UN.Warns US Attacks on Cartel Drug Boats ‘Unacceptable’

Via Breitbart News:

U.S. military strikes against cartel drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean journeying from South America are “unacceptable” and must stop, the U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk warned Friday.

Türk, an Austrian-born career U.N. bureaucrat, called for an immediate investigation into the strikes against narco terrorists in what is the first such condemnation of its kind from the globalist organization.

The problem is that the previous strategy for stopping drug traffic via sea routes has been clearly identified, and although supported by existing law, completely ineffective. According to a September article at the US Naval Institute,

For decades, the United States has relied on the Coast Guard’s unique legal authorities, backed by Navy support, to interdict drug shipments on the high seas. Those operations follow a predictable pattern: warning shots, disabling fire, boarding, seizure of evidence, and arrest. A patchwork of bilateral agreements ensures suspects face extradition and trial in U.S. federal courts.

This strike marks a sharp departure from that process. Instead of a law enforcement interdiction, the U.S. military conducted an operation that could be perceived as executing suspected criminals without trial or even due process. There are several pressing legal questions: Was the strike legal? Was this an extrajudicial killing in violation of the Geneva Convention? Does the executive branch have the authority to carry out this type of strike without congressional oversight, even at the risk of embroiling the United States in armed conflict?

However, according to a February report by the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General,

The United States Coast Guard (Coast Guard) was not able to consistently interdict non-commercial vessels smuggling drugs into the United States. From fiscal years 2021 through 2023, the Coast Guard interdicted an estimated 421.9 metric tons of cocaine but fell short of its total cocaine removal goal of 690 metric tons. This occurred, in part, because the Coast Guard did not always have cutters available to perform the counterdrug mission and did not have a contingency plan to address the cutters’ unavailability. We found Coast Guard cutters were unavailable for 2,058 cumulative days over a 3-year period. Using the Coast Guard’s formula, we calculated that the Coast Guard could have interdicted an additional 57 to 89.1 metric tons of cocaine had these cutters been performing the counterdrug mission.

However, the same report says that for the years 2021-2023, the average amount of cocaine flowing into the US via non-commercial vessels was about 2500 metric tons each year. This means that even the most optimistic Coast Guard goal, which it's been unable to reach, 690 metric tons, would interdict only 20-25% of the cocaine coming in by sea. Despite this, the Coast Guard has consistently claimed a 90% success rate with interdictions.

The US Naval Institute link repeats this claim without skepticism:

In the late 1990s, the Coast Guard created the Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron (HITRON) to improve its ability to stop high-speed vessels. HITRON employs armed MH-65C Dolphin helicopters that apply graduated force against suspect vessels. Aircrews begin with sirens, loudspeakers, and hand signals to compel compliance. If ignored, they escalate to warning bursts across the bow from mounted machine guns. Should the vessel continue flight, precision rifle fire—typically from a .50-caliber sniper rifle—is directed at the outboard engines to disable propulsion.3 The approach works: By the early 2000s, HITRON boasted interdiction success rates of more than 90 percent.

But if the Coast Guard has a 90% interdiction rate, than the only conclusion we can draw is that at least 75-80% of the cocaine coming into the US completely escapes the notice of the Coast Guard -- in other words, the Coast Guard only tries to interdict 20-25% of the smuggling attempts. That in turn means that the cocaine that's successfully interdicted amounts to just an overhead expense to the traffickers. So why are we doing this? The USNI link continues,

This model reflects a deliberate policy choice to preserve life and capture suspects for prosecution rather than destroy vessels and kill crews. The approach lends itself to building criminal cases against organizations and their leaders, rather than taking out low-level operatives. It also allows careful management of relationships with countries known or believed to support narcotics trafficking. The model historically has resulted in high rates of efficient and successful criminal prosecutions.

Great! Every few years, we put another cartel head in jail! We finally caught El Chapo! And El Mayo too! El Nini! Los Quinis! But the drugs keep coming in, by the inspector general's estimate, a consistent 2500 metric tons a year by sea, no visible decline at all. The USNI link continues,

It is precisely this longstanding framework that makes the 2 September strike so remarkable. The operation bypassed the Coast Guard’s established procedures of warning, disabling, and boarding in favor of immediate lethal force, foregoing any notion of protecting the due process rights of the individuals involved.

But the Coast Guard's established procedures amount to nothing but rounding up the usual suspects. The link continues,

Earlier this year, the State Department designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization, citing its involvement in human trafficking, extortion, and drug smuggling across South America and the Caribbean. By designating the gang as terrorists, the administration created a bridge from law enforcement to military action: Narcotics smugglers are criminals, but terrorists are legitimate military targets. However, the legal authority for conducting a strike under these circumstances is questionable, despite the target being designated a terrorist.

But it isn't that simple. The Trump administration is moving toward the position that the various cartels and gangs that import the drugs operate either under the direct control, or with the tacit consent, of governments, including Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico. For instance,

[I]n a roundtable promoting his aggressive anti-drug campaign, US President Donald Trump took aim at Mexico, implying that Sheinbaum is not in control of her country.

“Mexico is run by the cartels,” Trump told reporters. “I have great respect for the president, a woman that I think is a tremendous woman. She’s a very brave woman. But Mexico is run by the cartels, and we have to defend ourselves from that.”

If the cartels are effectively enabled by their governments, even if it's only via under-the-table payments or even just threats, we're entering the arena of international policy, which in turn can ultimately involve military force. This is clearly the direction Trump is moving -- but if the threats are big enough, this may be the only effective solution.

Was J B Pritzker Thrown Out Of The Family Business?

Trump: Then I will look at New York in a little while… If we need to we'll do the same thing in Chicago. We have an incompetent Governor there. Pritzker is incompetent. His family threw him out of the business pic.twitter.com/1zw5PIWLvX

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 11, 2025

I asked Chrome AI mode, "Was J B Pritzker thrown out of the family business?" It answered,

Reports from trusted news outlets contradict the claim that J. B. Pritzker was "thrown out" of the family business. While his family restructured its assets, he was a successful entrepreneur who co-founded his own private equity firm, Pritzker Group. A social media post from August 2025, which falsely claimed he was thrown out, appears to stem from comments made by Donald Trump.

. . . After the death of his uncle, Jay Pritzker, in 1999, the family underwent a planned and highly publicized restructuring of its assets. J. B. Pritzker and his cousins chose to divide the family fortune among themselves to pursue their own business ventures.

The second part of the quote is clearly inaccurate: the Pritzker family restructuring was neither planned nor highly publicized, which throws the whole answer into question. Via Forbes Magazine in November 2003,

On a recent fall morning Liesel Pritzker shows up for a meeting wearing a simple black top and slacks. Her face free of makeup and brown hair down, this sophomore at Columbia University is all ingenue. But history may record her as the heiress who helped tear apart one of America's most storied and wealthy families. "This is the last thing I wanted to do," she says. She could be referring to either her first interview with the press--or the ruckus she has caused among the Pritzkers. The suit "is not how I want to define myself," says the 19-year-old actress.

It's been nearly a year since she launched a $6 billion lawsuit against her father, Robert, and 11 older cousins, accusing them of looting her trust funds and those of her brother, Matthew, 21. (Matthew joined the battle, filing suit five months later.) The action focused unwanted attention on deep divisions tearing apart this obsessively private family. It has also shed more light on a plan, which FORBES first reported in September 2002, to carve up the $15 billion fortune that took the Pritzker forebears a century to build. The aftermath of the suits has parted the curtain on the shadowy financial underpinnings of this empire--a vast network of domestic and foreign trusts designed to minimize, if not eliminate, taxes.

Via The Chicago Tribune in 2011,

This weekend the Pritzker family reaches the end of a tumultuous 10-year effort to divide its $19 billion fortune, one of the nation’s largest.

. . . Their paths already have diverged. Some of the cousins are focused on the world of corporate finance. Others have decided to use their wealth primarily to pursue philanthropic and creative interests, such as movie-making, music and history.

