Perhaps the Federalist Society's vetting is less robust that they thought....
Also the Sinister Six's use of the shadow docket instead of actual cases. Those aren't precedent under any theory. I seem to recall reading that one of the Justices -- Alito? Thomas? -- was complaining about the lower courts not using the shadow docket rulings and said something like, "How many hints do you need about how we will eventually rule?"
Even if the DHS budget gets slashed, what would stop His Orangeness to just transfer funds from elsewhere*? Iirc he already does so in other places** and SCOTUS has essentially said that nothing can be done about it
“Defense” will get its usual boost, so it’s not as if there is no money available.
and refuses to spend funds Congress has specified for use.
Historically the President can't repurpose funds except under very specific conditions that Congress has put into statute. So far, Trump's minions have been careful to at least make a case that such repurposings meet one of Congress' conditions. Depressing thought -- if the Dems retake Congress this year, it seems possible that sometime in the next two years the SCOTUS will actually say that Congress can't specify purposes for their appropriations.
Trump's proposed budget gives Defense a 50% boost, from a bit under a trillion dollars to a trillion-and-a-half. Battleships ain't cheap, you know. In point of fact, the Pentagon has no idea how to spend a trillion-and-a-half dollars per year; it will take them at least a few years to ramp up to that.
Impoundment was settled in the 1970s while Nixon was in office. The SCOTUS will probably revisit the subject. I expect them to rule that it's a political matter and deny that anyone has standing to bring the case.
I'm trying to figure out how to interpret the part of Carney's speech where he promises to pour another trillion dollars into tar sands development. I haven't thought of one that isn't some sort of Trump appeasement.
Hard to spot, but up in the NE corner of South America, French Guiana is no longer a colony but part of France. The 300,000 residents are French citizens and vote in French elections. Ask someone who thinks they are clever for their opinion on the EU's lengthy land border with Brazil :^) 15-20% of the economy is the Guiana Space Center, owned by the European Space Agency and operated by Arianespace.
Any guess (other than Africa being outside their area of study) why Ethiopia isn’t included in the “never colonized” group?
Over about 50 years, Italy claimed it as colonial property and significant numbers of Italians settled there. (See, Italian East Africa.) Post-WW2, it went through much the same sort of protectorate process that other European colonial holdings in Africa did, eventually gaining independence. Sorting out all the borders, many influenced by Italian colonial status, didn't get fully sorted out until the 1990s.
...and demand that South American countries also enforce it in their territories and expect them to obey under Maduress.
I've mentioned before that Trump's view of South America is hopelessly Caribbean-centric. Most South American countries' top international trading partner is either already China, or China's share is within reasonable distance of the #1 partner. And it's getting worse: as soon as Chancay opened and knocked 20% off the shipping costs, three different Chinese companies began selling EVs in Peru; Tesla doesn't sell EVs in Peru.
This is typical of Trump's general world view. During his first term, he visited six foreign countries before he set foot in a state west of the Mississippi River (Cedar Rapids, IA). It was more months before he went farther west than Iowa.
There’s some speculation there that China is not ready and willing yet to take on the US in South America, and this move by the US has shown the rest of the continent that Xi is mostly talk.
The new deep-water port China funded at Chancay, Peru has entered the conversation. Peru has increased its seafood exports to China via Chancay. Bolivia has signed a deal to increase its lithium production and ship it to China via Chancay. Brazil is making noises about exporting semi-refined rare earth metals to China via Chancay. The truly paranoid are already muttering about China leasing adjacent space for a naval base.
I am reminded of an acquaintance who was in Chicago in 1968, and his advice for protesters.
If you have to drive to the site, leave your car well away from the action because any moving car is threatening.
Don't carry a sign on a stick, because sticks are threatening.
If people around you start throwing baggies full of sh*t at the law enforcement personnel, leave. Immediately. Because baggies full of sh*t are threatening.
If you're going to stand in front of advancing law enforcement, whether one officer or a line, be prepared to be hit in the head with a solid baton. Being hit in the head with a solid baton can be fatal.
He showed me the scar where the baton split his scalp open.
