Monday, January 26, 2026

Resistance

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

– commonly attributed to George Orwell

What did we learn from the Holocaust? We have to act and we have to resist. If I’m not going to act and resist now, then I shouldn’t call myself a rabbi and I can’t be a proud Jew.

- Rabbi Diane Tracht,
explaining why she joined the hundreds of faith leaders
who came to Minneapolis this week

This week's featured post is "Turning Point or Tipping Point?".

Ongoing stories

  • Trump's assault on American democracy. For the second week in a row, I'm ignoring all the other ongoing stories. I'll get back to them as soon as the regime stops murdering people in the streets.

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about Minneapolis

That's the subject of the featured post.

The Contrarian makes a list of reforms Senate Democrats might demand in exchange for passing DHS funding:

In the short run, Democrats can advance a batch of proposals, for example, to cut off funds to the Minneapolis deployment absent a request from the governor; limit CBP operations to the border (as used to be the case); require body cameras, immediate suspension of any agent after firing his/her weapon, and full cooperation with local and state authorities; eliminate masks; install an Inspector General to review all DHS actions and recommend policy and personnel changes; and ban arrests without a judicial warrant.

Minnesota's Department of Corrections has gotten involved in a different kind of correction: pointing out disinformation coming from DHS. Here's an example:

DOC quickly identified 68 cases in which individuals were lawfully transferred from Minnesota Department of Corrections custody directly to ICE, only for DHS officials to falsely claim these same individuals were “arrested” by waves of federal agents deployed into Minnesota communities.

The new ICE surge is underway in Maine.

and TACO Trump retreats on Greenland

This week European leaders proved something children have known for centuries: Fundamentally, bullies are cowards. If you give them what they want, they'll demand more. But if you convince them you're going to stand up for yourself, they'll back down.

For months, Trump has been bullying Europe. Just a few months ago, the EU agreed to a 15% American tariff on their exports while maintaining a zero tariff on American imports. European leaders have tried to placate Trump with praise and flattery.

So of course, he asked for more: Denmark should give him Greenland, as if we were living in the age of absolute monarchs, and the rights and desires of 50,000 Greenlanders didn't matter. He said ominous things about acquiring Greenland the easy way or the hard way. Stephen Miller, the ventriloquist who frequently speaks through Trump's mouth, used his own lips to say that no one would fight us for Greenland.

But it turned out that someone would. Several of our (and Denmark's) NATO allies sent troops to Greenland as an "exercise". Not enough troops to repel a US invasion, but enough to possibly make American generals balk at killing allies they are treaty-bound to defend.

So Trump backed down on physical threats and instead threatened to raise tariffs again, breaking the agreement he had just made last summer. A list of European countries would face additional 10% tariffs, rising to 25% if they didn't turn over Greenland.

And Europe held firm, threatening retaliatory tariffs rather than cringing in fear.

So Trump backed down, claiming that he had worked out a "framework of a future deal" with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. The framework appears to be what Denmark was offering all along: expanded NATO military bases in Greenland and negotiations about mining rights.

But there is a long-term cost, as Fahreed Zakaria observes in "How Not to Lead":

When I asked a senior European leader whether there was relief that Trump had stepped back from the threat of military action, he said yes. “But we’ve now seen a pattern in his dealings with us,” the leader said. “He treats us with contempt. And even if this crisis gets resolved, we will remember.”

and the regime's "Nazi problem"

A number of commentators have begun to notice how often the Trump regime echoes white supremacist or even Nazi tropes. The Atlantic reports:

The official social-media channels of the Trump administration have become unrelenting streams of xenophobic and Nazi-coded messages and imagery. The leaders of these departments so far refuse to answer questions about their social-media strategies, but the trend is impossible to miss: Across the federal government, officials are advocating for a radical new understanding of the American idea, one rooted not in the vision of the Founders, but in the ideologies of European fascists.

This framing goes back at least to J. D. Vance's speech about "heritage Americans" at the Claremont Institute in July. But lately it is in virtually every department of Trump's government.

At a press briefing January 8, the day after the murder of Renee Good, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem spoke from a podium sporting the slogan: "One of ours, all of yours." Regime critics widely interpreted this as a reference to the Nazi policy of collective retribution, as when the Czech village of Lidice was destroyed and all its adult males killed after the assassination of SS leader Reinhard Heydrich.

