Keeping Things Complicated
And a heavily intoxicated raccoon
Good Morning:
I have never met
, who describes herself as a “mother of five, writer and sex educator based in Jerusalem.” I know her only on social media, where she does a fascinating Instagram page about her life as a left-wing Orthodox Jewish woman. We have occasionally corresponded in one another’s comments. But I also apparently sent her a note some time back, praising her for being willing to be complicated in public. Being Orthodox is not the same thing as being a settler or hating Palestinians or being right-wing, after all. And it’s not the same thing either as being militaristic vis a vis Israeli security. It strikes me as important to encourage people to be unashamed to wear their complexities in public. Life, after all, is complicated.
The note apparently made an impression. Chaya has started a Substack and the other day, she sent me the opening post, which reflects on how my note influenced the title of her project:
The title of this blog, Making Things Complicated, came from words of encouragement I received from Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare. He told me: “Keep up what you’re doing. It’s important to keep making the world more complicated.”
This helped me name what I’m seeking as I move through life, collecting identities, communities and worldviews. I’m every version of myself, all at the same time—Israeli and American; strictly religious and heterodox; rationalist and mystical. I’m halachically Jewish, and I’m connected to my mixed heritage. My politics are radical, but I’m inclined toward moderation and pragmatism. I’m a feminist with a casual affinity for traditional gender roles.
And the longer I live in this land, the more my passion for Zionism and Jewish national renewal is coupled with support for Palestinian self-determination.
I’m never at ease in any one place. I’m at war with myself, struggling toward resolution and synthesis. I wish I could compartmentalize instead of trying to force everything to fit together peacefully. I long for simple clarity, stark truth in black and white, but I’m drawn to complexity.
Many congrats to Chaya on the new project, the first post of which is very worth your time.
An important #DogShirtTV programming note involving a time change for both tomorrow’s and Friday’s shows. The estimable
informs me that our guest on Italian politics is joining us tomorrow, not on Friday. Which means that the show will be at 8:00 am Eastern time on Thursday and 11:00 am Eastern time on Friday, not the other way around as I previously announced.The show will be at 8:00 am Eastern time on Thursday and 11:00 am Eastern time on Friday.
Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, new and innovative coup techniques! Also, holiday preparations, Venezuela, and more:
The Situation
In Monday’s “The Situation” column, I contemplate developments that took place since the beginning of the Thanksgiving weekend, from a court ruling against Alina Habba’s appointment as interim U.S. attorney to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s alleged order to kill all survivors of a boat strike in the Caribbean.
This order, of course, Secretary Hegseth hotly denies having given—sort of.
“This entire narrative is completely false,” his spokesman said in a statement that went on to insist that, “Ongoing operations to dismantle narcoterrorism and to protect the Homeland from deadly drugs have been a resounding success.” Which is something less than a denial that a kill-them-all order emerged from the secretary’s mouth. Kind of more like: This story is completely false to the extent the Post suggests that our killing of shipwrecked survivors was ineffective or less than a resounding success.
Yesterday On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Isabel Arroyo
How U.S. Export Controls Risk Undermining Biosecurity
Doni Bloomfield, Joe Khawam, and Tim Schnabel explain how U.S. export restrictions on “assist[ing]” the design of biological weapons risk chilling critical biosecurity testing at frontier artificial intelligence (AI) firms.
Recognizing this danger, major U.S. AI labs evaluate their models to ensure they can’t be used to design or deploy weapons of mass destruction. However, these evaluations themselves risk violating U.S. export control laws—even if testing is conducted entirely within the United States by American companies working in good faith. This regulatory paradox threatens national security at a critical moment in AI development. The executive branch should promptly clarify how existing export control tools can facilitate biosecurity evaluations while pursuing targeted regulatory changes to ensure that compliance supports rather than impedes safety testing.
Litigating in the Shadows: Federal Funding and the Supreme Court
John Lewis presents three strategic lessons for litigants unsure how to navigate the dynamics of the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket.” Lewis stresses the preliminary nature of shadow docket decisions and urges litigants to continue bringing cases.
As these federal funding cases have illustrated, the rise of the shadow docket has ultimately created a judicial management problem for the Supreme Court. As much as it seems to be trying, the Court lacks the capacity to rush to the Trump administration’s defense in every challenge to administration policy that arises in the federal courts. The Court relies on the willingness and ability of the 800-odd lower court judges across the country to correctly follow its decisions—to strive to reach the result that the Court believes is appropriate in a given range of cases. The Court might wish to consider whether its aggressive use of unexplained shadow docket orders to guide lower courts has instead had the opposite effect, leaving them rudderless and increasingly at odds with the Court itself. Until then, litigants, in the federal funding context or otherwise, should not be overly deterred by the existence of the shadow docket or give these largely unexplained interim decisions more weight than they deserve.
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, Daniel Byman and Seth Jones discuss Jones’s new book “The American Edge: The Military Tech Nexus and the Sources of Great Power Dominance,” which compares the industrial bases of China and the United States.
On Scaling Laws, Caleb Withers joins Kevin Frazier to discuss how frontier models disproportionately advantage attackers in cyberspace, the steps labs and governments can take steps to address attacker-friendly asymmetries, and the future of cyber warfare driven by AI agents.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is—once again—the raccoon. Yes, I know the raccoon was the BotD less than a week ago, but this truly glorious headline came to my attention today:
Animal control officers in Ashland responded to an unusual call this weekend after a racoon broke into an ABC store, ransacked several shelves and passed out in the bathroom.
On Saturday, officers with the Hanover County Animal Protection and Shelter were called to the Ashland ABC store and found the raccoon unconscious in the store’s restroom.
The raccoon had damaged merchandise on multiple shelves and got into the liquor before passing out in the restroom.
The officer safely secured the “very intoxicated raccoon” and took it to an animal shelter to recover, the shelter said.
After several hours of rest, the raccoon showed no signs of being hurt, “other than maybe a hangover and poor life choices,” the shelter said. It was released back into the wild.
Behold, in all its glory, the Beast of the Day:
Normally, at this point, I would tell you how you can honor today’s Beast with your actions. But today’s Beast is not worthy of honor. Today’s Beast is here to be mocked for our entertainment. Look at today’s Beast and rejoice. However wretched you feel, however deep and profound your misery, you are not as pathetic as a drunk raccoon passed out next to a toilet.
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