In the business camp are Tom, Penny, John, Anthony, J.B., Nick and Matthew. While also philanthropic, they are actively involved in trying to turn their billions into more. But they aren’t necessarily working together. That complicates matters for people seeking to do deals or raise money from a Pritzker. If they do a deal with one, does that exclude them from dealing with another?

So as of 2011, J B was in the "business camp". He and his brother Tony founded the Pritzker Group in 1996 as an investment firm. However, by 2017, J B Pritzker announced his intention to run for governor of Illinois, and when he took office in 2019, he promised to put his assets into a blind trust. According to Chrome AI mode,

Pritzker formally left his role as managing partner of the Pritzker Group in April 2017.

. . . His resignation was to "devote himself full-time to a run for the Illinois governorship," according to Crain's Chicago Business.

However, accordinmg to Wikipedia, Pritzker had dabbled in politics at least since the late 1990s, including an unsuccessful 1998 primary campaign for the Illinois 9th congressional diatrict. Also,

Governor Rod Blagojevich appointed Pritzker to chair the Illinois Human Rights Commission. He held that position from 2003 to 2006.

. . . In May 2017, the Chicago Tribune published an 11-minute FBI wiretap of Pritzker and Blagojevich in 2008 discussing campaign contributions and options for Pritzker to be appointed to statewide office. At the time, Pritzker was described as a "businessman with political ambitions". On the tapes, Blagojevich asked Pritzker if he would like to be appointed state treasurer, to which Pritzker, who has a background in finance, responded, "Yeah, that's the one I would want."

Exactly who does what in the Pritzker family appears to be a closely guarded secret. The public position, via Chrome AI mode, is that while earlier generations of the Pritzker family had more centralized control, the family fortune was divided into separate trusts in the 2000s. On one hand, one of those trusts was The Pritzker Group, in which both J B and his brother Tony were at least nominally managing partners. The Pritzker Group itself has been reorganizing itself on a more or less constant basis as well, and it's difficult to know which of the brothers is still directly involved. However, according to Wikipedia, Tony has been far more active in business than J B:

From January 1993 to December 1994, he was president of the Fenestra Corporation. From 1995 to 1996, he was a group executive at the Marmon Group and directed operations at Arzo, MD Tech, Micro-Aire, Oshkosh Door, and Fenestra. From 1996 to 1998, he was the Regional Vice President of Operations in Asia for Getz Bros. & Co. In 1998, he was appointed by the Marmon Group to oversee Stainless Industrial Companies. From 2000 to 2004, he was the President of Baker Tanks. He is managing partner of Pritzker Group. He is on the board of directors of Halcyon Ventures, Glenayre, Evercore Partners, and the Signicast Corporation. From 2004 to 2007, he was chairman of AmSafe Partners.

It's plain that J B Pritzker had been pursuing a political career for much of his adult life in both appointed and elected office, as well as donating heavily to the Democrat Party. It's hard to avoid the impression that J B, although only marginally successful at politics until he ran for governor in 2018, always had politics as his primary interest, and the family, or at least his brother, was happy enough to see him leave The Pritzker Group if he didn't work actively to ease him out.

So I'm inclined to rate Trump's claim that J B was in some way thrown out of the family business as more likely than not. The family business history has in any case been tumultuous for the last generation.

Tim Donaghy Drops A New Name

In Sunday's post, I mentioned Tim Donaghy, a former NBA referee who in 2007 pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to transmit wagering information across state lines. After his inbitial plea in 2007 but before his sentencing in 2008, he made a number of allegations regarding overall corruption in NBA refereeing. According to Wikipedia,

On June 11, 2008, Donaghy alleged in a statement through his lawyers that several series in the NBA Playoffs had been improperly refereed according to the NBA's instructions. He alluded specifically to a playoff game where "personal fouls [resulting in obviously injured players] were ignored even when they occurred in full view of the referees" because "it was in the NBA's interest to add another game to the series." . . . Donaghy also referred to a playoff series where "Team 3's Owner alleged that referees were letting a Team 4 player get away with illegal screens. NBA Executive Y told Referee Supervisor Z that the referees for that game were to enforce the screening rules strictly against that Team 4 player." . . . Federal authorities investigated Donaghy's claims and found no evidence to support them.

In the context of the new NBA scandal, in which similar allegations have been raised about players and coaches relaying insider information to organized crime, which in turn uses it to bet on games, Donaghy has made several public appearances, in which he renews claims that both the NBA and the Justice Department covered up evidence that the 2007 scandal was much wider than represented. At 3:45 in the video embedded above, he says,

You know, I think David Stern [then-NBA Commissioner] was basicaslly able to put a lid on it and paint me as one bad apple, the only guy involved, and nobody else did anything but me, and we're gonna move on from it. The FBI said that there was six or seven other people that they wanted to indict, and this got shut down from the highest level. And then I find out, after I go to jail, a guy by the name of Greg Andres, who was the head of the Eastern District of New York, took a job at a law firm and all of a sudden got all the outside legal counsel work for the NBA, so it was a situation where David Stern really ran that whole investigation, and it got shut down by the highest level people.

When he says "this got shut down from the highest level", it may refer also to David Stern, but Stern had no authority to shut down an investigaion. Robert Mueller, who was FBI Director at the time, did have this authority "at the highest level". According to Wikipedia,

Greg Donald Andres is an American attorney, who most notably served as an Assistant Special Counsel for Russian interference in 2016 United States elections under Robert Mueller. He rejoined the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell in June 2019.

. . . Andres previously served as . . . an Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, where he rose to be Chief of the Criminal Division, and a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell.

According to Davis Polk's website, during the period Donaghy refers to, Andres was

Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, U.S. Department of Justice, 2010-2012

Chief of the Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of New York, 2007-2010

Special Assistant U.S. Attorney, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, 2009-2011

Deputy Chief, Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of New York, 2006-2007

Although Andres is variously listed as leading several significant prosecutions during this period, including of the Bonnano crime family, the Donaghy gulty plea apparently hasn't been one of his major cases. But it's also reasonable to infer that he got to know Robert Mueller, who was FBI Director from 2001 to 2013, during this time. Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate Russian election interference in May, 2017. Andres left Davis Polk in 2017 to work for Mueller as an Assistant Special Counsel, where he led the prosecution of Paul Manafort.

According to Wikipedia,

The FBI reportedly began a criminal investigation into Manafort in 2014, shortly after Yanukovych was deposed during Euromaidan. That investigation predated the 2016 election by several years and is ongoing. In addition, Manafort is also a person of interest in the FBI counterintelligence probe looking into the Russian government's interference in the 2016 presidential election.

. . . Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was appointed on May 17, 2017, by the Justice Department to oversee the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and related matters, took over the existing criminal probe involving Manafort. On July 26, 2017, the day after Manafort's United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing and the morning of his planned hearing before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, FBI agents at Mueller's direction conducted a raid on Manafort's Alexandria, Virginia home, using a search warrant to seize documents and other materials, in regard to the Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

. . . The Trump–Russia dossier, also known as the Steele dossier, is a private intelligence report comprising investigation memos written between June and December 2016 by Christopher Steele. Manafort is a major figure mentioned in the Steele dossier, where allegations are made about Manafort's relationships and actions toward the Trump campaign, Russia, Ukraine, and Viktor Yanukovych.

. . . On October 30, 2017, Manafort was arrested by the FBI after being indicted by a federal grand jury as part of Mueller's investigation into the Trump campaign.

. . . Manafort was jailed from June 2018 until May 2020. . . . On May 13, 2020, Manafort was released to home confinement over COVID-19 concerns. On December 23, 2020, Trump issued Manafort a full pardon.

Why would a white-shoe law partner leave his firm to work as an assistant special counsel? I have no ides, but there must have been a really, really compelling reason. In 2019, Andres returned to Davis Polk, making this statement:

In an interview, he declined to discuss any aspect of his work with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's team, other than to say, “I’m proud of the special counsel office’s work, and it was truly a professional privilege for me to work with the men and women of the FBI and IRS and Department of Justice, and obviously I have a great deal of respect for Director Mueller.”