This attribution appears to be inaccurate, in that no one can find a record of the Nazis (in German, Czech, or any other language) using that slogan. But we're left with the question: What was Noem trying to communicate here? Who is "us" and who is "you"? What are we -- I assume I am one of "yours" rather than "ours" -- being threatened with? Brendan Beebe examined the controversy in detail (and fairly, I would claim).

In the context of the Minneapolis incident, “ours” clearly referred to federal agents (and by extension, their political leadership), while “yours” implicitly meant the protesters, community watchdogs, and perhaps local authorities challenging federal actions. The slogan thus served to dehumanize and threaten the latter group – effectively saying their lives and rights are forfeit if they dare challenge federal power.

Beebe noted that Noem's defenders refused to address the question of precisely what she meant.

Notably, few Republican politicians publicly commented on the slogan itself – neither repudiating nor explicitly endorsing it. Their responses mostly mirrored the administration’s talking points: defend the ICE agent, condemn “domestic terrorists” (a term Noem used for the driver and by extension the protesters[17]), and support sending federal reinforcements to Minnesota. By sidestepping the explicit phrase, allies of Noem effectively normalized it through lack of acknowledgement.

The same question could be asked across the board. If the people who made the "Which way American man?" post for the DHS Instagram page or the "Which way, Greenland man?" post for the White House X page weren't trying to echo the classic white supremacist (and antisemitic) book "Which Way Western Man?" -- then what were they trying to do?

and you also might be interested in ...

The Epstein files still have not been released. Nor is there any coherent explanation of the delay. When DOJ tries to indict someone Trump wants revenge on, like Jack Smith or Letitia James, they're fond of saying "No one is above the law."

But Trump is. When a law applies to Trump or his lackeys, it means nothing.

So J. D. Vance excused Trump's bad economy by blaming it on Biden, saying "You don’t turn the Titanic around overnight." When I first heard that quote, I thought it must be fake. Surely the Vice President of the United States is not that stupid, because nobody is. If you compare something to the Titanic, it must be sinking. Everybody must know that.

J. D. Vance doesn't. He really said it.

Just to make sure he wasn't taken out of context, I watched a 12-minute clip of the speech he gave Thursday to an audience of manufacturing workers. (He says it at about the 9:30 mark.) As is always the case, fact-checkers must be having a field day with this speech: For example, he lumps the statistical averages in such a way that the impact of COVID falls mainly on Biden, not on Trump, who played a major role in letting the virus get out of control. (Two can play the let's-ignore-COVID game. When Trump handed the economy to Biden, the unemployment rate was 6.4%. When Biden gave it back, unemployment was 4.0%. Now it's 4.4%.)

What's makes the metaphor even worse is that it wasn't some off-the-cuff screw-up in response to a difficult question. The Titanic metaphor was part of Vance's prepared remarks. As one commenter put it: "His speech-writer must hate him."

Trump created the Board of Peace to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza. Its charter makes interesting reading.

The Board is very much a top-down organization, as the charter gives all power to the Chairman. The Chairman invites members to join and can expel them at any time. He appoints the executive board. Decisions are made by majority vote "subject to the approval of the Chairman". Decisions of the executive board are "subject to veto by the Chairman at any time thereafter". There is no procedure for overturning the Chairman's veto. The Chairman is the "final authority regarding the meaning, interpretation, and application of this Charter". There is no provision for removing the Chairman, or a stated time when his term ends.

So who is this chairman? Who else?

Donald J. Trump shall serve as inaugural Chairman of the Board of Peace

Donald J. Trump, personally, by name, is the Chairman. He doesn't hold office by being President of the United States. He holds office because he's Donald J. Trump and his name is written into the charter. When his term as president ends, or even if he gets removed by impeachment, he continues as Chairman of the Board of Peace.

So let's be clear: Any contribution to the Board of Peace is simply a bribe to Trump. He can do anything he wants with it, for as long as he lives. And like a medieval king, he names his own successor.

and let's close with something threatening

BBC Wildlife posted its 2026 award-winning photos. The overall winner was this close-up of a crocodile. I hope to never see anything like this in real life.

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Monday, January 19, 2026

All We Have

All we have are whistles. They have guns.

- Francisco Segovia, executive director COPAL

This week's featured post is "Greenland: It's getting serious". There is also an Expand Your Vocabulary post explaining "the Dual State".

