Cornered

To be sure, I was somewhat surprised to find that people were still out protesting on behalf of the Palestinians. At least out here... given that the war with Israel has quieted down, I would have expected, if protests were still going to happen, that they'd be taking place closer to "the Other Washington." But I suppose that this just shows what I know; I can't really think of a good reason for people to allow their concerns to fade from the public's consciousness.
 

Small Time

Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email, publish photos and documents

Is that all?

Okay, who cares? "We in ur e-mail, posting ur pics," doesn't really seem to move the needle in a shooting war. I would have thought that Iranian cyber-warfare would be more... warlike. If getting into Kash Patel's Gmail account is the best they can do, why are they bothering?

While President Trump's random boasting about Iran suing for peace comes across as complete fantasy, it's still been fairly clear that this is a one-sided war to this point, as Iran has no real way of defending its territory from U.S. air power. Accordingly, the United States can strike pretty much when and where it wishes. And, the legitimacy and necessity (and maybe the actual drivers) of this particular conflict aside, the Iranian military was unable to protect it's Head of State, and has been shown to be unable to protect it's own high-ranking members in the past. A simple hack of someone's e-mail account doesn't do anything to make the country seem more able to make a real fight of it.

Now, that could change if the United States puts soldiers on the ground in Iran. Taking and holding territory is always more difficult than launching in munitions from a distance. But it's not like this exfiltration of data from Director Patel's personal e-mail account show that Iran is more capable in that regard than one may have first thought, either.

In the end, this sounds like empty boasting. I guess we'll see if it turns out to be more than that.

Misfired

At the risk of coming across as flippant, I'm going to quote Superman, from the DC Comics series Kingdom Come. "You can't have a war," the Man of Steel said to Wonder Woman, "without people dying." To which most people, I expect, would respond with something along the lines of: "That, we knew already." People generally understand the nature of war. While it might not be true that "War never changes," there are certain things that tend to be constants; like casualties.

After the first three deaths were reported, Trump told NBC News on Sunday: “We have three, but we expect casualties, but in the end it’s going to be a great deal for the world.”
[...]
Then in a video posted to social media the same day, he again seemed to ask for people’s understanding about the subject.

“And sadly, there will likely be more [deaths] before it ends,” Trump said, before adding: “That’s the way it is. Likely be more.”

He then added: “But we’ll do everything possible where that won’t be the case.”
Trump’s and Hegseth’s awkward comments about US troop deaths in Iran war

But another constant is the deaths of non-combatant civilians.

Speaking aboard Air Force One on Saturday, President Trump accused Iran of being responsible for the school bombing.

"Based on what I've seen, I think it was done by Iran," Trump said. "Because they're very, inaccurate as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran."
Video appears to show U.S. cruise missile striking Iranian school compound

On the one hand, I understand the President's looking to shift the blame. After all, he's been pushing a narrative of the United States being the unambiguous Good Guys in this conflict, even if looks like, once again, President Trump using the military to go after a nation that no-one else is close enough to that they'd be willing to stand up for them, and that doesn't have the wherewithal to fight back in kind.

But on the other hand, there's nothing new or unusual about inaccurate or outdated intelligence, or weapons not being quite as "precision guided" as they're advertised as being. People die in wars. And sometimes, they're people that everyone would rather had not been killed. The history of war is littered with people who has the misfortune of happening to be somewhere that a weapon also happened to be, but who weren't the intended, or presumed, targets of that weapon. Why would anyone expect this particular war to be any different?

It's reasonable for people in the United States to want their nation to have clean hands. It's less reasonable to expect that a war being fought mainly with long-distance weapons is going to result in clean hands. And if the President wants to keep American casualties to a bare minimum, then the United States is going to have to do much of its fighting from a distance. And the more that the war relies on hitting targets from a long way away, the more it relies on reports of what's where and who's who, the more that there are going to be times when a bomb, or a missile or whatever hits someone that it wouldn't if someone had realized precisely who was in the line of fire. The Commander-In-Chief, off all people, should be prepared to own up to that.

Another Go-Round

There was a protest today; big surprise. I didn't see it take place... I only caught some of the preparation for it, a long line of cars, formed up on the shoulder of Interstate 405 North, bedecked with flags. There were a number of Iranian flags, and a fairly good representation of the Stars and Stripes, too. What was somewhat surprising was the number of Israeli flags that the protestors had brought along. Traffic was flowing too quickly (as in, it wasn't stop-and-go) for me to risk taking a picture. I'd hoped to get a snapshot when I came back the other way, but by then, the protest had moved from its staging area to wherever it was actually planned for.

I'm starting to have the same thought whenever I see a large protest against the Administration around here: This place is too Blue for anyone to care. Neither the President nor Republicans in Congress are going to be moved by a protest in the Seattle suburbs. It's much more likely that they'll regard it as convenient fundraising fodder, casting the protestors as anti-American supporters of the government of Iran.

I understand why dialog with Red America isn't happening, but I'm still of the opinion that it's the most fruitful path forward. Which, perhaps, isn't saying much. It's possible that the United States is too far gone for a coming together to even be possible, let alone change anything. There's too much invested in the fighting, and each side sees backing away from that investment as a crippling loss.

News reports claim that the Supreme Leader of Iran has been killed in the strikes, and we'll see how things materialize in the wake of that. It's unlikely that the United States will be able to find someone high up in government who will agree to work with Washington, as happened in Venezuela. But it's just as unlikely that Iran would fare much better than Iraq did, in the event of an invasion. So the best case scenario may be an internal uprising within Iran. We'll see if it comes to pass.

