largely because they need a place where liberals can feel safe saying what they think.

So I can’t claim that I have spent much time talking to Quincy’s MAGA majority. But simply being there gives me occasional bursts of insight into their worldview. This time something crystalized for me that I probably should have seen a long time ago: The Democratic Party has no message for towns like this.

Think about it. If I support MAGA, I can tell a story about how my vote is going to help this community thrive: Immigrant workers are going to leave the country, and tariffs will keep out foreign products. So we’ll return to a time (like the 1950s) when Americans made products for other Americans. Factories will boom again, and jobs will be plentiful.

Now, so much is wrong with that vision that there’s virtually no chance of things working out that way. The ultimate effect of Trump’s policies won’t be to shift money from immigrant workers to native-born workers. Instead, money will flow from ordinary people to the oligarchs who own the machines and algorithms. I don’t believe many of those oligarchs call Quincy their home. Meanwhile, the people who do live in Quincy will have to make do with holes in their safety net, without well-funded schools, and without decent health insurance.

But as vaporous as the MAGA fantasy is, it’s still a narrative that you can believe in if you need to believe in something. If somebody asks how your policies are going to help Quincy thrive, MAGA at least has a story to tell.

What’s the Democrats’ story? As best I can suss it out, we offer to help Quincy’s young people pay for college, so they can get qualified for decent-paying jobs somewhere like Boston (where I wound up). In other words: We’ll help your kids escape from the hellhole you call home. If you’re lucky, they’ll make enough money that they can come visit you at Christmas.

That’s not going to win many votes. We need a story of how people from small towns can succeed and prosper in those towns.

I have a few ideas about that, but nothing like a complete program. For now, I’d just like to get more people sitting with the question.

and you also might be interested in …

Maybe you remember that viral video where an ICE agent manhandled a woman in the hallway of a New York City immigration court. The agent was briefly taken off duty, but he was back the next week. Now DHS Office of Inspector General has decided no criminal probe is necessary.

ICE does not punish this kind of violence. It condones it.

Anti-government demonstrations are going on in Iran, sparked largely by economic issues.

Trump’s super PAC raised over $100 million in the second half of 2025, mostly in big contributions from people who expect favorable treatment from his administration. Together with his wife, the founder of Open AI gave $25 million. Crypto.com tossed $20 million Trump’s way.

Other donors included a nursing home entrepreneur seeking an ambassadorship, a vape-maker, a pro-cannabis group and a woman whose father was seeking a deal from prosecutors to settle charges that in 2020 he bribed Puerto Rico’s governor at the time.

Anti-abortion politicians always deny that they want to go after women, but then there’s this:

A Kentucky woman has been charged with fetal homicide after police say she admitted to terminating her pregnancy at home. Kentucky State Police arrested 35-year-old Melinda Spencer on charges of fetal homicide in the first degree, abuse of a corpse and tampering with physical evidence.

Apparently, Spencer confessed to clinic workers, who ratted her out to the police. Her “crime” was to obtain abortion drugs through the mail, induce her own miscarriage, and then bury the fetus in her back yard.

The trans University of Oklahoma instructor who was put on leave for giving zero to a Christian student essay has now been officially removed from all instructional duties.

This story has been in the news for about a month, but I hadn’t paid any attention until recently. So I read the assignment, an abstract of the article the essay was supposed to comment on, and the essay itself.

My conclusion: A failing grade was justified, but a zero was probably harsh. Out of the 25 points available, I’d have graded it somewhere in the single digits. I mean, she did turn in an essay, the essay was made up of coherent English sentences, and an opinion was expressed, if not justified. Maybe five points.

The central problem is that the essay doesn’t really address the assignment. The social-science article the essay is supposed to be commenting on was a study of the relationship between “gender typicality” and popularity in high school, and exploring the extent to which the poor mental health associated with gender atypicality is inherently part of gender atypicality, versus how much is due to teasing, bullying, and other social responses.

The student essay is almost entirely a personal emotional response to gender atypicality itself, and repeatedly makes the religious point that gender roles were established by the Creator. Teasing to enforce these gender roles is “not necessarily … a problem”. Did the student read any more of the article than the abstract I read? Not clear.

Personally, I’m reminded of a failing grade a friend of mine got on an essay for a college course on Indian philosophy. His essay responded to the questions in the assignment, but only from the point of view of Western thinkers. Similarly, he wrote coherent English sentences that had something to do with the general topic, but didn’t demonstrate any course-related knowledge.

My conclusion: Removing the instructor is much worse overkill than zeroing the essay. Have somebody else regrade the essay and give the instructor a lecture about sensitivity to the prevailing winds of Christian domination. Right-wing Christians are encouraging their students to walk around with chips on their shoulders, looking for a fight. It’s unwise to give them such a clear target.

Trans News Network interviews former NYT editor Billie Jean Sweeney, who describes how the NYT’s hostile attitude towards trans coverage was pushed down from above.

Guess what? Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post disapproves of taxing billionaires. California is considering a ballot initiative for a wealth tax, and some billionaires are already relocating to dodge it. “California will miss billionaires when they’re gone”, the WaPo editorial board writes, pointing out that it’s better for a state to collect low taxes from billionaires rather than none after they leave.

And that’s true as far as it goes, but it misses the more important point: We need national taxes on billionaires precisely so that they can’t play one state off against another.

Similarly, the nations of the world need to come together on a global corporate tax scheme, so that corporations can’t play one country off against another. Here’s how it could work: If you want to be a corporate tax haven like the Cayman Islands, fine. But you don’t get to use the international banking system or trade with the countries who participate in the global tax regime.

You see this kind of argument all the time: Nobody should challenge the rich and powerful because they’ll use their wealth and power to make your effort counter-productive. That argument is always presented in a matter-of-fact of-course-the-world-works-this-way manner, and the possibility that the world can and should work differently is never discussed.

and let’s close with something positive

In a year with a lot of bad news, the WaPo picked out its five best good-news stories of the year.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (8)

The Venezuela attack is a constitutional crisis for the United States

January 5, 2026 – 10:07 am

Is Congress still a branch of government?

As I often point out: A one-person weekly blog is a bad place to cover breaking news. This morning, the attack on Venezuela is in that nebulous zone between breaking news and an ongoing story: US forces attacked Caracas early Saturday morning, seized President Nicolás Maduro, and apparently left. We can see the general outline of what happened, but what it all means and where it’s all going is still very cloudy.

At the same time, we can’t just wait for the dust to settle, because this is an emergency moment not just for Venezuela, but for America.