Ongoing stories

  • Trump's assault on American democracy. Typically, I use "assault" metaphorically. But in Minneapolis the assault has become literal.
  • Climate change. The EPA will report only on the cost to industry of implementing new standards, not on the money or lives saved.
  • War. Venezuela already seems like ancient history. Now Trump is starting a trade war with Europe in order to claim Greenland.

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about Minneapolis

In a sane world, the administration would look at videos of the Renee Good shooting -- which clearly show Jonathan Ross killing her for no good reason -- and say, "We've got to tone this down." But of course, we haven't been living in a sane world for nearly a year now. So ICE surged additional troops into Minneapolis in an attempt to bring the city to heel. There are now something like 3000 federal agents in Minneapolis, which Mayor Frey says is about five times the size of the municipal police force. More and more, the stories that come out of the city sound like reports of a military occupation rather than law enforcement.

NPR has witnessed multiple instances where people with legal status or U.S. citizenship have been questioned about their immigration status. Everyone NPR witnessed in the last week were people of color. We have also witnessed people being picked up by immigration agents off the streets.In one neighborhood, immigration officers crashed into a car of a U.S. citizen who refused to pull over. ICE officers ultimately let him go after running his license plate. In the same area, immigration agents dragged a woman out of her car. She said she was on her way to the doctor when she encountered the agents. The agents says she did not follow the commands to move. We witnessed how demonstrators blocked the federal agents from leaving the area and banged on their vehicles. In return, officers sprayed the large group with pepper spray and tear gas and left after throwing flash-bangs.

Meanwhile, DOJ reports that it is not investigating Ross, but is investigating the governor of Minnesota and the Mayor of Minneapolis for “actively encouraging” protesters “to go out on the street and impede ICE.” Previously, we learned that DOJ is investigating Good's widow, prompting six career prosecutors to resign. Governor Walz summed up:

The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.

CNN collects nearly three minutes of videos of ICE abusing protesters. Also: racially profiling a US citizen, grabbing a woman's phone for no reason, yanking a disabled woman out of her car as she was on her way to a doctor's appointment, and using flashbangs and tear gas against protesters.

Mainstream media is not paying nearly enough attention to the role gender plays in these confrontations. ICE agents, with their masks and body armor and extreme weapons, are cosplaying hypermasculinity. They are trying to dominate and intimidate, and they get angry when people (especially women) fail to be impressed. Andi Zeisler writes in Salon:

It’s fair to assume, for instance, that Ross was looking to intimidate both Renee Good and her wife (who was outside the car, directing Renee in making a three-point turn). Neither woman gives him that satisfaction: Renee speaks to him calmly and clearly; she’s not gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles but has one hand on it. Rebecca more closely matches Ross’ energy. He has a phone in his hand; she has one in hers. She’s not scared of Ross either, instead poking fun at his obvious desire to intimidate.

Hence Ross walks in front of Good's SUV and reaches for his gun long before she starts to roll forward. I think he was planning to point the gun in Good's face and see if that finally scared her into submission. Her driving away was thwarting that plan. He felt a flash of rage and his gun was already drawn, so he shot.

As the various justifications for Ross' actions dissolve under scrutiny, ICE supporters are falling back on blaming the victim for antagonizing Ross. Fox News columnist David Marcus made Good the exemplar of a class of uppity women:

According to a recent poll, only 24% of Americans believe that it is acceptable to go beyond peaceful protest in response to ICE enforcement. But among White women 18-44, that number leaps to an astounding 61%. ... The video of Good and her partner heckling and, let's be honest, goading ICE officers with an obnoxious smugness that makes most people’s skin crawl, is just one of many. 

We see these self-important White women doing it in video after video after video, taunting cops, insulting journalists or even bystanders, often with a weird and disturbing glee. Let’s be clear, this is happening because we let it happen.

We? Are American men failing to keep their women sufficiently intimidated? It's true, I guess. In 40 years of marriage, I don't think I ever saw my wife cringe in fear of me.

And here is my warning: If we do not enforce the law, if we simply allow these cosplaying would-be revolutionaries to do whatever they want, including hitting cops with cars, Renee Good will not be the last to needlessly die. This madness needs to end, and it needs to end right now.

Let's be clear: The "madness" Marcus refers to isn't ICE agents killing people for no reason beyond offended pride. No, he insists that will continue until women learn their lesson. This agent agrees, asking a woman who is legally following his vehicle: "Have you not learned from the last couple of days?"