However, by the time of Mueller's 2019 congressional testimony, it had become clear that he had undergone significant mental decline:

“It was a painful reminder that age catches up to all of us,” one unnamed House Democrat who questioned Mueller said, according to the Washington Examiner. “Here you have this Vietnam hero and this post-Sept. 11 FBI director. You could tell he was having a hard time hearing, and it was like, ‘Ugh! This is not how I want him to be remembered.'”

It's hard not to surmise that Andres during this period was able to act in Mueller's name with near-complete discretion, and he must have been fully aware of Mueller's condition. Nor is it difficult not to conclude that from the NBA to the Russia investigation, Greg Andres has been knee-deep in covering up shady enterprises. I suspect his name will pop up again.

Dems Ditch Labor. Nothing New.

Yesterday, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees posted on the AFGE website:

This week, Congress pushed our nation into the fourth week of a full government shutdown – an avoidable crisis that is harming families, communities, and the very institutions that hold our country together. Both political parties have made their point, and still there is no clear end in sight.

Today I’m making mine: it’s time to pass a clean continuing resolution and end this shutdown today. No half measures, and no gamesmanship. Put every single federal worker back on the job with full back pay — today.

Illinois Sen Dick Durbin, the Senate Democratic Whip, who is second in leadership to Sen Schumer, replied with a rambling and equivocal statement:

“It has a lot of impact, and they’ve been our friends and we’ve worked with them over the years,” Durbin told reporters on Monday, adding that he has talked to representatives with the union and recognizes that they’re in “a terrible mess” representing so many federal employees who are missing paychecks and facing threats to their jobs.

Still, Durbin told CNN, “I’m not seeing any change in position at this time” as Democrats continue to oppose a bill to extend current funding levels through November 21.

Further,

Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, who represents a large population of federal workers, said of the union’s statement, “I work very closely with them. That matters to me. But the issue that I’ve always been focused on, that I’ve shared with y’all is, is a deal, a deal? And the AFGE would not want us to cut a deal and then have Trump fire a bunch of people next week. If we cut a deal and then he did that, they would come to us and say, ‘What the hell were you guys thinking?’”

The real issue, of course, is that the shutdown isn't about federal workers at all, it's about Schumer's poll numbere, AOC, Zohran Mamdani, and who controls the Democrats.

"Chuck Schumer is trading off his polls. What's different than when he passed a clean CR in the spring? It's his polls," says @SecScottBessent on the Democrat Shutdown.

"We're starting to eat into muscle here... I don't know what the purpose is. I'm not sure they do." pic.twitter.com/Bt0ej6d8yF

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) October 26, 2025

For whatever reason, the Senate Democrat leadership has closed ranks with Schumer, even though prospects for his continued career grow dimmer and dimmer:

The Brooklyn Democrat brought in just $133,000 during the three months ending Sept. 30 – while facing a potential primary challenge from “Squad” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Bronx and Queens), 36, who raised $4.5 million during the last quarter for her House reelection campaign.

. . . Schumer’s haul was less than half of the $337,000 he brought in during the equivalent period of his 2022 election — his October 2019 report. Senators serve six-year terms and typically ramp up fundraising as their race nears.

He actually spent more on his political operation than he raised from July through September, shelling out $322,000, his latest campaign filing reveals.

The message that's being sent here is something I've been saying about the Democrats for a while: the interests of the working class are no longer a priority, because the Democrats have become an alliance of the upper class and Marx's Lumpenproletariat, once defined as the urban underclass of street criminals, vagabonds, pimps, and prostitutes, but which might now be expanded to include the homeless, drug addicts, illegal migrants, and sexual deviants.

I said during the 2024 campaign that Kamala Harris was the best possible avatar of the new alliance, a woman who dressed in upper-class clothing and accessories while speaking in condescending street argot -- and it was utterly inauthentic; it simply didn't work. This has me scratching my head at the sociopolitical economy of the alliance: many of the modern Lumpenproletariat are ineligible to vote, because they aren't citizens, but whether or not they vote, they don't have the money to donate to candidates.

Unions like the AFGE both vote and donate to campaigns. The trouble is that ever since 1972, labor has been edging away from the traditional Democrat coalition:

As George Meany summoned labor's executive council to decide whether to endorse George McGovern, two national union presidents said today that they would support President Nixon for re‐election because Mr. McGovern's Democratic platform was “unacceptable and repulsive.”

The endorsements of Mr. Nixon by Kenneth T. Lyons of the, 232,000‐member National Association of Government Employes and Jesse M. Calhoon of the 10,000‐member National Marine Engineers Beneficial Association were the first by the heads of any major unions.

The AFL-CIO itself adopted a neutral stance and did not endorse McGovern in the 1972 election. The Teamsters made a similar decision to remaion neutral in the 2024 election. The AFGE is in a similar spot, because on one hand, the government shutdown is delaying paychecks for many of its members, while on the other, its membership covers many traditionally white-collar job types like physicians and administrators.

But the explanations we see above from Sens Durbin and Kaine for why they won't support the members of a major union simply aren't clear -- what, in fact, are they supporting instead? Unspoken is what appears to be the major factor; they're supporting Minority Leader Schumer's wish, however unrealistic it may be, to run for reelection in 2028. But by implication, Schumer will be runnning against AOC and the future of the party, while Sen Schumer is 74, and Dick Durbin is 80.

In effect, the current Democrat leadership is going to age out no matter whether it supports labor or doesn't, but it's likely that the replacements for Schumer and Durbin will resemble AOC and Mamdani more than traditional members of the old Democrat coalition. But the new Democrat alliance of the upper class and the Lumpenproletariat isn't the same majority coalition. This is going to leave the AFGE in a bad spot no matter what.

But here's yet another sign of Trump's political instincts: the shutdown is reaching a point where AFGE members expect the union to work with the Democrats to protect their interests, when the Democrats -- astotishingly short-sighted -- are putting the interests of the upper class and the Lumpenproletariat above the interests of the workers, which will benefit neither the Democrats nor the workers -- and the workers are staring to see it. Right now, it looks like the shutdown is going to kill the Democrat party.

Retrospective Takes On The No Kings Demographic

Over the weekend, I saw two conflicting versions of the demographic at the No Kings rallies on October 18. The most common was that those who attended were retirees accompanied by a smaller contingent of younger, male "furries" dressed in animal suits. This essay from a retail store manager serving protesters stocking up on poster board goes into more depth:

[O]nce we got so busy that I needed to jump on a register to help move the lines along, I was able to speak with a 60-something lady with a yellow cap (covering the proverbial “Karen” haircut) about the meaning of all the yellow. She shared with me that yellow was the color of “resistance” . . . . she was a walking stereotype of the retired Boomers that made up a large portion of the people who were participating in these protests. Boomers who like Bruce Springsteen [want] to relive their “glory days” when they protested the Vietnam War or marched for civil rights.

Let's recall that the civil rights demonstrations, like the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches, took place in the mid-1960s. The 1967 March on the Pentagon was a bit later, while the Kent State shootings took place in 1970, the same year as the first Earth Day celebrations. People who turned 18 in 1965 would have been born in 1947, which means that this year, they are 78. People who turned 18 in 1970 would have been born in 1952, making them 73 now. So the essayist was a bit off when he surmised that a 60-something lady wanted to relive her glory days, if those glory days were between 1965 and 1970. Someone 60-something now would have been born past the end of the baby boom in the early 1960s. The actuarial fact is that the baby boomers are already dying off. But let's look at another take on the No Kings demographic:

A psychotherapist has explained why many attendees of last week's No Kings protests were educated white women in their forties.

Jonathan Alpert, a New York City-based mental health counselor, told Fox News that '40-something women are probably the biggest demographic of consumers of mental health services. Probably twenties to forties'.

