The Opposite of Iraq

That was pretty interesting, rhetorically speaking, from Secretary of War (as you know, the title is his idea, not mine) Hegseth in yesterday morning's presser, the first official comment on the war they started on Saturday:  

To the media outlets and political left screaming, "Endless wars." Stop. This is not Iraq. This is not endless. I was there for both. Our generation knows better, and so does this president. He called the last 20 years of nation building wars dumb, and he's right. This is the opposite. This operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission. Destroy the missile threat, destroy the Navy, no nukes.

One of the interesting things is that, two months ago, he said basically the same thing about the war on Venezuela, that it was the "exact opposite" of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I take that to mean that it's not a nation-building exercise but a nation-destroying exercise, and not "endless" because the intention was to walk away as soon as it was destroyed enough, except for the oil. Kind of like a Trump casino, where the Emperor always takes some money away from the catastrophe for himself. 

That's what happened in Venezuela, and it looks like what they're hoping for in Iran as well. Certainly Trump was planning to name a new Supreme Leader after the old one was assassinated, somebody from the existing Islamic Republic hierarchy, just as he named Venezuela's new president from the Bolivarian Socialist Party instead of looking to the opposition there, but Israeli bombs killed all the candidates, so that will be harder to do:

 Seems weird to be the one to name the replacement dictator (they were hoping to pick one from the more "pragmatic" faction of the IRGC) at the same time as you're urging the population to revolt against the dictatorship, like he's expecting to be on both sides of the civil war he's trying to start, but perhaps Binyamin Netanyahu, if that's really who's giving Trump his orders, along with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (in private calls with Trump, though he's publicly against the war), doesn't think Trump or his writers need to know how civil wars work. 

Government of Carelessness

 

So we may be on the brink of fighting our second war with Iran in eight months. Or maybe not, who can say? "We'll see what happens," as the commander-in-chief always says. I think he generally means he'll see it on TV and he won't be sure until then, and find out what his decision was at the same time as the rest of us do.

I mean this more or less literally: that his more gnomic utterances, especially the social media posts when he writes them himself, should be understood as oracular, like the words of a Sibyl, possibly drug-induced, but in need of interpretation. They represent Trump's hopes, the thing he wants done, but in a way that can't be understood directly, and that indeed he can't understand himself. His lieutenants have to divine it for him, and put it into action, and then he'll know.

In a way that's not even particularly weird. It's really nothing more than the familiar figure of the psychopath CEO, like Dilbert's boss in the old comic strip when it was good (may its memory be a blessing!). It's not so hard to interpret what he's saying if you just remember that (a) it has a context, and (b) he's a psychopath. 

There was a delicious example in yesterday's news, with the melodramatic AI image of the US hospital ship being sent posthaste to rescue all the suffering Greenlanders from their ailments (Greenland runs its extremely good single-payer healthcare on Danish lines with Danish assistance, of course). WTH was that about?

Disillusionment

 

The worst of the worst, really?

I was gone for a couple of weeks, and when I got back the whole place had gone nuts. The president seemed bent on conquering Greenland, apparently because he thinks the island is as big as it looks in the traditional Mercator projection and he just had to have it, and had in fact persuaded the Venezuelan Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado to give him her prize, or at least the gold medal that represents it (the prize itself also includes a variable monetary award of around 10 million Swedish kronor or one million US dollars, which the recipient normally uses to benefit the cause for which it was awarded, and which Machado didn't surrender to Trump, as far as I can learn, though I'm sure he'd have cheerfully accepted the money if it was offered, and the reputational enhancement that comes of having been judged worthy of the prize by the Norwegian committee, a glory that can no more be transferred than that of Trump's unearned Super Bowl rings and Purple Hearts, as the Committee made clear). 

Then there was the paramilitary occupation of Minnesota by 2000 irregular troops, 3000 after January, which seemed a good deal more serious than all that tomfoolery, more Miller than Trump if you know what I mean, with ICE and CBP terrorizing the Twin Cities with their arbitrary seizures of people, especially Somali and Latino, in "Operation Metro Surge" since Trump condemned Somalia as "garbage", not so different from what we'd already seen in California, Illinois, Oregon, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C., in particular the ethnic profiling leading to arrests and detention of US citizens and permanent residents and otherwise protected people and kidnaping of children, parking them in the hideous prison camps rising around the country, not to mention all the simple people occupying what may be considered an "illegal" position on US territory (I'll get to that later) doing nothing but working, often in what we call "essential" occupations, educating themselves, and caring for their kids—the exceptional discipline of the general population rising to help protect their neighbors evade the invaders—and the out-of-control response of the latter, who seem to have decided they're at war and so far murdered two.

Things are now apparently getting a little bit better. Seven hundred of the Guards have been removed from the site. Citizens and other officially protected individuals are still getting wrongfully arrested for immigration violations, but are now able to file a habeas claim to get out, though not very quickly: it's going to take you a long time to get your day in court as the entire federal justice system in Minnesota collapses:

the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office has been crippled by mass resignations, including some of its most senior career attorneys. That has left the remaining DOJ attorneys in Minnesota inundated with more cases than they can keep up with. But I’m not sure that does justice to what’s been happening. It’s quite a bit worse than that.

The quality of lawyering has eroded to such a point that government lawyers have been unable to keep up with the court orders demanding that detainees be released. As a result, detainees have lingered in confinement even after courts have ordered their release....

You've probably heard of Julie Le, a DHS lawyer seconded to the U.S. Attorney's Office who was called in to explain why ICE was failing to comply with court orders and more or less broke down in front of the judge:

“I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep,” Le said. “The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need.”