For almost a year now, Trump has been pushing Congress into irrelevancy, and the Republican majorities in both houses and in the Supreme Court have been letting him do it: Congress no longer controls government spending. Agencies set up by Congress to be independent of the President have been taken over. The deadlines laid out in the Epstein Files Transparency Act have been ignored. The Education Department established by Congress has been all but eliminated.

And now, Congress has been shoved out of any role in making decisions of war and peace.

Apologists for the administration will tell you that this is nothing new. Ever since World War II (the last war officially declared by Congress), Congress’ constitutional power to declare war has been in tension with the President’s constitutional power as commander in chief. [1] Exactly where the boundary lies — what the President can do on his own and what requires congressional authorization — has been a topic of legitimate debate. A rule of thumb has been that decisions that need to be made quickly belong to the President, while longer commitments require Congress.

Congress asserted its power in the War Powers Act of 1973, which set clear limits on presidential discretion. Subsequent presidents have refused to recognize the constitutionality of the WPA, but have generally respected its boundaries as a matter of good form and sound politics. [2] So, for example, President Bush II sought congressional approval before invading both Iraq and Afghanistan. Lesser military actions have sometimes been initiated without Congress.

But the Venezuela attack is completely outside the bounds of previous constitutional debates. Not only did Trump not seek authorization from Congress, but the congressional “Gang of 8” — leaders of both parties in both houses, who by law are required to be kept informed — did not know about the attack until it was underway. Worse, briefings by Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth actively misinformed congresspeople about the administration’s intentions. [3] In short, Trump has given Congress no role whatsoever in this decision to go to war.

If Congress were taking seriously its constitutional obligation to preserve our system of checks and balances, it would immediately launch an impeachment. But unfortunately, Republicans in Congress are mostly taking an all’s-well-that-ends-well view: Maduro was bad and he is out now. The mission itself was a stunning display of tactical brilliance. So we should all just be happy with our military success.

The problem with that view is that nothing has ended yet. Immediately, power has not passed to the opposition leaders whose election victory Maduro stole. Instead, Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodríguez has taken charge of a governing structure that is very much intact. So far, she has sent signals in both directions, denouncing the US attack as “an atrocity that violates international law”, but also saying she want the US government to “collaborate with us on an agenda of cooperation”.

Trump, meanwhile, has said several times that the US is going to “run” Venezuela now and “fix” it. No one in the administration seems to know exactly what that means, or whether American troops will have to occupy the country and take casualties. He seems to imagine that he can manage Rodriguez with threats. But even if he can, will Rodriguez’ people let her stay in power as an American puppet?

Rep. Jim Hines, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee (which makes him one of the uninformed Gang of 8) summed up pretty well:

We’re in the euphoria period of acknowledging across the board that Maduro was a bad guy and that our military is absolutely incredible. This is exactly the euphoria we felt in 2002 when our military took down the Taliban in Afghanistan, in 2003 when our military took out Saddam Hussein, and in 2011 when we helped remove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya. … Let’s let my Republican colleagues enjoy their day of euphoria, but they’re going to wake up tomorrow morning, knowing, oh my God, there is no plan here any more than there was in Afghanistan, Iraq, or in Libya.

[1] This is one of many situations where the Founders lived in a different world than we do now. The early United States had only a minuscule standing army. So any president who wanted to go to war first had to convince Congress to raise and supply a larger force. But World War II made the US a global superpower, so recent presidents have always had large military forces to command.

[2] One of the lessons of Vietnam was that it’s hard to sustain a war without popular support. Getting Congress to buy in is usually part of a larger effort to sell a war to the general public.

[3] Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told CNN’s “State of the Union” yesterday:

I can certainly tell you that the message that [Rubio and Hegseth] sent was that this wasn’t about regime change. When they came to Congress — and they literally lied to our face — they said, “This is just a counternarcotics operation. This is about trying to interrupt the drug flow to the United States.” Right around that same time, the White House Chief of Staff [Susie Wiles] said publicly if we ever had boots on the ground in Venezuela, of course, we would have to come to Congress.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , | Comments (10)

The Monday Morning Teaser

January 5, 2026 – 8:35 am

Observe how quickly the Peace President becomes the War President. Saturday morning US forces raided Caracas and seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who will face drug charges later today in New York. In the wake of that move, confusion reigns. Secretary of State Marco Rubio paints the attack as a simple law enforcement operation, while President Trump frames it as a successful conquest, saying repeatedly that we will “fix” and “run” Venezuela now.

Certainly I’m in no position to resolve the uncertainty about what’s happening or is about to happen in Venezuela. But instead I want to focus on what this episode means for America: Trump has once again sidelined Congress and ignored its constitutional powers. If checks and balances were working the way the Founders intended, Congress would defend its role by launching an impeachment. Obviously, that’s not happening.

Today’s featured post is going to flesh all that out. I haven’t titled it yet, but I’ll predict that it posts between 10 and 11 EST.

That leaves quite a bit for the weekly summary: reviewing all the year-end looking-ahead/looking-back articles, Jack Smith’s testimony to Congress, and the growing fault lines in the MAGA movement. Additionally, I want to raise the question of what the Democratic Party’s message to small-town and rural voters should be. I’ll try to get that out by 1.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (2)

Blackouts

December 22, 2025 – 12:41 pm

These documents are more blacked out than Pete Hegseth on New Years Eve.

– feral streep, on the redactions in the newly released Epstein material

No Sift next week. The next new posts will appear on January 5.

This week’s featured post is “Three days in the life of a pathetic man“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. He’s trying to move CNN into the hands of an oligarch ally, and is maneuvering us towards war with Venezuela without consulting Congress.
  • Climate change. Based on the theory that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, the administration is planning to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, due to its “climate alarmism”.
  • Gaza and Ukraine. I didn’t run across anything new this week. Probably I was too busy with Christmas stuff.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was still talking about the Epstein files

Friday was the deadline that the Epstein Files Transparency Act had set for the Justice Department to release all of its files about Jeffrey Epstein, with a few minor exceptions, mostly related to protecting the identities of the young women who were Epstein’s victims.

But the EFTA is just a law, one passed overwhelmingly by Congress and signed by President Trump himself. Why should the Justice Department consider itself bound to obey? So of course, DoJ waited until the final day to release anything at all. When it did, the release was not complete, and appeared to be much more heavily redacted than mere victim-protection could account for. (One 119-page document is entirely redacted. One commenter characterized the release as a whole as “more blacked out than Pete Hegseth on New Years Eve”.)

on Friday morning, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, went on Fox News to say that the department wouldn’t actually be releasing all of the files on Friday as required by the law. “I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks, so today, several hundred thousand, and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” Blanche said on Fox News. “There’s a lot of eyes looking at these and we want to make sure that when we do produce the materials we are producing, that we are protecting every single victim.”