Yo Ho Ho

The United States has apparently seized a tanker ship carrying oil from Venezuela to Cuba. The stated rationale for this is that the ship has been sanctioned for, at some point in the past, carrying oil from Iran, when that nation was barred from exporting.

I hadn't realized that vehicles could be sanctioned this way. Until now, I'd been under the impression that sanctioned were always leveled against individuals and organizations, whether those were businesses, governments or other entities. I looked at a United Nations page on sanctioned vessels, and it seems the main penalty there is that such ships are to be barred from ports. Which, honestly, seems kind of toothless to me. After all, if someone is sending goods into North Korea, it makes sense that they would simply use ships that had the range to make it all the way there without needing to make any stops along the way.

So in this sense, the Trump Administration seizing the ship makes a certain amount of sense. What I'm a bit dubious about is the fate of the cargo.

Asked what would happen with the oil, Trump said: "We keep it, I guess."

US seizes sanctioned oil tanker off coast of Venezuela, Trump says

Maybe it's just me, but this seems like it's making the United States Coast Guard into commerce raiders at best, and privateers at worse. But maybe there's some rule that says that people ship things on sanctioned vessels at their own risk.

Still, it creates a perverse incentive for President Trump, at least, to wait for sanctioned vessels to load up on cargoes and then seize them, if the cargo is then free for the taking. This is an act that I can see other nations getting in on. Although President Trump does seem to have a real soft spot for anything having to do with petroleum.

But I wonder about the real goal here. It seems fairly clear that this is a means of putting pressure on the Maduro Administration, although knowing President Trump, I'm doubtful that much thought has gone into what happens if it works. There may be an attempt to set up a pro-Washington client government in Caracas, but I'd be willing to bet that any such effort would be doomed to failure, especially if it seemed that the United States was hoping to set up the sort of cheap resource hub that the Bush Administration supposedly had in mind for Iraq. I suspect that Russia and China already have accounts set up to bankroll and anti-American insurgency if President Maduro loses his grip on power.

The United States playing pirate as a way of throwing its weight around will, of course, have consequences. But not for the President or Congressional Republicans. The rest of us will have to wait and see what this most recent act of international bullying costs us. This could be a very expensive tanker's worth of crude, when it's all said and done. 

Watching

Data Protection Commission Ireland has posted a video online, titled "Pause Before You Post." This was brought to my attention on LinkedIn, which noted its use of AI. The implication was that "Pause Before You Post" was created entirely with AI, but I'm not sure.

In any event, "Pause Before You Post" is a stereotypical "stranger danger" public service announcement. It show a young girl, Ava, and her parents in a shopping mall, while random adults make comments that demonstrate they understand some of the details of Ava's life. The soundtrack could have come from a slasher movie, and Ava spends most of the video looking suitably frightened of the people who address her. And, of course, it's hinted that one of those adults might be a pedophile.

The root cause, of course, is shown to be the parents' social media posts. They've been sharing random details online, and creepy strangers have been reading them. And since these strangers are creepy, they've been speaking to Ava with a familiarity reserved for friends and family members.

I get it, but I wonder if there wasn't a better way to go about it. "Pause before you post" is sound advice, but the underlying message seems to be "treat the details of your child's life as state secrets," rather than "understand who you're sharing things with." Of course, almost anything shared online can become public. After all, someone can simply take it and repost it publicly. But while public posting may be the default, for many platforms, it's not a requirement. If a parent wants to share a self-deprecating post about being late to pick their daughter up from soccer practice, they can simply choose to only share it with online "friends"/contacts. But it's easier to get a message that everyone one doesn't know might be dangerous, or have designs on one's children, into a 40-second video spot. Nuance often takes more time than people feel they have to communicate.

As far as the "AI-ness" of it all, the only thing that really stood out for me was the fact that Ava was the only visible child in the spot. Maybe it's just how modern malls are, but the place seemed really sparsely populated in general. There's nothing odd about that, in and of itself; extras can be expensive, too, and the idea that Ava and her parents are alone in this situation adds to the overall sense of creepiness, but it was something of a reminder that generative automation isn't ready to replace people wholesale yet.

I rate it a "C," for being an effective vehicle for a too-simplistic message. I have a dislike for scare tactics, especially when there are better means of reaching the same goals, but perhaps this is why I'm not in advertising.

Dark Strokes

 So I saw this headline on the BBC this morning: "Tories pledge to remove 750,000 migrants under borders plan." Given the fact that the United Kingdom's Conservative Party feels that the most pressure on it is coming from Nigel Farage and the Reform Party to their political right, this makes sense. But I'll come back to this.

Because there was another headline that caught my attention: "'I have everything to ruin you' - BBC tracks down sextortion scammer targeting teenage boys." I have a passing interest in Internet fraud, and the media coverage thereof; accordingly, I wanted to see if the article had anything interesting or new in it. The piece is bookended by the stories of Kari and Brad Boettler and South Carolina State Representative Brandon Guffey (R-48th District). Each had a son, Evan Boettler and Gavin Guffey, respectively, who committed suicide after who they thought was a young woman turned out to be an internet blackmailer, or "sextortionist" in common parlance.

But the headline notes that the BBC tracked down one of these Internet extortionists, and that's what I was interested in. The trail takes them to Nigeria, and they start talking to people there. The Nigerians, unsurprisingly, do not come off well. This statement about Nigeria's "Yahoo Boys" sets the tone for much of the middle of the story:

These young men, often in their 20s, live in impoverished areas but dream of fast cars and quick money.

