Donald Trump killed Capt. Cody A. Khork, 35, of Winter Haven, Florida; Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens, 42, of Bellevue, Nebraska; Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor, 39, of White Bear Lake, Minnesota; and Spc. Declan J. Coady, 20, of West Des Moines, lowa. They died for the stupidest fucking man on the face of the Earth and his almost as stupid Secretary of “War.”
Два месяца без болтовни (и с ограниченным чтением) на политические темы оказали на мой организм заметный положительный эффект: окружающую действительность удается воспринимать гораздо более благодушно, многие поводы для негодования я вообще больше не замечаю, а те, которые замечаю, вызывают куда меньше негодования, чем раньше. Если в начале января я не выдержал и написал тут чего-то про Венесуэлу, то сейчас с легкостью воздерживаюсь, несмотря на обилие новостей. Strong Moral Urgency™ уже совсем не та, эмоций прежних нету, чем не достижение.
Правда, надо соблюдать гигиену и в определенные места не заглядывать. А в комментарии лучше не заглядывать нигде. Я все-таки не святой.
Не обошлось и без разочарований. Думал, отвлекусь от политики, появится время на что-нибудь другое. А вот хрен: вместо чего-нибудь другого пришлось заниматься просто работой, которая сейчас у меня выглядит не как моя обычная работа, а как сеанс одновременной игры в пинг-понг на двадцати четырех столах. С одной стороны, увлекательно, с другой - несколько утомляет. Тут несколько дней назад с утра был совершенно фантастический туман с солнцем, а я остался без фотографий, потому что пинг-понг же. Безобразие. Но эта суета должна скоро кончиться, как раз вместе с зимней погодой, так что надежда не умирает.
Nothing demonstrates better the moral bankruptcy of neocons like Max Boot and Bill Kristol who cheerled us into Iraq and have warmongered for an invasion of Iran ever since. They now define themselves only by opposition to Trump. Total losers. https://t.co/WYsuNMXyni
ATLANTA -- The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's new acting director, Jay Bhattacharya, on Monday urged Americans to get vaccinated against measles, saying it was the best protection against the disease. Возвращение доверия к науке и здравоохранению больше не стоит в повестке дня. И слава Богу.
The timidity of Europeans towards regime change in Iran is in stark contrast to their aggressive attitude towards regime change in Russia. Last year Von der Leyen called Vladimir Putin “a predator” who can “only be contained by strong means.” In November, Macron declared that Europe “must show that we are not weak in the face of the power that threatens us.”
Why the difference? Russia, for all its malevolence, does not have the means to stoke civil unrest in western Europe. The Islamic Republic of Iran does.
It is estimated that there are 45 million Muslims in Europe, approximately 6 per cent of the total population. Of course, many will support the US and Israeli attack on Iran, mindful of how Tehran massacred tens of thousands of protestors in January. Nevertheless, it is instructive that while there have been countless mass demonstrations in western European cities for Palestinians since 2023, street protests in support of Iranians have been negligible.
European governments are reluctant to wholeheartedly endorse the American-led strikes against Iran because they fear the conflict could spill onto their streets. This alarm is not misplaced; some left-wing parties in Europe see America’s attack on Iran as an opportunity to strengthen their “Islamo-gauchisme” credentials. Zack Polanski, the leader of the increasingly popular Green party, said at the weekend that America’s attack was “illegal and unprovoked.”
The Scottish wing of the party described Donald Trump as a gangster who was demonstrating “total contempt for human rights, international law and negotiations.”
In France, Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise was similarly scathing. One of the senior figures in his party, Rima Hassan, posted on X: “Iran has the right to defend itself, and Israel has the right to shut up.”
Such is the hatred of Israel among many within the European left they are prepared to side with Iran’s murderous Mullahs, particularly if they think it will be electorally advantageous.
Fortunately, these Muppets don’t appear too worried about Belgium’s Muppets:
I'm testing the capabilities of AI. I am using kilo.ai with pay-per-use subscription to various models.
Prompt:
I need to implement a Web application using Elm language. The Elm language (elm, elm-test) is already installed on this machine. The Web application's purpose is to display a labyrinth in the browser window, which the user can then print when desired. The labyrinth needs to be drawn using SVG or similar vector graphics. Use elm-community/typed-svg library. The application needs to have some controls over the labyrinth size and complexity. The labyrinth needs to be random and refreshable each time. The algorithm for creating a random labyrinth needs to be selected in a way that allows us to adjust the difficulty of the labyrinth - not just the size. Say, whether the labyrinth has only one solution path, whether it has loops inside, whether the solution paths are longer or shorter. The entrance must be at top, the exit at bottom by default, but this is also configurable. Make a detailed plan to design and implement such an app using Elm. It should be just a static HTML with javascript, no http calls, just display a labyrinth and refresh instantly when sliders change. Write the plan into an .md file in this repository. Do not do any git commands. Create a bash script such as "build.sh" to build the app. Go
In Mirabelli v. Bonta, the conservative justices allowed a district-court injunction to go back into effect during litigation that blocks California schools from preventing parents from being told about their children’s gender presentation, name, or pronouns. The challenged policy requires a student’s consent for a teacher to do so.