By the time the department eventually did release thousands of pages of materials on Friday evening – not the hundreds of thousands Blanche promised – many of the documents had been heavily or completely redacted. Other than a few pictures, the materials made no mention of Trump, even though attorney general Pam Bondi reportedly told Trump earlier this year his name was in the files.

Some of the pictures released did include former President Bill Clinton, an apparent effort to support Trump’s gaslighting that the Epstein affair was a Democratic scandal, not a Trump scandal. Trump doesn’t seem to grasp that whattaboutism won’t get him out of this jam. “Democrats did it too” or even “Democrats did worse” isn’t a valid excuse. If Democrats are also guilty, expose them too.

The two sponsors of the EFTA, Republican Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna, both denounced the partial release, which fails to identify anyone who victimized the girls other than Epstein, who is dead, and Ghislaine Maxwell, who is already in prison for sex trafficking (after apparently trafficking the girls to no one, if what has been released is the whole story).

What can Congress do to force DoJ to obey the law? Not much, apparently. It could find Pam Bondi in contempt of Congress, but her own department would then be responsible for prosecuting her, which it would not do. Congress could impeach her, if it had the will to do so (which is doubtful). But Bondi could make the impeachment moot by resigning. Again, whatever Trump is hiding would stay hidden.

The only penalty Trump can be forced to pay is political, which they apparently believe they can mitigate by continuing to dribble out files little by little.

and war with Venezuela

Step-by-step, we are marching into a war with Venezuela. First we blew up their fishing boats, which may or may not have been smuggling cocaine and may or may not have been headed towards the US.

On December 10, the US seized a Venezuelan oil tanker. And then Tuesday, Trump announced an oil blockade of Venezuela. He did it in a Truth Social post that was barely coherent, making references to “the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us”.

It’s tempting to sanewash this by looking for some plausible reference — maybe the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. But nations all over the world (Saudi Arabia, for example) have nationalized their oil industries without getting attacked. And why oil previously claimed by an oil company should be “ours” is a bit of a stretch.

But while I think justifications like that should be put to administration spokespeople, I’m not going to assume Trump’s post makes sense at all until some official source explains it.

Here’s something more people should be saying: The recent moves make it clear that the attacks on boats were never about drugs, they were about regime change. And changing the Maduro regime is about getting control of Venezuela’s oil. Without the oil, Maduro could be five times as tyrannical and nobody in the Trump administration would care.

and the Bondi Beach shooting

On December 14, a father and son opened fire on a crowd gathered for a Hannukah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia. 15 people were killed and 40 injured. The father was killed by police and the son badly wounded. No official statement of motive has surfaced, but antisemitism seems like an obvious guess.

I find two things noteworthy here: First, antisemitism really is rising around the world. I know some people falsely claim that any criticism of the current Israeli government is antisemitism, but you can brush off that canard and still recognize that antisemitism is real.

I’ll repeat what I’ve often said before: You can think whatever you want about Netanyahu or Hamas, but that’s no excuse to bring the war here. American Jews and American Muslims or Arabs are not the problem, and violence against them will not solve anything or prove anything. Ditto for Australians.

Second: Pro-gun people have been crowing about how Australia’s more rigorous gun restrictions didn’t stop this mass shooting. But they’re not thinking this through. The shooters used a bolt-action rifle and a shotgun, rather than semi-automatic weapons, because that’s what they could get their hands on in Australia. Because of that restriction, they only got off 83 shots in something like ten minutes. With American AR-15s, they could have unleashed hundreds of rounds and killed many more people. The 2017 Las Vegas shooter, by himself, fired over a thousand rounds and killed 60.

These kinds of restrictions make a difference, as do limits on the sizes of gun magazines. Shooters are most often stopped when they have to reload. The more bullets they have available without reloading, the longer it will take to stop them.

and Trump’s sad sick week

The Rob Reiner post, the strange plaques Trumpifying past presidents, the self-serving national address, and then the Trump-Kennedy Center. All in three days. The featured post covers these incidents, emphasizing how Trump’s attempts to aggrandize himself just make him smaller.

and Susan Wiles

For some reason nobody has been able to specify, White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles gave a series of interviews to a Vanity Fair reporter, and high-ranking members of the administration posed for a Vanity Fair photographer.

We learned that Wiles thinks:

  • Trump has an alcoholic’s personality.
  • Vance’s conversion to Trumpism has been “sort of political”
  • OMB head Russell Vought is “a right-wing absolute zealot”.
  • The destruction of the White House’s East Wing is just the beginning. “I think you’ll have to judge it by its totality because you only know a little bit of what he’s planning.”
  • There is no evidence to support Trump’s claims about Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein.
  • The component parts of the Big Beautiful Bill are popular. “That will be a very big deal in the midterms.”
  • Blowing up boats in the Caribbean isn’t about drugs, it’s about pressuring the Maduro government in Venezuela.
  • Trump’s attacks on the high seas don’t needs congressional approval, but an attack on the Venezuelan mainland would.
  • Trump believes Putin wants all of Ukraine, not just the provinces he has claimed so far.
  • If Vance runs in 2028, he’ll be the Republican nominee.
  • Trump hasn’t been asleep in cabinet meetings. He’s just resting his eyes.
  • He insults female reporters because “He’s a counterpuncher. And increasingly, in our society, the punchers are women.”
  • Trump won’t run for a third term.
  • Trump doesn’t wake up thinking about revenge against enemies like James Comey, “But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”

Amazingly, Trump has not denounced her.

and pro-Trump media consolidation

Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary is often cited as a model for Trump’s authoritarian takeover. A key piece of Orbán’s strategy was to make sure the major media outlets wound up in friendly hands, creating a state media unofficially.

Trump has been doing the same thing, partly by acquisition, partly by coopting the oligarchs who already own media properties. And so:

  • The richest man in the world (Elon Musk) is a Trump ally who owns X/Twitter.
  • The US’s second-richest man (Jeff Bezos) owns The Washington Post, and blocked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024.
  • The US’s third-richest man (Mark Zuckerberg) owns Meta, which controls Facebook.
  • The fourth-richest (Larry Ellison) controls Skydance, which owns Paramount, which owns CBS. His hand-picked news baron is Bari Weiss. She just spiked a 60 Minutes episode exposing the Trump gulag in El Salvador. Ellison also has wound up controlling the US version of TikTok.

Now Ellison’s empire is bidding against Netflix for Warner/Discovery, which controls CNN, among other notable media properties. Trump is in a position to influence how this goes: He could hint that DoJ would sue to stop a Netflix acquisition as a violation of antitrust laws, but let the Paramount bid go through.

and you also might be interested in …

To no one’s surprise, Republicans in Congress still have no solution to the ObamaCare insurance premiums that are set to skyrocket. The House did pass a bill roughly along the lines I told you about in November: You can lower your premiums by buying the kind of junk insurance that the Affordable Care Act made illegal. You won’t be insured if anything really bad happens to you or your family, but you can tell yourself you have insurance. And even that won’t get through the Senate.