The first young man they speak to is identified only as "Ola." He comes across as callous, due to poverty; he's quoted as saying "I don't feel bad because I need the money." Interestingly, it's not noted what he needs the money for. The reader is left to presume that he simply wants to wealth, and the status in his community that comes with it. Ola is also presented as being ignorant, "It was apparently impossible for Ola to believe a British or American teenager couldn't pay. In his mind, being born in the West automatically meant privilege." Which is easy enough to understand, I suppose, but Ola is also shown as being Internet-savvy enough to create fake profiles of young women, using internet-based tools to generate names. As an aside, it takes a certain amount of knowledge to use these properly... otherwise one can wind up creating a LinkedIn profile for a woman named "Keith."

Of the prestigious "Mc" family, no less!

When the BBC talks to "Ghost," a leader of a "Hustle Kingdom" or group of young men collectively engaged in online frauds of various sorts, he "said they were mainly conducting financial scams, mostly romance, not sextortion, as he was a 'God-fearing person.' He said only people with a 'black heart' did this." One wonders precisely which school of Christian theology allows for defrauding people by tricking people into thinking they've found a new (if financially needy) life partner, but frowns on the rug-pull of attempting to blackmail them.

"Ghost's" religiosity becomes a convenient segue to the next bit of the story, in which we're told that the Yahoo Boys engage in "visiting local priests to bless scams, and to cast spells they believed would make victims more compliant, or protect the scammers from being caught." Case in point being one "Ade," who allows the BBC to tag along as he visits a "cyber-spiritualist" for a ritual "a ritual the spiritualist said would bind him to wealth and protection," and involved the sacrifice, and partial consumption, of a dove.

When I asked how common this was, the healer told me he saw six or seven Yahoo Boys a day. For Ade, it was not superstition but a business expense.

I suspect that for most of the BBC's readers, especially in (but not limited to) the industrialized West, it is simply superstition. Backwardness pressed into service to facilitate crime. Not that Nigerians are above using the tools of high-technology; and shelling out for them. The next fraudster the BBC speaks to reporting hiring a woman to facilitate his frauds, and spending $3,500 on a deepfake face-swapping tool, claiming that the returns justified the investment.

The story turns back to the United States for a time, getting responses to the concerns raised from Meta and Snap. To be sure, they don't come off all that great, either, but corporate CYA-speak rarely does. But we do go back to Nigeria one last time, as it turns out that the BBC was specifically looking for whomever had extorted Evan Boettler. They were unable to find him, because the Nigerian ISP GloWorld, had failed to keep user information as it was supposed to. Whether out of incompetence or deliberate non-compliance (among other possibilities) is a mystery.

None of the Nigerians photographed or on video in the piece show their faces; apparently ski masks are all the rage there these days. (Maybe they hit the slopes after a hard say in the fraud mines.) Which raised a question for me: Who were they afraid would be able to identify them? And if what they were doing was illegal enough in Nigeria that fear of arrest and prosecution was reasonable, why did the BBC not present any interviews with authorities there, seeking to understand what was being done to combat the problem?

As I  noted before, Nigerian, and perhaps sub-Saharan Africans more broadly, do not come off well in this story. There's pretty much nothing positive in the picture the BBC article paints of them. And that takes us back to Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, and her pledge that if the Conservatives win the next election (and she becomes Prime Minister), a Trump-style purge of illegal migrants is on the agenda.

The part of "the Global South" that is closest to the United Kingdom is Africa, and so a good number of migrants to the United Kingdom, and also the European Union, come from there. And a good portion of the hostility to them is driven by the idea that they don't bring anything worthwhile with them; they're simply needy people with a penchant for criminality. So for many people, having them around is all cost, and no benefit. And while nothing about the BBC piece comes across as intending to play on the prejudices of Britons, such intent isn't really necessary. The contrast between the partially-named or pseudonymous Nigerians and the Boettlers and Representative Guffey is no less clear for not being deliberate. And yes, Ms. Badenoch and the Conservatives (or the Reform Party, for that matter) can create their own stereotypes, but why pass on work that the BBC has done for them?

In the end, the biggest problem with the piece is that it hinted at a "gotcha" moment, when an intrepid BBC reporter tracks down a sinister extortionist, and confronts them on camera, leads the authorities to them, or both. And that's not an entirely reasonable expectation, after all, Hassanbunhussein Abolore Lawal was extradited from Nigeria to face five federal charges in connection with Gavin Guffey's extortion and death. Although it must be said that Mr. Lawal didn't know when to quit, and that likely had a lot to do with his being tracked down. (Not to mention the fact that if convicted, he'll be well into middle age by the time he completes even the minimum possible sentence.)

But perhaps a story on how to protect one's loved ones, or oneself, from these schemes would have been more useful. The story's referencing of the various tools available to people being targeted by such schemes comes across as boilerplate, and besides, it's all reactive, rather than proactive, with the BBC placing the sole onus for protection on the providers of online services who have both weak incentives and poor tools to do such work well. "Ola" notes that "young boys are scared of their pictures being released to their class groups, their parents and their friends," and there seems to be a general acceptance of that fact. But young men are always likely to do dumb things when pursuing relationships and sex. Evan Boettler and Gavin Guffey killed themselves because they perceived that being dead was better than being outed as having sent explicit pictures to someone who turned out to be someone other than who they claimed. And the whole scheme works on the presumption that paying ever-escalating amounts of money is preferable to one's friends and family knowing that one's willing to do something dumb in the hope that one gets an attractive girlfriend out of the bargain.

