Monthly Archives: January 2026

Regarding that all-powerful ICE memo, Andrew Napolitano clarifies its, aaaaaah, evil nature:

This is a direct and profound violation of the Fourth Amendment, which expressly says people are entitled to be secure in their homes and that security can only be invaded by a search warrant signed by a judge based on probable cause of crime. [NewsMax via MediaMatters For America]

Napolitano might be described as a right-winger, but he seems to be able to think ahead:

But the thought that ICE wants to break down doors without a search warrant is profoundly un-American, and has been un-American since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791.

There we go, much better than I.

The left is feeling a bit antsy because President Trump, the Mendacity Machine, is making threatening noises.

Trump: "It was a rigged election. Everyone knows that, they found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It's probably breaking news, but it should be. It was a rigged election."

— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) 2026-01-21T15:18:23.612Z

In case the above disappears:

Trump: “It was a rigged election. Everyone knows that, they found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It’s probably breaking news, but it should be. It was a rigged election.”

Here’s the thing about prosecutors: if they are caught abusing their office, they are well-aware that they could do a stretch in prison and maybe even lose their law license. Hence the reference to self-preservation, above.

So if & when President Trump tries to pressure Federal prosecutors to go after those he considers his enemies, he may run into difficulties because the prosecutors, along with often having a sense of honor, or at least discretion for future business, also don’t want to risk going to prison just to bring false charges against the President’s enemies.

Keep in mind how Trump has already seen a veritable flood of quality prosecutors abruptly resign rather than take that risk, along with the more honorable reasons as well – I actually suspect most or all have reasons in the honorable category, rather than the risk category. Trump was reduced to nominating Lindsey Halligan, whose previous experience was in insurance, was rejected by a collection of judges as U.S. Attorney and, on January 20th, left her untenable position. If he orders more abuses by prosecutors he may see Bondi’s DoJ empty into a shell. It’ll be Bondi and Washington, DC U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and a lot of empty desks. Would Pirro do Trump’s bidding? Hard to say, she’s had many failures atypical for her office since she began her service, and she may decide No more!

I suspect the threats, above, are another smoke screen to conceal the President’s consistent and long string of failures, this time in Davos, Switzerland, concerning Greenland and NATO, as I mentioned here. He’s trying to put critics on their back foot with all the smoke, but continuing to expose his duplicity is the way forward.

The smoke is getting thick, let’s try not to stumble off a cliff.

This is a follow-up to my derisive post concerning abortion and gun control legislation concerning a decision in which SCOTUS attempted to invent and hide behind a test called History and Tradition, as advanced by Erick Erickson, and I shot it down.

The followup is that Associate Justice Brown has advanced an analysis, as part of her questioning of attorneys in Wolford v. Lopez, that exposes History and Tradition’s weaknesses, as discussed by Madiba Dennie at Balls and Strikes:

Wolford v. Lopez is the Court’s second confrontation with the absurdities produced by Bruen’s embrace of originalism, the idea that the Constitution has one true, historically discoverable meaning. At oral argument on Tuesday, the Republican justices were deeply disturbed that Hawaii defended its statute in part by pointing to an 1865 Louisiana law that prohibited people from entering private property with guns “without the consent of the owner or proprietor”—a statute that lawmakers originally adopted in order to disarm Black people. Nodding to the genesis of the “vampire rule” nickname, Justice Neil Gorsuch marveled at the fact that “a lot of people” who would normally react to historical anti-Black laws like “garlic in front of a vampire” are now citing them to promote gun restrictions. “I’m really interested in why,” he said.

The Bruen opinion, which Gorsuch joined, contains the answer to his question. State lawmakers digging up historical gun regulations to justify modern gun regulations are simply doing what the Court told them to do. It is not their fault that many historical gun regulations are racist.

The History and Tradition test contains an implicit belief that the past is the location of excellence, a belief that falls apart the moment it’s examined. Our advances in everything from tangible science to moral reasoning renders that implicit belief moronic and is the mark of people who fear change and how it’ll impact their social standing. Decisions must withstand reasoned argument on their own and throw that damn robe on the all-consuming fire.

Sorry, that’s a bit harsh, but this software engineer is just callin’ them as he sees them.

Excuse me?

With an Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo that allows officers to enter homes without a judicial warrant, the Trump administration is seeking to usurp guardrails that are enshrined in the Fourth Amendment and have protected Americans’ civil liberties for centuries, experts in constitutional law and immigration policy told CNN.