North Carolina’s legislature is one of the most gerrymandered in the country. That’s how a state that has had Democratic governors since 2017 and that Trump carried by a mere 3% in 2024 has substantial and rock-solid Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature: 30-20 in the Senate and 71-49 in the House.

It’s a great frustration to NC Republicans that you can’t gerrymander a statewide office like the governorship. So they’ve done the next best thing: Taken away nearly all the power of the governor and moved it to the legislature.

In essence, they have disempowered their own voters: The voters can control which party gets the governorship, but control of the legislature is baked into the maps.

The Democratic Party is about to go through its usual pattern in the Texas Senate race:

  • A firebrand progressive (Jasmine Crockett, who I love to watch on TV news shows) will excite the base and win the primary.
  • The national party will decide she can’t win and will refuse to put any resources into the race.
  • She’ll lose.
  • The finger-pointing will start: Was the problem that she’s too liberal or that the national party sabotaged her?

I’m not taking a side here, I’m just pointing to the pattern. Until the Party goes all-in on one of these races, we won’t know whose intuition is right.

In his testimony to Congress, FCC Chair Brendan Carr (last seen demanding that ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel) denied that the FCC is an independent agency. Instead, he sees the FCC as an instrument of Trump’s political agenda.

Data from Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Press Freedom Tracker shows that every single investigation or social media tirade Carr has launched against licensees’ speech – be it 60 Minutes’ editing of its Kamala Harris interview, Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks about Charlie Kirk’s death, or Comcast’s accurate reporting that contradicted Trump’s lies about the Kilmar Abrego García’s immigration case – has involved content that upset Trump.

and let’s close with something seasonal

Randy Rainbow’s new parody: It’s beginning to look a lot like f**k this.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

Three days in the life of a pathetic man

December 22, 2025 – 9:55 am

Everything Trump does to aggrandize himself just makes him smaller.

From the time he came down the escalator in 2015, Donald Trump has gloried in his ability to get a rise out of people like me. All our howls of outrage, all the shocked shouts of “He can’t say that!”, have been music to his ears. But lately he’s been losing his touch. Donald J. Trump, once the greatest troll of the social-media era, has jumped the shark. The realization that he is past his sell-by date seems to be driving him ever further off the deep end.

I catch on slowly, so I didn’t notice until his Rob Reiner tweet.

I don’t know if Gen Z even knows who Reiner was, but several of his movies — The Princess Bride comes to mind — became cultural touchstones for my generation. They didn’t often make the critics’ lists of all-time greats, but you could quote them decades later and people would know what you meant.

So Monday, Reiner and his wife were found dead in their home, apparently murdered by their troubled son in the kind of tragedy that touches every parent somewhere deep: What if my kid had inner demons that all my attention, all my love, all the resources I could bring to bear, were helpless to exorcise?

And Trump’s response Tuesday morning was to make this tragic murder all about himself: Reiner died because his Trump Derangement Syndrome made the people around him crazy. The President of the United States went on at some length in that vein.

When I read that post, I was surprised to realize that it didn’t make me angry. No “How can he say that?”. No desire to strike back with some cutting insult.

His tweet wasn’t outrageous. It was pathetic. What a sick, sad little man.

The next two days backed up that assessment. Wednesday we found out about the presidential plaques now lining the colonnade connecting the White House residence to the Oval Office. It’s a newly installed “walk of fame” with plaques for Trump (twice, since he’s both the 45th and 47th president) and his predecessors.

But of course, the plaques for past presidents are not really about them, they’re about him. Andrew Jackson, for example, was “unjustifiably treated unfairly by the Press, but not as viciously and unfairly as President Abraham Lincoln and President Donald J. Trump would, in the future, be.” Ronald Reagan “was a fan of President Donald J. Trump long before President Trump’s Historic run for the White House.”

Joe Biden — who committed the unpardonable sin of kicking Trump’s ass by seven million votes in 2020 — got the nastiest treatment, with the plaque proclaiming him “by far, the worst president in American history”, and representing him not with a portrait, but with a picture of an autopen. The plaque declares that Biden became president “as a result of the most corrupt election ever” and “brought our nation to the brink of destruction”. Barack Obama is characterized as “one of the most divisive political figures in American history” who presided over “a stagnant economy” until his handpicked successor was defeated by Trump. Bill Clinton’s plaque also ends with the defeat of his wife by Trump.

Am I angered? No, I’m embarrassed for my country. Trump probably pictures himself impressing foreign dignitaries by leading them along this walk. In fact, they also will be embarrassed, like your friends are when your senile grandpa starts bragging about things they all know he never did. By casting his plaques in brass, Trump probably imagines them being read decades or even centuries from now. But of course they will vanish the instant he is gone, because they are sad and pathetic. They reflect badly on the White House and whomever its future occupants might be.

Wednesday night, Trump gave a nationally televised address. Typically, presidents demand time from the major networks either when there is something of substance to announce (like a the raid that killed Bin Laden) or some tragedy that calls for a presidential response (like like the Challenger disaster). Prior to Trump, addresses like this were non-partisan: The President was acting as president, speaking to or for all of us, and not as a politician revving up his base.

But that kind of compartmentalization is foreign to Trump’s nature. He demanded national attention Wednesday not because Americans needed to know something, but because his ego was hurting: The economy is doing badly and the American people are increasingly blaming him for it.

His 18-minute address (about the same length as JFK’s Cuban missile crisis speech) contained no news worth mentioning — no major developments, no policy initiatives. (The one apparent announcement turned out to be flim-flam: His $1776 “warrior dividend” to members of our military isn’t new money; it comes out of funds already appropriated for housing allowances.) The self-justification started in his first line: “Good evening America. 11 months ago I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it.” From there he launched into the kind of self-contradictory excuses you might hear from an 8-year-old: I wasn’t fighting, and besides, he started it.

Everything is wonderful, and the fact that it’s not wonderful is Joe Biden’s fault.

Most presidential addresses call for a fact-check, but that would not do this speech justice. A reverse fact-check would be more appropriate: Try to pick out some statements that are true. It’s a challenge. Sentence after sentence, clause after clause, is a travelogue from a fantasy world where Trump is a world-defining super-president.

What a sick, sad little man.