The problem is that there no longer a good way to make the case that part of the problem lies with Anglo-American society without casting people like the Boettlers and Representative Guffey as culpable in the tragedies that have been visited upon them. And this is a common dilemma. Telling people that taking precautions makes it more difficult for perpetrators to act is often seen as casting those people as perpetrators themselves and absolving wrongdoers of culpability. And so there's a singular focus on bad actors; even at the risk of casting entire swaths of humanity as undesirables to be kept away from one's shores.

Dealt Out

I read "President Donald J. Trump's Plan to End the Gaza Conflict," which was appended to the NPR story on its announcement. It left me with a question... Who makes sure that the Palestinians get what they're promised? None of the 20 points mentions any sort of agreement that's binding on all parties.

I'm not sure that any rational person would expect the government of Israel to adhere to the spirit of any agreement, even if they were to live up to the letter of one, unless some sort of formal sanctions for noncompliance are involved. There's simply too much bad blood there. And of course President Trump thinks that he's an absolutely trustworthy partner, but given they United States' more or less reflexive support of Israel, I can't see why the Palestinians would take him at face value, either. There's no accountability for either the United States or Israel to ensure a good outcome fore the people of Gaza. And Prime Minister Netanyahu has shown a willingness to openly cross President Trump, and his predecessors, when it's suited his purposes to do so, mainly because strong Evangelical support for Israel is a check on imposing consequences.

Perhaps it's a testament to a person's ability to convince themselves that everyone else's opinion of them is in line with their own self-image. President Trump appears to think that this is such a good deal for the remaining members of Hamas that they'll simply give up the fight, but if that were the case, they'd already be suing for peace. And if the Palestinians were ready, willing and able to aggressively police one another for the sake of Israel, things wouldn't be in the state that they are right now.

A good deal comes across as a win for everyone involved, and it's hard to see how this particular plan gets to that point, given that it's basically a call for an unconditional surrender on the part of Hamas, and sets up Gaza to be controlled by someone who doesn't really appear to have the interests of its residents at heart. It could be that the President understands that, but the threat to allow Israel to "finish the job" of destroying Hamas relies on people thinking that the only reason why that hasn't happened already is the United States forcing moderation on the Netanyahu Administration. I'm not convinced that there's widespread belief in that position.

But there's also a strange paradox built into this plan. Both the United States and Israel claim that Hamas is not a legitimate government in Gaza. But Hamas agreeing to the plan would be a green light for President Trump to effectively take over the government of Gaza with this "Board of Peace." But if Hamas doesn't speak for the people of Gaza, it also can't agree to hand over governance to an international body on their behalf. And it's pretty much a given that as soon as another armed insurgency of some sort starts shooting people, or blowing things up, because they feel that they're getting a raw deal out of all of this, all bets will be off. And they likely will come to see this as a bad deal, because it's highly unlikely that Israel would allow a truly sovereign, reasonable self-sufficient Palestinian territory on it's border. Because a Palestine that could defend itself from Israeli incursion could attempt to launch incursions into Israel. And a strong police force that had the support of the people of Gaza can't also be one that's seen to be a tool of the Israeli security apparatus.

Of course, I'm not a Middle-East researcher, or an expert in crafting international agreements. So things could work out swimmingly. But even given the current situation in Gaza, I can't imagine the groundswell of support needed for this plan to succeed actually materializing. Mainly because this deal isn't being made with, or for, the people who are going to have to pay for it.

Punch Drunk

Lisa Hawkins, the chief of Communications and Public Affairs for the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States posted on LinkedIn that "It's time to put American spirits back on the shelves in Canada. U.S. distillers have nothing to do with this trade dispute."

The overall response to Ms. Hawkins' post was sharp and swift. Several Canadians in the comments thread, associating the spirits industry in America with Red states, were quick to point out that the distillers got what they paid for, and the point that Canadian businesses are just as blameless as the distillers was also raised.

What rational incentive do people in Canada have to take actions that the Trump administration will surely see as needy and weak? The trade dispute that Ms. Hawkins notes that "U.S. distillers have nothing to do with" didn't start in Ottawa. It started in Washington. If the White House is willing to sacrifice the American spirits industry as part of its unilateral trade warring, it doesn't make sense for Canadians to roll over to bail them out. The problem lies with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and Ms. Hawkins' appeal to Canada demonstrates that Distilled Spirits Council lacks (or is afraid to use) the access and/or the influence to obtain the Administration's agreement to mitigate it.

President Trump used to claim that trade wars were painless, and easy to win. He's now changed that tune, saying that the manufacturing boom is between 18 and 24 months away, and that there will be pain in the meantime. We'll see if the distillers can hold on that long, or if they can convince Americans to drink more liquor.

I Spy?

Came across this while browsing through Reddit yesterday evening. It's something that doesn't come up much in the debate (shouting match, really) on remote work; the difficulties that can be encountered in knowing that people are who they say they are.

Presuming that this person was recounting the offer being made to them accurately, a company is promising to create an entire fake identity for them to assume while working. Truth be told, it seems weird to me... it's possible that it's just about price; they'd charge the client $10,000+ a month when someone legitimately in the US or EU would ask for more, but I thought this is what outsourcing to south and southeast Asia was for...

Which is where a corporate espionage angle may come in... if the company offering the placement controls the VPN that the "employee" is using to fake their presence in the US/EU, I would think they can use that to eavesdrop on the connection. Or it could be something as simple as using the credentials the "employee" is provided to access company systems, disappear and then put the blame on whomever is being impersonated.