ICE believes they are law enforcement. So far, the courts seem to agree with them. They don't have batons, they have guns, which are much more dangerous (any fool can point and pull a trigger; batons take at least minimal training). They have less training about crowds than riot police, are milling around, lack explicit shields, so are more dangerous. The biggest difference I see is that the Chicago PD in riot gear were actually anonymous. I'm slightly amazed that we know who the ICE person behind the mask was.
Once an annexation of Greenland leads to the break-up of NATO, Canada would probably be seen as an easier target than now.
The US and Canada have mutual defense agreements that pre-date NATO and are still in place. NORAD, for example, falls under those agreements rather than NATO. If the US leaves NATO, I wonder if Canada will withdraw from the bilateral arrangements.
Are there any instances in which Denmark has refused to co-operate with the USA over collective security in Greenland?
They did not invite any US units to participate in the 2025 annual Greenland military exercise, just units from France and Germany. Total 550 personnel, two F-16s, one helicopter, one frigate. Write-ups on the exercise also emphasized the difficulties Denmark and France had getting two planes and one helicopter to Greenland.
Worth noting that a single US Wasp-class amphibious assault ship carries more Marines and much heavier weaponry than took part in the exercise. Standard compliment for an AAS is 1900 Marines with six F-35Bs, four attack helicopters, a dozen supply helicopters, three air-cushion landing craft, five tanks, eight howitzers, lots of trucks, plus fuel and ammunition. And a hospital. On the Navy side there's 1200 crew with anti-air and anti-ship missiles, multiple sorts of air and surface radar, and a long list of defensive stuff. The US has seven Wasp-class ships. Range is 9,500 nautical miles. The trip from their Atlantic Coast home port to Greenland and back is about half that.
It’s becoming clear through statements by Rubio and Miller, that the goal is hemispheric dominance by the US for the sake of dominance.
I've been saying since about February that the actions of the administration make some sort of weird sense if you assume the goal is Donald, First of His Name, Emperor of the Americas. There are lots of parallels to historical empires. Vassal states are to produce raw materials and consume manufactured goods. Citizens of the vassal states don't easily acquire citizenship in the dominant country.
Perhaps not all of the Americas, though. Like the historical Monroe Doctrine, Trump's version is very heavily Atlantic- and Caribbean-centric. There is an interesting test case: a shiny new deep-water port built by China opened in Chancay, Peru late in 2024. Bolivia has already signed a deal to increase their lithium production and ship it to China through that port. Estimates are that very soon there will be a million shipping containers per year of consumer goods shipped directly to South America through Chancay. There also appear to be lots of EVs going there as well in big roll-on/roll-off ships.
Somehow I’m in the spam bucket after a comment with no links or anything else I can imagine would flag it.
Freed it. Spam filters are the magic sauce in commercial blogging software. Good ones make sites usable. The companies don't reveal how it works, so there's no reliable way to warn people about what not to do. That's actually understandable: if the spam-detection algorithms were revealed, the spammers would be working even harder to find ways to defeat them.
On editing... To add slightly to @wj's comment, you generally have to be logged in to WordPress and have sufficient privileges to edit comments. I have enough privileges to be really dangerous, so if I want to edit, I log in, do the edit, then log out immediately.
Are the G-I-UK gap sonar facilities to keep Russian submarines from reaching the North Atlantic undetected still a thing? I assume so, since some of NATO's strategy still involves holding open the sea lanes between Europe and the (supposedly) vast manufacturing capacity of the US.
@Hartmut, if Western Europe has really reached that sort of conclusion, that the US executive branch (with cover from the judicial) can do as it pleases, w/o any attention to even the niceties of form, well... There's three more years before control of the executive can legally change hands. I would suggest Europe thinks hard about taking action:
Get serious about the mutual defense parts of the EU treaties, rather than NATO. How does France feel about a nuclear-capable Germany?
Accept that it's going to be damned expensive.
Kick the 80,000+ US military and their kit out of Europe. Soon.
Work hard to get Britain to jump the right way.
And part of me also thinks, don't ask me to constrain the Trumpists overseas, I've got a civil war to fight.
In addition to Trump's threats about crude oil resources in Venezuela, a Delaware court is nearing the end of the process to sell off Citgo's US assets. Citgo is majority owned, indirectly, by Venezuela. Citgo's big Gulf Coast refineries were specifically tailored to handle Venezuela's crappy crude oil. As I understand that case, much of the proceeds from the sale will go to the companies whose Venezuelan assets were nationalized. None of the big oil majors bid on the Citgo assets. You have to wonder if any of them will be interested in taking on the billions of dollars of deferred maintenance the oil infrastructure in Venezuela requires.
