Tough Questions from the NYT Headline Writers
I really had to think about these
Good Morning:
Truth be told, I can argue it either way and it honestly depends who you are. If you’re a human toddler, for example, and you have growing to do overnight, I’m not sure that you should deprive yourself of the calories necessary to expand your brain because some article writer for a newspaper you’re not yet able to read has an ideological commitment to small dinners. On the other hand, if you’re an adult leopard and it’s 11:00 am and you should took down an antelope and you’re hungry now, then sure, gorge now and go light on dinner. That, I’m sure, is the advice the estimable
gave to this fine specimen, when asked whether dinner should be the smallest meal of the day:
Which brings us to this one:
Ah, what does it mean? Does life have any meaning at all? Surely sports do not. They are, after all, inherently meaningless competitions in which two corporations puts forward teams of athletes to engage in shows of strength, endurance, or still under arbitrary sets of rules. There are many things to read into sports, but one of them is not meaning. And of course, college football recruiting is a level of meta-meaninglessness. It is, one might say, the game of the game—a set of meaningless rules about meaningless rules.
So yeah, sound and fury signifying … nothing.
Okay, this is a hard one. First of all, it’s not quite a question headline. Notice that it’s not framed as “How Should You Stop Asking: ‘Are You Mad at Me?’?” But it’s kind of an embedded question headline—designed to be like a question headline without taking the specific form. I will treat it as one because it fooled me at first.
It’s very hard. I walk around constantly asking people whether they are mad at me. It’s like a tic. I walk into a store and greet the person behind the counter with a cheerful, “Are you mad at me?” I answer the phone: “Are you mad at me?” I text strangers asking whether they are mad at me. It’s all very reassuring, because the answer is almost always no. And it’s so validating that I find it very hard to stop asking.
But here’s the secret to it: glue your lips shut. It helps. I promise.
Scandalous Cactus Gossip
The cactus has a girlfriend:
Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable
and the estimable joined me to welcome the estimable (Deece Eckstein), a 40-year veteran of Texas state politics, to tell us about how Texas is coping with the current Situation. Spoiler alert: badly.Yesterday On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Mary Ford
Trump’s Agreement With El Salvador Violated the Constitution
Raphael Goldman argues that the post-removal detention of Venezuelan nationals—whom the Trump administration designated as members of the Tren de Aragua gang—in the notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo prison in El Salvador was unlawful. Goldman suggests that such extraterritorial jailing violates the requirements for criminal punishment outlined by the Constitution.
In other words, the government effectively sentenced these men to prison after removal—a criminal punishment. Yet criminal punishment is not permissible under the U.S. Constitution unless the government has first convicted the defendant of a crime (with all the due process protections that attend a criminal conviction, including a jury trial), the punishment is authorized by a statute enacted by Congress, and the statute uses words that provide fair warning of what conduct is subject to punishment. None of that happened here.
The D.C. Circuit Rules on the 9/11 Guilty Pleas—and Says Much More
Natalie Orpett responds to the D.C. Circuit’s 2-1 decision to allow then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to lawfully withdraw from plea agreements military prosecutors made with three 9/11 defendants detained at Guantanamo. Orpett argues that the ruling is indicative of a lack of faith in the military commissions system’s ability to hold terrorists answerable for their crimes using the law.
The conscious or unconscious subtext of the opinion, in other words, is that the majority has reached an unavoidable conclusion. The military commissions system is inadequate to the task for which it was created and the task for which it has been repeatedly propped up by all three branches of government for nearly two decades: holding terrorists to account using the rule of law. The experiment, the majority suggests, has failed.
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, Justin Sherman sits down with Candace Rondeaux to discuss her recent book entitled “Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos,” the rise of the Wagner Group, and Wagner’s role in Russia’s military objectives abroad.
On Rational Security, Kevin Frazier, Tyler McBrien, and Orpett join Scott Anderson to take stock of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the White House’s Artificial Intelligence Action Plan, and the D.C. Circuit’s decision to nullify plea deals made by several Guantanamo Bay detainees.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the mustached bat, seen here doing calculus:
Wait, what? I didn’t see the bat do any calculus. Where’s the calculus,
?Tell Me Something Interesting
I would explain the mathematical acuity of the mustached bat myself, but science educator Tom Lum already did so, and I don’t mess with perfection:
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