Even in an administration that has always pushed an expansive vision of its law enforcement authority, the directive is notable for the way it tosses aside longstanding prohibitions against warrantless searches on private property — a legal concept that predates the creation of the United States and is among the country’s most foundational principles. [CNN/Politicshttps://www.cnn.com/2026/01/22/politics/ice-memo-warrantless-entry-what-we-know]

No, departmental policies are not law and do not override judicial opinion and directives.

And I await, in horror, the inevitable occurrence of them breaking and entering a home protected by an AK-47 and a no-nonsense owner. We’ll have dead ICE agents everywhere and a Secretary of DHS who, frankly, should never have been appointed.

At this point, up here in Minnesota we’re at -22°F and I believe the storm is just about to start up for you folks down south and southeast.

And when did Trump’s Chumps figure it out? Just today.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has abruptly halted ongoing terminations of hundreds of disaster workers as the agency prepares for an enormous winter storm expected to pound a large swath of the country in the coming days.

In an email Thursday afternoon, obtained by CNN, staff were told that FEMA would “cease offboarding” disaster workers whose employment contracts are expiring in the days ahead — a practice that had been ongoing since the start of January.

Two sources familiar with the decision said the looming storm was a significant factor in the sudden pause, though Homeland Security officials have been quietly grappling with the fate of these workers for weeks. [CNN]

It seems a bit late there, darlin’s?!

Well, let it never be said that the current generation of conservatives aren’t all about appearances, eh? Just like, ah, grifters. Funny, that.

In the last hour or so the thermometer has been measuring the outside temperature to be -7°F, and most of that drop (from +11°) has happened over the last hour or so, and it’s supposed to stay cold for the next few days. If I may engage in some faux-sympathetic magic, here’s some summertime pics.

Stay warm and stay safe, folks.

Trunnion:

A trunnion (from Old French trognon ‘trunk‘) is a cylindrical protrusion used as a mounting or pivoting point. First associated with cannons, they are an important military development.

In mechanical engineering (…), it is one part of a rotating joint where a shaft (the trunnion) is inserted into (and turns inside) a full or partial cylinder. [Wikipedia]

Well, noted near the end of this Cruising the Cut video.

I noticed another couple of failures yesterday for the Bondi DoJ:

Lindsey Halligan, a Trump administration lawyer who was named head of a key U.S. attorney’s office in Virginia last year with instructions to seek criminal charges against President Donald Trump’s perceived political adversaries, left her post at the Justice Department on Tuesday.

Halligan’s departure followed a pair of extraordinary moves by two federal judges who issued court orders hours earlier saying they intended to replace Halligan at the helm of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia and threatening disciplinary sanctions for any government lawyer who continued to refer to her as U.S. attorney in legal filings.

The separate actions by Chief Judge M. Hannah Lauck and Judge David J. Novak, who were nominated by President Barack Obama and Trump, respectively, signaled a breaking point for the federal bench in the Eastern District of Virginia months after Halligan was disqualified from serving as U.S. attorney in the high-profile office. [WaPo]

Having moves like this one successfully rebuffed makes Trump look not only weak, but not very bright. A Trump-nominated judge was a nice touch. Then along came this admission that letting the faux Federal department DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency, be invented and run wild has resulted in one of the biggest and potentially most damaging leaks of voter information in American history:

If you don’t pay attention to the national weather scene, you may not be aware that a large, nay, even huge storm is about to pop up over the South, Midwest and upper East Coast, the result of abominably cold Arctic air sliding in underneath warm & juicy air from the south – or at least that’s my understanding from meteorologist Ryan Hall. He’s describing it as historic in proportion and intensity, with freezing rain possibly destabilizing power networks, many inches of snow, and that sort of thing.

What I’ve not seen mentioned anywhere is emergency response, including that traditionally provided by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency). While FEMA nominally still exists, it’s been disassembled and doesn’t even having an acting director, according to its Wikipedia page. While I know anti-government types like to look down on FEMA, especially given its poor performance during Hurricane Katrina, in other disasters it has performed quite well and gets full marks, even from Republican governors.

If you live in an area affected by this storm, please try to be prepared for it. Assume imminent catastrophe and prepare accordingly.

And if you’re a Federal official, please be aware that shrinking the Federal government by getting rid of FEMA is just another example of blind adherence to ideology. It’s my guess that if the storm does turn out to be historic, and I hope it doesn’t, there’ll be some Federal asses roasting over an out of control fire. Yes, including him.