A district court had granted class-wide injunctive relief to parents and teachers who objected on free exercise of religion claims and on due process claims — ultimately creating four subclasses. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a stay of the injunction while it is considering the state’s appeal.
On Monday, in a relatively extensive per curiam — unsigned — order, the court’s conservatives “vacate[d] the stay with respect to the parents.“
[…]
As to the due process claim, that portion of the order is hypocritical and offensive on multiple grounds.
In her dissent, Kagan addressed why at length.
“Even in recognizing that parental right, the Court cannot quite bring itself to name the legal doctrine—it is, again, substantive due process—that provides the right’s only basis,“ Kagan wound up. “Anyone remotely familiar with recent debates in constitutional law will understand why: Substantive due process has not been of late in the good graces of this Court—and especially of the Members of today’s majority.“
[…]
After raising the court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Kagan quoted Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh attacking substantive due process in the past.
“There are many such statements to choose from in this Court’s recent substantive due process caselaw,” she wrote. Returning to Dobbs, she continued, “Especially given the Court’s last venture into the field, today’s decision cannot but induce a strong sense of whiplash.“
The Court also cites a free exercise claim that continues to ignore what is still theoretically the Court’s controlling precedent in Employment Division v. Smith because it tries to avoid merits rulings wherever possible these days. But as Kagan observes, the free exercise claim is ultimately redundant because the substantive due process claim covers all parents, and it’s quite remarkable to see this line of cases straightforwardly being applied in the light of Dobbs, with no hint that anything has changed. And for Thomas, whose Dobbs concurrence explicitly repudiated the doctrine rather than merely logically implying its invalidity like the majority, to argue that the majority didn’t go far enough in not granting a stay to teachers is remarkable stuff even for Roberts Court standards.
In its second ruling, the Court learned to love intervening in elections and prematurely overruling state courts on matters of state law again:
In Malliotakis v. Williams, the conservative justices blocked a New York state court ruling that found “unlawful vote dilution” of Black and Latino voters in a congressional district — NY-11 — and would have required changes to that district.
The Supreme Court stayed that order in a one-paragraph order of its own on requests that included Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, the Republican representative of NY-11.
Justice Sam Alito wrote a concurring opinion for himself laying out his view that the state court-order was “unadorned racial discrimination” — a move that UCLA Law professor Rick Hasen called “bad news not just for Section 2 of the [Voting Rights Act] at issue in [Louisiana v.] Callais but for more voting protections in the states.“
The Callais case — raising the question of whether the “intentional creation” of a “majority-minority congressional district” is unconstitutional — was reargued on October 15, and the court is yet to issue a decision.
This shadow docket application raises different issues than the Texas and California shadow docket requests, which were part of federal court challenges to mid-decade redistricting. This, on the other hand, was a New York state court ruling about the 2024 congressional map, so the intervention of the court raises its own, unique issues.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor detailed those concerns in her dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Beginning, “The Court’s 101-word unexplained order can be summarized in just 7: ‘Rules for thee, but not for me,’“
This represents another application of the PURCELL PRINCIPLE: that is, it is always too close to an election for a court to rule in favor of Democrats, it is never too close to an election for a court to rule in favor of Republicans.
Steve Vladeck, who has much more about both cases, concludes:
Although my critics may not notice, I spend a lot of time defending the Court, at least as an institution. But rulings like these certainly make it harder to do so. If the Court were consistently applying procedural and substantive principles with which I disagreed, that would be one thing. But it’s the inconsistency that, in my view, opens the Court to charges of more than just being wrong on the law.
That inconsistency is not just about which substantive principles the Court applies in which cases; it’s about how the Court acts—and when. Here, the grants of emergency relief seem to reflect impatience on the Republican appointees’ part with the ordinary flow of litigation, which would surely have brought these issues to the justices sooner rather than later.
Maybe one could defend “judicial impatience” as a virtue in the abstract. But the Court can’t (for volume reasons) and doesn’t (for … other … reasons) apply that impatience consistently. And if you’re going to intervene only when that impatience is getting in the way of results you want to reach now, and not in any other cases, well, that’s only going to exacerbate charges that the justices are simply doing what they want, when they want. Whatever else that is, what it ain’t is “law,” at least how I’ve always understood it.
“A mere decade ago,” Kagan observes in her Mirabelli dissent,” “this Court would never have granted relief in this posture. (Indeed, I am confident that the plaintiffs would never have thought to ask, at this stage, for the Court’s involvement.)” As bad as the Roberts Court has always been, obtaining a nearly impregnable supermajority has made it even worse, and it continues to escalte.
По слухам с утюпчика (государственные СМИ глухо молчали, прорвало только сегодня), "либеральное" канаццкое правительство с барского плеча подарило одной доверенной группе аборигенов земли, на которых расположен город Ванкувер (и ещё сколько-то воды и гор до кучи).