People in their twenties to forties aren't baby boomers, they're the children and grandchildren of baby boomers, but I'm not sure if there's an actual conflict here if these are the same people but just in different age cohorts. When I look back on the women I dated in the 1970s, after I got out of college, I see trends that align with the New York psychotherapist, even though these ladies are now in their late 70s if they're still around.

First, they definitely were consumers of mental health services. They would talk extensively on dates about their visits to their therapists. One in particular was proud of the fact that her therapist talked with her about his own problems, and he apparently told her she was helping him more than he was halping her. Another talked about her struggles to find the right therapist, but it was essential that whatever else, the therapist be a feminist.

It's worth pointing out that by the 1970s, when I dated these women and others, political rallies had changed, at least in California. In the 1960s, the demonstrators posed as outsiders. By the 1970s, those inclined to demonstrate were in fact joining mainstream political campaigns, the McGovern presidrential campagin in 1972 and Chicago Seven radical Tom Hayden's primary campaign for the US Senate in 1976. Both of these women attended those campaign rallies, but other than expressing general sympathy for the overall goals of the campaigns, they never seriously engaged with the issues.

Instead, they were completely open about seeing campaign events just as hookup venues, opportunities to connect with men whose perspectives on life matched their own. There can be no question that this was a formula that could only reault in unhappy outcomes, but these were unhappy ladies, which was why they were going to therapy. Let's go back to the insights of Jonathan Alpert, the New York psychotherapist:

'The No Kings protests, from what I've seen in person and on TV, it seems to me like a big venting session. It's almost like a big group therapy. So, people get stuff off their chest and they feel better in the moment, but it doesn't necessarily bring about any sort of positive change,' he said.

He said that rather than actually effecting change, many of them are simply craving community or validation, which he said 'can be addictive'.

'A lot of times people are unhappy in their own lives,' he told Fox. 'They may have anxiety or anger, and they project that onto others. That's partly what we're seeing play out at these rallies.'

This has the ring of truth. But Alpert recognizes that the women who attended the No Kings rallies are the children and grandchildren of the women who attended McGovern and Hayden campaign events, not boomers themselves -- or if there were in fact boomers in their late 70s and 80s, they were the ones who stayed for an hour or two and went straight home.

It's also worth pointing out that the other big demographic Alpert cites, in addition to being 20-to-40 years old and major consumers of mental health services, is that they're college-educated. What does this tell us about the value of a college education? We can certainly be sure that the education the ladies at either the Hayden and McGovern rallies or the No Kings rallies received, or at least absorbed, was never any sort of exposure to principles of thinking or of life that would lead to happier outcomes.

But this is a generational problem. If a college education was dysfunctional in the 1960s, it's even more so now. The overall problem must at least be reflected in the US educational system, or at least the system as it applies to the prosperous middle class, the Starbucks target market, many of whom we may be sure attended No Kings rallies.

I started out thinking about how the women I used to date seem to have been the sort who'd now attend No Kings rallies, but now I've started to think about the professors I got to know when I was in graduate school back in the day. This may apply as well, but I need to think more about it.

The Mob Is Involved In Gambling? Say It Ain't So!

Via CNN,

A sprawling FBI probe into mafia-linked gambling and sports rigging schemes led to the arrests this morning of Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, according to federal law enforcement officials. The NBA says both men have been placed on leave.

. . . Among the defendants in the dual operations are members of four major American crime families, as well as current and former NBA players and coaches, New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said.

Via The Gateway Pundit,

Former mobster Michael Franzese reacted to the FBI’s raid on an NBA gambling ring tied to the Italian Mafia.

Michael Franzese worked for the Colombo crime family in the 1980s and made a fortune in the gasoline business. His father, Sonny Franzese, also a notorious mafioso, was the underboss for the Colombo crime family.

. . . Rudy Giuliani indicted Michael Franzese five times in the 1980s – and Franzese beat the government five times. Franzese was later indicted again on racketeering and conspiracy charges and spent several years in federal prison.

. . . Franzese said he isn’t surprised to see a gambling ring this large, although he did say it is unusual to see several ‘families’ working together.

Franzese did note that the Colombo crime family was not involved in this gambling ring.

Well, I'm sure glad the Colombo fsmily wasdn't involved. Except I thought the Five Families were history. I thought Rudy Giuliani and FBI agent Joe Pistone AKA Donnie Brasco had done the job. Now that I have free access to AI, I double checked and asked Chrome AI mode, "What was Donnie Brasco's effect on the Five Families?" It answered,

The infiltration of FBI agent Joseph Pistone, under the alias "Donnie Brasco," had a devastating effect on the Bonanno crime family and fundamentally changed how law enforcement approached the Mafia. The consequences rippled through the other four New York families as well, weakening the entire criminal institution.

It looks like it weakened them so badly that they managed to infiltrate professional bssketball and likely other sports. Sports gambling is highly pervasive these days:

Sports betting has become so ubiquitous and so massive in the US that it can be difficult to remember that at the start of 2018, it was only legal in four states, and only in Nevada could you bet on individual games.

All that changed in May of that year, when the Supreme Court stuck down the federal law that barred most forms of sports gambling. Since then, the legal sports gambling industry has spread to 38 states plus Washington, DC, with revenues of nearly $14 billion in 2024, much of which has come from burgeoning and highly addictive mobile apps like DraftKings and FanDuel.

The reason why sports betting was off-limits for so long was because of concerns that the sheer money involved could lead to scandals that would call into question the integrity of sports games.

But there were gambling scandals in professional basketball before 2018. The Discovery series Hustlers Gamblers Crooks covered, just a few weeks ago in season 2 episode 4, the case of former NBA referee Tom Donaghy, who admitted to betting on games he officiated between 2003 and 2007, as well as to providing inside information to intermediaries linked to organized crime.

Interviewed in the program, Donaghy alleged that the NBA itself was complicit in rigging games. He said that there were routine meetings with the referees before each game in which the NBA would stress which particular rules the referees were expected to enforce, which inevitably played to the particular strengths and weaknesses of the respective teams. Donaghy said that these instructions were so explicit that he could reliably predict each game's outcome, which he then passed on to the mob, which was very happy with the results.

The NBA categorically denied blah blah blah. The intermediaries named categorically denied blah blah blah. But this was all before 2018 but after Donnie Brasco. And it's worth pointing out that the NBA itself investigated Terry Rozier, one of those arrested last week, and cleared him:

The NBA said it investigated “unusual betting activity’’ related to Terry Rozier in 2023 and did not find a violation of league rules. But now Rozier has been charged in the Eastern District of New York as part of a federal probe into illegal sports betting.

. . . The NBA had initially cleared Rozier following its own investigation. On Jan. 30 2025, news of the investigation in the Eastern District of New York first came to light. At that point, the NBA said it would cooperate with federal authorities.

The FBI versus the mob has always been a hot potato. J Edgar Hoover apparently felt the FBI never had the resources to fight the whole strength of the mafia, so he found it politic to deny that the mafia existed, but subsequently the FBI seems to have wanted to claim credit for beating the mob via the Donnie Brasco story.

The current scandal is juist as sensitive, with the ESPN sports analyst Stephen A Smith sensing a Trump connection:

Speaking on “First Take,” Smith said that he believes President Donald Trump is behind the arrests and that a trend is forming that is “very concerning.”

“I’m watching a press conference with the director of the FBI. Tell me when we’ve seen that,” Smith said. “We’ve seen accusations before, we’ve seen athletes get in trouble with the law before. You don’t see the director of the FBI having a press conference.

“It’s not coincidental. It’s not an accident. It’s a statement, and it’s a warning that more is coming. And that’s what they’re saying here.”

Well, back in the day, the director of the FBI denied the mafia existed. If anything, Kash Patel is trying to point out this isn't your grandfather's FBI, which ought to be a good thing. But it's looking like Tom Donaghy, the disgraced NBA referee, may have a point, and if the NBA itself is complicit in fixing games, this could have a major effect on basketball and other professional sports. Stephen A Smith could even be out of a job if pro sports are discredited overall.

If AI Is So Smart, Why Is It So Dumb?