Stay safe.

Former Ambassador to Russia McFaul agrees with me about the renaming of Greenland:

McFaul argued that seizing Greenland has “nothing to do with our security” and instead “has everything to do with Trump’s vanity.”

“This is a vanity project he wants. He wants Greenland to become Trump-land,” he said, “and it’s just as simple as that.” [MS NOW]

He also calls this … the worst idea ever.

The Minneapolis Art Sled Rally of 2026 – not entirely safe for work:

But it’s possible, and Erick Erickson knows it as he responds to the European Union rallying to defend Greenland, causing Trump to tell the Norwegian Prime Minister off:

And there is no Trump Derangement Syndrome here except from his most ardent supporters who feel compelled to justify, explain, and defend every single thing Trump does, no matter how crazy. You can read the texts for yourself. It’s the ramblings of an obsessive eighty-year-old who just cannot let something go.

Those supporters are probably composed of trouble-makers, posting with a malicious grin, and folks who’ve gained some social stature because of their connections to the President. This latter group are typically now working in government and are addicts of power, their conceptions of how the government should be run and the policies it pursues composed of theories of how humanity works which are, to be polite, inaccurate.

Today I was watching Tasting History with Max Miller’s episode for the week, in which he gave a very light history of English workhouses from, oh, the 17th century to the start of the 20th century, and I was struck by the similar attitudes of the GOP over the last maybe 60 years, and Miller’s description of the work houses through the eyes of the elite:

The welfare queen, for the GOP, and a worry that the poor will get themselves sent to the workhouse in order to get free, delicious meals, for the English elite of the cited period.

This lack of understanding of how the bulk of humanity works, and what they want, seems to be a common theme, even a plague, for those who oppose charity, although it defeats me as to whether it’s a cause or effect. But it remains true that modern polls and experiments, such as universal basic income, show people do want to work and not laze about. It may be an example of confirmation theory, as it’s certainly a bias that I suspect many “successful” people pick up, thinking their success has been due to their hard work, discounting the usual factors of random chance, or luck as we call it, that have served them.

Andrew Sullivan is thoroughly tired, and a little frightened, of the Greenland tilt:

The essence of tyranny is the imposition of one man’s will on an entire polity — with no checks, balances, or even reasons cited to back him up. It is, to coin a phrase, a triumph of will. In fact, you could argue that a tyrant aims for exactly such a demonstrable act of pure solipsism as soon as he can pull it off — against all elite and popular opinion and common sense — because it proves by its very arbitrary irrationality that only he matters.

That’s why President Trump’s threat to the sovereignty of a NATO ally, Denmark, is a red line. No one — neither Greenlanders nor Americans — wants what is an insane idea. No one needs it. No reason can be given for it. And yet Trump keeps insisting, like a mafia boss, that he will take it. He must be stopped.

The reasons given have changed, as they do when they are being invented on the fly to justify something already decided and totally bonkers. We were first told that this was about national security, because the Arctic — thanks to the climate’s rapid heating of the North Pole — is becoming a far more disputed part of the globe, with more valuable shipping lanes and military activity. Russia and China have their eyes on it. And so should we. …

So what’s left to defend the madness? According to Trump, the “psychological” benefit of “owning” the place. The best way to understand that, I think, is simply that Trump wants, like all tyrants, to expand the footprint of his domain. We missed this in the first term. [The Weekly Dish]

Not everyone. My friend Lisa called it pathological narcissism a few days after Trump announced his first candidacy, and from that it’s not hard to deduce his frantic grasps for power, for respect, for legitimacy.

None of which he attains.

Now he’s working on legacy, and only the howls of the power-addicted support him. It’s not as if he’s attracting new supporters with his antics. But will that matter? Someone has to remove him; who can, and will, bell the cat?

We saw this on the local news and were appalled:

Federal immigration agents bashed open a door and detained a U.S. citizen in his Minnesota home at gunpoint without a warrant, then led him out onto the streets in his underwear in subfreezing conditions, according to his family and videos reviewed by The Associated Press.

ChongLy “Scott” Thao told the AP that his daughter-in-law alerted him on Sunday afternoon that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were banging at the door of his residence in St. Paul. He told her not to open it. Masked agents then forced their way in and pointed guns at the family, yelling at them, Thao recalled.