The fact that the poster realized that something didn't add up, but seemed open to giving it a shot (Why else ask about whether they'll actually be paid or the consequences of detection?) could speak to there being a lot more people being made offers like this, but who don't decide to ask the Internet for advice.

In the end, this is simply a random anecdote, but it answers, at least for me, why companies can appear to be so reticent to hire remotely. A person who's local may not be the best available person for the job, but at least they aren't potentially an overseas threat actor.

Elemental

The question of whether Israel's actions in the Gaza strip constitute a genocide has been hotly debated for nearly as long as the latest fighting between Israel and Hamas has. Now, a pair of Israeli human rights groups have weighed in on the side of calling it genocide.

Genocide has a specific definition in international law: particular acts carried out with intent to destroy a group in whole or in part.

And it's the word "intent" that's really become the stickler. While many people point to statements from Israeli politicians, like the comment from Yoav Gallant that Israel's opponents were "human animals" to explain their positions, the fact remains that the case for whether the government of Israel intends, as a matter of policy, to exterminate or displace the population of Gaza, is, at this point, purely circumstantial. Which doesn't mean that Israel is innocent of the charge, but it does mean that it's difficult, like any charge that requires mens rea, to prove.

The law often uses language differently from the way the public at large, or subsets thereof, tend to use it. Consider anti-abortion activists using the term "murder" to describe the procedure, or people using the term "kidnapping" to describe the arrests of immigrants by ICE agents. In places where and under circumstances when abortion is legal, it is, by definition, not murder, just as when ICE agents are legally allowed to detain someone, their doing so is not kidnapping.

In the case of genocide, the calculus is a bit different; here people tend to judge what is happening based on outcomes, even though international human rights law is based on intent, and if that intent is there, the predicate acts don't have to be particularly horrific, or even effective. They simply need to happen at all.

It's unlikely that there is a formal document, somewhere in an Israeli government office, that spells out a deliberate plan to engage in

... any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2

And if there is, it hasn't come to light, so people are left to infer the requisite intent. There is a certain degree to which the inferences a given party makes are related to their overall partisanship concerning the issue. Which is what makes the statements from B’Tselem and the Israel branch of Physicians for Human Rights newsworthy; they could be expected (at least by outsiders) to side with the Israeli government and so their inference that the government intends to destroy the Gazan population, in whole or in part, carries weight.

But it doesn't settle the issue. This is, after all, a matter of law, and it's judges, not human rights campaigners, who make the final decisions. Whether they decide that the elements of the crime are all present, or if judges decide at all, remains to be seen.

Murk and Mire

On LinkedIn, Emily Harding, a Director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies lays out her reasons for supporting the Trump Administration's strike on Iran, and what she thinks the next steps should be. Two of those steps are: 

--Make it clear the goal is ending the nuclear program, not toppling the regime. Recognize regime change won’t come from the outside. 
--Open the door wide to negotiations. Invite Iran to seek face-saving measures in exchange for on-the-ground inspections of the damage and verifiable dismantlement of the program.

Which make sense, but they require the administration in Iran to trust what the United States tells them. And when you have a person in the White House who claims to believe in the "madman theory," it's unclear how much trust to put in anything coming out of Washington D. C. if Tehran actually believes that President Trump is irrational and volatile. Of course, on the flip side of this, it's unclear how much face-saving that President Trump would be willing to allow the Iranians, and given his willingness to walk away from agreements made in the past, I suspect that they'd be unwilling to take any assurances that regime change was off the table at face value.

But perhaps a bigger problem is simply the realization that the partisan winds in the United States change. President Trump walked away from the agreement that the Obama Administration made with the government of Iran in the opinion that he could squeeze them for an arrangement more to his liking. What's to say that a future Democratic administration won't do the same? The unilateral way in which the President behaves is going to undermine the idea that the United States can be trusted to honor commitments it makes when those commitments become politically inconvenient. While this is to be expected to a certain degree, the growth in presidential power gives the impression that changes can happen at the whim of one person. And as long as that's the ground truth, making something clear to Iran, or extending an invitation that will be seen as genuine, will be difficult. And this leaves aside the current administration's willingness to resort to hints of regime change as a negotiating tactic.

Bad Ends

While we cannot know the detail of the negotiation talks that have taken place behind closed doors - what we do know is that Israel halting aid entering Gaza 17 days ago was an attempt to force Hamas into offering new concessions.

That hasn't worked so far and now it appears Israel has returned to violence in order to try to extract a new deal, one that is more favourable for its political leaders, and one that offers fewer wins to Hamas.
Why has Israel bombed Gaza and what next for ceasefire deal?

I don't think that I am the only person who believes that Hamas isn't daft enough to believe that Israel would abide by whatever new agreement it extracts from them. And that's the problem with breaking a deal in order to attempt to win a better deal; it gives the other party a pretty good reason to doubt one's honesty and intentions. (But what do I know, considering that Hamas is daft enough to think they can force the dissolution of Israel?)

Although Hamas still seems willing to negotiate while the United States is a party to the talks, so there may still be some possibility that some sort of agreement can be reached; but since the Trump Administration has made no bones about the fact that it's clearly on the side of Israel, I'm curious what it brings to the table in all of this. It's certainly not going to hold the government of Israel to any agreements it makes.