Via The Guardian,

An artificial intelligence system (AI) apparently mistook a high school student’s bag of Doritos for a firearm and called local police to tell them the pupil was armed.

Taki Allen was sitting with friends on Monday night outside Kenwood high school in Baltimore and eating a snack when police officers with guns approached him.

“At first, I didn’t know where they were going until they started walking toward me with guns, talking about, ‘Get on the ground,’ and I was like, ‘What?’” Allen told the WBAL-TV 11 News television station.

Allen said they made him get on his knees, handcuffed and searched him – finding nothing. They then showed him a copy of the picture that had triggered the alert.

“I was just holding a Doritos bag – it was two hands and one finger out, and they said it looked like a gun,” Allen said.

Recently, Chrome added an "AI mode" to its search feature that has a prompt, "Ask anything". Unlike Chat GPT, this is free. So I asked,

An artificial intelligence system (AI) apparently mistook a high school student’s bag of Doritos for a firearm and called local police to tell them the pupil was armed. How can this happen?

AI replied, at length,

In this incident, an AI gun detection system mistook a student's bag of Doritos for a firearm, triggering a police response at a Baltimore high school. This type of error, known as a "false positive," happened for several reasons related to the limitations of AI-powered computer vision and the conditions of the incident.

A computer vision system "sees" objects by identifying learned patterns in pixels, not by understanding real-world context. The crumpled shape of the shiny bag of chips, combined with the way the student was holding it, likely contained features that closely resembled the patterns the AI was trained to recognize as a gun. According to the company Omnilert, the bag "closely resembled a gun being held," an assessment that led to the system's alert.

After a couple more paragraphs, we get to the meat of the matter:

Unlike humans, the AI system lacks the ability to understand the broader context of the situation. It could not infer that the student was simply eating a snack after football practice. The AI's sole function was to match visual patterns against its "firearm" category, and it triggered an alert based on a pixel match rather than an understanding of the scene.

But let's flash back to May, 2020 in Canada, a country far more sensible and enlightened than ours,

A restaurant employee in a “Star Wars” costume was detained in Canada on Sunday after 911 callers reported seeing someone in a Stormtrooper costume with a gun, police said.

The employee, who was carrying a plastic blaster, had been trying to drum up business for the struggling restaurant, which opened two months before Canadian authorities shuttered eat-in dining because of the coronavirus, the woman’s boss, Brad Whalen, told NBC News.

. . . A video showed multiple officers, some with their guns drawn, shouting at the employee to get on the ground. The worker, who Whalen did not want to identify, could be seen face down in Coco Vanilla’s parking lot. She could be heard sobbing while officers handcuffed her.

Dudley Do-Right's colleagues needed no AI assistance to make this mistake. I asked AI, "How much does an Omnilert detection system [the type used by the Baltimore schools] cost?" It answered,

A tiered plan for the mass notification system typically ranges from $2,500 to $15,000 per year.

So Baltimore schools spent $2500 to $15,000 per year to get exactly the same black eye the Lethbridge, AB Police Service got for free. Of course, the personnel cost of the multiple-officer response and the public relations cost of the snafu are extra -- not to mention the damage to the vendor's reputation. Since I can ask Chrome AI mode anything, I asked, "Has Omnilert made a public response to the Baltimore Doritos incident?" AI answered, again at length,

Yes, Omnilert has issued a public response regarding the Baltimore incident in which its AI gun detection system mistook a student's Doritos bag for a weapon. The company stated that while it regretted the incident, its system "functioned as intended".

It worked perfectly! What's all the fuss about, you doofus? But even AI seems to have had second thoughts, as, just as above, it rambled on for several more paragraphs:

A spokesperson told CBS News that the technology's purpose is to detect potential threats and route them for human review. An image that closely resembled a gun was flagged, verified by human review, and then forwarded to the school's safety team, which the company claims concluded its involvement.

But how does this differ from the Canadian case, where conscientious citizens reported a Galactic Empire storm trooper brandishing a blaster, dutifully notified police, and Lethbridge's Finest took the girl in the Star Wars costume down? Sounds like someone at Lethbridge's dispatch should have asked more questions, just as someone at the safety team should have said, "Hey, that's just a bag of Doritos!" when the system fowarded the image. The difference is that Baltimore was paying good money to avoid the embarrassing situation, while Lethbridge got it for free. Advantage, Canada! AI nevertheless continued,

Despite Omnilert's claims, some Baltimore County officials have expressed concerns and called for a review of the school system's procedures. The incident has raised questions about the reliability of AI technology in school safety and the protocols that lead to an armed police response based on false alerts.

Gee, d'ya think? Since it doesn't cost me to keep asking Chrome AI mode anything, I asked, "Can AI make stupid people smart?" it replied,

While AI cannot magically make people smarter in a fundamental way, it can be a powerful tool to enhance learning, decision-making, and access to information, helping motivated individuals to improve their abilities. However, the effect depends on how it is used; over-reliance can potentially diminish critical thinking skills through "cognitive offloading"

Which is another way of saying if AI is feeding information to unmotivated people who don't think, you're paying big bucks to get the same results you'd get from the same unmotivated people without AI. But hey, it doesn't cost me anything to keep asking Chrome AI mode questions, so I asked, "What was the outcome of the investigation into the Lethbridge, AB takedown of the Star Wars trooper?" It replied,

Ultimately, the officers were cleared, and the investigation concluded that they had followed proper protocol in a stressful and ambiguous situation.

This is exactly what Omnilert concluded about the Baltimore case. I think we can safely say that if you're feeding AI output to mediocre and unmotivated people, you'll get the same result you would have gotten from mediocre and unmotivated people without AI. But hey, it doesn't cost me anything, so I asked, "Given the Baltimore Doritos episode, isn't it true that if you expect mediocre and unmotivated people to act on AI product, all you'll get is the same thing you'd get without AI?" The reply was surprising:

The idea that AI simply amplifies pre-existing human behavior, rather than inherently improving outcomes, is a critical perspective, and the "Baltimore Doritos incident" serves as a powerful example of this principle. The incident did not demonstrate a flawless AI system that was undermined by human failure; rather, it showed that human systems, especially when uncritical or poorly managed, can exacerbate the flaws of an automated process.

The AI system acted as designed, but its design was flawed. An AI-powered gun detection system correctly identified an object that resembled a firearm and flagged it for review. The problem was that the object was just a bag of chips. In this case, the system's "success" was a total failure of real-world judgment.

But even when, as in both the Lethbridge and Baltimore cases, a "total failure of real world judgment" takes place, with or without AI, human institutions are going to excuse it. But then, isn't AI nothing but a boondoggle?

Pope Leo Prays With King Charles

I've already said that I'm staying away from the female Archbishop of Canterbury story, but this latest quasi-ecumenical gesture is mostly unrelated, and it has me scratching my head:

King Charles III and Queen Camilla prayed Thursday [October 16] with Pope Leo XIV in an historic visit to the Vatican to forge closer relations between the Church of England and the Catholic Church, a welcome spiritual respite for the royals from the turmoil at home over sexual misconduct allegations against Prince Andrew.

Charles, who is the titular head of the Church of England, and Camilla sat in golden thrones on the raised altar of the Sistine Chapel, in front of Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment,” while Leo and the Anglican archbishop of York presided over an ecumenical service.

Although one of King Charles's titles is "Supreme Governor of the Church of England", as the UK constitutional monarchy has developed, his role vis-a-vis the Church is exclusively to appoint bishops on the recommendation of the Crown Nominations Commission via the Prime Minister. If he were either to refuse to appoint a bishop as nominated or attempt to remove a bishop, it would cause a major constitutional crisis.

A few weeks ago, Charles in his ceremonial capacity met with President Trump, and each said nice things to each other about shared language and political traditions. Charles's ecumenical gensture with Pope Leo amounted to each saying nice things to each other about the Almighty, and it has nothing to do with theological issues relating to the Reformation, which Charles likely doesn't understand very clearly in any case, and which he would have no power to affect if he did.