“I was shaking,” he said. “They didn’t show any warrant; they just broke down the door.” [The Seattle Times]

The WCCO report includes the video clip. Fortunately, they let him go, although the report says

Thao said agents drove him “to the middle of nowhere” and made him get out of the car in the frigid weather so they could photograph him. He said he feared they would beat him. He was asked for his ID, which agents earlier prevented him from retrieving.

Agents eventually realized that he was a U.S. citizen with no criminal record, Thao said, and an hour or two later, they brought him back to his house. There they made him show his ID and then left without apologizing for detaining him or breaking his door, Thao said.

Another report had him driven and kicked out of the vehicle in Elk River, an exurb to the north, to find his own way home. Regardless, this behavior is, to my mind, criminal.

And taped.

So when Trump is shoved out of Washington, ICE agents that have engaged in this shameful behavior can be charged and, hopefully, found guilty and imprisoned.

And if Trump tries to defend their behavior, he can be charged with conspiracy. OK, OK, it’s just fantasy on my part, since I’m not a lawyer, but that’s what this looks like to me.

But this is why I’m surly today.

Attribution science:

In general, extreme event attribution, also known as attribution science, evaluates relative contributions of multiple causes of an event, and assigns statistical confidence to that evaluation. Most often, the term is applied to the science of identifying and quantifying the role that human-caused climate change plays in the frequency, intensity, duration, and impacts of individual extreme weather events. Attribution science aims to determine the degree to which such events can be explained by or linked to human-caused global warming, and are not simply due to random climate variability or natural weather patterns.

Noted in “The secret weapon that could finally force climate action,” Thomas Lewton, NewScientist (10 January 2026, paywall):

But climate models can be put to another use if they are run in a slightly different way. The idea is to simulate counterfactual scenarios and compare them with how things really turned out. How would the world look if we had left a certain portion of fossil fuels in the ground, for example? Climate scientists have spent decades using this technique to figure out the consequences of carbon emissions, in a field that is broadly called attribution science.

In all of the recent uproar, Minneapolis and Greenland and the East Wing, yes all that, I’m not hearing anything about the Epstein Files. Yes, the Epstein Files, the issue that was tearing MAGA apart and had the President sweating a couple of months ago.

At least, until last week, when this showed up:

The U.S. Department of Justice has formally moved to block the appointment of an independent monitor or special master to oversee the release of Epstein-related records in the long-closed criminal case of Ghislaine Maxwell—arguing that no federal court has the authority to compel such disclosures.

In a six-page letter filed tonight, to U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, prosecutors contend that recent efforts by members of Congress to force production of the so-called “Epstein files” amount to an improper attempt to reopen a concluded criminal case and to create a form of judicial oversight that Congress itself did not authorize. [MTN]

I read this as Trump going back on his approval of the original legislation requiring the publication of the Epstein Files. Sure, I could have a discussion as to whether that interpretation is going a bit far or not.

But, to my ear, the dogged refusal to obey a law approved by the President himself speaks catastrophically, yes that’s not just a decorative adjective but a real description of the situation, catastrophically of what the Trump name in the Epstein Files may imply: knowledge, participation, principal architect.

Do we even need to know the sordid details?

Or should the rank & file of MAGA simply begin gathering at the White House, calling for Trump’s resignation, ready to run him out of office if he tries to prance forth and convince them their lying eyes have lied to them again? Down that path lies sure redemption.

And, by doing so, we can avoid the world-wide humiliation of invading Greenland, of harassing Minneapolitans, of our economy continuing to head into the crapper, the whole nine yards.

Time to wake up, MAGA, to your humiliating buy-in of a lifelong grifter. Don’t be embarrassed, Trump’s had a lifetime of fooling people, and the Democrats have botched things, too.

“I dunno, they both look like cardboard cutouts. Has your brother moved yet?” she asked. He replied, “I doubt it, Mom was made of paper and Dad was a crude glue casting.”

The impact of Destination Wedding (2018) on me is much like how Groundhog Day (1993) affected me: predictable, silly … and teary-eyed charming. As the leads carried Groundhog Day, the leads of Destination Wedding provide the main lift for this mildly odd story – and it works.

A current-day destination wedding has been decreed for Keith, who we never meet, and brother Frank and Keith’s former fiancée, Lindsay, are invited. These two meet, for the first time, on the way to Keith’s wedding; why they’ve never met before is explained away as a consequence of Frank’s antipathy for Keith, and, in fact, neither of them care for Keith. Keith may be a real jerk, though it occurred to me that conclusion may be more the prism through which Frank and Lindsay view their worlds than a forthright commentary on the ever-faraway Keith.