Thursday, his handpicked board at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts attached his name to this once-iconic institution. It’s now supposed to be known as the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But like the Department of Defense, the Kennedy Center was named in the statute that Congress passed to establish it, so Trump and his board of puppets have no power to rename it. The Washingtonian reports:

While the board’s “change” is basically just another flashy marquee that Trump has hung up in service of his inner real-estate developer, it’s likely to accelerate the tangible decline of the Kennedy Center’s reputation. Ticket sales have nosedived since the president took over in February, which has taken a palpable toll on the performers who work there—including the National Symphony Orchestra’s principal violist, who recently spoke to Washingtonian about his experience serenading half-empty audiences.

Maddening? No, pitiable.

One frequent discussion topic among my friends is how long it will take to undo the damage Trump has done to this country. Some of it, of course, can never be undone. The children who died of hunger or disease after he gutted USAID are beyond the help of future administrations. And we’ll never get back the four wasted years in the battle against climate change (plus a little from his undoing the small progress Biden had made).

I can’t guess how many responsible presidents will have to come and go before our allies trust us again. Or how long the CDC or the Kennedy Center will need to rebuild their reputations. How long before the Presidential Medal of Freedom becomes an honor again? Or until all the demons of bigotry he unleashed can be put back in their bottles? And what about our national sense of decency? Our respect for one another? To rebuild them will require decades of nurturing.

But Trump has never really cared about that kind of thing. He cares about promoting his name and about dictating the names others use. He cares about buildings and decor and gaudy gilding.

And I think he’s starting to realize that all those things will begin vanishing the instant he loses power. No one will ever again talk about the Gulf of America, or the Department of War, or the Trump-Kennedy Center. (JFK’s niece wants to wield a pickaxe to remove Trump’s name herself.) If he leaves before his term is up — this is precisely the situation Section 4 of the 25th Amendment was written for — not even Vance will want anyone to see those ridiculous plaques. The tasteless gilding of the White House will go away, and even his over-priced ballroom will be used for some other purpose and carry some other name.

As soon as he’s gone, the whole country (even most of the people who voted for him) will start pretending he was never there.

I think he’s starting to realize that, and so he’s been turning his Trumpiness up to 11. Every effort to aggrandize himself just makes him shrink faster, but he can’t help himself. It’s like he’s constantly screaming: “You can’t forget me!”

But we will, Donald. We will.

Maybe a small reminder will survive here or there. Perhaps, as in Shelley’s Ozymandias, somewhere the ruins of a statue will survey the wasteland of his legacy.

Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair.

Posted in Articles | Tagged | Comments (14)

The Monday Morning Teaser

December 22, 2025 – 8:46 am

So Friday was the deadline that the Epstein Files Transparency Act set for DoJ to release everything it had on the Jeffrey Epstein case, except for material that would identify his victims. Guess what? It didn’t. None of the files that mention Trump were released, and Deputy AG (and former Trump personal lawyer) Todd Blanche kicked the can a bit further down the road by promising the rest of the files in “a couple of weeks”.

I mean, the EFTA is just a law, and when has the Trump DoJ cared about the law? Expect Blanche’s couple of weeks to become a month or more. And when that excuse runs thin, DoJ can start exploiting apparent loopholes in the EFTA and litigating its interpretations up through the courts. Whatever Trump is hiding can stay hidden for quite a while yet.

But that’s not the main thing I’m writing about this week, because from Tuesday to Thursday we saw a remarkable display of pathos by the President of the United States. His sick sad response to the Rob Reiner murder came on Tuesday. Wednesday we learned about the ridiculous “walk of fame” he has installed on the White House collonade: cast-in-brass plaques about Trump and all his predecessors, interpreting American presidential history through the lens of Trump’s ego. (Ronald Reagan was a fan of Trump. Andrew Jackson was treated unfairly by the press of his day, but not as badly as Trump has been.)

Wednesday night he demanded (and got) free air time from the major networks to make the most trivial national address in American history: Thanks to him, the economy is doing great, and the fact that it’s not doing great is Joe Biden’s fault. Thursday, his puppet board put his name on the Kennedy Center.

Once, this kind of nonsense would have angered me. But now I just feel sad for him, and embarrassed for my country. Every time he tries to aggrandize himself, he gets a little smaller. As soon as he’s gone, we’re all going to forget him as quickly as we can. That realization is driving him to ever more extreme aggrandizement, which shrinks him all the more.

So this week’s featured post calls out the theme: “Three days in the life of a pathetic man”. It should be out shortly.

The Epstein files will be covered in the weekly summary. Also the moves towards war against Venezuela, the Bondi Beach shooting, the Brown/MIT murders, Susan Wiles’ unfortunate Vanity Fair interviews, Bari Weiss’ continuing efforts to turn CBS into Fox News, and a few other things, closing with a new Randy Rainbow song. I’ll try to get it out by noon.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (1)

Decent World Order

December 8, 2025 – 11:52 am

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.

Of course SNL had to get into the act.

and the national strategy

I discuss this at length in the featured post.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (18)

A MAGA National Security Strategy

December 8, 2025 – 10:26 am

America used to frame its self-image around freedom and democracy. Now it’s about making money and preserving whiteness.

Back in July, J. D. Vance tried his hand at answering the question “What is an American?” But first he had to say what an American wasn’t, namely, someone who agrees with the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence, that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time.

I don’t think many people would argue with the over-inclusive part. As Vance observed, there are probably billions of people who agree with the founding principles of the United States. They may even identify with America the way JFK was identifying with Germany when he said “Ich bin ein Berliner.” But that doesn’t make them Americans in any real sense. Now, if they come here, work, pay taxes, and pledge their allegiance to the government defined in the Constitution, we can start to have a discussion. But until then, hardly anyone would claim they’re Americans.

Where Vance caused controversy, though, was with “underinclusive”. If your ancestors fought in the Civil War, then you “have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say [you] don’t belong”, even if you don’t believe in the founding principles. Vance seemed to be saying that you could be, say, a Nazi. But if your ancestors fought for the fascist empire of its day, the Confederacy, maybe because they wanted to defend and preserve slavery, then you’re one of us.

In short, Vance’s America isn’t fundamentally about freedom or democracy or any other grand principle.

America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.

This is sometimes described as the “blood and soil” vision of a nation, and it quickly lends itself to what the far right calls “heritage Americans”, who are English-speaking and Christian and (predominantly) White and have a “way of life” that puts men (and not women) at the top of the pyramid. As one author explains:

Non-Christians can be tolerated, as long as they acquiesce to living in an unashamedly Christian America (i.e., submitting to Christian civil law, government support for Christianity, Christian moral, civil, and religious norms and customs, etc.). At the same time, both public and private citizens should be concerned to help the Christian Church flourish in our nation, since a collapse of Christian conversions, church plants, and influence will mark the end of America.