I am still of the opinion that, sooner or later, all of this inevitably ends in the deaths and displacement of the Palestinians. It may not be this conflict, or the next, but it's coming, one way or another. Arab leaders may view Donald Trump's plan to empty Gaza (and I'm sure that the West Bank will come up eventually) of its residents and remake the place into an Israeli-run resort as an insult, but if President Trump could be trusted to live up to his end of the deal (and there's very little chance of that) it would likely be the best outcome that they could hope for. (Although why any sane person would want to get anywhere near a resort that's going to be under constant attack by angry former residents of the area is beyond me.)

The central problem in all of this is the same as it ever was, namely:

Hamas, to put it crudely, has one card to play in the negotiations: the hostages.

The Palestinians, as a people, have nothing to offer Israel in exchange for being allowed to stay, in either Gaza or the West Bank. They can go the "no justice, no peace" route as they have been, but we can see where it's gotten them. And while there is an Israeli Left that's willing to stand up for them, they don't have the political clout to get someone into the office of Prime Minister. Unless something changes, and gives them from real bargaining power, bad deals are likely to to be the only ones the people of Palestine ever get.

Do Not Pass Go

It's almost enough to get me to rethink retiring the "Rampant Idiocy" Label.

An American man is being held in Russia after airport security discovered cannabis-laced sweets in his luggage, according to Russian state media.

US man held in Russia for carrying cannabis sweets - state media

To be sure, I have no idea whether or not this unnamed traveler was actually carrying cannabis edibles with him when he landed at Vnukovo International Airport. If he was, that was unwise... someone should have told him that a note from one's doctor doesn't invalidate other nation's laws. But given that the current government of Russia appears to treat locking up American travelers as it newest hobby, why are people going there in the first place? Are Russian jails the hot new tourist destination? It's on a level with vacationing in Iran, at this point.

I'm dubious enough about Americans whose jobs require them to be in Russia being over there. Every time I see or hear a news report from an American journalist somewhere in Russia, I half expect the story to end in their detention. So I find the idea of traveling there for leisure to be almost completely nonsensical. And taking cannabis along for the trip?

Prisoner exchanges occurred as recently as this week, when a Russian national jailed in the US on money laundering charges was freed in exchange for American Marc Fogel, who was arrested for cannabis possession in 2021.

This whole thing smacks of a strain of "Ugly Americanism" that decides that it's not worth respecting, or even knowing, the laws of other places, even when there are active geopolitical tensions with those places, because those tensions aren't worth taking into account, either. Even if the traveler didn't actually have cannabis on him when he was stopped, the idea that this would somehow protect them seems laughable.

Some parts of the world are, for all intents and purposes, closed to American citizens. Russia is one of them. And while I'm sure that a lot of Americans, for whatever reason, are able to travel there without incident, that's not the same as traveling there without risk. And in this case, the risk is being detained, to be used as a bargaining chip for the return of people the Putin Administration finds valuable to itself. Of course, there are other risks; no journey comes with a guarantee of making it home in one piece, or when one expects to. But I'm not sure that's a good reason to tempt fate, in the face of fate actively demonstrating what it's capable of.

Woe Is Us

In posts on social media media, Trump accused South Africa of embarking on "land grabs" against "certain classes of people." And he told reporters that the government was "confiscating land" and "doing things that are perhaps far worse than that."
South Africa's land reform is rousing right-wing ire

One of the common critiques of the American Right is that it is, basically, a bastion for modern American racism. And one of the common critiques of Donald Trump, which is not starting to attach itself to Elon Musk (himself a child of apartheid South Africa), is that he enables that racism. Which, honestly, makes sense. The American ideal of "one person, one vote" may have, for a long time, excluded women and minorities, but bigotry was never disqualifying, and people like Marko Elez have the franchise, too. And in a nation that's edging ever closer to a permanent split between two broad political coalitions, neither side can afford to throw even otherwise loathsome people overboard.

And that means buying into the American Right's narrative that casts Europeans (Conservative European Christians, more specifically) as an oppressed minority, assailed on all sides by the unworthy people whose lands, resources, freedoms and/or lives had been taken from them during the age of colonial expansion. Seeing Africans, Latin Americans and other non-White people as unjustly bitter and vengeful for not agreeing to a (awfully convenient) offer to simply allow bygones to be bygones stems from what I suspect is a widespread human desire to be seen neither as one of history's villains nor the direct beneficiaries of historical injustice. And so there's a mindset that decides that the end of Apartheid, Jim Crow or forced relocations to reservations wiped all slates clean and everyone became equal again. So there is no such thing as redress for past wrongdoing; there is only present wrongdoing.

Part of the politics of grievance is the idea that only the in-group's grievances are legitimate. This has played itself out in American race relations for as long as I've been aware of the concept. Black and White people alike having fallen into seeing the others (real or perceived) resentment of them as both unjust and a legitimizer of their own resentments. When, during the campaign, President Trump accused migrants of taking "African-American jobs" and "Hispanic jobs" and then Vice-President Kamala Harris of claiming to be Black as a cynical means of appealing to Black voters, he was encouraging people to take on the Right's grievances as their own, rather than telling them he would advance their interests. Because the in-group's grievances always come first, as I'm sure some of the Arab-American population in and around Dearborn, Michigan are finding out.

I have to admit that I wasn't expecting President Trump to lean so far into the Right's many disputes with the rest of the world (not to mention America) so completely this early in his tenure. Although it makes sense... he has to keep appealing to his base of voters, because otherwise he becomes a lame duck fairly quickly. Perhaps the goal here is to avoid losing seats in next year's (sigh) midterm elections. And casting the Ramaphosa Administration in South Africa as anti-White racists is par for that particular course.