Border Czar Tom Homan repeated the threat on Meet the Press:

I've said, from March, if the hateful rhetoric doesn't decline, there's going to be bloodshed. I've seen this movie before. And unfortunately, I was right. And there's been a lot of bloodshed. ... We need to let [the investigation] play out. But while we're doing that, we've got to stop the hateful rhetoric. Saying this officer is a murderer is dangerous. It's just ridiculous. And it's just going to infuriate people more, which means there's going to be more incidents like this because the hateful rhetoric is not only continuing, now has tripled down and doubled down.

So I get that it upsets Homan to hear his people called murderers. But I have a suggestion for that: Get them to stop murdering people.

I know that's radical, but think about it: What if Jonathan Ross had never drawn his gun? What bad thing was he preventing by doing that? What if he hadn't stood in front of her vehicle to begin with?

and Greenland

That's the subject of the featured post.

but take a minute to learn a new idea: the Dual State

That's the subject of this week's Expand Your Vocabulary post.

and you also might be interested in ...

The Justice Department has stopped releasing Epstein files. The last new documents came out on December 23.

The "Great HealthCare Plan" Trump has been promising for a decade came out. It's a title page and one page of explanation. Nothing in it is going to make a significant different in your life.

This week's measles outbreak is in South Carolina.

No vaccine is 100% effective, but the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine comes close. Two doses, usually given around age 1 and then again around age 4, are 97% effective at preventing measles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to NBC News data, the K-12 vaccination rate for MMR in Spartanburg County was 90% for the 2024-25 school year, below the 95% level doctors say is needed to protect against an outbreak. In neighboring Greenville County, the MMR vaccination rate was 90.5%.

Another story that is all but getting lost in the avalanche of news: Venezuelan oil has started coming under US control. We sold the first batch for $500 million, and put a bunch of the money in a Qatari bank. You might think Congress would need to be involved in deals this large, what with the constitutional power-of-the-purse and all. But no, of course not.

I worry that Democrats are repeating a mistake. Lately I've once again been seeing the slogan "Abolish ICE", which reminds me a lot of "Defund the Police".

I supported the strategy behind "Defund the Police" -- namely, to empower more appropriate agencies with more appropriate specialists to respond to 911 calls that don't involve violence. Instead of men and women with guns, we might send social workers, mental health workers, and so on, as the situation warranted. This would have the effect of lowering funding for the armed police.

It was a good idea and still is. But politically, the slogan was a disaster, because it allowed Republicans to smear Democrats as wanting to let criminals run wild, which was never the idea.

Same thing here. If we start demanding that Democratic candidates pledge to abolish ICE, that will come back to haunt us in general elections. Republicans will say that Democrats want to open our borders and let people in without any vetting or process. (They already say that.)

Under Trump, ICE has become a monster that needs to be slain. The outrageous budget it got in the Big Beautiful Bill needs to be scaled back. The thuggish agents it has recruited need to be let go. Possibly it should be cut up into smaller agencies with more targeted tasks. But border protection is a legitimate mission that some agency needs to take on.

I'm not sure how to put that into a slogan. But "Abolish ICE" isn't it. When your opponents decide to lie about you, they shouldn't be able to point to your own slogan for support.

The week's most pathetic story was Donald Trump accepting María Corina Machado's Nobel Peace Prize medal.

Trump has long campaigned to get a Nobel Peace Prize, which President Obama won in 2009. He said many times this year that he deserved the medal for (in his fantasy world) ending eight wars.

Trump holds leverage over Machado. Her opposition party won the 2024 election in Venezuela, but Nicolás Maduro remained in office anyway until US troops kidnapped Maduro three weeks ago. Rather than try to install Machado or her party's winning candidate Edmundo González in the presidency, or even push for swift elections that her party might win again, Trump has backed Maduro's vice president Delcy Rodríguez. He said of Machado:

I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn't have the support within or the respect within the country. She's a very nice woman, but she doesn't have the respect.

Others have speculated that Trump was still miffed at Machado for winning the Peace Prize he had convinced himself he deserved. So Thursday, Machado attempted to appease Trump's jealousy by presenting him with her Nobel medal. It probably won't work, but it was worth a try.

The sad thing here is that Trump accepted the gift. This fits the portrait I painted last month in "Three Days in the Life of a Pathetic Man". This is a man who frames fake Time covers and still won't admit that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

Trump is president and a billionaire and the godlike idol of millions of MAGA sheep, replacing Jesus in the hearts of many who call themselves "Christians". For almost anyone else, that would be enough. And yet his own heart is such a yawning abyss that he must have Machado's Nobel medal so that he can pretend he deserves it.