Frank is the Cynic, questioning everything and putting the black spin on all the answers. Lindsay, still shattered at the breakup with Keith all these years later, is not so dark, and they soon fall to arguing, discussing, agreeing, disagreeing.

And, maybe, falling in love. I mean, they talk so much that you can’t really tell. It’s almost a philosophy seminar disguised as a movie.

Found in the rom-com bin at the store, Destination Wedding may have some hidden currents in it for the philosophy major, while still getting laughs for the casual viewer. You may not remember this cute story a week post-viewing – but, then again, depending on your intellectual composition, you may.

Enjoy.

I get the feeling President Trump wants to be something like a statesman:

Leaders from several countries on Saturday received a letter inviting them to join a so-called U.S.-led “Board of Peace” initiative that would initially aim to end conflict in Gaza but then be expanded to tackle conflicts elsewhere, diplomats said.

The White House on Friday announced some members of this board, which would outlive its role supervising the temporary governance of Gaza, under a fragile ceasefire since October.

The names include U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, former British prime minister Tony Blair and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Trump is the chair of the board, according to a plan his White House unveiled in October.

Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas signed off on Trump’s plan, which says a Palestinian technocratic administration will be overseen by an international board, which will supervise Gaza’s governance for a transitional period. [Reuters]

Unfortunately for him, most world leaders understand that trusting Trump is a major unforced error. I suspect this’ll go nowhere while Trump keeps screaming that everyone wants to join up.

Welcome to prosperity church cant.

From Nobel Prize (Econ) winner Paul Krugman:

Donald Trump has many weird obsessions, but his fixation on acquiring Greenland may be the weirdest. Alas, it’s also consequential. European nations are taking it seriously enough that they have sent military forces into Greenland — not exactly to fight off an invasion, but to serve as a tripwire that would mean that U.S. forces trying to seize the island would have to open fire on allies. This would be an awesome act, and also an order that the U.S. military might (and should) disobey.

So Trump is making his all-purpose response:

Trump vows tariffs on eight European nations over Greenland (Reuters)

Some quick thoughts, in no particular order:

• European deterrence has worked. This is basically a howl of frustration on the part of a mad dictator who has just realized that he can’t send in the Marines
• A tariff to promote territorial expansion is clearly illegal, under any sane interpretation of U.S. trade law. This is on the Supreme Court, which is obviously dithering while the world burns
• Trump thinks, or at least wants to believe, that tariffs are a Veg-O-Matic policy that can accomplish all goals. They slice! They dice! They eliminate budget deficits! They reindustrialize! They intimidate foreigners!
• These are nations that allegedly made trade deals with Trump. They’ve just learned what they should have known from the beginning: a deal with Trump lasts until he feels like breaking it
• Greenland? We’re going to demolish what’s left of our credibility for Greenland?

Trump is a fourth-rater, which means his philosophy for conducting himself in the world is basically inferior. Well, that’s being polite. It’s awful. It’s embarrassing.

He may make initial progress, but his driving narcissism and failure to adhere to the rules of good behavior means that, at some point, all of his friends stop supporting him and he is torn apart by the peasants with pitchforks crowd.

That’s why Minnesota needs to exercise patience while the squalling infant continues to thrash about. Eventually, someone in the group of Congress, SCOTUS, US Marshals, and Secret Service will cuff him and drag him off, much to the dismay of his adherents, but not to the surprise of former allies he’s burned. It’s conceivable he’ll fly to The Seychelles (no extradition treaty, last I heard), but I’m not sure he’s that smart.

Last Woman on Earth (1960) begins with three scuba divers in the depths off of Puerto Rico, who, upon surfacing, discover their boat’s crew member is mysteriously dead.

He has been suffocated.

And the divers, upon removal of their gear, have problems with breathing as well. However, they still have their air tanks, and, those not being exhausted, use those to make it to shore.

And another ugly scene. All, from insects to humans, are dead.

The survivors are composed of a discontented married couple and their youngish lawyer, and the balance of the story is a sordid tale of jealousy, debauchery, and possibly a trifling bit of necrophilia, although that last bit was a puzzle.

The resolution of our petty love triangle attempts to drag the Divine in, but that seemed unsuccessful. Directed by veteran director Roger Corman, it’s another puzzling addition to his oeuvre, and perhaps only Corman completists should make time to see this, even if the cinematography is charming.