It remains to be seen what the effects will be if Secretary of State Marco Rubio (whose posts on X seem to have been written by President Trump these days) makes good on his promise to not attend the upcoming G20 Summit in Johannesburg at the end of the year. (Of course, given that it's more than 9 months out, Secretary Rubio will have more than enough time to change course.) It could be a good opening for the Chinese, presuming that they can overcome the impression (and reality) that their offers of help come with more strings attached than a kite festival. It's part of a broader push to portray the United States as the only important nation in the world, and one that everyone else needs, which is again a play to a base resentful of what they perceive as other nations benefiting at the United States' direct expense.

Prior to Donald Trump, the Republican party had been coming to terms with the idea that it needed a broader message than right-wing anger at the world in order to be successful. Donald Trump (with, it seems, an assist from the Democratic Party) had upended that consensus. But it remains to be seen if this is a strategy that can be maintained for longer than the President can remain in office. At present, I'm not betting on it. I don't think that the Black and Hispanic voters who backed Donald Trump last year will come to regard him as someone who is willing to do anything for them, specifically, or come to believe that they're benefiting equally from what he does for conservative Whites. The American Right, I suspect, regards them more as useful patsies than valued allies, and won't balk at demanding more for itself at their expense.

If, even in spite of that, it can, that's likely not a good sign. I suspect that the Democrats will wind up having little choice but to turn to their own brand of grievance politics to remain relevant (let alone competitive) in that political landscape. It will be instructive to see who their voters are able to push the federal government into placing on its enemies lists, and which grievances it pursues on their behalf.

Scrubbing

File Under: He didn't think that anyone would notice?

President Trump has come up with a novel plan to deal with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: Ethnic cleansing.

I don’t know, something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything’s demolished, and people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where I think they could maybe live in peace for a change.
Trump suggests his plan for Gaza Strip is to ‘clean out the whole thing’

I suspect that the biggest problem with this whole scheme is the fact that it immediately creates the suspicion that President Trump is attempting to help out the Israeli far right, given that, on his first day in office, he lifted sanctions against Israeli settlers deemed responsible for the murders of Palestinians in the West Bank. The United States' pretense of being an honest broker in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had worn thin a lot time ago; so while it's somewhat refreshing that President Trump doesn't bother attempting to maintain it, that doesn't give him any more credibility with the Palestinians or their Arab supporters in the region. While he stopped short of calling for the permanent removal of the Palestinians from Gaza, using the words "temporary or long-term" instead, I can't imagine that anyone believes that the Israeli settler movement wouldn't be on the ground the day after the last Gazan left. Or that they wouldn't be prepared to use force to keep them from ever returning.

This is a part of the President's well-known M.O., find a conflict, and then ally himself with one side, and champion their issues. And, hear me out here, it might be for the best. I'm one of those people who thinks that the United States really doesn't have any more of a role to play in this whole thing. As I've said before, no-one honestly views the United States as a disinterested third party whose primary motivation is peacemaking. Alleged support for a "two-state solution" notwithstanding, pretty much everyone understands that the United States is backing Israel. And maybe Donald Trump, his administration and his family will be so open about it that it puts and end to the entire charade, and the Palestinians and their backers simply refuse to come to the table when the United States is present. It's not a state of affairs that could possibly make anything worse.

Line Up

The protestors who fly the Palestinian flag over I-405 east of Seattle were out again this weekend. I live not far away from the more northerly of the places where they set up, and saw one of their number walking to join them.

Good-For-Nothing

Back in the day, the song "War" by Edwin Starr (the stage name of one Charles Hatcher) was one of my favorites. As a teenager, I would take a tape player out with me when I cut the grass, so I could listen to it as I pushed the mower around. The song's anti-war message was pretty hard to miss, even for someone like me, who was more into the music, and it flits around inside my head from time to time.

I was reminded of it again yesterday, when I was reading an NPR article on a small rally in Israel in support of resuming Israeli Jewish settlement in Gaza. I have been of the opinion for some time that Palestinian militants shoot themselves (and the rest of the Palestinian population, for that matter) in the proverbial foot every time they pick a fight with Israel. Not simply because the casualty counts are always remarkably one-sided, but because it's always an open invitation for Israeli Zionists to make the case for their project of ethnic cleansing. And while it's not government policy in the United States to back such a thing any more than it is in Israel, the fact that there are American Christians, especially Evangelicals, who view the presence of the Palestinians in the area as an obstacle to a Messianic new world tends to seep into policy, just as much as people's belief's that crime is worse than it is or that their experience of inflation demonstrates that the economy is tanking.

But it seems that no matter how little it gets the Palestinians in the end, there will always be people spoiling for the next fight. It's possible that there's a drive for the large-scale martyrdom of the Palestinian people behind it all, but I suspect that it's really just as simple as as anyone else's reasons for backing a war; the belief that it can result in, or is the only viable path to, the desired outcome. And that people who are convinced that there's no real profit to be had in the enterprise are simply being defeatist.

Maybe it's time to own that label, however, under the philosophy of "if the shoe fits..." For my part, I am "defeatist" when it comes to the Palestinian's chances of undoing the grant of a substantial portion of the former Mandate of Palestine to the State of Israel. That is to say, I fully expect, and accept, that the result of more fighting will be the eventual displacement of a good number of the Palestinians (to where, I have no idea), and the extermination of most of those who remain. Granted the battle is not always to the strong, nor the race to the swift, but it's pretty evident that here, that's the way to bet.