As I said in the December article: Trump used to make me mad, but he doesn't any more. He just seems pathetic.

The Internet has been ruthless, spreading manufactured images of Trump accepting other awards he never earned, like the TriWizard Cup.

Josh Marshall explains the wider effects of firing the government's inspectors general and corrupting the Justice Department: It isn't just that corrupt government actors don't get prosecuted, but that they can escape public notice entirely.

There’s a natural trajectory: reporting builds a record, and then the record is the basis of an investigation. Then the progress of the investigation becomes the focus of more reporting and public disclosure. If you can decapitate the investigatory agencies, the whole ecosystem of investigation and accountability becomes like a car that can’t ever get out of second gear. You assume that axing the investigators just means no one will be criminally accountable. Actually it means much more than that: the whole system of public accountability and disclosure breaks down.

Also Josh Marshall: The corruption of the Supreme Court makes it much harder for a Democratic Project 2029 to outline the reforms necessary to safeguard democracy against the next would-be autocrat, because there's no predicting what new pseudo-constitutional doctrines the Court will invent to strike reforms down. That's why reforming the Court needs to be front-and-center in any set of reforms. Democratic planners have been slow to realize this, and it's throwing a monkey-wrench into any kind of planning process.

The point is that the corruption of the Supreme Court is actually beginning to slow, disincentivize, detour policy work. It could not be more critical that people across the Democratic world — policy, law, electoral politics — have this realization. There’s no reason to accept a situation in which democratic self-government is only allowed now for Republicans.

and let's close with something spooky

We all realize that we share certain features with other members of our families, but not to this extent. Canadian artist Ulric Collette has a project called "Genetic Portraits", where he presents two relatives as left/right halves of a single face. Mother/son, sister/brother, and so on. The results are striking testimony to the heritability of facial features. This one is a grandmother/granddaughter pair.

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Monday, January 12, 2026

Two Options

They're telling you to believe them and not your eyes. ... So the message from this administration is clear: only they determine the truth, and when their forces come to your city, obey or die. And if you die, you clearly didn’t obey.

- Stephen Colbert

This week's featured post is "Renee Good and Our Epistemological Crisis".

Ongoing stories

  • Trump's assault on American democracy. A woman got in ICE's way, so they killed her. Then the top people in the regime smeared her. See the featured post.
  • Climate change. Trump renounced the Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty and pulled the US out of 66 international groups that combat climate change. The groups "advance globalist agendas over US priorities".
  • War. With the regime so enthused by its Mission-Accomplished moment in Venezuela, we all wait to see where they'll strike next: Cuba, Colombia, Greenland?

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about ICE killing Renee Good

See the featured post. One thing I didn't get into that post: Border Czar Tom Homan is working to intimidate protesters, now that one of them is dead.

“The hateful rhetoric has caused a lot of this violence,” Homan said in a Sunday interview on “Fox News Sunday” with host Jacqui Heinrich. “So I said way back in March if the hateful rhetoric doesn’t decrease, there will be bloodshed, and, unfortunately, I was right, and it’s not over. There will be more bloodshed unless we decrease the hateful rhetoric.”

Homan added that “I don’t want to see anybody die,” asking Minnesota leaders to “work with us” despite allegations from Frey and Walz that federal officials have not collaborated with them in investigating the incident.

If everyone would just do what he tells them, nobody would have to die. Lots of thugs say things like that.

The day after Renee Good's death, ICE agents shot two men in Portland, Oregon. ICE claims they had "ties" to the Tren de Aragua criminal group, whatever that means.

DHS said the duo "weaponized their vehicle against Border Patrol" and the agent fired at them in self-defense.

That seems to be what ICE says whenever they shoot somebody in a car. Maybe sometimes it's true, but there have definitely been times where evidence shows they lied. There is no independent video of the Portland incident, but two eye-witnesses fail to support the ICE narrative.

One witness in the Portland shooting said he heard five gunshots fired in the parking lot of a Southeast Portland medical office after federal officers boxed in a Toyota truck that had pulled into the lot Thursday afternoon.

The man had been seeking care at the office near Adventist Health hospital when he said he saw the officers follow the truck into the lot at 10201 S.E. Main St. and approach it.

One officer pounded on the truck’s window and the driver appeared scared, the man said. The driver then backed up and moved forward, striking a car behind him at least twice, before turning and speeding off, he said.