The movie’s posters may be better than the movie if your middle name is Garish. See the Wikipedia link, above.

Thigmomorphogenesis:

Thigmomorphogenesis is a phenomenon observed in plants in response to physical disturbances such as wind or touch. This adaptive response typically results in a reduction of stem elongation and an increase in stem diameter, leading to the development of shorter and sturdier plants. Such structural changes help plants withstand mechanical stress in their natural environments, making them less prone to damage compared to taller, more slender varieties. The response is particularly significant in plants grown indoors, where the absence of mechanical stimuli can lead to thinner, weaker structures that struggle when transplanted outdoors. [EBSCO]

Say that five times fast. Noted in “Why stroking seedlings can help them grow big and strong,” James Wong, NewScientist (3 January 2026, paywall):

Chemical growth regulators are one answer, helping produce sturdier, more compact plants. However, many of these substances aren’t available to home gardeners. Fortunately, research has shown that mechanical stimulation – simply rubbing, shaking or stroking seedlings – is also remarkably effective at reducing etiolation. This is all down to a phenomenon called thigmomorphogenesis, where plants alter their growth patterns in response to forces such as touch, wind, rain or vibration, by growing thicker stems, more supportive tissues and an overall shorter, stockier stature. Although scientists are still unravelling exactly how plants sense and translate these signals at the cellular level, numerous studies demonstrate that mechanically stimulated seedlings are not only structurally sturdier, but also more resilient to threats like pests and drought.

Minnesota’s current and future seems to be all about ICE and the possible use of the Insurrection Act, at least from this perspective in a suburb of St. Paul, MN. If you look at Howard J. Bashman’s How Appealing blog^[1] for Friday, January 16, 2026, among many other entries is this:

“Trump Backs Down on Insurrection Act as Democrats Take the Offensive; Officials denounced the Trump immigration crackdown in Minneapolis at an unofficial congressional hearing, while the president said he no longer saw a need to send in military forces”: Jazmine Ulloa of The New York Times has this report.

Praveena Somasundaram of The Washington Post has an article headlined “What could happen if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act in Minnesota; Protesters have clashed with federal immigration officers in Minneapolis since Jan. 7, when an officer fatally shot 37-year-old Renée Good.”

And Madlin Mekelburg of Bloomberg News has a report headlined “What to Know about the Insurrection Act Trump Wants to Invoke.”

Posted at 8:32 PM by Howard Bashman

These are factual articles, at least that was the nature of the WaPo article, so I’ll supply the speculation. What does President Trump risk if he were to invoke the Insurrection Act?

• Loss in the Courts. The President has a record of failure in the Courts when it comes to ICE, such as the  recent order to remove troops from Illinois, resulting in removals from not only Illinois, but Oregon and California. He suffered a loss of prestige by that order, and decided to stem the bleeding, I think.
• Hard refusal to cooperate by the military. Attempting to order the military, which can be both National Guard and regular military, runs the risk of a refusal to deploy. After all, the US military is not composed of foreign mercenaries, but of Americans who, hypothetically, are being ordered to confront and possibly harm fellow Americans; in the case of the National Guard, fellow Minnesotans. The temptation to refuse the order, even to suddenly resign en masse, must be considered by Trump and his team. If this scenario were to occur, the damage to the Trump Administration’s prestige would be colossal, and the subsequent polls would be catastrophic.
• Soft refusal to cooperate by the military. Suppose such an order was issued and obeyed, but the military spent most of its time in coffee shops and not on patrols or frightening citizens. An ineffective deployment is not as damaging to Trump as a refusal to obey orders, but it’s still undesirable and may have more long-term damage, adding to a reputation of being ineffective.
• Mutiny. If the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Caine, chooses to classify such an order as illegal, Trump might be arrested, or even killed, if Caine chooses to take the risk of a shootout and/or losing at court-martial. I am not familiar with the General, and so cannot offer an assessment of probability. The hit on Trump’s prestige, however, would be immense, as his prestige does have some dependency on dominating others, even if only fourth-raters like AG Bondi, staffer Miller, etc, and a mutiny would be a failure of that dominance. While dying in a mutiny may have some appeal to Hollywood Trump, President Trump would realize that the termination of his time in office via arrest or violent death would do more damage to his reputation, which may be his most highly valued attribute.