...for among other things illegal possession of firearms and intent to acquire such. Where in the constitution does it say that one needs a congressional approval for that?
If I recall what I've seen this morning correctly, the indictment that is the basis for the arrest warrant says "fully automatic firearms". Full-auto weapons are only legal under some very narrow conditions. I don't remember if a non-citizen can qualify. So far, at least, the Supreme Court has upheld state and federal restrictions on full-auto weapons.
I like to think that there's an approaching epiphany with respect to electricity, as they realize the administration doesn't care at all about higher residential power rates, they only care about forcing the use of fossil fuels, denying the use of renewables, and making the generic ratepayer foot the bill for all the (risky) new generating capacity that will have to be built for the AI data centers.
Style.min.css is a WordPress core file. There are two disadvantages to changing it: (1) changing core files occasionally has unpleasant side effects, and (2) the change will be overwritten every time a WordPress update is applied. There are better places to put additional CSS.
The center span as a unit ready to be hoisted into place is 195 feet. That includes the portions that sit on top the piers, so the distance between the pier faces is somewhat less. I think the clearance over the trail is a little higher than 20 feet; regardless, the arrow for the clearance is drawn very badly in the sense that the bottom is nowhere near the part of the trail directly below the deck.
It's always a crap shoot when you upload images with unusual sizes. Not just in WordPress, but in many social network applications. Click on the image of the overpass above to get a version that's not scrunched-up horizontally.
Yesterday it was 65 °F with high clouds here at the north end of the Colorado Front Range urban corridor. I took a ride to see the city’s new gift to the bicycle cult. The city seems to finish about one major construction project on the trail system every couple of years. The next one broke ground this month — it will close a half-mile gap in the trail system, including going under the six lanes of the second busiest street in town.
On “Feeling Philoctetes”
Perhaps the Federalist Society's vetting is less robust that they thought....
Also the Sinister Six's use of the shadow docket instead of actual cases. Those aren't precedent under any theory. I seem to recall reading that one of the Justices -- Alito? Thomas? -- was complaining about the lower courts not using the shadow docket rulings and said something like, "How many hints do you need about how we will eventually rule?"
On “Moral insanity”
Even if the DHS budget gets slashed, what would stop His Orangeness to just transfer funds from elsewhere*? Iirc he already does so in other places** and SCOTUS has essentially said that nothing can be done about it
“Defense” will get its usual boost, so it’s not as if there is no money available.
and refuses to spend funds Congress has specified for use.
Historically the President can't repurpose funds except under very specific conditions that Congress has put into statute. So far, Trump's minions have been careful to at least make a case that such repurposings meet one of Congress' conditions. Depressing thought -- if the Dems retake Congress this year, it seems possible that sometime in the next two years the SCOTUS will actually say that Congress can't specify purposes for their appropriations.
Trump's proposed budget gives Defense a 50% boost, from a bit under a trillion dollars to a trillion-and-a-half. Battleships ain't cheap, you know. In point of fact, the Pentagon has no idea how to spend a trillion-and-a-half dollars per year; it will take them at least a few years to ramp up to that.
Impoundment was settled in the 1970s while Nixon was in office. The SCOTUS will probably revisit the subject. I expect them to rule that it's a political matter and deny that anyone has standing to bring the case.
On “Carney’s speech”
I'm trying to figure out how to interpret the part of Carney's speech where he promises to pour another trillion dollars into tar sands development. I haven't thought of one that isn't some sort of Trump appeasement.
On “An interesting map”
Hard to spot, but up in the NE corner of South America, French Guiana is no longer a colony but part of France. The 300,000 residents are French citizens and vote in French elections. Ask someone who thinks they are clever for their opinion on the EU's lengthy land border with Brazil :^) 15-20% of the economy is the Guiana Space Center, owned by the European Space Agency and operated by Arianespace.
"
Any guess (other than Africa being outside their area of study) why Ethiopia isn’t included in the “never colonized” group?