***

Housekeeping

Hanoi Train Street (Trần Phú), cutting through the city's Vieux Quartier, is neither on the wrong nor the right side of the tracks, but both sides, and lined with cafés where trainspotting locals and tourists gather, often to take pictures of the trains passing at a perilous distance between the rows of tables, and of each other (this picture, from Vespa Adventures, is a lot better than mine). Apparently closed down in 2023 by concerned officials after a near-accident, it is now back in operation.

I really should have said something sooner, but I've been pretty busy with this Vietnam vacation, more packed with planned touristy activities than I'm accustomed to, not that I'm apologizing for that (in fact I'm kind of liking that aspect a lot, especially in Hanoi, a wild city it would have taken us years we don't have to be able to negotiate for ourselves),  but I haven't had a couple of hours together when I could put my thoughts to the current situation since New Year's Eve. We'll be reducing the pace considerably starting tomorrow, and heading for familiar Singapore in a couple of days, and I hope to be posting more substantially again soon.

Mamdani

 

My photo, not the shop I've been going to since COVID inflation made haircuts equally unaffordable everywhere, but mine is also called "Excellence". My shop has Arab barbers, but I go there not just because they're Arabs but also because they straight-razor shave the back of my neck and give me a great hot towel.

Happy New Year! The New York City news, of the inauguration of my borough president Mark Levine as city comptroller, Jumaane Williams as public advocate (a New York institution in which he has served since 2019, preceded by Attorney General Letitia James and former mayor Bill de Blasio), and our new mayor Zohran Mamdani, really feels like a beginning of something in a way New Year festivities rarely do (I don't know but I think January 1 is a pretty unusual date for holding inaugurations; Spanberger's gubernatorial, in Virginia, is going to be January 17 and Sherrill's in New Jersey on January 20).

The ceremonial itself, and the speeches, were pretty inspiring, as far as I'm concerned. I really liked Levine pointing out that each of the three of them swore on a different holy book, and Williams getting emotional, and then asking all of us to take an oath together:

— that no one let go of anyone’s hands, because if we’re all connected, we can’t lose anyone. So we hold on to the hand of our neighbor, and we reach out with our other hand to grasp someone who may fall through cracks, and we bring them along. I want everyone, if they’re comfortable, take a hand of the person next to you, or the arm, and just repeat after me. We can all be the voice of the people.

CROWD: We can all be the voice of the people....

Echoing Mamdani's tribute to the collectivity of democracy in his November victory speech:

Holiday reading: Jon Swift memorial

One of the meanings of Italian "batocchio": The thing you use to whack your Tibetan therapeutic singing bowl, in black chamois and wood, with wooden bowl, €49.90 from macrolibrarsi.

Oh, hell, the gang's all here! OG blogger Batocchio has mounted the annual Jon Swift Roundup for 2025, honoring the late Jon Swift/Al Weiser and the ghosts of blogs past and blogs present and Blogmas yet to come, and the blogiverse itself, such as it is gathering the bloggers' best posts of the year, in the bloggers' opinion (and we're nothing if not opinionated!). So pay it a visit!

Epstein Narratology

Not finding a credit for this widespread image. Can't reach the T-shirt company, Picturestees, that was selling it at Halloween.

Everybody loves a good Christmas ghost story, and I don't mean the Dickens of A Christmas Carol, but something a lot darker, the kind of ghost story that offers a real chill without a compensatory sweetness. This one is maybe altogerther too creepy, in fact, especially in the sense that you can easily imagine it's true, though that's unlikely. It's about that postcard that showed up in the Epstein document dump yesterday, purportedly addressed by Jeffrey Epstein shortly before his death to the notorious child molester Larry Nassar, the team doctor of the women's national gymnastics team, who assaulted the young athletes under his care for years before he was finally stopped:

Bye, Elise

 

21st congressional district, New York, via Wikipedia,

Some gossip, mostly from a caller from New York's 21st congressional district, on the radio WNYC Brian Lehrer, unable to link at the moment), about Rep. Elise Stefanik: that she's never liked the district, the state's largest geographically and most sparsely populated and of course poorest, if only because it's too cold, not too mention plagued by awful unemployment and alcohol and drug abuse. She's not even from there but from Albany; she's a carpetbagger, claiming residence on the basis of what upstaters call a "camp", or summer place, owned by her parents. She hasn't done a town hall for six years, and in what the local press categorized as a "rare visit" for a ceremonial function in August, to Plattsburgh, the booing stopped her from addressing a crowd consisting mostly of anti-Trumpers:

"Well, Elise has not shown up in our district for months and months," said protester Mavis Agnew. "She won't hold a town hall, she won't take questions. She's never in her office. People show up at her office constantly, door's closed. Her representatives, her employees won't talk to her... So this was her first appearance, the first opportunity we had to let her know we're unhappy."

She got a more positive response in February, but that was what was advertised as her farewell tour, when she was expecting to leave the House for a stint as US ambassador. Then, when Trump ordered her to stay in Congress instead to protect his razor-thin majority, a visit to Saranac Lake celebrating a federal grant for the firehouse (in an appropriation signed by President Biden) was received with "mixed emotions".

The other thing is, the district isn't inevitably Republican; it was held by Democrat Bill Owens, defeating a GOP torn by culture war issues, from 2009 through 2015, and voted for Obama twice, along with Schumer and Gillibrand (whose 20th congressional district overlapped a good deal with where the 21st is today).

Her dropping out of the governor's race is pretty easy to understand: she was certain to win the Republican primary, but very likely to lose the general election, and certain to lose, at least as long as Trump refused to endorse her, which he did for his own Trumpy reasons; perhaps he was mad at her for even considering giving up the congressional seat, like she valued herself more than him. You can see how that would be hard for him to take. Whatever happens to her next, she's certainly an instance of the Trump Curse. I"m sure she'd love a job in Washington, but I really feel she's headed for being relatively alive on the proverbial Farm Upstate. 

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.