Явно накрученные (не знаю, бывают ли другие) одобренными государством объяснениями искины бают, что чуть ли не 40% тамошних обитателей поддерживают восстановление исторических справедливостей. Я так понимаю, в основном живущие в арендованном жилье. Подозреваю, домовладельцы на измене примерно все.
As the fleet of EVs on the road ages, new data pooled from tens of thousands of vehicles is showing those batteries are lasting longer than expected.
Lithium-ion batteries undergo two kinds of aging. First, there’s calendar aging: They degrade as time goes on, holding less juice, even if they just sit in storage.
Then there’s cyclical aging, which is how much a battery degrades based on its use — being charged and discharged, over and over again.
That means there’s no way to dodge degradation. Whether you use a vehicle a lot or a little, eventually, the battery will hold less energy.
But the trajectory of aging isn’t a straight line. Recurrent, a research firm that pulls in data from over 30,000 EV drivers, describes it as an “S curve.” There’s a rapid decline at the beginning, a long leveling off, and then a more rapid decline at the end.
It’s nice that they last longer than initially thought. But that’s still a very expensive replacement with no repairability.
BREAKING: President Trump says US government will backstop war insurance for all shipping in the Persian Gulf.
In addition, he says the U.S. Navy will provide naval escort to tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. But note the “… as soon as possible…” which isn’t very reassuring pic.twitter.com/ifPUmv9Y3h
The outlines of something that might be called a strategy are beginning to emerge in Trump’s war. A discussion of strategy in this context should always be prefaced by a warning that Donald Trump doesn’t do strategy in the way the rest of us do. His process seems to be the emergence of a desire or need, followed by an order to others, then perhaps modified by what those others tell him can or cannot be done, after which the others do something.
I’m not interested in that process for this post, but rather the outcome and how he and others are justifying it. That outcome is still foggy, with several justifications floating around it, but I think I see some shape.
Trump has now said several times that the outcome he wants for Iran is like what happened in Venezuela. The first thing we can take from this is that he wanted a fast and easy (for him) outcome, perhaps with more US casualties. Other comments, particularly that the people he wanted to take over were killed, point to a further similarity.
Trump’s formula for avoiding forever wars seems to be to remove the ornery top people, corrupt those just below them to do as Trump says, and call it a success. This avoids the kind of breakdown that occurred in George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. Or at least has so far in Venezuela.
The part we haven’t seen is the corruption of substitutes. This would have been easier in Venezuela than in Iran, although the details of how it was done in Venezuela are not available. There was little to no chance of it in Iran. Israel probably could have accomplished it more easily than the US, but their motivation to do it would have been low. And the US has the son of the former Shah in reserve.
The Venezuela operation was accomplished by the US alone. In Iran, Israel is also an actor, and their objectives tend more toward chaos than replacement at the top. Iran itself had a deep succession plan because they knew they were a target. That would provide potential targets for corrupters – those people who are now dead – but those targets would be less likely to be corruptible than those in the more open Venezuelan system.
Trump’s current floundering – today he said they hadn’t expected Iran to hit back – indicates that there may have been little of that attempt to corrupt, although Trump did have an analogy in his head.
Isfahan, where Iran’s enriched uranium is believed to be stored or buried, has been relatively untouched in the current campaign. Are they planning to do a special operation to retrieve it? That would be an analogy to Venezuela – bring out the uranium instead of Maduro. Isfahan is much further from US warships than Caracas, and Iran has more air defense. There’s a good chance that analogy wouldn’t work too.
Joyce Carol Oates makes what seems in retrospect like a very obvious point, but not one that occurred to me at the time:
fortunately US didn't elect a woman president to prattle on cluelessly about interior decorating in a time of war; if so, calls for her impeachment would be immediate. https://t.co/p5xJiXvSDX
— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) March 2, 2026
Meanwhile, Trump says he’ll just invade Spain if he feels like it:
“Spain has been terrible,” he continued. “In fact, I told [Treasury Secretary] Scott [Bessent] to cut off all dealings with Spain.”
The president cited Spain’s refusal to increase their defense spending along with other NATO member countries, and the country’s refusal to allow the U.S. to use their bases as part of the operation in Iran.
“We can use their base if they want. We can just fly in and use it. Nobody’s going tell us not to use it,” he said.
“We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain,” he declared, before ripping into Starmer.
“And by the way, I’m not happy with the U.K. either,” he said.
Trump condemned the U.K.’s move to give up the Chagos Islands, which is home to the Diego Garcia military base, to the East African country of Mauritius.
An LGM reader reminds me of Churchill’s apparently apocryphal remark about the virtues of democracy:
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
There’s no evidence Churchill ever said this, although I doubt he would have quarreled much with the sentiment. (Churchill was many things, but a democrat wasn’t really one of them, except as a matter of absolute necessity).
In any event, the best argument against democracy, from now until the heat death of the universe, is and will remain Donald Trump.
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