About five shots rang out from the contingent of officers as the truck raced away, he said.

Back in October, Pro Publica wrote about the dangers of rapidly expanding ICE's size and mission while simultaneously scrapping all independent oversight.

Check out the Marsh Family's updating of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

and Venezuela

We're still waiting for things to shake out on the ground. So far, the US isn't occupying Venezuela, but Trump is acting as if he had the country completely pacified. Maduro is in US custody and facing trial, but his VP is now in charge and the rest of Maduro's government remains in place. How cooperative they will be is still not clear.

If the point was to seize Venezuela's oil, the Trump regime doesn't seem to have thought it out very well. The country's oil infrastructure is in bad shape, and US oil companies haven't expressed much interest in fixing it. The CEO of ExxonMobil called the Venezuelan oil industry "uninvestable".

Meanwhile, the tactical success of the Maduro operation has emboldened the regime. Trump has threatened to cut off the supply of oil Cuba has been getting from Venezuela, warning them to "make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE". As usual, Trump's threats contain no specific demands, so it's not clear what Cuba is supposed to do.

And the pressure on Greenland has ramped up again, with Trump saying that "one way or the other, we’re going to have Greenland."

Once again, it's not clear what Trump specifically wants -- and in particular, what he wants that he can't get from Greenland as a territory of our NATO ally Denmark. Trump claims to be worried about Russia or China taking over Greenland, but it's not clear why we can't defend as part of NATO.

Jake Tapper tried to get Stephen Miller to rule out taking Greenland by force, and Miller sidestepped.

The United States should have Greenland as part of the United States. There's no need to even think or talk about this in the context that you're asking of a military operation. Nobody's going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.

and Iran

Anti-government demonstrations rage on in Iran.

The Oslo-based Iran Human Rights group raised its toll to 192, while HRANA, a rights group based in Washington, said it had confirmed the deaths of nearly 500 protesters and almost 50 security personnel.

and you also might be interested in ...

Anybody who stands in Trump's way is going to have the Justice Department go after them sooner or later. Now it appears to be the turn of Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

In a highly unusual move, Powell disclosed that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) served the agency with subpoenas and threatened a criminal indictment over testimony he gave to a Senate committee about renovations to Federal Reserve buildings.

Calling the probe "unprecedented", Powell said he believed it was opened due to Donald Trump's anger over the Fed's refusal to cut interest rates despite repeated public pressure from the president.

So Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, has its own chatbot, Grok, which offers this amazing free-market feature: If you give it a picture of a person and ask it to give you an image of the same person naked, it will. Wired reports:

Paid tools that “strip” clothes from photos have been available on the darker corners of the internet for years. Elon Musk’s X is now removing barriers to entry—and making the results public.

So you might publicly or privately undress a celebrity like Taylor Swift, your colleague at work, your colleague's 13-year-old daughter, or anybody else.

But wait, it gets worse:

Grok’s website and app, which are are separate from X, include sophisticated video generation that is not available on X and is being used to produce extremely graphic, sometimes violent, sexual imagery of adults that is vastly more explicit than images created by Grok on X. It may also have been used to create sexualized videos of apparent minors.

Is that a problem? Well, Elon's people came up with this solution: They took the image-generating engine out of Grok's free version. So if you want sexualized images of your pretty niece, you'll have to upgrade to the paid subscription.

If you think this is an occasion for regulation, two governments agree with you: Malaysia and Indonesia, which aren't the countries we usually count on to lead the world. Why hasn't Europe acted? Well, maybe because X is an American company, and the Trump regime has threatened reprisals against attempts to regulate the US tech lords.

Financial Times found an interesting way to strike back without breaking its own policies against pornography: It used Grok to produce clown-face images of X executives.

I'm waiting for some curmudgeon to do this research: Prove that computer-generated deepfakes are hurting the economy by causing young men to lose their visual imaginations. That'll get some action. "In my day, if you wanted to picture your teacher naked, you had to work at it."

Ah, the romantic MAGA movement: As the ACA subsidies go away, people are getting married so that they can afford health insurance.

"I find myself in the middle of some sort of rom-com plot," he says. "For me to be able to see my doctor to tend to my autoimmune disease, I had to marry my best friend — it's like some weird twisted plot of Will and Grace."

and let's close with something too, too cute

After a week like this one, we can all use some baby animals.

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Monday, January 5, 2026

The Euphoria Period

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.

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