Based on the above, using the Insurrection Act may not be an attractive option, although as a threat it’s useful, right up until it’s shown to be an empty threat. The President may have tromped down a path with a lose-lose terminator, but we shall see.

While he waits to see if Minnesotans can be frightened into obedience – seems unlikely – Trump’s once again trying to use the Department of Justice to personally threaten Mayor Frey of Minneapolis and Governor Walz (D-MN), who was candidate for Vice President in the 2024 Presidential Election.

¹ “The Web’s first blog devoted to appellate litigation.” It’s devoted to links to articles on appellate litigation.

² In case you have not yet encountered the phrase Mendacity Machine, it’s a reference to the man who can’t open his mouth without spewing a lie, President Trump.

If the stock market is your thing for measuring national performance and you think it’s going well, Raw Story has an article from two weeks ago that may put a damper on your celebratory steak:

A new report laid out in stark terms President Donald Trump’s toxic impact on the U.S. economy as the president boasts of a “golden age” and a country that is “hotter than ever.”

Bloomberg on Thursday wrote that the MSCI USA Index’s 16.3% surge screams champagne and caviar for investors looking to celebrate the new year — but beer and chips might be more realistic.

“Stacked up against the rest of the world, America’s stock market looks like an also ran: The MSCI USA’s advance pales next to the 29.2% surge in the MSCI All Country World Index excluding America,” the report noted. “To understand just how poor this performance was, consider that nothing of this magnitude has happened since 2009, when the global economy began to recover from the financial crisis. Stocks are no anomaly, US bonds and the dollar are relative losers as well.”

Here’s the definition of MSCI USA Index. And the ballpeen hammer treatment:

The report pinned the blame on Trump’s policy chaos, chiding that “America’s economic premium has vanished.”

It’s certainly enough to get the blood pressure up for the super-competitive – but do the rest of us care? Well, yes: this suggests the amateur hour management in the White House, what with tariffs and various other mismanagements.

Sounds like the Administration is run by laggards.

Not much on the environmental thing? Think you stand apart from Nature? Think again:

What is becoming increasingly clear is that without [frogs], humans are in trouble. It turns out that frogs — in biblical times regarded as a plague — are actually guardians against disease.

As dozens of frog species have declined across Central America, scientists have witnessed a remarkable chain of events: With fewer tadpoles to eat mosquito larvae, rates of mosquito-borne malaria in the region have climbed, resulting in a fivefold increase in cases. [WaPo]

It was Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), and, along with the frogs, and via the network, aka web of nature, it kills us.

Then [the scientists] compared that spread to county-level health records of malaria in humans. They found a striking pattern: a fivefold spike in malaria cases after the fungus arrived and the frogs died. Lips, Springborn and their colleagues published the discovery in 2022 in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Nor is this a one-off, with wolves, vultures, and bats featuring in impacting human health, human lives.

So what? you say.

So consider how capitalism handles this situation. Who is incentivised to work on this problem? Who can provide a solution that is effective?

Well, until we, all of us, allow that certain problems are not amenable to private investigation and remediation until government steps in with cash and, yes, even actual basic research, we’ll continue to suffer the slings and arrows of a nature that neither hates us nor loves us, but considers us, if you’ll allow the illegitimate analogy, simply another competitor in the great game of life.

Thinking the Divine will protect us is simple, self-destructive arrogance, and believing capitalism solves everything is self-evidently fallacious. If I ever get around to reading Adam Smith, father of free markets, I suspect I’ll also be able to say Horrifying to Adam Smith.

But these are the folks who inhabit our current Administration and can’t figure out how we can spend so much money on this, that, and the other thing. The reason we do is because it’ll be much more costly if we don’t, on average.

Some folks may be wondering at María Corina Machado giving her 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to American President Trump, as if the medal had worth in and of itself.

It does not. Meant to identify someone who has made significant contributions to peace, it’s not like a football. To possess such a medal … maybe you bought it at a garage sale.

And the point is that when a monster is loose in your land, as Trump is in Venezuela, you feed it unimportant stuff until satiated, and hope the damage isn’t too severe. Trump wants a medal? Fine, have the medal. All the adults are well aware he did not win it; it’s merely an insignificant spoil of an unwise war.

I expect that when Trump is arrested and imprisoned, the medal will be returned, if not by J. D. Vance, who’ll probably succeed Trump, then by whoever succeeds Vance.

And “Trump’s Nobel Prize” will become the stuff of trivia contests, probably under the heading of Mental Illness.