Over about 50 years, Italy claimed it as colonial property and significant numbers of Italians settled there. (See, Italian East Africa.) Post-WW2, it went through much the same sort of protectorate process that other European colonial holdings in Africa did, eventually gaining independence. Sorting out all the borders, many influenced by Italian colonial status, didn't get fully sorted out until the 1990s.
On “¿Qué quieres decir cuando dices China, por favor?”
...and demand that South American countries also enforce it in their territories and expect them to obey under Maduress.
I've mentioned before that Trump's view of South America is hopelessly Caribbean-centric. Most South American countries' top international trading partner is either already China, or China's share is within reasonable distance of the #1 partner. And it's getting worse: as soon as Chancay opened and knocked 20% off the shipping costs, three different Chinese companies began selling EVs in Peru; Tesla doesn't sell EVs in Peru.
This is typical of Trump's general world view. During his first term, he visited six foreign countries before he set foot in a state west of the Mississippi River (Cedar Rapids, IA). It was more months before he went farther west than Iowa.
"
There’s some speculation there that China is not ready and willing yet to take on the US in South America, and this move by the US has shown the rest of the continent that Xi is mostly talk.
The new deep-water port China funded at Chancay, Peru has entered the conversation. Peru has increased its seafood exports to China via Chancay. Bolivia has signed a deal to increase its lithium production and ship it to China via Chancay. Brazil is making noises about exporting semi-refined rare earth metals to China via Chancay. The truly paranoid are already muttering about China leasing adjacent space for a naval base.
On “An open thread”
I am reminded of an acquaintance who was in Chicago in 1968, and his advice for protesters.
He showed me the scar where the baton split his scalp open.
ICE believes they are law enforcement. So far, the courts seem to agree with them. They don't have batons, they have guns, which are much more dangerous (any fool can point and pull a trigger; batons take at least minimal training). They have less training about crowds than riot police, are milling around, lack explicit shields, so are more dangerous. The biggest difference I see is that the Chicago PD in riot gear were actually anonymous. I'm slightly amazed that we know who the ICE person behind the mask was.
On “Moving towards Epiphany”
Once an annexation of Greenland leads to the break-up of NATO, Canada would probably be seen as an easier target than now.
The US and Canada have mutual defense agreements that pre-date NATO and are still in place. NORAD, for example, falls under those agreements rather than NATO. If the US leaves NATO, I wonder if Canada will withdraw from the bilateral arrangements.
On “2026, as f**ked up as 2025”
Are there any instances in which Denmark has refused to co-operate with the USA over collective security in Greenland?
They did not invite any US units to participate in the 2025 annual Greenland military exercise, just units from France and Germany. Total 550 personnel, two F-16s, one helicopter, one frigate. Write-ups on the exercise also emphasized the difficulties Denmark and France had getting two planes and one helicopter to Greenland.
Worth noting that a single US Wasp-class amphibious assault ship carries more Marines and much heavier weaponry than took part in the exercise. Standard compliment for an AAS is 1900 Marines with six F-35Bs, four attack helicopters, a dozen supply helicopters, three air-cushion landing craft, five tanks, eight howitzers, lots of trucks, plus fuel and ammunition. And a hospital. On the Navy side there's 1200 crew with anti-air and anti-ship missiles, multiple sorts of air and surface radar, and a long list of defensive stuff. The US has seven Wasp-class ships. Range is 9,500 nautical miles. The trip from their Atlantic Coast home port to Greenland and back is about half that.
"
Now I can see it, but it still has “awaiting approval” or whatever the exact wording is.
I didn't notice that unspamming it left it waiting for approval, rather than just releasing it completely.
"
It’s becoming clear through statements by Rubio and Miller, that the goal is hemispheric dominance by the US for the sake of dominance.
I've been saying since about February that the actions of the administration make some sort of weird sense if you assume the goal is Donald, First of His Name, Emperor of the Americas. There are lots of parallels to historical empires. Vassal states are to produce raw materials and consume manufactured goods. Citizens of the vassal states don't easily acquire citizenship in the dominant country.
Perhaps not all of the Americas, though. Like the historical Monroe Doctrine, Trump's version is very heavily Atlantic- and Caribbean-centric. There is an interesting test case: a shiny new deep-water port built by China opened in Chancay, Peru late in 2024. Bolivia has already signed a deal to increase their lithium production and ship it to China through that port. Estimates are that very soon there will be a million shipping containers per year of consumer goods shipped directly to South America through Chancay. There also appear to be lots of EVs going there as well in big roll-on/roll-off ships.