And it's possible that I'm not the only one who would place their money on this outcome, and there are elements within Gaza, the West Bank and maybe even the Palestinian diaspora who have decided that they're going to go down swinging. If so, I salute them, even as I expect that I will mourn for them. But it does seem like something of a waste. Then again, I suppose that for some people, there are more important things in life than living. And I can understand the principle, even if I must admit to being unable to understand the specific application being put force here.

In "War," Mr. Starr notes that "War has caused unrest, within the younger generation. Induction, then destruction; who wants to die?" And maybe that's why the message seems to not find it's mark. For the people this conflict is forced upon, it is something worthy of unrest; it's a fight they don't want. But not all wars are waged on the wishes of "élites" who have no direct skin in the game. Sometimes, they're waged with the (sometimes grudging) support of people who understand that, despite the costs, the fight is worth it. Because I suspect that very few of the people who start these conflicts want to die. But they see it as an acceptable outcome, in the larger scheme of things.

I've noted before that I believe the Palestinian's problem to be that they have nothing to offer in return for what they understand is theirs. So they are reduced to extortion, in the same way that protestors here who chant "no justice, no peace," are playing the only card they have. Even if it would be better, even for them, to fold.

Grinding

The current conflict between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement (known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas) turned one the other day, and currently shows signs that it has a long and healthy life ahead of it, with Hezbollah and Iran having joined in the fighting. This is, as always, bad news for the residents of the Palestinian Territories. Gaza has received the worst of it thus far, with more than half of the buildings in the territory damaged or destroyed, and just over 42,700 people killed since the fighting began.

And this is always the way of things. While it's led some people to speculate that Hamas cares more for attacking Israel than it does for protecting Gaza, I have a sinking feeling that the reality may be worse, and the dead and injured in Gaza are seen as literal martyrs to Israeli aggression, people whose suffering is tallied as proof of the enemy's evil.

Given that Gaza's population is somewhat greater than two million people, even the current level of casualties could be maintained for decades without depopulating the place. And if tens of thousands of deaths, plus many more injuries and displacements aren't enough to push the belligerents to make some sort of accord, one can see this dragging on and/or recurring again and again.

The restoration of the Mandate of Palestine is simply not an option for any sort of foreseeable future. Even a return to the 1967 borders seems to be a pipe dream at this point. The current population is Israel isn't going anywhere, and since Israel is more populous (by about a factor of three) than the whole of the Palestinian Territories and there are always more Palestinians killed or injured in the fighting than Israelis, Hamas' actions are never going to have the desired outcome. The Palestinians are always going to come out on the short end of a war of attrition.

But that's the thing about religiously-driven conflicts, I think. There is always an understanding that a power greater than military capability (or simple mathematics) will decide things. Even if a demonstrated track record of a divine thumb on the scale of conflict is lacking.

The whole thing feels like a large-scale feud, marked not by progress to a conclusion, but an interminable series of outrages and reprisals, as each side seeks to prove that it has the greater stomach for the conflict. Grudges can last a very long time; some have continued on for centuries, perhaps even stretching into a millennium. I suspect that this one will, in the end, be a viable candidate for that kind of longevity.

Tall Tail

What's been described as China's first "triple-A" video game, Black Myth: Wukong, has landed in the news due to controversy sparked by a rather strange set of instructions sent to some number of people who planned to livestream themselves playing the game.

Ahead of Black Myth’s release, some content creators and streamers revealed that a company affiliated with its developer had sent them a list of topics to avoid talking about while livestreaming the game: including “feminist propaganda, fetishisation, and other content that instigates negative discourse”.

Not surprising, because this is China that we're talking about, and the Chinese government is notoriously sensitive when it comes to topics that it believes (correctly or not) might undermine or delegitimize it in the eyes of the populace.

I was watching a video-on-demand recording of one such livestream, and early in the game, the streamer responds to a viewer calling the game "Chinese propaganda." While the streamer wasn't interested in pursuing that line of discussion (after all, they were there to play a hot new video game), I'm sure that debate continued in the comments for a while.

It's an interesting commentary on the nature of relations between the United States and China. Black Myth: Wukong is a video game tied into the Chinese literature. And it's not the only property that's sought to mine the same story for details. The original Dragon Ball manga and anime draw very heavily from Journey to the West, and the Enslaved: Odyssey to the West video game couldn't be more clear about its inspirations. Even Lego got in on the act with their Monkie Kid set theme and accompanying animated shows. So it seems rational that Chinese companies would also get in on the act.

Responding to a video game that re-uses a very popular character from Chinese literature as propaganda speaks to the culture of distrust that has grown up under the geopolitical tensions between China and most of the developed Western world. (Except, it seems, where TikTok is concerned. Go figure.) While I'm sure that the Chinese Communist Party would like for games like Black Myth: Wokong to prompt young people in the industrialized West to think more highly of China, it seems unlikely that a game about an anthropomorphic monkey beating up on gods and monsters with a staff is somehow going to prompt people to overlook either the conflicts between China and other nations, or between the governing philosophy of the Chinese Communist Party and their own values. For some people, a video game is just a video game.

The charge of "propaganda" is usually one of disagreement with the supposed beneficiary of a message, rather than the message itself, and concerns that this new game is yet another plot to undermine China's geopolitical rivals/opponents seems to fall into that category. It's also a charge of stupidity (or at least pliability) on the part of others... no-one ever worries that propaganda will somehow manage to subvert them. And in that sense, it's as self-aggrandizing as what it seeks to call out.