Like so much of Trumpism, this is deniable if you find it embarrassing (as I hope many Trumpists do). Vance didn’t actually spell all that out, and besides, it’s Vance, not Trump. Who takes what J. D. Vance says all that seriously anyway? And since Trump isn’t coherent enough to enunciate such a grand vision, MAGAts don’t have to own up to the full implications of redefining America in blood-and-soil terms.

NSS-USA. Last month, though, the regime put out a document that is harder to deny: National Security Strategy for the United States of America. The text part of it is only 29 pages, but I can’t recommend you read the whole thing, because (like nearly all regime publications) it’s full of praise for how Donald J. Trump rescued America from the pit of despair Joe Biden had left it in. Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of New York, and yadda, yadda, yadda.

But beyond the huckstering, the NSS-USA does have some real content. In particular, it declares an end to the era in which the US tried to be the linchpin of a rules-based global order, and tried (at least some of the time) to promote freedom and democracy. The NSS-USA characterizes this past policy both as “permanent American domination of the entire world” and as “lash[ing] American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty”.

But we’re done with all that now. Instead, we’re going to control immigration, make money, and launch a “restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health”. And we’re not going to try to export American values like human rights that disrespect “other countries’ differing religions, cultures, and governing systems.” (So if MBS wants to lure an Washington Post journalist into a foreign embassy, kill him, and saw his body into little pieces, that’s just how they do things in Saudi Arabia, and we want to do profitable business with them. As the Emperor Vespasian supposedly said about raising funds by taxing public toilets, “Pecunia non olet“, meaning “Money doesn’t stink”, no matter where it comes from.)

Here’s what that “reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health” means:

We want an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age. We want a people who are proud, happy, and optimistic that they will leave their country to the next generation better than they found it. We want a gainfully employed citizenry—with no one sitting on the sidelines—who take satisfaction from knowing that their work is essential to the prosperity of our nation and to the well-being of individuals and families. This cannot be accomplished without growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.

That’s why we have to turn our schools into propaganda mills that expunge any real discussion of slavery, genocide against the Native Americans, or the ongoing effects of racism and sexism. The American past must have nothing but “glories”, and we must ignore discouraging trends like climate change, the increasing concentration of wealth, or anything else that might cause our people to expect something other than the Golden Age of Trump. The NSS-USA doesn’t define “strong traditional families” or “healthy children”, but I hear a lot of ominous subtext there.

The document then goes region by region. Some of its goals are the same as previous administrations. We don’t want a hostile power to control the oil of the Middle East, and we want to maintain our access to other critical resources. We want to avoid seeing some rival power dominate the world.

But then it starts to diverge. It defines what is basically an American sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere. We want countries that are “reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States”. Beyond that, we don’t care what they do to their people.

The one place where we do want to interfere in other countries’ business is with our allies.

We will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies.

However, it looks like the regime sees those “elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions” mainly in our allies’ attempts to suppress right-wing radicalism. It promotes a view of Europe’s future that sounds a lot like proto-fascist parties such as Germany’s AfD (which Vance endorses). Due to immigration and falling native birth rates, Europe faces “civilizational erasure”. But the US wants Europe to “remain European” and to “regain its civilizational self-confidence”.

Europe’s support for Ukraine against Russia (i.e., its “unrealistic expectations for the war”) is due to its “anti-democratic” aspects.

A large European majority wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes. This is strategically important to the United States precisely because European states cannot reform themselves if they are trapped in political crisis.

Again, what this “reform” consists of is not spelled out, but I suspect the model is fascist Hungary.

American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history. America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism. … We want to work with aligned countries that want to restore their former greatness.

But that’s not where NSS-USA sees Europe heading, so it wants to “cultivat[e] resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”, I suppose this means supporting blood-and-soil European parties like France’s National Rally.

If Europe refuses to defend its white cultural heritage, though, it sounds like the Trump regime wants to cut them loose.

Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter

I mean, we signed a treaty with white countries. We can’t be expected to honor it if Whites become a minority.

Other than Europe, where we want political change to preserve a native-European racial mix, we care about other countries only as potential business partners. Nothing in the document suggests that Russia is an enemy, a rival, or a threat to anyone in particular. China is a frenemy, a rival we can do business with. I would really worry if I were Taiwan, because this is how NSS-USA views it:

There is, rightly, much focus on Taiwan, partly because of Taiwan’s dominance of semiconductor production, but mostly because Taiwan provides direct access to the Second Island Chain and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters

Taiwan is a fellow democracy and a long-standing ally, but who cares? It produces semiconductors and has a strategic location. China would have to cough up some serious bucks to induce us to turn our backs on that.

The Kagan interview. Robert Kagan is a historian of US foreign policy with whom I have often disagreed. Recently he was interviewed by Bill Kristol, who I also differ with on many things. But despite past differences, I’m fascinated by this interview [video, transcript], which takes a view-from-orbit perspective on American foreign policy. It happened before the NSS-USA came out, but anticipates much of it.

Kagan’s view, basically, is that the American-dominated post-World-War-II world order is a pleasant aberration in history, because for 3/4 of a century other potential great powers like Britain, France, Germany, and Japan have been content to live inside the American orbit. The unspoken contract was that America would take the lead in international affairs, the dollar would be the world’s reserve currency, and so on; and in return, the US would guarantee its allies’ security and wouldn’t use its preeminent position to take advantage of them.

Ordinarily, sovereign nations wouldn’t trust each other to keep a deal like that. (One cautionary historical example is the Delian League, an anti-Persia alliance that got coopted into an Athenian Empire.) But this one has held largely because of the faith all the nations had in shared liberal values like democracy and human rights.

Kagan sees that deal unraveling, largely because Trump doesn’t share liberal values and wants to take advantage.

[T]hat bargain has been exploded. And that’s why we are entering a new era, because if these countries, as is now the case, cannot rely on the American security guarantee, and I think the Trump administration has made it very clear that they can’t, that it’s sort of the intention of the Trump administration to make it clear that they can’t really rely on the United States, on the one hand.

While on the other hand, the United States now is using its superior power to demand, what is in effect, tribute from its allies in the form of these high tariffs. And so the United States is taking advantage of its overwhelming power and abusing it with its own allies. I don’t see how the alliance structure can continue under those circumstances. And now all these countries that have relied on the United States for their security are now going to have to go back to the world that existed before this unusual era in which they can only rely on themselves for security. And that has vast implications for regional geopolitics and global geopolitics that I think, again, Americans have not really begun to contemplate.

(Kagan doesn’t mention this, but from my point of view the contract has been slowly eroding for several years, as the US has used the dollar’s central role to finance enormous budget and trade deficits. In essence, the world sends us goods and we send them dollar-denominated bonds that we could devalue at any time. The Fed could, for example, create enough dollars out of nothing to redeem all the bonds.)