"
Somehow I’m in the spam bucket after a comment with no links or anything else I can imagine would flag it.
Freed it. Spam filters are the magic sauce in commercial blogging software. Good ones make sites usable. The companies don't reveal how it works, so there's no reliable way to warn people about what not to do. That's actually understandable: if the spam-detection algorithms were revealed, the spammers would be working even harder to find ways to defeat them.
"
On editing... To add slightly to @wj's comment, you generally have to be logged in to WordPress and have sufficient privileges to edit comments. I have enough privileges to be really dangerous, so if I want to edit, I log in, do the edit, then log out immediately.
"
Certainly Greenland still has strategic value.
Are the G-I-UK gap sonar facilities to keep Russian submarines from reaching the North Atlantic undetected still a thing? I assume so, since some of NATO's strategy still involves holding open the sea lanes between Europe and the (supposedly) vast manufacturing capacity of the US.
"
@Hartmut, if Western Europe has really reached that sort of conclusion, that the US executive branch (with cover from the judicial) can do as it pleases, w/o any attention to even the niceties of form, well... There's three more years before control of the executive can legally change hands. I would suggest Europe thinks hard about taking action:
And part of me also thinks, don't ask me to constrain the Trumpists overseas, I've got a civil war to fight.
"
In addition to Trump's threats about crude oil resources in Venezuela, a Delaware court is nearing the end of the process to sell off Citgo's US assets. Citgo is majority owned, indirectly, by Venezuela. Citgo's big Gulf Coast refineries were specifically tailored to handle Venezuela's crappy crude oil. As I understand that case, much of the proceeds from the sale will go to the companies whose Venezuelan assets were nationalized. None of the big oil majors bid on the Citgo assets. You have to wonder if any of them will be interested in taking on the billions of dollars of deferred maintenance the oil infrastructure in Venezuela requires.
"
...for among other things illegal possession of firearms and intent to acquire such. Where in the constitution does it say that one needs a congressional approval for that?
If I recall what I've seen this morning correctly, the indictment that is the basis for the arrest warrant says "fully automatic firearms". Full-auto weapons are only legal under some very narrow conditions. I don't remember if a non-citizen can qualify. So far, at least, the Supreme Court has upheld state and federal restrictions on full-auto weapons.
On “Moving towards Epiphany”
I like to think that there's an approaching epiphany with respect to electricity, as they realize the administration doesn't care at all about higher residential power rates, they only care about forcing the use of fossil fuels, denying the use of renewables, and making the generic ratepayer foot the bill for all the (risky) new generating capacity that will have to be built for the AI data centers.
"
style.min.css
needs to have an addition:
a:visited{color:red}
Style.min.css is a WordPress core file. There are two disadvantages to changing it: (1) changing core files occasionally has unpleasant side effects, and (2) the change will be overwritten every time a WordPress update is applied. There are better places to put additional CSS.
On “An inscrutable Merry Christmas”
The center span as a unit ready to be hoisted into place is 195 feet. That includes the portions that sit on top the piers, so the distance between the pier faces is somewhat less. I think the clearance over the trail is a little higher than 20 feet; regardless, the arrow for the clearance is drawn very badly in the sense that the bottom is nowhere near the part of the trail directly below the deck.
"
It's always a crap shoot when you upload images with unusual sizes. Not just in WordPress, but in many social network applications. Click on the image of the overpass above to get a version that's not scrunched-up horizontally.
"
Yesterday it was 65 °F with high clouds here at the north end of the Colorado Front Range urban corridor. I took a ride to see the city’s new gift to the bicycle cult. The city seems to finish about one major construction project on the trail system every couple of years. The next one broke ground this month — it will close a half-mile gap in the trail system, including going under the six lanes of the second busiest street in town.
On “Weekend Music Thread music thread #09 In Russia, Christmas music sings you!”
Too much Cyrillic, perhaps.
I fished it out of the spam folder. WordPress' built-in spam filter is a black-box trade secret. Too much Cyrillic is as good a guess as any.
"
...what does it take to use an icon of my own choice?
Register the e-mail address you use at Gravatar, and upload the image you want to use. WordPress loves Gravatar.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.