On the other hand, I wonder if Pope Leo is even aware of Pope Benedict's 2009 apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus -- I've never met a US diocesan priest who was aware of it -- which provided primarily for the admission of dissident Anglican and Episcopalian parishes into the Catholic Church as a body, including the ordination of their Anglican or Episcopalian clergy. Even in the increasing pansexualization of Anglicanism, this has had little appeal to conservatives.

For example, although the Catholic Church's interpretation of Anglicanorum Coetibus makes Methodist parishes and their clergy eligible to join, following the recent schism in the United Methodist Church over issues like same-sex marriage that gave UMC parishes the option to leave the UMC and join other denominations -- and thousands of UMC parishes chose this path -- absolutely none chose to become Catholic via Anglicanorum Coetibus, even though they were fully eligible to do this from the viewpoints of both the UMC and the Vatican.

So it's very difficult to say what it would mean to "forge closer relations between the Church of England and the Catholic Church", especially since the Church of England has effectively abandoned the uneasy compromise among Protestant factions on which it settled during the Elizabethan period. The compromises between radical and less radical reformers, with an element of superficial Catholic atmosphere grafted on in the 19th century, would find the current Anglicanism of female bishops and same-sex marriage unrecognizable and utterly repellent.

In this context, GAFCON, the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, just this month formally separated itself from the Anglican Communion headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. This was prompted by the appointment of a female Archbishop, which as the panel in the video embedded at the top of this post discussed, created some level of awkwardness even for the meeting of Leo and Charles -- it would apparently have been unseemly to include Her Grace in the meeting, and His Grace the Archbishop of York stood in as a surrogate.

But this leaves the meaning of the encounter between Leo and Charles even less clear. The King has absolutely no effective power over the Church of England, but this hardly matters, since at this point a majority of global Anglicans are outside the Anglican Communion, while even in the UK, the percentage of Church of England membership appears to be around 12-16%, with only about 1% attending services weekly.

The ambiguity is reflected in the panel in the video above, which has chosen Calvin Robinson, a prominent conservative figure, as a representative Anglican. The problem is that as far as anyone can determine, although he wears a clerical collar, Robinson's ordination is not currently recognized by any Anglican denomination. According to Wikipedia,

Robinson trained at St Stephen's House, Oxford, from 2020 with the hope of being ordained in the Church of England, but he was unsuccessful in his application for a curacy. In 2022, he was ordained as a deacon in the Free Church of England, a conservative Confessing Anglican denomination, which he left in 2023 to join the Nordic Catholic Church, a conservative Old Catholic denomination of High Church Lutheran patrimony, which ordained him as a priest.

In 2024 he moved to the United States to become a priest in the Anglican Catholic Church, a Continuing Anglican denomination. The Anglican Catholic Church removed Robinson on 29 January 2025, four days after he ended a speech with a gesture which the church said had been widely interpreted as a "pro-Nazi salute", in an apparent reference to Elon Musk's similar gesture earlier that month. In May 2025, Robinson's parish voted to disaffiliate from the ACC, and he was granted a temporary license by Bishop Ray Sutton of the Reformed Episcopal Church, part of the Anglican Church in North America. This was revoked nine days later after criticism from ACNA archbishop Steve Wood.

Both the Anglican Catholic Church and the Reformed Episcopal Church are splinter denominations that left the US Episcopal Church, about 50 years ago and 150 years ago respectively. Certainly for Robinson, they, like all the tiny substitute denominations he's been through, were ports of convenience, but they give an indication that there are very few potential platforms for high-profile conservative Anglicans. Certainly Robinson would be a more visible figure than any splinter-denomination bishop who would license him to preach, and that's probably the biggest part of his problem -- no conservative splinter denomination could support a prominent apologist, much less a Bp Barron or an Abp Fulton Sheen.

But we're left with a puzzle: what does it mean to "forge closer relations between the Church of England and the Catholic Church" when King Charles can do nothing to further that end, while most Anglicans are no longer part of the Anglican Communion, of which the Archbishop of Canterbury is head -- except that it was apparently deemed politic not to include Her Grace in that meeting meant to "forge closer relations" in any case?

New Information On January 6 Pipe Bomber?

BREAKING: FBI releases new info, offers $500,000 reward for suspect who planted pipe bombs near the DNC on January 5, 2021 pic.twitter.com/GUbAI8Mzev

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) October 22, 2025

There's been a flurry of new stories about the FBI releasing video footage of a person who appears to be planting pipe bombs next to the Republican and Democrat National Committee headquarters buildings the evening before January 6, 2021. Actually, there seems to be little new. The FBI has a web page on its site dated September 8, 2021, only eight monthd after the incident, that includes nearly all the information about the suspect that media claims to be "new" in the latest release.

This includes still shots from the video and essentially the same description as in the renewed appeal, including,

The person who placed these bombs wore a face mask, glasses, a grey hooded sweatshirt, gloves, and black and light grey Nike Air Max Speed Turf shoes with a yellow logo. The suspect used a backpack to transport each of the devices.

By that September, the FBI had traced at leaast part of the suspect's path around the immediate area of the buildings and concluded,

Based upon the suspect’s route of travel to the DNC and from the DNC to the RNC, and the manner in which the suspect carries the backpack after placing the pipe bomb at the DNC, the FBI believes the suspect had a location in the vicinity of Folger Park from which the person was operating. Reviews of the suspect’s behavior in video footage and interviews with residents in the Capitol Hill neighborhood have led the FBI to believe the suspect is not from the area.

At that time, the lead FBI figure on the case was Steven M. D’Antuono, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office. D’Antuono appears not necessarily to have been with the Comey-McCabe-Wray program, and he left the bureau in late 2022 after differing with the Garland Juastice Department over the Mar-a-Lago raid:

In a closed-door congressional interview last week [June 2023], the official who led the FBI’s Washington Field Office at the time of its Mar-a-Lago search detailed a disagreement between bureau and Justice Department officials over how to recover sensitive papers that former President Donald Trump held onto after leaving office.

During his conversation with committee aides, D’Antuono said DOJ wanted FBI agents to immediately use a search warrant to seize documents from Mar-a-Lago, worried that any classified papers there could fall into the wrong hands. But D’Antuono’s team at the FBI’s Washington Field Office wanted to seek Trump’s permission, through the former president’s attorneys, to search the club — pointing out that Trump didn’t even spend his summers at Mar-a-Lago.

. . . “There was consternation from both sides” ahead of the Mar-a-Lago search, D’Antuono told the judiciary panel. “DOJ wants stuff. We were pushing back. That’s the beauty of our system, right. It’s like, that’s the judicial system in a sense.”

But other sources trace D'Antuno's resignation to a threatened Republican investigation:

Just weeks after Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee announced an investigation into recent “operations and actions” at the FBI, Steven D’Antuono, the assistant director in charge of the FBI Washington Field Office announced his retirement on Dec. 2 in a LinkedIn post.

. . . D’Antuono was the FBI agent in charge of the investigations into both the Gov. Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. He came under fire when two of the defendants in the Whitmer case were acquitted. At the time, there were allegations that the FBI had effectively entrapped them into taking part in the plot. Two other defendants initially received mistrials before being convicted in a second trial.

In a Nov. 18 letter written to FBI director Christopher Wray, the committee listed D’Antuono as one of nine FBI employees they would “require prompt testimony” from as part of their investigation.

As the 2023 link shows, D'Antuono did in fact eventuallty testify, but if he was no longer with the FBI by then, Wray couldn't have stopped him as he appears previously to have done. Although D'Antuono was in charge of the January 6 investigation, the Whitmer kidnap case, and the Mar-a-Lago raid, it appears that much of his testimony has never been released. It does appear that the FBI made almost no progress on investigating the January 6 pipe bombs since D'Antuono was in charge, but when he was in charge, it seems to have made the progress we've seen.