Needing to be able to go it alone, without the US, will probably change the nature of those countries and their governments. Kagan gives the example of Japan, which he says came out of World War I with a largely democratic pro-American government. But in the 1920s, America instituted high tariffs and strong barriers to immigration.

[P]olitics in Japan completely shifts, and then you get the Japan that invades Manchuria in 1931.

For now, our NATO allies may cut deals with Trump and pay his tariffs, while grasping that he no longer guarantees their security against, say, Russia. Short-term, they have little choice. But that’s not a stable situation.

Germany having to re-arm to the point where it can actually meet Soviet power means a completely new Germany again. Now, maybe a heavily armed Germany will still be a liberal Germany, that’s possible. But it’s clear that Germany’s neighbors are going to have the same reaction to that level of German power that they’ve always had in the past. If Japan can’t rely on the United States, it’s going to go become a nuclear weapon state. It’s going to build up its capabilities, and tensions between Japan and China are going to increase exponentially. And if there’s one thing Americans have learned over the past century is that when other great powers get into wars, the United States is immediately implicated in that. That’s the great lesson of World War II. And that’s why we created this liberal world order in the first place.

And again, that’s another thing that I think Americans just are not conscious of. A lot of Americans think we created this liberal order to fight the Soviet Union, which was not true. It was created without regard, even without anticipation that the Soviets were going to be the big problem. It was to prevent a return to effectively a multipolar world.

Trump may think the US can just collect its tribute and live happily ever after. But history has never worked that way before. Picture, for example, a re-militarized Germany led by a xenophobic far-right party like the AfD. What could possibly go wrong?

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , | Comments (4)

The Monday Morning Teaser

December 8, 2025 – 8:36 am

This week we got a look at the new National Security Strategy. If you’ve been ignoring all the MAGA rhetoric about “heritage Americans” or blood-and-soil nationalism, the new NSS codifies a lot of these ideas into national policy. Namely, immigration of non-European people is framed as a threat to the “spiritual and cultural health” of the United States, and Europe itself faces “civilizational erasure”. So the US should not only clamp down on immigration itself, but back the “patriotic parties” in Europe that want to preserve European whiteness.

Also, the US no longer stands for any particular principles like democracy or human rights. Instead, we want to do business and make money wherever we can, without disturbing “other countries’ differing religions, cultures, and governing systems.” (Except for Europe, where we want to see right-wing parties take power.) And we no longer envision or support a rules-based international order. Instead, we want to go back to the great-power spheres of influence that worked so well until World War I.

The featured post goes into greater detail about the NSS, and quotes at length from an insightful conversation between (I can’t believe I’m saying this) Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol. It should be out around 10 EST.

The weekly summary then as to cover the increasing hot water around Pete Hegseth, yet another partisan ruling by the Supreme Court, a DoJ ad apparently aimed at recruiting bloodthirsty immigration judges, a neurologist’s theory about subtle Covid-related brain damage that is changing social behavior, and a few other things. I’ll try to get it done around noon.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (2)

Killing People

December 1, 2025 – 12:14 pm

I don’t think we’re necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead.

– President Donald Trump
Oct 23 (at 58:50 in the video)

This week’s featured post is “Crime in the Cabinet“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. Courts continue to push back against Trump. Trump’s spiteful indictments of James Comey and Letitia James got thrown out.
  • Climate change. COP30 was dispiriting. The fossil fuel industry seems to be winning the information war.
  • Gaza. In spite of the “ceasefire”, the death toll keeps rising. It’s now over 70,000.
  • Ukraine. It looks like Marco Rubio has managed to stop the attempt to force Ukraine to surrender to Putin’s demands.

This week’s developments

This week the Ukraine peace negotiations got more confusing

Initially, we heard that the Trump administration had negotiated a 28-point plan to end the Ukraine/Russia War. Trump’s amateur diplomat Steve Witkoff (a real estate mogul) supposedly had worked it out with Putin’s representative Kirill Dmitriev (who is the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund).

Ostensibly, this was “the Trump plan”. But the deal looked suspiciously one-sided, and was essentially a reiteration of Putin’s demands: Ukraine would yield all the territory that Russia claims (including territory it has been unable to conquer), Ukraine would limit the size of its army, NATO would agree not to station peacekeeping troops in Ukraine or let Ukraine join the alliance, and a few more points. Russia would yield essentially nothing, beyond making commitments similar to ones it had already broken by invading Crimea in 2014 and attacking the rest of Ukraine in 2022. Western sanctions against Russia would be dropped, opening up lots of business opportunities for men like Witkoff and Trump, if Putin felt inclined to look on them favorably.

Worse, some odd phrasing in the proposal suggested it had been translated from Russian. In other words, Witkoff had received a Russian plan and passed it off as “the Trump plan”, which Trump seemed content to go along with. Trump gave Ukraine until Thanksgiving to respond to the plan, warning that Ukrainian President Zelenskyy “is going to have to approve it” or face an even worse future for his country.

Two major things have happened since. First, Marco Rubio managed to insinuate himself into the process, pull Ukraine and our NATO allies back in with him, and rewrite the plan in a more balanced way that Putin is likely to reject. In other words, Trump’s Secretary of State for now has managed to scuttle “the Trump plan” to force Ukraine’s surrender.

Second, Bloomberg (behind a paywall) released transcripts of phone calls Witkoff had with Dmitriev and Putin’s top foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov. The calls raise serious doubts about Witkoff’s true loyalties. (The Foreign Office blogger Michael Weiss refers to Witkoff as “Dim Philby”, a play on the name of the famous Cold War British traitor Kim Philby. The nickname seems to be catching on.) In the transcripts, Witkoff coaches the Russians in how to pitch their proposal to Trump, as if Witkoff’s job were to manipulate Trump for the Russians, rather than the Russians for Trump.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan summarizes:

Trump is left with two choices: to either fire Witkoff, who is not a formally appointed official anyway, or essentially confirm that he is acting as a Russian tool as well. The fact that Trump has decided to send Witkoff to Moscow for further talks in the coming days suggests the latter.

Three sources tell the story in more detail: Marcy Wheeler, Fred Kaplan, and Michael Weiss.

My two conclusions:

  • The 28-point “Trump plan” is dead, at least for now. Ukraine will not be pressured to surrender for at least another week.
  • We’re going to see more of this kind of behind-the-throne maneuvering, as Trump’s cognitive abilities continue to fade. Strong-willed lieutenants like Witkoff, Rubio, J. D. Vance, Stephen Miller et al will keep trying to manipulate Trump’s increasingly simple thought processes to get their own pet projects through, or just do things and hope the details never rise to the level of Trump’s attention.

and someone killed one of the National Guard troops Trump posted to DC

Two members of the West Virginia National Guard were shot near the White House Wednesday. One, Sarah Beckstrom, has died. The other, Andrew Wolfe, is in critical condition. The two were victims of what appears to have been a planned attack. No motive has been identified.

The alleged gunman, identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, came to the US in September 2021 under an Operation Allies Welcome program that gave some Afghans who had worked for the US government entry visas to the US. He was granted asylum in April this year, under the Trump administration, Reuters reported. Lakanwal’s ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, which worked alongside US special forces in Afghanistan, were confirmed by the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, to media outlets. The New York Times reported that the shooting suspect had worked for several US government agencies in Afghanistan, including CIA-backed units in the southern province of Kandahar, a stronghold of the Taliban.

Trump, of course, did what he always does: blamed the Biden administration, took no responsibility for his own administration’s role, and cast collective blame on all asylum seekers.

The Trump administration has halted all asylum decisions following the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington DC, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) director has said. Joseph Edlow said the pause would be in place “until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible”.

That article is an example of “sanewashing”. It makes Trump’s actions sound like a reasonable, if maybe misguided, response. But you get a different impression if you read what Trump actually posted:

Even as we have progressed technologically, Immigration Policy has eroded those gains and living conditions for many. I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization. These goals will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal Autopen approval process. Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation. Other than that, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for — You won’t be here for long!

So:

  • Trump wants us to believe that immigrants (and not billionaires or Trump’s tariffs) are responsible for the dismal current economy and the long-term hollowing out of America’s middle class.
  • In general, even illegal immigrants are not a “disruptive population”. The vast majority keep their heads down, try not to draw attention to themselves, and work hard for very little money.
  • Trump is promoting the Biden-autopen conspiracy theory, which has no evidence to back it up.
  • Terminating Biden’s “illegal admissions” means getting rid of 1.3 million people who came here entirely legally, through programs like temporary protected status for victims of natural disasters.
  • “Denaturalization” is not a thing, unless your path to citizenship was based on fraud, as Melania’s probably was. Naturalized citizens are like native born citizens; you can’t get rid of them by labeling them “non-compatible with Western Civilization” or making vague claims about “undermining domestic tranquility”.

This is all White supremacist rhetoric otherwise unhinged from reality.

Some background: The US fought a war in Afghanistan for more than 20 years, until President Biden finally faced the reality that we were accomplishing nothing and pulled out in 2021. The pullout was chaotic, which only emphasized the need to get out: Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump had been telling us for 20 years that we were building a viable government with a viable military, but in fact everything collapsed before we could even get our people out of the country.

In the chaos, everyone who had helped the US military or the CIA was in danger. Operation Allies Welcome was designed to get them out of the country before the Taliban could find and kill them. It was followed by Operation Enduring Welcome. About 200,000 Afghans got at least temporary legal status in the US.

Now one of those 200,000 has done something terrible. So of course we should have left them all to the mercy of the Taliban. And refugees from every other country are also suspect — except Whites escaping South Africa.

and Trump continues to lose in court

Not long after last week’s Sift posted, a federal judge threw out the James Comey and Letitia James indictments because Lindsey Halligan had not been lawfully appointed as US attorney for eastern Virginia. Halligan is a former personal attorney of Trump’s and has no previous experience as a prosecutor. She was appointed after the previous US attorney refused to prosecute the Comey case.

The regime may find another way to prosecute James, but the statute of limitations has run out on what Comey is accused of.

Another court just took out a different Trump prosecutor: An appellate court panel upheld a lower court ruling that Alina Habba was not legally appointed as acting US attorney for New Jersey. Every case she has prosecuted since July 1 is now subject to challenge. The issues here are slightly different than in the Halligan situation, but similarly concerns a scheme to keep a Trump-friendly and unqualified US attorney in office without Senate confirmation, beyond the 120-day period allowed for acting appointments.

and you also might be interested in …

The Epstein files issue hasn’t gone away. The Epstein Transparency Act gives the regime until December 19 to release the files. The clock is ticking.

During the shutdown, Democrats were holding out to get ObamaCare subsidies extended, in an effort to avoid premiums skyrocketing on January 1. Republicans said no, but that they’d deal with the problem after the Democrats caved on the shutdown.

Well, Democrats eventually caved, and guess what? Republicans can’t get a proposal together. Trump briefly seemed to be pushing for a plan to extend the subsidies for two years. But that ran into opposition in the House and vanished.

The basic problem is that a sizeable number of Republicans favor a plan they can’t defend in public: Let poor people die.

Kristi Noem’s contempt of court got covered in the featured post. But that wasn’t even the only Noem scandal this week: $220 million of DHS money has gone to an ad firm with close ties to Noem. The money is for image-building ads starring Noem herself.

Under Noem, DHS bypassed the normal competitive bidding process when awarding the contracts — allocating the majority of the money to a mysterious Delaware LLC that was created days before the deal was finalized. The Strategy Group does not appear on public documents about the deal.

My annual dose of humility: The NYT’s 100 Notable Books list for 2025. This year I’ve read three: 1929, Katabasis, and Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.

In stark contrast to Trump’s apparent concern with drug smuggling, which has caused him to have the US Navy murder 80 or so Venezuelan fishermen — see the featured post — he said this week that he intends to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who is serving a 45-year sentence in US prison for drug trafficking and related offenses.

Who knows what this is about? Maybe Hernandez paid somebody off. Or maybe Trump is just showing loyalty to a fellow criminal president, or his characteristic sympathy for people at the top of a pyramid, no matter how corrupt the pyramid is.

Similarly mystifying: Trump commuted the sentence of convicted fraudster David Gentile from seven years to 12 days. Gentile ran a Ponzi scheme that defrauded more than 10,000 investors. Does Trump just identify with fraudsters? Or is there something more sinister happening?

The War Defense Department is investigating Senator Mark Kelly for his role in an ad reminding members of the armed forces not to obey unlawful orders, which is just what the Uniform Code of Military Justice says.

President Bone Spurs and Secretary Drunkard don’t seem to understand that any story placing them next to decorated-pilot-and-astronaut Kelly works to his benefit, not theirs.

Meanwhile, South Park has its sites on Hegseth in its Thanksgiving episode. The episode ends on a song that obscenely insults Hegseth, then asks “Pete Hegseth, what you gonna do? Your kids will watch this, and their friends will see it too.”

and let’s close with something fishy

No doubt this question has been keeping you up nights: Can an octopus learn to play the piano? The answer is: kinda/sorta, if you apply huge amounts of time and ingenuity to the project.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (6)