On the other hand, I had a faint memory that a pipe bomb suspect had been traced to a Virginia station on the Washington Metro. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Wasn't there a J6 pipe bomb suspect traced to a Metro stop in Virginia?" It replied, in typical Chronme AI style, with an attempt to set me straight:

No, no J6 pipe bomb suspect has been successfully traced to a specific metro stop in Virginia. While there has been public discussion of this theory, the individual who placed pipe bombs near the DNC and RNC on January 5, 2021, remains unidentified.

The golden mountain does not exist! You'd think AI would be smart enough to have taken Philosophy 101. But then AI proceeds to identify the golden mountain notwithstanding:

The idea that the suspect was traced to a Virginia metro stop comes from a statement by former FBI agent George Seraphin, who was fired from the bureau.

Seraphin, who has criticized the FBI's handling of the case, claimed that early in the investigation, the bureau used Metro system video and a Metro SmarTrip card to track the suspect getting off a train at a Northern Virginia stop. However, he admitted he did not know if the FBI followed up on this lead.

The FBI has never confirmed or released information about any Metro-related lead for the suspect.

So who is George Seraphin? He appears in an October 2022 NBC News story. Seraphin was identified as a

suspended FBI special agent who joined Truth Social and did an interview with conservative firebrand Dan Bongino after his suspension. Seraphin has written that the Jan. 6 cases keep him awake at night, and promoted a fundraiser for a Jan. 6 legal defense fund.

Seraphin himself, in a video posted online, said that he was at a shooting range with local law enforcement officials when the Jan. 6 attack happened, and thought that a bunch of “goofballs” were behind the attack.

“We were laughing about it, and there’s no other way to say it,” he said. “We were literally laughing, people were cracking up, you know, somebody has Nancy Pelosi’s podium. Is that the way that our country is supposed to act? No, but these were a bunch of clowns, that’s not what an insurrection looks like to me.”

In another message on Truth Social, Seraphin said he had “literally hundreds of employees” standing behind him. “You’ll only see me. But you will hear them. And we aren’t happy.”

Seraphin was on now-FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino's radio show several times during the Biden years and made general reference to an association between a Wasshington Metro card and the January 6 pipe bomber, but said little more specific. According to this NBC News story, Seraphin was suspended from the FBI in 2021 for refusing to take the COVID vaccine. He is one of several former agents who were in contact with Kash Patel prior to his designation as FBI Director:

Patel "keeps tabs on me and the guys that he’s helped out, and also we share information about FBI stuff," Seraphin told NBC News.

Patel, through his foundation, provided financial help to Seraphin and other agents who hAd been suspended from the FBI. However, that relationship has more recently soured:

Alexis Wilkins, the longtime girlfriend of FBI Director Kash Patel, is suing an ex-agent and self-described whistleblower for defamation, alleging he called her a former Israeli spy whose relationship with Patel is a “honeypot” operation.

The defendant, Kyle Seraphin, “has maliciously lied” about Wilkins by “falsely asserting that she—an American-born country singer—is an agent of a foreign government, assigned to manipulate and compromise the Director of the FBI,” Wilkins’ attorney wrote in the lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court in Austin, Texas.

Wilkins accuses Seraphin, a conservative podcaster who calls himself a “recovering FBI agent,” of “using this fabricated story as self-enriching clickbait.”

On one hand, there may be nothing to the possible connection between the J6 pipe bomber and a Washington Metro card. On the other, Kyle Seraphin seems to be so squirrely that the FBI probably needs to retrace all its steps in that case.

Meanwhile, we seem to know almost nothing more than we knew in late summer 2021. My current theory, like my theory about Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson, is that the pipe bomber's actions appear to be disorganized. On one hand, he wanders around the several-block area of the scene, possibly checking to see if he has a tail, but the streets are deserted -- if he had a tail, there's nothing he could do to disappear. But on the other, he seems completely unaware that in the 2020s, cameras are everywhere.

The guy seems too clueless to be any sort of professional. But the story needs to be followed up to eliminate any serious doubt.

Why Is There No News?

I check Real Clear Politics twice a day for a take on the conventional wisdom. What's odd today is that nowhere in the list of headlines does the word "shutdown" appear. On the other hand, near the top of the list, there are two big think pieces on the No Kings demonstrations, which appear to be among the biggest non-events in history. But isn't the current government shutdown a much bigger dog that isn't barking?

Curious, I asked Chrome AI mode, "How is trump polling in the shutdown?" Normally, "AI" prefaces its response with a couple of paragraphs to let me know the correct way to think about the question, but this morning, it just listed a bunch of headline links without comment:

Newsweek: Donald Trump Is Winning the Government Shutdown, Polls Suggest
Reuters: Trump's approval edges up despite Americans blaming Republicans for shutdown
The Hill: Trump approval ticks up despite GOP shutdown blame: Survey
CNN: Could Democrats win the shutdown standoff? They’re still winning the blame game
PBS: Who’s winning the blame game over the shutdown? Here’s what a new AP-NORC poll shows

The PBS link, which we may assume is one of the most liberal, is hardly optimistic:

Roughly 6 in 10 Americans say President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of responsibility for the shutdown, while 54% say the same about Democrats in Congress, according to the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. At least three-quarters of Americans believe each deserves at least a “moderate” share of blame, underscoring that no one is successfully evading responsibility.

It looks like any take that the Democrats are "winning the blame game" even if Trump's popularity is rising is optiimistic indeed. The consensus of even liberal commentators is that the polling is a "jump ball". But only a little over half of US adults think the shutdown is a big deal at all:

The poll finds that 54% of U.S. adults call the shutdown a “major issue,” with just 11% saying it is “not a problem at all.” Democrats are most likely, at 69%, to see it as a major problem, but 59% of independents and 37% of Republicans feel the same way.

I decided to take a look at the paradigmatic shutdown, the pair of closures led by Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995-96. According to Wikipedia,

As a result of conflicts between Democratic President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress over funding for education, the environment, and public health in the 1996 federal budget, the United States federal government shut down from November 14 through November 19, 1995, and from December 16, 1995, to January 6, 1996, for 5 and 21 days, respectively. Republicans also threatened not to raise the debt ceiling.

. . . Polling generally showed that most respondents blamed congressional Republicans for the shutdowns, and Clinton's handling of the shutdowns may have bolstered his ultimately successful campaign in the 1996 presidential election. The second of the two shutdowns was the longest government shutdown in U.S. history until the 2018–2019 government shutdown surpassed it in January 2019.

. . . A 1995 ABC News poll had Republicans receiving the brunt of the blame with 46% of respondents compared to the 27% that blamed Clinton. Clinton's Gallup approval rating stood at 51% in the early days of the December shutdown, but fell significantly to 42% as it progressed into January. Once the shutdown had ended, however, his Gallup approval ratings rose to their highest since his election.

However, the overall political impact of the shutdown is harder to gauge. Its impact on the 1996 election, especially in Congress, was counterintuitive:

The shutdown also influenced the 1996 Presidential election. Bob Dole, the Senate Majority Leader, was running for president in 1996. Due to his need to campaign, Dole wanted to solve the budget crisis in January 1996 despite the willingness of other Republicans to continue the shutdown unless their demands were met. In particular, as Gingrich and Dole had been seen as potential rivals for the 1996 Presidential nomination, they had a tense working relationship.

. . . Gingrich stated that the first re-election of a Republican [House] majority since 1928 was due in part to the Republican Party's hard line on the budget. The Republican Party had a net loss of eight seats in the House in the 1996 elections but retained a 227-206-seat majority in the upcoming.

Dole lost the 1996 election, at least in part because he ran on the idea that his canmpaign was a "last mission for the greatest generation", which inevitably contrasted his age with the younger and comprehensively more vigorous Clinton. Dole certainly played to type two years later as the national spokesman for Viagra, which Clinton presumably didn't need -- this may have been the unspoken underlying issue of the campaign. It's also hard to argue with the implicit contrast with Gingrich's congrressional strategy in the election, where Dole stood for compromise while Gingrich continued a hard line. Republicans lost the presidency, while they held onto Congress.

A reasonable assessment that might be made across the 1995-96 and the 2025 shutdowns is that over the long term, energetic hardliners succeed electorally, while figures who seem namby-pamby or perhaps past their sell-by date don't. Right now, Trump is the energetic hardliner despite his age, while Schumer is as old as Dole was in 1996 and has the aura of letting women like AOC boss him around, while nobody's complaining that Schumer is too hot to trot. Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones didn't hurt Clinton in 1996, any more than Stormy Daniels and E Jean Carroll hurt Trump in 2024, which is to say that the ladies all subliminally worked to Clinton's and Trump's benefit, even in the context of shutdowns. But one of the few efforts I've seen to explain the current alignment omits these factors:

During the 2018-2019 government shutdown (the longest federal shutdown in US history lasting 35 days), Donald Trump's first term administration was ill prepared for the tactics used by the establishment media, Democrats and even saboteurs within his own cabinet. The narrative spin was highly effective in painting Trump as the villain, subverting his efforts to achieve lasting security at the southern border.

The 2018 shutdown hinged largely on the fight between Republicans and Democrats over funding for a border wall that would ensure far lower illegal immigration numbers well after Trump left office. The construction cost of $5.7 billion seems like a pittance compared to the projected cost of $350 billion to deport alien migrants over four years.

Seen from this perspective, I would say the problem in 2018-19 was that the issue was too specific and not couched in bigger terms. In 2025, the issue isn't budgetary line items, the issue is Trump vs Schumer, just as after the 1995-1996 shutdowns, the issue became Clinton vs Dole. I think in both cases, the outcome will favor the higher-profile, more energetic figure. Dole lost to Clinton in 1996, but Gingrich won as well. Something like that dynamic is happening now.

So of course, there's no news about it.

More On Trump's Shutdown Strategy

I'm seeing very little commentary on the shutdown that takes into account what we've been learning about Trump. First, as we've seen with the Hanas deal, little pieces of an overall strategy fall into place over a period of months. The June B-2 raid on Iran's nuclear facilities was seen as an isolated episode that was maybe even ineffective. By October, it began to be recognized that it was a big enoujgh blow to Iranian power and prestige that Iran's neighbors could agree to pressure Iran's client Hamas into a peace deal.

By the same token, the shutdown is just one part of an overall domestic strategy to break down the current structure of the Democrat party. Several things are working to his advantage: Democrat leadership figures are simply aging out: Nancy Pelosi is 85, already retired as Speaker, still retaining her House seat, but increasingly frail. Bernie Sanders is 84, still vocal only because there are no credible younger replacements who aren't jokes, but the calendar is the calendar.

The other major leadership figure still in office is Schumer, a decade younger at 74, but so likely to be defeated in the 2028 primary cycle that he's already a lame duck, with no heir apparent. Trump is acutely aware of this:

“The Democrats have no leader. They remind me of Somalia,” Trump said.

“I don’t, I just don’t know if Schumer has any power anymore. I look at your, your leadership. I don’t know who to speak to.”

Trump has repeatedly claimed Schumer fears a 2028 primary challenge by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), saying: “Schumer is petrified of the primary because he’s not going to win, probably against anybody.”

Most important, Schumer isn't holding the party together in a coherent shutdown strategy, because he can't. One problem is a putative consensus among Democrats that the Republicans should agree to extension of Affordable Care Act premium subsidies, but there's no real assurance that that would be enough, and the specifics of what Democrats might accept have never been clear:

Democrats say they're fighting to restore Medicaid benefits that were cut in President Donald Trump's "Big Beautiful" tax and budget bill, which he signed into law in July.

The morning after the shutdown began, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, told MSNBC that Democrats are not in any way asking for health care for people in the country without legal status.

. . . The new law restricts eligibility only to U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents, i.e. green card holders and certain Cuban and Haitian immigrants.

. . . Democrats want to reverse many of the health care-related provisions included in the new act to keep more Americans, and some lawful immigrants, eligible for Medicaid. They say the shutdown is over preserving healthcare access, and there is no proposal to provide free health care to people living in the country illegally.

So the real dispute isn't over premiums, it involves what additional groups, mainly involving one or another class of migrants, can be added to Medicaid. The question is whether a simple agreement to negotiate continued ACA premium subsidies alone in return for reopening the government would bring enough Democrats around to reach 60 votes, or whether other concessions would be needed.

It's plain that Trump currently sees no urgency in even starting any such negotiation. Ed Kilgore writes in New York Magazine,

Nearly three weeks into the current federal-government shutdown, Democrats have made it clear that their principal — and, perhaps, their sole — demand for cooperating to end it is a commitment to move some sort of bipartisan extension of the Obamacare premium subsidies, due to expire at the end of the year. They may be willing to accept half a loaf, like an ironclad commitment for a vote on a specific measure, or a Trump commitment to back some kind of remedy for an impending health-insurance-price spike that worries Republicans, too.

Kilgore refers to "Democrats" as though they're a single group, but they aren't. At The Hill,

Democratic senators acknowledge a handful of their colleagues would love to end the tense standoff over federal funding, but they say those members are worried a liberal backlash could end their political careers.

“Are there enough Democrats to join Republicans to reopen the government? Not in the near term,” said the Democratic senator who requested anonymity. “There is no bipartisan conversation that’s anything but bulls‑‑‑.”

This is what Trump understands; there's nobody who can shepherd the Democrats into a single group that will negotiate realistically with Republicans, and the moderates are terrified of the leftists. Put another way, Zohran Mamdani and AOC are the de facto leadership of the Democrats, with veto power over any consensus. But neither can they assemble a national majority on their own.

It's also worth remembering that Trump takes a multifaceted approach to solving any problem. The shutdown right now applies to congressional Democrats, but he isn't concentrating just on congressional Demnocrats. He's clearly also taking aim at big-city and blue-state Democrat machines via his parallel crime fighing efforts, sending DHS, ICE, FBI, and the National Guard into places like Chicago, Portland, and San Francisco.

But he isn't stopping there. The military attacks on drug smuggling boats and submarines coming from Venezuela and Colombia are intended to turn off the money spigot that uses drugs to fund the big-city machines. Meanwhile, potential crises loom if the shutdown contines into November, but Trump is deliberately preoccupied with foreign policy:

President Donald Trump — mostly checked out during the standoff — leaves Friday for Asia after spending the weekend at his Palm Beach, Fla., home. The White House feels as if it’s winning the political fight. So if Congress wants to get Trump’s attention, this is the moment to do so.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has been practically begging Trump to get involved in negotiating a deal to extend the enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies. Trump, though, has easily resisted these calls and is letting Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune run the shutdown strategy.

. . . If Democrats are willing to accept a political victory without a policy win, this is a critical moment for Schumer to figure out what this looks like — and how he shields himself from inevitable criticism from the left. What does Schumer demand in exchange for Democratic votes to reopen the government? Is it a vote on extending the subsidies? Will Schumer cut loose some moderates and retiring Democrats? How does he message this publicly?

In other words, Schumer is hoping the potential fallout from a continuing shutdown will lead Trump to rescue him from his own leadership dilemma by opening negotiations. But why should Trump do Schumer any favors? And if he opens negotiations, won't that simply give the left more opportunities to pressure Schumer to try to get more concessions from Trump? Trump has nothing to lose by letting the shutdown continue, and a lot to lose by rescuing Schumer:

It’s day 20 of the Schumer Shutdown, and Donald Trump is winning. Don’t take my word for it—CNN is admitting that this Democrat-led fiasco has done nothing to hurt the president’s approval. In fact, Trump’s approval has increased. CNN’s Harry Enten broke down the numbers. In terms of ‘blame,’ even the networks data cruncher said, “it’s a different world’ for the better for the Trump White House.

The end result of this particular phase in the overall war will likely be continued diminished prestige for Schumer, but the unlikelihood that any serious change in Democrat congressional leadership will emerge. But we need to keep io mind that this is just part of a bigger strategy.